Phenomenology: Responses and Developments (The History of Continental Philosophy) [1 ed.] 1844652149, 9781844652143

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phenomenology

the history of continental philosophy General Editor: Alan D. Schrift 1. Kant, Kantianism, and Idealism: The Origins of Continental Philosophy Edited by Thomas Nenon 2. Nineteenth-Century Philosophy: Revolutionary Responses to the Existing Order Edited by Alan D. Schrift and Daniel Conway 3. The New Century: Bergsonism, Phenomenology, and Responses to Modern Science Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and Alan D. Schrift 4. Phenomenology: Responses and Developments Edited by Leonard Lawlor 5. Critical Theory to Structuralism: Philosophy, Politics, and the Human Sciences Edited by David Ingram 6. Poststructuralism and Critical Theory’s Second Generation Edited by Alan D. Schrift 7. After Poststructuralism: Transitions and Transformations Edited by Rosi Braidotti 8. Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy Edited by Todd May

phenomenology responses and developments Edited by Leonard Lawlor

 volume 4 the history of continental philosophy General Editor: Alan D. Schrift

First published in 2010 by Acumen First published in paperback by Acumen in 2013 Published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Editorial matter and selection, 2010 Leonard Lawlor. Individual contributions, the contributors. This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notices Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for whom they have a professional responsibility. To the fullest extent of the law, neither the Publisher nor the authors, contributors, or editors, assume any liability for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products, instructions, or ideas contained in the material herein.

ISBN: 978-1-84465-612-7 (paperback) ISBN: 978-1-84465-668-4 (paperback 8-volume set) ISBN: 978-1-84465-214-3 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-1-84465-219-8 (hardcover 8-volume set) British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in Minion Pro.

contents

Series Preface Contributors

vii xiii

Introduction leonard lawlor

1

1. Dialectic, difference, and the Other: the Hegelianizing of French phenomenology john russon

17

2. Existentialism s. k. keltner and samuel j. julian

43

3. Sartre and phenomenology william l. mcbride

67

4. Continental aesthetics: phenomenology and antiphenomenology galen a. johnson

87

5. Merleau-Ponty at the limits of phenomenology mauro carbone

111

6. The hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology daniel l. tate

131

7. The later Heidegger dennis j. schmidt

157

8. Existential theology andreas grossmann

177

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9. Religion and ethics felix ó murchadha

195

10. The philosophy of the concept pierre cassou-noguès

217

11. Analytic philosophy and continental philosophy: four confrontations dermot moran Chronology Bibliography Index

235 267 287 305

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“Continental philosophy” is itself a contested concept. For some, it is understood to be any philosophy after 1780 originating on the European continent (Germany, France, Italy, etc.). Such an understanding would make Georg von Wright or Rudolf Carnap – respectively, a Finnish-born philosopher of language and a German-born logician who taught for many years in the US – a “continental philosopher,” an interpretation neither they nor their followers would easily accept. For others, “continental philosophy” refers to a style of philosophizing, one more attentive to the world of experience and less focused on a rigorous analysis of concepts or linguistic usage. In this and the accompanying seven volumes in this series, “continental philosophy” will be understood historically as a tradition that has its roots in several different ways of approaching and responding to Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, a tradition that takes its definitive form at the beginning of the twentieth century as the phenomenological tradition, with its modern roots in the work of Edmund Husserl. As such, continental philosophy emerges as a tradition distinct from the tradition that has identified itself as “analytic” or “Anglo-American,” and that locates its own origins in the logical analyses and philosophy of language of Gottlob Frege. Whether or not there is in fact a sharp divergence between the work of Husserl and Frege is itself a contested question, but what cannot be contested is that two distinct historical traditions emerged early in the twentieth century from these traditions’ respective interpretations of Husserl (and Heidegger) and Frege (and Russell). The aim of this history of continental philosophy is to trace the developments in one of these traditions from its roots in Kant and his contemporaries through to its most recent manifestations. Together, these volumes present a coherent and comprehensive account of the continental philosophical tradition vii

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that offers readers a unique resource for understanding this tradition’s complex and interconnected history. Because history does not unfold in a perfectly linear fashion, telling the history of continental philosophy cannot simply take the form of a chronologically organized series of “great thinker” essays. And because continental philosophy has not developed in a vacuum, telling its history must attend to the impact of figures and developments outside philosophy (in the sciences, social sciences, mathematics, art, politics, and culture more generally) as well as to the work of some philosophers not usually associated with continental philosophy. Such a series also must attend to significant philosophical movements and schools of thought and to the extended influence of certain philosophers within this history, either because their careers spanned a period during which they engaged with a range of different theorists and theoretical positions or because their work has been appropriated and reinterpreted by subsequent thinkers. For these reasons, the volumes have been organized with an eye toward chronological development but, in so far as the years covered in each volume overlap those covered in the subsequent volume, they have been organized as well with the aim of coordinating certain philosophical developments that intersect in a fashion that is not always strictly chronological. Volume 1 begins with the origins of continental philosophy in Kant and the earliest responses to his critical philosophy, and presents an overview of German idealism, the major movement in philosophy from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. In addition to Kant, the period covered in the first volume was dominated by Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and together their work influenced not just philosophy, but also art, theology, and politics. This volume thus covers Kant’s younger contemporary Herder, and his readers Schiller and Schlegel – who shaped much of the subsequent reception of Kant in art, literature, and aesthetics; the “Young Hegelians” – including Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and David Friedrich Strauss – whose writings would influence Engels and Marx; and the tradition of French utopian thinking in such figures as Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Proudhon. In addition to Kant’s early critics – Jacobi, Reinhold, and Maimon – significant attention is also paid to the later critic of German idealism Arthur Schopenhauer, whose appropriation and criticism of theories of cognition later had a decisive influence on Friedrich Nietzsche. Volume 2 addresses the second half of the nineteenth century, in part as a response to the dominance of Hegelian philosophy. These years saw revolutionary developments in both European politics and philosophy, and five great critics dominated the European intellectual scene: Feuerbach, Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Responding in various ways to Hegelian philosophy and to the shifting political landscape of Europe and viii

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the United States, these thinkers brought to philosophy two guiding orientations – materialism and existentialism – that introduced themes that would continue to play out throughout the twentieth century. The second half of the nineteenth century also saw the emergence of new schools of thought and new disciplinary thinking, including the birth of sociology and the social sciences, the development of French spiritualism, the beginning of American pragmatism, radical developments in science and mathematics, and the development of hermeneutics beyond the domains of theology and philology into an approach to understanding all varieties of human endeavor. Volume 3 covers the period between the 1890s and 1930s, a period that witnessed revolutions in the arts, science, and society that set the agenda for the twentieth century. In philosophy, these years saw the beginnings of what would grow into two distinct approaches to doing philosophy: analytic and continental. It also saw the emergence of phenomenology as a new rigorous science, the birth of Freudian psychoanalysis, and the maturing of the discipline of sociology. Volume 3 thus examines the most influential work of a remarkable series of thinkers who reviewed, evaluated, and transformed nineteenthcentury thought, among them Henri Bergson, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. It also initiated an approach to philosophizing that saw philosophy move from the lecture hall or the private study into an active engagement with the world, an approach that would continue to mark continental philosophy’s subsequent history. The developments and responses to phenomenology after Husserl are the focus of the essays in Volume 4. An ambiguity inherent in phenomenology – between conscious experience and structural conditions – lent itself to a range of interpretations. While some existentialists focused on applying phenomenology to the concrete data of human experience, others developed phenomenology as conscious experience in order to analyze ethics and religion. Still other phenomenologists developed notions of structural conditions to explore questions of science, mathematics, and conceptualization. Volume 4 covers all the major innovators in phenomenology – notably Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and the later Heidegger – as well as its extension into religion, ethics, aesthetics, hermeneutics, and science. Volume 5 concentrates on philosophical developments in political theory and the social sciences between 1920 and 1968, as European thinkers responded to the difficult and world-transforming events of the time. While some of the significant figures and movements of this period drew on phenomenology, many went back further into the continental tradition, looking to Kant or Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche, for philosophical inspiration. Key figures and movements discussed in this volume include Adorno, Horkheimer, and the Frankfurt School, ix

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Schmitt, Marcuse, Benjamin, Arendt, Bataille, black existentialism, French Marxism, Saussure, and structuralism. These individuals and schools of thought responded to the “crisis of modernity” in different ways, but largely focused on what they perceived to be liberal democracy’s betrayal of its own rationalist ideals of freedom, equality, and fraternity. One other point about the period covered in this volume is worthy of note: it is during these years that we see the initial spread of continental philosophy beyond the European continent. This happens largely because of the emigration of European Jewish intellectuals to the US and UK in the 1930s and 1940s, be it the temporary emigration of figures such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Lévi-Strauss, and Jakobson or the permanent emigration of Marcuse, Arendt, and Gurwitsch. As the succeeding volumes will attest, this becomes a central feature of continental philosophy’s subsequent history. Volume 6 examines the major figures associated with poststructuralism and the second generation of critical theory, the two dominant movements that emerged in the 1960s, which together brought continental philosophy to the forefront of scholarship in a variety of humanities and social science disciplines and set the agenda for philosophical thought on the continent and elsewhere from the 1960s to the present. In addition to essays that discuss the work of such influential thinkers as Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray, Habermas, Serres, Bourdieu, and Rorty, Volume 6 also includes thematic essays on issues including the Nietzschean legacy, the linguistic turn in continental thinking, the phenomenological inheritance of Gadamer and Ricoeur, the influence of psychoanalysis, the emergence of feminist thought and a philosophy of sexual difference, and the importation of continental philosophy into literary theory. Before turning to Volume 7, a few words on the institutional history of continental philosophy in the United States are in order, in part because the developments addressed in Volumes 6–8 cannot be fully appreciated without recognizing some of the events that conditioned their North American and anglophone reception. As has been mentioned, phenomenologists such as Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, and other European continental philosophers such as Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt, began relocating to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of these philosophers began their work in the United States at the University in Exile, established in 1933 as a graduate division of the New School for Social Research for displaced European intellectuals. While some continental philosophy was taught elsewhere around the United States (at Harvard University, Yale University, the University at Buffalo, and elsewhere), and while the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research began publishing in 1939, continental philosophy first truly began to become an institutional presence in the United States in the 1960s. In 1961, John Wild (1902–72) left Harvard to become Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Northwestern University. With a commitment from the provost of the university x

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and the Northwestern University Press to enable him to launch the Northwestern Series in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Wild joined William Earle and James Edie, thus making Northwestern a center for the study of continental philosophy. Wild set up an organizational committee including himself, Earle, Edie, George Schrader of Yale, and Calvin Schrag (a former student of Wild’s at Harvard, who was teaching at Northwestern and had recently accepted an appointment at Purdue University), to establish a professional society devoted to the examination of recent continental philosophy. That organization, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), held its first meeting at Northwestern in 1962, with Wild and Gurwitsch as the dominant figures arguing for an existential phenomenology or a more strictly Husserlian phenomenology, respectively. Others attending the small meeting included Erwin Straus, as well as Northwestern graduate students Edward Casey and Robert Scharff, and today SPEP has grown into the second largest society of philosophers in the United States. Since those early days, many smaller societies (Heidegger Circle, Husserl Circle, Nietzsche Society, etc.) have formed and many journals and graduate programs devoted to continental philosophy have appeared. In addition, many of the important continental philosophers who first became known in the 1960s – including Gadamer, Ricoeur, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Habermas – came to hold continuing appointments at major American universities (although, it must be mentioned, not always housed in departments of philosophy) and, since the 1960s, much of the transmission of continental philosophy has come directly through teaching as well as through publications. The transatlantic migration of continental philosophy plays a central role in Volume 7, which looks at developments in continental philosophy between 1980 and 1995, a time of great upheaval and profound social change that saw the fruits of the continental works of the 1960s beginning to shift the center of gravity of continental philosophizing from the European continent to the anglophone philosophical world and, in particular, to North America. During these years, the pace of translation into English of French and German philosophical works from the early twentieth century as well as the very recent past increased tremendously, and it was not uncommon to find essays or lectures from significant European philosophers appearing first in English and then subsequently being published in French or German. In addition, the period covered in this volume also saw the spread of continental philosophy beyond the confines of philosophy departments, as students and faculty in centers of humanities and departments of comparative literature, communication studies, rhetoric, and other interdisciplinary fields increasingly drew on the work of recent continental philosophers. Volume 7 ranges across several developments during these years – the birth of postmodernism, the differing philosophical traditions of France, Germany, and Italy, the third generation of critical theory, and the so-called xi

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“ethical turn” – while also examining the extension of philosophy into questions of radical democracy, postcolonial theory, feminism, religion, and the rise of performativity and post-analytic philosophy. Fueled by an intense ethical and political desire to reflect changing social and political conditions, the philosophical work of this period reveals how continental thinkers responded to the changing world and to the key issues of the time, notably globalization, technology, and ethnicity. The eighth and final volume in this series attempts to chart the most recent trends in continental philosophy, which has now developed into an approach to thinking that is present throughout the world and engaged with classical philosophical problems as well as current concerns. The essays in this volume focus more on thematic developments than individual figures as they explore how contemporary philosophers are drawing on the resources of the traditions surveyed in the preceding seven volumes to address issues relating to gender, race, politics, art, the environment, science, citizenship, and globalization. While by no means claiming to have the last word, this volume makes clear the dynamic and engaged quality of continental philosophy as it confronts some of the most pressing issues of the contemporary world. As a designation, “continental philosophy” can be traced back at least as far as John Stuart Mill’s On Bentham and Coleridge (1840), where he uses it to distinguish the British empiricism of Bentham from a tradition on the continent in which he sees the influence of Kant. Since that time, and especially since the early twentieth century, the term has been used to designate philosophies from a particular geographical region, or with a particular style (poetic or dialectical, rather than logical or scientistic). For some, it has been appropriated as an honorific, while for others it has been used more pejoratively or dismissively. Rather than enter into these polemics, what the volumes in this series have sought to do is make clear that one way to understand “continental philosophy” is as an approach to philosophy that is deeply engaged in reflecting on its own history, and that, as a consequence, it is important to understand the history of continental philosophy. While each of the volumes in this series was organized by its respective editor as a volume that could stand alone, the eight volumes have been coordinated in order to highlight various points of contact, influence, or debate across the historical period that they collectively survey. To facilitate these connections across the eight volumes, cross-referencing footnotes have been added to many of the essays by the General Editor. To distinguish these footnotes from those of the authors, they are indicated by an asterisk (*). Alan D. Schrift, General Editor

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contributors

Mauro Carbone is Professor of Aesthetics in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Université “Jean-Moulin” Lyon 3, France, and senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He taught contemporary aesthetics for many years at the State University of Milan, Italy. His books include: La Visibilité de l’invisible: Merleau-Ponty entre Cézanne et Proust (2001); The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty’s A-Philosophy (2004); and Una deformazione senza precedenti: Marcel Proust e le idee sensibili (2004), revised and enlarged in French as Proust et les idées sensibles (2008), then published in English as An Unprecedented Deformation (2010), and La Chair des images: Merleau-Ponty entre peinture et cinema (2011). He is the founder and a coeditor of the journal Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies concerning Merleau-Ponty’s Thought. Pierre Cassou-Noguès is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris 8. His work concerns the tradition of epistemology in France in the twentieth century and, in a more speculative perspective, the relationship between reason and imagination. His books include De l’expérience mathématique: Essai sur la philosophie des sciences de Jean Cavaillès (2001) and Les Démons de Gödel (2007). He has also coedited a volume on the opposition between concept and consciousness in French philosophy: Le concept, le sujet et la science (with Pascale Gillot; 2008). Andreas Grossmann is Research Fellow at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Germany. He is the author of Spur zum Heiligen: Kunst und Geschichte im Widerstreit zwischen Hegel und Heidegger (1996) and Heidegger-Lektüren: Über Kunst, Religion und Politik (2005), coeditor of the correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Bultmann, Rudolf Bultmann/Martin Heidegger: Briefwechsel xiii

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1925–1975 (with Christof Landmesser; 2009), and the author of numerous articles on practical philosophy, philosophy of religion, and hermeneutics. Galen A. Johnson is Honors Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island and Director of the URI Center for the Humanities. He is currently General Secretary of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle. In addition to large numbers of articles in continental and American philosophy, he is the author of Earth and Sky, History and Philosophy (1989) and The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics (2010), editor of The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (1998) and coeditor of Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty (with Michael B. Smith; 1990). Samuel J. Julian is Limited-Term Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgia College and State University. His interests include recent continental philosophy and contemporary ethical, social, and political issues. S. K. Keltner is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Her primary research interests are in social and political philosophy in the continental tradition and gender studies. She is coeditor of Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics, and Politics in the Work of Kristeva (with Kelly Oliver; 2009) and is finalizing a manuscript entitled Julia Kristeva: Thresholds. Leonard Lawlor is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He has written several books, including The Implications of Immanence: Towards a New Concept of Life (2006) and This is not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (2007), and is one of the coeditors of Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty. William L. McBride is Arthur G. Hansen Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University and President of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP). In addition to French philosophy, especially Sartre’s, his research interests include social and political philosophy and philosophy in Eastern Europe. He was cofounder and first director of the North American Sartre Society and is past President of the North American Society for Social Philosophy. In addition to well over a hundred book chapters, articles, and critical reviews, he has authored, edited, and coedited twenty books, most recently Philosophical Reflections on the Changes in Eastern Europe (1999), From Yugoslav Praxis to Global Pathos (2001), Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy after Postmodernity (2002), and Social and Political Philosophy, Volume 2 of the Istanbul World Congress Proceedings (2006). xiv

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Dermot Moran is Professor of Philosophy (Metaphysics and Logic) at University College Dublin and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He a member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology (CARP), and a member of the Steering Committee of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP). His books include: The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena (1989), Introduction to Phenomenology (2000), Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (2005), and, as editor, The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy (2008). He is founding editor of The International Journal of Philosophical Studies, and coeditor of the Contributions to Phenomenology book series. Felix Ó Murchadha is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is the author of Zeit des Handelns und Möglichkeit der Verwandlung (1999), The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger (2012), A Phenomenology of Christian Life: Glory and Night (forthcoming), and the editor of Violence, Victims, Justifications (2006). He has research interests in phenomenology (especially Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Marion) and in issues of violence and conflict. John Russon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada. He is the author of two books on Hegel, The Self and Its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1997) and Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology (2004), and two books of original philosophy, Human Experience (2003) and Bearing Witness to Epiphany (2009). Dennis J. Schmidt is Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and German at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Ubiquity of the Finite: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Entitlements of Philosophy (1988), On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical Life (2000), and Lyrical and Ethical Subjects: Essays on the Periphery of the Word, Freedom, and History (2005), and the coeditor of The Difficulties of Ethical Life (with Shannon Sullivan; 2008) and Hermeneutische Wege (with Günter Figal; 2000). He is also the editor of the SUNY Press Series in Continental Philosophy. Daniel L. Tate is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Bonaventure. His publications have focused principally on hermeneutics and aesthetics. He is currently working on a manuscript on Gadamer’s philosophy of art.

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introduction Leonard Lawlor

In the three decades covered by this volume, Husserl’s rallying cry for phenomenology – “to the things themselves” – takes on new meaning. It must. This is the period that sees the rise of Nazi Germany, which results not only in the devastation of the Second World War, but also in the Cold War opposition between the United States and the Soviet Union. History forces philosophers to require that the things themselves be concrete. No longer is it possible for phenomenological descriptions to be concerned with the abstractions of logic, no longer with idealities, no longer with a subject removed from situations. Now, they must be oriented toward the real problems of existence. In his 1945 Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty expresses this shift best: “Husserl’s originality lies beyond the notion of intentionality; it is to be found … in the discovery, beneath the intentionality of representations, of a deeper intentionality, which others have called existence.”1 Hence it is the movement of existentialism that dominates this period. Of course, along with Merleau-Ponty, the central figures of existentialism are Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. All three develop “ontologies,” that is, attempts to define what it means to exist. In the process of developing an answer to the question of the meaning of being, the tasks of philosophy and literature, especially in France, come to coincide. As we see in Sartre’s novels and plays, both philosophy and literature are able to express existence. The identification of the tasks of philosophy and literature leads to a transformation of aesthetics. Instead of being a limited field of philosophical investigation, aesthetics refers us to a 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 121 n.5, emphasis added.

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primary experience – the experience of art – through which we are able to gain access to existence. Here Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” and Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” take on particular importance. As we see in these two texts, artworks are events in which a “world” (Heidegger’s terminology) is “instituted” (Merleau-Ponty’s terminology). Because of the artwork’s event character, it turns out that what most defines existence for Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty is history. The fact that human existence is fundamentally historical leads Heidegger in particular (and already in his 1927 Being and Time) to appropriate the nineteenth-century theories of interpretation called “hermeneutics.” Therefore, just as aesthetics no longer refers simply to a field of investigation, hermeneutics no longer refers to the interpretation of ancient texts. Hermeneutics becomes philosophical. By themselves, however, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre do not define this period. Throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, other movements are fueled by and run parallel to these three great thinkers. Both Sartre’s and Heidegger’s philosophies assert atheism. This assertion results not only in a kind of “existential theology,” but also in a reconsideration of religion (both Christian and Jewish religion). While the drive for the concrete calls forth strong political statements from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, we find nothing like an ethics in their works (at least in their published works) nor in the works of Heidegger. A figure working in relative obscurity over this thirty year period, Emmanuel Levinas, therefore criticizes Heidegger for having overlooked the fundamental status of ethics. Also stemming from Husserl’s work, in particular his work in the phenomenology of mathematics, and bypassing Sartre, MerleauPonty, and Heidegger, the philosophy of the concept develops during the same years when existentialism first comes on the scene. Although we cannot deny the abstractness of this philosophy, it falls under the category of concreteness because it wants to conceive not the static forms of mathematics, but the way mathematics develops or becomes. As the near coincidence of philosophy and literature indicates, problems of expression accompany the experiences of the concrete. Logical positivism and neo-Kantianism, the seeds of what today we call “analytic philosophy,” bring these problems of expression to the fore. As we can see already, the period from 1930 to 1960 has focal points, but around these focal points there are diverse trajectories. And all of them emanate from the drive to concreteness. The new meaning for the phenomenological slogan is indeed announced by the title of Jean Wahl’s 1932 book, Vers le concret (Toward the concrete). But it is also important to recall that Wahl was among the first to introduce Hegel’s thought into France.

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i. hegelianism and existentialism: sartre Prior to this period, there was little interest in Hegel’s thought in France. It was dominated by Bergsonism and neo-Kantianism. But as German phenomenology – Husserl and Heidegger – started to dominate, French philosophers looked to another great phenomenologist of an earlier German tradition. From the 1930s to the end of the 1950s we are in the period of the “three H’s”: Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.2 To French thinkers, Hegel appeared to anticipate ideas found in Husserl and Heidegger. Although Husserl had developed his phenomenological slogan in opposition to metaphysical speculation such as it is found in German idealism, Hegel had already tried to turn philosophy strictly to the things themselves. Merleau-Ponty, for instance, recognizes the principal idea of Hegel’s phenomenology: the sense of things must not be determined by an external and static faculty of reason; the sense of things must emerge from the things’ own dynamism.3 But the French philosophers of this period also recognized that Hegel’s thought provides an alternative to Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. Especially in Husserl’s idealist version of transcendental subjectivity, one could not find the struggle through which existence, human existence, became meaningful. For Wahl however, Hegel’s thought is completely concerned with overcoming “unhappy consciousness,” that is, the consciousness of the difference between what one is and what one wants to be, the difference, for instance, between one’s desire for freedom and the fact that one is enslaved. Through this interpretation of Hegel’s thought, Wahl opened the way for history to be conceived as the search for meaning. While Wahl focuses on the “Unhappy Consciousness” section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Alexandre Kojève focuses on the “Lordship and Bondage” section. Indeed, the dialectic presented here (which resonated with Heidegger’s descriptions of “being-with” in Being and Time) powerfully influenced French philosophy of the 1940s. Through Kojève’s famous lectures, it appeared to Sartre and MerleauPonty that human life consists in an interpersonal struggle; self-consciousness is the desire that the other recognize one’s freedom. However as the 1940s came to a close, another Hegel commentator appeared, Jean Hyppolite. Hyppolite tries to show that Hegel’s thought was not existential in the popular sense and especially not anthropological, as Kojève had believed. Like the later Merleau-Ponty, whose philosophy started to resemble Heidegger’s more and more, Hyppolite shows that Hegel’s thought is concerned with the meaning of being, with a foundation below 2. See Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (trans.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 8–16. 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 63.

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and beyond human existence. The impact of Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel would not really appear until the 1960s, when existentialism would start to fade with the advent of structuralism. Stressing Hegel’s concept of difference, Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence would resonate with the main idea that drives structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure’s view of language as a system of differences, to which we will return below when discussing his influence on the later Merleau-Ponty. In the 1940s, however, existentialism dominates the French scene. Although there are many figures associated with the movement, Sartre is its center. Sartrean existentialism is at once indebted to Husserlian phenomenology and breaks with it. On the one hand, as with the slogan of “to the things themselves,” the phenomenological method of description calls for concrete descriptions; on the other, phenomenology seems bound up with vestiges of Cartesian thought. It is in his 1936–37 essay The Transcendence of the Ego, that Sartre attempts to show that anything like a Cartesian ego is unnecessary. For Sartre, the ego must be transcended since the “I” that thinks is unsubstantial and spontaneous. The elimination of anything like a substantial ego, as some sort of fixed entity, sets up the dualism that animates Sartre’s major work Being and Nothingness (1943). As the title indicates, there is being, meaning brute reality that does not have the capacity to negate itself and thereby become self-aware; simply being is, and it remains in itself; it is full positivity.4 But, in contrast to “being-in-itself,” there is consciousness, which has the capacity to negate, and to negate even its own determinations, by means of which it becomes conscious of itself and therefore “for-itself.” Having the capacity to negate any determination of itself, human consciousness is, for Sartre, nothingness. From this dualism, many famous and interesting analyses unfold, including the structure of bad faith and the description of concrete relations with others with its poles of sadism and masochism. But what is most famous and controversial in Being and Nothingness – and what is most indicative of this moment of continental philosophy – is the notion of absolute freedom. A notion already anticipated in The Transcendence of the Ego, absolute freedom refers to the spontaneous movement of the “for-itself.” For Sartre, the evidence for absolute freedom of the “for-itself ” or self-consciousness lies in the fact that we ask questions. Questions essentially contain the possibility of a negative reply. As Sartre says in Being and Nothingness, “It is essential therefore that the questioner have the permanent possibility of dissociating himself from the causal series.”5 But this dissociation has a further implication for Sartre. Alluding to Husserl’s epochē (the “putting out of circuit” or suspension in the belief in the natural determinations of things), he says: 4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Hazel E. Barnes (trans.) (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 27–9. 5. Ibid., 58.

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For man to put a particular existent out of circuit is to put himself out of circuit in relation to the existent. In this case he is not subject to it; he is out of reach; it cannot act on him, for he has retired beyond a nothingness. Descartes … has given a name to this possibility which human reality has to secrete a nothingness which isolates it – it is freedom.6 This “ontological freedom” (not political freedom) implies therefore that there is no determinism, like the natural causation of actions. But it also implies that I am not, my being is not, any of the natural properties I seem to have. If there is no determinism and how I find myself is not what I am, then I am totally responsible for myself, for my actions, and for the world conditioned by my actions. Total responsibility is a crushing experience, which Sartre expresses by saying that human reality is “condemned to be free.”7 It is this condemnation and the anxiety of total responsibility that we see portrayed in Sartre’s many literary works. Although a philosophical movement, the immense popularity of existentialism undoubtedly stemmed from its literature. If existentialism is generally defined by the concern to describe concrete experience as it is lived, and not the abstract idealization of science and traditional philosophy, then literature must portray this project. Here Camus’s novels are exemplary. There is no question that in his 1942 novel The Stranger, Camus portrays a universe “divested of illusions and lights.” Without such illusions, human reality experiences itself as “an alien, a stranger.”8 Although Merleau-Ponty, unlike Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, never wrote a literary text, he sums up this close association between philosophy and literature when he says, “From now on, the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated.”9 This association between philosophy and literature led to a transformation of the field of aesthetics.

ii. aesthetics and hermeneutics: merleau-ponty and heidegger It is important to hear the double sense of the word “aesthetics.” On the one hand, it refers to the investigation of artworks, of the history of art (painting, poetry, literature); on the other, taking the word in a more literal sense (aisthesis: 6. Ibid., 60. 7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, Carol Macomber (trans.) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 29. 8. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Justin O’Brien (trans.) (New York: Knopf, 1955), 6. 9. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 28.

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sensation), it refers to experience. During this period then, aesthetics is no longer a limited field of philosophical investigation distinguished, say, from metaphysics or ethics. Instead, it becomes “ontological.” In other words, the experience of the artwork becomes the fundamental means of access to the meaning of being. The experience of the artwork takes on this role because in it one experiences a thing not as relative to human use; one experiences it as something still to be determined, in a word, as something new. As we just mentioned, the existentialist movement is inseparable from a literary movement. However, one of the many debates Merleau-Ponty had with Sartre concerned the very function of literature. Through this debate, we can see the transformation of aesthetics more precisely. Although cofounders – along with Simone de Beauvoir – of the journal Les Temps modernes and at times close friends, the relationship between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty was not tranquil. Already in the 1945 Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty had criticized Sartre’s concept of freedom. But the 1947 publication of What is Literature brought Sartre into conflict with MerleauPonty’s views on art and language. For Sartre, the center of literature is the writer who in the clarity of thought uses language as a means for communication. In his prose writing, the writer informs readers of the conditions of the world so that the readers become responsible and committed to political action. Importantly, Sartre classifies poetry with painting as arts that do not produce meanings, which therefore do not communicate. Even more he subordinates silence to words. In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty, whose 1951 “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (his last publication in Les Temps modernes) is a kind of response to Sartre, the center of literature is not the conscious author who has clear intentions to communicate. Always for Merleau-Ponty, consciousness is not spontaneous; it is based on a thick past that continues to have effects in the present. Merleau-Ponty understands this past in a variety of ways. Having been the first of many French philosophers to appropriate Saussure’s linguistics, Merleau-Ponty sees that a system of language is based on a series of diacritical differences (the differences between phonemes for example). Any act of speaking (or of writing) is able to function and produce meaningful effects only through these differences. These differences, however, are themselves never spoken. There is no other conclusion than the fact that speaking or writing is based on silences. These silences that have never been spoken give language a latency that the artist is able to express. Hence the title of Merleau-Ponty’s essay. The language of poetry and literature is “indirect,” pointing to that which has never been spoken; the artist’s voice is “the voice of silence.” Although MerleauPonty writes about literature, his real interest seems to lie in painting.10 Merleau10. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Metaphysics and the Novel” and “A Scandalous Author,” in Sense and Non-Sense, 26–40 and 41–47. “Metaphysics and the Novel” extensively describes

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Ponty is a philosopher of perception, and painting concerns nothing but vision. As he says, and this comment is in direct contrast to Sartre: Art and especially painting draw from this pool of brute sense, about which activism wants to know nothing. Art and painting alone do this in full innocence. From the writer and the philosopher, we want opinions and advice. … Only the painter is entitled to gaze upon everything without being obliged to appraise what he sees.11 We just quoted from Merleau-Ponty’s key text in aesthetics, “Eye and Mind.” In it, Merleau-Ponty claims that painting is an expression of vision, not the vision that sets up an object over there, nor the vision that classifies and divides; painting expresses the vision that participates in world. What is the nature of this participation? Merleau-Ponty realizes that since vision is always vision from the eyes, since it is carnal vision or even fleshy vision, vision is made of the same “stuff ” as what is seen. Made of the same stuff, vision sees itself: the eyes that see can also be seen. Thus there is a sort of mirroring relation in this vision. On the one hand, the mirroring relation means that there is no subject–object separation here. On the other hand, and more importantly, the mirroring relation means that just as there is an interior to my vision, that is, there is a kind of invisibility in me that you cannot see (and vice versa, an interior life in you that I cannot see), likewise there is a kind of interiority or invisibility to all visible things. Hence the mirroring relation implies the title of Merleau-Ponty’s last and unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible. Painting continues the work of vision’s attempt to bring this invisibility into the visible. Insofar as it continues this work of vision, painting is a kind of institution. It institutes a tradition, in which each painting stands as one of the attempts to bring the latency, the shadows, and the textures of things to visibility. Each painting therefore says something new, which itself institutes more possibilities for expressing the invisible. For Merleau-Ponty, the tradition of painting is never done. These are the final words of “Eye and Mind”: For if we cannot establish a hierarchy of civilizations or speak of progress – neither in painting nor even elsewhere – it is not because some fate impedes us; it is, rather, that in a sense the very first Beauvoir’s novel She Came to Stay (L’Invitée), while “A Scandalous Author” defends Sartre’s literary writings. It is important to recognize, however, that this volume opens with a text on painting, “Cézanne’s Doubt.” 11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” Carleton Dallery (trans.), Leonard Lawlor (trans. rev.), in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor (eds) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 353.

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painting went to the farthest reach of the future. If no painting completes painting, if no work even is itself absolutely completed, each creation changes, alters, clarifies, deepens, confirms, exalts, re-creates, or creates in advance all the others. If creations are not acquisitions, it is not just that, like all things, they pass away; it is also that they have almost their entire lives before them.12 Hermeneutics – the nineteenth-century approach to interpreting ancient texts – had already recognized that artworks “have almost their entire lives before them.” But with Heidegger, just as aesthetics becomes ontological, hermeneutics becomes philosophical. Indeed, more than the thought of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, it is Heidegger’s thought that defines this period for the continental tradition. His influence cannot be measured, even today. In Being and Time, Heidegger had announced that phenomenology must become hermeneutical. With this announcement, Heidegger meant that the very concept of the phenomenon had to be rethought. It could not be conceived as something simply present before my gaze. Instead, going back to the ancient Greek word for truth, “a-lētheia,” Heidegger defines the phenomenon as un-concealment. For Heidegger, the hyphen in the literal meaning of “alētheia” implies that phenomena in general tend to conceal and hide themselves. Therefore, since the phenomenon is not simply given, it requires a process of making manifest. This process of bringing to light is interpretation (hermeneuein). In Being and Time, interpretation is based on understanding. For Heidegger, understanding is our basic relation to the world; no knowledge, not even philosophy, is possible without understanding. Yet, unlike Husserl’s desire to make phenomenology a “rigorous science,” Heidegger sees that understanding can never be presuppositionless. Understanding always involves what he calls a “fore-structure,” that is, a structure set up earlier, before. In other words, human existence (Dasein13) always finds itself already with, and is always already using, a set of concepts and projects through which it deals with the world. In short, human existence always finds itself with prejudices. Finding ourselves with preset ways of understanding 12. Ibid., 378. 13. The term “Dasein” is highly charged in Heidegger’s writings. Normally the term would be translated into English as “existence.” But frequently Heidegger hyphenates the term as “DaSein” to show that existence always finds itself with a dis-position, positioned in a “Da” (in a “there”); the hyphen is always supposed to indicate that existence is where (again “Da”) Being (“Sein”) happens, the unconcealment that occurs with understanding. Finally, while Heidegger stresses that Dasein cannot be conceived biologically or anthropologically and therefore seems to be distinguished from the human, the only example Heidegger gives of Dasein is human Dasein. That the human is the sole example explains why I have used here the phrase “human existence” to render “Dasein.” I have also done this in order to remove some of the mystery from the German word “Dasein.”

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the world, our expectations about the world always seem to be confirmed. We seem to find what we already knew, as if our understanding were moving in a circle. Heidegger calls this confirmation “the hermeneutic circle.” But here both prejudices and the hermeneutic circle – this claim will become explicit in Gadamer’s 1960 Truth and Method – do not have a negative value. The “prejudices” provide a framework within which to interpret. But, more importantly, the interpretation must be a “working out” of the prejudices. That is, the interpretation makes the prejudices explicit, so that we can decide if they cover over the things or allow them to be unconcealed. Over the course of Being and Time, we learn that the fore-structure refers ultimately to the fact that human existence finds itself always and necessarily constituted historically. The historicity of human existence becomes more apparent for Heidegger in the artwork. Like Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger has one key aesthetical text, his 1935 “The Origin of the Work of Art.” This is a complicated text to which Heidegger would return several times over his career. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger approaches the artwork by means of its “thingly” character. Such an approach is intended to make us think of the artwork not as an object, that is, not as something formal with a determinate set of attributes. Instead, to call the artwork a thing is intended to make us focus on what it does, focus on it as something at work. In order to bring the work character of the artwork to light, Heidegger famously interprets a Van Gogh painting of peasant shoes. His interpretation of the painting draws our attention to what the shoes do, their essence as something used, that is, as equipment. Of course, we know what shoes do; they are for protecting the feet. But, do we really understand the reliability in which the shoes consist? This is Heidegger’s interpretation, which is, undoubtedly, quite moving. Indeed, Heidegger’s words take us somewhere other than what we commonly and obviously know about shoes: And yet – From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by the uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, and trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the 9

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world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.14 Through this long quote, we see that the work the artwork does is to bring forth what the shoes really are. In their being or essence, the shoes are the point of a gathering of the world and earth. The world is the set of meaningful relations that a people sets up. In contrast, the earth is that upon which a world is set up; it is a ground, but that ground shelters and conceals. As Heidegger says, “Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrate into it. It causes every merely calculating importunity upon it to turn into a destruction.”15 Thus what the artwork brings forth is the strife between the needs of the world and the refusal of the earth. That the artwork brings forth the being of the shoes as a gathering-strife is an event. The event character of the artwork means that the artwork is historical: it brings forth “a being such as never was before and will never come to be again.”16 The artwork then is an event of truth. As we have already seen, Heidegger appropriates the ancient Greek word for truth, “alētheia.” This appropriation means that, for Heidegger, truth is not correctness, not the adequate relation between a proposition and a state of affairs. Rather, truth is un-concealment, in which something comes to presence but in which, as well, something else remains concealed. Earlier I said that Heidegger’s description of the peasant shoes presented in Van Gogh’s painting takes us elsewhere. Now we can really see where. The description takes us away from the world of technology in which all things are determined through calculation. The earth and the world in their striving bring forth things not as objects, but truly as things, incalculable and uncertain. As his career develops from this point (1935), Heidegger relentlessly criticizes the increasing technologization of the world. He criticizes technology not in order to make us give up our devices, but in order to remind us that the things we possess are gifts. Insofar as they are gifts, they come forth to us mortals (the peasant woman “shivers at the surrounding menace of death”17), through the striving of earth and world, from the holy. At this point, we are able to be more precise about the differences among the three great thinkers of this period. Sartre is the thinker of freedom and responsibility. But his requirement for freedom and responsibility is spontaneity. Spontaneity in Sartre seems to imply that a decision and the responsibility for that decision must be based in a present that is able to separate itself from the

14. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter (trans.) (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 33. 15. Ibid., 45–6. 16. Ibid., 60. 17. Ibid., 33.

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past (and then project itself into the future).18 In contrast, for Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, the present is set upon a past within which other possibilities remain concealed. The artwork brings these latencies forth as an event, which means that the artwork, like human existence in general, must be conceived historically. But there is one more difference besides the thickness of the past and the slender present of the instant, between essential historicity and irreducible spontaneity. In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty calls objectifying vision “profane vision.” However, he never provides us with a name for the more originary and participatory vision.19 Perhaps this vision of the flesh is “sacred.” In this way we could say, echoing Heidegger, that for Merleau-Ponty the thinker says being, while the poet and the painter name the holy.20

iii. god, concept, and logic The relation between Heidegger and religious thought is complicated. One thing, however, seems clear. With the technologization of the world, the dimension of the holy has come to be closed.21 Such a closure is even, Heidegger says, “the sole malignancy” of our times. Nevertheless, by means of his characterization of human existence as “being-in-the-world,” and by means of his association to Sartre’s existentialism, Heidegger seemed to many readers of his works to be an atheist. Moreover, at this point few people knew of Heidegger’s early investigations of the Christian tradition, and how Christian life functioned as a model for his characterizations in Being and Time of human existence. Consequently, the movement of existential theology arose as a kind of reaction against atheistic existentialism even as it received its primary impetus from the thought of existence. The impetus is seen most clearly in Rudolf Bultmann’s “existen18. This interpretation of Sartre comes from Merleau-Ponty, in particular, from his two last extensive analyses of Sartre’s thought. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Sartre and Ultra-Bolshevism,” in Adventures of the Dialectic, Joseph Bien (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), chapter 5, esp. 105. Here, Merleau-Ponty says that “Sartre’s entire theory of the Party and of class is derived from his philosophy of fact, of consciousness, and beyond fact and consciousness, from his philosophy of time.” See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Interrogation and Dialectic,” in The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, Alphonso Lingis (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), chapter 2, esp. 73. Simone de Beauvoir defends Sartre from Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation in “Merleau-Ponty and PseudoSartreanism,” Veronique Zaytzeff (trans.), in The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Jon Stewart (ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), esp. 463. 19. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, 357. 20. Martin Heidegger, “Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics?,’” in Pathmarks, William McNeill (ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 237. 21. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Pathmarks, 267.

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tial interpretations” of biblical texts. His “demythologization” was intended to show how the Revelation is not about a transcendent and distant God; rather, the Revelation is about an occurrence in existence. Similarly, Paul Tillich wrote out of the experience of the “death of God” (an expression taken both from Heidegger and Nietzsche). But the doubt implied by the death of God, for Tillich, is supposed to make us find the courage to have faith. Reacting against atheistic existentialism, Gabriel Marcel rejected the label “existentialism”; but then, indirectly exhibiting a similarity to Heidegger, Marcel criticizes modern individualism and subjectivism because they render the religious question obsolete. For this movement, the religious question is always a question of what the person is. The fundamental experience of the person, according to Emmanuel Mounier, is the experience of being spoken to. This second-person experience is at the heart of the “I–Thou” relation, as we find it in Martin Buber. The “Thou” refers to each other human other, but within each other there is the eternal Thou, which is God. As Levinas notes, Buber is the “pioneer” of the thought of alterity. The thought of alterity always attempts to escape from the immanence of consciousness. Therefore, for Levinas, the thought of the other is the thought of transcendence. And as his thought develops, Levinas calls the thought of transcendence “ethics.” Although not using the word “transcendence,” the philosophy of the concept shares with existential theology the project of an escape from consciousness. Even more, as it develops through Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem, and into Michel Foucault, the philosophy of the concept understands itself as moving in the reverse direction from phenomenology. While phenomenology tried to show that the subject constitutes structures, meanings, and science, the philosophy of the concept (especially as Foucault appropriated it) tried to show that structures outside and independent from the subject constitute the subject, turning the subject into a kind of epiphenomenon. At its beginning, however, the philosophy of the concept has a more intimate relation to phenomenology. The phrase “the philosophy of the concept” originates in “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” a posthumously published text written by Jean Cavaillès, a war hero from the French Resistance who was executed by the Gestapo in 1944. In “On Logic and the Theory of Science”, Cavaillès is seeking a philosophy that is faithful to mathematics, in particular, faithful to the becoming of mathematics. For Cavaillès, mathematics is not tautological. If it were, all the discoveries of mathematics that have occurred throughout its long history would have been logically contained in its basic axioms. In other words, if mathematics were tautological, then its discoveries would not be real discoveries. Mathematics, in Cavaillès’ eyes, is genuinely creative, genuinely historical. We can see here how the historicity of human existence (at first illuminated for us through the artwork) is still functioning in the background of Cavaillès’ thought of mathematics. It is precisely this interest in the history of mathematics that leads 12

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Cavaillès to Husserl, in particular to Husserl’s late writings on history, such as his “The Origin of Geometry.” What Cavaillès finds in these late texts is that Husserl thinks that, through a process of “reactivation,” a thinking back into the original activities of the first geometer, one is able to discover the original meaning of geometrical concepts. Yet, Husserlian reactivation, Cavaillès realizes, does not require the concrete study of the history of geometry. What Cavaillès then objects to is that the history of mathematics never contains discoveries that actually change the meaning of mathematics. In Husserl, the current developments are continuous with the past; they do not erase the past. According to Cavaillès, however, when a new theory is invented, the new theory in fact radically modifies the concepts of the former theory. The becoming of mathematics, for Cavaillès, consists in the deepening and eradication of concepts. Therefore Cavaillès famously concludes “On Logic and the Theory of Science” by saying, “It is not a philosophy of consciousness but a philosophy of the concept that can give a theory of science. The generating necessity is not the necessity of an activity but the necessity of a dialectic.”22 Like the philosophy of the concept, what was called “logical analysis” and what is now called “analytic philosophy” arises from reflections on scientific knowledge. Also, like the philosophy of the concept (at least if we restrict ourselves to Cavaillès), logical analysis has an intimate relation to phenomenology. The first criticisms of phenomenology arise not in the anglophone world but in the Germanic world, from philosophers deeply aware of Husserl’s writings.23 At this point, in the 1930s, a rift does not exist between phenomenology and logical analysis. There is no question that the first criticisms took phenomenology seriously. The criticisms of phenomenology (which also target Bergsonism and all life philosophy) coming from logical analysis (and from logical positivism and neo-Kantianism) seem to focus on one relation: the relation of intuition to conceptualization (or experience to linguistic expression). Starting from this relation, the criticisms then seem to go in two directions. Either phenomenology concerns experience without conceptualization or it provides linguistic expressions without experience. The first side of the disjunction applies mainly to Husserl, since according to Husserl the phenomenological method is fundamentally intuitive. So, for instance, Moritz Schlick argued that knowledge could not be reduced to any kind of intuition, the pure content of intuition being inexpressible. The result of such criticisms was that phenomenology was seen as an irrational, nonconceptual intuitionism. Passing from the first side of the disjunction 22. Jean Cavaillès, “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” in Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, Joseph J. Kockelmans and Theodore J. Kisiel (eds) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 409. *23. For a detailed discussion of these early reactions to phenomenology, see the essay by Michael Friedman and Thomas Ryckman in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3.

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(intuitions without concepts), we come to the second side, which applies to Heidegger. Rudolf Carnap’s 1931 essay, “The Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language,” targeted nonsensical philosophical sentences. Although Carnap presents several examples of such nonsense, what he says about Heidegger’s 1929 address called “What is Metaphysics?” became famous. The criticism is simple. In “What is Metaphysics?” Heidegger writes this sentence: “The nothing nothings.” It is grammatically correct and it resembles sentences such as “the rain rains.” However, what Carnap stresses is that Heidegger has made a logical mistake of using “nothing” as a noun. One can meaningfully say “the rain is outside,” since the word “rain” is a noun or a name. And one can say that “nothing is outside,” but here the word “nothing” is not a noun or a name. The sentence consists in a negative existential. It must therefore be reformulated as “There is nothing (nothing exists) which is outside.” The sentence “the nothing nothings” is nonsense according to Carnap, not only because the word “nothing” is being used incorrectly, but also because Heidegger has introduced a word “which never had a meaning in the first place.” Moreover, not being a noun or a name, “the nothing” in Heidegger’s sentence refers to no object.24 Not referring to an object, it is not possible to verify the sentence. The sentence then must count as metaphysical speculation in the worst sense. It is not clear whether these criticisms hold or not. Questions could be raised, questions Heidegger himself later raises: Is experience restricted to the experience of objects? Is language restricted to logical form? Nevertheless, these criticisms have had their effects. Even today, these criticisms have the result of making phenomenology (and more broadly continental philosophy) constantly defend itself against the charge of obscurantism.

iv. conclusion: “to the things themselves” With these three last topics (God, concept, and logic), we have started to move beyond the chronological period of this volume. Thanks to Derrida’s 1964 essay, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” Levinas’s thought becomes increasingly important. Levinas’s emphasis on alterity, on the wholly other, will produce what has come to be called “a theological turn” in phenomenology.25 In the early 1960s, Foucault’s archeological 24. Rudolf Carnap, “The Overcoming of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, Michael Murray (ed.) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 24–5. *25. For a discussion of this “theological turn,” see the essay by Bruce Ellis Benson in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 7. Levinas’s work is a focus of Robert Eaglestone’s essay in the same volume.

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studies take up the banner of the philosophy of the concept. These early Foucault studies are emblematic of the structuralist movement. But “structuralism’s” attempt to displace the subject and therefore its attempt to displace phenomenology leads to the entire development of the great French thought of the 1960s: not only Foucault, but also Derrida and Deleuze.26 Structuralism turns into post-structuralism, and the development of French poststructuralism (and postmodernism) occurs at the same moment that anglophone analytic philosophy comes to dominate departments of philosophy in the English-speaking world. In the second half of the twentieth century, the divide between what we now call “continental philosophy” and “analytic philosophy” becomes more severe. Yet, as the century comes to a close, what we see is a powerful resurgence of phenomenology. The call “to the things themselves” therefore seems to have an inexhaustible vitality. 27

*26. For a discussion of these and other figures of French poststructuralism, see the essays in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6. 27. I am very grateful to all the authors for their effort and cooperation. Alan Schrift’s direction of this volume in particular and the entire series was invaluable. My thanks as well to Kate Williams at Acumen for her copyediting and to David Agler at Penn State for composing the index.

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1 dialectic, difference, and the other: the hegelianizing of french phenomenology John Russon

i. hegel in france There have been a number of times in history when the (re)discovery of something from the past by a culture or a community has had a remarkably stimulating and revitalizing effect on the work of that community. The discovery of Aristotle’s texts in the Christian West in the thirteenth century led to a sort of philosophical revolution in the works of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The works of Plato provided a seemingly inexhaustible source of nourishment and inspiration for the cultural imagination of the Italian Renaissance. Although never lost, St. Paul’s writings from the New Testament were in a sense “rediscovered” by Martin Luther, leading to a revolutionary reformation of the Christian church. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s experience of the art of the Hellenistic and Hellenic world led to an explosive “classicism” in German writers. The unearthing of the works in Lascaux, and related “discoveries” of “primitive” art around the world led to a revolution in twentieth-century European art. In each of these cases, the revolutionary developments are new; yet, nonetheless, there is an important sense in which they are – and are seen to be – a kind of belated reception of the force of those “original” works. There is a profound sense in which the rediscovered works motivate and shape the original and revolutionary cultural developments, even as those developments themselves give new life and new meaning to those older documents or artifacts.

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Something similar could be said about the role of the texts of Hegel in French intellectual culture of the 1930s and 1940s.1 In particular, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807 demonstrated some of its incredible potency through the huge impact it had on original work in many different areas of intellectual culture. Prior to the late 1920s, Hegel’s philosophy was known almost exclusively through his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The Encyclopaedia, although vast and rich in its content, is opaque and schematic, written by Hegel as a handbook to accompany his lectures. Careful reading of the Encyclopaedia, especially by those highly conversant with his central works – the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic – reveals it to be a powerful and exciting work of philosophy; when it was read in isolation from his other texts and without a strong understanding of the principles of Hegel’s philosophy, however, the work appeared dry and, indeed, machine-like in its attempt to categorize systematically the full range of reality. The introduction of Hegel’s Phenomenology to French readers – especially through the work of Jean Wahl and Alexandre Koyré2 – suddenly presented a new Hegel, vibrant, provocative, and revolutionary. Initially through these writers, and subsequently through a multiyear seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology led by Alexandre Kojève from 1933 to 1939, a new Hegel was discovered who spoke powerfully to the existential contradic1. The reception of Hegel in France is discussed in Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2003); Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); and Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Helpful discussions of these works are Judith Butler, “Review of Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History,” History and Theory 29 (1990); Stefanos Geroulanos, “Review of Bruce Baugh, French Hegel,” MLN 118 (2003); and Marcel Stoetzler, “Subject Trouble: Judith Butler and Dialectics,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (2005). On Butler’s interpretation of Hegel, see also Shannon Hoff, “Restoring Antigone to Ethical Life: Nature and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” Owl of Minerva 38 (2007). For a brief discussion that parallels my own of the significance of Wahl, Kojève, and Hyppolite, see Terry Pinkard, “Hegel in the Twentieth Century,” in The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy, Dermot Moran (ed.) (London: Routledge, 2008). [*] See also Pinkard’s essay on Hegel in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 1. 2. Jean Wahl (May 15, 1888–June 22, 1974; born in Marseille, France; died in France) was educated at the École Normale Supérieure (1907–10), and received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1920. His influences were James, Kierkegaard, Marcel, Nietzsche, and Whitehead, and he held appointments at the University of Besançon (1918), University of Nancy (1920), University of Lyon (1923), Sorbonne (1927–36), Mount Holyoke College (1942–45), Smith College (1944–45), and the Sorbonne (1945–60s). Alexandre Koyré (August 29, 1892–April 28, 1964; born in Taganrog, Russia; died in Paris, France) was educated at the University of Göttingen (1908–11) and the Sorbonne (1912–14). His influences were Brunschvicg, Husserl, and Meyerson, and he held appointments at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (1922–32, 1950s), Fuad University (later Cairo University) (1932–34, 1936–38, 1940–41), Johns Hopkins University (1950s), and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study (from 1956).

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tions of personal and interpersonal life, to the motor and meaning of historical and political development, to the stifling and alienating conditions of modern social life, to the transformative power of artistic creation, to the dynamism and life of the mind, and to the “irrationality” of reason.3 In Hegel’s text, vital new resources were discovered for engaging with many of the most pressing concerns of contemporary life. The reception of Hegel flowed down many different channels. Wahl, Koyré, Kojève, and Jean Hyppolite were engaged in the scholarly interpretation of Hegel.4 In Jacques Lacan, Hegel’s ideas intersected with the tradition of psychoanalysis. Hegel’s philosophy had a significant impact on the artistic world through André Breton and the surrealists, a trajectory that, in the work of Georges Bataille, also intersects with the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and structuralist anthropology.5 Indeed, this line of structuralism, with its roots in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, also intersects with Lacan and the psychoanalytic stream, and later flows into the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida. Hegel’s work had a direct and powerful impact on existentialism, through Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, a trajectory itself interwoven, in the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida, with the mainstream trajectory of phenomenology that had been developing through the works of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Many of these thinkers, too, can also be understood to be continuing the tradition of Marxism, and, through the work of Beauvoir, Hegel’s text was involved in some of the most influential work in the founding of contemporary feminism. The explosive influence of Hegel’s thought and texts is thus implicated in, and significantly contributed to, the interweaving of surrealism, existentialism, Marxism, structural linguistics, structural anthropology, psychoanalysis, feminism, phenomenology, deconstruction and the discipline of the history of philosophy. Indeed, as MerleauPonty rightly says, “all the great philosophical ideas of the last century – the philosophies of Marx and Nietzsche, phenomenology, German existentialism, 3. Alexandre Kojève (1902–68; born in Moscow, Russia; died in Brussels, Belgium) was educated at the University of Heidelberg (1920–22, 1924–26). His influences included Hegel, Heidegger, Koyré, and Marx and he held appointments at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (1930s). 4. Jean Hyppolite (January 8, 1907–October 27, 1968; born in Jonzac, France; died in Paris) was educated at the École Normale Supérieure (1925–28). His influences included Bergson, Hegel, Heidegger, and Husserl, and he held appointments at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand (1939–41), Lycée Henri-IV (1941–45), University of Strasbourg (1945–49), Sorbonne (1949–54), École Normale Supérieure (1954–63), and Collège de France (1963–68). Eric Weil (1904–66; born in Mecklenberg, Germany; died in Nice, France) held appointments at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, and the University of Lille (1955–68). *5. Lacan, Bataille, and Lévi-Strauss are each the focus of an essay in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 5.

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and psychoanalysis – had their beginnings in Hegel,” and “there would be no paradox involved in saying that interpreting Hegel means taking a stand on all the philosophical, political, and religious problems of our century.”6 Like Hellenistic sculpture, the works of Aristotle and the epistles of St. Paul, Hegel’s Phenomenology offers inexhaustible resources. The critical appropriations of this philosophy, however, typically also involved various expressions of critical dissatisfaction. These critical appropriations were interwoven with interpretations of Hegel that ranged from sensitive but imperfect to highly incompetent, and along with a recognition of many of his great insights came a legacy of outrageous misrepresentations that have themselves influentially colored the subsequent developments in French philosophy. The “meaning” of a text or a philosophy – Hegel’s or any other – will always be open-ended, for its meaning will always be its significance as defined by the living parameters of the world in which it is apprehended, and thus the “reading” of Hegel’s text is not simply a matter of reconstituting an already fully accomplished sense but will always be interpretation, will always be transformative.7 This undecidability of the authoritative meaning of the text does not, however, change the fact that Hegel’s text is itself very determinate, and the text itself thus still offers itself as a standard for judging the adequacy of any “reading,” and the history of the reception of Hegel in French philosophy must be recognized to be as much a history of misrepresentation, (significantly because of the incredible difficulty of Hegel’s text) as it is the Wirkungsgeschichte of that text, which defines retroactively what it was able to mean. Nonetheless, through the embrace of Hegelian ideas in response to and within the phenomenological movement, the reading of Hegel grew progressively more substantial and more rigorous, reaching a kind of culmination in the works of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. In what follows, I will address the reception of Hegel as a response to the phenomenological philosophy that had been developing in the works of Husserl and Heidegger. My primary orientation will not be toward the claims about Hegel made by the various figures involved, but toward how they can be seen to be deploying Hegelian themes as those are understood by the best contemporary scholarship on Hegel.8 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Hegel’s Existentialism,” in Sense and Non-Sense, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 63–4. 7. As Merleau-Ponty says, “A man cannot receive a heritage of ideas without transforming it by the very fact that he comes to know it, without injecting his own and always different way of being into it” (“Man and Adversity,” in Signs, Richard C. McCleary [trans.] [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964], 224). 8. The quality of scholarship on Hegel underwent a great qualitative improvement in the 1960s and 1970s, largely in tandem with the publication of high-quality research in the journal Hegel-Studien. Since the 1970s, many outstanding interpreters have distinguished themselves,

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ii. the new hegel of the 1920s and 1930s: reason as open sense Hegel’s philosophy is the project of being rigorously committed to allowing whatever appears to show itself on its own terms, and philosophy is thus a project of bearing witness to the dynamism by which the phenomenon transforms itself for its own reasons. This is what Hegel calls “phenomenology” or “the science of the experience of consciousness.”9 Hegel’s philosophy was revolutionary in the history of philosophy for introducing this new method of philosophy: the method of adopting a stance of descriptive receptivity to the self-motion of the object. Hegel’s philosophy is unique – at least prior to parallel developments in twentieth-century phenomenology – in being rigorously and by definition without a thesis or an author. Hegel’s philosophy is true exactly insofar as it does not present views attributable to the author “Hegel,” but instead is only a site for the self-presentation of the phenomenon itself according to its own standards. This rigorous demand that the philosopher not import a point of view of his or her own equally means that the process of description cannot presume in advance to know what rules to follow or what principles to use in interpretation. Hegel’s method, in other words, is the abrogation of method, and his bearing witness to the sense of the phenomenon itself – which Hegel calls variously die Vernunft, der Geist or der Begriff, that is, in English, reason, spirit, or concept – is precisely a renunciation of all conceptions of an independent reason that could define in advance the terms of meaningfulness. It is the phenomena themselves, in their own self-manifestation, that must be the very Darstellung (presentation) of sense, or rationality. That the sense of things must emerge from their own dynamism, and cannot be measured by some alien, predefined, static “reason,” is probably the single most salient idea in Hegel’s phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty writes:

and one cannot claim to be working competently in the domain of Hegel interpretation without engaging with the work of these scholars. The best contemporary English-language commentary on the Phenomenology of Spirit (and possibly the best in any language) is H. S. Harris, Hegel’s Ladder (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997); Harris addresses in detail contemporary scholarship on the Phenomenology of Spirit up to the mid-1990s. For the Science of Logic, the best contemporary work is Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006); Houlgate discusses in detail the whole range of contemporary scholarship on the Science of Logic. Unfortunately, Houlgate’s discussion only goes as far as Hegel’s category of “the infinite”; for an excellent interpretation of the Science of Logic as a whole, see John W. Burbidge, The Logic of Hegel’s Logic (Calgary: Broadview Press, 2006). 9. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, A. V. Miller (trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), paras 27, 26, and 88.

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It was [Hegel] who started the attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason that remains the task of our century. He is the inventor of that Reason, broader than the understanding, which can respect the variety and singularity of individual consciousnesses, civilizations, ways of thinking, and historical contingency but which nevertheless does not give up the attempt to master them in order to guide them to their own truths.10 Hegel’s Phenomenology studies violent struggles for personal recognition and glory, slavery, religious ecstasy, Hellenic funerary practices, the Roman emperor, sun worship and Dionysiac processions. Hegel’s philosophy teaches one not to look “up” to universal principles, but to look “into” the specificities and singularities of determinate realities, and to find sense within things, events, and practices that are pointedly nonuniversal. This conception of reason as immanent sense leads to the prominence of the theme of the philosophical interpretation of history as the phenomenon of freedom realizing itself; as thus self-creative, history is a process that actually accomplishes meaning rather than being a vehicle for an already established sense. This notion is paralleled by Hegel’s emphasis on the primacy of the practical in general, seen especially in his analysis of the distinctive form of self-consciousness – namely, the consciousness of oneself as a competent agent and a participant in the real – that is accomplished through the experience of work.11 These aspects of the Hegelian conception of meaning resonated with a number of emerging cultural movements in France in the 1920s. The Hegelian themes of the inherent meaningfulness of history and work characterize the writings of Marx that self-consciously drew on these Hegelian ideas and that made their own explosive entry into French culture at roughly the same time as the discovery of Hegel, through the discovery of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and many of Hegel’s ideas were thus obviously significant to the intellectual and political traditions of French Marxism. The demand of Hegel’s “method” that one find an immanent sense within phenomena rather than defining them in terms of a pre-established standard of rationality or normalcy also had a natural affinity with psychoanalysis and its recognition of “illness” as autonomously meaningful. And Hegel’s notion of sense as something that is not established in advance and held in reserve but is 10. Merleau-Ponty, “Hegel’s Existentialism,” in Sense and Non-Sense, 63. 11. The discussion of work is in Phenomenology of Spirit, paras 194–6. For contemporary interpretations of these passages, see Harris, Hegel’s Ladder, vol. I, 363–70, and my Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), ch. 6. Themes pertinent to history are found in Chapter 6 of the Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled “Spirit”; these claims are more directly found in the introduction to Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hugh Barr Nisbet (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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realized in giving oneself over to the self-defining life of the particular is what appealed to the surrealists in their enthusiasm for Hegel in the early 1930s. The surrealist movement aligned itself with the Communist Party, and thus was already in the political ambit of Marx and Hegel, but the connection with Hegel was more significant and more explicit in the definitive “method” of surrealism. André Breton (1896–1966), in his “Surrealist Manifestos” called for a commitment to a vibrant pursuit of meaning through the rejection of the rule of alien reason. Along with an invocation, in the First Manifesto (1925), of Freud as a pathbreaker for “recovering the rights” of imagination against convention and conformity, Hegel’s dialectical method was imagined, in the Second Manifesto (1929), to offer a resource for overcoming the strictures of a bureaucratizing and normalizing “rationality.” In the First Manifesto’s definition of surrealism as an “automatism … by which one proposes to express … the actual functioning of thought … in the absence of any control exercised by reason,”12 Breton’s words clearly do resonate with Hegel’s “method” of abandoning oneself to the immanent rationality of what appears. A similar resonance is apparent in Breton’s notion of “objective chance,” according to which one gives oneself over in desire to what unexpectedly arrives through the unpredictable development of the object of desire.13 Finally, the surrealist notion of the generation of novel “syntheses” through the conjoining of seeming aliens clearly drew on a notion of synthesis that was seen to be at work in Hegel’s dialectic. Although his relation with the surrealists was always strained, Bataille’s thought in the 1930s and 1940s is strongly resonant with this movement. Perhaps the strongest connection between Bataille and the surrealists, and also his strongest connection with Hegel, is found in his idea that the regularized relations of normal social life (which he later called a “restricted economy”) do not present the original or ultimate form of meaning, but rather depend on a more fundamental flow of energy (“general economy”) that does not itself answer to the terms of normalized life. This Hegelian idea of a more basic sens that is both the condition of and the source for the undermining of the conformist rationality of social systems was subsequently highly influential on Derrida, Lacan, and others for shaping their own engagement with phenomenology.14 12. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (trans.) (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 26. 13. André Breton, L’Amour fou (Paris: Gallimard, 1937), 46. Compare Derrida, “dialectics is the indefinite movement of finitude” (“The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation,” in Writing and Difference, Alan Bass [trans.] [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978], 248). 14. For Bataille’s notions of “restricted” and “general” economy, see The Accursed Share, Volume I, Robert Hurley (trans.) (New York: Zone Books, 1991). The significance of this for Derrida is explicit in “From Restricted to General Economy: An Hegelianism Without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference.

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Breton and Bataille were not Hegel scholars, but the contemporaneous commentaries on Hegel’s philosophy written by Wahl and Koyré are straightforward works of Hegel scholarship. Wahl, who was Professor at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967 (except for a period during the Second World War, when he fled to the United States after escaping from a German prison camp), was highly influenced by the philosophical ideas of Henri Bergson and William James. He was himself highly influential on both Sartre and Levinas, and on French philosophy in general, especially through his early works on Hegel and Kierkegaard. The work on Hegel was a self-conscious attempt to introduce French readers to the perspective of the young Hegel, whose works had been published by Wilhelm Dilthey and Herman Nohl in Germany in 1905 and 1907.15 What distinguished Wahl’s work on Hegel was its emphasis on the existential concreteness behind the logical forms of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Wahl, strongly influenced by Kierkegaard, showed Hegel to be of compelling existential importance by rightly recognizing the centrality for Hegel’s philosophy of the figure Hegel calls “the Unhappy Consciousness.” “The Unhappy Consciousness” is Hegel’s name for the ultimate condition of self-consciousness, which is, namely, that we are never fully self-possessed but are always at a distance from our own selves, waiting to receive our own sense of meaning and identity.16 As Wahl puts it, “consciousness is too small for itself, because greater than itself.”17 Wahl found in Hegel’s study of unhappy consciousness the “tragic, religious, and romantic” context of meaning – the “fear and trembling” – that so prominently shapes Kierkegaard’s thought.18 Unhappy consciousness is the experience of a self torn between its being embedded in the finite, and its being drawn to an infinite beyond: it both is and is not itself, is and is not its object, such that its unity is its dismemberment, its duplicity its unity.19 Philosophy, religion, and the search for meaning that is the motor of human history all begin in the affectivity of this divided consciousness, and Wahl understands Hegel’s Phenomenology to be the history of the attempts by unhappy consciousness to fill its inner void, its inability ever to fully “be” itself. Wahl’s interpretation of Hegel is distinguished primarily by this idea that the dialectic of the Phenomenology is to be understood as the 15. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels,” in Abhandlung der königlichen preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: 1905), and Hermann Nohl (ed.), Theologische Jugendschriften (Tubingen: Mohr, 1907). 16. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paras 206–31. For contemporary interpretation of the Unhappy Consciousness, see Harris, Hegel’s Ladder, vol. I, ch. 9; and my The Self and Its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), ch. 1. 17. Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la conscience dans le philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Rieder, 1929), 155. 18. The language is from Koyré’s “Review of Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la conscience,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 110 (1930). 19. See Jean Wahl, “Commentaire d’un passage de la Phénomenologie de Hegel,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 34 (1927).

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working through of this existential situation, an interpretation that privileges affectivity and existentiality over abstract rationality or systematicity. Wahl, (who took himself ultimately to disagree with Hegel), construed the ultimate force of this insight to be the need to reinvest the contingent with the force of the infinite, the initial experience of transcendence being thus folded back into immanence.20 Wahl’s insight into Hegel’s figure of the “Unhappy Consciousness” – which must also be in a stance of waiting for ourselves – fit well with Koyré’s writings on Hegel’s understanding of time. Koyré, himself explicitly operating in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl and Heidegger, correctly recognized (pace Heidegger) that Hegel’s philosophy operates with a conception of temporality that is defined by the primacy of the future.21 These two interpretations of Hegel, like the work of the surrealists and Bataille, draw from Hegel the notion of the openness of sense, and, correspondingly, of the way in which our existential condition is one of being necessarily both excluded from participation in a fully established rational system and responsible for engaging with the issue of meaning. These themes obviously resonate powerfully with the existential movement in French philosophy in the 1940s, and the Hegel-inspired works of these intellectuals had a direct influence on that movement. In fact, though, because of the work of Kojève, the Hegelinterpretation begun in Wahl and Koyré was temporarily eclipsed by the less competent and much more influential Hegel-interpretation of Kojève, a situation that was not corrected until the work of Jean Hyppolite.

iii. existentialism and phenomenology in the 1940s: sense and the other The most manifest impact of Hegel on French philosophy is found in the writings of the existentialist philosophers of the 1940s. In 1927, Heidegger, in Being and Time, launched an “existential analytic of Dasein.” This study argued that we are always already “in-the-world” and that experience could not be understood as a “product” of a preexistent and independently defined transcendental meaning-giving power. Whether the transcendental ego, as that is understood by Husserl, ultimately is such a detached, autonomous meaning-giving power is by no means obvious, but the effect of Heidegger’s work was to inaugurate an “existential” approach to phenomenology that challenged such a “transcendental” 20. See Jean Wahl, Existence humain et transcendence (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1944), 37–8. 21. Alexandre Koyré, “Hegel à Iéna,” in Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 147–89; see esp. 160, 170, 176–7.

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phenomenology that was identified with Husserl. The existentialist philosophers, in advancing this “antitranscendental” orientation, found Hegel’s phenomenology a welcome ally, partially because of the Hegelian–Marxist focus on engagement, but especially because of Hegel’s emphasis on the experience of others and the “dialectic of recognition.”22 Hegel’s phenomenology aims to describe accurately the various forms experience takes, and one of its central studies is the description of the experience of self-consciousness. In the sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology entitled “The Struggle to the Death” and “Lordship and Bondage,” Hegel shows that the definitive desire of explicitly self-conscious beings is a “desire of the other,” that is, we desire to be the object of the other’s desire, and we are inherently responsive to the experience of being subjected to the gaze of other explicitly self-conscious beings.23 His description captures the various strategies we live out in response to this experience that run from (i) trying to obliterate our “outside” as embodied in the perspective of the other upon us so as to maintain an experience of total self-possession (the struggle to the death), through (ii) trying to subordinate and control that outside/other (lordship and bondage), to (iii) embracing the shared intersubjectivity of our self-identity (the reciprocal recognition of “spirit,” the “I that is We and We that is I”24). These latter two developments are interpersonal relations that are only possible through a kind of institutionalization, which means they are relations that are inherently mediated by law and language. The half dozen pages of the Phenomenology in which Hegel describes this dialectical development were perhaps the most influential pages for French philosophy of the 1940s. These pages made their entry into French thought primarily through Kojève’s seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1933 to 1939.25 Kojève worked through the entirety of Hegel’s text with seminar participants who included Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Aron Gurwitsch, Eric Weil, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As Wahl before him had seen the power of Hegel’s figure of “the Unhappy Consciousness” for 22. This opposition of Husserl and Heidegger is expressly discussed in Trân Duc Thao, “Existentialisme et matérialisme dialectique,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 54 (1949), according to which Husserl’s epochē puts the transcendental ego “outside the world,” whereas Heidegger recognizes that there must be “a concrete and temporal self ”; Trân Duc Thao rejects Hegelianism, but nonetheless draws substantially on Marx and on notions derived from Hegel. 23. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, paras 178–96. For contemporary commentary, see Harris, Hegel’s Ladder, vol. I, ch. 8, and my Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology, chs 5 and 6. 24. Hegel defines spirit (Geist) as the “I that is We and We that is I” in Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 177. 25. These lectures were published as Introduction à la lecture de Hegel in 1947, selections translated in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel in 1969.

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interpreting a wide range of human affairs, so Kojève found in the figures of “The Struggle to the Death” and “Lordship and Bondage” a powerful key for unlocking the significance of the whole range of human experience. Through Kojève’s direct or indirect influence, an entire generation of French intellectuals saw the importance of the idea that self-consciousness is the desire of the other and that this definitive structure naturally ushers in a dialectic of interpersonal struggle that weaves together the psychological and the political, and that situates law and language at the heart of human identity. Sartre apparently did not himself attend Kojève’s seminar, but his Being and Nothingness (1943) is nonetheless highly alive to these ideas from Hegel that were popularized by Kojève. Sartre argues that all experience must be characterized by a prereflective cogito, a tacit awareness of oneself as an experiencing subject that must be constitutive of any experience, and he makes a parallel argument for what he describes as a sort of “cogito of the other.”26 Just as I always necessarily experience myself tacitly as an “I” or subject, I also tacitly experience myself as a “me,” that is an object for another. “The look” of the other to which I am subjected is also a constitutive feature of all experience, and my selfconsciousness is thus (irremediably) divided between a sense that I am what I take myself to be and a sense that I am what others take me to be. What I am, in other words, is from the start not in my possession but is determined by others, and thus “the original meaning of being-with-others is conflict” because my own reality is inherently a site of contestation between the definitive authority of myself and that of others.27 In a manner highly reminiscent of Hegel’s discussion of “Lordship and Bondage,” Sartre argues that we are always trapped in unsuccessful strategies for embracing our own subjectivity in a way that also embraces the subjectivity of others, for our strategies all result in some form of relationship of domination and subordination. In these sections of Being and Nothingness, Sartre draws on Heidegger’s discussion in Being and Time of the constitutive being-with-others that characterizes our being-in-the-world, and the discussion of the experience of the alter-ego in the fifth of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, but uses the resources of Hegel’s phenomenology of self-consciousness to bring to this theme a richness and a dynamism unexplored in these other texts. His deploying of this Hegelian theme of “the Other” is especially powerful for challenging what critics imagined to be the excessively “immanentist” theme of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. One of the main perceived problems of the “transcendental” approach to phenomenology is that Husserl’s conception of a “sense-giving” transcendental 26. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Hazel E. Barnes (trans.) (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 11–14, 265–7, 301–3, 338. 27. Ibid., 475.

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ego that is a “constituting power” is the conception of an agent that is actually constructing experience that, in one form or another, ends up making experience into a kind of representation of the other.28 If there can be sense only within the purview of the transcendental ego, then both the forms of meaning brought to experiential material and the very materials with which the forming power works must be within the domain of that transcendental ego, so in a profound way the “I” will only ever deal with itself. Transcendental phenomenology is thus accused of being ultimately solipsistic, and providing only a model for a self-absorbed subjectivity. Heidegger’s existential analytic, Levinas’s writings on phenomenology throughout the 1930s and 1940s (which seem to have been highly influential on Sartre), and Sartre’s existentialism all emphasize a primary realm of sense that cannot be understood on the “representational” model of a self-absorbed subject. Ek-sistent or ek-static Dasein (in Heidegger’s language) is outside itself, engaged with what is other. Dasein is not “consciousness” but engagement, being-in-the-world. Sartre’s emphasis on the experience of the other underscores the essentiality of this point. For it to count as experience of the other, that experience must necessarily not be immanent, must not be a representation, but must be precisely what cannot be found within the internal horizons of my ego.29 The experience of the other is precisely, on Sartre’s account, the 28. This basic orientation is captured in these remarks by Paul Ricoeur: “Thus Husserl … conceives of phenomenology not only as a method of description … but also as a radical self-grounding. … [But] in its effective practice phenomenology already displays its distance from rather than its realization of the dream of such a radical grounding in the transparence of the subject to itself. … It is because we find ourselves first of all in a world to which we belong in which we cannot help but participate, that we are then able, in a second movement, to set up objects … that we claim to constitute. … The subject-object relation – on which Husserl continues to depend – is thus subordinated to the testimony of an ontological link more basic than any relation of knowledge” (“On Interpretation,” in Philosophy in France Today, Alan Montefiore [ed.], Kathleen McLaughlin [trans.], 175–97 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983], 188–90). Basically, this “transcendental I,” this constituting power, is a position that “I,” as an engaged, perspectival being-in-the-world, can never occupy. In the 1930s, in The Transcendence of the Ego (1936) and “Husserl’s Central Idea” (1939), Sartre himself defends Husserl against a “representational” view, which he attributes to Descartes and neoKantianism, although he does criticize Husserl for an analogous problem of reifying reflecting consciousness. 29. Sartre also emphasizes the practical and situated character of the self, both in Being and Nothingness and in his later Critique of Dialectical Reason. Like the emphasis on the experience of the gaze of the other, this notion of the engaged subject brings out the way that subjectivity is something in-the-world rather than in consciousness. Hegel’s and Marx’s analyses of work are highly influential on Sartre’s notions of situatedness, action, and history. In “MerleauPonty vivant,” in The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Sartre credits Merleau-Ponty with teaching him about the importance of this theme of the “action that since Marx and Hegel has been called praxis” (The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Jon Stewart

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experience of the insufficiency of “my own” constitutive powers to be adequate to the sense of world in which I find myself. Here, then, Sartre draws on a powerful Hegelian insight in order to highlight the way in which phenomenology must always recognize an unclosable gap in the experience of meaning. Closely related developments are found in the works of Simone de Beauvoir. In both The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949), the influence of Hegel is prominent and explicit. In studying the inherently situated character of freedom, Beauvoir brings together explicitly the rich themes of being-withothers developed by Sartre and his notion of “bad faith,” and she develops what is roughly a systematic model of the forms of intersubjective bad faith. Sartre in his notion of “bad faith” and Heidegger before him in his notion of the “das Man” had both emphasized the way in which our freedom (in Sartre’s vocabulary) can be lived authentically or inauthentically, that is, we can live in a way that owns up to our free nature (authenticity) or in such a way that the image we present of our nature through our actions contradicts the freedom that is the true condition of those actions (bad faith).30 This idea that a form of behavior can be at odds with itself such that its manifest character contradicts its inherent nature is one of the primary characteristics of the dialectical self-transformations of experience as described by Hegel. Sartre had already begun to make manifest something like this link between bad faith and intersubjectivity inasmuch as he demonstrated the ways in which our attitudes toward our being-with-others contradict themselves and transform themselves in accordance with those contradictions. This structure is at the core of Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, the second chapter of which shows both how our attitudes are rooted in the dynamic development of free self-consciousness from childhood and how the different adult attitudes we adopt can themselves each be understood to respond to tensions generated by the contradictions in other attitudes. The attitudes Beauvoir addresses are all one-sided in actively or passively embracing the inherent duality of freedom that is both transcendence (i.e. we are always faced with defining anew the significance of what we have done) and facticity (i.e. through the choices we make we are always defining who we are).31 Beauvoir portrays this work as significantly [ed.] [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998], 582). These themes of engagement and history in Sartre’s philosophy are helpfully discussed in Baugh, French Hegel, 101–17. For other thinkers as well, Hegel and Marx also provided the basis for a philosophy of nature and history that seemed missing in Husserl’s phenomenology. See Trân Duc Thao: “Marxism imposed itself on us as the only conceivable solution to the problems posed by phenomenology itself ” (Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique [Paris: Éditions Minh-Tan, 1951], 5). Compare also Jay Lampert, “Husserl and Hegel on the Logic of Subjectivity,” Man and World 21(4) (October 1988). 30. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 86–116; Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Joan Stambaugh (trans.) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), Division I, ch. 4. 31. This is the subject of chapter 2 of Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity.

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Hegelian, and it is strongly Hegelian in its emphasis on our essential intersubjectivity, on its emphasis of the dynamism within and between attitudes, and, in general, in its emphasis on the self-contradictory character of forms of behavior. The Second Sex is even more direct in its appropriation of Hegel because of its wholesale taking over of Hegel’s dialectic of the relationship of lordship and bondage to explain the formation of women’s and men’s identities in Western culture.32 Although neither The Second Sex nor The Ethics of Ambiguity presented itself expressly as a response to phenomenology, they both operate within the tradition of the existentialist appropriation of phenomenological philosophy so prominently and powerfully introduced by Sartre, and demonstrate the importance of the reception of Hegelian ideas to the history and vicissitudes of the phenomenological tradition. Just as we have already noted that the reception of Hegel ran along many avenues that coalesced and intersected with each other in various ways, so here do we see in Beauvoir’s work how the Hegelianized existential phenomenology itself grew into a cultural significance far beyond the exclusive field of official, intradisciplinary philosophical discourse. The Second Sex in particular stands out not only for its impact in a larger field but indeed for its virtual inauguration of the field of contemporary feminism. In the roughly contemporary work of Lacan, we can also see the impact of Hegel outside intradisciplinary philosophical discourse. We noted above a certain natural affinity between the project of psychoanalysis and the results of Hegel’s phenomenological inquiry into human experience. This connection was powerfully developed by Lacan, who used the parameters of the development of self-consciousness mapped out by Hegel (and interpreted by Kojève) as the model for understanding the child’s psychological development through the Oedipus Complex that Freud had outlined. Freud’s own psychological writings certainly presumed the important place of the experience of the other in psychological development, but they never justified the idea that desire is inherently motivated to care about the other as a self-consciousness;33 Lacan’s insight was to see that Hegel’s description of the desire of self-consciousness as the desire of the other supplied the understanding of desire that would complete the Freudian model. And, following Hegel, Lacan, too, saw that the dialectic of self-consciousness depends on the mediation of desire through the estab-

32. This is the subject of the concluding section of The Second Sex. 33. For relevant texts and discussion, see my “The Bodily Unconscious in Freud’s ‘Three Essays,’” in Rereading Freud: Psychoanalysis Through Philosophy, Jon Mills (ed.) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004). [*] See, also, the essay by Rosi Braidotti and Alan D. Schrift in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6.

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lishing of law and language.34 Because desire defines itself through the other, growing up into the world requires social integration, which is the insertion of oneself into a system of normalizing relations (“the law of the father”) that effectively constitute a universal language. This very system of universal interpretation, however, draws its resources for meaning from the originary propulsion of desire, which will itself never be fully assimilated by or adequately articulated in the terms of this universal order. Through and behind the regularized, “literal” language of culture, desire – the unconscious – speaks in its own language of metaphor/condensation and metonymy/displacement. The interest in an immanent “reason” beneath the surface of regularized rationality that initially defined the common terrain of Hegel, psychoanalysis, and surrealism is hereby shown by Lacan to be translatable into a matter of signs, with the result that the central existential and humanistic questions of meaning are displaced into the domain of linguistics and semiology.35 Lacan’s early work was initially influential among the surrealists, but it was in the 1950s that the trajectory of these developments intersected with the main development of phenomenological philosophy in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.

iv. from existentialism to deconstruction through the 1950s: method and difference The central place of Hegel’s dialectic of recognition in the existentialism of Sartre and Beauvoir is reproduced in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), especially in his discussions of the “metaphysical” dimension of sexuality and the role of expression as “confirmation.”36 Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with Hegel, however, goes far deeper than this. The first and most obvious 34. See, in particular, the so-called “Rome lecture,” “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” published as Chapter 3 of Écrits: A Selection, Alan Sheridan (trans.) (New York: Norton, 1977). On the relation of Hegel and Lacan, see Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 35. A helpful presentations of these ideas is Part I, “The Semiotic and the Symbolic,” of Julia Kristeva, The Revolution in Poetic Language, Margaret Waller (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). 36. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 215 and 261; published in English as Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.), Forrest Williams (rev.) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 168 and 185. See also MerleauPonty, “Metaphysics and the Novel,” in Sense and Non-Sense, 26–40. In his discussion, in the “Sexuality” chapter, of “existence” as the coming together of necessity and contingency, Merleau-Ponty effectively equates the definitive notion of existentialism with Hegel’s notion of “spirit” (which is likewise the coming together of reason and history). See Phénoménologie de la perception, 197–9; Phenomenology of Perception, 196–8.

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“Hegelianism” of the Phenomenology of Perception is found in its structure and method. Like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which describes the dialectical development of experience from it most immediate form (“Sense-Certainty”) to its most developed form (“Absolute Knowing”), the Phenomenology of Perception is a phenomenological description of experience that runs from the most immediate form (“The Sensation as a Unit of Experience”) to its richest development (“Freedom”). Merleau-Ponty’s work is also organized around a triadic structure of subject (Part I: “The Body”), object (Part II: “The World as Perceived”), and their relation (Part III: “Being-for-itself and Being-in-the-World”). In these respects, there is a strong mirroring of Hegel’s work in Merleau-Ponty’s own. The most striking and important parallel, however, is in the method MerleauPonty follows in his phenomenological description. Merleau-Ponty’s manner of proceeding in his description and analysis of each successive topic in his work is not to assert and defend the position he advocates, but rather to take up familiar approaches to the phenomenon in question and, through careful attention to their responsiveness to the phenomenon they purport to explain, to allow them to demonstrate their own insufficiencies. More or less with respect to each topic, Merleau-Ponty first describes an empiricist interpretation (i.e. one that interprets the subject as inherently passive), which description typically reveals an insufficient account of agency, and then turns to a rationalist interpretation (i.e. one that interprets the subject as inherently active) as an alternative, which description typically reveals an insufficient account of passivity. The positive characteristics of the phenomenon revealed through these accounts, together with their mutual insufficiencies, are then shown to point to the need for a third form of accounting for the phenomenon that reveals the subject (and mutatis mutandis the object) to be being-in-the-world, a condition that, indeed, necessarily underlies and makes possible the sorts of attitudes that empiricism and rationalism presume to be primary. Although somewhat more formulaic than Hegel’s approach in the Phenomenology of Spirit (indeed, in external form it resembles more closely the method of Bergson in Matter and Memory in particular, which work is organized around the idea that neither idealism [rationalism] nor realism [empiricism] can adequately account for experience, and which proceeds, like Merleau-Ponty, by considering in turn the errors of each method in order to make possible the articulation of Bergson’s own account), this method of allowing one-sided accounts (i) separately to demonstrate their own need for supplementation by what they exclude as opposite, and (ii) mutually to demonstrate their reliance on a more basic form of experience that is not itself defined in terms of the antithesis that characterizes the two opposites, is very much the method of dialectical observation demanded by Hegel. The Phenomenology of Perception can, therefore, with equal legitimacy, 32

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be called a book of Hegelian or Husserlian (or, for that matter, Heideggerean) phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty thus represents the strongest version of the reception of Hegel’s phenomenology as a response to Husserl’s phenomenology inasmuch as his work is effectively an argument for the identity of those two phenomenologies. Merleau-Ponty, too, reproduces the comprehensiveness of Hegel’s philosophy – which is a call to openness – inasmuch as he similarly calls for an identification of phenomenology with linguistics, psychoanalysis, and art. Indeed, all the streams of “Hegel-interpretation” that we identified in French culture themselves come together explicitly in Merleau-Ponty’s work. The very openness of phenomenology – its very comprehensiveness – ultimately erases its unique and distinctive status as an exclusive discipline. Merleau-Ponty’s writings from the 1940s resemble very much the writings of Sartre and Beauvoir in that they are occupied with the “human drama” of existence. Like Heidegger, however, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on experience is not “anthropological” or “humanistic,” but rather provides an opening for engaging with the “question of being,” and Merleau-Ponty’s writings of the 1950s and early1960s explicitly emphasize this “ontological” dimension. If, as MerleauPonty and Heidegger argue, we are essentially being-in-the-world and if, therefore, the very opposition of “self and world” is a meaning that occurs within being-in-the-world, then the terms of that opposition cannot explain the source of meaning – indeed, they cannot explain themselves. Just as the oppositions of rationalism and empiricism are shown in the Phenomenology of Perception to point to a more fundamental source from which they derive their meaning but that they cannot explain, so does this “ultimate” opposition of self and world point to a more basic source that gives it meaning and that it is inadequate to explain. Like Heidegger’s, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy ultimately points to something like being as the ultimate sense-giver. This development within the French existential response to phenomenology from a focus on human experience as the site of meaning to a focus on the human as responsive to being is paralleled in the development in Hegel interpretation manifest in Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence (1952). Hyppolite was important in the tradition of French Hegelianism initially because of his translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit into French in 1939 and 1941, and subsequently because of his commentary on the same book, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1946). This book was particularly notable because of its continuation of the line of interpretation developed by Wahl, which rightly recognized the figure of “the Unhappy Consciousness” as the essential form of self-consciousness in Hegel’s understanding. In this respect, Hyppolite’s book was an important corrective to the exciting and provocative, but substantially misrepresentative interpretation developed by Kojève in his lectures (which 33

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Hyppolite avoided). Kojève drew powerful lessons from the analysis of Hegel’s description of the relation of lordship and bondage, but he failed to understand the logic and organization of Hegel’s argument in his description of selfconsciousness, and wrongly presented the relationship of lordship and bondage as the completed form of self-consciousness. In Genesis and Structure, Hyppolite continues Wahl’s emphasis on the tragedy and division that inherently characterize human experience, and he understands the movements of the dialectic as our attempts to deal with the questions of meaning within this context, drawing this especially from the analysis of “unhappy consciousness.”37 This book, which is primarily a careful and detailed commentary on Hegel’s text, emphasizes the permanent dilemmas that characterize our human situation, rather than finding in the text a fundamental drive toward “systematization” or the “overcoming” of tensions. Elsewhere Hyppolite writes, “Hegel maintains the tension of opposition within the heart of mediation, [with the result that] … he would reject the possible disappearance of the ‘tragedy of the human situation.’ … It is in the existential tragedy of history that Hegel apprehended the Idea.”38 It is this tragedy that points to the essentiality of forgiveness for human life, and Hyppolite’s work stands out from other interpretations for its emphasis on this topic: the violence and the tensions of human life are not erased, but we become reconciled with them and, through this, we become reconciled with each other. Finally, the figure of “Unhappy Consciousness” points, as the ultimate goal of our existence, and hence of Hegel’s philosophy, to a reconciliation between the here and now and the beyond; such a reconciliation, however, must neither deny our permanent experience of selfdivision nor reduce either side of the opposition to the other. Because there is no “other world” beyond human history, history is the domain invested with ultimate meaning; at the same time, history itself – the empirical reality of humanity – is not a self-defining realm of meaning (as Kojève might ultimately have it),39 but is itself the site for the revelation of God (in the language of religion) or of 37. Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de Hegel (Paris: Aubier, 1946), 187–8; published in English as Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 190–91. 38. Jean Hyppolite, “La Conception hégélienne de l’état et sa critique par Karl Marx,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 2 (1947), 152–3. 39. Like Hyppolite, Eric Weil also rejected Kojève’s claim that the end of history had arrived, instead arguing that our world has reached a point where in principle the goal of history can be articulated, but it has not been accomplished (Hegel et l’état [Paris: Vrin, 1950], 77–9, 102). In Hegel et l’état, Weil also challenged the view that Hegel was a defender of the Prussian state, seeing, on the contrary, ways in which Hegel’s philosophy was precisely a critique of that state, a point ultimately made most powerfully by Jacques d’Hondt in Hegel en son temps (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1968).

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the self-showing of the absolute (in the language of philosophy).40 Hyppolite thus interprets Hegel’s philosophy as a site for uniting existentialist themes of meaningfulness with the Marxist theme of the dialectic of history, and, ultimately, with the Heideggerean theme of Being. Genesis and Structure was an important corrective to Kojève, but it was with Logic and Existence that Hyppolite developed the interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy that showed how it could contribute to the “ontological” approach to phenomenology developing in the works of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. The strength of Hyppolite’s analysis in Logic and Existence is that it argues for the essentiality of the Science of Logic and its engagement with the problematic of “being” for Hegel’s philosophy, as a corrective to the “humanistic” views that saw the Phenomenology of Spirit as the definitive work and as a work whose value was found in separating it from the Science of Logic. Whereas earlier interpreters had made of Science of Logic an otherworldly importation of reason, Hyppolite rightly recognized that what Hegel calls the concept (der Begriff) is the immanent sense of whatever is. Hyppolite argues, in Logic and Existence, that the Logic and the Phenomenology form a pair, each of which presupposes the other, and neither of which can be reduced to the other. Against the “anthropological” approach of Kojève, Hyppolite’s argument is that the human experience that is the subject of the Phenomenology is not itself “the absolute,” but is rather the site for the self-showing of the absolute (i.e. being).41 In this way, humanity is not the ultimate subject of history; rather, history, language, and human practice are the contingent, determinate modes of articulation through which this self-showing of being accomplishes itself. In this interpretation of Hegel, Hyppolite is clearly drawing on Heidegger’s discussion of language as “the house of being” in his “Letter on Humanism,” itself recognized as an important gesture of distancing phenomenology from anthropology and humanism. While it is not at all clear that it is correct to call the existentialism of the 1940s “anthropological,” it is certainly correct to describe Kojève, and his interpretation of Hegel, in this way. In addition to his (misrepresentative) emphasis on the dialectic of lordship and bondage, Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel was also especially significant for its interpretation of Hegel’s notion of the “end of history” from Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history. Kojève presented Hegel as maintaining that history had reached an end, meaning there was fundamentally nothing further to be accomplished politically. Hyppolite’s much more accurate interpretation of Hegel 40. Hyppolite, Genèse et structure, 509–10, 514; Genesis and Structure, 524, 528. 41. See Jean Hyppolite: “Man is the house of the Logos, of the being which reflects on itself and thinks itself ” (Logic and Existence, Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen [trans.] [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997], 74); and “Through this freedom, which Hegel say is the absolute Idea of history … man does not conquer himself as man, but becomes the house of the Universal, of the Logos of Being, and becomes capable of Truth” (ibid., 187).

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comes closer to recognizing that Hegel’s references to the “closure” of history are precisely a demand for infinite openness, and that, far from claiming the accomplishment of human happiness, it is the condition of “unhappy consciousness” that is the permanent and final condition of humanity. The openness of “the Concept” and, likewise, the “unhappiness” of self-consciousness are both situations of an unclosable divide between reality and its own meaning, the permanent condition of a humanity defined as a site for the self-disclosure of being and a reality, as Koyré noted two decades earlier, defined as inherently futural. Hyppolite’s interpretation is important in the tradition of the French reception of Hegel primarily because it begins to come to terms with Hegel’s understanding of being as an originary self-differing, a notion very similar to what MerleauPonty had been developing in his own “ontological” writings of the 1950s under such headings as “interrogation,” “flesh” and “écart.” Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence strongly influenced the development of French philosophy in the 1960s. Inasmuch as this work (like his Genesis and Structure) is a massive improvement over the interpretation offered by Kojève, this influence had a salutary effect on the reception of Hegel. But insofar as engagement with Hyppolite’s interpretation seems often to have functioned as a substitute for the actual engagement with Hegel (much as engagement with Kojève played such a role for an earlier generation of French intellectuals), Hyppolite, who is by no means the best modern interpreter of Hegel, is also responsible for the perpetuation of many unfortunate misrepresentations of Hegel’s philosophy. Much of the focus on language in such writers from the 1960s as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault (all of whom were students of Hyppolite42) seems directly inspired by their studies of and with Hyppolite, and this is perhaps even truer of the focus on difference. The recognition of the notion of constitutive and irreducible differing discussed above marked a significant advance in the interpretation of Hegel’s Science of Logic and of Hegel’s philosophy in general. Hyppolite, however, also put his authority behind the perpetuation of more familiar cartoons of Hegel’s engagement with the themes of dialectic, synthesis, and contradiction, with the result that Hegel’s own profound reflections on the relationship between difference, opposition, and contradiction have largely been lost on a generation of philosophers who made a point of distancing themselves

42. Deleuze dedicated his first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953), to Hyppolite; and Foucault, who succeeded him at the Collège de France, acknowledged his importance on several occasions, including at his memorial at the École Normale Supérieure, where, noting Hyppolite’s influence as a teacher, he said: “All the problems which are ours – we his former students or his students of today – all these problems are ones that he has established for us” (“Jean Hyppolite: 1907–1968,” in Dits et écrits, Daniel Defert and François Ewald [eds] [Paris: Gallimard NRF, 1994], vol. I, 785).

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from a notion of difference-as-contradiction that they attributed to Hegel but that has very little connection with anything in Hegel’s actual philosophy. Derrida, in his “deconstruction,” is obviously and explicitly influenced by Hegel in many ways. Although Derrida at a number of points avows a distancing of himself from Hegel, it is to his actual works that one must turn to determine the relationship of deconstruction and Hegel’s dialectical phenomenology.43 It is particularly in Glas (1974) that Derrida demonstrates most effectively his appreciation of Hegel’s philosophy, but the Hegelianism of Derrida’s thinking is already manifest in his writings on phenomenology from the 1950s and early 1960s.44 Most definitively he, like Merleau-Ponty, embraces Hegel’s method, and the ontology of difference. Hyppolite’s discussion of Hegel rightly showed that “the absolute” both can never appear as such and yet nevertheless must always be appearing in and as something or other. This is the relation between the ontological and the anthropological, between the “origin” and the site that conditions the origination of that origin. This description conforms almost exactly to the notion of différance that Derrida introduced in his discussion of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena in 1967, and these notions were already present in his writings on Husserl between 1954 and 1962. Especially in The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1954), and Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry (1962), Derrida grapples with this theme of the emergence of the ontological within the phenomenological, or of the ideal within the historical.45 In The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology, Derrida looks at Husserl’s works from the Philosophy of Arithmetic through The Crisis of the European Sciences to note the abiding tension between, on the one hand, the ideal value of universal and necessary truths (mathematics), “transcendental” 43. Jacques Derrida, Positions, Alan Bass (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 44. These remarks from the 1970s should be read in relation to his introductory remarks to Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic, Lisabeth During (trans.) (New York: Routledge, 2005). This work aims to correct misportrayals of Hegel that too easily distance him from the work of Derrida and other contemporary French philosophers. See also the review of The Future of Hegel by William Dudley in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (October 5, 2006). On the relation of Derrida and Hegel, see my Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology, ch. 14, and “Reading: Derrida in Hegel’s Understanding,” Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006). 44. Excellent treatments of these texts are Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), and Joshua Kates, Essential History: Jacques Derrida and the Development of Deconstruction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2005). 45. See also Jacques Derrida, “‘Genèse et structure’ et la phénoménologie,” in Entretiens sur les notions de genèse et de structure, Maurice de Gandillac (ed.) (Paris: Mouton, 1965); revised and published in English as “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology,” in Writing and Difference, 154–68.

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ideas such as “the thing in general,” and essences, and, on the other hand, the empirical genesis of meaning within experience. Derrida’s argument is analogous to Merleau-Ponty’s in the Phenomenology of Perception, which sees each philosophical topos as motivating both a rationalist account that begins from the necessary pre-givenness of ideal truths (in order to account for the apodicticity) and an empiricist account that begins from the necessary historical accomplishment of meanings (in order to account for the relevance to experience). Following Husserl’s own analyses of the origin of sense, Derrida shows that this “original“ must already be characterized by an irreducible alterity. In his working through of Husserl’s Lectures on Internal Time-Consciousness, Derrida shows that, in Husserl, the “original” “absolute” must be an engagement with the real that is a temporally thick moment, a duration, which means that the experience of meaning is already characterized by a relationship to – a retaining of – the past (and future), and thus, by its own terms, is already not first: it is itself delayed with respect to itself, self-differing. Husserl’s own search for an entirely immanent, self-constituting/constituted meaning thus completes itself in the discovery of a moment that transcends itself, an immanence that is already inherently characterized on its own terms as a relation to outside.46 Sense is thus irreducibly characterized by what Derrida came to refer to as “différance,” here understood through the irreducible temporality of sense.47 In the “Introduction” of 1962, these same themes are replayed with special attention to the nature of writing (a theme introduced in Husserl’s text on the origin of geometry), and this provides the occasion for Derrida to develop a further understanding of this notion of différance through the irreducible role of signs in sense. Basically, any “moment” of sense can function only by being determinate – having a meaning of its own – and by serving as a pointer to other sense – having its meaning outside itself. Determinacy is thus a sign inasmuch as it embeds itself/is embedded in a contextualizing system of reference. A sign is a mark, a contingent, historical, empirical specificity that, by invoking a transcending meaning, inaugurates the engagement with an inexhaustible sense that can be universally repeated. Meaning is thus founded in the sign, always second to a graphic difference (as Saussure argued) which itself has its character of sign only on condition of its revelation of an inexhaustible sense.48 The universal 46. Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, Marian Hobson (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 54–68. 47. In some respects this work, like that of Trân Duc Thao, may be functioning primarily to establish the necessity to reinterpret Husserl’s transcendental ego in terms of Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, thus reflecting more the emphasis of the “humanist” appropriations of phenomenology from the 1940s. 48. Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, John P. Leavey, Jr. (trans.) (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 87–93.

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and the determinate, the ideal and the empirical, are thus intertwined, each the origin of the other, irreducibly different but mutually implicated: “contaminated.” The “original” is always already delayed, a meaning always interpreted by the very sense it inaugurates, always thus a “representation” of an infinitely repeatable sense that exceeds this trace, and thus always already available to others, and thus always inherently in dispute. The phenomenological tradition, which began with Husserl as the imperative to describe what presents itself thus concludes, in Derrida, with the recognition that “what presents itself ” is the unpresentable, that is, appearing is always the disappearing of the writing that is its condition (a theme that was seen to intersect with Lacan’s psychoanalysis, and the notion of an originative desire always disappearing behind that normalizing language that mediates its presence, its “presentability”). Descriptive phenomenology will never be present at the origin of meaning, but will always be instead the revelation of its own condition in a givenness for which it can never account but to which it must respond and from which it is given its resources. Derrida’s taking up of Husserl in these early works is highly influenced by Hegel. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Phenomenology and “‘Genesis and Structure’ and Phenomenology” (1959) both draw explicitly on Hegel, although the sense of Hegel that Derrida deploys is not highly refined. In the “Introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry,” however, Derrida’s relationship to Hegel is significantly more refined, apparently through the direct influence of Hyppolite. In this work, Derrida remarks that Logic and Existence “lets the profound convergence of Hegelian and Husserlian thought appear.”49 We saw above that Hegel’s notion of an originary differing – the core of Derrida’s notion of différance – is a prominent theme in Logic and Existence, and the importance of this for the development of Derrida’s appropriation of phenomenology is made clear in a note in his 1964 “Violence and Metaphysics”: “Hegel’s critique of the concept of pure difference is for us here, doubtless, the most uncircumventable theme. Hegel thought absolute difference, and showed that it can be pure only by being impure.”50 Presumably through the direct influence of Hyppolite, Derrida was able to recognize in Hegel the very terms of his own most central philosophical (non)concept. These early works of Derrida from the 1950s and 1960s parallel very closely in time and in content the work done by Merleau-Ponty himself on the theme of the origin of geometry, both in the “Cogito” chapter of the Phenomenology of Perception and in his lecture course on Husserl’s “The Origin of Geometry” from 49. Ibid., 67 n.62. 50. Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, 320 n.91.

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1959–60, entitled “Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology.” In these works of Derrida, as in the work of Merleau-Ponty generally, the philosophy that emerges is not a criticism of Husserlian phenomenology but rather stays with Husserl to the point that phenomenology shows its own limits, shows its own reliance on what exceeds it. This method of staying with the phenomenon and allowing it to demonstrate its own nature without external imposition is, of course, the method called for by Hegel, and, indeed, with both philosophers, their resulting philosophy can with equal legitimacy be called Hegelian or Husserlian, although both of these philosophers rhetorically identify themselves more primarily with Husserl. But although Derrida and Merleau-Ponty are remarkably similar in their philosophical projects (and, indeed, are remarkably close to Hegel), the works ultimately have a rather different style. In his earlier works especially, (less so in late works such as Aporias, for example), Derrida uses the fundamental insights about writing as a motivation to work from the themes of language and to focus on the character of written texts (in the familiar sense of that designation), whereas Merleau-Ponty works much more from the phenomena of human engagement. The result of this is that Derrida’s work links him much more with the traditions and trajectories of structural linguistics and literary criticism, while Merleau-Ponty’s work intersects more obviously with “humanist” phenomenology and existentialism and with psychology. Structuralism in linguistics had already been embraced as a response to “humanism,” as a way to displace the human subject’s centrality by showing the embeddedness of meaning in “inhuman” systems (a tradition for which the Hegelianized psychoanalysis of Lacan was already significant). While Merleau-Ponty, in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” had already established a connection with Saussure’s linguistics, it was much more the work of Derrida that had the transformative force of allowing the seemingly more humanistic tradition of existential phenomenology to be displaced from the center of French thought by the tradition of structural linguistics in the later 1960s.51 Throughout each of the stages of its development from the 1920s to the 1960s, French philosophy took powerful and productive inspiration from Hegel’s philosophy. This intellectual world also produced, in Jean Wahl, Alexandre Koyré, and Jean Hyppolite, three of the most sympathetic and insightful of Hegel’s interpreters. The engagement with Hegel was hearty: it was enthusiastic and polemical, and it was rooted in a real sense of the power of Hegel as an interlocutor, and of the importance of grappling with the specifics of his text. The generation of French thinkers that followed this period, however, seem in many cases to have accepted a “received” Hegel, which carries on the misrepresentations and 51. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs, 39–83.

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inadequacies of these earlier Hegel interpreters as much as it carries on their insights. It seems unfortunate that the work of Hegel, which was so consistently essential to this history of the development of French philosophy, now suffers misrepresentation at the hands of later French thinkers who consistently adopt a received anti-Hegelian rhetoric in their philosophizing, rather than generating their own, reinvigorated Hegel. It is worth remembering that Wahl, Koyré, and Hyppolite produced their Hegel-interpretations in large measure to correct existing misrepresentations, and it is this spirit, rather than the imperfect letter of their interpretations, that should be carried on.

major works Jean Hyppolite Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de Hegel. Paris: Aubier, 1946. Published in English as Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974. Logique et existence. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953. Published in English as Logic and Existence, translated by Leonard Lawlor and Amit Sen. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997. Études sur Marx et Hegel. Paris: M. Rivière, 1955. Published in English as Studies on Marx and Hegel, translated by John O’Neill. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

Alexandre Kojève Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Published in English as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, translated by James H. Nichols, Jr. New York: Basic Books, 1969.

Alexandre Koyré Études galiléennes. 3 vols. Paris: Hermann, 1939. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957. Published in French as Du monde clos à l’univers infini, translated by Raïssa Tarr. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962. Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.

Jean Wahl Le Malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel. Paris: Rieder, 1929. Vers le concret: Études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine. Paris: Vrin, 1932. Études kierkegaardiennes. Paris: F. Aubier, 1938. Petite histoire de “l’existentialisme,” suivie de Kafka et Kierkegaard, commentaries. Paris: Club Maintenant, 1947. Published in English as A Short History of Existentialism, translated by Forrest Williams and Stanley Maron. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949.

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Eric Weil Hegel et l’état. Paris: Vrin, 1950. Published in English as Hegel and the State, translated by Mark A. Cohen. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Logique de philosophie. Paris: Vrin, 1950.

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2 existentialism S. K. Keltner and Samuel J. Julian

i. the origins of existentialism in prewar france Today, “existentialism” broadly construed refers to the lives and works of a number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and philosophical figures. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche1 are commonly regarded as the predecessors of a diverse set of twentieth-century thinkers, including Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers (Germany);2 Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Emmanuel Levinas, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre (France);3 José Ortega y Gasset, Miguel de Unamuno, and Xavier Zubiri (Spain);4

*1. Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche are discussed in detail in essays in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 2. *2. Jaspers and Heidegger’s early works are discussed in essays in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3. 3. Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986; born and died in Paris, France) was educated at the Sorbonne (1926–29). Her influences included Heidegger, Husserl, MerleauPonty, and Sartre, and she held appointments at the Lycée Janson-de Sailly, Paris (1929), and several lycées in Marseille, Rouen, and Paris (1930–43). Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960; born in Mondovi, Algeria; died in Villeblevin, France) was educated at the University of Algiers (1930–33). His influences included Heidegger, Husserl, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. [*] For more on Marcel, see the essay by Andreas Grossmann in this volume. 4. The focus of this essay on existentialism in France has made it impossible to integrate the Spanish existentialists into the following account. But their work is too important to pass over without comment. For that reason, readers will find a brief introduction to the work of Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, and Zubiri in the Appendix to this essay.

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and Frantz Fanon (Martinique).5 Although Sartre and Beauvoir are the figures most readily identified with existentialism, generally speaking what unites existentialists, or philosophers of existence, in the twentieth century is the analysis of “concrete” or “lived experience” – “existence” broadly construed – as opposed to a second-order reflection on the sciences. The existentialists coupled the rejection of scientific reflection with the rejection of ideal reflection, especially a reflection directed toward ideal values. The term “existentialism” gained immense popularity in France in the 1940s; however, it was not immediately embraced by anyone to whom it was applied and was ultimately rejected by most. Beauvoir recounts her embarrassment at not even understanding “the meaning of the word ‘existentialist’” as late as 1943.6 Nevertheless, Beauvoir and Sartre’s lives and works became inescapably linked to the term. By the end of the 1940s, Sartre and Beauvoir were not only forced to adopt the label “existentialist,” but were also expected to define and defend “existentialism.” While Sartre’s 1945 lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” is the most famous of these explanations/apologies, Beauvoir also wrote several popular defenses of existentialism in the immediate postwar period,7 and her own philosophical works were published next to Sartre’s under the same banner. Others were less willing to accept the label mainly because of its association with Sartre. After Marcel first applied the term to a “resistant Sartre” in 1945,8 he ironically found himself having to distinguish his own version of “existentialism” from that of Sartre – even though he preferred the term “neo-Socratic” for himself.9 Other members of the previous generation who directly influenced Sartre also found themselves having to distinguish their work from his: Jaspers rejected the term as only partially representative of his work because the anal-

5. Frantz Fanon (July 20, 1925–December 6, 1961; born in Martinique, French Antilles; died in Washington, DC) studied medicine at the University of Lyon (1947–51). His influences included Césaire, Freud, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre and he held appointments in the psychiatry department, at Blida-Joinville Hospital, Algeria (1953–56). 6. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, Peter Green (trans.) (New York: Paragon, 1992), 433. 7. See Simone de Beauvoir, “Existentialism and Popular Wisdom,” “Jean-Paul Sartre,” “An Existentialist Looks at Americans,” and “What Is Existentialism?,” all in Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, Margaret Simons, with Marybeth Timmerman and Mary Beth Mader (eds) (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 203–20, 227–35, 307–15 and 323–26, respectively. (“Jean-Paul Sartre” originally appeared in Harper’s Bazaar and “An Existentialist Looks at Americans” originally appeared in the New York Times Magazine.) 8. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, Vol. 1: After the War, 1944–1952, Richard Howard (trans.) (New York: Paragon, 1992), 38. 9. See Marcel’s chapter “Existence and Human Freedom,” in The Philosophy of Existentialism, Manya Harari (trans.) (New York: Citadel Press, 2002), 47–90. Marcel’s own Metaphysical Journal, published in 1927 (the same year as Heidegger’s Being and Time), is generally regarded to be the first work of existential philosophy published in the twentieth century.

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ysis of existence makes up only one of three main parts of his philosophy;10 Heidegger regarded the analysis of human existence as merely a means to the understanding of Being and so preferred the term “ontology.” The application of the term existentialism was problematic for Sartre’s own generation as well. Sartre applied the label to Camus, who he claimed inaugurated a new “existentialist literature”;11 but later, both Camus and Sartre distinguished the latter’s “existentialism” from the former’s “absurdism.”12 Merleau-Ponty preferred the term “philosophy of existence,” but later even rejected that description of his work. Although Levinas has come to represent “the philosophy of the Other,” his early work in fact focused on the relationship between existents and existence; indeed, he was the only member of the generation to include the term “existence” in the title of his major early work (Existence and Existents). Thus, both Sartre’s immediate predecessors and contemporaries had to situate their work in relationship to his. The same is largely true for the next generation of thinkers educated in France. Fanon, one of the most significant social and political theorists of the next generation who has subsequently come to be known as the father of black existentialism,13 also situated his work explicitly in relation to Sartrean existentialism. This chapter will focus on French (or francophone) existentialism as it emerged in response to Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerean ontology. It is organized primarily around Sartre, who occupies a privileged place in the history of existential phenomenology as the dominant figure to whom everyone (including those who influenced him) was required, in some way, to respond. The origins of existentialism as a twentieth-century philosophical movement, to a great extent, can be traced back to an influx of German philosophy in France, primarily the works of Nietzsche, Husserl, Scheler, Jaspers, and 10. Karl Jaspers, Philosophy [1932], E. B. Ashton (trans.), 3 vols (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969). 11. Sartre, “A Commentary on The Stranger” (1943), in Existentialism is a Humanism, Carol Macomber (trans.) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 73–98. 12. In a 1945 interview with Jeanine Delpech, reprinted in Albert Camus: Lyrical and Critical Essays, Camus commented: “No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. We have even thought of publishing a short statement in which the undersigned declare that they have nothing in common with each other and refuse to be held responsible for the debts they might respectively incur. It’s a joke actually. Sartre and I published our books without exception before we had ever met. When we did get to know each other, it was to realize how much we differed. Sartre is an existentialist, and the only book of ideas that I have published, The Myth of Sisyphus, was directed against the so-called existentialist philosophers” (Albert Camus: Lyrical and Critical Essays, Philip Thody [ed.], Ellen Conroy Kennedy [trans.] [New York: Knopf, 1968], 345). 13. See Lewis Gordon (ed.), Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996). [*] See also Gordon’s essay in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 5.

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Heidegger, and secondarily those of Hegel, Marx, and Kierkegaard, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. With respect to phenomenology, the late 1920s witnessed the first book-length study of phenomenology in France; translations of key phenomenological works; Husserl’s Parisian lectures; and the Heidegger– Cassirer disputation in Davos, Switzerland, attended by young intellectuals from both sides of the Rhine.14 The early 1930s added two more book-length studies of the phenomenological movement (one by Georges Gurvitch and another by Levinas15), and saw the publication in 1932 of Jean Wahl’s Vers le concret, very much informed by Wahl’s reading of Being and Time,16 and French translations of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and two essays by Heidegger.17 This largely receptive phase of the phenomenological movement in France was followed by a wave of original works.18 While phenomenology exercised some influence on established thinkers such as Gabriel Marcel and Eugene Minkowski,19 the first great series of original phenomenological studies was produced by Sartre, including The Imagination: A Psychological Critique (1936), The Transcendence of the Ego (1937), Nausea (1938), The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (1939), and The Imaginary (1940). Today, two essays by Levinas – “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” (1934) and On Escape (1935) – also stand out from this early period owing to recent interest in political phenomenology. The decade 14. The first book-length study was Jean Hering’s Phénoménologie et Philosophie religieuse. Max Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy was the first work by a phenomenologist translated into French and was followed by Karl Jaspers’s General Psychopathology, which was proofread by Sartre and Nizan. See The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Volume 1: A Bibliographical Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974). The Heidegger–Cassirer disputation was attended by, for example, Eugen Fink, on the German side, and Levinas and Jean Cavaillès, on the French side. 15. Georges Gurvitch, Les Tendances actuelles de la Philosophie allemande: E. Husserl, M. Scheler, E. Lask, N. Hartmann, M. Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1930); Emmanuel Levinas, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, André Oriann (trans.) (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), hereafter cited as TIH followed by the page number. 16. In Search for a Method, Sartre mentions Wahl’s text as enjoying a “great success” among his generation (Search for a Method, Hazel E. Barnes [trans.] [New York: Knopf, 1963], 19). 17. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” and “On the Essence of Ground,” both in Pathmarks, William McNeill (ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 82–96 and 97–135, respectively. “What is Metaphysics?” was originally published in Bifur 8 (1931); Sartre’s “Légend de la vérité” was also published in the same issue. 18. For the characterization of the first phase of the phenomenological movement as primarily a receptive phase, to be distinguished from the next productive phase of the movement, beginning with Sartre, see Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd rev. and enl. ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984), 425–47. 19. See, for example, the essays published in Recherches philosophiques, including Marcel’s “Esquisse d’une phénoménologie de l’avoir” (vol. 3, 1933/34) and “Aperçus phénoménologiques sur l’être en situation” (vol. 6, 1936/37); Minkowski’s “Esquisses phénoménologiques” (vol. 4, 1934/35) and “Le problème du temps vécu” (vol. 5, 1935/36).

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immediately preceding the Second World War thus marked, as Merleau-Ponty recounts in “The Philosophy of Existence” (1959), “the moment of [his generation’s] great initiation into the philosophy of existence.”20 At the time of his death in 1938, Husserl’s main published works could have given the impression of reducing the whole of conscious life to theoretically “pure” (or representational) acts. Yet, prior to Husserl’s death, both Sartre and Levinas also saw what the latter called “the very wide extension of the Husserlian notion of intentionality” (TIH 44). For each, the fecundity of the Husserlian notion of intentionality depended on freeing it from the restrictions imposed by Husserl’s concerns for the foundations of the formal sciences (logic, arithmetic, and geometry). Following Scheler and Heidegger’s lead, both Sartre and Levinas sketched the structures of intentionality in affective and practical life. For them, being is irreducible to its mode of appearance to “pure” consciousness: the world itself is essentially a wanted or a hated world – beautiful or ugly, alluring or repulsive, charming or horrifying. Again, following Heidegger, Sartre and Levinas saw in Husserl the possibility of getting beneath traditional subject– object dualism and, so, beyond the impasse between idealism and realism. In The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology (1930), the work that introduced Sartre to phenomenology, Levinas argues that “[t]he precise function of intentionality [in Husserlian phenomenology] is to characterize consciousness as a primary and original phenomenon, from which the subject and the object of traditional philosophy are only abstractions” (TIH 48). Sartre’s The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness21 also denied the primacy of the “I think.” By distinguishing between a prereflective, spontaneous consciousness and reflexive consciousness and by describing how the act of reflection constitutes an empirical ego, he shows how the subject–object correlation depends on the existence of an “absolute, impersonal consciousness” (TE 106). Later, in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty would note that “Husserl’s originality lies beyond the notion of intentionality; it is to be found in the elaboration of this notion and in the discovery, beneath the intentionality of representations, of a deeper intentionality, which others have called existence.”22 The seemingly empty formulation of consciousness as always being 20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosophy of Existence,” Allen S. Weiss (trans.), in The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Jon Stewart (ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 495. 21. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (trans.) (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), hereafter cited as TE followed by the page number. 22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.), Forrest Williams (rev.) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1995), 121 n.5, hereafter cited as PP followed by the page number.

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“consciousness of …” thus opened the possibility of an analysis of concrete life beyond its representational function. French existential phenomenologists also emphasized not serene reflection but “limit-situations” (an idea inherited from Jaspers and employed effectively by Heidegger in Being and Time) as providing concrete access to the level of existence, which remains hidden to theoretical life. Beauvoir aptly describes the significance of the limit-situation thus: “[I]t is in these privileged cases that man discloses and manifests his essence in a way that is more pure and necessary than in daily life.”23 While in Being and Time Heidegger had presented anxiety as a privileged mode of access, interestingly, in the 1930s both Sartre and Levinas, each apparently without knowledge of the other, presented nausea as a revelatory experience. In Nausea, Sartre describes how in the experience of nausea existence loses its status as an abstract philosophical category and appears as “the very paste of things.”24 Nausea reveals existence to be contingent, without reason, absurd – superfluous, yet also impossible to abandon: “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. … Existence is a fullness which man can never abandon.”25 In On Escape, Levinas similarly presents nausea as an experience that shows existence to be a fact from which it is impossible to escape. Nausea is a desperate “effort to get out [of] the fact of being riveted” to oneself: “We are there, and there is nothing more to be done, or anything to add to this fact that we have been entirely delivered up, that everything is consumed.”26 For Levinas, then, “The experience that reveals to us the presence of being as such, the pure existence of being, is an experience of its powerlessness, the source of all need” (OE 69). The profound link between Sartre’s and Levinas’s early works and the major works of existential phenomenology in the 1940s is a shared concern for and manner of approaching the common theme of “existence” inspired by, if not entirely faithful to the letter of Husserlian phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s utilization of abnormal psychology (for example, Minkowski’s analysis of the schizophrenic’s lived experience of space) functions in the same way as these first-person descriptions in Sartre’s and Levinas’s early works. Conversely, for Beauvoir and Fanon, the significance of being a woman or having black skin in a white man’s world, respectively, is concretely revealed from the start by the shock of not being able to escape the surveillance of another – which marks the end of all naïveté.

23. 24. 25. 26.

Beauvoir, Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, 233. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, Lloyd Alexander (trans.) (New York: New Directions, 1949), 127. Ibid., 133. Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, Bettina Bergo (trans.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 66–8, hereafter cited as OE followed by the page number.

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ii. essential texts of french existential phenomenology in the 1940s Against the background of war, existentialism emerged as a major cultural phenomenon in the 1940s largely because of popular literary and political writings by Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, and Camus, including the publication of the newspapers Les Temps modernes, edited by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir, and Combat, edited by Camus. The war’s end also brought with it a major wave of criticisms from the general public as well as from intellectuals on the political Left and Right, directed particularly against Sartrean existentialism. Sartre famously catalogues some of the criticisms from both the Marxist Left and the Catholic Right in the opening pages of “Existentialism is a Humanism.”27 Beauvoir succinctly summarizes the charges against existentialism in The Ethics of Ambiguity: “[I]t is … claimed that existentialism is a philosophy of the absurd and of despair. It encloses man in a sterile anguish, in an empty subjectivity. It is incapable of furnishing him with any principle for making choices.”28 The more philosophically significant objections were aimed at Sartre’s presentation of his ontology in Being and Nothingness (1943). Being and Nothingness thus serves as an essential point of departure for approaching a series of foundational texts of French existential phenomenology, especially those by his contemporaries and closest associates: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. Camus’s thesis of absurdism was an important point of reference in the reception of existentialism. Although Sartre and Camus were one in their insistence on the meaninglessness of the world, Camus’s absurdism was largely born of his reading of nineteenth-century philosophical and literary texts, especially those of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. In his 1942 The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes the feeling of absurdity as “born of the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.”29 The feeling of the absurd arises in the human being’s confrontation, for example, with mortality or the baselessness of absolute ideals. Consciousness of the absurd, however, does not simply destine the human being to meaninglessness, which could be used to justify crime, oppression, and murder. Instead, for Camus, “the man of the absurd” may also be a “man of revolt” who transforms values. Camus’s philosophy of revolt would not be developed until later, in The Rebel (1951), but 27. Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 17–18. 28. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, Bernard Frechtman (trans.) (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1996), 10. Hereafter cited as EA followed by the page number. 29. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and other Essays, Justin O’Brien (trans.) (New York: Knopf, 1955), 32.

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already in the early 1940s one hears the emergence of an ethics of the absurd that orients human beings to a concern for injustice in the world. Although Camus’s absurdism was formulated independently of Sartrean ontology, its moral and political meaning would be subsequently deepened in relation to Sartre’s own attempts to work out the implications of existentialism.30 Sartre opens Being and Nothingness by making a distinction between two irreducible regions of being characteristic of inert objects, on the one hand, and consciousness, on the other, which also make up two aspects of the self: being-in-itself and being-for-itself. For Sartre, things simply are: “being in-itself is what it is.”31 This is not to say that things are in the sense that their meaning is forever fixed and unchangeable. Things are, rather, determinations of being whose meaning is disclosed by the for-itself. Being-for-itself, to the contrary, is not simply what it is: being-for-itself is “being what it is not and not being what it is” (BN 28). Sartre’s contradictory formulation is meant to express the essential noncoincidence of human reality.32 To be human is to exist in such a way that one is not simply present to oneself in the manner of things. Being-for-itself is a negation of being and a desire for being – a lack of being, nothingness, or negating activity (“nihilation”), which at the same time discloses the meaning of being-in-itself in this very act of negation. Sartre further describes human reality in terms of a tension between transcendence and facticity. Negatively, transcendence refers to the capacity of consciousness to escape being-in-itself; positively, the desire “to be” transcends being-in-itself by projecting possibilities into the future – possibilities that it is not, but that it has to be. Positively, the desire to be such-and-such aims to accomplish the kind of identity that is specific to the being of things, but which is essentially impossible for conscious beings. Conversely, facticity refers to the way in which transcendence is essentially bound up with already given facts, for example, my place, my past, my environment, my fellowmen, and my death. The characterization of human reality as a tension between transcendence and facticity was meant to reveal a central point: that the meaning of being is not simply given, but is constantly negotiated through the projection of possibilities. The for-itself constantly escapes being-in-itself by projecting itself toward a yet to be determined or possible future; however, this escape can never be total, since it is always bound to given material, social, and historical conditions. The impossibility of realizing the desire to be what one is, that is, of attaining

30. See section III of this essay. 31. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Hazel E. Barnes (trans.) (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 28. Hereafter cited as BN followed by the page number. 32. “La realité humaine” was the French translation of Heidegger’s term for existence, Dasein.

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the identity of being-for-itself and being-in-itself, is what leads Sartre to define “man” as a “useless passion” (BN 615). The refusal to accept what one is (facticity) or the affirmation that one is simply what one is not (transcendence) is at the root of the phenomenon of bad faith: “The condition of the possibility for bad faith is that human reality, in its most immediate being, in the intra-structure of the prereflective cogito, must be what it is not and not be what it is” (BN 112). In bad faith, one treats oneself as an object. Temporally speaking, one identifies with either one’s past (facticity) or one’s future (transcendence). The fact that the transcendence of the for-itself is essentially tied to past, or to the world within which one finds oneself always already entangled with things and others, implies that human reality is essentially being-in-situation. For Sartre, being in a situation is, at once, beingthere and being-beyond (BN 703). The idea that consciousness projects itself toward the future and thereby escapes its given condition, unlike the being of things, was inspired by Heidegger’s conception of the thrown-project in Being and Time. The circle of selfhood (ipseity) – the tension between transcendence and facticity, or what is not yet and what already is and has been – thus articulates the temporal structure of human reality. “To exist” in this sense is not to be alone among inert things within the world, but to be in relation to others; being-for-others is an essential fact of human reality. Furthermore, since each individual aims to re-create the given world in its own image, Sartre saw intersubjective conflict as the fundamental relation to others. Sartre utilizes Hegel’s master–slave dialectic, in which each participant desires the death of the other, as his point of departure for his descriptions of concrete relations to others. To aim at the “death” of the other for Sartre is first and foremost to attempt to subordinate the other’s freedom to one’s own. Sartre develops this struggle to the death through an analysis of “the gaze” or “the look” (le regard). The Other, he maintains, “is on principle the one who looks at me” (BN 345). The fact of being affected by the look of the Other introduces essential modifications into the structure of human reality. To exist is also to be an object within another’s world. The meaning of my existence is not solely determined by me. In the phenomenon of shame, for example, I experience myself as I am seen by the Other. The gaze of another reduces me to the status of a thing: “Shame reveals to me that I am this being” (BN 351). The linchpin of Being and Nothingness – its various analyses of concrete experience and the basic structures of being they are meant to disclose – is what Sartre refers to as his “ontological understanding of freedom” (BN 612). More fundamental than political freedom, ontological freedom is the originary spontaneous movement of the for-itself, which tends beyond given facts toward possibilities projected into the future. To be “absolutely” free, however, is not the capacity to do what can be conceived without contradiction, nor is it the ability 51

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to satisfy one’s desires or to achieve one’s goals. Ontological freedom is an originary relation to the given world; in other words, freedom is essentially situated: “the situation … is an ambiguous phenomenon in which it is impossible for the for-itself to distinguish the contribution of freedom from that of brute existence” (BN 627). A corollary of the thesis of absolute freedom is total responsibility. If I am never wholly determined by the givens of my situation, then I am totally responsible for myself and for the world conditioned by my acts, whether these acts are due to explicit, reflective decisions or prereflective, spontaneous choices. To choose not to act, as in, for example, the phenomenon of apathy, is still a choice for which I am responsible. Sartrean freedom even renders one responsible for that which one seemingly could not have even chosen: the very shape of the social and historical world into which one is born. To be free is not to be determined to be or to do this or that by “the facts”; it is to be unable to escape the fact that I am absolutely responsible for everyone and everything – human reality is irrevocably “condemned to be free.” Sartrean ontology – including its apparent dualism between the in-itself and the for-itself, his conflictual model of human relations or being-for-others, as well as his de-emphasis of the constraints of facticity in his hyperbolic formulations of freedom – was the subject of controversy from the start. Perhaps the most significant critique of Being and Nothingness was leveled by MerleauPonty in his Phenomenology of Perception. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s magnum opus can be conceived as offering an alternate ontology in light of what he takes to be the defects of Sartre’s ontology. Merleau-Ponty criticizes Sartre for maintaining an untenable dualism between being-for-itself and being-in-itself and, hence, for his conception of the subject as self-transparent and absolutely free. Merleau-Ponty, therefore, draws more attention (than Sartre) to the fundamental ambiguity inherent to human existence. By making the body the middle term between consciousness and being, on the one hand, and that by which one participates in a common existence with others in a shared world, on the other, he emphasizes the opacity and weight of being – the obscure, anonymous background of existence. He thus highlights the limits of self-consciousness and freedom: Our freedom, it is said, is either total or non-existent. … If indeed we place ourselves within being, it must necessarily be the case that our actions must have their origin outside us, and if we revert to constituting consciousness, they must originate within. But we have learnt precisely to recognize the order of phenomena. We are involved in the world and with others in an inextricable tangle. The idea of situation rules out absolute freedom at the source of our commitments, and equally, indeed, at their terminus. (PP 454) 52

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These and other, often implicit, points of contention between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre would become more explicit in their political debates throughout the 1940s and 1950 (see section III, below). Beauvoir’s position vis-à-vis the opposition between Sartre and MerleauPonty is an ambiguous one. On the one hand, Beauvoir might be thought to have launched an implicit defense of Sartrean ontology against Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms, when she developed the concept of ambiguity – a term exploited by both Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – in The Ethics of Ambiguity. There, Sartre’s work takes pride of place, but remarkably she never mentions Merleau-Ponty, despite the fact that she had favorably reviewed the Phenomenology of Perception in 1945.33 On the other hand, in The Prime of Life she recounts having arguments at this time with Sartre about the situation.34 Additionally, her review of the Phenomenology of Perception might be read as indicating that she found Merleau-Ponty to offer a richer ontological framework. Nevertheless, Beauvoir’s philosophical development was not merely parasitical on the debates between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. In her first philosophical essay, “Pyrrhus and Cineas” (1944), she began to develop her own original analyses of concrete existence, subsequently deepened in The Ethics of Ambiguity. In opposition to the absurdity and despair that characterized the mood of the period and colored the reception of existentialism, she identified the spontaneous creation of meaning through the project as “the joy of existing” and characterized the world as “a source of joy” (EA 41). Further, she emphasized the weight of the situation and the difficulties it posed for the oppressed, an insight that would reveal its larger significance in The Second Sex. Finally, while Beauvoir presented conflict with others as necessary, this conflict was counterbalanced, if not underwritten, by an ethical relation, which she characterized as being one of concern, responsibility, and generosity. This authentic relation would function as the measure and signify the proper end of action – even of conflict. Beauvoir’s analyses of intersubjectivity (or being-for-others) were perhaps her most significant philosophical achievements at the time. In them she maintains that the individual is both separated from and connected to others. For Beauvoir, my existence as a free project fundamentally appeals to the existence of others. In particular, without the Other, my own freedom would harden into “the absurdity of facticity” (EA 17). Beauvoir thus describes this ambiguous relation as a conflict between two freedoms, and she further develops it within an ethical register. Because I am the Other’s facticity, and thereby the condition of the Other’s situation, the Other’s freedom concerns me: 33. Simone de Beauvoir, “A Review of The Phenomenology of Perception by Maurice MerleauPonty,” in Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, 159–64. 34. Cf. Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, 434.

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I am there, and for him, I am confused with the outrageous existence of all that is not him. I am the facticity of his situation. The other is free based on that, totally free based only on that, but free facing this and not that, facing me. The fate that weighs on the other is always us.35 When, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir contends that to will one’s own freedom is, simultaneously, to will the freedom of all, she may appear to be merely reiterating Sartre’s formulation of this idea from his 1945 “Existentialism is a Humanism,” but she had already begun to prepare the ground for this claim in “Pyrrhus and Cineas”. While the works of Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and Beauvoir attracted the attention of intellectuals and the wider public in postwar France (and indeed around the world), Levinas’s first major work, Existence and Existents, was largely ignored at the time. The book, begun before the war and mostly written while interned in a German prisoner of war camp for French soldiers, includes an apology “for the absence of any consideration of those philosophical works published, with so much impact, between 1940 and 1945.”36 The reference is presumably to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Instead of directly addressing the works of his contemporaries, Levinas presents his analyses primarily in opposition to Husserl and Heidegger, with whom he had studied in 1928–29: “[W]here the continual play of our relations with the world is interrupted, we find neither death [Heidegger] nor the ‘pure ego’ [Husserl], but the anonymous fact of existing” (EE 8).37 The centerpiece of Existence and Existents is accordingly an analysis of horror as the concrete mode of access to impersonal or anonymous existence (being-in-general), or what Levinas calls the “there is” (il y a). Horror reveals a more fundamental dimension of existence than personal existence within the world, a condition that Levinas regarded as not simply given. Freedom in this situation outside of the world is merely a thought: “The concept or the hope of freedom explains the despair which marks the engagement in existence in the present” (EE 90). Limited for the most part to the analysis of the relationship between an existent and its existence, the book nevertheless provides a first sketch of an analysis of “the relationship to the Other, as a movement toward the Good” (EE xxvii), which Levinas presents as an asymmetrical, face-to-face,

35. Simone de Beauvoir, “Pyrrhus and Cineas,” in Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, 126. 36. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, Alphonso Lingis (trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1978), xxvii. Hereafter cited as EE followed by the page number. 37. Henri Bergson also served as an important point of reference for Levinas in his early works, although not to the same extent as Husserl and Heidegger.

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I–thou relation,38 contrary to Heidegger’s description of being-with-others in Being and Time. Levinas thus shares with Sartre the rejection of Heidegger’s being-with as the primordial relation to others. He first characterized existence as toward others in Existence and Existents, but shortly thereafter as being for others – where the “for” has an ethical sense. Although Levinas did not have a personal relationship with Sartre, like others in the immediate postwar period, he found Sartrean existentialism an unavoidable point of reference. Chief among the works published during this period that address Sartre is “Time and the Other,”39 a series of four lectures delivered in 1946/47 and published in 1948, which reframes and extends the analyses of Existence and Existents in terms of the antinomy between Marxism and existentialism. In this context, Levinas’s critique of Sartre is twofold. On the one hand, Sartre does not fully take account of the limitation imposed on freedom by the materiality of existence: “In Sartre’s philosophy there is some sort of angelic present. The whole weight of the past, the freedom of the present is already situated above matter” (TO 62). On the other hand, Sartre mistakenly conceives of intersubjectivity as a fundamental relation between two opposing freedoms: “[T]he relationship with the Other is entirely different from what the existentialists propose as it is from what the Marxists propose” (TO 79). To a large extent, this entails challenging the primacy of the master–slave dialectic common to both Marxism and existentialism. Levinas’s analysis of intersubjectivity, particularly the relation to “the feminine” in “Time and the Other,” was subsequently attacked by Beauvoir in The Second Sex (1949).40 That same year, Levinas employed Sartrean language to express the core idea of his philosophy: “the primary fact of existence is neither the in itself, nor the for itself, but the ‘for the other.’”41 Here, as alluded to above, we find for the first time an ethical significance attached to the “for.”

38. Levinas explicitly connects this relation to the dialogical philosophy of Martin Buber. 39. Emmanuel Levinas, “Time and the Other,” in Time and the Other, Richard Cohen (trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987). Hereafter cited as TO followed by the page number. 40. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley (trans.) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), xxii; hereafter cited as SS followed by the page number. When Beauvoir criticizes Levinas’s description of the relation to the feminine, she fails to note that Levinas’s account took place within a critique of Sartre’s ontology. 41. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Transcendence of Words: On Michel Leiris’s Biffures” (1949), reprinted in Outside the Subject, Michael B. Smith (trans.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 149.

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iii. addressing social and political realities in the 1940s and 1950s Whereas the interwar period may be characterized in terms of the political opposition between French liberalism and German National Socialism, the postwar political situation in France may with some right be characterized in terms of the opposition between the United States and the USSR, or liberalism and communism, with France and, in particular, existentialism somehow caught in the middle. The formation of the broadly leftist Les Temps modernes in 1945 by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and others was in fact initially conceived as an alternative venue for addressing social and political issues. The review marked the fruitful collaboration between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, but it also instigated an eventual, hostile break, which saw the two develop in different political directions. With the onset of the Korean War, Merleau-Ponty became increasingly withdrawn from politics and repudiated his earlier sympathies with Marxism. Although Sartre’s last interviews would ultimately suggest a break with Marxism, during the 1940s and 1950s Sartre became more committed to politics and more immersed in Marxist thought,42 ironically in large part owing to his association with Merleau-Ponty. Sartre’s relationship with Camus would likewise suffer as a result of Sartre’s increasing sympathies for Marxism. The postwar political situation thus provided the context for the further development of existential social and political theory. These developments were not limited to the Marxist framework, within which the debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and that between Sartre and Camus were largely played out. First, Levinas and Beauvoir, and then Fanon also made significant contributions, particularly with regard to the complexities of the lived experiences of identity politics. Sartre’s leftist sympathies provided the ground for the public and hostile break between Sartre and Camus. Both Sartre and Camus equated communism and violence, but whereas Camus rejected communism as rationally justified murder, Sartre embraced revolutionary violence. Camus’s The Rebel, published in 1951, presented a notion of “revolt” inspired by Sartre’s “for-itself ” but distinguished his sense of revolt from the revolutionary violence that Sartre defended. He identified an originary impulse of freedom beneath historical revolt, the latter of which he claimed transformed revolt into murder in an attempt to overcome the absurdity of human existence. Communism was simply the modern form of this attempt. In the final chapter of The Rebel, and without mentioning Sartre or his works by name, Camus distinguished himself from “the existentialists” by *42. For a discussion of French Marxism with an emphasis on Sartre, see the essay by William L. McBride in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 5. McBride also discusses the response to Camus’s The Rebel.

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attacking Sartre’s play The Devil and the Good Lord for its justification of revolutionary violence. Sartre promised to review the book in Les Temp Modernes, but continually delayed his response owing to their friendship. Sartre eventually allowed Francis Jeanson,43 his younger colleague and defender, to review it. Jeanson, like most others on the Left, vehemently opposed and criticized it. The publication of The Rebel, and the (silent) debate between Sartre and Camus that took place surrounding it, marked the end of their friendship and solidified their own opposing political positions. While Camus favored a “revolt” that would lead to reform and solidarity, Sartre favored a “revolution” that acknowledged the material needs and experience of the oppressed.44 The major criticism of Sartre from the Marxist Left was that his ontology represented the most recent expression of bourgeois individualism and, more generally, that it was incapable of addressing (if not unconcerned with) the pressing ethical, social, and political issues of the time. In this context, Sartre presented his most widely read and controversial essay, “Existentialism is a Humanism.” There, Sartre defines existentialism by the principle according to which “existence precedes essence.” The formulation was at the center of Heidegger’s critique of Sartre in “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” where Heidegger accuses Sartre of simply reversing metaphysics, which had traditionally privileged essence over existence. Sartre later stated that he deeply regretted the oversimplification of the formulation and explained that his formula was meant to be heard within the context of phenomenological analysis in which concrete experience discloses and articulates the essential structures of existence. When Sartre claimed that “existence precedes essence,” he did not intend these terms to be heard in their traditional metaphysical sense, as Heidegger heard them. Sartre’s claim, in fact, was meant to reiterate Heidegger’s own formulation in Being and Time: “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence.”45 Similarly, in the opening lines of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty highlights this point as phenomenology’s attempt “to put essences back into existence” (PP vii); and Beauvoir, for her part, distinguished existential phenomenology from a philosophy “separating essence from existence.”46 Nevertheless, although Sartre 43. Francis Jeanson (1922–2009) was, in addition to being on the editorial board of Les Temps modernes, the author of over twenty works, including several on Sartre, Beauvoir, and Algeria. He is perhaps best known for his underground activities in support of the National Liberation Front (FLN) in Algeria, for which he was sentenced in absentia in 1960 to ten years in prison (pardoned in 1966). 44. See Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), ch. 7, “The Explosion,” 131–54. 45. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Joan Stambaugh (trans.) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), para. 9. 46. Simone de Beauvoir, “Literature and Metaphysics,” in Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, 275.

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meant to express his agreement with Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, the point he drew from the claim was an emphasis on freedom and responsibility: [T]he first effect of existentialism is to make every man conscious of what he is, and to make him solely responsible for his own existence. And when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.47 “Existentialism is a Humanism” is significant because it contains Sartre’s initial attempt to work out the ethical and political implications of his ontology. Prior to the 1945 essay, Sartre had only gestured at the ethical and political import of existentialism. At the end of The Transcendence of the Ego, for instance, he claimed that the existential theory of consciousness sketched there provided the ground of an ethics and a politics that would be “absolutely positive” (TE 106). Similarly, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre gestured twice toward an ethics that would be consistent with his thought.48 But Sartre explicitly formulates the relationship between his “ontological understanding of freedom” and political freedom for the first time in “Existentialism is a Humanism.” There he claims that to will one’s own freedom is simultaneously to will the freedom of all, a formulation, again, that Beauvoir too would favor. In defining human reality in terms of freedom, Sartre expressed the idea that within one’s conscious act is projected a future in which all of humanity is free. The choice that defines the existent’s project is simultaneously the choice of a specific shape of the world in which the freedom of all is realized. Sartre’s emphasis on freedom seems to create an unbridgeable gap between existentialism and Marxism since, according to Marx’s famous formulation, “being determines consciousness,” whereas it would seem that for Sartre “consciousness determines being.” Sartre’s formulation of existentialism as a humanism, however, should not be confused with classical, Western humanism, of which Sartre himself was a staunch critic as early as Nausea. Rather, Sartre meant to establish a new humanism on existentialist principles; that is, on an analysis of sociohistorical struggle based on an open future, but guided by the idea of freedom. Sartre’s first major attempt at a synthesis of Marxism and existentialism appears in several essays initially published in Les Temps modernes in the early 1950s and later gathered under the title The Communists and Peace. (His first extended critique of contemporary Marxism took shape in “Materialism and 47. Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 23. 48. In a footnote to the section on bad faith, Sartre promised an ethics to come (BN 116), and he concluded Being and Nothingness with some preliminary reflections on ethics.

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Revolution” in 1946.) Merleau-Ponty in turn wrote several essays collected in Adventures of the Dialectic in 1955. The book concluded with a chapter entitled “Sartre and Ultrabolshevism,” where Merleau-Ponty argued that Sartre’s extreme subjectivism made his ontology irreconcilable with dialectical materialism. In “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,”49 Beauvoir explicitly defended the early Sartre against Merleau-Ponty’s charges and showed how Sartre’s thought had developed between Being and Nothingness and The Communists and Peace. Nonetheless, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason may still in great respects be seen to respond to Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms in his synthesis of existentialism and Marxism. In Search for a Method, Sartre states that he “accepts without reservation the thesis set forth by Engels in his letter to Marx”: “Men themselves make their history but in a given environment which conditions them.”50 In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, he uses a quote from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte to make the same point: “Men make their own History … but under circumstances … given and transmitted from the past.”51 As he would write, regarding Paul Valéry: “Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism is contained in these two sentences” (CDR 56). Sartre thus opposes the determinism of orthodox Marxism at the time in favor of “the permanent and dialectical unity of freedom and necessity” (CDR 35). With regard to material existence, the thrown project remains fundamental, but he concretizes it by grounding the project in material needs and the practical field defined by scarcity. With respect to intersubjectivity, Sartre maintained his analysis of “the look,” but he redescribed its significance in terms of a social situation of alienation produced by a process of serialization. The possibility of the formation of practical groups thus required transcending this alienated condition. In The Second Sex and Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Beauvoir and Fanon demonstrate the positive value of Sartre’s account of the look in their respective analyses of gender and racial oppression.52 Phenomena such as race and gender 49. Simone de Beauvoir, “Merleau-Ponty and Pseudo-Sartreanism,” in The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Jon Stewart (ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 448–91. 50. Sartre, Search for a Method, 85. 51. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, Alan SheridanSmith (trans.) (London: New Left Books, 1976), 35. Hereafter cited as CDR followed by the page number. 52. Interestingly, whereas Merleau-Ponty had initially criticized Sartre’s existential Marxism for its distance from Marxism proper, Fanon criticizes Sartre for his proximity to Marxism. This is not to say that Fanon did not recognize the significance of socioeconomic conditions, but rather that its sole focus on class was inadequate for understanding racial colonialism. Fanon’s criticism of Sartre’s subordination of the Négritude movement to a larger socioeconomic dialectic took place in response to Sartre’s “Black Orpheus,” an introduction to an anthology of

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may be said to exist not as the result of essential determinations, nor as the mere reflection of group solidarity, but rather as the effect of a lived reality of oppression. Fanon says, for example, “the black soul is a white man’s artifact” (BSWM 14). In his account of the colonialism of the Malagasy, he writes, “the Malagasy alone no longer exists … the Malagasy exists with the European … something new had come into being on that island” (BSWM 97). In this sense, it is the white man who gives identity to the black man. Analogously, Beauvoir claimed “man defines woman not in herself but relative to him” (SS xxii). In perhaps the most famous and oft-cited formulation in the history of feminist theory, Beauvoir claims, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (SS 267), a formulation of the lived experience of social oppression that came to represent the revolutionary claim that sex and gender are distinct. Sartrean existentialism thus opened the possibility of accounting for the reality of social identities without falling into essentialism by means of an analysis of racial and gendered experience within determinate social and historical situations. Beauvoir and Fanon, however, were not merely disciples of Sartre. Fanon, for example, was deeply influenced by Merleau-Ponty’s account of the “corporeal schema,” the Négritude movement, and psychoanalysis. Beauvoir’s work actively engaged the histories of philosophy and literature, as well as that of the natural and social sciences. Fanon and Beauvoir offer some of the most provocative and creative analyses of social identity to date. A number of shorter pieces, including “Some Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” show Levinas already addressing the question of Jewish existence prior to the war. After the war, Levinas continued to develop this line of thought, but now primarily in relation to Sartrean existentialism in general and Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew in particular. Anti-Semite and Jew provoked harsh criticisms, and Sartre himself admitted many years later that he did not properly treat the subject matter. His most controversial claim was that the anti-Semite makes the Jew. For Sartre, in other words, the sociohistorical conditions of anti-Semitism, rather than the past or a futural purpose, is what makes the Jew a Jew. While Levinas admitted that “Sartre’s notion that Jewish destiny is determined in function of anti-Semitism can be most disappointing,” he also highlighted the positive significance of Sartre’s attempt to criticize anti-Semitism using existentialist principles: “The most striking feature of Sartre’s struggle lies less in his victory than poems edited by Léopold Senghor. Fanon did not deny the reality of Sartre’s dialectic, but his evaluation of it remains ambiguous. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Charles Lam Markmann (trans.) (New York: Grove Press, 1967), ch. 5, “The Fact of Blackness,” 109–40; hereafter cited as BSWM followed by the page number. For a better translation, see “The Lived Experience of the Black,” Valentine Moulard (trans.), in Race, Robert Bernasconi (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). [*] For further discussion of Fanon, see the essay by Lewis R. Gordon in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 5.

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in the arms he employs. They are absolutely new. He attacks anti-Semitism with existentialist arguments.”53 Much later, in “A Language Familiar to Us” (1980), Levinas also came to Sartre’s defense, not on the grounds of his account of the Jew, but on the grounds of his account of freedom, which, Levinas says, offered a “fundamental lesson of freedom” or “a message of hope” for a generation for which it had been lost – “regardless of all he might have thought and said” about the Jews (UH 92). In the meantime, Levinas spent much of the 1950s developing the Judaic dimension of his thought, including the notions of “Jewish humanism” and “holy history.”54 Humanism of the Other (1972), which opens with an essay on Merleau-Ponty, shows, moreover, that the ongoing French debate over humanism and antihumanism provided the cultural context for the publication of Levinas’s last major work, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1974).

iv. the investment of freedom: the 1960s and beyond By the end of the 1960s, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze would emerge as major voices of a new generation of French philosophers who sought to get out from under the immense shadow cast by existential phenomenology. But neither the birth of a new generation, the deaths of Camus in 1960 and Merleau-Ponty and Fanon in 1961, nor the passage to old age spelled the downfall of existential phenomenology. In fact, the 1960s and 1970s brought forth a second and third wave of major works: beginning with the first volume of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Merleau-Ponty’s Signs (1960), Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961), and Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (1961). These works would be followed by Sartre’s multivolume work on Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971–72), Levinas’s Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, and Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age (1970), while Beauvoir’s The Second Sex became a major inspiration for feminism’s second wave. As the debate concerning humanism and antihumanism came to the fore, Levinas’s critique of Heideggerian ontology came to be seen in terms of the same debate. In this context, the possibility of an ethics on existential-phenomenological grounds remained a central concern, that – despite their differences – served to unite Sartre and Levinas in opposition to those who would dissolve the subject into the situation (or reduce consciousness to being). The relationship between the existential phenomenology of Sartre and Levinas thus represents one of the major issues of the later period. 53. Emmanuel Levinas, Unforeseen History, Nidra Poller (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 73. Hereafter cited as UH followed by the page number. 54. Many of Levinas’s essays on Judaism were later collected in Difficult Freedom, Seán Hand (trans.) (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1963] 1997).

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Contrary to the Sartrean conception of freedom as an originary spontaneity, in Totality and Infinity, Levinas refers freedom back to a more fundamental passivity, that is, to a preoriginary alterity that incessantly troubles the identity of the same. Nevertheless, in referring freedom back to an originary passivity, Levinas employs Sartrean language against Sartre: Existence is not in reality condemned to freedom, but is invested as freedom. Freedom is not bare. To philosophize is to trace freedom back to what lies before it, to disclose the investiture that liberates freedom from the arbitrary. Knowledge as critique, as a tracing back to what precedes freedom, can arise only in a being that has an origin prior to its origin – that is created.55 Contrary to Sartre’s originary spontaneity, Levinas presents the identity of the same as always already troubled by the demands of the Other: The subject is “for itself ” – it represents itself and knows itself as long as it is. But in knowing or representing itself it possesses itself, dominates itself, extends its identity to what of itself comes to refute this identity. This imperialism of the same is the whole essence of freedom … the Other imposes himself as an exigency that dominates this freedom, and hence as more primordial than everything that takes place in me.56 In his last major work, Otherwise than Being, Levinas similarly characterizes responsibility for the other, or the-one-for-the-other, as prior to “committed” (or “engaged”) subjectivity.57 From this perspective, Sartre and Levinas may be seen to defend radically opposed conceptions of subjectivity. However, toward the end of his life, in a series of controversial conversations posthumously published as Hope Now, Sartre began to conceive of ethics as foundational to consciousness: By “ethics” I mean that every consciousness, no matter whose, has a dimension that I didn’t study in my philosophical works and that few people have studied, for that matter: the dimension of obligation.

55. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Alphonso Lingis (trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 84–5. 56. Ibid., 87. 57. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Alphonso Lingis (trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), esp. 136–40.

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… In my opinion, each consciousness has this ethical dimension; no one ever analyzes it, and I should like us to.58 Sartre formulates a notion of freedom that simultaneously carries “the nature of a requisition” (HN 70) from the thought of ethics in his prior work: I was looking for ethics in a consciousness that had no reciprocal, no other (I prefer other to reciprocal). Today I think everything that takes place for a consciousness at any given moment is necessarily linked to, and often is even engendered by, the presence of another … To put it differently, each consciousness seems to me now simultaneously to constitute itself as a consciousness and, at the same time, as the consciousness of the other and for the other. It is this reality … that I call ethical consciousness. (HN 71) The proximity of Sartre’s later thought to Levinas’s was pointed out by Levinas himself in a later interview, where he links his use of the term “for others” to Sartre’s use in Hope Now: “Existing for others does not mean appearing to others but being devoted to others. This position is very close to my idea of both ethics and the general role of the category of ‘for the other’ in the very position of the ego or rather in the deposition of the ‘ego’” (UH 98). Interestingly, in “Meaning and Sense,” an essay (included in Humanism of the Other) in which Levinas frames his thought in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of meaning, Levinas appeals to Sartre’s “striking observation that the Other is a pure hole in the world.”59 These interviews with Sartre were criticized by Beauvoir and others for distorting Sartre’s thought. Indeed, Beauvoir’s own Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, which included her own interviews with Sartre, largely sought to discredit Hope Now, describing Benny Lévy as having taking advantage of an old man. Others, like Jean-Pierre Boulé, defended the interviews against Beauvoir, insisting that the interviews represented a new stage in Sartre’s thought. Ronald Aronson has suggested that most reactions to Hope Now may be read as various forms of ageism and that a more balanced and responsible approach to the text would be to locate Sartre’s own intention within “several fields of tension,” including the complex relationship with Lévy.60 Sartre was careful to insist that his rethinking of ethics as requisitioned freedom was not foreign to his earlier thought. Indeed, 58. Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Lévy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews, Adrian van den Hoven (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 69–70. Hereafter cited as HN followed by the page number.. 59. Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other, Nidra Poller (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 39. 60. Ronald Aronson, “Introduction,” in HN 40.

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he claims to have never conceived of the subject as a closed whole: “I really did envisage something that needed to be developed … the dependence of each individual on all other individuals,” where “dependence” does not signal nonfreedom, but rather a constraint that keeps intact free choice (HN 71–2). He thus regarded this “later phase” neither as a break with his earlier thought nor as a distortion of that thought.61 Rather, he identified an essential moment implicit in his work that needed to be deepened and explored. He refers this moment back to Being and Nothingness and suggests that “requisitioned freedom” as an ethical, “inner constraint” at the foundation of consciousness – that is, a self engendered by otherness in an ethical signification – can be found throughout his writings. If Sartre gives to us a further determination of the ethical investment of freedom, Levinas’s thought might represent the sustained interrogation of this moment left implicit within Sartre’s philosophical works. For both Sartre and Levinas the ethical demand that “requisitions” or “invests” freedom means that freedom is not arbitrary but ethically elected. Contrary to the traditional opposition between the self-sufficient ego and the self as a mere moment within a general structure or historical movement, both Sartre and Levinas delineate a more primordial relation to others – an ethical demand at the root of political commitments. Indeed, both can be seen as negotiating the sense of responsible freedom within history – a sense given by the needs of others and articulated in terms of one’s response to them.

appendix: existentialism in spain The three most important Spanish existentialist philosophers were arguably Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, and Xavier Zubiri.62 Unamuno (September 29, 1864–December 31, 1936; born in Bilboa, Spain; died in Salamanca, Spain) was educated at the University of Madrid (BA 1883, doctorate, 1884). His influences included James and Kierkegaard, and he held appointments as Rector at the University of Salamanca (1900–1924, 1930–36). He was a novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, philosopher, philologist, and political figure. The existentialist elements in Unamuno’s works can be found in his two most philosophical works: The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (1905) and The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (1913). Both present the two pillars of Unamuno’s thought: (i) the battle between faith and reason, and (ii) the longing 61. See Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, Patrick O’Brian (trans.) (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 62. The authors wish to thank Marianna Alessandri for providing this appendix on the Spanish existentialists.

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for immortality. The tragic sense of life, for Unamuno, consists in a universal fear of death and longing for immortality, and is something that reason alone cannot alleviate or eradicate. As a self-proclaimed “irrationalist,” Unamuno rejected systematic philosophy and turned to a philosophy of the whole human being, or the “man of flesh and bone.” His thought thus emphasizes not just reason but also imagination, illusion, desire, fear, love, faith, and so on. Nineteen years Unamuno’s junior, and a philosophical rival, José Ortega y Gasset (May 9, 1883–October 18, 1955; born and died in Madrid, Spain) was educated at the University of Deusto, Bilbao (1897–98), Complutense University of Madrid (1898–1904, doctorate, 1904) and University of Marburg. He was influenced by German neo-Kantianism (Cohen, Natorp) and phenomenology, and he held appointments at the Complutense University of Madrid (1910–36). Ortega was a philosopher, essayist, and literary critic, a student of Hermann Cohen, and an intellectual descendent of Dilthey, Husserl, and Heidegger. For Ortega, philosophy’s strength is its capacity for conceptual transparency, intelligibility, and clarity. José Ferrater Mora helpfully classified Ortega’s work into three phases: Objectivism, Perspectivism, and Ratio-Vitalism. Ortega’s first phase expressed a preference for abstract, rational ideas above all else, while the second considered the relationships between things to be crucial to understanding any idea. Famously repeating the phrase “I am myself and my circumstance,” Ortega claimed that distinguishing between an individual and her surroundings perpetuates a mistaken description of the world. Ortega’s third phase was his most existential in proclaiming reason as a product of living: “I think because I live.” His main philosophical works are Meditations on Quixote (1914), Invertebrate Spain (1921), and The Revolt of the Masses (1930). As a student of Ortega, Xavier Zubiri (December 4, 1898–September 21, 1983; born in San Sebastián, died in Madrid) was educated at the University of Madrid (doctorate, 1921) and held appointments at the University of Madrid (1926–36), Institut Catholique, Paris (1936–39), and the University of Barcelona (1940–42), before returning to Madrid where he delivered private cursos (seminars) to a large group of dedicated followers. Zubiri argued for the importance of historical and existential context of thoughts and ideas. He also attempted to combine Aristotelian thought with the phenomenological tradition by claiming that the foundation for thought is not life, but the perception of reality. Like Ortega, Zubiri rejected the portrait of the subject presented in the history of philosophy as somehow detached from life. Instead, he posited that human beings possess “sentient intelligence,” so that what we apprehend is real, although this reality has not been adequately accounted for in the history of metaphysics. His main works include Nature, History, God (1942), On Essence (1962), and the threevolume work, Sentient Intelligence (1980–83).

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3 sartre and phenomenology William L. McBride

Jean-Paul Sartre’s fateful encounter with Husserlian phenomenology was the result, in part, of a casual meeting with his erstwhile École Normale Supérieure classmate Raymond Aron,1 at which the latter, just returned from a fellowship year at the French cultural center in Berlin, waxed enthusiastic about this new approach to philosophy and urged Sartre to apply to do the same thing as he had done.2 Aron’s main point was that phenomenology, unlike the broadly idealist approach that was still dominating the French intellectual landscape in the early 1930s, opened the way for philosophers to give concrete descriptions even of everyday objects. Sartre applied, and was awarded the grant, which he utilized during the academic year 1933–34. During this period Sartre did indeed study a number of Husserl’s principal works and wrote a short expository article, “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité,” which was first published in 1. Raymond Aron (1905–83) was Professor of Sociology at the Sorbonne (1957–68) and held the Chair in Sociology at the Collège de France (1970–83). A close friend of Sartre and Beauvoir during the 1920s–30s, their relationship was strained after the Second World War, as Aron’s politics turned toward classical liberalism. A prolific writer, Aron published over thirty books of philosophy, sociology, history, and political analysis, including Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire (Introduction to the Philosophy of History: An Essay on the Limits of Historical Objectivity), La Sociologie allemande contemporaine (German Sociology), and L’Opium des intellectuels (The Opium of the Intellectuals). 2. Jean-Paul Sartre (June 21, 1905–April 15, 1980; born and died in Paris, France) was educated at the École Normale Supérieure (1924–29). His influences included Heidegger, Husserl, Marx, and Nietzsche, and he held appointments at the Lycée du Havre (1931–33, 1934–36), Lycée de Laon (1936–37), Lycée Pasteur, Paris (1937–39, 1941), and Lycée Condorcet, Paris (1941–44).

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the Nouvelle revue française in January 1939, in other words five years later, but which Sartre’s bibliographers Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka characterize as extremely important because it marked a major development in his thought and the beginning of a more original philosophical perspective on his part.3 Far from being esoteric, it stresses the distance of Husserlian phenomenology from the fixation – common, according to Sartre, to both the idealisms and the realisms of the past century – on knowledge as all-absorbing and on subjectivity and the inner life rather than a robust appreciation of things in the world. In short, this essay treated Husserl as a realist, but a realist of an entirely new sort: Aron had been right. Another product of Sartre’s Berlin year, one that was longer and philosophically more original than “Une idée fondamentale,” was “La Transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’une description phénoménologique.” It first appeared as a long article in the journal Recherches Philosophiques (1936–37), and was only re-edited and published as a small separate volume in French in 1965. Meanwhile, however, in 1957, an English translation (by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick) had been published in book form and was widely read and studied by Sartre scholars in the anglophone world. The Transcendence of the Ego expresses Sartre’s disappointment with Husserl’s introduction into his thought of the notion of a transcendental ego, which occurred in his Sorbonne lectures of early 1929, Einleitung in die transzendentale Phänomenologie, and had first been published in an expanded version in French translation (by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas) in 1931: in other words, two years before Sartre was to become aware of phenomenology. Against these Cartesian Meditations, the title by which everyone now knows this work, Sartre argues that the hypothesis of a transcendental ego is unnecessary and misleading, since the “I” that thinks is best understood as unsubstantial and spontaneous, not a fixed entity of any kind, whereas the conception of myself and of others as having such-and-such qualities is always a construction, and a corrigible one at that, which is best characterized by using the pronoun-object, that is, “le Moi” or, in English, “the Me.” This work clearly anticipates, in a number of basic respects, the ontological position that Sartre was to spell out in such detail in his chef d’œuvre, Being and Nothingness, although in the earlier work Sartre had still not developed the systematic terminology (in particular, the three regions of being: in-itself, foritself, and for-others or for-another) for which the later work is so well known, and he strongly insists there on the impersonality of consciousness in a manner that readers previously familiar only with Being and Nothingness usually find

3. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. Volume 1: A Biographical Life, Richard C. McCleary (trans) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press), 65.

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surprising.4 The Transcendence of the Ego concludes, in its final paragraph, with a ringing defense of phenomenology against charges that it is ultimately a version of idealism; rather, Sartre contends, phenomenology is the most realistic philosophical movement “in centuries,” opening the way for philosophers to be critical of the world’s many evils (suffering, hunger, war) and hence quite sympathetic with historical materialism without, for all that, subscribing to the “absurdity” of metaphysical materialism. This interesting anticipation of Sartre’s later engagement with Marxism is the only such reference in the essay, but it furnishes valuable evidence against the claim, once quite commonly voiced by some critics, that that engagement constituted a radical break, on Sartre’s part, with the phenomenological tradition as he understood it. Back in France in the fall of 1934, teaching at a secondary school in Le Havre, Sartre returned to a set of topics that had interested him well before his introduction to Husserl and had, in fact, been the theme of the thesis that he wrote for his diplôme d’études supérieures in 1927: images and the imagination. The first portion of what he completed, intended as an introduction to the full work, was published separately in 1936 under the title L’Imagination; the title of the later English translation is the same, The Imagination. Since it is primarily a historical survey of various earlier theories (associationism, Bergson, the Würzburg School, etc.), one can readily see how Sartre was able to rely primarily on adaptations of his earlier research for much of its content. Only in the brief final chapter does he present Husserl’s phenomenology as the gateway to truly understanding what an image is. But at the same time he is not uncritical, suggesting that, while for the most part Husserl seems to observe the distinction, crucial for Sartre at this point, between imagining and perceiving, he does not provide a full account of what the hyle of an image is, and suggests that there may be a need to go beyond eidetic description (although this must remain the startingpoint) to experimentation in order to complete the account. In the final sentence of this book, Sartre promises to undertake a future work containing a phenomenological description of the image structure. In fact, this work was already largely completed; it had been the decision of the publishing house (Félix Alcan), to publish only the portion that we know as L’Imagination. But the remainder eventually appeared in print in 1940, that is, four years later, under the title L’Imaginaire, psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. (To make the bibliographer’s task just a bit more confusing, an early English translation of this was given the title The Psychology of the Imagination, whereas a recent [2004] and much better translation restores 4. “Nous pouvons donc formuler notre thèse: la conscience est une spontanéité impersonnelle” (Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick [trans.] [New York: Noonday Press, 1957], 98).

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the spirit and letter of the French title: The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination.) Here, Sartre explores many different forms of image and image-related phenomena, from symbols to dreams, referring to many other writers in addition to Husserl, and concludes with a discussion of art and the aesthetic attitude. Throughout, he remains firmly wedded to the idea that imagination, as that type of consciousness that evokes the “irreal,” is a form of consciousness distinct from such other forms of consciousness as perception, which focuses on the real. As a whole, the work is probably Sartre’s most sustained effort consistently to carry out phenomenological description, and little else, within the framework of Husserlian methodology as he has adapted and reinterpreted it, and in certain ways, in style and range of content, it is anticipatorily reminiscent of Merleau-Ponty’s later and much longer Phenomenology of Perception, where this Sartrean study will in fact be cited from time to time. The next several years saw Sartre involved in various literary efforts, the most important being the ongoing revision of the manuscript of his most famous novel, Nausea, and at the same time continuing his secondary school teaching, the venue of which changed from Le Havre to Laon for one year, and then to the Lycée Pasteur in Paris in the fall of 1937. It was then that he undertook, as he explains in his posthumously published Carnets de la drôle de guerre (The War Diaries),5 to write a long treatise, still in the Husserlian tradition while maintaining a distance from the letter of Husserl’s philosophy, to be entitled La Psyché. If we are to believe him (and why not, given the absolutely prodigious quantity of those of his writings with which we are acquainted?), he wrote 400 pages of it in three months, then stopped in order to complete editorial work on his book of short stories (Le Mur), and never returned to it. One small portion of it, and only one, was published as a short monograph in 1938: Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (The Emotions: Outline of a Theory). This work – self-contained, clear, and rather original – analyzes emotions as kinds of “magic” responses that we adopt as ways of coping with new situations, without ever fully succeeding in identifying ourselves with any of our emotions (e.g. never becoming entirely saturated with the anger that we display). It anticipates, in a very interesting way, Sartre’s much more complex critique of traditional views of the human person as consisting of certain fixed qualities, traits of “character,” and so on that will be one of the central messages of Being and Nothingness. Just how does Sartre explain his abandonment of The Psyche? Above all, he says, it had to do with his increasing discomfort with what he saw as idealist tendencies in Husserl and his increasing dissatisfaction (of which he only became fully aware in retrospect), during that time, with at least two fundamental issues 5. Jean-Paul Sartre, The War Diaries: November 1939–March 1940, Quentin Hoare (trans.) (New York: Pantheon, 1985), Notebook 11, 184.

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that he found it impossible really to resolve within the Husserlian framework as he had inherited it: the issue, previously mentioned, of the “passive matter” in consciousness to which Husserl had given the name hyle, and the question of how to assure oneself that other minds do indeed perceive the same world as I do. At the same time, the gathering war clouds contributed to his distraction from his more austere methodological concerns of the past and motivated him to take seriously, for the first time, the work of Heidegger, which he had previously dismissed as somewhat barbaric. There exists no complete, sustained, systematic Sartrean account of exactly how this first in-depth reading of Heidegger, especially of Being and Time, reshaped his own thinking to such an extent as to play a major role in inducing him so quickly to conceive and compose Being and Nothingness: we have only some occasional, scattered references to this development in the Diaries and in his contemporaneous letters to Simone de Beauvoir. Some scholars have even voiced the suspicion that the systematic ontology elaborated over several hundred pages in Being and Nothingness is derivative, not so much from Heidegger despite the numerous texts in which Sartre engages with and critically discusses the latter, but rather from the mind of Beauvoir, who was his closest companion and the prepublication reader of all, or almost all, of his manuscripts (as he was of hers). This suspicion has been further fueled by the relatively recent discovery of diaries that Beauvoir wrote when an adolescent, parts of which evince greater background knowledge of philosophy and greater philosophical creativity during those early years than had previously been attributed to her, as well as by a new awareness that Sartre had read, at an earlier stage than had previously been believed, a draft of her novel, L’Invitée (She Came to Stay), which contains numerous philosophical reflections reminiscent of some basic ideas (particularly concerning relations with others) contained in Being and Nothingness. “Thus,” comments a leading Beauvoir scholar, “Beauvoir’s novel, long assumed to be an application of Sartre’s philosophy in his essay, was instead discovered to be one of its sources.”6 There should be no doubt that Beauvoir was a stronger and more original philosophical thinker than she, partly out of deference to her companion with respect to the domain of philosophy, ever acknowledged. Indeed, her The Second Sex, while remaining indebted in some basic ways to Husserlian phenomenology, plows new conceptual furrows that neither Sartre nor any of her other contemporaries came close to exploring in such depth. Nor should there be doubt that she exerted a considerable influence on his thinking. But so did he on hers. Continuing research on the details of exactly how each influenced the other will almost certainly prove valuable, but 6. Margaret Simons, “Introduction,” in Simone de Beauvoir: Philosophical Writings, Margaret Simons, with Marybeth Timmerman and Mary Beth Mader (eds) (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 3.

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engaging in polemics with a view to disparaging one or the other is unproductive. It is time now to call a (temporary) halt to my chronological narrative and to confront directly the landmark phenomenon that is Being and Nothingness. It is very important, for understanding the evolution of philosophy in the twentieth century, not to forget that the subtitle Sartre gave this work was “Essay in [literally, “of ”] Phenomenological Ontology” (Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique).7 Ontology had not been a central preoccupation of Husserl’s, although he had left the door open for it as a possibility within the framework of his grand research project. For Heidegger, on the other hand, no aspect of philosophy was of greater importance, even though he gradually came to eschew the word, “ontology,” itself, because of what he came to regard as its deeply misleading connotations. Being and Nothingness begins with a somewhat forbidding introductory chapter that purports to establish, giving due credit especially to Husserl and Descartes, that, if we are to overcome the dualism of appearance and being as well as most of the other dualisms (such as realism and idealism) that have long dominated philosophical thought, there must be a “region” of being that is “transphenomenal,” that is, not exhausted in any or all appearances, and yet at the same time is not of a different order of reality from the appearances (in other words, is not some hidden “noumenon”). He calls this region (the term, “region,” is derived from Husserl) “being-in-itself ” and concludes that all that we can validly say about it is that it is, that it is what it is, and that it is in itself. In the course of this same analysis he makes reference to consciousness, accepting Husserl’s famous statement that every consciousness is a consciousness-of, and determines that consciousness must belong to a different region of being, which he denominates “being-for-itself.” It would not be a great oversimplification to say that all the rest of this long book is an extended analysis of the interrelationships and interactions between these two regions of being, although almost halfway through Sartre will introduce yet a third “mode of existence” that he will insist is as fundamental as being-for-itself and that he will call “being-forothers” (pour autrui, more literally “being for another”). Sartre proceeds to approach his exploration of the nature of the pour-soi, the for-itself, by first examining some familiar experiences of negation and negativity (for which he coins the general term “négatités”), such as that, dear to the hearts of Kierkegaard and Heidegger before him, of anguish or dread, or that of vertigo, or the discovery that someone whom one is expecting is not present as expected, and so on. The inference that he draws from these analyses is that the for-itself is literally nothing (“nothingness,” le néant), in itself. Contrary to 7. As is, alas, all too often the case, the generally trustworthy, although of course not impeccable, English translation by Hazel Barnes bears a slightly, but importantly, misleading subtitle: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology.

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Descartes’s conception of the cogito as an immaterial but substantial mind that thinks, consciousness for Sartre is insubstantial but active, spontaneous, free; in his deliberately paradoxical formula, it is the being “that is what it is not and is not what it is.” It is in this early context of elaborating on our experiences of negation that Sartre introduces, as a particular instance to be explored in greater detail, his analysis of “bad faith,” a lie that one tells to oneself, which has since become perhaps the book’s single best-known chapter. Faith itself, he concludes, is what he calls a “metastable” phenomenon. Sartre’s for-itself can never, as it were by definition, exist apart from the in-itself. Hence, the idea of “facticity,” already proposed by Heidegger, is of crucial importance to him: I always exist, to employ another favorite Sartrean expression (one that gave the title to his ten-volume series of shorter essays, Situations), in situation. As examples of facticity he selects, and analyzes in some detail, my place, my past, my environment, my fellowman, and my death (while assigning to this last a much less central role than it plays in Heidegger’s thought) – in addition to a long discussion of the body as facticity, about which Sartre writes more interestingly and in a more nuanced way than brief summaries of his work usually acknowledge. Although one cannot hope to do more here than skim the surface of the themes developed by him, and then only in a highly selective way, I may note a few more highlights that have attracted particular attention and helped shape a large body of philosophical discussion that was generated in the book’s wake. One is his treatment of values as constructed rather than “given” or “natural”; his famous remark, already adumbrated in The Transcendence of the Ego if not even earlier, to the effect that there is no such thing as a fixed “human nature” epitomizes this. Another highlight is his lengthy treatment of temporality, drawing in some ways on both Husserl and Heidegger and sharing in their critiques of the often taken-for-granted idea of the priority of physical time, but placing in a rather original perspective all three temporal dimensions of past, present, and future. (For Sartre, the past is certainly a part of facticity, as already noted, and yet through our free choices we can and often do alter the meaning of the past, or of any portion thereof; the present takes a certain priority over the other two dimensions; and our “projects” toward the future are fundamental to explaining what it means to act.) Yet a third highlight is Sartre’s proposed solution to the problem of “the Other,” which is to focus on the common experience of being looked at, and hence objectified, by another – an experience that, without involving deductive reasoning or any other type of logical inference, establishes with undeniable certainty that I live in a world with other selves; this notion of the “look” (or “gaze” – le regard) of the Other as a defining characteristic of human experience has been of great influence over a wide range of later thinkers, especially in France. (It is not unreasonable to regard this aspect of Sartre’s philosophy as his response to the dissatisfaction 73

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that he had felt with Husserl’s treatment of intersubjectivity.) A fourth highlight is his chapter on “concrete relations with others,” in which he deals with various possible attitudes and behaviors, particularly of a sexual nature (such as desire, love, sadism, and masochism), starting with the premise that conflict – not always actual, of course, but always potential, given the inevitability of mutual objectification disclosed in the analysis of “the look” – is fundamental to all such relations. Not nearly so unremittingly gloomy as a bare, abstract summary of its topics and themes is likely to make it sound, this series of descriptions of certain concrete human relations is a rather bold venture into territory left mostly unexplored by other philosophers; at the same time, it represents a kind of response to Freud. (This fact is made clearer in parts of the final regular chapter of Being and Nothingness, where Sartre proposes, as a suggestion for others to implement, the development of what he calls “existential psychoanalysis,” to be rooted in his unswerving assumption of the priority of human freedom both as an ontological truth and as basic to the explanation of all human behavior, as opposed to Freudian, or other, determinisms.) As even this very short condensation of just a few of the principal themes of Being and Nothingness should have made abundantly evident, its atmosphere, if not so clearly in the introductory chapter then certainly thereafter, is light years away from the dominant atmosphere of Husserl’s writings, with their strong emphasis on developing a rigorous methodology. Sartre still makes considerable use, throughout the book, of techniques of phenomenological description – his famous illustrations of “bad faith” beginning with the too-perfect cafe waiter are good examples of this – but most usually at the level of everyday experiences and without observing some systematic protocols that Husserl would have considered necessary. The very centrality for Sartre of the enterprise of ontology, mentioned earlier, is in itself a significant departure from Husserl’s concerns, much closer to Heidegger’s, but also differing considerably from the latter by virtue of the basic contrast between Heidegger’s orientation toward Being and Sartre’s anthropocentrism. (One has only to read and compare Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” with Sartre’s later-published lecture, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” to see this contrast. While it is true that the lecture is a popularization that makes no mention of the distinction between two or more different kinds of “humanism” that is to be found elsewhere in Sartre’s writings, and while it is also true that Heidegger emphatically denies that his rejection of the “humanism” that he takes Sartre to be endorsing there makes his own position antihuman, the root differences of philosophical perspective are clear.) In addition, Being and Nothingness is suffused with numerous hints, although often they are little more than that, concerning various aspects of value theory: something conspicuously absent from most of Husserl’s work, at least until his final years. Besides the previously mentioned section on “the For-Itself and the Being of Value,” one may cite as 74

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examples Sartre’s famous footnote at the end of his chapter on bad faith that holds out the possibility of a radical escape from bad faith in the form of “authenticity” – a discussion of which, however, he says has no place there; his dismissal of the hypothesis of a God as being the impossible pure confluence of in-itself and foritself, and his concomitant view of the ultimate human project as that, again an impossibility, of becoming God; and, most important, his promise in the book’s final paragraph to write a book on ethical issues in the future. In short, Being and Nothingness played a key role in opening up an exciting new philosophical and, more generally, intellectual world, one that was to resonate with the spirit of the time that began in France, with the Liberation of Paris in late summer 1944, a little over a year after its publication, and gradually and to some extent came to prevail in much of the rest of the West. Cautious philosophers might refer to the rise of “existential phenomenology” or even of “phenomenological existentialism,” but to the broader public it was simply the vogue of “existentialism.” Although, of course, Sartre’s more strictly literary works commanded a wider early audience than his long and somewhat difficult philosophical treatise, it would be an error to think, as some have claimed, that Being and Nothingness remained virtually unknown and unappreciated during its first years in print. A survey of early reviews of it reveals a few that were written (e.g. Gabriel Marcel’s first review, published somewhat later but dated “November 1943”8) and others that were already published before or close to the time of the Liberation (e.g. one by an anonymous reviewer for the Revue de métaphysique et de morale and another by Alexandre Astruc, from 19449), a time at which any such activity was necessarily rather difficult. Thereafter, beginning in 1945 (Izard in the Argentine journal Sur, A. J. Ayer in Great Britain, A. de Waelhens in Belgium, P. Godet in Switzerland, and R. M. Albérès, F. Alquié, J. Beaufret, R. Campbell, M. de Gandillac, C.-E. Magny, J. Mercier, and R. Troisfontaines in France), and continuing from early 1946 (H. Arendt, W. Barrett, I. Lepp, J. Wahl, et al.) onward, one finds quite an array of reviewers and their reviews in various publications both in France and elsewhere, with a considerable majority concurring in recognizing the great importance of the new philosophy that it contained – even including those, such as Ayer and Barrett, who for one reason or another did not like it.10 The case of Marcel, at the time probably the best-known original 8. Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysics of Hope, Emma Craufurd (trans.) (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 166–84. 9. The first, two pages of summary and untitled, appears in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale 44 (1937), 183–4; the second, “À propos d’un livre,” was published in Poésie 44(17) (1944), 87–8. 10. For more detailed corroboration of these claims, see my “Les Premiers comptes rendus de ‘L’Être et le Néant,’” in La Naissance du “Phénomène Sartre”: Raisons d’un succès 1938–1945, Ingrid Galster (ed.) (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001).

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philosopher among the names I have just mentioned, is especially instructive and interesting in this regard. Although he had invited the young Sartre to present a paper at one of his regular, popular prewar at-home receptions and had encouraged him to expand on the idea of a psychoanalysis of things that had been his theme in that paper, Marcel later developed an ever-increasing bitterness with regard to Sartre’s thought, identifying it with atheism, immorality, and the younger generation; nevertheless, or perhaps in part just for this reason, Marcel did not attempt to deny Sartre’s significance and influence. By 1945, Sartre had achieved the celebrity status that he continued to have for the next decade or so, and it was his philosophy, as much as and probably more than his dramas, his prose fiction, or his rapidly expanding work as an essayist and editor identified with the new journal, Les Temps modernes, that gave him this status. Given the principal theme of the present volume, which is three crucial midcentury decades of responses to phenomenology, I think it would be a mistake to devote space in this essay to Sartre’s extensive work between 1943 and 1960 in the other genres that I have just mentioned (with the partial exception of a couple of the essays). On the other hand, 1960 is the perfect cut-off year for a presentation of Sartre’s historical role as a philosopher, because it was in 1960 that Volume One of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, the only part of that work to appear during his lifetime, was published.11 However, although for many years few Sartre scholars were aware of this, Sartre devoted considerable effort during the immediate postwar years to writing what was to have been his promised work on ethics, only to decide eventually to abandon it. Despite this decision, he did not discard the abandoned manuscript, and it finally appeared posthumously in print in 1983, edited by Sartre’s adopted daughter and literary heiress Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, under the title Cahiers pour une morale (Notebooks for an Ethics). It is a mélange, composed of two notebooks totaling more than 650 pages, plus two brief appendices: one on “the good,” dated from a time in December 1945 when he was taking a long sea voyage to the United States; the other on oppression, focusing on the American slave experience. It is filled with interesting insights and details, but it is by no means a finished effort. Since, moreover, it obviously had no impact on the philosophical world at large prior to 1983, and has had relatively little impact even since then, it does not merit extended attention here. But I will first pick out for mention, in passing, a few of its interesting aspects, then consider possible broader implications of Sartre’s decision not to edit it or publish it. It is clear from the earliest pages of the first notebook that history has begun to play a much more central role for Sartre than in his earlier work. *11. Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason is discussed in detail below and in my essay in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 5.

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He is beginning to believe that an acceptable ontology must be fundamentally historical, and he gives numerous indications of the influence that his careful reading of Alexandre Kojève’s work on Hegel is exerting on him. At the same time, especially since Kojève is notorious for insisting on the close connection between Hegel and Marx but also no doubt in light of the enormous importance being accorded to Marx and to Marxism within the French intellectual climate, Sartre in the Cahiers shows much greater interest than before in such notions as class struggle, labor, alienation, and, of course, dialectics, as well as in the meaning of history. While critical of the Communist Party for its prevarications and inclined to consider Hegel a better philosopher than Marx and the atomic bomb as of greater importance than the Russian Revolution, Sartre now takes very seriously the idea of the “end of history,” which he sometimes equates with the idea, already mentioned occasionally in Being and Nothingness, of a “radical conversion,” but now treated, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly, as a social, even global, rather than merely individual, future possibility. From this point of view, Sartre sometimes treats his earlier work dismissively, as at best a description of “the hell of the passions”12 rather than of the full range of human capabilities, and recognizes (quite rightly, in my opinion) the inadequacy of its treatment of the “we,” of humanity as collective. He now sees “revolutionary socialism” as the ideal, although perhaps only a regulative ideal, and fluctuates between critiquing traditional ethics as a study in the status quo and looking for a new Ethics beyond traditional ethics that would seek to overcome oppression and realize true equality and freedom. Within this general context he engages in fascinating, quite original phenomenological (in the broad sense) descriptions exploring such diverse themes as the basis of law in violence; prayer (or pleading), threats, and demands (or requirements); failure, ignorance, and stupidity; the relations of parents to children; and the oppression of women. Another, albeit mostly implicit, influence on Sartre in the Cahiers is the much-discussed little book on “the gift” written by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss.13 Sartre connects this concept with the virtue of generosity, which at some points he seems to treat as the capstone of a value hierarchy in the sought-for new ethics. (A deep irony that he may not have fully appreciated is that this same phenomenon, generosity, was accorded a sort of capstone role by Descartes in his Passions of the Soul.) This may go further than any of the other proposed explanations (such as that noted by Beauvoir, in her autobiography of the period, to the effect that Sartre became firmly convinced that ethics was 12. “The hell of the passions” (Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, David Pellauer [trans.] [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992], 499). *13. Mauss is discussed in the essay by Mike Gane in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3.

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simply a manipulative bourgeois trick designed to help us live with a world filled with oppression) by way of accounting for Sartre’s eventual abandonment of the entire project embodied in the extant Cahiers: he was simply unable satisfactorily to bring together so many disparate strands of thinking. For example, it is difficult if not impossible to envisage a future ethic that would be in some sense axiological (a hierarchy of values) without putting into serious doubt the radical critique of traditional notions of value that characterizes his treatment of that theme in Being and Nothingness and even of some other texts in the Cahiers. Sartre also came to realize that the latter exhibits certain obvious elements of idealism, which he had always attempted to shun, and decided that this work was a failure. In several important senses he was right, although its variety of rich insights makes it worth reading nonetheless. Of course, Sartre’s concern with ethical issues never really “went away.” It is arguable that his long, probing biography of the playwright, Jean Genet, entitled Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952), in which Genet’s having been branded a thief when still a child is hypothesized as helping to explain many aspects of his later, conflict-filled life, is among other things a masterly study around the fundamental moral question of the meaning of good and evil. His 1964 Gramsci Institute paper on “Ethics and Society,” the background manuscript for which has yet to be published in its entirety, constitutes a serious although sketchy effort at developing a socialist ethic, aimed at bringing about a genuine human society for the first time (faire l’humain), and influenced as much by the Algerian struggle for independence as by anything in classical Marxism. (This institute, in Rome, was among other things a gathering-place for Italian communist intellectuals, with whom Sartre, who vacationed frequently in Rome, felt more at home than with most of their more rigid and dogmatic French counterparts.) Of equal interest are the notes that Sartre sketched for presentation in lecture form at Cornell University but never gave because he felt obliged to cancel his planned visit (in 1965) in protest against the United States government’s escalation of its war against Vietnam; in them, as well, through the exploration of themes as diverse as the decision of a group of Belgian mothers to have their infants aborted when it was discovered that they had become severely deformed through the mothers’ having been prescribed the drug thalidomyde, and the Kennedy–Humphrey Presidential primary contest in West Virginia, in which Kennedy’s Catholicism was a central issue, Sartre focused primarily on ethical issues. It could even be argued, as some have attempted to do, that there are the germs of yet a new Sartrean ethic in the three published dialogues, given the collective title L’Espoir, maintenant (Hope Now), that Sartre had with his secretary and confidant, Benny Lévy, at a time that proved to be the eve of his death (1980). And it can also be argued, quite plausibly, that the later Sartrean work with the most extensive ethical implications, 78

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even if they must be inferred obliquely, is the Critique of Dialectical Reason, to which I will turn shortly. One quite short essay that Sartre wrote after having set aside the Cahiers and that he also failed to publish occupies a special niche: it is Vérité et existence (Truth and Existence), written in 1948 and finally published in 1989. In her introduction to it, Arlette Elkaïm asserts that it is, to her knowledge, the only posthumously published mature work of his that gives the appearance of being a finished piece.14 If one were to try succinctly to characterize its single central theme, a task made difficult by its excessively grandiose and sweeping title, it would be that of the so-called “meaning [or truth] of history,” one of the principal issues that were to come into play in Sartre’s 1952 quarrel and rupture with Camus. In Truth and Existence, Sartre attempts to occupy a middle ground between the relativist view that there is no such thing as a truth of history and its absolutist opposite, that there is a single such truth. He is very clear that truth must be anchored in intersubjectivity, and hence that the understanding of the past is bound up with the changing perceptions of successive generations of human beings. Thus, there can be no final truth of history, even if (and when) humanity ceases to exist, since even at that point there will be no one and no outside entity to close humanity’s eyes. Meanwhile, a certain degree of ignorance will and must always accompany our historical projects, whatever they may be: if we could foresee our “destiny” with certainty, we would no longer be free. The idea of a universal truth is a pure abstraction, he says, yet to acknowledge this is by no means equivalent to denying that there are historical truths, based on the availability of evidence. This little essay is one of the most important keys, in my opinion, to understanding the connection between the so-called “early” (ontologically oriented) and “later” (more historically oriented) Sartre, showing with great clarity that there was a process of intellectual evolution rather than a truly “radical conversion.” Indeed, as he himself points out in the essay’s first paragraph, every conversion doctrine runs the risk of being ahistorical. History certainly played a commanding role in Sartre’s life and thought during the tumultuous Cold War years between 1945 and 1960. One of his most discussed and influential monographs/essays of that period was What Is Literature?, first published in segments in six successive monthly issues (in 1947) of Les Temps modernes, which probes above all the question of whom one writes for and concludes that, given the nature of the writer’s contemporary readership and of the times in which they were living, the only acceptable type of prose literature would have to be one of commitment (or “engagement”: littérature engagée). Writers could no longer remain “above the battle.” But in the context of that 14. Jean-Paul Sartre, Truth and Existence, Adrian van den Hoven (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xliv.

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period particularly in France, and in fact to some extent worldwide, one could not avoid taking some stance with respect to Marxism as part of that engagement. Less well known but of comparable importance in understanding Sartre’s evolution is a shorter essay from mid-1946, “Materialism and Revolution,” in which Sartre had endeavored to delineate just such a stance for himself. Its message is one of solidarity with the revolutionary ideal that was espoused by the so-called “orthodox Marxists” who dominated the then quite powerful French Communist Party, of an understanding of the value of that Party’s crude historical materialist ideology in helping to rally workers to the cause (because materialism implies a fundamental equality among all human beings, undercutting any claims to superiority on the part of some privileged individuals), but of an ultimate rejection of such materialism as a myth because its dogmatic determinism seeks to deny the reality of human freedom. In this essay, Sartre calls for the creation of a philosophy of freedom that would be dedicated to the same revolutionary ideal without needing to rely on the materialist myth. Sartre’s later essays of the same early postwar period, during a portion of which (in the early to mid-1950s) his practical efforts at collaborating as much as feasible with the communists while not joining the Party or giving up his intellectual independence reached their height, are heavily oriented toward political issues: the struggle against the remnants of colonialism, especially in Africa; the cruel and hopeless French war in Indochina; the prosecution of a young French sailor, Henri Martin, for distributing leaflets opposing that war; the outbreak of the Korean War and his somewhat related, somewhat disconnected break with his increasingly anticommunist colleague Merleau-Ponty; and so on. The appearance in mid-1955 of MerleauPonty’s Les Aventures de la dialectique, the long final chapter of which famously accuses Sartre of “ultra-Bolshevism,” must have intensified Sartre’s desire to meet the challenge of creating a new, freedom-based revolutionary philosophy that he had himself posed in “Materialism and Revolution.” In early 1956, one of history’s predictably unpredictable watershed events occurred, to wit, Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation, meant to be kept secret but soon made available to the world, of the many crimes and excesses of his predecessor, Stalin. This ushered in the period of the so-called “Thaw” in the Cold War, which incidentally provided the opportunity for Sartre to move beyond occasional political essays to serious, systematic social and political philosophy, culminating in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. The mechanism for this was a Polish intellectual journal, Twórczosćź, the editors of which decided to profit from the relatively greater intellectual freedom permitted under the new dispensation to prepare a special issue (in 1957) on contemporary thinking in France and invited Sartre to be one of the contributors. He accepted, and the resulting essay, published separately in English translation under the title Search for a Method but appearing in French as the preliminary essay, “Questions de 80

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méthode,” in the same volume as Volume One of the Critique proper, constitutes a major statement of Sartre’s view of the then-current situation of philosophy. It begins with the outline of what amounts in fact to a rather simplistic conception of the history of philosophy, according to which every major period is defined above all by one or at most a couple of great systematic thinkers: Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and so on Our period, says Sartre, is the period defined by Marx, and so every other contemporary philosophical position must be understood as either somehow dependent on or reactive against his thought. From this perspective, existentialism must be seen as an “ideology” (Sartre’s use of this word here is unclear and out of step with most recognized usages) that is subordinate to Marxism, but is nevertheless a needed corrective to the course taken by mainstream Marxism proper, which has effectively come to a halt and grown out of touch, in certain important ways, with reality. What existentialism most emphasizes, while recent Marxism has neglected it, is the individual human being with his or her particular characteristics and the freedom to choose his or her individual projects, albeit within the framework of larger sociohistorical structures. Today’s Marxists, Sartre remarks at one point, speak as if a person comes into existence only on beginning his or her first job, as if he or she had had no childhood. Freudians certainly acknowledge and even emphasize childhood, but fail to recognize other aspects of complete human existence. Behavioral social scientists neglect the dimensions both of freedom and of history. To explain why an individual turns out in one way rather than in any other possible way, Sartre argues, a new method is needed that would involve first undertaking a kind of “archeology” (to employ Foucault’s term anachronistically), uncovering the social and historical layers underpinning that individual’s environment, and then a reconstruction of his or her personality as it develops and manifests itself through that person’s life. Sartre borrows the term “progressive-regressive [more accurately, regressive-progressive] method” from an article written by his Marxist contemporary, the sociologist/philosopher Henri Lefebvre, as the best available label for this sought-for approach to anthropology (in the broad, European sense of that word); he accordingly describes his task as being that of developing “a structural and historical anthropology” and calls the Critique proper a “prolegomenon to any future anthropology,” and his lengthy, much later study of Gustave Flaubert (who is used frequently as an example in Search for a Method), The Family Idiot, will be identified at the outset as a detailed attempt to carry out this very approach. Sartre began writing the Critique in late 1957 and was able to hand the manuscript of Volume One, subtitled “Théorie des ensembles pratiques” (Theory of practical wholes), to Gallimard for publication in early 1960. It was an enormous effort, undertaken under great stress brought on by both personal and political factors (this period was the height of France’s extremely self-destructive 81

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effort to preserve its hegemony in Algeria), and its often verbose, unedited style reflects this. Volume One is, in effect, a detailed manual of the regressive part of Sartre’s “method;” Volume Two, which, although long, is obviously unfinished and would ideally have ranged over much wider territory than its posthumously published version actually contains, is nevertheless an illustration of the progressive part of the method, as its subtitle, “The Intelligibility of History,” suggests. The focus of the largest part of Volume Two is Stalin’s Soviet Union during a period in the 1930s; while it is quite interesting in a number of respects, I will not try to summarize it here, since its very belated publication and the fact that it is still studied only quite infrequently by philosophers, even by comparison with Volume One, makes it of marginal relevance to the overall presentation of Sartre’s thought between 1930 and 1960 that I have been attempting. It is true, to be sure, that Volume One itself has been much less frequently commented on than its earlier counterpart, Being and Nothingness, but it deserves somewhat greater attention here than its sequel both for its content, which is philosophically quite challenging, and because of its role, as I believe we can now see in retrospect, as the embodiment of the end of an era. The overall scheme and structure of this often highly complex work are themselves fairly simple to recount. After a long introductory section that pursues the methodological concerns raised in Search for a Method but at a much higher level of both systematicity and abstraction, Sartre introduces an imaginative structural picture of the individual human being working on inert matter (e.g. as a peasant farmer) under conditions of material scarcity in order to produce enough to satisfy his basic needs and stay alive. The human being, in this account, is characterized above all by “praxis,” the more action-oriented, less purely intellectual term, taken from the early Marx, that serves the same basic function as did “for-itself ” in Being and Nothingness. (Inert matter is the counterpart of “in-itself,” as Sartre himself affirms in a long footnote well into the text that involves one of the very few cross-references to his early work to be found in the Critique.) This necessity-driven activity creates a domain that Sartre denominates the “practico-inert,” a domain in which there comes to be an appearance of role reversal, with the free being of praxis, the human being, becoming objectified in the struggle against recalcitrant matter. This is the point at which Sartre introduces the element of collectivity, of intersubjectivity, that will be his principal concern in the Critique: human beings in such a passive, dominated condition are forced to work together – basically, again, in order just to survive – in social structures that Sartre denominates “series,” their common condition being given the designation of “seriality.” Sartre offers many concrete illustrations, in the form of (loosely) phenomenological descriptions, some of them rather unforgettable. Examples are the actions of the Chinese peasantry succeeding, over generations, in cutting down the trees along the banks of the 82

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Yangtze for such uses as firewood, thus inadvertently contributing, through erosion, to the devastating annual floods (an especially good illustration of the historical phenomenon that Sartre calls “counter-finality”); or, in a less sinister vein, the commuters queuing for a bus at a stop in Paris, each remaining as oblivious as possible of the identities of the others; or the broadcast of propaganda over a government-controlled radio station to thousands of listeners who are impotent to respond; and so on. After much detailed analysis of such serial conditions, Sartre moves to the book’s climax, in which we are confronted with the possibility of an alternative form of social formation, a manifestation, at least in its initial phases, of human freedom expressed collectively, which he calls “the group.” The group formation that he famously chooses as his principal illustration is the taking of the Bastille by residents of one incipient working-class district of Paris who felt themselves to be under threat of being massacred by government forces and who somehow conceived the idea of seizing and occupying this large fortress-prison that loomed over the only route of access to the neighborhood. These individuals engage in a genuinely free common praxis, which, however, as Sartre insists, is always constituted rather than constitutive and can never become a single “organism.” Initial success, however, if there is such, soon gives way to the need to begin to develop some forms of organization – for instance, in this historical case, the need to assign hours of standing guard to warn against any possible attempt by the authorities to regain control – and this process will ultimately lead to the taking of some sort of pledge, or oath, of solidarity, and eventually to much more advanced forms of institutionalization and finally of bureaucratization. And so the circle will be closed, so to speak, and something closely resembling the original condition of seriality, but far more complex, will return. Despite the apparent pessimism of this scheme, to say nothing of Sartre’s depiction of human beings under primitive conditions of scarcity as cruel and destructive, he insists throughout that the dialectical progression being sketched is at every point reversible and by no means necessary. He keeps his commitment to the reality of freedom even while obviously admitting to far more elements of determinism in the world than the reading of Being and Nothingness would have led us to expect, and there are even a few isolated passages in which, while they do not contain the old language of “radical conversion,” seem to hold out the possibility of a world, or at least of isolated milieux, in which free group praxis could be sustained indefinitely. The last principal section of the volume is entitled “From the Group to History,” and, while including a number of references to the concept of class and related notions and allusions to recent history, is intended above all to pave the way for reflections on the history of our increasingly “one World” (Sartre prefers to use this English-language expression, something that is quite unusual for him) as ultimately a single “totalization” 83

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– his word for ongoing and indefinite forward progress (although certainly not necessarily in the Enlightenment sense of “progress”!) across time – which he consistently contrasts with “totality,” the view of a society or a segment of history from the outside, as frozen. This, then, to paraphrase Hegel near the end of his own Philosophy of History, is the point to which Sartre’s consciousness had attained by 1960: the completion of the first volume of a new magnum opus, one that is far richer and more varied than can possibly be conveyed in a brief summary, but one that never became the succès fou that Being and Nothingness had been. Soon, the voices of other philosophers – Althusser, Foucault, Derrida – would begin to be listened to more attentively than Sartre’s, at least in his own country. It may well be, of course, that eventually the Critique of Dialectical Reason as well as some of his even later work will achieve greater recognition from the learned philosophical public, while some or all of these then-new vedettes will fade from consciousness: that remains to be seen, since history is open. As for Marxism, Sartre in his last years lost faith in it, concluding that it was not, after all, reconcilable with his views of freedom nor with some of his other intellectual interests. He first made this clear, as far as I know, in a long interview that he gave to three interlocutors acting on behalf of the editor of the American series, Library of Living Philosophers. Since he had by then become too blind to be able to read the critical articles written by contributors to the volume that had been prepared on his philosophy, much less to write responses to them as is the usual practice, these interlocutors summarized some points from the articles as well as from questions drawn up separately for this purpose by the contributors. Responding to a question that I had requested that he be asked and to which others had also alluded, to wit, whether he still considered himself to be a phenomenologist – “Have you ever left phenomenology?” posed by Susan Gruenheck – he answered: “Never. I continue to think in those terms. I have never thought as a Marxist, not even in the Critique de la raison dialectique.”15 Although, as far as I can see, the entire Critique contains only one, rather casual and incidental reference, near the beginning, to Husserl, it is obvious that the latter’s long shadow continued to fall across the philosophical landscape of the twentieth century well past the year 1960.

major works L’Imagination. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1936 and Presses Universitaires de France, 1949. Published in English as Imagination: A Psychological Critique, translated by Forrest Williams. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1962.

15. Paul Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1981), 24.

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sartre and phenomenolo gy “La Transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’une description phénoménologique.” Recherches philosophiques 6 (1936–37). Reprinted as La Transcendance de l’égo. Paris: Vrin, 1965. Published in English as The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, translated by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick. New York: Noonday Press, 1957. La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard, 1938. Published in English as Nausea, translated by Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions, 1949. Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions. Paris: Hermann, 1939. Published in English as The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. L’Imaginaire, psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Paris: Gallimard, 1940. Published in English as The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, translated by Jonathan Webber with revisions by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre. New York: Routledge, 2004. L’Être et le Néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique. Paris: Gallimard, 1943. Published in English as Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. Paris: Nagel, 1946. Published in English as: (i) Existentialism and Humanism, translated by Philip Mairet. London: Methuen, 1948; (ii) Existentialism is a Humanism, translated by Carol Macomber. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007. Réflexions sur la question juive. Paris: Morihien, 1946. Published in English as Anti-Semite and Jew, translated by George J. Becker. New York: Schocken Books, 1948. Matérialisme et révolution. Les Temps modernes 9, 10 (1946). Reprinted in Situations III. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Published in English as Materialism and Revolution, translated by Annette Michelson, in Literary and Philosophical Essays. London: Rider, 1955. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Les Temps modernes 17–22 (1947). Reprinted in Situations II. Paris: Gallimard, 1948. Published in English as “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays, translated by Steven Ungar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. Paris: Gallimard, 1952. Published in English as Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: George Braziller, 1963. Questions de méthode: Les Temps modernes 139, 140 (1957). Reprinted, Paris: Gallimard, 1967. Published in English as Search for a Method, translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Knopf, 1963. Critique de la raison dialectique, précédé de Questions de méthode. Tome I: Théorie des ensembles pratiques. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. Revised edition, 1985. Published in English as Critique of Dialectical Reason, I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. London: New Left Books, 1976. L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857. 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1971, 1972. Revised edition, 1985. Published in English as The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857, translated by Carol Cosman, 5 vols. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 1987, 1989, 1991, 1993. Cahiers pour une morale. Paris: Gallimard, 1983. Published in English as Notebooks for an Ethics, translated by David Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Vérité et existence. Paris: Gallimard, 1989. Published in English as Truth and Existence, translated by Adrian van den Hoven. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

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 4 continental aesthetics: phenomenology and antiphenomenology Galen A. Johnson

The phrase “continental aesthetics” is itself a surprise. For one thing, continental philosophy during the middle of the twentieth century has been engaged in a critique of the Cartesian theory of perception and the subject as origin of philosophy, and whereas one meaning of the “aesthetic” is perception or sense experience (aisthesis), there is something of a paradox in conjoining “continental” with “aesthetics.” The other meaning of “aesthetic” having to do with philosophy of art or philosophy of fine art, common only since the time of Alexander Baumgarten and Kant’s Critique of Judgment, shows this bias toward subjectivism clearly in its dominant terms of taste, pure feeling, imagination, and genius. For another thing, “continental aesthetics” is far from a unified field of study. No one has made this clearer than Theodor Adorno, whose Aesthetic Theory, published in German posthumously in 1970 and still the most recent attempt to develop something like a comprehensive aesthetic theory on the European continent, found that “the unusual situation of aesthetics is discouraging.”1 Like a weather vane it is blown about by every philosophical, cultural, and scientific gust; at one moment it is metaphysical and in the next empirical; now normative, then descriptive, now defined by artists, then by connoisseurs, one day art is supposedly the center of aesthetics and natural beauty merely preliminary, the next day art beauty is merely second-hand natural beauty. (AT 332)

1. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, Robert Hullet-Kentor (trans.) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 333. Hereafter cited as AT followed by the page number.

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Therefore, rather than a unified field of study we find a pluralism of meanings. The situation is complicated further with the introduction of phenomenology, for, on the one hand, there are those responses that take up phenomenology and develop various forms of a “phenomenological aesthetics” – these would include most prominently Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne, and Hans-Georg Gadamer – and, on the other, there are those instances of continental aesthetics that develop based on explicitly antiphenomenological premises and themes – these would include Adorno himself, as well as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and, from some points of view, Jean-François Lyotard (whose first book, in 1954, was a critical introduction to phenomenology).2 Thus, it will be up to us to sketch out what we will mean by “continental aesthetics” as we find it in the mid twentieth century. It is true to say that aesthetics are “continental” because they are written in a language other than English, principally French and German. However, beyond such a linguistic and geographic qualifier, there seem to be a number of features of the figures of this period that distinguish the period from earlier aesthetic thinking, particularly from the aesthetics of giants such as Kant and Hegel. These will be more or less pronounced from one figure to another. One feature we have already mentioned: these philosophers – Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and so on – develop their aesthetic thinking in opposition to philosophies of subjective perception and philosophical categories such as taste and pure feeling. This means, second, that they understand art and the aesthetic as the disclosure of Being, and this means the work of art is exemplary of the meaning and truth of experience. The artwork and aesthetic experience give us the outline and architecture of an ontology similar to the way natural science, especially mathematical physics, functioned in the thinking of Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers, or the way religion dominated the philosophies of the medieval period. This is why, third, aesthetics turns, for the first time, away from abstract philosophical categories such as the imagination, and toward the study and comprehension of specific artworks. In a very direct sentence in his “Draft Introduction” that Adorno may well have modified if he had lived to work on its revision, he wrote that “Hegel and Kant were the last who, to put it bluntly, were able to write major aesthetics without understanding anything about art” (AT 334). From Heidegger through Sartre to Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne, we find the study of specific artists and artworks: Hölderlin and Rilke, Calder and Giacometti, Velásquez and Magritte, Beethoven and Mozart. Even here, we note again another pluralism with respect to which of the arts comes in for attention, whether poetry, sculpture, painting, or music. Two painters stand out, Paul Cézanne and Paul Klee, 2. Jean-François Lyotard, La Phénoménologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954).

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for they influenced the aesthetic thinking of nearly every one of our continental philosophers, most prominently Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but Adorno, Gadamer, Benjamin, and Foucault as well. A fourth feature might be that aesthetics becomes central in philosophy in an unprecedented way. The ontology of art comes to be taken as an opening, as an analogy, for understanding broader domains of human experience such as language, history, and politics. We find, ranging from Sartre to Foucault, the injunction to “make of our life a work of art,” as well as Merleau-Ponty’s statement that “we would undoubtedly recover the concept of history in the true sense of the term if we were to get used to modeling it after the example of the arts and language.”3 We thus rough out a beginning and a way for our thinking of “continental aesthetics” to proceed. Within “phenomenological aesthetics,” the ontology of art is so central that our beginning will be with Heidegger. Then we will move to Merleau-Ponty. This brings us to Sartre by way of his dispute with MerleauPonty, as well as Roland Barthes, over the meaning of art and “engaged” literature. We will pause to give some consideration to the variations on the ontology of art introduced by Ingarden, Dufrenne, and Gadamer. Then we will consider an objection from Levinas. Prominent among the “antiphenomenological” reactions, the work of Adorno and Benjamin must be considered before arriving at Foucault’s commentary on Velásquez’s Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor) in The Order of Things. Throughout, owing to limitations of space, we will be forced to be more cryptic and less nuanced than I would prefer. The recent, valuable Continental Aesthetics Reader (2000) runs to some 618 pages, just to give some sense of the scope of what is involved and the reduction that is necessitated here.

i. heidegger on the origin of art The key work by Heidegger bearing on continental aesthetics is “The Origin of the Work of Art,” originally given as a lecture in Freiburg in 1935, then repeated in Zurich in early 1936 and subsequently reworked as three public lectures in Frankfurt in late 1936. It was eventually published in the 1950 volume entitled Holzwege.4 Also of considerable import are four lecture courses that Heidegger taught at the University of Freiburg-im-Breisgau from 1936 to 1940 on Nietzsche, the first two of which take up the theme of “The Will to Power as Art.” “The 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, Richard C. McCleary (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 73. 4. For Holzwege, see Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, William McNeill (ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). We are using the Hofstadter English translation of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” found in Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell (ed.) (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993); hereafter cited as OWA followed by the page number.

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Origin of the Work of Art” has three sections: “Thing and Work,” “Work and Truth,” and “Truth and Art,” and as this structure suggests, Heidegger’s aim was to establish a close relationship between the artwork as “thing” and truth as “unconcealment.” The question of the “origin” of the work of art is not to be understood in a historical or even genealogical sense, but rather as the question of the “essence” of the artwork (OWA 143). Heidegger approaches this question by considering the “thingly” character of the artwork and the three traditional interpretations of the “thing” stemming from ancient ontology: (i) the thing as a substance with accidents or properties, or as a subject with certain predicates; (ii) the thing as the unity within the mind of a manifold of sense-impressions; and (iii) the thing as matter invested with form. Although all three interpretations distort the essence of the artwork, Heidegger argues, the interpretation in terms of matter and form has gained a special dominance, which Heidegger believes is due to its derivation from the familiar mixture of matter and form we find in tools or equipment. Here we come in “The Origin of the Work of Art” to the much discussed text about a common sort of equipment, a pair of peasant shoes, and Van Gogh’s several paintings of them. Heidegger’s text deploys the equipmental character of the shoes as serviceable and reliable to introduce the two most central concepts for his understanding of the essence of the artwork, “world” and “earth:” “In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth. … This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman” (OWA 159). The “world” of the peasant woman that is rural and agricultural might seem to suggest an individual horizon or context for her work in the plowed fields, but Heidegger’s equally famous narrative about a Greek temple as artwork makes it clear that “world” is a historical and cultural setting for life that belongs to a people (OWA 167). Every human being is born into a fundamental horizon of disclosure that Heidegger calls “world,” the background and usually unnoticed understanding that determines for a historical people what, for them, fundamentally there is. Thus, “world” in “The Origin of the Work of Art” is continuous with Being and Time, in which Heidegger identifies it as an “ontological structure” that emerges from the ready-to-hand.5 Heidegger’s essay seems to suggest two somewhat different understandings of the relationship between the artist/artwork and world: first, a role of making manifest or revealing a world that is already present; second, what has been called a Promethean view that art creates world. In the temple passage we find both in close proximity. The first reading that emphasizes revealing, making manifest, and preserving is far more politically neutral than the much stronger Promethean reading that, in 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Joan Stambaugh (trans.) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), para. 16.

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the 1930s historical context of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” has been taken by some as an implicit reference to a new world established by the agenda of National Socialism, its art and architecture, and the Nuremburg rally.6 Another complication is that there is a discrepancy between Heidegger’s interpretations of the Van Gogh painting and the Greek temple, for it is really not the painting per se that opens up a world, nor the painting that evinces equipmentality, but the subject in the painting, those shoes, whereas the Greek temple itself is reliable and serviceable in the world of the Greek people as a place that “lets the god himself be present” (OWA 168). The narrative of the Van Gogh painting is also at odds with Heidegger’s own rejection of the institutional view of the artwork, that it is the “art industry” of museum boards, directors, and curators who specify the nature of art (OWA 166).7 Whereas the meaning of “world” and of the artwork as “truth setting itself to work” is only moderately troubled, the meaning of “earth” is much more difficult in Heidegger’s essay. Heidegger himself rules out a literal reading of “earth” or the native “ground” either as a mass of matter deposited somewhere or as the idea of a planet in the solar system (OWA 168). Rather, the meaning of earth circulates between two thoughts in the essay: the thought of sheltering and stability, that earth has more solidity and durability than either world or artwork and thus offers them shelter and protection; and the thought of concealment, even ineffability in the work of art, that leads in the direction of Heidegger’s 6. The argument against the Promethean reading is developed by Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 29–38. On Heidegger’s “Origin” and its political undercurrents, cf. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, Chris Turner (trans.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 7. In the early versions of “The Origin” from Heidegger’s Freiburg and Zurich lectures, Heidegger does not discuss Van Gogh’s shoes painting. Cf. Hugh J. Silverman, Textualities: Between Hermeneutics and Deconstruction (New York: Routledge, 1994), ch, 13, “The Autobiographical Textuality of Heidegger’s Shoes,” 250 n.5. Another fascinating aspect of Heidegger’s reading of the Van Gogh painting is a correspondence that occurred between Heidegger and Columbia University art historian Meyer Shapiro much later in the 1960s, about which Shapiro published “The Sill Life as a Personal Object” in 1968. Shapiro effectively demonstrated that Van Gogh had not painted a pair of peasant’s shoes at all but, indeed, his own shoes. These would have been the shoes of a poor artist struggling to exist and even afford paints through the winters of 1886 and 1887 living in Paris, in Montmartre – boots really, in one of which the overturned shoe reveals the distinctive white of extending nails. Derrida, in The Truth in Painting, Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), has further compounded the discussion between Shapiro and Heidegger by questioning whether the paintings even show us a “pair” of left and right matched shoes and whether they are the shoes of a man or of a woman. Part of the trouble that generates these questions is that Heidegger does not name the specific Van Gogh painting that he is narrating, and Van Gogh made several – five, in fact – different paintings of shoes during the years of 1886–88, at least one of which Heidegger would have seen at a 1930 exhibition in Amsterdam. Cf. Silverman, “The Autobiographical Textuality of Heidegger’s Shoes,” 137.

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language of the sacred and the “holy.” Just as in Heidegger’s thinking of the essence of truth, every revealing is also a concealing, so this notion that artist/ artwork disclose a world must be given its other side of darkness, unfathomability, depth, and mystery. Being also “withdraws,” “closes,” and “conceals itself,” and this thought is part of the meaning of “earth” (OWA 172). In world and earth we can also hear an echo of Nietzsche’s aesthetic theory of Apollo and Dionysus.8 We find Heidegger engaged explicitly with the interpretation of the Apollonian and Dionysian in the chapter entitled “Rapture as Aesthetic State” in Nietzsche, Volume I. In the last analysis, Heidegger refers the meaning of these terms to the German poet Hölderlin, who draws the contrast as one between “holy pathos” and the Occidental “sobriety of representational skill.”9 “The Origin of the Work of Art” often speaks of earth as site of the “holy,” leading us to believe that Hölderlin’s terms provide the best reading for interpreting the meaning of earth and world. Heidegger describes the relationship between world and earth as “strife” (Urstreit), “conflict,” and even “warfare” between the forces of disclosure and those of concealment. “The conflict is not a rift [Riss] as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other” (OWA 188). Heidegger imported the notion of strife rather directly from Heraclitus, Fragment 53, to mark the conjunction of dualities that “earth” conveys as contradictory tendencies: “what is holy and unholy, what great and what small, what brave and what cowardly, what lofty and what flighty, what master and what slave” (OWA 169). Thus, truth in the work of art does not just “happen,” but must be won. Heidegger himself later came to see that the language of strife in “The Origin of the Work of Art” was a mischaracterization of the happening of truth in the work and he replaced it by the idea of Ereignis, which we should not attempt to summarize here, but in rough outline is the meaning of advent, also of an irruption, a happening or “event” that introduces discontinuity and alters the course of things.10 At the time of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger was very clear that the great work of art brings together a living community and gives to a people their outlook upon themselves (OWA 202), and what does this, above all, is poetry (poiesis), for only in it, much more so than in painting, music, or 8. Cf. Jacques Taminiaux, “Philosophical Heritage in Heidegger’s Conception of Art,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Michael Kelly (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 2, 383. 9. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art, David Farrell Krell (trans.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 104. 10. Young’s systematic study of Heidegger’s philosophy of art states: “after the transition to ‘Ereignis-thinking’ in 1936–38, it [Urstreit] makes no further appearance either in connection with art or with anything else” (Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, 64).

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architecture, do we find the clearest articulation of truth and world that gather a people and a people’s history. This gives us essentially a Greek template, or medieval template, for understanding the essence of art. After seeing the paintings of Cézanne and the artwork of Klee in Basel in the late 1940s, Heidegger came to realize that under what we might call the heroic-historical requirements of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” these artworks could not be great art and realized his philosophy of art needed a broader, more pluralistic cast. We have only Heidegger’s conversations with Heinrich Petzet during the 1940s and 1950s to hint at the shape of such a rethinking.11

ii. merleau-ponty on art and the ontology of the invisible Merleau-Ponty’s signature contribution to aesthetics is “Eye and Mind” (1961) and, like Heidegger, he finds in art the germ of an ontology that he would further develop in The Visible and the Invisible, published posthumously (1964). Unlike Heidegger, however, Cézanne had been central to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking from his earliest works, The Structure of Behavior (1939) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Also unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty works from quite specific artists and artworks by name, photographs of eight of which are included in “Eye and Mind”: Giacometti, Cézanne, de Staël, Matisse, Klee, Richier, Rodin, and the unknown Alain de la Bourdonnaye. The number of artists upon whom Merleau-Ponty draws in the essay includes a dozen more and is remarkable in spite of his own humble comment that he is a “layman” who lacks “both competence and space”12 to draw upon art history properly. The dominant new artistic voices in “Eye and Mind” are Auguste Rodin, especially Rodin’s conversations in Art: Conversations with Paul Gsell,13 and, above all, Klee. The multiple references in “Eye and Mind” to Klee’s notebooks, journals, and nature studies indicate that Klee had become the most influential artist for Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of vision and Being. Part IV ends with Merleau-Ponty’s own transliteration of Klee’s words written at age thirty-seven and inscribed on his tomb: “I cannot be grasped in immanence” (Je suis insaisissable dans l’immanence).14 11. Cf. Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Heidegger, 1929–1976, Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), ch. 6: “Heidegger’s Association with Art.” 12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, Galen Johnson (ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 63; hereafter cited as MPAR followed by the page number. 13. The Rodin text was originally published in 1911. 14. The German inscription found on Klee’s tomb is: “Diesseitig bin ich gar nicht fassbar, denn ich wohne grad so gut bei den Toten wie bei den Ungeborenen.” Merleau-Ponty was working

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Structurally, “Eye and Mind” has five parts. Part III, the hinge between the philosophy of vision of Parts I and II and the ontology of Parts IV and V, contains the philosopher’s critique of the philosophy of vision and metaphysics in Descartes’s Optics. Cartesian rationalism, Merleau-Ponty argues, was unable to grasp the central artistic dimension of depth, either bringing the world too close to the eye by reducing vision to thought or shifting to the divine perspective of God in which the world is surveyed from above (survol). When one is too close or too far, Being is flattened and Merleau-Ponty argues that this is why Descartes favored drawings and etchings over painting and sculpture. This argument pertaining to vision and depth is supplemented by a metaphysicalepistemological argument against Cartesianism: as flattened, the visible world is reduced to mere representations or icons for the mind to know as ideas or thoughts, rendering problematical the relation of mental representations and things. For Descartes, perception is a form of thinking in which mental ideas represent things, separating the mind from body and the world. “It is the mind that sees, not the eye,” Descartes had famously written in the Optics. Finally, Merleau-Ponty argues that Cartesianism mistakenly takes for granted the perspectival techniques of the Renaissance as yielding an “exact and infallible art of painting” (MPAR 135), while Leonardo da Vinci’s own studies of linear perspective themselves involve competing and sometimes contradictory claims. This tripartite critique and rejection of rationalism enabled MerleauPonty to overcome Cartesianism and move toward a new ontology with depth as the central problem, and Flesh (la chair), Merleau-Ponty’s innovative ontological notion, is introduced in Parts II and IV. This envelopment, generality, and anonymity named Flesh (la chair) is comparable to the Greek idea of element, which is not substance, nor mind, nor matter. The world and the painter are the inverse and obverse of one sole Power that breaks open in an unending generosity of creation and expression. This ontology of Flesh and reversibility both preserves the gaps (écarts), strife, and differences among colors and things and between self and world, and prioritizes genesis and process over substance. Verbs and adverbs replace nominatives. The incarnate principle of Flesh imbues life and the world with a longing (désir) for unity that is deferred, but a deferral that keeps open the genesis and metamorphosis of expression. The gains for aesthetic theory offered by Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” are multiple, for the work includes discussions of color, iconography, etchings, from the French translation by Klossowski, which reads: “Ici-bas je ne suis guère saisissable, car j’habite tout aussi bien chez les morts que chez ceux qui ne sont pas nés encore” (Paul Klee, Journal, traduit de l’allemand par Pierre Klossowski [Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1959], 354). Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s rendition in “Eye and Mind” is quite free rather than literal and reflects the philosophical meaning Merleau-Ponty intended by introducing the terminology of transcendence and immanence.

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sculpture, mirrors, self-portraits, motion, depth, voluminosity, line, and abstraction. His discussion of line emphasizes the flexuous line and cites Klee’s ability to “let a line dream” (laissé rêver une ligne), as well as Henri Michaux’s phrase “to go line” (aller ligne). The reflections on line and abstraction, as well as on color as a dimension, indicate that Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic ontology is not limited to artists and works at the beginning of the twentieth century and in the mid century he himself knew so well, but extend to the more abstract and experimental artistic works of contemporary times, amenable particularly to abstract expressionism such as we find in Newman, Rothko, and Pollack.15

iii. sartre vs. merleau-ponty (with ingarden, dufrenne, and barthes): “engaged” literature and its critique Articulating his theory of engaged literature, Sartre’s 1947 What is Literature? brought him into eventual direct dispute with Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic and ontology. Originally published in the journal Les Temps modernes, which the philosophers coedited together with Simone de Beauvoir from its founding in 1945 until Merleau-Ponty’s resignation in 1952, the essay subsequently appeared in a slightly revised version in Situations II. Sartre’s aesthetic thinking was very much broader than this particular work. It included his own literary art in the novel Nausea (1938) and the trilogy of novels together titled Roads to Freedom (Les Chemins de la liberté) about the Second World War and the Nazi occupation beginning from The Age of Reason (1945), a series of plays including the bestknown No Exit (1943–44), short stories such as The Wall (La Mur; 1939), and his autobiography, Words (Les Mots; 1964). He also published substantial essays of criticism on topics and figures ranging from the paintings of the Renaissance Venetian Jacopo, to Lapoujade and Giacometti of modern times, the mobiles of Calder and sculpture of Giacometti, as well as the literature of Baudelaire and Flaubert. Amid this massive breadth of creativity, production, and interest, we will take Sartre’s theory of engaged literature as our focus here. In Merleau-Ponty’s Sense and Non-Sense (1948), which opens with “Cézanne’s Doubt,” we find the essay “A Scandalous Author,” in which Merleau-Ponty defended Sartre as a person – “What makes the man winning makes the author

15. Cf. the discussion of Merleau-Ponty and abstract art offered by Véronique M. Fóti, “The Evidences of Painting: Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Abstraction,” in Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting, Véronique M. Fóti (ed.) (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 137–68, as well as my own “The Invisible and the Unpresentable: Barnett Newman’s Abstract Expressionism and the Aesthetic of Merleau-Ponty,” Analecta Husserliana 75 (2002).

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scandalous … it is good that from time to time there is a free man”16 – and also defended Sartre’s literary philosophizing of the bestial, ugly, and horrible in human life. He attributes to Sartre the “violence of the sublime” rather than obedience to a “religion of the beautiful” (SNS 43). At the time, Merleau-Ponty believed that he had found in Sartre and Beauvoir (particularly her novel, L’Invitée [She Came to Stay]) that marriage of philosophical and literary expression he himself advocated: “From now on the tasks of literature and philosophy can no longer be separated” (SNS 28). The seeds of the break between Sartre’s existentialist aesthetic and Merleau-Ponty had already been planted in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), particularly in its critique of Sartre’s philosophies of time and freedom. However, Merleau-Ponty’s reply to Sartre’s theory of engaged literature, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” (1951), would be his last essay published in Les Temps modernes prior to his resignation from the editorial board. It is important to realize that prior to this dispute and rupture, Sartre had long been at work on the topic of the imagination and Merleau-Ponty had been deeply influenced by his work. Sartre had written two works on imagination, Imagination (1936) and L’Imaginaire (1940), the latter translated as The Psychology of Imagination. Sartre’s theory of the imagination was intent on defeating the portrayal of the image as an immanent mental content, rather explicating imagination as an intentional act that refers to a transcendent object. It differs from perception, nevertheless, for imagination is an awareness of something as not being, as absent, elsewhere, or as pure possibility. Thus, imagination’s distinguishing characteristic is freedom and spontaneity, which Sartre calls the “magical” quality of imagination, and renders it the only type of conscious act that is wholly spontaneous and unmotivated, not bound to body, place, time, or circumstance. Merleau-Ponty’s response to this theory is found in a 1936 review of Sartre’s Imagination, as well as in Phenomenology of Perception. In the review, Merleau-Ponty takes Sartre’s account as evidence for assigning an impoverished and reduced significance to imagination in comparison with perception and, in Phenomenology of Perception, he wrote that “the imaginary has no depth.”17 With the appearance of Sartre’s What is Literature? in 1947, Merleau-Ponty could see explicitly the latent implications in Sartre’s dualisms of perception and imagination, real and unreal, and he realized that his own philosophy of perception and depth would need a much greater and revised role for imagination right within perception itself. Painting “scrambles all our categories” (MPAR 130), he would 16. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 47; hereafter cited as SNS followed by the page number. 17. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.) (revised by Forrest Williams in 1981) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 323.

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write in “Eye and Mind,” essence and existence, real and imaginary, activity and passivity. These can no longer be thought as binaries or dualities but as intertwinings or interlacings (entrelacs). In What is Literature?, Sartre contests that committed writing does not also imply committed painting, sculpture, or music because there is no parallelism among all art forms. The plastic or musical artist makes a thing such as notes, colors, and forms that are not signs and that express the emotions and motives of the artist or composer. The “painter is mute,” in Sartre’s judgment, for one does not paint meanings and Picasso’s Guernica “won no one over to the Spanish cause.”18 Further, within the arts of writing there is a clear distinction between prose and poetry. Prose is the “empire of signs,” while poetry is on the side of painting, sculpture, and music in producing words as things similar to colors and notes. Poets refuse to utilize language whereas prose is explicitly utilitarian, seeking to use words as actions taking up the responsibility of commitment. “The function of the writer is to act in such a way that nobody can be ignorant of the world and that nobody may say that he is innocent of what it’s all about” (WL 38). Silence is subordinate to words because it is the refusal to speak, “therefore to keep on speaking” (WL 38). The engaged writer is thus projected out of Sartre’s existentialism, the person of action who regards writing as an enterprise, who may be right or may be wrong but nevertheless refuses to be an abject passivity and commits to an authentic course of action. It is worthwhile to compare Sartre’s theory of engaged literature with the most prolonged phenomenological consideration of the literary work of art, that of Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art (1931).19 For one thing, the distance of this work from Sartre is seen immediately, for Ingarden was not interested in questions of engagement, action, or politics but of the ontology of the artwork. Ingarden rejected Husserl’s late transcendental idealism and argued that the literary work of art is neither exclusively an ideal nor a real object, but partakes of both real and ideal features. On the one hand, a character such as Hamlet came into existence at a particular moment in history like a real object, but on the other, the character is constructed by purely ideal elements, namely word meanings. Thus, Ingarden concluded that the identity of the literary work of art, Hamlet, is an intentional being in Husserl’s sense, constituted in the cognitive relation between the author and work and between the reader and the work. The 18. Jean-Paul Sartre, “What is Literature?,” in “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays, Steven Ungar (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)s, 28; hereafter cited as WL followed by the page number. 19. Roman Witold Ingarden (February 5, 1893–June 14, 1970; born and died in Krakow, Poland) was educated at the University of Göttingen (1912–16) and University of Freiburg (1916–21). His influences included Heidegger and Husserl, and he held appointments at Jan Kazimierz University, Lwów (1933–41) and Jagiellonian University, Kraków (1946–49; 1957–63).

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work of art is “heteronomous,” depending on consciousness for its animation and concretion. Thus, for a second point in comparison with Sartre’s theory of literature, we find a concordance, for Sartre also argues that the literary object is a mixture of immanence and transcendence. On the one hand, the substance of a character is formed by the reader’s subjectivity: “Raskolnikov’s waiting is my waiting which I lend him. Without this impatience of the reader he would remain only a collection of signs” (WL 45). On the other hand, the words are there “like traps to arouse our feelings and to reflect them toward us. Each word is a path of transcendence” (WL 45). Mikel Dufrenne,20 in The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1953), has criticized both Ingarden’s and Sartre’s conceptions of the literary work of art. In reading a poem or a novel, one is not dealing with an unreal world known through the image and imaginary knowing, as Sartre characterizes the situation, nor does one go straight to the significations through the words, as Ingarden would have it, for the words have the quality of the perceptible and, Dufrenne argues, “to read is to perceive.”21 Words have a peculiar physiognomy of gravity or of brightness, not the clarity and precision of an algorithm, and their meaning receives stability only through their sensuousness. The signification obtains from the word a type of insistence and density that is far from imaginary but is a presence, and this presence expands into a world. The fruits and flowers of Verlaine are concrete because they introduce us to a certain atmosphere, which is the world of the text (PAE 211). For Dufrenne, there is a difference between the artwork and the aesthetic object. The artwork is the object the artist makes and that hangs on the wall in the museum, while the aesthetic object is the artwork so far as it is perceived. The aesthetic object derives its structure and content from the artwork and the artwork derives its truth from the aesthetic object. “The work itself calls for a type of perception which discovers in it (or realizes through it) the aesthetic object, so that the very analysis of the work continually refers, at least implicitly, to this perception” (PAE 223). In the notion of “world,” Dufrenne extends the Heideggerian understanding of the essence of the artwork, but in the notion of the aesthetic object, he joins with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception that insists on the presence of meaning in the world as primordially given in embodied sensuousness.

20. Mikel Dufrenne (1910–95; born in Clermont, France; died in Paris) was educated at the École Normale Supérieure (1929–32). His influences included Jaspers and phenomenology, and he held appointments at the University of Poitiers (1953–63) and University of Nanterre (later Paris X) (1963–74). 21. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, Edward S. Casey (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 210; hereafter cited as PAE followed by the page number.

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Merleau-Ponty also undertook his critique of Sartre’s philosophy of the word and writing from the perspective of the phenomenology of language. Under the influence of Saussure’s linguistics, Merleau-Ponty had undertaken a systematic study of the differences and relations among speech, writing, and the language system. Fundamentally, he wanted to think more systematically about the relationships between writing and the visual arts, especially painting, that Sartre had bifurcated so sharply. Regarding artworks, Merleau-Ponty contended that the work is not an opaque thing, and although the relation of a painting to the world is not one of univocal resemblance or representation, yet the relation is one of revealing or disclosing a world with its latent, hidden hollows, “rendering the invisible visible,” to cite the famous words of Klee’s Creative Credo. MerleauPonty often wrote about how “painting speaks” and said that Cézanne “writes in paint” and “thinks in paint.” Regarding linguistic signs, he argued that these are filled with multiple meanings that lend them their fullness and richness. Within both speaking and writing, silence is not a negative phenomenon but is the “voice of the spirit” that dwells in the pauses and spaces between signs, in what the author omits to say, and silence is also the style of an artist’s work. In short, in Merleau-Ponty’s famous conclusion, “the voices of painting are the voices of silence,”22 very far removed from Sartre’s analysis that treats artworks as mute or “silenced” forms without expression. Although Roland Barthes does not explicitly mention Sartre’s What is Literature? in his 1953 Writing Degree Zero, it is commonly understood that Barthes had that work in mind. His argument is an attempt at assessing and partly refuting what he thought to be Sartre’s very strong and somewhat oversimplified view of the nature of language, writing, and the ethical and political responsibilities of the writer.23 Sartre had supported his thesis that the responsible writer’s end or function is to communicate an ethical and political stance by differentiating between language and style, the latter of which means individual expression and may be prominent in the arts and poetry, but is least significant in prose writing. In prose, the language or content is what matters. Barthes drew up a different analysis of writing. The subtle shift in his French title compared with Sartre’s first chapter title is telling. Sartre had used the straightforward French verb “écrire” (to write) whereas Barthes used the much more complex French noun “écriture,” which he made into a technical term. To Sartre’s dyad of language and style, Barthes added this third term, “écriture,” which stands between them as a middle ground and means something like “form” that is 22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, Johnson (ed.), 117. 23. Cf., for example, the Preface to the English translation by Susan Sontag in Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (trans.) (New York: Hill & Wang, 1968), xi; hereafter cited as WDZ followed by the page number.

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neither purely objective nor purely personal. The writer makes choices with respect to form that are directed toward society but are also directed toward what literature itself has been and what it will become through the work at hand. Thus, there is indeed an ethical responsibility of the writer, but this is never wholly free and spontaneous but somewhat hemmed in by the history and tradition within which the writer stands. As Barthes himself put it in his “Introduction”: What we hope to do here is to sketch this connection; to affirm the existence of a formal reality independent of language and style; to try to show that this third dimension of Form equally, and not without an additional tragic implication, binds the writer to his society; finally to convey that fact that there is no Literature without an Ethic of language. (WDZ 5–6) The “zero degree of writing” of which Barthes speaks represents what he thinks of as the last episode of a “passion of writing” that has dismantled bourgeois consciousness and includes “colorless writing” such as that of Camus, Blanchot, or Queneau. Barthes’s notion of écriture in Writing Degree Zero laid the groundwork for a structuralist theory of literature that he went on to develop in his later work such as his truly original and now classic essay, “The Death of the Author,” published in Image – Music – Text (1977).24

iv. levinas’s antiaesthetic, gadamer’s hermeneutics, and the “religion of the beautiful” When Merleau-Ponty made reference to a certain “religion of the beautiful” in relation to Sartre’s critics, he was speaking specifically of classical art and art theory that emphasized harmony, proportion, and rationality “wherein lies the beauty of the Greek god” (SNS 42). Although Merleau-Ponty thus criticized a certain religion of the beautiful that characterized the classical age, Emmanuel Levinas detected in his own age a kind of philosophical worship or adoration of the artwork and aesthetic experience that he believed impedes or even blocks altogether our contact with reality. This countervailing antiaesthetic demurral was also first published in Les Temps modernes in the year following Sartre’s What is Literature? under the title, “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948), and it also took

*24. For further discussion of Barthes, see the essay by Claire Colebrook in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6.

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its bearings from within what the author calls a “phenomenological analysis.”25 The commonly held belief is that an artwork goes beyond common perception, and a poem or a painting speaks with metaphysical intuition, “thus an artwork is more real than reality” (RS 117). To put it in theological terms, Levinas says, art belongs neither to the order of revelation nor that of creation (RS 118). Agreeing more with Sartre than Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty, Levinas argues that art is not on the side of cognition and knowledge but rather on that of the image; art consists in substituting for the object its image, not its concept, thus in substituting an image for being. Therefore, art is “the very event of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow” (ibid.). Levinas reinvokes the shadows of Plato’s cave and builds his argument through a phenomenology of the image, rhythm, and “the meanwhile.” Although rhythm certainly has its privileged locus in music, there is a certain musicality of every image inasmuch as each one has its temporal pulse or beat that creates a certain hold on us, the subject is caught up and carried away by it. This is a function of rhythm quite like the automatic character of a walk or a dance in which the image imposes itself on us without our consent and holds us in its present. There is no longer a self but a passage from oneself to anonymity, which is the captivation or magical incantation of poetry and music. In this sense, every image and every artwork is an idol, for what it produces is time’s delay. Art brings about this “duration in the interval” in which the future as a promise of a new future is refused. This eternal duration of the interval “differs radically from the eternity of a concept; it is the meanwhile, never finished, still enduring – something inhuman and monstrous” (RS 125). Aesthetic enjoyment is thus a form of irresponsibility. It replaces the world to be built by its shadow, which is art, and replaces it with moments of charm, lightness, and grace, which is aesthetic experience, sheer sensation. “There is something wicked and egoist and cowardly in artistic enjoyment. There are times when one can be ashamed of it, as of feasting during a plague” (RS 126). Art is a “dimension of evasion” in which we become preoccupied with it rather than our responsibilities to the world and, above all, to the Other (RS 127). Levinas argues that only a new kind of art criticism, the “philosophical exegesis of art,” would be able to separate shadow from reality by speaking of art “frankly, through concepts, which are like the muscles of the mind” (ibid.). The critique of the “religion of the beautiful” is approached from an entirely different angle by Gadamer because Gadamer, following Heidegger, seeks to know the essence of art, but seeks to know it in such a way that would show the commonality between the older, classical “fine arts” of the beautiful with their 25. Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow,” Alphonso Lingis (trans.), in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, Clive Cazeaux (ed.) (London: Routledge, 2000), 119–20; hereafter cited as RS followed by the page number.

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“quasi-religious” function and modern art with its irreligious impulse toward provocation and to “destroy beauty,” as Rimbaud, Barnett Newman, and others have put it. Gadamer’s best-known work, Truth and Method (1960) opens with its entire First Part on “The Question of Truth as it Emerges in the Experience of Art.” Nevertheless, Gadamer subordinated his examination of art and the aesthetic in that work to the questions of truth, understanding, and interpretation and did not produce a comprehensive aesthetic theory. In its place, we have the collection of aesthetic essays titled The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (1967, 1977). There, in a number of ways, Gadamer draws the language of aesthetic experience and religious experience into close relationship. A late essay in the book takes up explicitly the theme of “Aesthetic and Religious Experience” and considers the integration of poetic and scriptural texts. Unlike Levinas, Gadamer argues that the work of art “signifies an increase in being”26 because we find in the artwork the same sort of self-movement that Aristotle found to be the most fundamental characteristic of living beings, organic aliveness that has the “basic character of excess striving to express itself ” (RB 23). Gadamer’s word here for “excess” is Überfluss, which also means “superabundance.” In contrast with the everyday passage of time within which appears the possibility of boredom, Gadamer contends that “the essence of the temporal experience of art is in learning how to tarry. … And perhaps it is the only way that is granted to us finite beings to relate to what we call eternity” (RB 45). The experience of the beautiful “is the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things” (RB 32). Three main concepts organize Gadamer’s interpretation of aesthetic experience: play, symbol, and festival. He creates his account drawing from the aesthetic thinking of Plato, Kant, and Hegel, above all a reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, and in these three concepts, Gadamer believes he has found a way to link the older arts of the beautiful with modern art. Play is the fundamental excess of being alive and is meant to express the repetition of “to and fro” movement as in the “play of light” and the “play of the waves.” Gadamer introduces the expression “aesthetic nondifferentiation” to bring out the deep structure of the kind of perception that is at work in being addressed by an artwork and constitutes the cooperative play between imagination and understanding. In the work of aesthetic nondifferentiation, the artwork becomes a symbol, not in the sense of representing and standing in for something other than itself, but in Heidegger’s sense of resting on an intricate interplay between showing and concealing. The symbol is that “fragment that has always been sought in order 26. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, Nicholas Walker (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 35; hereafter cited as RB followed by the page number.

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to complete and make whole our own fragmentary life” (RB 32). Thus, the work of art becomes something unique, precious, and irreplaceable, which Gadamer likens to what Walter Benjamin called the “aura” of the work of art. Th is is why destruction of a work of art “always has something of the feeling of religious sacrilege about it” (RB 34). Gadamer introduces the unusual concept of the festival, drawn explicitly from the theological context of holidays and the fullness of time, to designate the communicative and participatory dimension of the artwork. Festive time is “autonomous time” in which there is no tedium but a tarrying that allows us to enhance our feeling for life. This tarrying with the work provides an opportunity through which finite beings may gain a feeling for eternity.

v. antiphenomenologies: theodor adorno and walter benjamin Although originally working within the phenomenological tradition in what is known as his “transcendental phase,” Adorno’s turn away from phenomenology and toward critical theory in the 1930s occurred as a criticism of what Adorno interpreted as Husserl’s idealism, essentialism, and above all, a-historicality. These criticisms are detailed in Adorno’s “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism” (1940). In Husserl’s effort to go “back to the things themselves” as immediate data of consciousness, Adorno argued that he inevitably remained too faithful to the idealism he was seeking to overcome. Phenomenological claims of direct access to immediate data fail to recognize the extent to which perception is overlain with its social and historical epoch, which means, for Adorno, with the values and ideology of bourgeois capitalist economy. Art and aesthetic experience have become a mass culture under the control and influence of the culture industry, thus the whole effort toward a phenomenology of aesthetic experience and of the art object is compromised and mediated by culture and history from the outset. It was in the context of Adorno’s negative dialectics and the work of the Frankfurt Institute that Walter Benjamin wrote his influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), in which he made a start toward what he thought of as a revolutionary “politics of art.”27 In the long run, Adorno would find many points with which to disagree with Benjamin’s essay, perhaps above all Benjamin’s treatment of the artwork as an element of 27. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Harry Zohn (trans.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 218; hereafter cited in the text as WAMR. [*] Benjamin and this essay are discussed in the essay by James McFarland in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 5.

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the superstructure in its own right, with its own history and its own processes of technological development necessitating separate analysis. Adorno could never agree with Benjamin’s idea that the mechanical reproduction of art, especially in the recently emergent medium of film, is progressive, even revolutionary. How could film become anything other than entertainment under conditions of mass culture?28 Nevertheless, what Adorno shared with Benjamin and found lacking in phenomenology was the thoroughgoing commitment to historical thinking about aesthetics and the arts. Benjamin even distinguished such historical thinking from Heidegger’s meditations on origins and “historicality,” finding them too sweeping and abstract with little specific and concrete nuance. After the preface, Benjamin’s essay is divided into fifteen sections followed by its famous epilogue on the “aestheticization of the political.” Benjamin argues that especially photography and film have introduced a profound change in the reproduction of artworks that previously was possible in only limited ways through older techniques such as the woodcut, printing, lithography, and forgery. The camera creates the possibility of such rapid and multiple reproductions that the whole concept of the “original” or “authentic” work loses its meaning. Benjamin here introduces the pivotal concept in the essay, that of the “aura,” which refers to the unique existence of the authentic original, and argues that our age is experiencing the withering or “decay of the aura.” This decay brings with it an alteration in human perception itself, and one of the points Benjamin wants to stress is that “human sense perception is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” (WAMR 222). Photography and film have altered the way we “see.” This alteration is illustrated by comparing the perception of a natural object such as a mountain with perception of pictures created by the camera. In the former, there is an aura defined as “the unique phenomenon of distance” (ibid.), that is, the mountain remains at a distance on the horizon displaying its uniqueness and commanding its proper respect. The camera, on the other hand, has the capacity to bring everything closer. Whereas uniqueness and permanence characterize perception previously, transitoriness and reproducibility mark the photograph and film. One can see this collapse of distance and aura very clearly with respect to the screen actor whose presentation on-screen is subject not only to a director but to the cameraman, camera angles, close-ups, and the film editor. In film, “the audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera” (WAMR 228). The decay of the aura as the collapse of distance replaces the “cult value” of the artwork with its “exhibition value,” and the total function of art experiences a 28. For further elaboration of the Adorno–Benjamin friendship and debates, cf. Susan BuckMorss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), chs 9, 10, 11.

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reversal. Instead of being based on the cult of beauty, the museum, and ritual, the function of art begins to be based on politics. No longer being a preserve of a religious or, more recently, moneyed elite, art, through its mechanical reproduction, becomes something available to and subject to “the masses.” There are a number of effects. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin film; in general, the conventional is uncritically enjoyed and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With close-ups of hidden details of familiar objects, an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored; thus “the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses” (WAMR 237). The movie frame also replaces the contemplation of the spectator before a painting with the bullet speed of an optical ballistics; thoughts are replaced by moving images; perception becomes “reception in a constant state of distraction” (WAMR 240) and it becomes “absent-minded” (WAMR 241). Benjamin’s famous epilogue focuses on the consequences of the role of art and aesthetics in the increasing formation of humanity into masses. He argues that fascism seeks to give masses of humanity not their rights but their expression and enjoyment: “the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politics,” and indeed, “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war” (ibid.). Benjamin cites Italian poet Filippo Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” (1909), in which Marinetti contended that “war is beautiful” with its gas masks, metalization of the human body, fiery orchids of machine guns and cannonades, geometric formation flights, and smoke spirals from burning villages. Benjamin bitterly concludes that in fascism and Marinetti’s futurism, mankind’s “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (WAMR 242). Whereas in the body of the essay Benjamin found in photography and film a progressive development that erodes the power of the elites, in the epilogue he makes it clear that the concomitant formation of mankind into masses endangers our humanity with the aestheticization of the political. Although focusing on Benjamin’s influential contribution to the debate surrounding technology, art, and politics, we need to note the much broader scope of his aesthetic thinking, which ranged over critical essays on Kafka, Baudelaire, Proust, and theater. Among these rich contributions, we single out two writings, the first being Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama (1925), which focuses on German seventeenth-century baroque theater. Although the work is complex and demands serious engagement, it has become recognized as one of the most original books of literary and philosophical criticism of the twentieth century. Benjamin orients his thinking in relation to two great preceding landmarks in the theory of tragedy, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – with its interpretation of the meaning of tragedy, especially the art of 105

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Sophocles in Antigone – and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. There are also Jewish facets of the work pertaining to the Jewish past and messianic future, as well as Kabbalistic overtones of the hidden word and a mystery in the word. This latter brings forward affinities with Kafka reflected in Benjamin’s two later essays on Kafka, translated in Illuminations.29 A second writing of aesthetic significance is Benjamin’s commentary on Klee found in section IX of “Theses on Philosophy of History.” From among Klee’s angel drawings, in 1921 Benjamin had purchased Angelus Novus (1920) and included comments about it in this text. Klee had made numerous angel pictures for twenty-five years since 1915 and these multiplied near the end of his life from 1938 to 1940. Klee invented angels of a mixed type that dwelt between this world and the next, such as an angel applicant that seems it might be a dog, a poor angel, a forgetful one, and many others, including the final Angel Still Ugly which appears as part of the composition in the final canvas Klee left on his easel at the time of his death, Last Still Life (1940). Angelus Novus presents us with a young, novice angel, wings upraised in what might be taken as a stop sign amid a storm of dust. Benjamin saw in it the angel of history, but a history that “piles wreckage upon wreckage” that the angel is unable to prevent because “a storm is blowing from Paradise” (WAMR 257).

vi. foucault: beyond phenomenology to the postmodern Like Adorno and Benjamin, Foucault’s writings on art are antiphenomenological, but perhaps he is also the beginning of what has come to be called the “postmodern.” We see this antiphenomenological approach to aesthetics in two sources. This is Not a Pipe (1973) took its premise from the series of paintings created by the Belgian surrealist, Rene Magritte, and undertook reconsideration of the relation of words to images in the history of painting. Foucault sought to undermine the two most fundamental assumptions supporting the representational theory of art. The first asserts the separation between the plastic representation and the linguistic reference of the title always placed outside the frame;30 the second affirms a representative bond with the object through the fact of resemblance.31 The paintings of Magritte (as well as Kandinsky and Klee) challenge both assumptions by placing words into the paintings themselves inside 29. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka on the 10th Anniversary of his Death,” and “Some Reflections on Kafka,” in Illuminations: Walter Benjamin Essays and Reflections, 111–40 and 141–5. 30. Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, James Harkness (trans.) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983), 32. 31. Ibid., 34.

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the frame and with the pointed assertion that the image is not the object (that is, the image of the pipe is, indeed, not a pipe). Magritte further played with the word–image boundary by frequently mismatching words and objects, such as painting the image of a horse and labeling it “the door” or labeling the image of a pitcher “the bird,” and so forth. Foucault’s rather playful and paradoxical challenge to the representational theory of art by way of Magritte had been preceded by the more rigorous and systematic dismantling of that theory in the opening chapter of The Order of Things (Les Mots et les choses; 1966), titled for the painting by Velásquez, Las Meninas. Foucault’s foreword to the English edition of that work makes his antiphenomenological stance and its reasons crystal clear. He states that the one philosophical approach that he rejects is the phenomenological approach “which gives absolute priority to the subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity – which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness.”32 Although the relationship between Foucault and critical theorists such as Adorno and Benjamin is complex and involves the tenuous relations of each to Marx, they both distance themselves from what they perceive as phenomenology’s a-historicality. Foucault offers us an extremely close reading of Spanish painter Diego Velásquez’s 1656 Las Meninas, which pictures the artist at work on a large canvas, only the back of which is visible to us as viewers. Princess Margarita and her maids occupy the center and to the right of them appears a dwarf with a dog in the foreground. The faces of the king and queen, King Philip IV and Queen Mariana, appear in a mirror in the background. We see only their reflected images and they themselves are not visible to us. They thus seem to occupy a place outside the canvas and in front of it, precisely where we as viewers are now placed. In the right background appears a shadowy figure about to enter or exit from the room. A number of things occupy Foucault’s attention about this work. One is the reciprocity of looking, the way in which we are looking at the painting and yet the painting looks back at us. Another is the uncertainties in visual representation that the painting creates, and creates these uncertainties precisely at the moment in history at the opening of the “classical age” in which that very representational theory of the mind–world relation had been created by Descartes. Las Meninas was a very early critique of the power of representation to express an objective order of reality visually. Foucault argues that the center of the painting is what is symbolically sovereign, the reflected images of the king and the queen, but this center fulfills a “triple function.” “In it there occurs an exact superimposition of the model’s gaze as it is being painted, of the spectator’s as 32. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), xiv; hereafter cited as OT followed by the page number.

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he contemplates the painting, and of the painter’s as he is composing his picture” (OT 14–15). In the space of the mirror in which the reflections of the king and his wife appear, “there could also appear – there ought to appear – the anonymous face of the passer-by and that of Velásquez” (OT 15). Thus, rather than being the complete or perfect representation that renders everything visible, the painting is incomplete, afflicted with invisibles and gaps. Foucault concludes: “in this picture, as in all the representations of which it is, as it were, the manifest essence, the profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the person seeing – despite all mirrors, reflections, imitations, and portraits” (OT 16). Thus, Las Meninas is the opening to everything that interests Foucault about the varying ways of ordering reality throughout history, the varying epistēmēs through which reality is constructed. As the ground of the classical age crumbled at the end of the eighteenth century and gave way to the modern age with its recent invention of “man” – and by this Foucault means transcendental ego or transcendental consciousness from Kant through Husserl – “then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (OT 387). This last line of The Order of Things brings into view a postmodern aesthetics that would be inaugurated by Jean-François Lyotard’s Discours, Figure (1971).33 Postmodern aesthetics would stress the blending of the discursive and the figural, desire and the optical unconscious, and above all the differend, which means, according to Lyotard, the unstable state wherein something, some suffering or some wrong, “must be able to be put into phrases but cannot yet be.” Lyotard contends that “what is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them.”34 The differend and Heidegger’s Ereignis are also at stake in Lyotard’s work on the abstract expressionism of Newman and a postmodern sublime. In “Philosophy and Painting in the Age of Their Experimentation: Contribution to an Idea of Postmodernity,” Lyotard has written succinctly: “What do we want from art today? Well, for it to experiment, to stop being only modern” (MPAR 335). But this is another story, equally long but equally fascinating, that has been foreshadowed along the way by much that we have seen in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault, to name just these three. Throughout the epoch in continental aesthetics that we have examined, we have seen the centrality our philosophers have afforded art and the aesthetic as the fecund nucleus from which other domains of their philosophical thought *33. For a discussion of Discours, Figure, and Lyotard more generally, see the essay by James Williams in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6. 34. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Georges Van Den Abbeele (trans.) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 13.

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grow. The work of art is not only exemplary for the limited domain of philosophical aesthetics but is exemplary of meaning and truth and, indeed, give us the outline and architecture of various approaches to the ontology of Being. In recent continental philosophy, aesthetics has become central in philosophy in an unprecedented way as an opening, an analogy, for understanding broader domains of human experience including language, history, politics, and religion. While analytic philosophies have tended to isolate and marginalize aesthetics and philosophy of art as a discrete discipline with its technical problems and vocabulary, the continental philosophers of the twentieth century have integrated aesthetics into the center of philosophical thinking.

major works Roman Ingarden Essentiale Fragen: Ein Beitrag zu den Wesensproblem. Halle: Niemeyer, 1925. Das literarische Kunstwerk: Eine Untersuchung aus dem Grenzgebiet der Ontologie, Logik und Literaturwissenschaft. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1931. Published in English as The Literary Work of Art, translated by George G. Grabowicz. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1968. Revised edition of the Polish original, O poznawaniu dzieła literackiego. Lvóv: 1937. Published in English as The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, translated by Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

Mikel Dufrenne Karl Jaspers et la philosophie de l’existence (with Paul Ricoeur). Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1947. Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953. Published in English as The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, translated by Edward S. Casey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. La Notion de l’a priori. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. Published in English as The Notion of the A priori, translated by Edward S. Casey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966.

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5 merleau-ponty at the limits of phenomenology Mauro Carbone

There is a Rembrandt painting that can perhaps help us to understand not only how philosophical reflection but, more widely, how Western culture has traditionally conceived our most common experience of the sensible world, that is, our experience of vision. The painting is The Philosopher in Meditation (1631), which depicts a philosopher in his room, sitting before a window at which, however, he does not direct his gaze, his eyes being cast downward while his forehead seems burdened with thoughts. Through the window only an oblique and faded light filters into the room, while the world is shut out. The original model for such a philosophical attitude was given by Réné Descartes. In fact, in the lecture “The Film and New Psychology,” presented in 1945 at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty1 recalls for us that: in a famous passage from the Méditations [i.e. Meditations on First Philosophy, originally published in 1641, only ten years after Rembrandt’s painting], Descartes wrote, “I say that I see men going by in the street, but what exactly do I really see? All I see are hats and coats which might equally well be covering dolls that only move by

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (March 14, 1908–May 3, 1961; born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France; died in Paris) was educated at the École Normale Supérieure (1926–30). His influences included Bergson, Descartes, Heidegger, and Husserl, and he held appointments at the Lycée de Beauvais (1931–33), Lycée de Chartes (1934–35), École Normale Supérieure (1935–39), Lycée Carnot, Paris (1940–44), Lycée Condorcet, Paris (1944–45), Université de Lyon (1945– 48), Sorbonne (1949–51), and the Collège de France (1952–61).

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springs, and if I say that I see men, it is because I apprehend through an inspection of the mind what I thought I beheld with my eyes.”2 Thus, Descartes would have certainly gazed upon the world with an attitude like that of Rembrandt’s philosopher. For, by distrusting anything his eyes threw before him, he remained generally suspicious of vision. He would have thus shut the window, gone back to his desk, and closed his eyes. The ideal mental position for Descartes was in fact to withdraw from experience and have recourse strictly to his own consciousness, since consciousness seems to be the only thing that could guarantee the truth of what actual vision could merely make us believe. This is the attitude that ultimately supports the philosophical approach where the philosopher, having first contemplated the world from a window, gathers it up within the seclusion of his room. In this way, he safely keeps his distance from the mistakes of his visual experience, which ultimately is sensuous vision grounded in the body. Descartes seems to trust in the ability to reach, through an inspection of the mind, an intellectual and therefore disincarnated vision, which, as such, has to be conceived as a “pan-oramic” (literally, an “all-seeing” vision), developing therefore in reflection (which etymologically means “bending backward”) all that was prereflectively implied in sense experience. Thus, the philosopher presupposes that he is not involved in what he sees, suggesting, therefore, that his vision is pure. On closer scrutiny, this Cartesian attitude is not relevant only to the philosopher depicted in the painting. The portrait itself seems to be Cartesian insofar as it is a representation in which a portion of the world appears in front of us, so that we become mere disembodied spectators of the external scene. This kind of representation would be directly related to the conceptions of the so-called “planimetric perspective,” which has prevailed over any other kind of perspective since the beginning of the Italian Renaissance. At stake, then, is not merely the attitude of a certain type of philosophy, Cartesianism. More generally, at stake here is a whole cultural disposition embedded in our concept of space – space as uniform and positive extension – and in our concept of vision – vision as an aerial view of Being. In other words, at stake is precisely the metaphysics of a disincarnated vision, which describes the way we relate to the world in terms of a frontal relation between subject and object. This is why at the end of his career, in “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty stresses that every theory of painting

2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 50. On the link between Descartes’s philosophical attitude and Rembrandt’s painting, see also Marc Richir, “La Défénestration,” L’Arc 46 (1971): 31ff.

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actually implies a metaphysics.3 This widely embedded metaphysics is why his reflections on painting are so important. They indicate the obstacles to the ideas he is trying to develop and thus they drive his thinking forward. Apart from numerous passing reflections on painting across his corpus, Merleau-Ponty produced three essays completely devoted to this topic. Each essay moreover chronologically represents one of the three periods in which his thought can be subdivided. More importantly, each summarizes the essential characteristics of the period in which it appears. Listed chronologically, the essays are: “Cézanne’s Doubt,” published in 1945, the same year of the Phenomenology of Perception, his most important complete work; “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” published in 1952, where, typical of his early 1950s work, he paid particular attention to language; and finally the last essay, mentioned above already, “Eye and Mind,” written in 1960 but published in 1961, just before his sudden death. Merleau-Ponty composed “Eye and Mind” at the same time that he was writing The Visible and the Invisible (posthumously published in 1964), in which he aimed to present a “new ontology.” We do not really know what this final ontology would have looked like. But if we follow his three main texts on painting, we can get a sense of it. So, contextualizing each essay within the period of Merleau-Ponty’s thought in which it falls, we will first focus our attention on “Cézanne’s Doubt”; then on “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”; and finally on “Eye and Mind.” As the title of this essay suggests, my aim here will be to show how painting, for Merleau-Ponty, at once brings forward great phenomenological truths but also leads his philosophy of the visible to the limits of phenomenology taken in the strict sense as a philosophy of consciousness.

i. cézanne and phenomenology In 1942, when Merleau-Ponty writes the essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,” his understanding of Cézanne is certainly not limited to Joachim Gasquet’s 1921 book, even though Merleau-Ponty carefully quotes passages from Gasquet’s account of his meetings and conversations with Cézanne. Nor did Merleau-Ponty know just the reports of Cézanne’s dialogues with Émile Bernard, about which he openly councils caution.4 Actually, it is hard to believe that Merleau-Ponty was not familiar with two crucial texts about Cézanne with which – it is important 3. See Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, Galen Johnson (ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 132; hereafter cited as EM and MPAR, respectively, followed by the page number. 4. See, for instance, Merleau-Ponty, “Cezanne’s Doubt,” in MPAR, 63; hereafter cited as CD followed by the page number in MPAR.

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to note – his interpretations naturally converge: Ranier Maria Rilke’s letters, and the 1929 “Introduction” that D. H. Lawrence wrote for an exhibition of his own paintings.5 In 1907, Rilke, who at that time lived in Paris, described his encounter with the way Cézanne’s paintings revealed “objectivity.” These descriptions seem to find an echo in Merleau-Ponty’s essay not only in the passage in which he states that “Cézanne wished to return to the object” (CD 62), but, even more, in the passage in which Merleau-Ponty points out that “it was the objects and the faces themselves as he saw them that demanded to be painted in that way, and Cézanne simply expressed what they wanted to say” (CD 71, translation modified). Moreover, the reasons why Lawrence regarded Cézanne as “the only really interesting character” of modern art also seem to find an echo in Merleau-Ponty’s essay. Just like Lawrence, Merleau-Ponty himself describes Cézanne’s obstinate attempt to give back to things the physicality that Western humanity had denied them. This Western humanity would be the humanity of Descartes’s rationality, which removed corporeality from rationality and which thereby imprisoned itself along with things within the immaterial clichés that its mentalistic consciousness had made. But it is not his knowledge of what others had said about Cézanne that is decisive here. I would like to show the traces of more crucial influences: those of Edmund Husserl, Erwin Panofsky, and Marcel Proust. As for the first, when Merleau-Ponty writes his essay about Cézanne, he had already visited the Husserl Archives in Leuven. Merleau-Ponty was the first scholar outside the Leuven circle to consult some of Husserl’s unpublished texts housed there.6 We know that the texts he read concerned primarily the “primordial constitution” (Urkonstitution) of the sensible world, which Husserl calls the Lebenswelt (lifeworld). For Husserl, the lifeworld is the world of our primordial experience, which, even though it always underlies the constructions of Galilean–Cartesian science, still remains an obvious and yet forgotten “presupposition” to such science. This forgetfulness produces the crisis that Husserl had identified, a crisis felt both in that model of science and in the European–Western culture that had given birth to it.7 Merleau-Ponty seems to unify Cézanne’s enter-

5. See Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, Joel Agee (trans.) (New York: Fromm International Publishing, 1985) and D. H. Lawrence, Introduction to These Paintings (London: Mandrake Press 1929). 6. As is well known, the Husserl Archives were founded in 1939 shortly after Edmund Husserl’s death. Because Husserl and his wife were of Jewish descent, his manuscripts were in great danger in Nazi-ruled Germany. The Franciscan father H. L. Van Breda succeeded in bringing Mrs. Husserl, the manuscripts, the extensive philosophical library, and the correspondence of Husserl to Leuven. 7. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, David Carr (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

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prise with that of Husserl when he writes, in “Cézanne’s Doubt,” that “we see things; we agree about them; we are anchored in them; and it is with ‘nature’ as our base that we construct our sciences. Cézanne wanted to paint this primordial world” (CD 64). Therefore, for Merleau-Ponty, the most disturbing novelty of Cézanne’s painting lies in his effort to express the bewilderment our bodies feel when we find ourselves in a world that is not yet organized according to the Copernican scientific order. Having read at Leuven a fragmentary text Husserl wrote on our primordial experience of space (usually referred to as “The Earth does not Move”), Merleau-Ponty saw in Cézanne’s painting an attempt to express precisely that kind of experience, according to which the earth does not move.8 In this primordial experience, the earth maintains a sort of otherness, suggesting that in fact it does not belong to humanity. In relation to this otherness, MerleauPonty’s comments on Cézanne’s Le Lac d’Annecy (1896) are exemplary: There is no wind in the landscape, no movement on the Lac d’Annecy; the frozen objects hesitate as at the beginning of the world. It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all human effusiveness. If one looks at the work of other painters after seeing Cézanne’s paintings, one feels somehow relaxed, just as conversations resumed after a period of mourning mask the absolute change and restore to the survivors their solidity. (CD 66–7) Thus, leaving aside Rilke’s letters, we see that what Merleau-Ponty is really thinking about when he emphasizes that “Cézanne wished to return to the object” (CD 62) is the famous Husserlian task of returning to “the things themselves.” We hear in the background a sentence from Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations – one of Merleau-Ponty’s favorites – when he writes that Cézanne “has returned to the source of silent and solitary experience on which culture and the exchange of ideas have been built” (CD 69, emphasis added).9 8. Edmund Husserl, Umsturz der kopernikanischen Lehre in der gewöhnlichen weltanschaulichen Interpretation. Die Ur-Arche Erde bewegt sich nicht. Grundlegende Untersuchungen zum phänomenologischen Ursprung der Körperlichkeit, der Räumlichkeit der Natur im ersten naturwissenschaftlichen Sinne (May 7–9, 1934); published in English as “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature,” Fred Kersten (trans.), in Shorter Works, Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (eds) (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). On the “external” history of this manuscript’s reading, see H. L. Van Breda, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty et les Archives-Husserl à Louvain,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 4 (1962); on the influence exerted by it on Merleau-Ponty’s thought, see G. D. Neri, “Terra e Cielo in un manoscritto husserliano del 1934,” aut aut 245 (1991), 40ff. 9. Here is Husserl’s sentence: “It is the experience … still mute which we are concerned with leading to the pure expression of its own meaning” (Cartesian Meditations, Dorion Cairns [trans.] [New York: Springer, 1977], 38–9). As for the recurrence of this sentence in

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As for Panofsky’s influence on “Cézanne’s Doubt,” we have no explicit reference as we have with the other sources. Nevertheless, it seems plausible to speculate that a reading of Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form may have been behind the writing of Merleau-Ponty’s text. In Perspective as Symbolic Form, Panofsky highlights how the birth of Renaissance “perspective construction” is connected to a rationalization of our visual perception. Both the psychophysiological characteristics of our vision (the binocularity of vision, the constant movement of the eyes, and the spherical configuration of the retina) as well as the “‘psychological’ interpretation of vision” come to be rationalized. The rationalization ends up asserting a mathematically inspired model of perceptual vision itself. In fact, the perspective construction of the Renaissance “reproduces the vision of one sole immobile eye that is supposed to be placed at a constant distance from the plane of representation.”10 One hears echoes of Panofsky’s remarks when Merleau-Ponty writes about a portrait depicted by Cézanne in 1895: “The work table in his portrait of Gustave Geffroy stretches, contrary to the laws of perspective, into the lower part of the picture” (CD 63).11 Therefore, Merleau-Ponty argues that “by remaining faithful to the phenomena in his investigations of perspective, Cézanne discovered what recent psychologists have come to formulate: the lived perspective, that which we actually perceive, is not a geometric or photographic one” (CD 64).12 As for Proust’s influence on “Cézanne’s Doubt,” it is certain that, when Merleau-Ponty writes it, he is profoundly acquainted with the Proustian novel Remembrance of Things Past, which he had already quoted in his first work, The Structure of Behavior (which dates from 1938, although it was published in 1942). We can then suppose that the knowledge of Proust’s novel influences also some aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of painting that we see emerging in “Cézanne’s Doubt.” When Merleau-Ponty writes that “The painter recaptures Merleau-Ponty’s writings, see for instance Phenomenology of Perception, Colin Smith (trans.), Forrest Williams (rev.) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), xv, as well as The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, Alphonso Lingis (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 129; hereafter cited as VI followed by the page number. On the influence exerted by Husserl’s sentence on Merleau-Ponty’s thought, see Jacques Taminiaux, “Experience, Expression, and Form in Merleau-Ponty’s Itinerary,” in Dialectic and Difference, Robert Crease and James T. Decker (trans.) (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1985). 10. M. Dalai, “La questione della prospettiva,” in E. Panofsky, La Prospettiva come “Forma simbolica” e altri Scritti, Guido Davide Neri (ed.) (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966), 129 n.7. 11. On the same portrait, see also CD 62. 12. Speaking of “recent psychologists,” this quotation alludes to Gestalt theorists. The German word Gestalt has no direct translation in English, but refers to the way in which we experience the world, that is to say, the way in which we know the world through our perception. Gestalt theorists state that perception of the “whole” in comparison with that of the parts of it is original, primordial, and that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, the whole carries a different and altogether greater meaning than its individual components.

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and converts into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the separate life of each consciousness” (CD 68), this echoes perfectly with what Proust writes in Time Regained (the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past): Through art alone we are able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist in the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we make that world multiply itself.13 Indeed, the nonfictional painter to whom Merleau-Ponty devotes this essay, Cézanne, seems, in certain respects, to have been modeled on Proust’s imaginary painter named Elstir. When Proust describes, in Within a Budding Grove (the second volume of Remembrance), “the effort [Elstir] made … to strip himself, when face to face with reality, of every intellectual concept,”14 with the aim of “reproduc[ing] things not as he knew them to be, but according to the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed,”15 Elstir’s aim converges with our primordial encounter with the world studied by Husserl and with the lived perspective evoked by Panofsky. Now, I have chosen to point out these three influences in particular because in my opinion they intersect in one of the two poles between which this phase of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy seems to be oscillating: that is, the pole according to which Merleau-Ponty tends to consider Cézanne’s painting as the exemplary attempt to paint our primordial perceptual experience. Moving toward this first pole, in the contemporaneous Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty assigns to phenomenological philosophy, and therefore to his own thinking, “the ambition to make reflection equal to the unreflective life of consciousness.”16 In other words, according to the first pole, in the oscillation we find, in MerleauPonty’s philosophy immediately after the Second World War, that both pictorial reflection and philosophical reflection are supposed to be able to “translate,” without any residue, “the text”17 written by the experience that Husserl defined as “silent and solitary experience.” Nevertheless, in this phase of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, this pole lives together with another one that, later, will prevail and will lead his thought to its ontological developments. According to this second pole, Merleau-Ponty writes in “Cézanne’s Doubt” that “the meaning of what 13. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (trans.) (New York: Vintage, 1981), vol. 3, 931–2. 14. Ibid., vol. 1, 755. 15. Ibid., vol. 1, 754. 16. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xvi, translation modified. 17. As for the terms between quotes, see ibid., xviii.

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the artist is going to say does not exist anywhere – not in things, which as yet have no meaning, nor in the artist himself, in his unformulated life” (CD 69). Thus, the second pole suggests a relationship between the unreflective life and its expression that, in the Phenomenology of Perception, is shaped precisely by the example of art; Merleau-Ponty says, “Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the realization of a truth.”18 As I said, the second pole will prevail in the further development of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, along with a more profound reflection on the “status” of the sensible that will push Merleau-Ponty toward its “ontological rehabilitation.”

ii. speaking language and tacit language In the early 1950s, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy was influenced in a decisive way by Saussure’s linguistics. Indeed, while Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics would become decisive for the so-called “structuralist movement” of the 1960s, Merleau-Ponty was in fact the first person to study Saussure from a philosophical perspective.19 Like the structuralists, Merleau-Ponty takes up Saussure’s definition of the “sign” as “diacritical, oppositional, and negative”: What we have learned from Saussure is that, taken singly, signs do not signify anything, and that each one of them does not so much express a meaning as mark a divergence [écart] of meaning between itself and other signs. Since the same can be said for all other signs, we may conclude that language is made of differences without terms; or more exactly, that the terms of language are engendered only by the differences which appear among them.20 The “écart” (divergence) mentioned here, which could also be rendered in English as “hiatus” or “gap,”21 refers both to space and differentiation, to the 18. Ibid., xx, translation modified. *19. For an extended discussion of Saussure and structural linguistics, see the essay by Thomas F. Broden in History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 5. 20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” MPAR 76, emphasis added. This essay reworks a chapter from Merleau-Ponty’s 1951 unfinished book The Prose of the World. Published for the first time in the journal Les Temps modernes in 1952, then collected in 1960 in Signs, Richard C. McCleary (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 39–83, and in MPAR 76–120. Hereafter cited as ILVS followed by the page number in MPAR. 21. The écart is “the gap, the separation, the differentiation between the touching and the touched, the seeing and the seen, mind and world, self and others; it is the fissure that language tries to bridge and that the philosophical methods of reflection, dialectic and intuition have

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space in between the signs and to the process that differentiates one sign from another. From this point on, the word “écart” will play a major role in MerleauPonty’s thought (as it will as well in that of Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault). On the basis of this écart among the signs, Merleau-Ponty argues that language “in the making” – which he calls “speaking language” (langage parlant) – signifies in an oblique, indirect way, that is, through the inextinguishable vibration crossing differences between signs. It is in this way that “speaking language” reorganizes “spoken language” (langage parlé), that is, reorganizes sedimented signs and meanings, and thereby establishes new meanings, as every creative use of language does. Saussure’s notion of “sign” is precisely Merleau-Ponty’s starting-point in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” Here, Merleau-Ponty’s purpose consists in a “reduction” of the speaking language of literature and philosophy to the tacit language of painting, in order to bring to light the similarities and differences of these two kinds of languages. “Reduction” is, of course, one of the key points of Husserl’s phenomenological method. This method requires that one avoid all abstraction, all theorizing, all generalization, in short, all knowledge that is usually assumed to be obvious, bracketing it and reducing the world to a phenomenon, that is, to the way it appears to us in our primordial experience. On the basis of this kind of reduction, Merleau-Ponty writes in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” that: If we want to understand language as an originating operation, we must pretend never to have spoken, submit language to a reduction without which it would once more escape us by referring us to what it signifies for us, look at it as deaf people look at those who are speaking, compare the art of language to other arts of expression, and try to see it as one of these mute arts. It is possible that the meaning of language has a decisive privilege, but it is in trying out the parallel that we will perceive what may in the end make that parallel impossible. (ILVS 84) This passage highlights that Merleau-Ponty’s interest in linguistics, which characterizes this phase of his thought, is not separable from his reflection on art and literature. In fact, if linguistics can illuminate the phenomenon of expression, art and literature practice expression in a privileged way. Modern art and historically attempted to close through their respective theories of meaning, only to ignore thereby how this ‘un-tamable,’ at once secretly nourishes and undermines the habits of thought and experience that they sought to establish” (Patrick Burke, “Listening at the Abyss,” in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith [eds] [Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990], 84).

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literature, in particular, according to Merleau-Ponty in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” put the phenomenon of expression into question insofar as it has been understood through the “‘objectivist’ prejudice.” Through this prejudice art and literature had been conceived mimetically as representations of nature (see ILVS 84). On this point Merleau-Ponty explicitly refers to André Malraux’s trilogy entitled The Psychology of Art (written between 1947 and 1949), and Merleau-Ponty’s title explicitly evokes Malraux’s subsequent 1951 book on art and art history called The Voices of Silence.22 Merleau-Ponty, however, does not agree with Malraux’s thesis in The Psychology of Art, which states that the peculiarity of modern painting consists in the transition from objectivity to (individual) subjectivity, that is, from painting understood as a mimetic representation of nature based on the law of “planimetric perspective” to painting as the expression of an individual point of view about the world that breaks with any law of reproduction. Criticizing this thesis, Merleau-Ponty states that: Modern painting presents a problem completely different from that of the return to the individual: the problem of knowing how one can communicate without the help of a pre-established Nature which all men’s senses open upon, the problem of knowing how we are grafted to the universal by that which is most our own. (ILVS 89) In fact, according to Merleau-Ponty’s opinion, in the first half of the twentieth century, painting, as well as literature and more generally culture – as he specifies in the contemporaneous essay “Man and Adversity” – focus on the experience of incarnate existence: Our century has wiped out the dividing line between “body” and “mind” and sees human life as through and through mental and corporeal, always based upon the body and always (even in its most carnal modes) interested in relationships between persons. … The twentieth century has restored and deepened the notion of flesh, that is, of animate body.23

22. André Malraux (1901–76) was a French author and dominant figure in French culture and politics from the 1930s to the 1970s, serving as Minister of Information (1945–46, 1958) and Minister of State for Cultural Affairs (1959–69). His major works include La Condition humaine (Man’s Fate) and Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence). 23. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 226–7. This essay is the text of a lecture that Merleau-Ponty gave in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1951. It was published for the first time in 1952, and later collected in Signs.

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Merleau-Ponty thinks that the investigation of incarnate existence characterizes all twentieth-century thought. But in particular such an investigation must grant to painting (especially owing to its singular proximity to the perceptual experience) the ability to reveal and even emphasize the primordial ability to express that is at work in our bodily relationship with the world: “it is the expressive operation of the body, begun by the least perception, that develops into painting and art” (ILVS 106–7). In this sense, despite the modifications that emerge in this phase of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, the fundamental reasons supporting his interest in painting have not changed from those supporting this same interest during the earlier period of his philosophy, as exemplified in “Cézanne’s Doubt.” Nevertheless – even though Merleau-Ponty continues to investigate painting as a singular way to develop the expressive operation begun by perception – now, when he engages in a description of perception itself, he grants a central role to the notion of style. “Perception already stylizes,” Merleau-Ponty asserts; style defines “our original relation to the world.”24 Already appearing in the Phenomenology of Perception, the Merleau-Pontean notion of style comes from Husserl, but here in “Indirect Language,” it is filtered through Malraux’s characterization of style as “the coherent deformation [of] the data of the world” (ILVS 91). For Merleau-Ponty, style is meant as a “system of equivalences” furnishing “the emblems of a certain relationship with being” (ibid.). In other words, style is entirely unified with the meaning things have for a person, but that meaning must, recalling Merleau-Ponty’s comments on Saussure’s notion of “sign,” in turn be understood diacritically as écart, that is, as differentiation. In perception, for Merleau-Ponty, there are differences between things, not just laterally in the perceptual field but also temporally or historically. These differences usually reside in the background of perception allowing the usual forms of things to appear. But one’s style deforms the usual form by drawing certain differences out and leaving others hidden – so that, when I for instance see a red hat, it signifies not only as not blue (it signifies its usual color form) but also as not fashionable (a deformation that is specific to me). Or when I look at a landscape, I see, according to my perceptual style, the shifting movements of birds, while others see the outline of the mountains. All of these meanings are hidden in what I see, but potentially visible. Thanks to the diacritical differences functioning in perception, our encounter with sensible being is therefore able to “sketch” a latent meaning. And it is the latent perceptual meaning that both the painter and the writer will later stylize once more in their works. In other words, that latent meaning will be retaken and recreated according to a movement, that is, 24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, John O’Neill (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 56.

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at the same time, archaeological and teleological, in order to become expressed and accessible in their work, whether pictorial or literary. Therefore, not in a way different from that of a painter, the style of a writer looks like a “coherent deformation imposed upon the visible” (ILVS 115), and the painting, no less than the work of writing, can be characterized as a “system of equivalences” that run across the traced signs. In fact, in both these cases, the expressive operation can be characterized in diacritical terms, because first of all their perceptual source can be characterized by difference. The concept of diacriticity gained through the investigation on language actually shines its light on the description of perception, illuminating this domain as well through the notion of a differentiation that excludes any positive term. This notion allows Merleau-Ponty to abandon the tendency toward conceiving the unreflective and silent life of consciousness as a positive foundation of meaning as it seemed to be in the earlier phase of his thought. Thus, in the summary for his 1952–53 course devoted to “The Sensible World and the World of Expression,” Merleau-Ponty states that “[T]he meaning of a perceived object when picked out from all others still does not stand isolated from the constellation in which it appears; it is articulated only as a certain gap [écart] in relation to the order of space, time, motion, and signification in general in which we are established.”25 This comment is in stark contrast to what we see in “Cézanne’s Doubt,” where the artist is described as someone who has “returned to the source of silent and solitary experience on which culture and the exchange of ideas have been built” (CD 69). Here unreflective life seems to be something like a positive foundation of meaning (as if the meanings were there already made); it does not seem to be a system of gaps or differences that in themselves are meaningless. In contrast to that pole of the oscillation we traced in the period of “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in the period of “The Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” Merleau-Ponty states that style – meant in a diacritical way – “is thus not shut up in the depths of the mute individual but diffused throughout all he sees” (ILVS 90). Moreover, if the Phenomenology of Perception definition of operative intentionality as a “text” suggests the same tendency toward conceiving the unreflective life as the presence of a positive layer of sense, in “Indirect Language and the Voice of Silence” Merleau-Ponty insists on excluding the idea of an “original text” that is supposed to precede and guide the effort of expressing (ILVS 80). Therefore, when he discusses the time-lapse film of Matisse’s act of painting that allows us to see Matisse’s hesitations, choices, and reconsiderations, MerleauPonty points out that that act was motivated only by “the intention of executing 25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Themes from the Lecture Courses,” John O’Neill (trans.), in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 71–2, translation modified.

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that particular painting which did not yet exist” (ILVS 83). On the same page, he specifies that speaking-language works in a similar way: “It gropes around a significative intention which is not guided by any text, and which is precisely in the process of writing the text” (ibid.). In fact, in the contemporaneous “On the Phenomenology of Language”26 (despite the title, what Merleau-Ponty says here about the problem of language may be made to refer to every other expressive form), he explains that the intention of meaning “is at the moment no more than a determinate gap to be filled by words.”27 In other words, the intention of meaning is a “mute aspiration” that precedes and provokes the expressive operation but as well an aspiration that comes to know itself only through the expressive operation. Therefore, the expressive operation cannot measure itself against any preliminary text, for the unreflective and silent life of conscience appears as a “determinate gap” and not as a positive foundation that the expression would need only to translate. For this reason, it is in the mutual diacritical configuration of silent experience and linguistic expression that the transition from the former to the latter can now be understood. In this way, we seem to have very nearly overcome the difficulties associated with the conception of the unreflective and silent life of consciousness as a positive foundation of meaning. Surely, here we do not yet find the reversibility between silence and speech that MerleauPonty will thematize when he subsequently attains the ontological perspective. However, the basis of the idea of reversibility seems to be present already since both perception and language share the same power of differentiation, which means that both express meaning in an indirect way. In this perspective, subjectivity gradually loses the characterization of being “full and positive,” which the Phenomenology of Perception seemed to give it. Subjectivity gradually finds a more precise status through the characteristics designated with the French terms “fissures” and “lacunes,” terms rendered in English as “fissures and gaps.”28

iii. the ontology of vision and flesh Now we are going to focus our attention on the finished but posthumously published essay entitled “Eye and Mind.” Appearing in the first issue of the journal Art de France, “Eye and Mind” included images of some artworks that Merleau-Ponty had selected; he apparently selected them because these 26. Text of Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to the First International Conference on Phenomenology (Brussels, Belgium, 1951). It was published for the first time in 1952, then collected in Signs. 27. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 89. 28. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 333.

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images highlighted the ideas he was developing. By itself, this small “imaginary museum” indicates that in “Eye and Mind” Cézanne is no longer, as he was in “Cézanne’s Doubt,” the exclusive reference point; now, more generally, MerleauPonty refers to what he calls “modern painting.” However it is important to point out that in “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that “from Lascaux to our time, pure or impure, figurative or not, painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility” (EM 127). In fact, here for Merleau-Ponty, each kind of painting manifests what he calls “a polymorphous Being, which justifies all of them without being fully expressed by any” (EM 134). In “Eye and Mind,” we find again Merleau-Ponty’s previous rejection of the concept of art as mimesis. Also, we find again the idea of artistic creation as a visible disclosure of what otherwise would remain trapped in one’s own individual universe. But in “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty focuses on painting primarily because, as he explains in the second section of this essay, painting interrogates the enigma of vision. For him, the enigma of vision forms one sole thing with that of the body as the seen and seer together. The phenomenon of vision is ignited in relation to this enigmatic peculiarity of the body. Therefore here, the body is defined as “an intertwining of vision and movement,” between which, Merleau-Ponty explains, there is an “extraordinary overlapping” (EM 124). “Intertwining” (a term appearing in the title of the most innovative chapter of The Visible and the Invisible29) and “overlapping” (a term translating the French word “empiétement”) are recurring terms in the last phase of MerleauPonty’s thinking. Elements that are mutually intertwining and overlapping imply reversibility. And it is reversibility, for Merleau-Ponty, that animates sensible being. The idea that the primary characteristic of sensible being is reversibility has its roots in the human body being an “intertwining of vision and movement”: movement implies vision, vision implies movement. Because of this mutual overlapping, it is a mistake to conceive vision and movement, respectively, as an “operation of thought” and a “decision made by the mind” taking place in front of a world understood as “in itself, or matter” (ibid.). It is thus a mistake to view the world as utterly heterogeneous with respect to vision and movement, which is really what the philosophical tradition and common sense springing from Cartesian thought would hold. In fact, as we saw at the beginning in relation to Rembrandt’s painting, the philosophical tradition and common sense are habituated to consider the world as a thing extended in space (res extensa) in front of the subject. Merleau-Ponty objects that, thanks to the mutual 29. The complete title of this chapter is “The Intertwining – The Chiasm,” showing that MerleauPonty uses both terms to designate the same notion. About Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term “chiasm” and its etymon, see Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, “Introduction,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (eds) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), 17 n.2.

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overlapping, vision is not “a representation of the world,” but a real and actual opening to it, while our movement is not a displacement in geometrical space as it would be in the case of a thing. Instead, movement is a tending toward, a self-transcending, and hence it is an aspect that decisively contributes to the definition of our body. Unlike a thing about which we say “it is moved,” in the case of our body, we say that it “moves itself.” Thus, vision and movement – which open us to the world – are decisive factors in establishing the reversible structure of the human body, which is its very enigma. In fact, in “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty explains that “the enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees and is seen” (ibid.). Therefore, one cannot say that the seer stands before the world. But, as well, one cannot say that the seer is placed in the world while remaining distinguished from the world itself. The seer is part of the world in so far as, being a body, the seer is visible just as the world is. Here Merleau-Ponty is thinking of the experience of the mirror. In order to have this experience, one must be not only a thing that sees but also a thing that is seen. Thus the seer’s body must be made of the same stuff as the world: the visible. At the same time, it is the visible that can see – the visible. Therefore it is that particular visible in which all of the visible can see itself. It is as if the visible were a single organism that, in order to see itself, gathers itself around that visible which is also the seeing, and therefore, in this respect, “it is its consciousness,” as Cézanne said (see CD 67). In “Eye and Mind,” the paradoxical consequence of the fact that my body is at same time seer and seen is found in the following statement: “Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself …; the world is made of the very stuff of the body” (EM 124–5). The reversible structure of the human body, being at the same time sentient and sensible, shows how this body is fleshly akin to the sensible world that therefore shares the same ontological status. In this sense, in his 1959 “The Philosopher and his Shadow,” an essay dedicated to Husserl’s “unthought,”30 Merleau-Ponty recognized the need for “an ontological rehabilitation of the sensible. For from now on we may literally say that space itself is known through my body.”31 On such a basis, rather than the mere relationship between the percipient subject and the perceived world indicated in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty asserts that the sentient and the sensible belong together to the same “flesh.” This flesh interweaves our own body, the other’s body, and the things of the world, wrapping them all up within 30. This essay was published for the first time in 1959, then collected in Signs. As for the expression “unthought-of element,” see Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 60. 31. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 166–7.

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a horizon of “brute” or “wild being.” In this wild being, the subject and object are yet not constituted as such, and therefore perception accomplishes itself in the indistinguishability of perceiving and being perceived, in the indivision of activity or passivity, and finally in the reversibility between seeing and being seen, of which Merleau-Ponty finds painting to be a telling example. Thus, Merleau-Ponty is the first in the twentieth century to explicitly claim a philosophical value for the notion of “flesh,” saying that he uses it to illustrate a type of being, which “has no name in any philosophy” (VI 147). “Flesh” names neither matter nor mind nor substance (VI 139, 145, 147); it names a unitary texture where each body and each thing manifests itself only as difference (as écart) from other bodies and other things. In other words, for Merleau-Ponty, the notion of “flesh” designates the common horizon where all beings belong. In that sense, such a notion may even sound “older” than the specific Christian use of it. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty defines it by resorting to the Presocratic term “element” (VI 139, 147) or to a Presocratic expression, attributed by Aristotle to Anaxagoras, “omou hn panta” (all was together) (VI 217).32 On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty tries to make us see that the flesh is not an origin, but something “originating.” Older than anything that has counted as an origin, older than all things that have originated, the originating, Merleau-Ponty warns, “is not all behind us” (VI 124); it is still present and in perennial explosion.33 It is indeed enough to repeat, Merleau-Ponty suggests, the experience of the hand that goes from touched to touching, as described by Husserl in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy – Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (§36), in order to encounter the phenomenon of reversibility. It must be noticed however that this is “a reversibility always imminent and never realized in fact” (VI 147). Thus, Merleau-Ponty comes to the notion of “flesh” by thinking of our relationship with the world in the direction showed by what he called the “shadow” of Husserl’s thought. At the same time, though, he is inclined to think that the danger of just overturning the metaphysical relationship between sensible and spiritual lurks in the idea, advocated by Husserl, of a stratification of experience – the truth of which would be directly proportional to its deepness. Merleau-Ponty comes therefore to criticize the goal, in stratification, of “‘unraveling,’ of ‘disentangling’ what is entangled” (VI 268), that is, the disentangling of the flesh itself. In this light, the definition of painting as the interrogation of the enigma of vision demands now to be recognized in all its importance. During the last 32. About this expression, see Aristotle, Physics, I, 4, 187a30. 33. See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 124, and even more clearly the following passage taken from a working note in the same text: “for me it is no longer a question of origins, nor limits, nor of a series of events going to a first cause, but one sole explosion of Being which is forever” (VI 265).

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phase of his thought, in which the dimension of subjectivity is inscribed as a fissure or a hollow in the dimension of Being, Merleau-Ponty tends to see in the operation of painting – rather than in the creative prolongation of the painter’s perceptual experience, as described in “Cézanne’s Doubt” and in “Indirect Language and the Voice of Silence” – the expression of a “Visibility” (a word that Merleau-Ponty uses as a synonym of “flesh”) understood with all its ontological implications. This does not mean that Merleau-Ponty gives painting a privilege with respect to other arts or cultural expressions. In reality, in the preparatory notes to the 1958–59 “Philosophy Today” course, Merleau-Ponty lists painting as just one of the “cultural symptoms” “that attest to [one] same crisis situation, i.e., at once peril and possibility for the rebirth of philosophy: example, in our Western ideology: poetry, music, painting, and psychoanalysis.”34 Nevertheless, painting understood in its ontological significance is, according to MerleauPonty, “a central operation contributing to the definition of our access to Being” (EM 132), since it is precisely this carnal Being “that itself comes to show forth its own meaning” in vision (EM 147). On the one hand, by virtue of one’s own body as seeing-visible, the one who looks in fact participates in the world he sees, and on this basis Merleau-Ponty conceives vision as the expression of a “fundamental narcissism” – the narcissism of the Ego – since “the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself he sees” (VI 139). On the other hand, in the involvement of the seer in what he sees, Merleau-Ponty also identifies “the second and more profound sense of the narcissism,” because such an involvement suggests the imminent reversibility between seeing things and being seen by them. This “second and more profound sense of the narcissism” is the ontological sense, which Merleau-Ponty traces both in the aesthetical dimension (the reciprocity of vision is witnessed by many painters who felt their glance was reciprocated by the things they were looking at) as well as in the sphere of desire: “to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom” of one’s own image (ibid.). Thus, the ontological sense of narcissism could be defined as the desire of the carnal Being for its own vision, which elicits its dehiscence in the seer and in the visible, both of which – as they spring forth from the same flesh – hold a mutual reciprocity and can therefore reverse their roles. But painting does not show only the reversibility between the seer and the seen, according to Merleau-Ponty. He writes, “Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible – painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe of carnal essences, actualized resemblances, mute meanings” (EM 130). In other words, painting also shows that, in the horizon of the flesh, perception takes 34. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes des cours au Collège de France 1958–59 et 1960–61, Stephanie Ménasé (ed.) (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 46.

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place in the steadfast intertwining with the imaginary, which “renders present to us what is absent” (EM 132). Thus, painting contributes to reveal vision as the capability to see the invisible in the visible.35 An example of this invisible in the visible can be found in the “carnal essences” mentioned a moment ago, essences that in the final pages of The Visible and the Invisible he calls “sensible ideas” (VI 151). These essences are nonconceptual generalities that, according to the peculiar logic of the aesthetical world, are inseparable from their particular, sensible presentation. Thus, it is in this logic of the aesthetical world that Merleau-Ponty saw a new, nondualistic ontology at work. He was hoping to give this nondualistic ontology a full philosophical formulation by refounding the very idea of philosophy in what he began to call “a-philosophy.”36 A-philosophy: this means a thinking that is finally able to establish and to maintain a close connection with the aesthetical world that the philosophical tradition, in contrast, devalued. “This philosophy, which is yet to be elaborated, is what animates the painter” (EM 138). At the time of his sudden death, it was this ontological perspective that Merleau-Ponty was stressing, going as far as the very limits of phenomenology.

major works La Structure du comportement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942. Published in English as The Structure of Behavior, translated by Alden Fisher. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1963. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Published in English as Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith (revised by Forrest Williams in 1981, reprinted 1995). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; translated by Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Humanisme et terreur: Essai sur le problème communiste. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Published in English as Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, translated by John O’Neill. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969. Sens et non-sens. Paris: Nagel, 1948. Reprinted, Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Published in English as Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964.

35. This is the reason why, in the quoted passage, Merleau-Ponty characterizes vision through the French term “voyance,” which literally indicates “clairvoyance,” the “gift of double sight.” For more about this notion in Merleau-Ponty’s last reflection, see my The Thinking of the Sensible: Merleau-Ponty’s A-Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 31ff. 36. See the preparatory notes of the unfinished course entitled “Philosophie et non-philosophie depuis Hegel,” that Merleau-Ponty was giving in 1960–61. These notes are now published in Notes des cours au Collège de France 1958–1959 et 1960–1961, and translated into English as “Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Hegel,” in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Merleau-Ponty, Hugh J. Silverman (ed. and trans.) (New York: Routledge, 1988). I examined these notes in the second chapter of my The Thinking of the Sensible.

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merleau-p ont y at the limits of phenomenolo gy Éloge de la Philosophie: Leçon inaugurale faite au Collège de France, Le jeudi 15 janvier 1953. Paris: Gallimard, 1953. Published in English as “In Praise of Philosophy,” translated by John Wild and James Edie, in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Les Aventures de la dialectique. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. Published in English as Adventures of the Dialectic, translated by Joseph Bien. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Signes. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. Published in English as Signs, translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. L’Œil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Published in English as “Eye and Mind,” translated by Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, edited by James M. Edie, 159–90. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Reprinted (with the translation revised by Michael B. Smith) in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, edited by Galen Johnson, 121–50. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. Reprinted (with the translation revised by Leonard Lawlor) in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, edited by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, 351–78. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Edited by James M. Edie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Le Visible et l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. Published in English as The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. La Prose du monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Published in English as The Prose of the World, translated by John O’Neill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Texts and Dialogues. Edited by Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry, Jr. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Edited by Galen Johnson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. La Nature, Notes, Cours du Collège de France. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995. Published in English as Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, translated by Robert Vallier. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003. Causeries 1948. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002. Published in English as The World of Perception, translated by Thomas Baldwin. London: Routledge, 2005. L’Institution dans l’histoire personnelle et publique, Le Problème de la passivité, le sommeil, l’inconscient, la mémoire: notes de cours au Collège de France, 1954–1955. Paris: Belin, 2003. Published in English as Institution and Passivity: Course Notes for the Collège de France (1954– 1955), translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Edited by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007.

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6 the hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology Daniel L. Tate

The intersection of phenomenology and hermeneutics in the twentieth century creates a new trajectory within contemporary continental philosophy. 1 But although we speak of the departure of hermeneutics from phenomenology, we must recognize the phenomenological impulse of hermeneutics as well. During the 1920s, Martin Heidegger redirects Husserl’s phenomenology toward a “hermeneutics of facticity” that examines the concrete, historical life of human being rather than the eidetic structures of transcendental consciousness.2 This hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology comes to fruition in the existential-ontological analysis of Dasein in Division I of Being and Time. The radicality of this hermeneutic thrust is most pronounced where Heidegger articulates his ontological conception of understanding in relation to the “hermeneutic circle.” Moreover, the hermeneutic implications of this analysis carry deep into Division II of that work, where Heidegger uncovers the temporality of Being-there as “Care” and the “historicity” of authentic existence. Hans-Georg Gadamer takes up the banner of hermeneutics later abandoned by his mentor. By drawing out the implications of Heidegger’s ontology of understanding for the human sciences, Gadamer lays out the basic traits of philosophical hermeneutics in Truth and Method. Pursuing further Heidegger’s emphasis on the historicity of human being, Gadamer places a new emphasis on the belonging of understanding to tradition. This insight challenges the concept of historical 1. I would like to extend my appreciation at the outset for the assistance provided in the preparation of this essay by James Risser, whose efforts were especially helpful in the second and third sections. *2. Heidegger’s philosophy is the focus of the essay by Dennis J. Schmidt in this volume, as well as the essay by Miguel de Beistegui in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3.

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understanding as the acquisition of objective knowledge. Conceived instead as a mode of historical being, understanding is more deeply characterized by its participation in tradition as an event of transmission. Influenced by Heidegger’s later linguistic turn, Gadamer stresses the import of language as the medium of tradition and its transmission and thereby completes the “ontological shift” of hermeneutics expressed in his formula “Being that can be understood is language.”3 This survey of the hermeneutic development of phenomenology concludes with a brief review of Gadamer’s exchanges with his contemporaries (Betti, Habermas, Ricoeur, and Derrida) highlighting the key points of contention in these debates.

i. hermeneutic radicalization of phenomenology: heidegger Heidegger’s transformation of phenomenology Heidegger frequently acknowledges his debt to Husserl’s phenomenology for providing an essential insight into the “genuine method” of philosophical thinking conceived not as a new technique, but as “a path toward the disclosure of objects.”4 For Heidegger, phenomenology is a way of “seeing” that refuses the self-evidence of accepted theory or prevailing opinion in order to attend solely to beings and the manner in which they disclose themselves. In this respect, he joins Husserl’s recourse to “the things themselves” (die Sachen selbst) as the abiding concern of phenomenology. But Heidegger is careful to take his distance from the “transcendental” conception debuted in Husserl’s lectures on The Idea of Phenomenology (1907) and the “idealist” tenor of its full statement in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy – First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (1913), preferring to develop his own appropriation of phenomenology from Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900).5 From the outset, Heidegger is unreceptive to Husserl’s claim that transcendental phenomenology fulfills the ideal of philosophy as a rigorous science. While Husserl holds that the transcendental reduction allows the intentional life of consciousness to be described without metaphysical presupposition, Heidegger maintains that Husserl’s project is bound by onto3. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (eds and trans.) (London: Continuum, 2004), 470. 4. Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Albert Hofstadter (trans.) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1979), 328. *5. For a detailed discussion of Husserl’s phenomenology, see the essay by Thomas Nenon in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3.

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logical commitments inherited uncritically from the metaphysical tradition. He also rejects Husserl’s discovery of a domain of “transcendental subjectivity” as a “sphere of immanence” secured by the reduction. Where Husserl claims that the intentional object is constituted within its intentional relation to consciousness, Heidegger insists that the “directedness toward” characteristic of intentionality marks a fundamental openness to the world that transcends any enclosure within consciousness. Heidegger also refuses the priority that Husserl’s emphasis on evidence grants to theoretical knowledge over practical engagement. When Husserl asserts that phenomenology offers no constructions or speculations but grounds its claims solely on the object as given in intuition, Heidegger sees the persistence of the paradigm of knowledge as the pure beholding of a present object. Heidegger instead appeals to ancient Greek thought for a more originary understanding of phenomenology than he finds in Husserl. In his recollection “My Way to Phenomenology,” Heidegger remarks: “What occurs for the phenomenology of the acts of consciousness as the self-manifestation of phenomena is thought more originally by Aristotle and all Greek thinking and existence as alētheia, as the unconcealedness of what is present, its being revealed, its showing itself.”6 Indeed, when he defines phenomenology in Being and Time (1927), it is not to Husserl that he turns, but to Aristotle. Above all, it is Aristotle’s stress on the unconcealment achieved in speech that guides Heidegger’s conception in section 7. There his definition of phenomenology proceeds from the Greek words phainomenon and logos. Phainomenon, derived from the Greek verb phainesthai (to show itself), means “that which shows itself in itself, the manifest [das Offenbare].”7 Although typically translated as “word,” “concept,” or “reason,” Heidegger renders logos as “discourse” (Rede) in order to stress its etymological connection to legein (“to bind together,” “to gather up,” and “to let something be seen”). This serves to underscore that the selfmanifestation of phenomena is realized in discourse. The logos of the phainomenon is such that it brings the matter out into the open, lets it be seen, or makes it manifest. “Thus ‘phenomenology’ means apophainesthai ta phainomena – to let that which shows itself be seen from itself as it shows itself by itself.”8 In this definition lies Heidegger’s radicalization of phenomenology that displaces the center of gravity from the intentional life of transcendental subjectivity to the ontological event of an entity’s self-presentation. Despite Husserl’s influence, it is the emphasis in Greek thought on the emergence of the being from 6. Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, Joan Stambaugh (trans.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 79. 7. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Joan Stambaugh (trans.) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), 25. 8. Ibid., 30.

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absence into presence that becomes decisive for Heidegger’s appropriation of phenomenology. Heidegger conceives an entity’s self-presentation as the unfolding of presence from absence. Hence an element of absence, of hiddenness, belongs to the ontological structure of such self-presentation; self-manifestation is inseparable from self-concealment. Heidegger’s recourse to Aristotle and Greek thought thus signals a renewal of “the question of Being” (die Seinsfrage) that profoundly affects his appropriation of phenomenology. This is apparent in Heidegger’s appeal to the Greek concept of truth as alētheia as the movement of an entity into the unconcealedness of its presence. Stressing the alpha-privative in the word’s grammatical structure, he maintains that phenomenological dis-closure or un-concealing requires making something manifest that otherwise tends to hide itself.9 Phenomenology is now wedded to an ontological problematic that demands a hermeneutic reorientation of phenomenology. In fact, he is quite explicit about it: Our investigation will show that the meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation. The logos of the phenomenology of Dasein lies in the character of hermeneuein, through which the authentic meaning of Being, and also the basic structures of Being which Dasein itself possesses are made known to Dasein’s understanding of Being.10 Because the Being of Dasein tends to conceal itself, phenomenological description must be supplanted by interpretation. Heidegger therefore broaches the question of Being through a hermeneutic investigation that brings Dasein to present itself by means of a self-interpretation that wrests Being-there from its own tendency to cover itself up. Yet Heidegger’s interpretation remains genuinely phenomenological because it approaches the phenomenon as it initially presents itself. Accordingly, the “Existential Analytic” begins with an interpretation of Dasein’s “average everydayness” as a manner of Being-there that is immersed in the world, preoccupied with the things of pressing concern, and pervaded by the prevailing outlook sanctioned by the “They.” The “average everydayness” of Dasein only comes to appear inauthentic by comparison to the authentic manner of Being-there that pulls itself out of its absorption in the world by seizing on those possibilities that are genuinely its own. The self-presentation of Dasein therefore requires the hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology.

9. Ibid., 29. 10. Ibid., 33.

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For only a hermeneutical approach can fulfill the phenomenological demand to let beings show themselves from themselves.

Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity Heidegger’s transformation of phenomenology is also inspired by his renewed interest in the hermeneutic tradition11 – especially the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, which marks a crucial, if problematic, advance. By situating the issue of understanding within the sphere of historical life, Dilthey succeeds in opening the scope of hermeneutics; but he also confines it within an epistemological project that seeks the conditions for the possibility of historical knowledge. Hermeneutics provides him with a method for the human sciences that supports a claim to objectivity for understanding comparable to the method of explanation in the natural sciences. Although psychology maintains its foundational function for Dilthey, hermeneutics assumes a more significant role later where he finds that what is understood is not really psychological but rather “forms of spirit” in which historical life achieves expression. For Heidegger, however, the appeal to psychology and the insistence on method misconstrues both hermeneutics and historicity. Yet Heidegger is still drawn toward Dilthey’s late work where the goal that emerges is, he says, “to understand life philosophically and to secure for this understanding a hermeneutical foundation in terms of ‘life itself.’”12 But where understanding belongs to the hermeneutical structure of historical life, it is necessary to transcend the methodological contrast of the natural and human sciences in order to retrieve the unique reality of history. It is necessary, that is, to remove understanding from the limits of its epistemological and psychological conception in order to appropriate it anew as an ontological structure of historical being. This radical reevaluation of hermeneutics emerges from Heidegger’s reflections on the historical experience of “factical life” that he finds exemplified in primordial Christian faith. His early lectures on the phenomenology of religion focus on the letters of Paul expressing the hope of Christ’s return on which the life of Christian faith is based. Attending to the “time of decision” (kairos) with its indefinite expectation of the coming event, Heidegger confirms the futural orientation of genuinely historical life that finds fulfillment in concrete performance. He calls this “factical life,” by which he means to emphasize the concrete, contingent, and individual character of historical existence. Although Paul and other Christian writers (Augustine, Luther) achieve an “ontic” comprehension *11. For a discussion of the hermeneutic tradition, with a focus on Dilthey and Schleiermacher, see the essay by Eric Sean Nelson in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 2. 12. Ibid., 363.

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of the temporality that belongs to such performance, none of them develops an adequate understanding of the ontological structure of factical life.13 Heidegger first provides this in the lectures on Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity (1923), where he conceives hermeneutics as the self-interpretation of factical life. “Hermeneutics” now means making Dasein understandable to itself as a being to which a state of having-been-interpreted belongs; “facticity” designates the “temporal particularity” of “this” Dasein in its Being-there “for a while” which is always situated in the “today.”14 This means that factical life is historical and that Dasein always understands itself historically. The specific task of hermeneutics is thus to interpret the Being of Dasein with respect to its facticity. For Heidegger, then, hermeneutics is not restricted to the domain of the human sciences, but incorporates the whole of human existence as a historical phenomenon.

Heidegger’s ontology of understanding Heidegger’s ontological conception of understanding (Verstehen) is decisive for his hermeneutic phenomenology. According to this conception, understanding is a mode of Dasein’s Being: existentially, understanding belongs to Dasein as potentiality-for-Being (Seinskönnen, literally, to-be-able-to-be); ontologically, it is a primordial mode disclosure. Rather than a theoretical cognition, Heidegger views understanding as a practical capacity, a “being-able to” that assumes familiarity with the world where Dasein’s involvements are oriented by its “concern” (Besorge). He emphasizes that the initial encounter with things is determined by our practical interests in accordance with which they become available to us for this or that purpose. Consequently, the disclosure of things in their initial availability as being “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandensein) occurs through the “circumspective concern” by which we engage the surrounding world. Understanding is then essentially anticipatory; it casts forth the horizon within which beings 13. Otto Pöggeler, Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, Dan Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (trans.) (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1987), 25–31. Pöggeler refers specifically to Heidegger’s Freiburg course Einfuhrung in die Phänomenologie der Religion (1920–21). Also see Thomas Sheehan, “Heidegger’s ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,’ 1920–21,” The Personalist LX/3 (1979): 312–24. 14. In the lecture course cited above, Heidegger exposes the inadequacy of the current selfunderstanding of Dasein by showing the “fore-having” operative in historical consciousness (and in contemporary philosophy) as one that understands itself and human being in an objective manner. But such an approach cannot do justice to the temporality of factical existence and the historicality of its performance. As long as Dasein interprets itself in objective terms, its self-understanding falls short and remains in the orbit of a metaphysical conceptuality that conceives Being as a constant presence. See Martin Heidegger, Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, John van Buren (trans.) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana State University, 1999), 40–52.

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disclose themselves to Dasein’s circumspective concern. Understanding therefore exhibits the ontological structure of “projection” (Entwurf).15 As a potentialto-be, Dasein understands by projecting upon possibility whereby it discloses both the world and itself. More specifically, understanding discloses beings by projecting upon the world and thereby understands itself as Being-in-the-world; at the same time, Dasein discloses itself and understands its own Being as a potentiality-for-Being. Dasein does not project upon free-floating possibilities, but rather upon those possibilities available in the factical situation to which it has been delivered over. This means that facticity modifies Dasein’s understanding. This modification refers back to “disposition” (Befindlichkeit, literally, the situation in which Dasein finds itself) as a mode of disclosedness by virtue of which Dasein finds itself in the midst of the world without whence or whither, a condition that he calls “thrownness” (Geworfenheit).16 Dasein’s understanding therefore has the character of “thrown projection,” which consists in a threefold “fore-structure” (Vor-struktur) that guides any interpretation by delineating in advance the Being of what is understood. “Fore-having” (Vorhabe) lays hold of the being as a whole; “fore-sight” (Vorsicht) projects an initial view of the kind of Being that belongs to that being; and “fore-grasping” (Vorgriff) sets forth the basic concepts by which to grasp it.17 A hammer, for instance, presents itself to our circumspective concern in regard to the work to be done within a context – in this case, a “work-world” – that provides a set of references or assignments that determine its meaning. To “understand” the hammer is to “have” the hammer as a whole “in advance” by locating it within the referential totality of the work-world from which it first appears. It is also to have “seen” how the hammer appears from out of this context in its Being as “ready-to-hand.” Finally, we “grasp” the hammer “in advance” by means of a set of concepts (such as those deployed above) that enables one to conceptually articulate the Being of the hammer precisely as it appears. To understand the meaning of the hammer (or anything else) is thus to project its Being upon the horizon to which it belongs – that is, the horizon set forth by this complex of fore-structures. The “fore-structure” of understanding thus comprises the “hermeneutic situation” within which the interpretation works out what is “presupposed” in this way. By presupposing what we seek, however, we seem to be moving in a circle. Yet Heidegger holds that this movement, which describes the “hermeneutic circle,” is not “vicious”; it is not a logical flaw to be avoided, but rather a constitutive feature of understanding. Understanding requires a “fore-structure” in 15. Heidegger, Being and Time, 136. 16. Ibid., 126–7. 17. Ibid., 140–41.

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order to provide a direction for the work of interpretation. Far from invalidating the inquiry, he argues, we must affirm the hermeneutic circle as determined by the ontological structure of understanding. The task of understanding is not to acquire a “presuppositionless” starting-point, but to ensure that the fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping are appropriate to the entity in question. As he says, “What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way.”18 Only then can one be confident that the interpretation will not be waylaid by inappropriate constructions but instead will be secured “by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves.”19 Heidegger thereby remains true to his phenomenological inspiration inasmuch as he seeks those conditions under which the die Sachen can show themselves from themselves as they are in themselves. However, those conditions are now thoroughly historical and hermeneutical. For Heidegger, interpretation (Auslegung) is integral to understanding; understanding grounds interpretation and interpretation elaborates understanding. By working out what understanding projects, interpretation completes understanding. “In interpretation,” Heidegger says, “understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself.”20 Interpretation thus consists in the articulation of what is pre-understood, so to speak, in the initial projection. It enriches understanding by making the disclosed possibilities more definite. In particular, interpretation reveals the “as-structure” by which something is understood. With the notion of “Auffassung,” Husserl already identified an interpretive element of intentionality whereby the given is apprehended “as” something.21 But Heidegger returns interpretation to the context of circumspective concern from out of which things first become accessible to us. For example, preoccupied by the work to be done, my grasping the hammer implies that I have prereflectively taken it “as” a tool for pounding nails. Such “taking-as” is not an act of predication (by which I assign a property to the “hammer-thing”), but a more primordial articulation of intelligibility that Heidegger calls the “hermeneutic ‘as.’” Assertion modifies the as-structure of understanding from the “hermeneutic-as” of our prethematic engagement with something readyto-hand in circumspective concern into the “apophantic-as” of a predicative beholding of something present-at-hand in pure intuition. For Heidegger, assertion is thus a derivative mode of interpretation.22 The hermeneutic-as is therefore closely related to “discourse” (Rede), another primordial mode of disclosure 18. 19. 20. 21.

Ibid., 143. Ibid. Ibid., 139. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Dermot Moran (ed.), J. N. Findlay (trans.) (London: Routledge, 2001), Investigation V, §14, 567. 22. Heidegger, Being and Time, 147.

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that Heidegger claims underlies both interpretation and assertion. In language the intelligibility of the world disclosed in discourse is put into words. Dasein therefore finds itself in an already interpreted world of meanings. The “hermeneutic circle” that characterizes the relation of understanding and interpretation also governs the hermeneutic inquiry of Being and Time.23 Such thematic questioning requires that understanding project the being interrogated upon the horizon that enables this being to disclose itself in its Being. So the decisive matter is to ensure that the projected horizon has sufficient depth and breadth to let the phenomenon show itself from itself. The interpretive task pursued in the “Existential Analytic” itself proceeds by an anticipatory projection that understands the Being of Dasein as “existence” (Existenz). Much is at stake in this projection since the interpretation of Dasein not only proceeds from the horizon of existence but constantly returns to it. That is why Heidegger speaks of a “relatedness backward and forward” between understanding and interpretation as the inquiry works out the meaning of Dasein’s Being as existence.24 Thus the point is not to step out of the circle but to enter into it more deeply so that the possibility projected by the understanding can be worked out more fully in the interpretation. Just as projection and retrieval are connected in the Being of Dasein, they are likewise connected in the thematic interpretation of Dasein’s Being. The hermeneutic structure of Heidegger’s inquiry in Being and Time therefore reflects the hermeneutic structure of Dasein’s Being.

Heidegger’s interpretation of historicity Heidegger addresses Dasein’s historicity on the basis of a temporal interpretation of Being-there. Such a temporal interpretation, in turn, presupposes that the Being of Dasein exhibits a unified structure that consists in “Care” (Sorge). According to Heidegger’s analysis, the Care-structure of Being-there is disclosed in the existentially privileged disposition of anxiety. Unlike fear, Dasein is never anxious about something in the world; rather, Dasein is anxious about its Being-in-the-world. Dasein is both anxious about its facticity – that is, about its being-thrown into the world – and anxious for its existence – that is, for its own potentiality-for-Being in the world. What anxiety discloses is Dasein’s absorption in the world where it adopts prevailing viewpoints and popular concerns. 23. The circularity is what requires the repetition of the “Existential Analytic” in Division II, where the temporal meaning of the Being of Dasein must be worked out. The integral relation of repetition and circularity in the being of Dasein and in Heidegger’s interpretive strategy in Being and Time is deftly discussed by John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 60–92. 24. Heidegger, Being and Time, 6–7.

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Having thus “fallen” into the world, Dasein conforms its own potential-to-be to the expectations “They” have, thereby shirking responsibility for its own existence. Because anxiety exposes Dasein as “being-fallen” (Gefallensein), it reveals that the elements of Dasein as Being-in-the-world – that is, existence, facticity, and fallenness – constitute a unified phenomenon that justifies the interpretation of Being-there as Care.25 On this basis Heidegger reveals the “authentic” manner of Being-there by reference to which he elicits the temporal meaning of Dasein’s Being. In this way the analysis of Dasein in Division II of Being and Time exhibits the very relation of understanding and interpretation described by the hermeneutic circle. Guided by the fore-structure of understanding that demands we have the whole of Dasein’s Being in view, Heidegger’s interpretation circles back on itself in order to retrieve Dasein’s authentic manner of existence from its “average everydayness.” Only then can the thematic interpretation fully work out the understanding’s initial projection of Dasein’s Being as existence. The retrieval of authentic existence opens with “the call” (das Beruf) of conscience that addresses anxious Dasein, summoning Being-there from out of its fallenness into the world to take over its thrownness by taking up its own potentiality-for-Being. Dasein responds to this call by projecting upon death as its most extreme, unique, and certain possibility. By resolutely projecting upon this possibility (of its own impossibility), Dasein anticipates death. Such “being-toward-death” (Sein-zum-Tod) constitutes Dasein’s authentic comportment toward its own potential-for-Being. By resolutely confronting the possibility of its own absence, Dasein is able to retract its preoccupation with worldly concerns, break the dominance of the “They,” and shatter the hold of the present. Yet being-toward-death requires no renunciation of the world; it rather enables Dasein to authentically engage its situation. In “anticipatory resoluteness,” Dasein thus seizes certain possibilities that are uniquely its own. This provides the existential basis for authentic selfhood. Dasein constitutes its “self ” as a “whole” by steadfastly drawing itself out of its dispersal in the “They” and its absorption in the world. Existentially, the “self-constancy” achieved in anticipatory resoluteness must be understood in terms of Care – and not misconstrued metaphysically as the selfsameness of an enduring substance that is always present-at-hand. Heidegger is now able to confirm the temporal meaning of Care as the ontological structure of Dasein. The Care-structure exhibits the dimensions of an existential (“ecstatic”) temporality: “Being-ahead-of-itself ” Dasein comes toward itself by projecting possibility (future); “Being-already-in-(the-world)” Dasein 25. The threefold structure of care expresses the manner of being of intentionality. Hence “Heidegger notes that Husserl’s description of intentionality is simply the phenomenon of care – ‘only seen from the outside’” (Daniel Dahlstrom, Heidegger’s Concept of Truth [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001], 289).

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comes back to what it already was (having-been); “Being-alongside (entities encountered within the world)” Dasein makes entities manifest in their possibility (present).26 Existential temporality is thus the “meaning” of Dasein’s existence; it is that “upon which” understanding projects the Being of Dasein as Care. This structural feature of Dasein sets the stage for Heidegger’s temporal interpretation of Being-there and its authentic historicity. Heidegger conceives the authentic temporal Being of Dasein as a forward movement that is at the same time a movement back that illumines the present. Drawing on Kierkegaard, Heidegger describes this circular movement of Dasein as one of repetition or retrieval. Here we begin to see the full depth of Heidegger’s hermeneutical conception of Dasein’s Being. As “existence,” Dasein projects its own potential-to-be such that it is always coming toward itself as possibility. As “facticity,” Dasein is disclosed as “thrown” Being-in the-world, which brings Dasein back before the sheer fact of its Being-there. As “thrown projection,” Dasein returns to its present situation, disclosing some possibility into which it has already been inserted. By projecting upon this possibility Dasein recovers its own potential-to-be. Repetition thus delineates the basic dynamic of Dasein’s Being as it moves forth and back from its futurity to its having-been in a movement of self-retrieval in the present. The enactment of this movement in anticipatory resoluteness Heidegger calls “authentic existence.” As such it is the counter-movement to Dasein’s fallenness whereby Being-there retrieves its authentic existence from its fallen and inauthentic way of Being. Anticipatory resoluteness thus discloses the temporality proper to Dasein: projecting upon its ownmost possibility, Dasein comes toward itself; freed to take over its thrownness, Dasein comes back to what it has been all along; drawn out of its fallenness, Dasein illuminates its situation in a “moment of vision” enabling it to seize possibilities hitherto hidden. The historical dimension of existence that Heidegger now adds is of greater significance to his hermeneutic phenomenology than the space devoted to it would indicate. In §74, he interprets the sense of having-been in terms of the Dasein’s historicity. As a factical being that is always already thrown into the world, Dasein carries its past along with it. This aspect of Dasein’s temporal being is now specified as its “heritage” (Erbe). Authentically projecting upon its ownmost possibilities, resolute Dasein is brought back to its present situation in order to disclose those possibilities that have been handed down to it. Dasein’s inheritance may be individual or collective, it may be a matter of “fate” (Schicksal) or “destiny” (Geschick), but in either case it points to the authentic historicity of Being-there. According to Heidegger, only the Dasein that resolutely anticipates death breaks free of its immersion in the actuality of the present 26. Heidegger, Being and Time, 299.

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in order to disclose those possibilities transmitted by tradition and seize them in the present moment. The authentic historicizing of Dasein is thus a matter of repetition – which is now understood as explicitly taking over those possibilities inherited from the tradition. “Repetition” (Wiederholung), however, is not a “bringing back again” (Wiedererbringen) of what once was; it does not mean reinstating some past actuality, but rather bringing forth a new possibility. Such possibility is always historically situated and determinate since it is a matter of disclosing a possibility delivered by the past that opens another future within the present. Thus the published portion of Being and Time effectively culminates with an account of the historicity of Dasein that outlines a theory of historical repetition. Indeed, repetition marks the structure of the “happening of tradition” (Űberlieferungsgeschehen) that provides the point of departure for the further development of philosophical hermeneutics.

ii. claims of philosophical hermeneutics: gadamer Gadamer’s recovery of tradition The human sciences return to the foreground of hermeneutic inquiry in Gadamer’s Truth and Method, where, in the second part, he sets about recovering the hermeneutic dimension of historical understanding and legitimating an experience of truth proper to the finitude of our historical being.27 His critical engagement with hermeneutics and historicism in the nineteenth century has two principal thrusts. First, he challenges the psychological orientation of hermeneutics – central to Schleiermacher’s hermeneutic approach – that claims understanding requires the “reconstruction” of the author’s experience, arguing that understanding involves the “integration” of past and present. Second, he confronts the epistemological orientation of hermeneutics that seeks to ground the human sciences methodologically, arguing that historicity is the condition of understanding and not a restriction on it. Dilthey plays a crucial role in Gadamer’s critical engagement with the tradition of hermeneutics, which culminates in his diagnosis of the ambiguity that persists in Dilthey’s dual commitment to the objectivity of historical knowledge and to the significance of life philosophy. On the one hand, Dilthey asserts that historical consciousness must rise above its immersion in history by assuming a “standpoint of reflection and doubt” that surmounts tradition. On the other hand, Dilthey holds that reflection arises within life such that the objectifications of mind in tradition (qua *27. Gadamer’s philosophy, as well as Ricoeur’s, is also the focus of an essay by Wayne J. Froman in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6.

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morals, law, and religion) and historical consciousness remain immanent to life. Gadamer concludes that Dilthey’s concern for the epistemological foundation of the human sciences precludes him from fully integrating the historicity of human experience.28 By rejecting the primacy of reflection and absorbing historical consciousness into the historical process, Gadamer moves beyond this impasse in Dilthey’s thought toward a philosophical hermeneutics that recognizes the speculative structure of “living being” (Lebewesen) that constantly separates and unites with itself.29 Gadamer’s own inquiry into the ontological conditions of understanding takes up Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity and the primacy it grants life over selfconsciousness. Accordingly, he affirms Heidegger’s insight into understanding as a mode of human being-in-the-world. But while Heidegger’s temporal interpretation of existence highlights the futural dimension of Zukommenheit, Gadamer emphasizes the hermeneutic import of Gewesenheit – the past, literally, “havingbeen” – that marks our facticity. To be thrown into the world is to find ourselves cast into history. As he says, “history does not belong to us; we belong to it.”30 The accent of Gadamerian hermeneutics thus lies on the manner in which understanding belongs to tradition. The ontological priority of our belonging to tradition constitutes the finitude of historical understanding and the limit of self-reflection. He argues that the methodical distance cultivated in the human sciences presupposes the primordial belonging to tradition without which there would be no access to the historical. For Gadamer, tradition is a dynamic reality that consists in the movement between “belonging” (Zugehörigkeit) and “distanciation” (Verfremdung) through which tradition is constantly appropriated anew in an event of transmission.31 He conceives this process of appropriation in Hegelian fashion as involving both integration – that is, the mediation of past 28. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 234. 29. Ibid., 235–45. Here Gadamer appeals to Count Yorck (1835–97), who, he argues, goes beyond Husserl and Dilthey in recognizing “the speculative import of the concept of life” first developed in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as the structural correlation of life and self-consciousness. James Risser does an especially nice job of articulating this significant, but often neglected, dimension of Gadamer’s thought; see The Voice of the Other: A Re-reading of Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 123–9. 30. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 276. 31. For Ricoeur, the relation of belonging and distanciation in Gadamer’s thought yields an “antinomy” between the “alienating distanciation” that makes possible the objectivity in the human sciences and the “primordial relation” of belonging by which we participate in historical reality. His hermeneutic theory seeks to overcome this impasse by developing a concept of the text that reintroduces a positive, productive notion of distanciation into the historicity of human experience, thereby developing a new concept of interpretation that incorporates explanation and understanding. See Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, John B. Thompson (ed. and trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 131–44, 145–64.

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and present, which produces new meanings – and preservation – that is, the historical continuity whereby the past holds in reserve possibilities for recasting the present. The occurrence of such an event Gadamer calls the “happening of tradition” (Überlieferungsgeschehen) in which understanding participates. The prior belonging of understanding implies that the fore-meanings involved in interpretation are drawn from those traditions that situate the interpreter. Confirming the projective character of understanding in Heidegger’s analysis, Gadamer holds that fore-meanings function literally as “pre-judgments” (Vorurteilen) by which the interpreter is able to engage the text.32 Hence it is impossible to disengage our prejudices without annulling the very condition under which understanding is possible. Consequently, he inveighs against the attempt to secure objectivity in the human sciences by the methodical suspension of prejudices. In Gadamer’s estimation, this misguided program is a legacy of the Enlightenment and its “prejudice against prejudice,” which is responsible for the negative connotation of the term as unfounded judgment. By contrast, he stresses the primary and positive role of pre-judgment as a legitimate precedent. Gadamer therefore argues for the “rehabilitation of prejudice,” which would recognize that prejudices form the common bond that links understanding with tradition, a bond that is constantly being developed. Hence he claims that “the prejudices [Vorurteile] of the individual, far more than his judgments [Urteilen], constitute the historical reality of his being.”33 Ultimately, the attempt to remove prejudices in order to neutralize the distortions of tradition succeeds only in denying the historicity of historical being. To this extent Gadamer is prepared to defend the provisional authority of tradition as the accumulation and distillation of what has been found reasonable. Consequently, he rejects the Enlightenment equation of authority and domination. There is, he maintains, an inherent rationality preserved in custom and tradition that remains operative in historical life.

32. Following Heidegger, Gadamer sees interpretation as a matter of working out what is anticipated in the “fore-meanings” projected by understanding, but in view of die Sache. Interpretation therefore executes a movement between the matter at issue that appears in the text and our projected fore-meanings. This back and forth movement is readily recognized as an enactment of the hermeneutic circle. The solution is not to break out of this circle but to follow it through to its pertinent “completion.” Such completion occurs when the anticipations of meaning, revised in the encounter with the text, allow the matter at issue to present itself. Here there is a coming to an agreement in which a common meaning emerges that belongs to neither text nor interpreter alone. As Gadamer puts it: “The meaning of a text goes beyond its author, not only occasionally, but always” (Truth and Method, 296). 33. Ibid., 278.

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Gadamer’s principle of effective-history Gadamer uses the term “effective-history” (Wirkungsgeschichte) to convey this operative principle of philosophical hermeneutics, which marks “the power of history over finite human consciousness.”34 It means that historical being is effective and that its being consists in the history of its effects. Historical understanding, in turn, takes part in the effective-history of the historical being it understands. This comprises the commonality that binds us to tradition even while that commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Taking part in the effective-history of what it understands, understanding participates in an event of transmission by which tradition forms itself anew. So Gadamer’s formulation of the hermeneutic circle acquires its genuine ontological dimension when rendered as the interplay between tradition and understanding. Understanding that comprehends its belonging to tradition and is therefore conscious of its historicity Gadamer calls “effective-historical consciousness” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein). Effective-historical consciousness is aware that the conditions that make it possible also render impossible the complete illumination of those conditions. This marks the finitude of historical understanding that is bound to a concrete situation and circumscribed by a historical horizon. But this horizon appears as such only when the alterity of the text that addresses us from tradition resists the anticipated meaning with which we engage it. The horizon of the text then differentiates itself from our own, creating a “temporal distance” (Zeitenabstand) between the horizons of past and present. But temporal distance is less a gap than a tension between the two that is productive of new meaning. So viewed, historical understanding accomplishes a “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) which enables the text that reaches us from the past to speak to the present. Gadamer nevertheless rejects a Hegelian teleology that anticipates the “end” of history in the overcoming of difference that incorporates all otherness into absolute self-relation. The tension between the horizons of past and present highlights the issue of historical understanding as a problem of application. This is evident in biblical or legal interpretation, where it is a matter of applying the claims of scripture or the prescriptions of law to the demands of the present. But Gadamer believes that this holds universally; because understanding is always bound to a historical situation, interpretation is always a matter of application. Gadamer therefore revisits the traditional division of hermeneutics into understanding, interpretation, and application as separate spheres governed by independent subdisciplines. Instead he considers them to be interrelated moments in a unified process of understanding where interpretation mediates between past and 34. Ibid., 300.

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present precisely by applying the text to the given situation.35 In this respect, the hermeneutic problem of application can be conceived on the model of mediating the universal and the particular. Interpretation involves applying the same text (the universal) to a different situation (the particular) so that we always “understand differently” if we understand at all.36 Gadamer also argues that Aristotle’s concept of phronēsis pertains to the problem of application. As moral knowledge, phronēsis cannot be detached from the person who exercises it or from the situation in which it is deployed. Because it requires a decision that commits one to action, moral knowing is inseparable from one’s own being; as a mode of self-knowledge phronēsis is thus distinct from technē. Because it must address concrete circumstances, moral knowing seeks what is right in this case; since it contains a moment of application phronēsis is also distinct from epistēmē (as abstract knowledge of the Good). Similarly, Verstehen is a mode of self-understanding that alters the way we see both ourselves and our situation. Gadamer thus views understanding as experience (Ehrfahrung), which, in its most genuine sense, involves self-transformation. He draws on the significance of this concept for Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where it means undergoing an experience through which one changes. Like Hegel, Gadamer emphasizes that experience involves negation. In more phenomenological terms, genuine experience occurs not when our expectations are confirmed, but when they are disappointed. In this regard, Gadamer endorses Hegel’s conception of the dialectical character of experience where negation alters both our knowledge and its object such that the new object contains the truth of the old one. In hermeneutic experience as well, not only our understanding of the matter changes, but so too does our self-understanding. In this experience we come up against something “other” that challenges our preconceptions and compels us to reconsider what we have taken (for granted) as true. Hence Gadamer affirms that hermeneutic experience is always related to the other as a “Thou” and never merely as an object.37 This requires an openness to the other that exhibits the priority of the question in all understanding. The model of dialogue prevails where each partner in the conversation is open to the other and to the truth of the matter at issue. However, Gadamer parts ways with Hegel, who anticipates a final dissolution of negativity and difference in complete self-knowledge. By contrast, Gadamer holds fast to the finitude of hermeneutic experience. Against Hegel he asserts that the end (telos) of experience does not lie in the overcoming of experience; rather, he insists that experience finds its proper completion in the openness to new experience. Being experienced does not mean knowing this or 35. Ibid., 307. 36. Ibid., 296. 37. Ibid., 310ff.

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that; it means knowing one’s limits. In other words, it means knowing that one’s being exceeds one’s knowing.

Gadamer’s concept of language Gadamer devotes the third part of Truth and Method to the hermeneutical relation of understanding and language. Following Heidegger, Gadamer eschews any approach that would objectify language. For, “language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs.”38 It is never simply an object because language comprehends everything that can ever be an object. Indeed, language only “is” in speaking where it allows what is said to be understood. Language is not simply one among other things in the world, because it is the condition for our having a world. “Not only is the world world only insofar as it comes into language, but language too has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented in it.”39 Language thus constitutes our belonging to the world; as the very element in which we live, language provides the primordial familiarity that Gadamer calls our “being at home” in the world. Potentially infinite, language constitutes an open horizon of intelligibility within which the meaning of things becomes understandable. Language therefore encompasses everything that can be understood or, in Gadamer’s words, “Being that can be understood is language.”40 The scope of hermeneutic understanding is therefore coextensive with the universality of language. Indeed, their integral relation is such that understanding only achieves its proper completion in language. When this occurs Gadamer speaks of coming to an “agreement” (Verstandigüng) that is linguistically mediated. The dialogical structure of understanding prepares us for this linguistic turn. As in conversation, interpretation seeks the right word, that is, the word that belongs to the thing meant, allowing it to be understood. Where this word is found, a common language is created that enables the sharing of a common meaning. This relation of the word to what it says reveals a deeper, speculative dimension to the being of language. The belonging-together of “word” (Wort) and “thing” (Sache) exhibits a “speculative unity.” Gadamer appeals to the mirror image to clarify this unity because the mirror image is an appearance that has no being of its own and yet lets the thing appear by its means, “like a duplication that is still only the one thing.”41 As an appearance of the original, the image and the imaged seem distinct although they cannot ultimately be distinguished; image and original belong essentially 38. 39. 40. 41.

Ibid., 390. Ibid., 440. Ibid., 470. Ibid., 461.

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together. The same unity is found in the word and its relation to the thing meant. The two appear distinct and yet belong together as presentation and presented. As with image and original, word and thing meant are not differentiated. In this respect, the word is something like an image and must be contrasted to the sign.42 The concept of the sign is defined by its reference to something else. But Gadamer’s point is that the word is not externally related to the thing meant in the manner of a sign. In order to get at this Gadamer draws on the Christian idea of the verbum, the “Word” that becomes flesh in the mysterious unity of the Father and the Son. The event of the Incarnation provides insight into the intimate unity of word and thought in the experience of language. Because the intellectual emanation of the inner word exists in the full perfection of thought it also includes the “the subject matter thought through to the end (forma excogitata).” By making the intended object present, the verbum affirms the unity of word and thing. Hence “the word is a process in which the unity of what is meant is fully expressed.”43 The “processual character” of the word is integral to the self-presentation of the thing; it is an ontological event. “Thus everything that is language has a speculative unity: it contains a distinction, … between its being and its presentations of itself, … that is really no distinction at all.”44 Gadamer explores a further implication to the speculative dimension of the word, namely, its relation to the whole. Indeed, words do not so much reflect beings as they express a relation to the whole of being. Therefore, “all human speaking is finite in such a way that there is laid up within it an infinity of meaning to be explicated and laid out.”45 Hence there is a “living virtuality” of human speech that brings a totality of meaning into play without being able to totally express it. The said implicates the unsaid thereby opening on to an inner multiplication of the word. Here the relation between the unity of the word and its multiplicity – the identity and difference of meaning in language – exhibits the dynamic that constitutes living language itself as an event. In this event there is a “realization” (Vollzug) of meaning that always remains open to other, different realizations. This openness marks at once the finitude of language and its speculative structure. To say what one means is thus “to hold what is said together with an infinity of what is not said in one unified meaning.”46 When what is meant is expressed in this way one speaks in a speculative manner inasmuch as “the possibilities of the word are directed toward the sense intended as

42. “A word is not just a sign. In a sense that is hard to grasp, it is also something like a copy or an image [Abbild]” (ibid., 416). 43. Ibid., 432. 44. Ibid., 470. 45. Ibid., 454. 46. Ibid., 464.

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toward the infinite.”47 This view reflects Gadamer’s conception of language as the “center” (Mitte) through which we are related to the totality of beings and are mediated to ourselves and to the world. “[E]very word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole through which alone it is a word. Every word causes the whole of language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole world-view that underlies it to appear.”48

iii. philosophical hermeneutics in conversation: encounters Various aspects of philosophical hermeneutics are set in relief through the series of debates into which Gadamer enters with contemporary theorists and philosophers.49 The exchange with Italian legal theorist and historian Emilio Betti50 bears on the question of hermeneutics as methodology. Betti’s hermeneutical theory was fully elaborated prior to the publication of Truth and Method, in his Teoria generale della interpretazione (1955), but his basic theory and critique of Gadamer is outlined in “Hermeneutics as the General Methodology of the Geisteswissenschaften” (1962). There he is primarily concerned to counter the “subjectivism” and “relativism” he discerns in the “existential hermeneutics” of Heidegger and Bultmann and its legacy in Gadamer by deploying a hermeneutical methodology that would secure the objectivity of interpretation in the human sciences. For Betti, the creative mind expresses itself through ideal, “meaning-bearing forms” (sinnhaltige Formen) that the interpreter seeks to understand. Following Schleiermacher, he conceives this task as an inversion of the creative process in which the interpreter reconstructs the author’s intention by recreating the meaning of their expression within oneself. Betti’s methodology develops canons of interpretation that specify the conditions under which it is possible to understand the author’s meaning objectively. Specifically, he identifies four “hermeneutical canons,” which are paired off according to whether they relate more to the “object” or “subject” of interpretation. While 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 454. 49. Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, Joel Weinsheimer (trans.) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 124–39. 50. Emilio Betti (August 20, 1890–August 11, 1968; born in Camerino, Italy; died in Camorciano di Camerino) received degrees in law from the University of Parma (1911) and classical literature from the University of Bologna (1913), and also studied at the Universities of Marburg and Freiburg. His influences included Dilthey and Schleiermacher, and he held appointments as Professor of Law at the Universities of Parma (1915–17, 1925–26), Camerino (1917–18), Macerata (1918–22), Messina (1922–25), Florence (1925–27), Milan (1928–47), and Rome (1947–60).

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the canons of “autonomy” and “coherence” specify the independence of the object (the meaning-bearing forms) as an internally coherent and integrated whole of meaning, the canons of “actuality” and “correspondence” ensure that the subject (the interpreter) engages the object by corresponding to the spirit expressed in these forms and by integrating them within the interpreter’s own intellectual horizon. Against Gadamer, he charges that the concept of historical understanding as the mediation of past and present threatens the objectivity of interpretation. By requiring that the meaning of the past be transposed into the present, Gadamer fails to safeguard historical understanding from the subjective interests (i.e. prejudices) of the interpreter. For Betti, this simply confuses the original meaning of a text with its present significance. For the same reason, he criticizes Gadamer’s integration of application with understanding and interpretation. Gadamer replies in “Hermeneutics and Historicism” (1962)51 that he is not proposing a method, but describing what always happens with understanding regardless of method. For Gadamer, Betti’s return to a psychological conception of hermeneutics narrows the hermeneutic phenomenon. As a result, he argues, Betti is entangled in the very subjectivism that philosophical hermeneutics seeks to overcome. “Understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as a participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated.”52 In Gadamer’s view, Betti fails to sufficiently acknowledge the integration of understanding into the historical process itself. Gadamer’s debate with Jürgen Habermas concerns the relation of hermeneutics to social praxis.53 Habermas initiates this debate with a review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, which first appeared in On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1967), where he takes issue with the universality that Gadamer claims for hermeneutic reflection. Concerned to ground the social sciences in a theory of language, he concedes that Gadamer clarifies how understanding occurs as the mediation between languages. However, Habermas also asserts that Gadamer “hypostasizes language” as “the subject of forms of life and tradition,” thereby falling prey to “the idealist presupposition that linguistically articulated consciousness determines the material practice of life.”54 In his view, Gadamer’s exclusive emphasis on language and tradition as the medium of 51. Reprinted in Gadamer, Truth and Method, 507–37; originally published as “Hermeneutik und Historismus,” Philosophische Rundschau 9 (1962), 241–76. 52. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 291. *53. Habermas’s critique of Gadamer is also discussed in the essay on Habermas by Christopher F. Zurn in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6. 54. Jürgen Habermas, “A Review of Truth and Method,” Fred Dallmayr and Thomas McCarthy (trans.), in Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy, Brice R. Wachterhauser (ed.) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986), 273.

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social interaction neglects the material conditions of social action in labor and domination. It also fails to appreciate the possibility that the social consensus attained in language could be the result of coercion. Where ideology prevails as “systematically distorted communication,” the emancipatory interest of critical reflection is necessary to expose it; hermeneutics must pass into the critique of ideology. For Habermas, psychoanalysis provides an explanatory model for the critical unmasking of such “false consciousness.” Gadamer responds, in “On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection” (1967),55 by denying the limits within which Habermas would circumscribe hermeneutic reflection. He argues that the distinction that sets language apart from labor and domination (as extralinguistic conditions of social action) is artificial, claiming it absurd to regard them as lying outside our linguistically mediated understanding of the world. He further argues that the claim to critically unmask systematically distorted forms of communication seriously overestimates the power of reflection. Moreover, he finds the appeal to psychoanalysis problematic in that the unique relation between patient and analyst cannot simply be extrapolated to society. Gadamer holds that hermeneutic reflection not only suffices for critically confronting prejudice, but that it alone is capable of doing so while remaining mindful of its bond to tradition. He further asserts that critical reflection becomes dogmatic when it pretends to rise above its historical conditions to systematically examine all prejudices. He again affirms that prejudices are not ipso facto illegitimate and that tradition is not something whose authority can or even need be dissolved by reflection. For the transmission of tradition constantly happens behind the back of critical reflection.56 The debate with Paul Ricoeur addresses the question of methodology and the aims of interpretation. This least publicized of Gadamer’s debates occurred at a meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in 1976.57 At that time Ricoeur characterizes the hermeneutic situation as a “conflict of 55. Reprinted in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, David E. Linge (ed.) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 18–43. 56. Habermas later modifies his position in a theory of communicative action that seems closer to Gadamer. But this theory develops a “formal pragmatics” that posits an ideal speech situation in which participants are able to examine disputed “validity” claims under conditions free of all constraints due to force or coercion. For Gadamer, the notion of a “rational consensus” that expresses “unconstrained communication” distorts hermeneutic reflection and remains “shockingly unreal.” See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Replik zu Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik,” in Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik, Karl-Otto Apel (ed.) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 314. 57. The record of this exchange is found in a volume in the series publishing the principal papers from these meetings. See Paul Ricoeur, “The Conflict of Interpretations,” in Phenomenology: Dialogues and Bridges, Ronald Bruzina and Bruce Wilshire (eds) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982).

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interpretations” between what he calls “the hermeneutics of suspicion” and “the hermeneutics of reenactment.” Standing before the “dramatic condition” of this intractable divide within modern culture, Ricoeur believes there is an important place for a hermeneutic approach that would begin by patiently working through the epistemological issues presented by the human sciences.58 So while he acknowledges that dialogue offers a significant gesture of mediation, Ricoeur resists the presumptive integration he detects in Gadamer’s hermeneutic ontology of understanding. Instead, Ricoeur turns his attention to the mediation of those conflicts within interpretation that arise between the respective roles of explanation and understanding in the human sciences. Hence he asks: “what can we do with a philosophy of dialogue that is not able to be reconnected with the discipline of the human sciences?”59 Against Gadamer, Ricoeur claims that hermeneutics must not take the ontology of understanding as its point of departure. He describes this as the “short route” because it breaks with any discussion of method and proceeds directly to the ontological problematic in order to recover the phenomenon of understanding. The longer route that Ricoeur takes aims to move to the level of ontology but only by first going through successive investigations into the science of linguistics and other specific human sciences. In taking this longer route, Ricoeur hopes to reconnect interpretation to a moment of explanation. In emphasizing the positive accomplishment of explanation as the methodic moment in interpretation, Ricoeur seeks to rescue method from its neglect by Gadamer and thereby resist the temptation to separate it from truth. In the actual exchange with Ricoeur, Gadamer began his remarks by noting that the version of Heideggerian hermeneutics that he follows differs from Nietzsche’s hermeneutics of suspicion. His intent was not only to open up the issue of the conflict of interpretations as he saw this being developed by Ricoeur, but also to set off his position from that of Ricoeur, who had appealed in his book on Freud to the necessity of a hermeneutics of suspicion. Like Ricoeur, Gadamer too wants to escape the illusions of objective self-consciousness, but in his view this escape can be accomplished only in the hermeneutic of communication as the exchange of words in speech (Vollzug des Sprechens) and not by the hermeneutics of suspicion. Gadamer’s intent in raising anew the question of hermeneutics is precisely “to go behind the conflict of interpretations that may preoccupy our scientific and methodological 58. In response to a question from the audience, Ricoeur said: “What I tried to do was to focus on certain epistemological situations in which we may proceed accurately in this task of mediation, instead of starting from, let us say, the cultural situation of our time, this desperate situation in which there is no bridge to build between the ongoing process of what Nietzsche called the devaluation of the highest values, and our desperate attempt to make sense of our whole heritage” (“The Conflict of Interpretations,” 314). 59. Ibid., 317.

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interests.”60 In the end, he holds, the conflict of interpretations can be resolved by philosophical hermeneutics inasmuch as “every radical form of critique should be and needs to be reintegrated into the basic process of social life” for which dialogue constitutes the model.61 In their 1981 encounter at the Goethe Institute in Paris, Gadamer and Jacques Derrida62 address the question of text interpretation and the supposed radicality of philosophical hermeneutics.63 The title of the conference, “Text and Interpretation,” identified the matrix wherein hermeneutics and deconstruction could be thought together. But the papers presented, along with the subsequent exchange of questions and responses, made it clear that joining hermeneutics and deconstruction would be problematic. The importance of Nietzsche and the “destruction” (Destruktion) of the history of metaphysics in these essays clearly indicates that the legacy of Heidegger’s thought is at stake. On the one hand, by characterizing his strategy of reading philosophical texts as “deconstruction,” Derrida intends his sustained interrogation of metaphysical concepts to mark a critical engagement with Heideggerian “destruction.” Gadamer, on the other hand, claims to resume the task of “destruction” by returning the fixed conceptuality of metaphysics to the living language from which it arises. From Derrida’s perspective, the hermeneutic commitment to dialogue and its model of understanding as coming to agreement threatens to suppress difference. Behind the “good will” required of the partners in dialogue, Derrida detects an avatar of the “(good) will to power” that remains complicit with the metaphysical drive to domination. At issue is whether the agreement at which hermeneutic understanding aims does not ultimately appropriate the other. Of course, Gadamer had already been at pains to distinguish hermeneutics from any such Hegelian gesture, insisting on the alterity of the text that disrupts our preconceptions. In Gadamer’s view, the task of understanding is not so much a 60. Ibid., 302. 61. Ibid., 304. *62. For a discussion of Derrida, see the essay by Samir Haddad in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6. 63. The essays from this colloquium, including Gadamer’s essay by the same title, were published in Philippe Forget (ed.), Text und Interpretation (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984). Gadamer subsequently published three more essays dealing with the relation of hermeneutics to deconstruction: “Destruktion und Dekonstruktion” (1986), reprinted in his collected works, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2: Hermeneutik II (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1993), 361–72; “Frühromantik, Hermeneutik, Dekonstruktivismus” (1987), reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10: Hermeneutik in Rückblick (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1995), 125–37; and “Hermeneutik auf der Spur” (1994), reprinted in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, 148–74. The original exchange plus several of Gadamer’s additional essays on the topic were published along with other scholars’ contributions in English translation as Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Exchange, Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (eds) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989).

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matter of deciphering meaning as it is an accomplishing of meaning in which “the voice of the other” is allowed to address us.64 Moreover, the “happening of truth” that takes place in understanding is not something that we possess; it is rather something that possesses us. Yet the very mention of “truth” invokes a relation of meaning and presence that deconstruction aims to put into question. Where hermeneutic interpretation seeks the meaning shared in common with the text, deconstructive reading works to displace the meaning that initially organizes the text. Looming behind Derrida’s remarks about hermeneutics is the charge of “logocentrism,” a charge that Gadamer confronts implicitly in “Text and Interpretation” and explicitly in “Hermeneutics and Logocentrism.” For Gadamer, there is no “language of metaphysics.” His “step back” into dialogue undermines the priority of assertion, enabling a retrieval of dialectic from the metaphysics of German idealism. Ultimately this retrieval sends Gadamer back behind Hegel to the Socratic-dialogical element of Platonic dialectic in order to reclaim its presupposition – namely, the anamnēsis awakened in logoi. What is recollected in dialogue, though, is not the eidē but rather “‘the spirit that would like to unite us’ – we who are a conversation.”65

iv. conclusion The hermeneutic transformation of phenomenology has been profound. Heidegger’s acknowledgement of Husserl’s insight into philosophy as a way of “seeing” is indicative of the phenomenological impulse behind hermeneutics. But even as he heeds Husserl’s recourse to “the things themselves,” Heidegger construes it as the demand that we attend to beings and the manner of their selfdisclosure. This emphasis on the event of a being’s self-presentation signals the ontological turn that characterizes Heidegger’s critical appropriation of phenomenology. But the element of absence that belongs to the ontological structure of such self-presentation requires a hermeneutic turn as well. Especially where the self-showing of Dasein as existence is at issue, Heidegger finds that the selfconcealing tendency of Being-there requires a hermeneutic strategy of interpretation rather than a phenomenological strategy of reduction. Further, with the introduction of Dasein, Heidegger deliberately disrupts Husserl’s transcendental program by returning the immanent subjectivity of consciousness and its intentional acts to the original openness of Dasein as Being-in-the-world. On this basis, Heidegger articulates his ontological conception of understanding 64. Risser develops this aspect of Gadamer’s thought into an entire re-reading of his philosophical hermeneutics. See Risser, The Voice of the Other. 65. Michelfelder and Palmer (eds), Dialogue and Deconstruction, 110.

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as a mode of disclosure that constitutes Dasein’s distinctive manner of Being. He develops the hermeneutic aspect of this conception through his insight into the circular relation of understanding and interpretation. Anticipatory in character, understanding projects the horizon, which delineates in advance the Being of what is to be understood. Rooted in understanding, interpretation elaborates what is therefore “pre-”understood. Thus the “hermeneutic circle” both defines hermeneutic understanding and describes the hermeneutic situation. It is because existence is thoroughly historical and hermeneutical that Dasein always finds itself to be historically situated within an already interpreted world. Gadamer resumes this ontological and hermeneutical reorientation of phenomenology by drawing out further implications of the hermeneutic circle. Following Heidegger, he underscores the historicity of understanding, construing its anticipatory fore-structure as a prejudgment drawn from tradition. By so doing he emphasizes that the condition for understanding consists in its prior relation to history. Gadamer’s insight into the ontological priority of our belonging to tradition lies at the heart of his philosophical hermeneutics. In fact, “effective-historical consciousness” is just the recognition of being historically situated by our belonging to tradition. He therefore refuses to conceive understanding and interpretation in epistemological terms as providing a methodologically secured objectivity for historical knowledge. Instead, he conceives them in ontological terms as constituting our participation in the happening of tradition as an event of transmission. Moreover, Gadamer conceives language as the very medium of this transmission. He thus pursues further Heidegger’s hermeneutic insight into the historicity of understanding and its essential relation to language. As the condition for having a world, it is through language that Being can be understood. Elucidating its speculative dimension, Gadamer conceives the word as it breaks forth from the center of language to be uniquely capable of saying the whole in an appropriately finite way. Perhaps more than other strands of continental philosophy, hermeneutics has sought resolutely to situate thought within the historical conditions of possibility that both enable and surpass it. In this respect, it has pursued “the hermeneutics of facticity” that originally motivated Heidegger’s departure from phenomenology. Indeed, the rigor with which it adheres to this original motivation may well serve as the most appropriate standard by which to measure its success. To the extent that it succeeds according to this measure, hermeneutics can still contribute to the development of a genuinely finite thinking in continental philosophy.

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7 the later heidegger Dennis J. Schmidt

Heidegger’s long career – his significant works range from 1919 to 1973 – coupled with the rapid pace and revolutions of history during his lifetime, meant that his work underwent some very real transformations.1 Heidegger was an uncommonly productive writer; his collected works is planned for over a hundred volumes. He was also unusually self-critical in his work so that there never emerges something like a “system” or even clear “fundamentals” that might characterize his work. His work needs to be read as very much a work in progress, guided by rather steady goals and concerns, but always evolving. The motto that Heidegger chose for his collected works – “Wege, nicht Werke” (paths, not works) – is one of the ways that Heidegger himself would call attention to this evolutionary quality of his work. One important consequence of this constantly evolving quality of Heidegger’s work is that even real transformations in his thought need to be understood in relation to earlier stages of his thinking. That is why this evolution of his thought is crucial and needs to be addressed in any effort to understand his philosophic contributions. The chronology of these developments in his thought is in dispute among scholars. While there is clear agreement that we find an important “turn” in Heidegger’s thought during the 1930s (Heidegger himself will use the word “turn” when speaking of this period), there remains much dispute about whether 1. Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889–May 26, 1976; born in Messkirch, Germany; died in Freiburg) was educated at the Gymnasium, Konstanz (1903–1906), Gymnasium and archiepiscopal convent, Freiburg im Breisgau (1906–1909), and Freiburg University (1909–15). His influences included Aristotle, Augustine, Dilthey, Hegel, Husserl, Kant, Kierkegaard, Lask, Luther, Nietzsche, and Rickert, and he held appointments at the University of Freiburg (1915– 23, 1928–45) and the University of Marburg (1923–28).

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later transformations in his thought should be regarded as indicating perhaps a “third” stage of his thought.2 In the end, however one parses the various stages of Heidegger’s thought, what needs to be stressed is the unity of Heidegger’s thought. Dynamic and self-critical, full of turns and at times even repudiating his own earlier vocabulary, Heidegger’s works ultimately need to be read as stages on a path that does not always move in a straight line. What we commonly refer to as the “late Heidegger” needs to be understood as the culmination of Heidegger’s lifelong project of thinking and so has a special importance. Dating the beginning of the “late” Heidegger is difficult. There does seem to be agreement that we find an important “turn” in Heidegger’s thought during the 1930s. This “turn” seem to begin with the essay on the artwork (“Origin of the Work of Art”; 1935) and reaches its summit in Heidegger’s exceedingly difficult but decisive work, Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38), which ushers in themes and approaches that will stay with Heidegger until the end of his life.3 However, there is good reason to date the beginning of his later work from the years after the Second World War. That was a time of great crisis for Heidegger – albeit more personal, indeed almost private, than political4 – and it too needs to be seen as providing the impulse for a significant change in Heidegger’s thought. One sees this “new” phase in his thought beginning with “Letter on Humanism” (1946) and with “The Saying of Anaximander” (1949). There will be no single major work anchoring Heidegger’s thought after the Second World War; rather, one finds shorter essays and addresses. At the end 2. One of the first and most important early commentators on Heidegger’s work, William Richardson, makes a distinction between Heidegger I and Heidegger II. In response to this distinction, Heidegger writes to Richardson the following: “The distinction you make between Heidegger I and II is justified only on the condition that this is kept constantly in mind: only by way of what Heidegger I has thought does one gain access to what is to-be-thought by Heidegger II. But [the thought of] Heidegger I becomes possible only if it is contained in Heidegger II” (William Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963], xxii). [*] Heidegger’s earlier work, up to and including Being and Time, is the subject of Miguel de Beistegui’s essay in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3. 3. One should not underestimate the impact of Heidegger’s disastrous foray into political life on his thought and the questions that guide him. Heidegger’s Rectorship was what he called “the greatest stupidity of my life” (private comment reported to me by Gadamer), and while it can be interpreted with reference to Heidegger’s personal character, it can also – indeed should – be interpreted as a philosophical problem and as a powerful impulse driving the turns in his thought during these years. Among the most interesting of the many approaches to the questions posed by Heidegger’s infamous Rectoral Address is Derrida’s On Spirit. 4. The years after the war involved the use of his house by the French occupying forces, the denazification process, and his removal from his university teaching post, and then, in 1949, Heidegger had what was described as a “nervous breakdown.” On the events of Heidegger’s life, see Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Ewald Osers (trans.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

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of his life Heidegger helped prepare the plan for the release of his collected works. As those works are released, further texts, notebooks, and letters give new insights into the character of his thought throughout his life. One suspects that questions about the evolution of Heidegger’s thought will not be answered until those works are finally fully available. Nevertheless, three themes tend to define the “late Heidegger”: the increasing technologization of the world, the achievements of the work of art, and the enigmatic character of language. In order to treat these themes Heidegger seldom, if ever, turns to contemporary authors. When he does refer to other texts or authors he does so by almost exclusively returning to ancient Greek texts – especially Presocratic – and to select German poetic texts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – especially Hölderlin, Trakl, and George. Whatever theme is addressed, these later texts beginning just after the war and continuing until Heidegger’s death in 1976 can seem to be rather hermetic and are invariably deceptively dense as well as intensely focused. The intention of the remarks that follow is to trace these three central themes as a way of presenting some of Heidegger’s most innovative and important later work.

i. technology: machenschaft and gestell In 1949, Heidegger presented a series of four lectures collectively entitled “Einblick in das was ist” (“Insight into That Which Is”). In 1954, the first two of those lectures, “The Question Concerning Technology” and “The Thing”, would be expanded and then published in the volume Vorträge und Aufsätze (Lectures and addresses). Those essays mark the beginning of Heidegger’s later investigations into the character of a world dominated and framed by technological and scientific reasoning. To be sure, these works are not the beginning of Heidegger’s concern with technology. The recent release of his works from the 1930s – above all Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) and On Ernst Jünger – provides evidence that his involvement with the question of technology stems from this earlier period.5 Already in those early texts one sees some of the later traits of Heidegger’s analysis and critique of technological reason; above all one sees the link between technology and the history of metaphysics. Technology, in all of the different determinations Heidegger gives it, is inevitably understood 5. Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis (Contributions to Philosophy [From Enowning]) was composed during the years 1936–38, but was not published until 1989. Zu Ernst Jünger was composed during three periods – 1934, 1940, and 1954 – but was not published until 2004. One even sees the question of technology emerging in the 1935 lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics (first published in 1953), which concludes with remarks about National Socialism and the encounter of globally defined technology.

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as the culmination of the history of metaphysics and of the assumptions that underpin that history. Technology is, in the final analysis, the concretization of metaphysics. Consequently, even in the earlier essays, technology is regarded in terms that also characterize metaphysics; namely, the increasing subjectivization, rationalization, calculability, explicability, consolidation, and uniformity of the world. The present historical juncture marks the summit of this increase, the point of its most extreme development, and that means that the present moment is a time of crisis and that this crisis needs to be thought with reference to the technologization of the world. The first word that Heidegger uses to get at the essential character of the technological world is Machenschaft (machination). He introduces this notion in Contributions to Philosophy, saying: What does machination [Machenschaft] mean? That which is set free into its own chains. Which chains? The schema of thoroughly calculable explainability through which everything draws closer to everything else and becomes thoroughly alien to itself, indeed becomes completely other than what is simply alien. The relationship of unrelationality.6 Later he will describe the epoch of Machenschaft as “the most extreme intensification of the power of calculability. What is at work here is the most indifferent and blind denial of the incalculable.”7 In Geschichte des Seyns (The history of beyng), a text composed in 1938–40, Heidegger will link Machenschaft and Macht (power) saying that “the essencing of power is the most extreme form of metaphysics”8 and then that “in power, spirit unfolds itself in the most extreme and unconditional manner, and it comes to the point of unrestricted ‘Unwesen’ [non-sense, de-essence].”9 Power is thus the culmination and consummation of the illusions that hold the operations of Machenschaft in place. One quickly realizes that Heidegger’s characterization of the technologically defined world is all-embracing and crushing. It is a relation to being that disturbs the very possibility of any such relation at all.

6. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (trans.) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 92, translation modified. 7. Ibid., 314. 8. Martin Heidegger, Geschichte des Seyns, in collected works, Gesamtausgabe 69 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1998), 69, my translation. During this period, Heidegger writes the word “Sein“ (“Being”) with a “y” in order to distinguish it from the term as it appears in the history of metaphysics. 9. Ibid., 78, my translation.

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Shortly after Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger will drop the word “Machenschaft.” However, the essential features that this word designates will remain much the same when Heidegger comes to the question of technology in later years. Above all, Heidegger will continue to argue that the question of technology is not defined by machines or tools or inventions. It is rather a relation of being itself. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger will open by reinforcing this claim: The essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely represent and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.10 Two points should be noted about this remark: first, that Heidegger insists that the essence of technology is nothing technological, that is, its essence is not something that can be thought from out of technology; and second, that representational thinking, conceptual thought – in other words, philosophy as it has long been defined – will not be able to grasp the essence of technology. In other words, to confront and think technology as the dominant form of the appearance of being in our times, a new way of thinking is needed, one not submitted to the “logic” of technological reason. Heidegger elaborates on this claim by outlining the rather standard and widely accepted view that technology is a means to an end and that it is something defined and controlled by human beings. In short, he discusses the viewpoint that holds technology to be a tool at our disposal.11 In order to deepen our understanding of what really is said in such a viewpoint, Heidegger unpacks the conception of causality at the basis of such a view, ultimately shifting the central point from how technology is a tool to how it needs to be understood as a form of production, of bringing into being (Hervorbringen). After having made the case for thinking technology as a form of “Her-vor-bringen,” a “bringing-into-being,” 10. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell (ed.) (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 311, emphasis added; hereafter cited as QT followed by the page number. 11. Although Heidegger does not point to his earlier work, Being and Time, here one would do well to return to the discussion of the tool in that book. See for instance section 15 and following.

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Heidegger then cites Plato’s Symposium (205b): “hē gar toi ek tou mē onton eis to on ionti hotōioun aitia pasa esti poiēsis.” Heidegger interprets this sentence by saying that “Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiēsis, is bringing-forth [Hervor-bringen]” (QT 317). Then he comments: It is of utmost importance that we think bringing-forth in its full scope and at the same time in the sense in which the Greeks thought it. Not only handicraft manufacture, not only artistic and poetical bringing into appearance, and concrete imagery, is a bringing-forth, poiēsis. Physis is indeed poiēsis in the highest sense. For what presences by means of physis has the irruption belonging to bringingforth, e.g., the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself (en heautōi). In contrast, what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g., the silver chalice, has the irruption belonging to bringing-forth, not in itself, but in another (en allōi), in the craftsman or artist. (Ibid.)12 The question of technology thus becomes a question of the becoming of being itself. Here Heidegger makes the distinction between beings that we summon into being, that is things that we produce, and those that come into being without our doing, namely, what is unbidden. Both, however, are modes of the disclosure of what is; both, in other words, are forms of alētheia, of revealing, of truth. It is from this point of view, not from the view that technology is a matter of the tool, that Heidegger will undertake his further inquiry into the essence of technology. This is the point at which Heidegger will set apart the real hallmarks of modern technology. He begins by asking: What is modern technology? It too is a revealing. Only when we allow our attention to rest on this fundamental characteristic does that which is new in modern technology show itself to us. And yet, the revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiēsis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern]. (QT 320)

12. It is helpful to read Heidegger’s discussion in these pages against the background provided by Aristotle’s Physics, Book II. One might also turn to Heidegger’s 1939 analysis of Aristotle on this point in “On the Essence and Concept of physis in Aristotle’s Physics B,” in Pathmarks, William McNeill (ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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Such a challenging, such a demand, that “orders” and “stockpiles” what is revealed would seem to be something at the disposal of human beings, of the will. Heidegger argues that such is not the case and furthermore that this challenging “captures” human beings and claims the possibilities open to human being: “The challenging gathers man into ordering” (QT 324). In other words, human beings are necessarily caught up in the framework of such disclosure and become another element in the realm of what is calculable. The human being comes to be regarded as a statistic and even as “producible” or “reproducible.”13 In order to name the essential character of this situation, Heidegger does not return to his earlier notion of Machenschaft, but introduces a new word, “Gestell” (usually rendered in English with the neologism “enframing”). Even though the word Heidegger now enlists to characterize the essence of technology is different from Machenschaft, which was the word he used in the 1930s, the meaning of those words remains very much the same: calculability, speed, reproducibility, manipulability, reliability, and utility are some of the key features of how Heidegger unfolds the notions of both Machenschaft and Gestell. But with the word Gestell Heidegger does want to emphasize something new, namely, the way in which something is posited and assembled (the prefix “Ge-” refers to a linking action, while the verb “stellen” that is the other part of the word “Ge-stell” means “to posit”). The Gestell is a composed realm, a region in which nothing remains open for what does not conform to what is already composed and set up as real.14 It is this foreclosure of the region of appearances that constitutes the aspect of the Gestell that Heidegger identifies as the great danger of the technological age. While he does not deny that the risk to the environment is especially great in the age of technology, his claim is that the deeper and more devastating danger is to the realm of appearance as such: that the only appearances possible will be those determined in advance as compatible with the demands of the world composed by the Gestell, the world that can be calculated, measured, controlled, ordered, and regulated. To close this realm would be to immobilize the conditions of appearance, it would, in some sense, be to freeze history: [T]he essence of modern technology starts human being upon the way of that revealing through which the real everywhere more or less distinctly, becomes a stockpile. “To start upon a way” means “to send” in our ordinary language. We shall call that sending-thatgathers which first starts human being upon a way of revealing 13. One thinks here of new developments that lead some to speak of a time in which human beings could be cloned or genetic manipulation could enable parents to select, among other attributes, the gender of their child. 14. One thinks here of Max Planck’s celebrated remark that “the sole facts are what can be measured.” From such a point of view, what is not able to be measured does not qualify as real.

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destining [Geschick]. It is from out of this destining that the essence of all history is determined. (QT 329) What is at stake in the age of technology, thought as the Gestell, is the possibility of a future. That is why Heidegger says “the destining of revealing is in itself not just any danger, but danger as such” (QT 331). The danger is that the Gestell will “conceal that revealing which, in the sense of poiēsis, lets what presences come forth into appearance” (QT 333). More precisely, “what is dangerous is not technology. There is demonry of technology, but rather there is the mystery of its essence. The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger” (ibid.). Heidegger’s sense is that the risk of our times, the risk that emerges out of the essence of technology, is a profound one. But he also argues that confronting this risk, entering into what it exposes, is the path that “saves” us from that risk. Citing Hölderlin, Heidegger remarks that “But where danger is, grows / The saving power too” (ibid.). What Heidegger means in this case is that it is precisely by rethinking the natures of disclosure and of production, and by opening the space of appearance such that possibilities become possible again, that there can be a hope for a future: “it is precisely in this extreme danger that the innermost indestructible belongingness of human being within granting may come to light” (QT 337). That is why he suggests that the essence of technology is “ambiguous”: properly thought, it can refer us to (even if only as a danger) the riddle of all disclosure and coming into appearance, that is, of truth. Heidegger amplifies this possibility by noting that technology emerges out of what the Greeks analyzed under the notion of technē, namely, that mode of bringing into being that has to do with human handiwork. He notes as well that technē was also the name for the production of the work of art in which our productions were a bringing into “radiance.” Art, which Heidegger at this time defines as the poetical, opens the possibilities of bringing into appearance, of production, a manner that does not challenge and demand, does not frame the possibilities of appearance, but rather lets things be: “the poetical brings the true into the splendor of what Plato in the Phaedrus calls to ekphanestaton, that which shines forth most purely. The poetical thoroughly pervades every art, every revealing of coming to presence into the beautiful.”15 Heidegger concludes this analysis of technology with a gesture toward the importance of the work of art and of reflection on such works. In one of the 15. Also, “Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art” (QT 340).

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companion pieces to “The Question Concerning Technology,” namely, “The Thing,” Heidegger will pursue yet another path to a more open future. There he will ask, as he had done in earlier years,16 what makes a thing what it is. This time, he will do so as part of an effort to recover the sense of a thing from its character in the Gestell as a reproducible object designed for consumption and as identical with other such objects. In pursuing this question of the thing, Heidegger will propose a notion that seems to be something of a counterpart to the notion of Gestell, namely, the notion of the Geviert (fourfold). While the notion of the Gestell is Heidegger’s way of characterizing the present age as a time of the constriction of the possibilities of life, the notion of the Geviert names the more original and free relation to the possibilities of our being in the world. The Geviert is among Heidegger’s most enigmatic notions. While it never receives any clear or determinate formulation, he does describe it always as a play; more precisely, as an interplay, of the relations among the four basic dimensions of existence: the earth, the world, the mortals, and the divine. These four dimensions are difficult to understand, especially because Heidegger insists that, in the end, they cannot be understood in isolation, but that each can only be understood out of the interplay of their mutual relation. The Geviert therefore does not designate any rigid measure indicating how we should regard or order life. Quite the contrary, it names what comes into play when the possibilities of life are set free, it names an “event.” Early in his career, Heidegger spoke of the relation of Dasein and world; some years later he spoke of the need for human beings to find our place in the relation of earth and world, that is, in a place we cannot define or control. This same concern for understanding what Heidegger once characterized as the relation of Dasein to being comes to guide the notion of the fourfold relation of earth, world, mortals, and divine: it is a concern with finding the place of life of mortal beings in the world. But here, in the notion of the fourfold, we see how the human being, located in the dimension of the mortal, does not occupy the center and so does not define or control the world in which it finds itself. Therefore, in the age of the Gestell (with the framing and ordering of life that defines this age), the Geviert needs to be understood as a critical idea, as the reminder of what comes into play when the range of possibilities open to us are freed up. Although the fourfold is a complex and difficult notion, it remains, along with reflection upon art, among the ways in which Heidegger attempts to think through the dominant and most pressing question of our age, namely, the question concerning technology. It stands as well as a reminder of just what is lost in the age of technological reason. 16. See Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, B. Barton and Vera Deutsch (trans.) (Chicago, IL: Regnery, 1967), which, although first published only in 1962, is the text of a lecture course given in 1935/36.

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ii. “the origin of the work of art” The critique of metaphysics as a form of ossified thinking, and the project of overcoming it had been well established by Heidegger in his earlier works;17 however, the notion that art opens an alternative to metaphysical forms of thinking, in other words, that art bears an original relation to truth, emerges as first fully developed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935). Part of the intention of that essay is to destroy the traditional philosophical categories for speaking of artworks. One sees this intention operating in the first sections of the text, where Heidegger quickly dispenses with longstanding notions such as substance and accident, sensation and formed matter. One also notices that the idea of beauty is mentioned only once and even then only as “one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment.”18 There is also an attempt to forge a new vocabulary for speaking of artworks: notions such as work, world and earth, struggle, clearing, rift, and endowing all emerge here as efforts to resituate and rethink the language that speaks of art. Heidegger also makes clear that the goal of this essay has nothing to do with what is called “aesthetics” or “art theory,” which he regards only as a way in which the metaphysical tradition has marginalized the accomplishments of the work of art. Rather, the goal of the essay is to rethink the artwork from its incipient moment, its “origin,” and to do so with an eye to asking how such a new starting-point for thinking opens thinking to possibilities closed off in metaphysics.19 In short, the ambition of “The Origin of the Work of Art” is enormous and that, in part, accounts for the enduring importance of this essay in Heidegger’s work. The range of themes that emerge as a result of the reflections on art is wide – truth, the nature of the thing, history, the idea of a people, the character of the polis are only some of the themes addressed – so wide that this text sometimes seems to almost be a manifesto for the task of thinking. But at the center of all of these themes is the 17. One sees this, for example, in Being and Time, What is Metaphysics? (in Basic Writings), and On the Essence of Ground (in Pathmarks), as well as in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. 18. Martin Heidegger, “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, 181; hereafter cited as OWA followed by the page number. 19. In other texts, Heidegger will even draw a tight link between the history of metaphysics and the history of art. So, for instance, one reads the following: “To this transformation of the essence of metaphysics there also corresponds a transformation of art in terms of its essence as symbolic image. That is why, for example, a Greek vase painting, wall paintings from Pompeii, Reichenauer frescoes from the Ottonian era, the paintings by Giotto, a painting by Dürer, and a picture by C. D. Friedrich, are not only different according to their style, for the style is itself of a different metaphysical essence” (Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” William McNeill and Julia Davis [trans.] [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996], 24–5). In “The Origin of the Work of Art” one finds a similar remark: “the transformations in the essence of truth correspond to the essential history of Western art” (OWA 206).

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“work,” the “deed,” of art itself. The central “categories” that Heidegger develops as illuminating the character of art are the pair “earth and world.” As was noted above, this pair anticipates the fourfold. Just as the fourfold departed from the technological view of the world as completely calculable, these notions must be understood as radical departures from the orthodox categories concerning artworks. Generated out of a discussion of a painting of shoes by van Gogh and the ruins of a Greek temple found in Paestum, Italy, these notions need to be understood as radical departures from orthodox categories for considering works of art. Most of all, they need to be understood as in a struggle with one another, as oppositional movements even, and this struggle needs to be seen as resulting in the opening of a space of appearance, ultimately, the space of truth. Heidegger puts the point this way: The world is the self-opening openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing. World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world … In this essential struggle the opponents raise each other into the self-assertion of their essential natures. (OWA 174) What happens in art, the “work” it instigates and sets forth, is precisely this struggle. Heidegger further describes what “happens” in art as the showing, the unconcealment, of world and earth insofar as each is brought forward in the work. Out of the earthly character of the work, a world emerges into view; likewise, the earth element of the work shows itself as earthly insofar as the world displayed recedes. For one element to emerge, the other needs to recede. Or, in Heidegger’s words: The essence of truth, that is, of unconcealment, is dominated throughout by a denial. Yet this denial is not a defect or a fault, as though truth were an unalloyed unconcealment that has rid itself of everything concealed. If truth could accomplish this, it would no longer be itself. This denial, in the form of a double concealment, belongs to the essence of truth as unconcealment. Truth, in its essence, is un-truth. (OWA 179) This remark, “Truth, in its essence, is un-truth,” appears frequently throughout Heidegger’s work. It refers to the fact that when something appears, it never 167

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appears completely, that there is still some hiddenness to it or in it. The “un-” of “un-truth” refers to this remaining hiddenness. The artwork, insofar as it has an earthly character – the sheer bulkiness of the marble in the temple or the sheer plasticity of the paint in the painting – seems especially to draw our attention to something not present. The basic impulse of the work of art is this disclosure of finite truth: “Art then is a becoming and happening of truth” (OWA 196). Heidegger develops this relation of art and truth in several ways in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Most importantly, perhaps, it is on the basis of this relation that he will find an essential link between the workings of art and history. The instigation of this struggle is the origination of something new. Each work, as uniquely itself, opens up the space of appearance in its own manner. In this way, the work clears a new space for appearance by transfiguring the given. Heidegger puts this as follows: At each time a new and essential world irrupted … Whenever art happens – that is, whenever there is a beginning – a jolt enters history; history either begins or starts over again. History here means not a sequence of events in time, of whatever sort, however important. History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entry into that people’s endowment. (OWA 201–2) From such a remark one can perhaps understand why it is that Heidegger contends that art is essentially an origin. It is a way in which truth comes into being, which means that it is a way in which truth becomes historical. When Heidegger writes the epilogue to “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1956) – after the war, after his deepened concern with the question concerning technology – the conviction that art did indeed offer a way in which thinking could move outside the empire of metaphysical assumptions is no longer selfevident. Referring to Hegel’s claim that “art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest vocation, something past,”20 Heidegger will write “Is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character? … The truth of Hegel’s judgment has not yet been decided” (OWA 205). One might rephrase this and ask whether a painter such as van Gogh (who Heidegger admired in “The Origin of the Work of Art”) still possesses the power to set into motion history. Do works that hang in a museum preserve the founding power to gather a people together? Can art still open the relations that found the life of a people? This hesitation about the promise of art had appeared just a few years after 20. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, T. M. Knox (trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), vol. 1, 11.

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“The Origin of the Work of Art” in the small text composed in 1938 entitled “Die Überwindung der Metaphysik” (The overcoming of metaphysics). There Heidegger would write a sentence that can only be heard as a criticism of his own earlier essay on art: “the attempt to rescue art by means of a more original interpretation of the work of art is misguided.”21 A deep ambivalence about the prospects of art for the task of thinking characterizes Heidegger’s work after “The Origin of the Work of Art.” He will continually return to investigations of art and he will not cease to speak of the potential “saving power” of art, but, in notes and other works that would not be published until after the war, it becomes clear that the question of the promise of the work of art is no longer settled for him. Nonetheless, after the war, Heidegger will continue to point to art as a promise of the sort of transformation that he argues is necessary in our times. The celebrated essay on technology is just one of the better known of such gestures. References to art will continue during this last stage of Heidegger’s career, but, strangely, there will be no further major work on the nature of art as such even while art seems to take on a growing importance for Heidegger.22 Even if he has doubts about the prospects of art in the age of the Gestell, it is clear that whatever new future we might find will, in some sense, be beholden to the achievements of art. Only in recent years have we begun to learn just how important the question of art was for Heidegger in the 1950s – and just how impossible it had become for him. Although there was long a rumor of a major work that Heidegger had composed on Paul Klee, it now seems that such a text does not exist. However, we do now have access to many of Heidegger’s notes on Klee and on the basis of those notes, as well as letters and other evidence, one can see that a new problem regarding art had emerged for Heidegger during these postwar years.23 The notes on Klee are, like all notes, fragmentary, obscure, and not intended for a reader other than their author. Nonetheless, one can see in them a strong self-critique regarding the approach to art in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and a sense that art has undergone a very real transformation, one in which the promises of art are greater than ever. In those notes, Heidegger recognizes that his early treatment of art was too restricted to the art of the past, to an art that was intimately bound up with the very metaphysics that he was seeking to overcome: 21. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus. In Gesamtausgabe 67 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1999), 105, my translation. 22. Most of the texts on art are smaller essays (for instance, “Die Kunst und der Raum” of 1969 or “Die Herkunft der Kunst und die Bestimmung des Denkens” of 1967) and they are never as extensive or ambitious as “The Origin of the Work of Art.” 23. The so-called “Notizen zu Klee” can, in part, be found in Günter Seubold, “Heideggers Nachgelassene Klee Notizen,” Heidegger Studies 9 (1993) and Kunst als Ereignis (Bonn: Denkmal, 2005); and Otto Pöggeler, Bild und Technik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002).

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“The Origin of the Work of Art” thinks out of the past of art … no longer [should one think with reference to] the production of world and the setting forth of earth as thematized [in that essay] … the art of the future should be given over to [thinking from out of] the bringing forth of relations from out of the event of the fuge.24 While this note is rather hermetic, it is clear that Heidegger is suggesting that a new approach to the work of art is needed, since his earlier effort to take up the challenge of art was insufficient insofar as it remained wedded to the art of the past, in other words, to an art still bearing an essential relation to metaphysics. Heidegger remarks, both in his notes as well as in letters to friends, that “[in Klee’s paintings] something becomes visible that we have barely even glimpsed before.”25 He is so overwhelmed by his “discovery” of Klee that Heidegger tells his friends that he plans on writing a pendant or sequel to “The Origin of the Work of Art.”26 He concedes that art has undergone a real transformation, even a revolution, that he had not previously recognized, and that this new shape of the work of art did indeed offer the possibilities for thinking that he had come to doubt since composing “The Origin of the Work of Art.” What he comes to recognize is that abstract art, art that sheds entirely any semblance of being a “copy” of objects in the world, can make visible the process of production, of coming into being, that Heidegger had sought in his earlier essay on the artwork: “the less [the painting is] interpreted according to objects, all the more evident the world brings itself forward.”27 By dispensing with the object as an object, abstract art can let something else appear, namely, the act of production, of coming into appearance, in which Heidegger had always located the real “workings” of art. When he takes up the Greek temple as an exemplary artwork in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger remarks that he is “deliberately choosing a nonrepresentational work of art … that does not copy anything” (OWA 167), but in choosing an ancient work of architecture, one that expresses the spirit of a different time, Heidegger misses the revolution of art in his own times that he would later recognize as providing a genuine opening to something new, to an art not determined by metaphysical assumptions. Klee’s paintings, but also Klee’s

24. Cited in Seubold, Kunst als Ereignis, 124. 25. Cited from a letter written on February 21, 1959, in Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Auf einen Stern Zugehen (Frankfurt: Societäts-Verlag, 1983), 158. 26. He has his first serious encounter with Klee’s works at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel in 1956. The pendant to the artwork essay was never written. 27. Pöggeler, Bild und Technik, 135.

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own theoretical writings and diaries,28 would open Heidegger’s eyes to this new possibility. It would even lead him to an interest in Zen artworks and the Zen conception of art,29 but this great excitement of 1956–59 that Heidegger finds in Klee’s paintings and writings would essentially disappear around 1960. He would republish “The Origin of the Work of Art” in 1960, but make no reference to any of the insights of his rather passionate involvement with Klee during the preceding five years. This second life of the question of art in Heidegger’s thought never bears fruit in any publications, nor does it seem to leave a mark on his efforts in related matters. The reason that such an important and promising path never leaves significant traces is not at all clear. Further discussions of the work of art in Heidegger’s later work tend to express a concern about the possibility of art in the age of technology and the Gestell. His worry is that the place for the appearance of art might well be foreclosed in our times, but when he does explore the vital possibilities of art those discussions center almost exclusively on art that happens in language, most of all in language as it appears in poetry.

iii. language: poesis and ethos The question put to us by language is perhaps the most enduring question of Heidegger’s career and occupied his attention in some of his earliest works as well as in his final works. Language already had a prominent place in the project of fundamental ontology as it is articulated in Being and Time (1927),30 and the texts and lectures of the 1930s that are so often devoted to reflections on Hölderlin’s poetry only serve to refine and intensify Heidegger’s early focus on the nature and experience of the word. Immediately after Heidegger’s disastrous political engagement as Rector (1933–34), he would turn to Hölderlin’s texts to find a way to think through some of the issues pressing on the times: the character of Germany, the nature of a people, the role of language in history, the experience of nature in the modern age, are among the topics that find their locus in Heidegger’s readings of Hölderlin.31 Hölderlin would also mediate

28. Heidegger was especially interested in a lecture that Klee gave in Jena (1924) entitled “On Modern Art.” 29. See the protocol of the seminar that he held in Freiburg with Hisamatsu (1958), “Das Kunst und das Denken” [Art and thinking], in Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges 1910–1976, in Gesamtausgabe 16 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000), 551–8. 30. See, for instance, the discussion of the equiprimordiality of language in the disclosure of a world as it is laid out in Being and Time, section 34. 31. It is important to bear in mind that Heidegger was seriously interested in Hölderlin’s work for many years prior to this (one can date this interest to the early 1920s), but that his philosophical interest began to show up in his lecture courses and published texts only in the mid-1930s. It

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Heidegger’s return to the Greeks, especially to Greek tragedy as one finds it developed in Sophocles, which was another large and abiding interest of the 1930s and 1940s. Heidegger’s work on language will always bear the imprint of this deep affection for Hölderlin’s poetry and theoretical texts. Hölderlin will always seem to mark the summit of the possibilities of language for Heidegger; even when he is not mentioned explicitly, one should always keep Hölderlin in mind when speaking of Heidegger and the question of language. In addition to that deep involvement with Hölderlin’s work, perhaps the most significant development in Heidegger’s considerations of language comes when he links his concern with language to his concern with the work of art, so that language in the poem emerges as the essential character of language as such. Heidegger argues that no matter what else it might be “about” – plums, flowers, love, despair, an April day – language in the poem is always language “about” language. In the poem, language calls attention to itself (much as an abstract painting will call attention to the image, not to any object it might “represent”), so that one must say that language in the poem is language at its most selfreflexive moment. Language in the poem is the essential form of all language. Heidegger had argued for a long time – at least since Being and Time – that we live “in” language and that “language is the supreme event of human existence.”32 Later, this view would come to be expressed by the oft-cited phrase “language is the house of being.”33 When he joins these two fundamental convictions – that language is the definitive event of human life and that poetry marks the culmination of the possibilities of language as such – he will arrive at the view, already expressed by Hölderlin, that we “dwell poetically upon the earth.”34 Our relation to language is at the basis of the very character of our being and the most pristine form of this basis, its intensified expression, comes in the form of poetic language. But while poetic language is language that calls attention to itself, it needs also to be said that for the most part language is poorest at doing just that. To think the nature of language, one needs to begin by recognizing that language is poorest at articulating itself and tends to hide its own nature.

would continue to be an active interest through much of the war, but would fade somewhat in the years after the war. 32. Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, Keith Hoeller (trans.) (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 56, translation modified. 33. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, Peter D. Hertz (trans.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 63. 34. This phrase comes from Hölderlin’s late prose poem, “In lieblicher Bläue …” (In lovely blueness …), and is quite frequently cited by Heidegger. It even serves as the title of an essay that he originally presented as a lecture in 1951.

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For Heidegger, it is important not to regard language as a tool or means of thinking, as if language was something we could pick up and put down.35 The intimacy of language and thinking is too great ever to think them separately. Language is not something that we “use.” Heidegger is so insistent on this point that he will say that “One speaks only insofar as one responds to language. Language speaks.”36 Language speaks us, giving shape and form to our world, our relations, our self-understanding. Even more: for Heidegger, the intimacy of language, world, and human being is so inextricable that to think one member of that relation is to think the other two. Language, one might say, is the relation of all relations. However, precisely because it does not, for the most part, call attention to itself, it is difficult to hear language as language. So it is not surprising that Heidegger’s discussions of language also inevitably speak of a requisite listening that is required for genuine speaking. In some sense one needs to say that this listening is “prior” to any genuine speech since all such speech is a response to the way that language discloses being. Such a comment does not mean that poems surpass works of philosophy or that we should all simply write poetry. Heidegger makes a distinction between the “poetic” and “poems,” and the nature of the “poetic” is a key concern for him. It belongs to the question of the work of art, to the question about technology, to the question of how we are to live and inhabit our world. It is important, then, to recognize that Heidegger’s concern with such literary works does not lead him to questions about various literary genre or into literary critical questions. Rather, his turn to these poetic texts is undertaken in order to broach – in a new and revolutionary manner – questions about the most basic character or way we belong to and experience the world. In Homer’s language, the word “ethōs” referred to the way and the place an animal lived. That word forms the ancient roots of our modern word “ethics.” I believe that this more archaic sense of ethōs is what one finds at stake in Heidegger’s reflections on language. Heidegger has often been criticized for never having addressed questions of political and ethical life, questions of our living together on the earth and in the time that we share.37 Heidegger could indeed be seemingly oblivious to the realities of suffering produced in our times. He could equate homelessness and the forgetfulness of being, the gas chambers of the Shoah with the mechanization 35. It is, however, important to note that Heidegger expresses serious concerns about language in the age of the Gestell. He is deeply critical of the view that holds language to be foremost a matter of “information.” 36. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter (trans.) (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 207. 37. The “Letter on Humanism” (1946) (in Basic Writings) is the text in which Heidegger most directly responds to such a criticism. One might also refer to the interview published in Der Spiegel (1976) entitled “Nur ein Gott kann uns retten” (Only a god can save us).

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of agriculture, and he never spoke directly of the political realities and immense sufferings brought into the world by the Nazis. Above all, and almost incomprehensibly, Heidegger never apologized or honestly discussed his own involvement in the politics of Nazi Germany. There is undeniably truth in such criticisms. To be sure, Heidegger’s thought tends to remain rather remote from the exigencies of life and history. He seems removed from his own times and unconcerned with what one easily sees as problematic about those times. Indeed, one sometimes has the feeling as well that all of those he regards as dialogue partners are dead. But such remarks miss the real point to which reading Heidegger’s work can lead us: Heidegger’s work has driven to the hidden foundations and impulses, the deepest imperatives, that have given shape to the present form of our world. He has shown, with exemplary insight, just how concealed the real sources of our contemporary problems are and how far-reaching any effort to truly address those problems must be.

iv. conclusion: reading heidegger Reading Heidegger one is quietly drawn into the heart of the riddles that define us. Heidegger’s work presses mightily to drive toward the questions that have been forgotten. He already demonstrated this trait in Being and Time, which opens by retrieving a question that has long been forgotten and covered over: the question of what it means to be.38 It is a trait that will define his entire career and all of his work from whatever period of his life. One does not find clear “positions” in Heidegger’s work; one finds, as he said, “ways” or “paths.” One finds as well a passionate investigation of questions that we need to be asking since, as Heidegger once remarked, “questioning is the piety of thought” (QT 341). Heidegger’s later work is a refinement of this passion. Some of the themes have changed since his beginnings, some of the assumptions as well. Certainly, the world had changed immensely in the years from which one might date his later work: computers, cell phones, video, and so many other inventions have changed the shape of daily life. Heidegger’s later work is an effort to respond to those changes. To what extent he has succeeded one can judge only by reading his work closely and carefully.

38. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Joan Stambaugh (trans.) (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), xix, as well as the opening sections, which are dedicated to an analysis of the very idea of a question.

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major works Beiträge zur Philosophie: Vom Ereignis (personal notebook from 1936–38). In Gesamtausgabe 65. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1989. Published in English as Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1944. Reprinted in Veröffentliche Schriften 1910–1976, Gesamtausgabe 4. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1981. Published in English as Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, translated by Keith Hoeller. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000. Holzwege. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1950. Reprinted in Gesamtausgabe 5. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977. Published in English as Off the Beaten Track, translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1953. Reprinted in Gesamtausgabe 40. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1983. Published in English as Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Neske, 1954. Reprinted as Vorträge und Aufsätze (1936–1953), Gesamtausgabe 7. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000. Was heißt Denken? Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1954. Reprinted as Was heißt Denken? (1951–1952), Gesamtausgabe 8. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002. Published in English as What is Called Thinking?, translated by J. Glenn Gray. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Der Satz vom Grund. Pfullingen: Neske, 1957. Reprinted as Der Satz vom Grund (1955–1956), Gesamtausgabe 10. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997. Published in English as The Principle of Reason, translated by Reginald Lilly. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. Identität und Differenz. Pfullingen: Neske, 1957. Reprinted as Identität und Differenz (1955–1957), Gesamtausgabe 11. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2006. Published in English as Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske, 1959. Reprinted as Unterwegs zur Sprache (1950–1959), Gesamtausgabe 12. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985. Published in English as On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Nietzsche, vols I–II. Pfullingen: Neske, 1961. Reprinted as: (i) Nietzsche I (1936–1939), Gesamtausgabe 6.1. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996; (ii) Nietzsche II (1939–1946), Gesamtausgabe 6.2. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1997. Published in English as: (i) Nietzsche. Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art, translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1979; (ii) Nietzsche. Volume 2: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, translated by David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1984; (iii) Nietzsche. Volume 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics, translated by Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, 1987; (iv) Nietzsche. Volume 4: Nihilism, translated by Frank A. Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Wegmarken. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967. Reprinted as Wegmarken (1919–1961). Gesamtausgabe 9. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976. Published in English as Pathmarks, edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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8 existential theology Andreas Grossmann

This essay has a heuristic intention. It attempts to sketch one of the most significant concepts of philosophical and theological thought, a concept that was developed on the basis of and in critical reflection on phenomenology and existential philosophy in the twentieth century. Despite their philosophical differences and their religious differences, the various thinkers to be discussed all share a fundamental characteristic, namely, that the Being (Sein) or existence of the human cannot be conceived without including a relation to the divine. The positions and projects linked to the names Edith Stein, Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier, Martin Buber, and Gabriel Marcel as well as Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich will be examined.

i. attempts at a christian and a jewish philosophy: stein, maritain, mounier, buber, and marcel One of the noteworthy consequences of Husserlian phenomenology was that it gave rise to quite divergent philosophical developments and elaborations in the work of his students. This applies in particular to the religious-philosophical projects of Edith Stein1 and Martin Heidegger. Stein, Husserl’s private assistant, born Jewish and a convert to Roman Catholicism in 1922, attempted to 1. Edith Stein (October 12, 1891–August 9, 1942; born in Breslau (Wroclaw), Poland; died in Auschwitz Concentration Camp) was educated at the University of Göttingen (doctorate, 1916). Her influences included Catholic theology (Aquinas) and mysticism (Teresa of Ávila), Heidegger, and Husserl. She held appointments at the Universities of Freiburg (1916–19) and Göttingen (1919–22), Dominican Girls School, Speyer, Germany (1922–32), Discalced

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bring Thomistic and phenomenological thought explicitly into dialogue. For her, “Christian philosophy” (oriented by Catholicism) is supposed to find its fulfillment in theology, but without conceiving itself as theology and without making theological claims.2 In contrast, Heidegger, who followed her as Husserl’s assistant, grew out of Catholicism to advocate a fundamental methodical atheism in philosophy, rejecting Christian philosophy, in “Phenomenology and Theology” (1927/28), as an impossibility, as a “square circle.”3 For Heidegger, unlike Stein, theology requires philosophy, namely, as a “guiding corrective”; philosophy, however, in no way requires theology in order to be philosophy.4 How can the specificity of these disparate options, which ultimately are mutually exclusive, be more closely determined? The resolution of this question is important. In fact, it will be shown that the disagreement that emerged between Stein and Heidegger in the question of a “Christian philosophy” marks something like a foundational rupture and, at the same time, a basic structure in the field of debates presented here. In her magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being, Stein follows Heidegger and characterizes the question of Being as the central motif of her investigations (FEB xxix–xxx). For Stein, however, the “meaning of Being” can accordingly only become clear in the “overcoming” of the finite toward the infinite. If one proceeds from Dasein (human existence) in its radical finitude – as Heidegger does – one succumbs, in virtue of this perspective, to the danger of already cutting oneself off from the meaning of Being (FEB 20). Thus, Stein claims that what Heidegger’s project of the “destruction of the tradition” (under Nietzsche’s influence) had to reject – the thought of the infinite or the beyond – is actually crucial for philosophy.5 Having become a faithful Catholic, Stein thinks that she

2.

3.

4.

5.

Carmelite Monastery, Cologne, Germany (1933–39), and the Carmelite Monastery, Echt, Netherlands (1939–42). Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being, Kurt F. Reinhardt (trans.) (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2002), 23–4; hereafter cited as FEB followed by the page number. Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” in Pathmarks, William McNeill (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 53. Heidegger repeated this assessment in his lecture Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and strengthened it in reference to St. Paul the Apostle (1 Cor. 1:18, 23): “A ‘Christian philosophy’ is a round square and a misunderstanding. … Philosophy, for originally Christian faith, is foolishness.” See Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (trans.) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 8. Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology,” in Pathmarks, 52–3. For a detailed discussion of this idea, see my Heidegger-Lektüren: Über Kunst, Religion und Politik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), 27ff. A more comprehensive individual study of Stein’s, contained in the sixth volume of her collected works, makes critical reference above all to Being and Time in the same sense, but also refers to Heidegger’s Kant book, as well as the later, shorter texts On the Essence

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is called on to demand precisely this supplement to philosophy. The direction of her thinking is emphatically expressed in an ontology of the human person that combines scholastic theology with mysticism and phenomenology. It is toward this kind of ontology that her thought aims. The investigation of finite Being leads Stein “to eternal being [as] that primordial being which conditions every other kind of being” (FEB 380). Finite Being is disclosed in a “relationship of image to divine Being” (FEB 418). For Stein, the ontological and ethical presupposition of finding oneself is that one finds God (FEB 509). Stein therefore strives for a “Christian philosophy” whose “foremost task” is conceived as the “pathfinder of faith.” Although Stein elaborates her thought with a critical view to Heidegger’s Being and Time, a certain proximity to other figures of the phenomenological movement, such as Max Scheler (1874–1928)6 and Hedwig Conrad-Martius,7 can be discerned.8 Thomism, which exerted a strong influence on her and which she sought to understand in intensive study after her baptism, certainly seems to be a determining element. The book Finite and Eternal Being frequently cites the authority of “St. Thomas,” but also refers to such Catholic thinkers as Maritain and Marcel, whose work, for their part, is oriented toward the concept of “person” as a means of linking ontology and ethics. Under the title Integral Humanism, Jacques Maritain9 conceives of a social order arising from the primacy of the human person. Maritain proposes a

*6. 7.

8. 9.

of Reasons and What is Metaphysics? See Edith Stein, Welt und Person: Beitrag zum christlichen Wahrheitsstreben, in collected works, Edith Steins Werke, vol. VI (Freiburg: Herder, 1962). Stein, who was murdered in 1942 in Auschwitz, was obviously unaware of the lecture on “Phenomenology and Theology” (which was first published in 1969). Cf. on this point Hugo Ott, “Phänomenologie und Ontologie: Edith Stein zwischen Edmund Husserl und Martin Heidegger,” in Gelehrtenrepublik – Lebenswelt: Edmund Husserl und Alfred Schütz in der Krisis der phänomenologischen Bewegung, Angelica Bäumer and Michael Benedict (eds) (Vienna: Passagen, 1993); also Rainer Marten, “Edith Stein und Martin Heidegger,” Edith Stein Jahrbuch 2 (1996); Otto Pöggeler, Heidegger in seiner Zeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink 1999), 249ff. (“Heidegger und die Religionsphänomenologie”). For a discussion of Max Scheler, see the essay by Dan Zahavi in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3. Hedwig Conrad-Martius (1888–1966) was a German phenomenologist who studied with Moritz Geiger in Munich and Husserl in Göttingen, where she was a part of the same circle of Husserl’s students with Stein. Her major work is Der Selbstaufbau der Natur: Entelechien und Energien (1944). See on this point Hans Rainer Sepp, “Edith Steins Stellung innerhalb der phänomenologischen Bewegung,” Edith Stein Jahrbuch 4 (1998): 495–509. Jacques Maritain (November 18, 1882–April 28, 1973; born in Paris, France; died in Toulouse) was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV (1898–99), the Sorbonne, where he studied for a licence in philosophy (1900–1901) and in the natural sciences (1901–1902), and the University of Heidelberg (1906–1908). His influences included Aquinas, Bergson, Spinoza, and Christian mysticism, and he held appointments at the Lycée Stanislaus, Paris (1912–14), Institut

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so-called “integral” or, as he also says with more pathos, “heroic” humanism as the figure of a secular Christianity oriented toward the “ideal of a fraternal community.”10 The point is “a veritable socio-temporal realization of the Gospel” (IH 94). For Maritain, the latter is not characterized solely by the fact that it is communal, but rather – and above all – by the fact that it is personalistic. And that means for him, as a Thomistic thinker, that the earthly temporal life order has to pay deference “to the eternal interests of the person … in such a manner as to facilitate the access of the latter to his supernatural ultimate end” (IH 97). This main idea of a “Christian philosophy of culture” (IH 142) connects to a double line of attack against socialism and Marxism, on the one hand, and against liberal individualism, on the other. In fact, the perspective of “Christian personalism” (IH 133) as the core content of a “new Christianity” is linked to the demand for a “Copernican revolution” in the concept of political action: “to act politically in a Christian style, to bring a thoroughly Christian life to the world” (IH 252). In no way does such action mean for Maritain the return to notions of sacred unity from the Middle Ages (IH 146), but he deems it to be possible, as well as necessary, to create new political images “of an essentially Christian spirit.” This is the core of “the proper task of Catholic action” (IH 269). “In order that there should succeed to capitalist civilization in decadence a new world superior to Communism,” explains Maritain, “nothing less is required than the personalist and integral humanist principle in its widest significance” (IH 279). The “integral humanism” shows itself to be, at least for Maritain, the “solution” to the enigma of history (IH 285). Emmanuel Mounier11 also proposes a decidedly Christian personalism that emphasizes, next to its personal structure, the communal character of Christian faith and life as its hallmark.12 The concept of personalism for Mounier also opposes the “ideology” of modern individualism, in so far as it regards humanity abstracted from all social and religious relations. The fundamental experience of a person is, as Mounier emphasizes, the experience of being spoken to, that is, the second-person experience, or, as Mounier says with reference to Buber’s philosophy of dialogue, the precedence of the You before the I (PER 20), the Catholique, Paris (1914–39), Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, Canada (1932–40), Princeton University (1941–42, 1948–60), and Columbia University (1941–44), and as French Ambassador to the Vatican (1944–48). 10. Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom, Joseph W. Evans (trans.) (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968), 7; hereafter cited as IH followed by the page number. 11. Emmanuel Mounier (May 1, 1905–March 22, 1950; born in Grenoble, France; died in Châtenay-Malabry) was educated at the University of Grenoble (1924–27). His influences included Bergson, Maritain, Charles Péguy, and Christian mysticism. 12. Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, Philip Maret (trans.) (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1952), 80–81; hereafter cited as PER followed by the page number.

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affirmation of self-alienation. Mounier says: “Alter then becomes alienus, and I in my turn become a stranger to myself, alienated. One might almost say that I have no existence, save in so far as I exist for others, that to be is, in the final analysis, to love” (ibid.). The economy of the person is an “economy of donation” and not an economy of compensation or of calculation (PER 22). The person exposes himself as a countenance (visage) (PER 45). Radicalizing Buber’s philosophy of dialogue, Levinas even speaks of the irretrievable primacy of the Other, whose face addresses an infinite responsibility to “me,” calling on me to respond to the demands that come from him. Like Levinas, Mounier conceives of responsibility on the basis of the speech act of the response; the human is free as one who answers – and in this way he is responsible. If we hear the word in a more literal sense as a re-sponding (and relation) to a call with a vow, then we see that responsibility is ultimately “religion,” “devotion” (PER 64). The human as a person is neither merely in himself nor for himself, but rather “movement”: movement from being toward being. Accordingly, Mounier can speak of the “superabundance” of the person, or, with Marcel, of the person as what “cannot be inventoried” (PER 67). “The personal being is made for a movement that exceeds itself,” and the person is this superabundance ultimately in relation to “one supreme Person.” Mounier concludes, “Christian personalism goes the whole way, and deduces all values from the unique call of the one supreme Person” (PER 68). It is not by chance that Mounier refers us to Martin Buber,13 who is regarded as the founder of dialogical personalism. Buber’s I and Thou,14 which was first published in 1923, established a philosophy of dialogue that left its mark on theology (for example in the works of Friedrich Gogarten [1887–1967], Karl Heim [1874–1958], and Emil Brunner [1889–1966]),15 but also on philosophy, preeminently in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, whom we have already mentioned. Levinas was later to return to Buber as the “pioneer” of a thought of the Other that does not take recourse to prior knowledge or to a certain structure of consciousness (as is the case in Husserl), but rather emphasizes that the

13. Martin Buber (February 8, 1878–June 13, 1965; born in Vienna, Austria; died in Jerusalem, Israel) was educated at the Universities of Vienna (1896), Leipzig and Berlin (1897), Zurich (1898), and received a doctorate in philosophy and art history from the University of Berlin in 1904. His influences included Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and he held appointments at the University of Frankfurt (1924–33), and Hebrew University, Jerusalem (1938–51). 14. Martin Buber, I and Thou [1923], Walter Kaufmann (trans.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1970); hereafter cited as IT followed by the page number. 15. On this point, see Helmut Gollwitzer, “Martin Bubers Bedeutung für die protestantische Theologie,” in Martin Buber: Bilanz seines Denkens, Jochanan Bloch and Haim Gordon (eds) (Freiburg: Herder, 1983).

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singularity of the relationship between I and Thou cannot be reduced to I–It relationships.16 According to Buber, I–Thou and I–It are fundamentally distinct “basic words” characterizing man’s relationship to the world. Whereas the word pair “I–It” stands for the intentional, objectifying approach to the world, the “Thou” in the pair “I–Thou” is not a something. The Thou is not an entity that could be experienced and spoken about. “Someone who says ‘Thou’ does not have a something, he has nothing. But he is in the relationship” (IT 55), a relationship that is characterized by presence and immediacy (IT 62). According to Buber, this does not mean that there is nothing other, no one other than the Thou, which is the Other. Rather, the idea is intended to express the fact that everything else, which is other and different from me, lives in the light of the Other (IT 59). I only become I inasmuch as I say Thou. “I become via the Thou; becoming I, I speak Thou” (IT 62). Or, as we read in another passage: “Man becomes I via the Thou” (IT 80). The “realm of the Thou” (IT 54) that is established in the basic word “I–Thou” is divided in Buber’s view into three spheres: “life with nature,” which takes shape “on the threshold to language”; the linguistically grounded and constituted “life with human beings”; and finally “speechless, but language-generating” “life with spiritual beings” (IT 57). In each Thou found in each sphere, we have to do with God as the “eternal Thou”: “In each Thou,” writes Buber, “we address the eternal [Thou], in each sphere in its own manner” (ibid.; cf. IT 113). This basic idea is developed in the third and last part of the book. For Buber, the religious dimension, the relationship to the “eternal Thou” proves to be the relationship that founds and supports all other relationships. To enter into the “pure relationship,” that is, the relationship to God, means for him to place the world “on its proper ground” (IT 127). In the eternal Thou, the world finds its unifying center “in which the extended lines of relationships intersect” (IT 148). Among the three spheres of the Thou-world, however, Buber highlights the second, the relationship to man. It is only in the relationship to the other person that a word receives a response. Hence, the relation to the other person turns out to be “the proper metaphor to the relationship to God,” because here, to say this again, a “genuine address receives a genuine answer” (IT 151). In the “pure” relationship to the eternal Thou, however, man does not have God. Man can only be regarded as a recipient here, but one who does not receive an object or a content, but rather living presence (IT 158). Indeed, it contradicts the essence of God to make him an It – even though man always tends to make him a something, an object, like any other Thou that we encounter within the world (IT 161; cf. 16. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Philosophy,” in Outside the Subject, Michael B. Smith (trans.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 33.

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IT 69). But God cannot be inferred from the world as the ultimate cause or as something of the sort. God as ultimate cause belongs to the categories of traditional onto-theology, which for Buber (no differently than for Heidegger, of whom Buber was otherwise critical17) have to be left behind. God can “rightfully only be addressed [angesprochen], not asserted [ausgesagt]” (IT 129). Theology as speaking of God (as Bultmann also understood) is thus shown to be fundamentally problematical. It is subject to the suspicion that it degrades God to an It, to a mere object of knowledge – thus missing his presence (IT 161). How to speak of God – except in appealing to him, in prayer?18 The relationship to God can ultimately only prove itself ethically, that is, in the fact that man, as Buber says, “according to his strength, in the measure of every day realizes God anew in the world” (IT 163). It is neither an atomized subject nor a collective subjectivity that characterizes human existence appropriately. “In the beginning is the relationship,” this is Buber’s basic thesis (IT 69). This is a relationship that is established through language, dialogically. Thus, the “sphere of the intermediate” must be conceived as the “fundamental fact of human existence,” as the space of encounter between I and Thou.19 Gabriel Marcel20 unquestionably counts as one of the central figures worthy of special attention in the frame of an account of “existential theology.” Largely forgotten today, Marcel was in his time widely discussed as the main representative of Christian existentialism. The extent of his influence can be seen in Paul Ricoeur’s early work,21 where Marcel functions as an important mediator of 17. Cf. above all, the chapter devoted to Heidegger in Martin Buber’s Between Man and Man, Ronald Gregor Smith (trans.) (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 163–80. 18. In his essay, “Welchen Sinn hat es, von Gott zu reden?” (“What does it mean, to speak of God?”) (1925), Bultmann attempted to make a strict distinction between speaking “of ” (von) God and an objectifying speaking “about” (über) God, and was thus remarkably close to Buber’s dialogics; with respect to the concrete existential situation of man, Bultmann also rejected the traditional distinction between subject and object as inappropriate. With a view toward the scientific-technical thought that is predominant in the present day, Heidegger reflected in his later thought on theological discourse about “Das Problem eines nichtobjektivierenden Denkens und Sprechens in der heutigen Theologie” [The problem of a nonobjectifying thought and speech in contemporary theology]. Heidegger rejects “the claim that all thought as thought is objectifying” as being “groundless,” and identifies “discussing within its own realm of Christian faith what it has to think and how it has to speak in terms of its [faith’s] specific essence” as a “positive task for theology.” In this connection, however, for Heidegger it must be asked “whether theology can still be a science – because it presumably must not be a science at all” (Heidegger, Pathmarks, 59, 61). 19. As Buber puts it in his later work Between Man and Man, 202. 20. Gabriel Marcel (December 7, 1889–October 8, 1973; born and died in Paris, France) was educated at the Sorbonne (1906–1907). His influences included Bergson, Bradley, Royce, and Schelling. *21. For a discussion of Ricoeur, see the essay by Wayne J. Froman in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6.

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Husserl, Heidegger, and Jaspers’s thought, and therefore as an important source of ideas.22 His influence is also seen in Levinas, who refers to him repeatedly and appreciatively.23 But what is remarkable about Marcel is that he wrote about the relationship between I and Thou in his Metaphysical Journal (1927) at almost the same time as Buber, although independently of him. In retrospect, Marcel himself noted and appreciated the substantive proximity to Buber’s dialogics. Decidedly a “Christian philosopher,” Marcel explicitly emphasizes the significance of Buber’s “philosophy of the intermediate.” He links, however, his recognition of Buber’s accomplishment with the critical question as to how the Jewish thinker’s insight “can be transferred to the level of dialogue without degenerating.” Is Buber’s characterization of the intermediate as a “relationship” not already a false objectification of what happens between I and Thou? Is the living communication with the Other not completely frozen in language, does it not inevitably lead to an objectification of the Other?24 Proceeding from the Cartesian-idealistic tradition of philosophy and in increasingly critical reflection on it, The Metaphysical Journal interestingly documents an effort to view the problem of existence beyond and outside the long-established metaphysical dualisms such as body–soul and immanence– transcendence. According to Marcel, the reality of the cogito is “of quite a different order from existence.” The existence for which Marcel is seeking is not to be established, as the “I am” of Descartes’s cogito was; it is to be identified in the sense that its absolute metaphysical priority must be noted.25 The point is to “determine the metaphysical conditions of personal existence” (MJ 255, my emphasis). Although it is unsystematic, and, as the author repeatedly admits, often quite obscure, the journal displays something of a conceptual center in the question of religion (God) as the question of the absolute or “pure” Thou (MJ 160; cf. MJ 86). It shows Marcel on the way to a “philosophy of the second

22. See the appraisal of Marcel in Paul Ricoeur, Gabriel Marcel et Karl Jaspers: Philosophie du mystère et philosophie du paradoxe (Paris: Temps présent, 1948), 471ff., and Lectures 2: La Contrée des philosophes, Olivier Mongin (ed.) (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992), 49ff., 92ff. On Marcel’s approach to existential theology, see Clyde Pax, An Existential Approach to God: A Study of Gabriel Marcel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972). 23. See Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, Richard Cohen (trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 34; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Alphonso Lingis (trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 68; and Humanism of the Other, Nidra Poller (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 44. 24. Marcel, Gabriel. “I and Thou,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber, Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman (eds) (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1967), 47; cf. also Levinas, “Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Philosophy,” 25. 25. Gabriel Marcel, The Metaphysical Journal, Bernard Wall (trans.) (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1952), 325; hereafter cited as MJ followed by the page number.

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person,”26 which regards the encounter between I and Thou27 as an ontological “mystery” (MJ 160). This is a secret that ultimately – in the reality of love – proves to be, as in Buber, ethical. The Thou is present not in the judgment of a proposition, but rather in the answer or better in the response to a question (MJ 199–200; cf. MJ 138). For “where no answer [response] is possible, there is room only for the ‘him’ [the It]” (MJ 138). According to Marcel, his studies of the problem of human existence lead back to a distinction that was to provide the title of his main work, Being and Having (MJ 310–12). To have or to be, that is the question for Marcel.28 Being and Having contrasts two realms in its title concepts, realms that appear to be “the very nature of man’s metaphysical condition” (BH 174). According to Marcel, the realm of having is the realm “at the root of the problem or the technics” (BH 172), while Being counts as that “sphere” (accessible in contemplation or worship) “that transcends all possible possession.” Being is the sphere in which love is rooted as “the essential ontological datum” (BH 167, 173). With this difference between being and having, Marcel is attempting to reconsider the topic of ontology, but he is doing this in a way that is entirely differently from that of Heidegger. According to Marcel (and here he looks quite close to Stein), the possibility of ontology reveals itself only “on a ground previously prepared by revelation” (BH 120). That is why Marcel sees himself directly required to caution his contemporaries against an uncritical adoption of the “language of the German phenomenologists, which is so often untranslatable” (BH 158). This directly refers to Husserl, but one would not be wrong to read this warning as addressed to a certain popular French Heideggerianism, represented by Sartre and others. Irrespective of this disassociation from “the German phenomenologists,” Marcel claims the concept “phenomenology” for his investigations. For him, phenomenology concerns a possible, accurate identification of the “nonpsychological” and, conversely, an accentuation and discovery of the decisive “content of the thought” (the “noemata” in the Husserlian sense) (ibid.). However, the ontologically primary “datum” is for Marcel, ultimately, the love that is grounded in God and that reveals existence to be a mystery. The 26. Peter Kampits, Gabriel Marcels Philosophie der zweiten Person (Vienna/Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1975). 27. Marcel prefers to speak of “encounter” and not of “relationship,” as does Buber, so as to emphasize the character of performance that eludes objectification. The concepts existence and objectivity are “radically dissociated” for Marcel (MJ 281), and, accordingly, the repeated question is “how it is possible to conceive a Thou that is not at the same time a him” (MJ 281; cf. 200). To put it in Levinas’s terms, the encounter with the Other resists a theoretical incorporation, the – infinite – significance of the human face resists conceptual classification (cf. Levinas, “Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel and Philosophy,” 35). 28. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, Katharine Farrer (trans.) (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976), 199; hereafter cited as BH.

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“existence of a Christian datum” (BH 120) is thus an essential starting-point for his phenomenological-metaphysical meditations, which involve (as do those of Maritain) a critique of “modern individualism.” “But I think,” writes Marcel, “it is beyond dispute that if pure subjectivism ought really to be considered as a standpoint attained once and for all by the modern mind, then the religious question would indeed have to be regarded as obsolete” (BH 188). But he immediately adds – with reference to Maritain – that “I think that this subjectivism cannot be for one moment regarded as an established position” (BH 188–9). It is necessary to climb back up the “hill down which modern philosophy has been slipping for more than two centuries” by means of a new reflection on the (religiously grounded) meaning structures of human existence (BH 189). This critique of modernity applies first of all to the idea of freedom in the Kantian sense. Based on the concept of autonomy, Kantian ethics strikes Marcel as an utterly “monstrous contradiction, a sort of speculative aberration” (BH 131). According to Marcel, Kant did not see “that the self can and should be transcended without there being any need for heteronomy to replace autonomy in consequence” (BH 174). Being faced with the fundamental mystery in religion, art, and metaphysics, the human becomes aware of a creative freedom that cannot be grasped as autonomy. In religion and art, it is shown that “freedom is not autonomy,” that, rather, here “the self … is entirely absorbed by love.” But Marcel extends his criticism of modern thought beyond Kant; it includes as well liberalism, Marxism, and Sartre’s existentialism. “Condemned to freedom,” as Sartre puts it, the human sees himself in a state of plain incomprehensibility, thrown back on to himself alone. However, to conceive of man as the Absolute is, in the final consequence, “self-destruction or idolatry,” as Marcel formulates it in his work Problematic Man.29 It belongs to Marcel’s basic convictions that human freedom can be defined only with reference to divine grace “in depth” (PM 60), but that freedom and grace must be understood in a language beyond a language of causality (PM 55). It is understandable that Marcel refused to accept the label of “existentialism” and characterized his position rather as a “neo-Socraticism” (PM 60). Self-questioning or putting-oneself-into-question, however, does not stop with ascertaining the mere questionability of the human. With Marcel, it opens – no differently than with Stein, Maritain, and Mounier – into religion and invocation, the invocatio dei: “You who alone possess the secret of what I am and of what I am capable of becoming” (PM 63).

29. Gabriel Marcel, Problematic Man, Brian Thompson (trans.) (New York: Herder & Herder, 1967), 53; hereafter cited as PM followed by the page number.

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ii. heidegger and christian existentialism: bultmann and tillich At the outset, we already indicated that Martin Heidegger proposed a path entirely different from the one taken by Husserl’s former assistant Edith Stein. The conception of a Christian philosophy appears to him to be a “square circle”; the different varieties of humanism, including Christian humanism, are summarily dismissed in his later “Letter on Humanism,” without giving any indication of a detailed examination of the relevant works. Regardless of its definition, each kind of humanism remains, for Heidegger, within the horizon of metaphysics.30 They do not, therefore, attain the “other perspectives” on Being and the human, which for Heidegger are the only ones to offer a prospect of a radically different thinking that has overcome metaphysics.31 The “essence of the holy” can be conceptualized only on the basis of the “truth of Being,” and the “essence of divinity” only on the basis of the “essence of the holy.” In turn, it is only “in light of the essence of divinity” that it can “be thought and said what the word ‘God’ should name.”32 The later Heidegger, after the so-called “turn,” sees Hölderlin as the definitive “prethinker” and the witness to such a different thought. Thereby, Heidegger blurs or even obscures the vestiges of his own earlier, quite intensive interest in the Christian tradition, especially his notable interest in Martin Luther’s theology.33 In fact, he disassociates himself from his earlier close cooperation and friendship with the protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann, of course, has drawn substantial impulses from Heidegger’s Being and Time and passed them on to a whole generation of theologians through his work.34 Yet, in spite of all of the critique and (self-)disassociation, Heidegger 30. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Pathmarks, William McNeill (ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 245. 31. Correspondingly, Heidegger considers the talk of ontology as well as ethics and a union of the two as inadequate and dismisses them in favor of a “primordial ethics,” understood as “originary” thought of the truth of Being. See ibid., 271. 32. Ibid., 267. 33. See Grossmann, Heidegger-Lektüren, 11ff., as well as Karl Lehmann, “‘Sagen, was Sache ist’: der Blick auf die Wahrheit der Existenz” and Otto Pöggeler, “Heideggers Weg von Luther zu Hölderlin,” both in Heidegger und die christliche Tradition, Norbert Fischer and FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann (eds) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2007). In order to distinguish the “theological” approach of the early Heidegger from his thought after the “turning,” one can call the latter, with Françoise Dastur, a “theiological” thought. As Dastur writes: “Après la Kehre, la dimension du divin fait sa réapparition. Mais c’est là, me semble-t-il, une tout autre perspective, qui s’ouvre, non plus théologique, mais proprement théiologique [After the Kehre, the dimension of the divine made its reappearance. But this was, it seems to me, a completely different perspective that emerges, no longer a theological, but properly speaking a theiological perspective]” (“Heidegger et la théologie,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 92 [1994], 239). 34. This generation would include such prominent figures as Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard Ebeling.

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could concede that he “never would have reached the path to thought” without his theological background.35 Indeed, the young Heidegger was able to represent himself – in a letter dating from August 19, 1921, to his student, Karl Löwith (1897–1973) – as a “Christian theologian.”36 In this way, Heidegger tried to characterize himself as one who strove to explore the logos of an existential understanding shaped by Christian faith. The early Heidegger regarded the early Christian life experience, as it is attested in the epistles of St. Paul, as a paradigm for the elucidation of what he calls “historical facticity” or “factual existence,” that is, a life that is profoundly determined by history (by the event of Jesus) and yet determined by a history whose source cannot be reached (since part of the event of Jesus is that he died). The fact that the grounds of one’s life are out of reach defines, for Heidegger, the facticity of human existence. Despite modeling facticity on Paul’s epistles, Heidegger conceives the business of philosophy as the “radically explication” of the facticity of human existence in its questionability without having at its disposal any support in Revelation.37 As a formally indicative hermeneutics, it can point out that there are religious dimensions, but has to leave the religious decision up to factual existence.38 As Heidegger ultimately says, faith, as a specific possibility of existence, remains the “deadly enemy” “with respect to that specific form of existence that is essential to philosophy.” Yet, Heidegger emphasizes equally and no less vehemently that this radical antithesis yields “the possibility of a community of the sciences of theology and philosophy.”39 Heidegger’s lecture “Phenomenology and Theology,” which we mentioned at the beginning, is evidence of this community. It resulted from Heidegger’s discussions with Bultmann40 at the University of Marburg. Bultmann’s own work demonstrates the possibility of theology and philosophy forming something like a community.

35. Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 10. 36. See Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler (eds), Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1990), vol. 2, 29. 37. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, Richard Rojcewicz (trans.) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 4. 38. On this key concept of formally indicative hermeneutics in Heidegger’s early work, see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 164ff.; also Pöggeler, Heidegger in seiner Zeit, 19ff. (“Heideggers logische Untersuchungen”). 39. Heidegger, Pathmarks, 53. 40. Rudolf Bultmann (August 20, 1884– July 30, 1976; born in Wiefelstede, Germany; died in Marburg) was educated at the Universities of Tübingen, Berlin, and Marburg (doctorate, 1910; habilitation, 1912). His influences included Karl Barth and Heidegger, and he held appointments at the University of Marburg (1921–51).

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As we just mentioned, Bultmann’s theology received crucial inspiration from Heidegger.41 It is no exaggeration to say that Bultmann’s dialogue with Heidegger determined his theology as one guided by the question of understanding human existence, as a hermeneutical theology. In particular, the “existential” interpretation of the New Testament gave his theology a systematic expression. To this day, Bultmann’s name remains associated with this hermeneutical approach, which, somewhat misleadingly, he also called “demythologization.” Although the term “demythologization” gave rise to much controversy, the expression is basically only another word for the task, absolutely necessary in Bultmann’s eyes, of existential interpretation of biblical texts. Demythologization is done as existential interpretation, and vice versa. This formula means that biblical texts are not to be understood historically, but rather probed for the understanding of the human existence that they express. The issue in “demythologization” is “whether the New Testament offers us an understanding of ourselves that constitutes for us a genuine question of decision.”42 According to Bultmann, to be related in the present, the biblical texts – for example, the accounts of miracles and the stories of Christ’s resurrection – have to be dissociated from the mythical “world picture” presupposed in them. Without “demythologization” then, the gospel of the New Testament would not be valid for us living today. Bultmann discovers the theological reason for this claim in the fact that “myth talks about the unworldly as worldly, the gods as human” (NTM 10). Insofar as the myth itself, with its objectifying representations, obscures and undermines “its real intention to talk about a transcendent power to which both we and the world are subject” (ibid.), it contains in itself the motive for criticizing it. The criticism allows one to interpret it so that it reveals “the truth of the Kerygma” (NTM 14), that is, the message of the New Testament. It must be stressed, as Bultmann himself has said, that the demythologizing criticism does not definitely mean “the elimination of the myth” (NTM 9). In the end, Bultmann is concerned less with myth than with the kerygma, that is, the preaching of Revelation as “an occurrence in existence.”43 41. Cf. on this point Grossmann, Heidegger-Lektüren, 27ff.; also Otto Pöggeler, Neue Wege mit Heidegger (Freiburg/Munich: Karl Alber, 1992), 465ff., and Helmuth Vetter, “Hermeneutische Phänomenologie und Dialektische Theologie: Heidegger und Bultmann,” in Metaphysik der praktischen Welt: Perspektiven im Anschluß an Hegel und Heidegger, Andreas Grossmann and Christoph Jamme (eds) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000). 42. Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and other Basic Writings, Schubert Miles Ogden (trans.) (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), 15; hereafter cited as NTM followed by the page number. 43. Rudolf Bultmann, Theologische Enzyklopädie, Eberhard Jüngel and Klaus W. Müller (eds) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1984), 159. Cf. the recent discussion on “demythologization” in Protestant theology in Eberhard Jüngel, “Die Wahrheit des Mythos und die Notwendigkeit der Entmythologisierung,” in Indikative der Gnade – Imperative der Freiheit: Theologische

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The object of theology is God. Yet, God is not an object in an abstract sense, but rather in relation to the human, that is, in the sense in which human existence – in faith – is determined by God. Therefore, Bultmann can also say that the theme of theology is “the existence of the human determined by God.”44 According to this notion, Christian faith is not a phenomenon of general religiousness. Faith is – concretely – “the response to the proclaimed word of God,” which opens up for human existence its distinct, “proper” self-understanding.45 Christian theology has no other task than “to explicate preaching in such a way that the understanding of human existence given in it emerges as an interpretation of human existence in which the human can understand himself.”46 Theology, accordingly, is the “conceptual explication of faithful existence,” a “task imposed on faith for faith.”47 As such, and as Heidegger had said in substantive agreement with Bultmann, theology is a positive science sui generis: a science serving faith. Finally, turning from Catholicism to Protestantism, we come to Paul Tillich.48 Influenced by the existential philosophy of this period, Tillich explicitly discusses the theme of religion or faith in its “existential” meaning. Here existential theology refers to a theology of culture, in which all the varieties of culture are seen as determined by the Unconditional. Tillich frequently uses this expression: the Unconditional is that “which concerns us unconditionally.”49 The basic idea is that the symbols of the Christian message are answers to existential questions that arise from the human situation. In the modern era, the human situation

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

Erörterungen IV (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000); Hans-Heinrich Schmid (ed.), Mythos und Rationalität (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1988); Ingolf U. Dalferth, Jenseits von Mythos und Logos: Die christologische Transformation der Theologie (Freiburg: Herder, 1993); and Walter Schmithals, “Zum Problem der Entmythologisierung bei Rudolf Bultmann,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 92 (1995). On the philosophical, that is, mainly neoKantian, legacy of Bultmann’s concept of demythologization see Roger A. Johnson, The Origins of Demythologizing: Philosophy and Historiography in the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (Brill: Leiden 1974), 38ff. Bultmann, Theologische Enzyklopädie, 159. Ibid., 200. Also, Rudolf Bultmann, “Der Begriff der Offenbarung im Neuen Testament,” in Glauben und Verstehen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1965), vol. 3, 6, 12. Bultmann, Theologische Enzyklopädie, 201. Ibid., 163, 166. Paul Tillich (August 20, 1886–October 22, 1965; born in Starzeddel, Germany; died in Chicago, Illinois, USA) received a doctorate from the University of Breslau in 1911. His influences included Heidegger, Husserl, Kierkegaard, and Schelling. He held appointments at the Universities of Marburg (1924–25), Dresden (1925–29), and Frankfurt (1929–33), Union Theological Seminary (1933–55), Harvard University (1955–62), and the University of Chicago (1962–65). Cf. on this point Werner Schüssler, “Was uns unbedingt angeht”: Studien zur Theologie und Philosophie Paul Tillichs (Münster: LIT-Verlag, 1999); for the broader context see also Hermann Fischer (ed.), Paul Tillich: Studien zu einer Theologie der Moderne (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1989).

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is characterized by the experience of non-being and anxiety: the experience of “the death of God” (Nietzsche). In his work The Courage to Be, Tillich argues that nothing other than this experience is at the basis of the existentialism of the twentieth century: “[Existentialism] is the expression of the anxiety of meaninglessness and of the attempt to take this anxiety into the courage to be as oneself.”50 In this description of anxiety, one can see Heidegger and Kierkegaard in the background. But, the existential expression of the experience inevitably leads to the question of whether and how such abysmal anxiety can be overcome. According to Tillich, we are able to overcome anxiety only by means of a negation of a negation, such “that the acceptance of despair is in itself faith and on the boundary line of the courage to be” (CB 175). In the same way, we are able to speak of Being appropriately and sufficiently only in the manner of a double negation. “Being must be thought of as the negation of the negation of being” (CB 179). As such Being, God appears as “God above God” (CB 182). As he appeared in Jesus as the Christ, God is a God beyond the theistic God. In “absolute faith” and “courage,” the God of theism is in fact transcended, inasmuch as faith integrates doubt directly into itself. “Absolute faith and its consequence, the courage that takes the radical doubt, the doubt about God, into itself, transcends the theistic idea of God” (ibid.). “The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt” (CB 190). The notion that faith is not faith without doubt amounts to what Tillich calls the “dynamics of faith.” Insofar as faith includes courage, it includes doubt about itself, and insofar as it integrates doubt, it proves itself to be faith as faith in the sign of the Cross.51 Tillich would have completely agreed with Heidegger, who explained at the beginning of his Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) that “if such faith does not continually expose itself to the possibility of unfaith, it is not faith but a convenience. It becomes an agreement with oneself to adhere in the future to a doctrine as something that has somehow been handed down.”52 Heidegger continues that such faith is tantamount to “indifference,” “which can then, perhaps even with keen interest, busy itself with everything, with faith as well as with questioning.”53 To speak with Tillich again, it is characteristic of the “Protestant principle” not to yield to such indolence and to recognize that the element of doubt is “sublated” in faith. The certainty of faith does not prove itself in abstract self-relatedness, but rather – in reference to God as the Unconditional or Absolute – in the midst of the insecurity and uncertainty of existence. When faith is conceived in this 50. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952), 139, also 173. Hereafter cited as CB followed by the page number. 51. Kierkegaard’s influence on Tillich’s thinking must be noted here. [*] For a discussion of Kierkegaard, see the essay by Alastair Hannay in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3. 52. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 8. 53. Ibid.

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way as “ultimate concern,” it is “the centered movement of the whole personality toward something of ultimate meaning and significance.”54 It is the expression of finite freedom in the face of the Absolute. In this and no other way, it is “an essential possibility of the human.”55

iii. concluding remarks “Existential theology,” as the name for the various philosophical and theological conceptions that have been outlined in this essay, tends to denote a field of overlapping interests rather than any doctrinal coherence. The traditions from which the approaches stem are disparate, the outlooks on the possibility and shape of – primarily Christian – philosophy or theology advocated by the various thinkers are controversial, and their individual standpoints with regard to what is called “existential philosophy” are contentious. What must be noted, however, is the special significance of the thought of Heidegger, which, whether critically challenged or positively received, has been shown to have influenced all of the thinkers here surveyed. As far as the intellectual history of the past century is concerned, the friendship between the philosopher Heidegger and the theologian Bultmann is doubtless one of the most important chapters in the dialogue between philosophy and theology. Documented in their recently published correspondence,56 this friendship was founded strikingly on the attention to the issue of thought. Perhaps what ultimately calls for thinking is existence (Dasein). But in regard to this issue, the theologian parts ways with the philosopher (or the thinker, as Heidegger might say). For the theologian, what is called “existence” is an issue that cannot be described in neutral terms. As fallen, or more precisely, sinful existence, human existence is at the same time existence determined by God. When it speaks of God, according to Bultmann’s conception, theology therefore must at the same time speak of man. What “existence” means thus refers to the relationship that is constitutive for existence: the relationship to God, who is solely present in his word and who comes toward man. And inasmuch as we have still not found the appropriate way in which to describe, express, and explain existence as the relation to God, existential theology remains relevant. It must remain on the agenda of the dialogue between philosophy and theology – whatever form it may take. 54. Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 106. 55. Ibid., 126. 56. Rudolf Bultmann and Martin Heidegger, Briefwechsel 1925–1975, Andreas Grossmann and Christof Landmesser (eds) (Frankfurt: Klostermann/Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).

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major works Martin Buber Dialogisches Leben: Gesammelte philosophische und pädagogische Schriften. Zürich: Gregor Müller, 1947. Selected English translations: (i) I and Thou [1923], translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Schocken Books, 1970. (ii) Between Man and Man, translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. New York: Macmillan, 1965.

Rudolf Bultmann Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition. Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1921. Published in English as The History of the Synoptic Tradition, translated by John Marsh. San Francisco: Harper, 1976. Glauben und Verstehen: Gesammelte Aufsätze. 4 vols. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1933– 65. Abridged and published in English as Faith and Understanding, edited by Robert W. Funk, translated by Louise Pettibone Smith. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1987. Neues Testament und Mythologie: Das Problem der Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen Verkündigung [1941]. Edited by Eberhard Jüngel. Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1988. Published in English as New Testament and Mythology and other Basic Writings, translated by Schubert Miles Ogden. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984. Das Evangelium des Johannes. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1941. Published in English as The Gospel of John: A Commentary, translated by G. R. Beasley-Murray. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster John Knox Press, 1971. Theologie des Neuen Testaments. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1953. Published in English as Theology of the New Testament, translated by Kendrick Grobel, 2 vols. New York: Scribner, 1951–55. Kerygma und Mythos: Ein theologisches Gespräch. Hamburg-Bergstedt: Herbert Reich, 1960. Published in English as Kerygma and Myth, translated by Reginald Horace Fuller. New York: Harper Torchbook, 1971.

Gabriel Marcel Journal métaphysique. Paris: Gallimard, 1927. Published in English as The Metaphysical Journal, translated by Bernard Wall. Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery, 1952. Être et avoir. Paris: Aubier, 1935. Published in English as Being and Having, translated by Katharine Farrer. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976. Homo viator: Prolégomènes à une métaphysique de l’espérance. Paris: Aubier, 1944. Published in English as Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysics of Hope, translated by Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962. L’Homme problematique. Paris: Aubier, 1955. Published in English as Problematic Man, translated by Brian Thompson. New York: Herder & Herder, 1967. Le Mystère de l’être. Volumes 1 et 2. Paris: Aubier, 1951. Published in English as: (i) The Mystery of Being, Volume 1: Reflection and Mystery, translated by G. S. Fraser. London: Harvill Press, 1951; (ii) The Mystery of Being, Volume 2: Faith and Reality, translated by René Hague. London: Harvill Press, 1951. Pour une sagesse tragique. Paris: Plon, 1968. Published in English as Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, translated by Stephen Jolin and Peter McCormick. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

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Jacques Maritain Saint Thomas and the Problem of Evil. Translated by Mrs. Gordon Andison. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1942. Humanisme intégral: Problèmes temporels et spirituels d’une nouvelle chrétienté. Paris: Aubier, 1947. Published in English as Integral Humanism: Temporal and Spiritual Problems of a New Christendom, translated by Joseph W. Evans. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968. La personne et le bien commun. Paris: Desclée, De Brouwer et Cie, 1947. Published in English as The Person and the Common Good, translated by John J. Fitzgerald. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.

Emmanuel Mounier Le Personnalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950. Published in English as Personalism, translated by Philip Maret. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1952.

Edith Stein Zum Problem der Einfühlung. Halle: Buchdrucheri des Waisenhauses, 1917. Published in English as On the Problem of Empathy, translated by Waltraut Stein. The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 3. Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1989. Endliches und ewiges Sein. Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins [1935–36]. Edith Steins Werke, vol. II. Freiburg: Herder, 1962. Published in English as Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being, translated by Kurt F. Reinhardt. Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2002. Welt und Person: Beitrag zum christlichen Wahrheitsstreben. Edith Steins Werke, vol. VI. Freiburg: Herder, 1962. Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1970. Published in English as Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. 7, translated by Marianne Sawicki and Mary Catherine Baseheart. Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2000.

Paul Tillich The Protestant Era. Edited by James Luther Adams. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1948. The Courage to Be. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952. The Dynamics of Faith. New York: Harper & Row, 1957. Systematic Theology, Three Volumes in One. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 1967.

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9 religion and ethics Felix Ó Murchadha

Religion and ethics in mid-twentieth-century Europe appeared in terms of the dominant contemporary ideologies, as outdated, indeed atavistic phenomena.1 Science and politics, often in strange and atrocious combinations, appeared to supersede religion and ethics in molding the fate of humanity. The goals of redemption and salvation, consolation and meaning, had been usurped by competing ideologies, those of Nazism, Marxism, and liberal capitalism, among others. These ideologies shared a common pretension to scientificality and an understanding of the ends (or non-ends) of humankind in terms of political and historically determinate solutions. In such terms religion and ethics – if they had any real value – were matters of the private sphere alone. Yet, and in part in response to this situation, this same period witnessed a renewal of intellectual traditions within Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism coupled with an increasingly insistent emphasis on the transcendent – conceived in ethicoreligious terms – in opposition to the immanent spheres of technological science and politics. The revitalization of the intellectual traditions of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism was not only responding to the contemporary developments of the time, but was also and concurrently reacting against the inheritance of the nineteenth century within those denominations. The struggle with modernity in the manner of its decentering of God and religion from the mainstream of science, politics, art, and daily life generally – a struggle that arguably can be traced to the end of wars of religion in the mid-seventeenth century and the concurrent rise of the New Science – had generated many theological 1. This essay is dedicated to my late father Aibhistín Ó Murchadha, the theologian in the family.

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responses: liberal Protestant theology, historical theology, modernism, and, on the other side, neo-Thomism. These responses ran many risks: those of anthropocentrism, which made theology vulnerable to a Feuerbachian-type critique; of a radical Pietistic decoupling of belief from knowledge; of an obscurantist rejection of contemporary science and ideas (best exemplified perhaps in the Papal Encyclical Syllabus of Errors [1864]). These issues became all the more pressing in the aftermath of the First World War. The shattering of optimism in human progress called liberal theology into question, while the neo-Thomist return not so much to Aquinas as to a scholastic Thomism was itself unconvincing, both philosophically and theologically. Within that situation, certain key thinkers emerged whose responses to these issues have had profound consequences for later thought. Indeed, the theological or religious turn in phenomenology in many ways bears the philosophical fruit of these trends, but already theologically by the middle of the century, a 180 degree shift (Karl Barth) from the inheritance of the nineteenth century had been effected. Certain key preoccupations can be discerned in this period, which – if we look at the debates surrounding the so-called theological turn in recent French, and more recently, North American phenomenology2 – have in many respects a contemporary ring. This essay will be divided into four sections dealing with some of these key issues. The first question explored is that of the relation of God to humanity, a relation understood increasingly in this period on the basis of a robust account of revelation as articulated in different ways by Franz Rosenzweig and Karl Barth. From Gabriel Marcel onward, the importance of the Incarnation in any such understanding of revelation was fundamental, and in this motivated profound and groundbreaking analyses of the human body and materiality generally. The human body was understood by Marcel and by Emmanuel Mounier as an expression of the person, and indeed religious and ethical thought of this period is incomprehensible without some understanding of what Mounier called the “paradox of personal existence”. Underlying many of these issues are reflections on the difference between the visible world of nature and society and the invisible or the supernatural. This difference was conceptualized in terms of grace, but through a rethinking of grace especially in the work of Henri de Lubac.

2. Cf. Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). For a representative recent collection on the debate in the English- (as well as French-) speaking world see Peter Candler and Conor Cunningham (eds), Transcendence and Phenomenology (London: SCM Press, 2007).

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i. relation of god and humanity As in many spheres, in theology and philosophy one can end the nineteenth century not in 1901, but in 1914. The First World War undermined for the intellectual elites of the day – in Germany, but also well beyond that country – the belief of the previous century in “modern man.” The human being and human capacities seemed a less and less suitable model for understanding the world or the divine. Ludwig Feuerbach had long before shown the logical conclusion of a theology that emphasized the humanity of God above all else; namely, that God be reduced to nothing more than a projection of humanity.3 But, with the exception of Kierkegaard (who remained theologically and indeed philosophically largely uninfluential until the interwar years), no other significant voice was raised against what could be called the domestication of the divine, that is, the understanding of the divine in the mirror of the human. It was only with the breaking asunder of that modern image of the human – prophesied by Nietzsche, but only realized with the First World War and the realities of industrialization – that theology began to free itself from the model of the human.4 If the human and its capacities no longer ground the understanding of the divine, then nor can the highest human capacity – science – arbitrate the understanding of the divine. What we see in the immediate aftermath of the First World War is the growing emphasis on the limits and indeed the violence of the pretensions of human knowledge. Theologically the correlate to such an emphasis is a radicalization of the notion of revelation and in turn the re-evaluation of the place of the miraculous in religious understanding. Such a re-evaluation and radicalization we see in two central figures of the 1920s: Barth and Rosenzweig.5 3. See Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, George Eliot (trans.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1957). [*] For a discussion of Feuerbach, see the essay by William Clare Roberts in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 2. 4. As Barth put it looking back in the mid-1960s: “Modern man can no longer impress us, as he impressed them [nineteenth-century theologians], in the light of his performances in this century” (“Evangelical Theology in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Humanity of God, John Newton Thomas and Thomas Wieser [trans.] [London: Fontana, 1960], 16). 5. Karl Barth (May 10, 1886–December 10, 1968; born and died in Basel, Switzerland) was educated at the Universities of Bern, Berlin, Tübingen, and Marburg (1904–1908). His influences included Anselm, Kierkegaard, and Schleiermacher, and he held appointments at the Universities of Göttingen (1921–25), Münster (1925–30), and Bonn (1930–35). Franz Rosenzweig (December 25, 1886–December 10, 1929; born in Kassel, Germany; died in Frankfurt) studied medicine at the Universities of Göttingen and Munich, and history and philosophy at the Universities of Berlin and Freiburg, receiving a doctorate from Freiburg in 1912. His influences included Buber, Cohen, and Hegel, and he founded the House of Jewish Learning, Frankfurt (1920). Mention must be made in this context also of Rudolf Otto, whose book The Idea of the Holy (originally published in 1917) was, along with Barth’s Commentary on the Epistle to the

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What is most striking about both of these figures, and that which marks in them a radical break with what went before, is the centrality of miracle for both. For Rosenzweig and Barth, revelation can only be understood as miraculous. In this respect, they both reject any attempt at rationalization of revelation. Rosenzweig points out that for ancient humanity “miracle” did not connote a break with the natural order but rather its confirmation.6 Miracles were signs, signs of divine providence. Crucial to miracles was the testimony of witnesses. The decline of belief in miracles corresponds to what he terms the “third Enlightenment,” that based in the critique of experience: the “historical Enlightenment.” This critique of experience rendered testimony itself suspect and relative to historical contingency. In the face of such critique two possibilities emerged: pietistic belief virtually unconnected to the historical objectivity of miracles, and rationalistic theology, which in embarrassment tries to rid itself of any dependence on the verity of miracles. For Rosenzweig, though, both mark a betrayal of the very notion of revelation, without which theology (and he thinks also philosophy) is not possible. Revelation is fundamental because it is the only bridge from subjectivity to objectivity, from the Weltanschauung of the philosopher to the “truth [which] is and remains the only soil in which truthfulness of experience can grow” (SR 107). Revelation, then, is a disclosing of truth, truth of the ultimate unity of what is: “In the authentic idea of revelation the three actual elements of the all – God, world, man – emerge from themselves, belong to one another and meet one another” (SR 115). It is difficult not to hear this echoed in Heidegger’s later notion of the fourfold.7 But here what Rosenzweig is concerned with is the relation of revelation to creation. For Rosenzweig, revelation is not creation, but is foreseen in creation and as such regains the authentic Romans (originally published in 1923), one of the two most influential works in theology in the interwar years. Otto’s account of the numinous parallels some of the themes that I will be exploring in Rosenzweig and Barth. I do not discuss him here partly for reasons of space, partly also because Otto does not mark the same break with nineteenth-century theology as do both Barth and Rosenzweig, as he develops an account of religion on the basis of Schleiermacher (for all the critical distance he takes from him) with certain neo-Kantian resonances. Nonetheless, Otto’s emphasis on the “wholly other” can quite fruitfully be brought into dialogue with the work of Barth. Barth himself wrote on reading The Idea of the Holy of his “‘considerable joy’ because, though Otto was very ‘psychologically orientated,’ he did point ‘beyond the boundaries to the moment of the numinous,’ to the ‘divine in God.’” Quoted in G. C. Berkouwer, A Half Century of Theology: Movements and Motives, Lewis Smedes (trans.) (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977), 47. 6. Cf. Franz Rosenzweig: “For the consciousness of earlier humanity miracle was based on its having been predicted, not on its deviation from the course of nature as this had previously been fixed by law” (The Star of Redemption, William Hallo [trans.] [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971], 94). The Star of Redemption is hereafter cited as SR followed by the page number. 7. Cf. Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter (trans.) (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 178–9.

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character of revelation: that of becoming wholly and solely the fulfillment of the promise made in creation.8 The difference between creation and revelation lies in language. “The language of revelation speaks” (SR 186),9 it addresses, it names. The name is just as essential as the thing, but it cannot be derived from the thing, even though “the thing is the presupposition and mute prediction of its name” (SR 188). From things alone, from the mere fact of creation, it is impossible to reach God. God is accessible only in terms of himself, as a showing of himself, that is, in revelation. In revelation the relation of God and world opens up into a threefold relation of God, world, and human. Such revelation is the showing itself of love. “Love cannot be ‘purely human.’ It must speak … and by speaking love already becomes ‘super-human,’ for the sensuality of the word is brimful with its divine super-sense” (SR 201). Contemporaneous with Rosenzweig, Barth also affirmed the miraculous and did so in the name of revelation.10 Similar to Rosenzweig, Barth is countering the liberal theological approach of effectively subordinating theology methodologically to science. For Barth – to use his image – theology in the nineteenth century opened its windows to that which does not belong in the house of theology and allowed it to stay.11 Nonetheless, he as much as the theologians of the previous century responded to the Kantian critique that seemed to deny to reason any claims on the divine. Kant’s arguments as to the speculative nature of any rational account of the existence or being of God are accepted by Barth. But while, for liberal theology, this led to concentration on the human reality of religious feeling and practice, for Barth the true consequence to be drawn is the distance between God and humanity. This distance, which in his early work Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, was absolute, is modified in the later work by an increasing emphasis on Christology and the phenomenon of revelation. Theology, if it has a future at all in the modern world, could have that future only through resisting any attempt to reduce the divine to the human. Christian scripture, in that context, far from being a text reducible to scientific, specifically historical, methods, bears testimony to a life, which – if properly understood – gives true insight into the human being itself. Barth defines revelation as

8. “Creation is the prophecy which is only confirmed in the miraculous sign of revelation” (SR 134). 9. The passage continues: “While the language of revelation addresses, the language of creation delineates, re-counts, de-termines.” 10. Rosenzweig was highly critical of the early Barth – the only Barth he knew – for what he saw as the overemphasis in Barth of the distance between God and humanity. Barth in his later work greatly modified this emphasis and came to see it as an overreaction to the then dominant liberal theology. Cf. Rosenzweig’s letter to Buber December 1922 in Gesammelte Schriften (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), vol. 1.2, 875. 11. Barth, “Evangelical Theology in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Humanity of God, 18–19.

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God’s sovereign action. In other words, revelation cannot be understood from the human sphere, but must rather be understood as that received, as that for which no prestructure exists. The coming to us of the truth of and about God is revelation. Human beings know God only through his self-revelation. But this self-revelation of God is not simply a concern of theo-logy – a discourse about God. Christian theology, Barth tells us, is really “The-anthropology.”12 In other words, theology’s real concern is not God as such but the relationship of God and human. In this contention, Barth does not differ greatly from the liberal theologians of the previous century. Where he does differ, however, is both in the emphasis he places on the divine side of that relation and the consequences he draws from this for the understanding of the human: “It is man as he is revealed in the light of revelation and only that man who can be seriously treated theologically.”13 Anthropology, in his view, is based on theology or, more specifically, on Christology. For Barth, Jesus of Nazareth, understood in Christianity as the Christ, is not to be understood as human by extrapolation from what we know nontheologically about human beings, but rather human beings can only be understood starting from the person of Jesus Christ. The fundamental here is the issue of sin. Jesus Christ being without sin is not less human but actually more human than any other human being. This is so because the true nature of human beings is that created by God and “what God knows of man beyond his sin … is the real creaturely nature of man.”14 In other words, human beings as we know them are not pure expressions of their nature. The nature of human beings that we see is a fallen nature, one that has turned away from its own true source of being in God. If, then, we are to seek a human being that truly expresses its own nature, we need to find a being “like us in all things but sin.” This being we find in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth, Barth says, is man as God willed and created him. This again carries methodological implications. If we want to discover the nature of Jesus Christ, we can listen to no other “logos of supposed humanity,” but only to him. But this means that in understanding ourselves we can look to nowhere else: “Our self-knowledge can only be an act of discipleship” (CDIII.2 53). This act of discipleship, this turning toward an other in self-knowledge, actually reflects the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth: “Jesus cannot speak ‘of himself ’ … Never in any event … does He seek or do His own will” (CDIII.2 63). Rather, Jesus of Nazareth always refers himself to the one who sent him. He is always one of two. Jesus of Nazareth’s participation in the Godhead is the basis of his humanity. What this means is that the 12. Ibid., 9. 13. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (eds), G. T. Thomson et al. (trans.) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956–1977), I.2, 296. 14. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III.2, 38; hereafter cited as CDIII.2 followed by the page number.

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human being is the being that is essentially for God and as such surpasses all other creatures. For this reason Barth rejects – much like Heidegger – the definition of the human being as a rational animal. Such a definition goes from the general to the particular and is essentially naturalistic for this reason. But the most universal and decisive feature of human reality is the most particular about a person; namely, her existence in a history determined by God’s attitude toward her (CDIII.2 78). Only when we ask this question, when we ignore every question about human nature and ask about human existence, do we really seek the human as subject and not alone as object. But in reaching the human as subject we are nonetheless concerned with ontology, with the ontological basis of the human. Ontologically, Barth is claiming, the human is turned toward God. The human is essentially turned away from herself toward others, toward the wholly other. In that case sin is an “ontological impossibility” for the human (CDIII.2 136).15 If the human denies God, she denies herself. Sin is first and foremost ontological rather than ethical: it is an affirmation of the nothingness, which God as creator has negated. It is the ultimate nihilism as it negates not only human being but all creation. Fundamentally such nihilism arises out of a selfassertion that paradoxically is a negation of the self. This can be seen, for Barth, in the mirror of Christ: here we see the human not as the presupposition of his own being, not as self-sufficient, but as radically other directed. God in his Word is the presupposition of Christ. This means that Jesus of Nazareth is not to be understood substantially, as a timeless being. Rather, “Jesus exists only in his history” (CDIII.2 160). By history, here Barth understands something very specific – history is not the working out of that which is already intrinsic in a being, but rather the: history of a being begins, continues and is completed, when something other than itself and transcending its own nature encounters it, approaches it and determines its being in the nature proper to it, so that it is compelled and enabled to transcend itself in response and in relation to this new factor. The history of a being occurs when it is caught up in this movement, change and relation, when its circular movement is broken from without by a movement towards it and the corresponding movement from it, when it is transcended from without so that it must and can transcend itself outwards. (CDIII.2 158)

15. In his early work, Barth rather saw sin as a contradiction; see Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, John Drury (trans.) (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 142–3.

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Such a concept of “being as history” is, for Barth, “the existence of the man Jesus” (CDIII.2 159). Without Jesus of Nazareth, there is no history in the strict sense in which Barth is using it. In effect, what is at issue here is the relation of creator and creature: history is as history through the Incarnation, through which the creator becomes creature and the creature creator in Jesus Christ. This is the radically new event of the Incarnation, which can be understood only as history, not in terms of any ahistorical ontology. This is so because it rests on an identity between creator and creature in Jesus of Nazareth, which is not a simple identity but a relation of transcendence and response. In such a relation, history in the emphatic sense begins. History is inaugurated in transcendence. But the self-transcendence that occurs would be impossible in and of itself. As Barth makes clear, there is no way from human self-awareness to God. The only transcendence here possible is that of response. The initiating event had to come from elsewhere, from the wholly other, from God. But this elsewhere is also here, close by, because “in Jesus Christ there is no isolation of man from God or God from man.”16 Furthermore: “His free affirmation of man, His free concern for him, His free substitution for him, this is God’s humanity.”17

ii. incarnation and history The question of history addresses one of the key concerns of modern thought. With the dethronement of the ideal of modern man, the understanding of history as progress also became, for both religious and secular thinkers, an issue of increasingly anxious concern. Fundamental to such concerns is the place of material progress in human history, a concern related closely to the question of technology. While both Barth and Rosenzweig emphasized the incapacity of humanity to reach the divine, hence the need for revelation, arguably the twentieth century saw the fulfillment of the technological promise of almost unlimited development of the human capacity to act on the world, and concurrently an increased emphasis on the materiality of the world and indeed of the human being itself. In France, the work of Marcel and Mounier18 was important in somewhat contrasting ways in reflecting these developments in broadly Christian terms. They did so by problematizing the mode of relation to the

16. Barth, “The Humanity of God,” in The Humanity of God, 43. 17. Ibid., 48. *18. For biographical information and major works for Marcel and Mounier, see the essay by Andreas Grossmann in this volume.

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material world, namely, that of incorporation, of embodied being, in terms of a “higher” destiny for both than simple additive increase in material goods. Paul Ricoeur credits Marcel with having opened up “the way for a philosophy of the lived body [corps proper] and given to philosophy the means of thinking the incarnation”19 through his critique of sensation as message and the body as instrument. Fundamental to this achievement was Marcel’s distinction between being and having, in terms of which the body holds a particularly ambiguous position: it seems to be something we have yet, unlike other things we have, we cannot dispose of it. The body is the condition of possibility both of our being and of our having. The relation of having is itself an ambiguous one in the sense that as a relation of possession it leaves us open to being “devoured by what we possess.” As Marcel puts it, “It seems to be the essence of my body or of my instruments insofar as I treat them as possessions, that they should tend to suppress me, I [moi] who possesses them.”20 This, Marcel suggests, is all the more evident where I am inactive, where I merely possess inertly my inert possession. When, however, I work on them creatively – Marcel gives the examples of the garden for the gardener, the farm for the farmer, the piano or violin for the musician, the laboratory for the scientist – then the possibility exists of transmuting or sublimating the relation of having into one of being (ibid., 180). In such cases the duality of possessing and possessed is abolished in a “living reality” (realité vivante) (ibid.). Such living reality is, for Marcel, always incarnate. The relation to “my body” is neither one of pure having or of pure being. As he puts it: “to be incarnated is to appear to oneself as body, as this particular body, without being identified with it nor distinguished from it.”21 This peculiar situation, which is fundamental to my being in the world, is nonrelational: there is no relation between self and body because relations exist only between objects. Incarnate being exists and existence Marcel understands as “participation.” Participation is not to be understood as relation, because such an understanding would involve an objectification of participation and as such its denial. The key notion here is that of sensation: sensation cannot be understood relationally in terms of message and translation as is routinely done. Indeed, any notion of translation is out of place here: “sensation is immediate, the basis of all interpretation and communication, hence not itself an interpretation or communication” (CF 25). This immediacy, however, gets lost in action: action is 19. Ricoeur, in Gabriel Marcel, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, Stephen Jolin and Peter McCormick (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 222, translation modified. This is part of a conversation between Ricoeur and Marcel reproduced in Tragic Wisdom and Beyond. 20. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, Katharine Farrer (trans.) (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1976), 179, translation modified. 21. Gabriel Marcel, “Incarnate Being,” in Creative Fidelity, Robert Rosthal (trans.) (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Co., 1964), 20; hereafter cited as CF followed by the page number.

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directed toward objects and cannot help but understand sensations as messages from such objects “without bothering about the absurdity of describing them in this manner” (ibid.). Sensation is reception, but what is it to receive? To receive, Marcel understands in terms of receiving another person – admitting or welcoming “an outsider into one’s home” (CF 27). Being at home is not a relation of objects, but rather a feeling, indeed a mysterious feeling: “I cannot refer to my feeling at home unless I grant or imply that the self does or can seem to itself to impregnate its environment with its own quality, thereby recognizing itself in its surroundings and entering into an intimate relationship with it” (ibid.). Thus, in exploring sensation Marcel comes unexpectedly to the phenomenon of hospitality.22 As a welcoming into one’s home, hospitality is a welcoming into that region in which the self seems to itself to impregnate its own quality. In this sense, to receive is to invite the stranger into participation with that region impregnated with those qualities. Once receptivity is understood in terms of hospitality, it does not “fill up a void with an alien presence but [makes] the other person participate in a certain plenitude” (CF 28). Marcel concludes from this analysis that since Aristotle feeling has falsely been identified with passivity. Feeling rather has an active element: taking oneself up or opening oneself up to … (CF 29). It is this active element that turns feeling into creativity. A key notion, for Marcel, here is that of admiration. Commenting on a contemporary dramatist who declared admiration for him to be a humiliating state, Marcel states in “Belonging and Disposability” that this is the “same as to treat the subject as a power existing for itself and taking itself as a center” (CF 49). This is the result of a free choice to resist participation, resist the feeling of receptivity. But, conversely, to affirm admiration to be “an exalted state is to start from the inverse notion that the proper function of the subject is to emerge from itself and realize itself primarily in the gift of oneself ” (ibid.). This gift of oneself is what Marcel understands as creativity: not a selfexpression, but rather a becoming other in expression. In this sense creativity is responsive. Response is “the wholly inner reaction evoked by an appeal” (CF 51). The appeal of the other does not coerce us but rather “mysteriously restores 22. In reading Marcel and Mounier, one finds some themes, such as hospitality, that have emerged more recently in French thought. It is perhaps indicative of the relative neglect of Marcel’s (and Mounier’s) work in France today that (as far as I am aware) no reference is made to him in the work on hospitality by Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Chrétien, or Jean-Luc Marion. For their respective accounts of hospitality see Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, Rachel Bowlby (trans.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’Arche de la parole (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), and Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness, Jeffrey L. Kosky (trans.) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

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us to ourselves” (ibid.). The creative individual responds freely to this appeal, this call. The work that is to be accomplished by his creative act is the “embodiment of his vocation, and that vocation is related to others and to the world. It is his way of giving himself ” (CF 53). This sacrifice Marcel understands as being characteristic of the saint (CF 56). I will return to vocation and the figure of the saint in the next section, but for the moment I want to relate this discussion to the distinction between problem and mystery in Marcel in the context of his account of technology and progress. In “An Outline of a Concrete Philosophy,” Marcel himself states the distinction between the mysterious and the problematic quite succinctly as follows: “A problem is something which one runs up against, which bars the way … A mystery, however, is something in which I find myself involved” (CF 68). That which bars the way is something that is set before me as a problem to be solved. This Marcel tends to understand along the model of the machine: a machine breaks down, this malfunction can be examined from the outside, and certain techniques can be employed to get it running again. The problematized finds its place in an order, which is an order for me, in the end an extension of my own body. The mysterious, on the other hand, is something I find myself in; it can never become a problem for me, because it is not for me at all. Rather, I experience it as that which transcends and envelops me. The mysterious cannot even strictly speaking be acknowledged, but only greeted (CF 69). What this points to is a decentering of the subject, something at the core of the personalist movement of which Marcel can be considered part. While individualism aims to center the person on himself, personalism aims to decenter him, to open up new perspectives.23 At the heart of such a decentered person is generosity. “Personal being is generosity,” according to Mounier.24 In other words, the personal being is one that does not close itself down according to the model of things, but opens itself up to the other. As with Marcel and Barth, for Mounier the model of such openness to others is to be found in Jesus Christ, and more specifically in the Incarnation. Furthermore, again in line with their thinking, for Mounier the Incarnation places history at the heart of thought: “Christianity was to graft human history into the very heart of divine life, through the mediation of Christ incarnate.”25 But, while Marcel tends to dichotomize problem and mystery, thereby separating the history of salvation from secular history, Mounier begins with the human being as maker: “the nature of man is artifice.”26 23. Cf. Emmanuel Mounier, “What is Personalism?,” in Be Not Afraid: A Denunciation of Despair, Cynthia Rowland (trans.) (London: Rockcliff, 1951), 176–8. 24. Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, Philip Mairet (trans.) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), 67; hereafter cited as PER followed by the page number. 25. Mounier, “Christianity and the Idea of Progress,” in Be Not Afraid, 75. 26. Mounier, “In an Hour of Apocalypse,” in Be Not Afraid, 19.

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The creative potential of the human being is not to be found only in art, poetry, and metaphysics, as Marcel seems to imply, but in the banality of the instrumental world. For the Christian, then, no dichotomies are possible, not even one between the spirit and technology. In this respect Mounier quotes Bergson against Marcel in affirming the inner dialectic of machine and mysticism, problem and mystery.27 For Mounier, technology is an extension of the body and as such cannot be divorced from the Christian dialectic of body and spirit, implicit in the doctrines of the Incarnation and Resurrection. The exploitation of nature Mounier understands in terms of this dialectic of matter and consciousness as an opening up of the highest possibilities of humanity. But this is not to be understood as a possession of nature, but rather as its humanization rooted in the relation of naming affirmed in Genesis (PER 13). “To deny nature as given [in order] to affirm it as work [œuvre],” he says (PER 12). As he puts it further, “Nature is not the property of the human being, but a sort of natural sacrament which contributes to the turning towards God, as he contributes himself to the orientating of nature to God.”28 In this respect, Mounier makes an anti-Jansenist affirmation of the world.29 Quoting St. Paul, he states that the Christian must be in the world as if not of the world, but he stresses the first part of the sentence, namely being in the world.30 Politically this found expression in his Christian socialism; but more fundamentally it meant an understanding of the relation of transcendence and immanence as one of mixture in which all dichotomies are reduced neither to monistic materialism or spiritualism (Mounier affirms clearly that personalism is not spiritualism [PER 10]), nor to any dualism, but rather to the body as the expression of personal being. Understood in this way, Christianity, far from being an obstacle to progress, is its richest expression. Progress, as Mounier understands it, cannot be nonteleological: progress is always toward something, hence the idea of indeterminate progress is a contradictio in adiecto. It is only in terms of a history of salvation that progress makes sense. This salvation, however, needs to be understood not in individual, but rather in collective, or even cosmic, terms (PER 64). Salvation is being understood here in terms of the “glory of God,” which marks the end of

27. Mounier, “Christianity and the Idea of Progress,” in Be Not Afraid, 99. 28. “La nature n’est pas la propriété de l’homme, mais une sort de sacrement naturel qui contribue à le tourner vers Dieu, comme il contribue, lui, à orienter la nature à Dieu” (Emmanuel Mounier, L’Engagement de la foi [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968], 20). 29. Jansenism was a movement within the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that was particularly strong in France. In its heyday, it was associated with the Port Royal philosophers and theologians such as Arnaud and Pascal. Jansenism stressed human depravity and the need for grace in order to reach salvation. Jansenist thinking remained strong in France well into the eighteenth century. 30. Mounier, L’Engagement de la foi, 94.

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history as the final reconstituted unity of God, history, and the human race. “The idea of certain solidarity between the fate of the universe and the destiny of man was already familiar to the Fathers of the Church.”31 The problem of modernity is not so much its belief in progress, but in its misconception of the nature of progress. Such a misconception poses serious dangers, which were, for Mounier, particularly apparent with the rise of fascism. The key term in his analysis of this danger was “person.”

iii. the “paradox of personal existence” “[B]eing a person in view of the present threat to man from the material world and its organization”32 was the major focus of personalist philosophy from Scheler through Mounier and beyond. The place of the person was at the forefront of the movement in France that led to the founding of the periodical Esprit.33 We need first of all to become clear on this very concept of “person.” Mounier, along with Marcel and later Ricoeur and Levinas, distinguished person from self in the sense of the self-same. In Mounier’s terms, such a distinction can best be understood in relation to the “paradox of personal existence.” The “paradox of personal existence” Mounier understands as the fact that being a person is the most human form of existence but is one that must be incessantly conquered (PER xix). This paradox is not accidental but essential to personhood, as a person is a free and creative existence. For this reason, unlike objects, persons cannot be defined.34 For Mounier, a classic philosophical mistake is to understand persons in terms of objects. This mistake he finds in Hegel, whose system he conceives as an imperialism of the impersonal order (PER xxiv). The impersonal order is that of objects, systems, and forseeability. Such an order fails to understand movement. For Mounier, under the influence of Bergson, movement is that which can neither be quantified nor predicted. Fundamentally, movement is not locomotion, but rather the movement of personalization of the person (PER 19). This movement lies at the core of the paradox of personal existence: the person is never manifest in the totality of its 31. Mounier, “Christianity and the Idea of Progress,” in Be Not Afraid, 79. 32. Bernhard Häring, “Personalism and Existentialism,” in The Christian Existentialist (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 10. 33. On the periodical Esprit and Mounier’s part in it, see John Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left 1930–1950 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 36–70. 34. In this respect Mounier echoes Sartre’s slogan of “existence precedes essence,” but in fact his affirmation of the person has more in common with Rosenzweig’s statement that the distinctiveness of a man is not accidental, but his essence. Cf. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 64.

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existence; rather the in itself – en soi – of the person is what Mounier calls the secret (PER 35–6). At the core of the person is that which is secreted, that which does not appear, which remains foreign to the world. The person is in this sense not in the order of being at all. Rather, the “person is more a presence than a being, an active presence without basis [sans fond]” (PER 35). Such personal existence we discover not through an analysis of objects in the world, but rather by recollection or meditation (recueillement), which is a relation to itself beyond the distractions of the world. Such meditation is the coming to understanding of the singular presence of the person, which I can only know from within. The person’s relation to the world derives from this inner knowledge and is first manifest in the sense of modesty. Mounier understands modesty as the sentiment of the person that his manifest existence is not to be taken as his total existence. In this sense, physical modesty is not rooted in any sense of the impurity of the body, but rather in the person’s sense that he – as an incarnate being – is infinitely more than his body as perceived and seen (PER 35–6). Much of this account has commonalities with the analysis we find in Sartre. One is reminded specifically of Sartre’s account of nudity and gracefulness in Being and Nothingness.35 The distinction between person and object reminds us also of the Sartrean dichotomy of pour soi and en soi. However, the implications that Mounier derives from this are quite different and these can be seen if we look at his accounts of freedom and of vocation. “Freedom is not welded [rivée] to a personal being as a condemnation, it is offered to him as a gift” (PER 58, translation modified).36 The reference to Sartre here is clear: for Mounier, freedom is not the negating power to nihilate, but rather is the gift of the capacity to value. Mounier recognizes in nature two forms of freedom: that of indifference and that of the indetermination (PER 54–5). The former is a type of freedom that human beings can never fully realize. The latter, which is present at the molecular level, is not genuine freedom but does lay the precondition of freedom in that it opens up domains of choice. Only the person is, however, truly free and that freedom is fundamental to the inner movement that is characteristic of the person. This freedom is not a freedom of choice in the Sartrean sense. Mounier furthers Bergson’s insight into the abstract nature of choice by emphasizing the centrality of value to freedom. My freedom begins with the sense of the freedom of the other. Faced with that freedom, I am faced not with an object but with a value, or rather with the affirmation of value. I discover my freedom in my response to that affirmation of value. The free human being in 35. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Hazel E. Barnes (trans.) (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 400–401. 36. “La liberté n’est pas rivée à l’être personnel comme une condemnation elle lui proposée comme un don.”

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that sense is the responsible human being (PER 64).37 Freedom is in the encountering of that which is other to me. It begins with that encounter with being and is manifest in an affirmation of being. Against Sartre, Mounier claims that only thus can one sensibly speak of being in a situation: for Sartre, nothing is ever encountered, because freedom as he conceives it “creates the obstacle itself, and never comes against ultimate limits.”38 As such, for Mounier, “it is ultimately useless to talk about the notion of situation if the concept of encounter with it is eliminated.”39 Understood as response to an encounter with being, freedom, Mounier affirms, is always situated. Its situatedness is not simply negative, in the sense of being a limitation to freedom: freedom is liberation, it involves a movement toward the other – a movement of personalization of the world and of myself. In that sense freedom does not isolate, it rather unites, indeed it is “religion” and “devotion” in the original sense of those words (ibid.). Freedom is, in this sense, responsibility toward another and toward oneself. Both these senses of responsibility are captured by the notion of vocation. For all the emphasis on the secrecy and inner life of the person, Mounier is clear that the person as incarnate being is both inner and outer. As he puts it: “the person is an inside which has need of the outside” (PER 44). This outer movement Mounier understands as desire. In her desire the person discovers her vocation. Such vocation is not something solitary; rather, it truly expresses freedom as a permanent devotion. It is permanent devotion to what Mounier calls three “united societies” (society being understood as being in relation to specific kinds of being, of which relations with fellow humans only constitute one): under her, the society of matter; beside her, the society of fellow human beings; and above her, the totality of spirit.40 The singularity of each person consists in the manner in which she responds to each of these calls, the manner in which in the freedom of her response she values matter, the mixture of matter and spirit, and spirit. These calls are, for Mounier, calls to love as devotion. Such love finds its exemplar in God, specifically in the creative acts of God. Creatio ex nihilo, for Mounier, expresses a supreme being characterized by an infinite capacity for singular acts of love.41 Such creative acts are free as loving, not as violent, affirmations of the self. Above all, the singularity of love is reflected in vocation, which is never generalizable. At the same time, vocation, like love, is 37. There are parallels here with Marcel. To quote again from Ricoeur’s conversation with Marcel, he says to Marcel: “For you, the freedom of response goes beyond the freedom of choice” (Tragic Wisdom and Beyond, 241). 38. Emmanuel Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies: An Introduction, Eric Blow (trans.) (London: Rockliff, 1948), 103. 39. Ibid., 104. 40. Mounier, L’Engagement de la foi, 17. 41. Ibid., 9.

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unifying. Indeed, for Mounier, the renouncing of one of the threefold vocations toward the societies mentioned above is materialism. “Materialism” is not, in this understanding, a reduction of reality to matter, but rather the displacing of matter from its proper place in reality. The human vocation is to devote oneself to matter as that which expresses divinity, creation. This expression begins with the body itself. This Mounier terms “Christian extremism,” an extremism of the Incarnation: “it always chooses in the real and for the real.”42 Vocation is found at its ultimate in the saint. The saint lives the threefold call of devotion and does so in the singularity of his own being. The saint takes his exemplar in Christ, not in the world. This requires an openness to the secrecy of the heart in which Mounier affirms, quoting St. Paul, God reveals his son in me.43

iv. the visible and invisible In the figure of the saint is expressed one of the key problems of religion in twentieth century thought, namely the relation of religion – or more specifically, in terms of Europe, the relation of Christianity and Judaism – to the world, or more specifically the modern world. Although this issue had institutional, political, and communicative aspects, it concerned in the first instance the deeply “metaphysical” problem of the relation of the visible to the invisible, something manifest within the churches themselves. Already Aquinas pointed out that the term “church” had an equivocal meaning: both the physical building (and by extension the visible institutions) and the spiritual people of God on their (spiritual) journey. In the wake of the liberal theology of the nineteenth century (and to a lesser extent the modernist movement in the Roman Catholic Church), a strong reaction against the perceived reduction of the invisible to the visible is evident in religious and theological thinking in Germany and France. We have already discussed this in terms of Rosenzweig’s and Barth’s accounts of revelation. According to the latter, the fatal move in eighteenth-century theology occurred in the work of Johann Franz Buddeus,44 for whom religion was not

42. Ibid. 24. 43. Ibid., 202. See Galatians 1.15–16. Louis Lavelle, the successor of Bergson at the Collège de France and a contributor to Esprit, engaged in a striking meditation on the figure of the saint in a book published in 1951 entitled The Meaning of Holiness. Lavelle stressed in respect to the saint, as does Mounier, the intersection of transcendence and immanence: “holiness belongs to eternity – but to eternity which is incarnate in time” (Louis Lavelle, The Meaning of Holiness, Dorothea O’Sullivan [trans.] [London: Catholic Book Club, 1956), 24). 44. Johann Franz Buddeus (1666–1729), a Lutheran theologian who taught at Jena, is best known for his critique of Spinoza. Although an orthodox Lutheran, his thought was strongly influenced by Pietism.

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to be understood in the light of revelation, but rather revelation in the light of religion.45 Religion understood as a human, historically specific phenomenon now became the site of revelation. On that basis the question of the religion of Christ could meaningfully be asked and a gap opened up (as it was by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing) between the faith of Christ and the faith in Christ. Out of this, for Barth, arose the increasing dependence of nineteenth-century theology on the philosophy of religion and, indeed, methodologically, it led to the situation in which theology allowed itself to be told by philosophy, history, and the natural sciences what the free investigation of truth really is.46 In such a situation, religion becomes one cultural phenomenon among others, and Christianity a subset of that cultural phenomenon. What is lost here, for Barth, is the specificity of revelation. In opposition to this, Barth states: “Revelation is understood only where we expect from it, and from it alone, the first and last word about religion.”47 Christianity in this sense is not the fulfillment of religion, but rather that which abolishes religion – or rather that which sublates religion (Barth’s term is Aufhebung) into that which is open to justification from without. Religion is constantly falling into idolatry, but such a judgment of idolatry is possible only in the light of revelation. The light of revelation is an invisible light, is the light of the sovereign act of God, which act however can only be understood in its relation to human beings: the “Word of God” addressed to humanity. Even for those who would not draw such radical consequences as Barth, the problem of the relation of the visible and the invisible is one that exercised religious thinkers of this time. The Kierkegaardian critique of visible Christianity in the name of the invisible became a dominant theme. Concurrently, especially within Roman Catholicism, the intersection of the visible and invisible became thematic, finding particular expression in the theology of the “mystical body of Christ.”48 The problem that many theologians, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, set themselves – and a problem, that we find also in such thinkers as Simone

45. 46. 47. 48.

Barth, Church Dogmatics I.2, 288–9. Ibid., 293. Ibid., 295. The notion of the “body of Christ” as that in which all members of the Christian church participates goes back to St. Paul (cf., e.g., Ephesians 5.22–32). The term “mystical body of Christ” is more recent, dating probably from the twelfth century. In our period, a theology of the mystical body of Christ was developed by the German theologian Karl Adams and was received enthusiastically in the French-speaking Roman Catholic world through the work of Yves Congar. For Mounier, this theology was one of collectivism, of the person understood not as individual but in his ethical and political responsibility as participating in an invisible, because spiritual and supernatural, destiny. (Cf. Hellman, Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 49–50).

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Weil,49 Mounier, Marcel – was how to understand the intersection of the natural and the supernatural beyond inherited dichotomies. Fundamental to this was the question of grace. Traditionally in Christian thinking there is a tension between nature and grace based in the gratuitousness of the loving gift of God. Henri de Lubac,50 in a breakthrough work, called into question the then pervasive concept of “pure nature.”51 Within Roman Catholic theology, a dominant manner of understanding the relation of nature and grace was through the postulation of a “pure nature.” Pure nature refers to the human being with a body and rational soul, which have purely natural capacities and a purely natural end. This natural end would be the love of God, but the love of God as the author of that nature and those capacities. In theological terms, this pure nature is a construct; such a human being for most Roman Catholic theologians never actually existed. The human being that does in fact exist has a supernatural destiny, a destiny that has a source beyond the visible world, beyond that world that corresponds to its capacities. The point of this construct, though, is to emphasize the gratuitousness of grace: such a nature would have no knowledge of, and would not in any way be owed, a supernatural destiny. But implicit in this concept is a certain dichotomy of natural and supernatural that allows a – if only notional – separation of the visible realm of natural capacities from the invisible realm of grace. Such a separation is shown by de Lubac to have served a profound methodological purpose in modernity. The force of de Lubac’s argument is, in the first place, historical: to show that the notion of pure nature is a modern one, which has been read back into Aquinas by modern Thomists. De Lubac quotes Maritain as maintaining that: in the time of William of Vair and Charron, and later of Descartes, it was as though thinkers who were still Christian had thought up a purely natural man whose duty was to philosophize, and upon

49. Simone Weil (February 3, 1909–August 24, 1943; born in Paris, France; died in Ashford, England) was educated at the École Normale Supérieure (1928–31). Her influences included Émile Chartier (“Alain”), Buddhism, and Hinduism, and she held appointments at lycées in Le Puy, Auxerre, Roanne, and Bourges (1931–36). 50. Henri de Lubac (February 20, 1896–September 4, 1991) was ordained to the Catholic priesthood (Jesuit) in 1927, and studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome (1928). He held appointments at the Catholic University of Lyon (1929–61), and the College of Cardinals (1983–91). 51. De Lubac’s book Surnaturel, published in 1946, caused a major debate in Roman Catholic theological circles by questioning the concept of “pure nature.” I will rely solely on his later (1965) book Le Mystère du surnaturel, which responds to (and takes account) of the main contributions to this debate. Hereafter de Lubac’s The Mystery of the Supernatural, Rosemary Sheed (trans.) (London: Chapman, 1967) will be cited as MSN.

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whom was superimposed a man with the theological virtues and a duty to merit heaven. (Quoted in MSN 233–4) This allows the separation of theology from other disciplines and the evacuation of theology from the realm of the human considered in terms of such a nature, which although theologically hypothetical reflects very well the presupposition of modern anthropology. De Lubac argues in response for the reintegration of the natural and the supernatural, the visible and the invisible. He rejects the methodological move of constructs such as pure nature. For one thing such constructs presuppose a dichotomy of nature and supernatural even when theologians go on to deny the actuality of such a dichotomy. Second, the hypothesis, although possible, concerns as he says another universe and one that is not constituted by God’s call. To place oneself in a universe in which one is not destined to see God is, de Lubac affirms, impossible: “You may put into this hypothetical world a man as like me as you can, but you cannot put me into it” (MSN 77). He goes on to say that between those two people (the man like me and me) there is a difference in nature. In other words, the place to begin in understanding the gratuitousness of grace is in its concrete reality. This concrete reality de Lubac understands as the dynamic of call and desire. The desire to see God is not an accident, but rather is essential to human nature as constituted by God’s call. This call is a call to finality, that is, a call to fulfillment of the nature of each person. “As soon as I exist … no other finality … seems possible for me than that which is now really inscribed in the depths of my nature; there is only one end and therefore I bear within me, consciously or otherwise, a ‘natural desire’ for it” (MSN 72).52 Yet despite this, de Lubac emphasizes the distance between the natural and the supernatural: “between nature as it exists and the supernatural for which God destines it, the distance is as great, the difference as radical, as that between non-being and being” (MSN 107). Similarly to Rosenzweig, de Lubac distinguishes here between creation and revelation: through creation human beings are brought into being, but by grace they are called to their final supernatural end. To understand how these two belong together, it is necessary to see the nature of the gift involved. De Lubac is quick to deny the analogy with gift giving: in gift giving, the giver and the receiver preexist; in the divine gift, he says, quoting Marcel, “all is gift. He who receives the gift is himself the first gift 52. Karl Rahner makes a similar point using the vocabulary of the personal being: “it is precisely the essence of the personal being (his paradox without which he cannot be understood) that he is ordained to personal communion with God in love (by nature) and must receive just his love as free gift” (“Concerning the Relationship Between Nature and Grace,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 1, Cornelius Ernest [trans.] [London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961], 305).

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he receives” (MSN 100). But the gift of creation does not necessitate the gift to a supernatural destiny. As created, human beings have a capacity for the supernatural, but this capacity de Lubac compares to a birthplace rather than a seed or embryo (MSN 109). The natural capacity is not a disposition, indeed the supernatural end is “natural to [the human being] without being naturally accessible to him” (MSN 110). This is not a faculty but rather an “aptitudo passiva” (ibid.). The desire for God, although a natural inclination, is not an inclination sufficient or appropriate to its object (MSN 111). It depends rather on the sovereign action of God: grace. Within the visible the invisible is traced. This is, for de Lubac, inherent in creation itself. He quotes Bonaventure in saying that creation is double (duplex est creatio): once as nature, then as grace. This doubling is manifest in the human being, who “was not created to remain within the bounds of nature” (MSN 141). This means that any natural account of the human, any cosmological account, that is, any account that places the human being in the world and only in the world, loses sight of that destiny embedded in the deepest desire of the human being – a desire essential to human nature (MSN 142).53 This appeal to the transcendent as that which cannot be suspended – even methodologically – in considering the human suggests that in every sphere of existence there is at work in the immanent world an invisible instance, an instance understood as vocation, as call and response. The denial of that call is at all times possible, but it is a denial that places the human being against its own nature.

v. conclusion: the religious impulse With Levinas’s publication of Totality and Infinity in 1961, a new era of philosophy was opened up, although this became apparent only much later.54 Although his initial breakthrough was characterized by Levinas himself in terms of a reversal of the priority of ontology over ethics, ethics in Levinas’s sense is that space opened up by transcendence. The force of Levinas’s thought is to reaffirm the priority of transcendence and the positivity of the infinite. The affirmation of transcendence (variously understood) – against the immanentist tendencies of modernity – is evident in each of the thinkers we have looked at. In each of them (and in others whom, for lack of space, we have not touched on), the 53. Here he says, “there is something in man, a certain capacity for the infinite, which makes it impossible to consider him one of those beings whose whole nature and destiny are inscribed in the cosmos.” 54. This era is often termed that of “new phenomenology.”

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irreducibility of discourse about the divine to worldly discourse means that there is manifest in human desire an excess, one that is without ground. This excess we can, without distortion, term the ethical. To understand the human purely rationally is to do so in a discourse sufficient to itself. But such a discourse has no need of the other, no need to listen, no need for vocation. Vocation is not the determination of a plan of life, but rather the answering of a call from elsewhere. Such a rupturing call “cuts across vision,”55 in other words, throws vision back on itself, exposing its pretensions to self-sufficiency. While vision commands, the ear in attending to the vocation waits. Waiting, Weil tells us, is not passivity, but the act of attention. “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached … thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.”56 Such openness, for Weil, is not confined to a private piety of faith, but rather is essential to all truth, because only through attention does an object disclose itself to the one who studies it. In that sense, all knowledge aims at prayer, which is “attention … directed towards God.”57 Attention is an act constituted by its own insufficiency. Such insufficiency, however, is not divorced (any more by Barth than by Marcel or Mounier or de Lubac) from the ontological – the natural, the visible, the fallen – but only from an ontology not informed by the religious impulse of transcendence. Indeed, this religious impulse, this impulse of receptivity towards the self-revealing, is understood in this period from different standpoints as liberating the question concerning the human from totalizing systems; in this way the human is made manifest in response to a vocation, a vocation that constitutes not a utopian projection, nor even a prescription, but rather the very being of the person.

major works Karl Barth Der Römerbrief. Munich: Kaiser, 1918. Published in English as Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, translated by Edwyn C. Hoskyns. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Credo; die Hauptprobleme der Dogmatik Dargestellt im Anschluss an das Apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis. Munich: Kaiser, 1935. Published in English as Credo: A Presentation of the Chief Problems of Dogmatics with Reference to the Apostle’s Creed, translated by J. Strathearn McNab. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1936. 55. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Alphonso Lingis (trans.) (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 195. 56. Simone Weil, Waiting on God, Emma Craufurd (trans.) (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1977), 58. 57. Ibid., 59.

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felix ó murchadha Die kirchliche Dogmatik. 5 vols. Zollikon: Verlag der Evangelischen Buchhandlung, 1932–70. Published in English as Church Dogmatics, edited by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, translated by G. T. Thomson, G. W. Bromiley, Harold Knight, J. K. S. Reid et al. 5 volumes. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, [1936–62] 1956–77. Revised edition published in English as Church Dogmatics: The Study Edition, 31 volumes, edited by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, translated by G. T. Thomson, G. W. Bromiley, Harold Knight, J. K. S. Reid et al. London: Continuum, 2009.

Henri de Lubac Catholicisme: Les Aspects sociaux du dogme. Paris: Cerf, 1938. Published in English as Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, translated by L. Sheppard. & E. Englund. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988. Surnaturel. Études historiques. Paris: Aubier, 1946. Le Mystère du surnaturel. Paris: Aubier, 1965. Published in English as The Mystery of the Supernatural, translated by Rosemary Sheed. London: Chapman, 1967.

Franz Rosenzweig Der Stern der Erlösung. Frankfurt: J. Kauffmann, 1921. Published in English as The Star of Redemption. (i) Translated by William Hallo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971. (ii) Translated by Barbara E. Galli. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Emmanuel Mounier L’Engagement de la foi. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968. Introduction aux existentialismes Paris: Denoël, 1947. Published in English as Existentialist Philosophies: An Introduction, translated by Eric Blow. London: Rockliff, 1948. Le Personalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949. Published in English as Personalism, translated by Philip Mairet. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952.

Simone Weil Attente de Dieu. Paris: La Colombe, 1950 (published posthumously). Published in English as Waiting on God, translated by Emma Craufurd. London: Fount Paperbacks, 1977.

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10 the philosophy of the concept Pierre Cassou-Noguès

We are able to come to understand the philosophy of the concept only in its opposition to a philosophy of consciousness or a philosophy of the subject. In a way, we must even say that the philosophy of the concept is defined by this very opposition. And, as Saussure’s linguistics shows, where language is made of “differences without positive terms,” neither of the terms seem to make sense without the other. Moreover, both the philosophy of the concept and the philosophy of the subject maintain a certain amount of indeterminacy. In particular, the opposite of the philosophy of the concept can be called either a philosophy of consciousness or a philosophy of the subject. The opposition first appears in the last lines of Jean Cavaillès’s posthumous work, “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” which was not published until 1947.1 But then, one has to wait for Georges Canguilhem’s reference to Cavaillès, in the 1960s, for this opposition to really impose its mark on French philosophy.2 From then on, this opposition 1. Jean Cavaillès (May 15, 1903–February 17, 1944; born in Saint-Maixent (Deux-Sèvres, PoitouCharentes), France; died in Arras) was educated at the École Normale Supérieure (1923– 26) and the Sorbonne (1926–27). His influences included Brunschvicg and Husserl, and he held appointments at the École Normale Supérieure (1931–35), lycée in Amiens (1937), the University of Strasbourg (1938–41), and the Sorbonne (1941). 2. Georges Canguilhem (June 4, 1904–September 11, 1995; born in Castelnaudary, Languedoc, France; died in Marley-le-Roi) was educated at the École Normale Supérieure (1924–28). His influences included Bergson, Paul Bernard, and Nietzsche, and he held lycée appointments in Charleville (1929–30), Albi (1930–31), Douai (1932–33), Valenciennes (1933–35), Béziers (1935–36), and Toulouse (1936–40), then appointments at the University of Strasbourg (relocated to Clermont-Ferrand, 1941–45; in Strasbourg, 1945–48), and as Inspecteur Générale de Philosophie (1948–55), Director of the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences et des Technique and Chair in the History of Philosophy of Science at the Sorbonne (1955–71).

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structures French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. Canguilhem’s texts are very much polemical, and they are intended to defend Michel Foucault and early structuralism against phenomenology. The debate between structuralism and phenomenology then becomes omnipresent in French philosophical circles to the point that, as contemporaries relate,3 one had to be on the side of the concept or on that of the subject: there was no way out. Later still, Foucault gives a wider scope to this opposition. Underneath the opposition, Foucault states, there are two tendencies that have shaped philosophy in France since the Enlightenment: experience and science. However, the opposition between the concept (science) and the subject (experience) seems to disappear from the philosophical debate in the 1980s. Philosophers today may appeal to the philosophy of the concept, Alain Badiou for example,4 or to the philosophy of the subject, as Jean-Michel Salanskis does.5 But the opposition now remains marginal, and the appeal to the concept or to the subject is understood as referring to a tradition rather than a contemporary debate. Insofar as the opposition between philosophy of the concept and philosophy of consciousness or of the subject was based in a polemic, the opposing categories seemed to shift and remain vague. Nevertheless, the opposition is not meaningless. One might even be tempted to characterize the French philosophical tradition by the very existence of this opposition. Indeed, it seems to catch a particular tradition of philosophy. For example, the opposition would make no sense in the context of German idealism. Thinking of Kant or Hegel, one cannot oppose the concept and the consciousness. Similarly, the opposition would work neither in analytical philosophy nor in American pragmatism. The simple possibility of opposing consciousness to concepts seems to be peculiar to this period of French philosophy (roughly from 1947 to 1985). One can de facto offer this (nominal) definition of French thought as a set a philosophies that should be able to be categorized under “philosophy of the concept” or “philosophy of the subject.” One thing is clear, however. During this period, the idea of a philosophy of the concept expresses a response to phenomenology. But as we just mentioned, neither of the terms is well defined by itself, and the philosophy of consciousness does not unequivocally refer to phenomenology. On one side, we must include doctrines such as Léon Brunschvicg’s (1869–1944) “critical

3. Pierre Macherey, in personal conversation with the author. 4. See, for example, Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds, Alberto Toscano (trans.) (London: Continuum, 2009), 7–8, with a remarkable shift in the names associated with the two opposed traditions. 5. Jean-Michel Salanskis, “Les Deux triades de Canguilhem-Foucault,” in Le Concept, le sujet et la science, Pierre Cassou-Noguès and Pascale Gillot (eds) (Paris: Vrin, 2009).

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idealism,” doctrines that are not related to phenomenology;6 and, on the other side, we would be hard pressed to decide whether to include certain philosophies heavily influenced by phenomenology within a philosophy of consciousness or, even, a philosophy of the subject. Nevertheless, it is clear that the perspective of building an alternative philosophy to phenomenology is at the center of the idea of philosophy of the concept. The aim of this essay is to analyze the idea of a philosophy of the concept and the opposition to phenomenology that it represents. In this perspective, we will study three texts, by Cavaillès, Canguilhem, and Foucault. We will first simply present these texts, going backward from Foucault to Canguilhem and Cavaillès. We will then discuss in greater detail the meaning of the philosophy of the concept in Cavaillès, in order to understand better the different moves that then enable Canguilhem and Foucault to give a wider meaning to the opposition between the concept and the subject. As we will see, there are three steps involved in the development of this opposition (represented by Cavaillès, Canguilhem, and Foucault). But these three steps make the opposition unstable. It then becomes quite difficult to extend the opposition to the philosophical positions found in subsequent twentieth-century French thought, in particular, those of Deleuze and the later Merleau-Ponty.7

i. three steps in the definition of the philosophy of the concept It is Foucault who gives the widest scope to the opposition between the philosophy of the concept and the philosophy of the subject. Paradoxically, the Foucault text that summarizes this division in French philosophy, during the 1960s and 1970s, was first published in English in 1978. It is the introduction that Foucault gives to the first English translation of Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological. Foucault’s article would be published in French only in 1985, after Foucault’s death, in a volume of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale dedicated to the work of Canguilhem. At the very beginning, Foucault draws a line that “separates a philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept. On the one hand, one network is that of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty; and then another is that of

*6. For a discussion of Brunschvicg, see the essay by Sebastian Luft and Fabien Capiellères in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3. *7. For more on Merleau-Ponty, see the essay by Mauro Carbone in this volume. For more on Deleuze, see the essay by Daniel W. Smith in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6.

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Cavaillès, Bachelard, and Canguilhem.”8 The revised French text is more detailed than the English translation: [C’est une ligne] qui sépare une philosophie de l’expérience, du sens, du sujet et une philosophie du savoir, de la rationalité et du concept. D’un coté, une filiation qui est celle de Sartre et Merleau-Ponty; et puis une autre, qui est celle de Cavaillès, de Bachelard, de Koyré et de Canguilhem. Sans doute, ce clivage vient de loin et on pourrait en faire remontrer la trace à travers le XIXème siècle: Bergson et Poincaré, Lachelier et Couturat, Maine de Biran et Comte. The English translation would be: [this is a line] that separates a philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject, and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept. On the one hand, one filiation is that of Sartre and MerleauPonty; and then another is that of Cavaillès, Bachelard, Koyré, and Canguilhem. Probably, the separation dates from far back and one can trace it through the twentieth century: Bergson and Poincaré, Lachelier and Couturat, Maine de Biran and Comte.9 Later, we will discuss the remark on phenomenology that in the English text replaces the last sentence of the French text. In both texts however, the “concept” and the “subject” are inscribed in wider sets of terms, “experience, meaning, and subject” on one side, and “knowledge, rationality, and concept” on the other. In addition, in the French text at least, these opposite sets of terms are taken to 8. Michel Foucault, “Introduction,” in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, Carolyn R. Fawcett, in collaboration with Robert S. Cohen (trans.) (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 8. This essay was revised and first published in French as “La Vie: L’Expérience et la science,” in Revue de métaphysique et de morale (January 1985); it was reprinted in Dits et écrits, Daniel Defert and François Ewald (eds) (Paris: Gallimard NRF, 1994), vol. 4. The quote in French that follows can be found in Dits et écrits, 764. [*] For more on Sartre, see the essays by S. K. Keltner and Samuel J. Julian, and William L. McBride in this volume. Gaston Bachelard (June 27, 1884–October 16, 1962; born in Bar-sur-Aube, Champagne, France; died in Paris) was educated at the Collège de Bar-sur-Aube (1919–22), and received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1929. He held appointments at the Collège de Bar-sur-Aube (1919–30); Faculté des Lettres de Dijon (1930–40), and the Sorbonne (1940–55). *9. Several of these figures are discussed elsewhere: Jules Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) in the essay by Babette Babich in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3; Jules Lachelier (1832– 1918), Louis Couturat (1868–1914), and Maine de Biran (1766–1824) in the essay by F. C. T. Moore in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 2; and Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in the essay by Alan Sica in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 2.

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describe two deep trends in French philosophy, which, as Foucault adds a few lines below, date from the Enlightenment. These two remarks are enough to distinguish Foucault’s view from that of Canguilhem. Canguilhem’s comments on the opposition “concept versus subject” appear in a series of texts on Cavaillès from the 1960s. Intended for the general public, these texts are not strictly academic. Here is one example taken from a speech given for the inauguration of the amphitheatre Jean Cavaillès at the Sorbonne. Canguilhem refers to the posthumous work of Cavaillès, “On Logic and the Theory of Science”. In fact, it is Canguilhem himself who gave the title to this manuscript, which Cavaillès had simply left as his “philosophical testament.” Before we look at this passage, we should recall the historical context behind Canguilhem’s statements. Active in the underground since the French capitulation in 1940, Cavaillès created and led an important resistance group. He was first arrested in 1943. He wrote his posthumous work while in prison. He escaped but was arrested a second time and, eventually, was shot by the Nazis in 1944.10 These actions made Cavaillès very famous. So, now let us look at what Canguilhem says: This text [“On Logic and the Theory of Science”] ends with several pages which seemed at first enigmatic to most of us. But we can understand today that the enigma was an announcement. Twenty years in advance, Cavaillès delineated the task that philosophy is now taking up: to substitute the primacy of the concept, the system, or the structure, for the primacy of lived or reflected consciousness. And it happens that this philosopher [Cavaillès] who does not believe in history in the existential sense, refutes in advance, by the actions he led while feeling that he was being led, by his carnal participation in history and by his historical death, the existentialist argument of those who try today to discredit what they call “structuralism” by condemning it to engender, among other misdeeds, a passivity before what has been accomplished.11

10. For more details, see the biography of Cavaillès by his sister, Gabrielle Ferrière, Jean Cavaillès: A Philosopher in Time of War, T. N. F. Murtagh (trans.) (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). 11. Georges Canguilhem, “Inauguration de l’amphitheâtre Jean Cavaillès,” in Jean Cavaillès, Œuvres complètes de philosophie des sciences (Paris: Hermann, 1994), 674. The French is: “Et il se trouve que ce philosophe qui ne croit pas à l’histoire, au sens existentiel, réfute par avance, par l’action qu’il mène en se sentant mené, par sa participation charnelle à l’histoire et par sa mort historique, l’argument existentialiste de ceux qui cherchent aujourd’hui à discréditer ce qu’ils appellent le structuralisme en le condamnant à engendrer, entre autres méfaits, la passivité devant l’accomplit.”

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Canguilhem relies on both Cavaillès’s actions and his philosophy in order to defend early structuralism. An argument against structuralism, broadly speaking, could be that, by putting aside the subject, one loses the ground for moral responsibility. That is, if the person is only an effect of the structure, he cannot be responsible for his action. And therefore all philosophy can do is observe the structures and their changes: “passivity before what has been accomplished.” Canguilhem’s answer to this criticism is clear: Cavaillès holds a philosophical position similar to that of structuralism (we will return to this similarity), but he still felt a moral demand. The feeling led him to actions, which the existentialists had not done. Canguilhem himself was active in the underground. His speech continues in this way: Today some philosophers cry with indignation because certain other philosophers have formed the idea of a philosophy without a personal subject. The philosophical work of Jean Cavaillès may be called upon in order to support this idea. His mathematical philosophy was not built with reference to the subject who could be identified as Jean Cavaillès. This philosophy from which Jean Cavaillès is radically missing has commanded a form of action which led the philosopher through the narrow path of logic to the point from which one does not come back. Jean Cavaillès is the logic of resistance lived all the way up to death. Let the philosophers of the existence, of the person, do as much next time if they can.12 Canguilhem certainly uses an argument ad hominem. More generally, one could question to what extent the actions of a philosopher can be called on to support or undermine his or her philosophy. We will discuss later how Cavaillès’s philosophy, which only concerns mathematics, could appear to Canguilhem as “commending” a certain form of action. In addition to being ad hominem, Canguilhem’s remarks are highly polemical, even more so than those of Foucault. They do not intend to give a historically accurate account of Cavaillès’s position in French philosophy. Their aim is both to praise the philosopher – for Cavaillès, shot by the Nazis, was certainly a hero – and to defend, in a heated polemic, structuralism. Cavaillès becomes the tutelary figure of structuralism, both theoretically and politically. Cavaillès here appears to give to structuralism both theoretical roots and a political caution. If we compare Canguilhem’s remarks with those of Foucault, we also see two differences. First, in opposition to the “concept,” Foucault speaks of the 12. Canguilhem, “Commemoration à l’ORTF,” in Cavaillès, Œuvres complètes de philosophie des sciences, 678, my translation.

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“subject” and he associates it with two other terms, “experience” (vécu), and “meaning” (sens). Canguilhem speaks in turn of “consciousness,” “subject,” or “person.” The opposite of the “concept” is not always designated with the same term, as if the philosophy of the concept could not name its opponent. It is certainly significant that the philosophy of the concept does not always have the same meaning. Second, in Foucault’s text, the philosophy of the concept is a deep trend in philosophy in France, a trend that dates from the Enlightenment, whereas in Canguilhem’s texts, the philosophy of the concept appears as a new movement, a “task that philosophy is now taking up.” The meaning, and the importance, of the philosophy of the concept have changed from Canguilhem to Foucault. It has, by Foucault’s time, established itself and is looking for deeper roots. But if we now go to the last lines of “On Logic and the Theory of Science”, to which Canguilhem refers in comments for the inauguration of the Cavaillès amphitheater, “the philosophy of the concept” seems more elusive. After a lengthy examination of Husserl’s phenomenology, which takes about half the book, Cavaillès argues for a “philosophy of the concept” against the “philosophy of consciousness.” This is what he says: “It is not a philosophy of consciousness but a philosophy of the concept that can give a theory of science [une doctrine de la science]. The generating necessity is not the necessity of an activity, but the necessity of a dialectic.”13 As Canguilhem notes, these lines are enigmatic. They end Cavaillès’s essay, without giving much information on the nature of this philosophy of the concept. And Cavaillès’s early death does not allow him to develop this project called a “philosophy of the concept” or, as he had written one year earlier, a “dialectic of concepts.” Our next task will be an examination of Cavaillès’s writings in order to understand his idea of a philosophy of the concept and its relationship to phenomenology. But we can say now, at the least, that these texts from Cavaillès, Canguilhem, and Foucault, indicate a progression, three steps in the constitution of a “philosophy of the concept”: (i) a project for Cavaillès; (ii) a contemporary movement for Canguilhem; (iii) an established trend for Foucault. They also show an ambiguity concerning the opposite of the philosophy of the concept: (i) a philosophy of “consciousness”; (ii) a philosophy of the “subject” or of the “person”; (iii) a philosophy of “experience, meaning and subject.”

13. Jean Cavaillès, “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” in Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, Joseph J. Kockelmans and Theodore J. Kisiel (eds) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 409.

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ii. cavaillès’s epistemology and the philosophy of the concept Our task now is to investigate at length the philosophy of the concept and the response to phenomenology that it underlies. Cavaillès’s first two books, which were his two doctoral theses, were published in 1938. His thèse complémentaire, Remarques sur la formation de la théorie abstraite des ensembles (Remarks on the formation of the abstract theory of sets), describes the development of Cantor’s theory from the early work in analysis up to the paradoxes. His primary thesis, Méthode axiomatique et formalisme (Axiomatic method and formalism), concerns the problem of the foundations of mathematics. It ends with Gödel’s theorem. Both books are historical studies. It is only in the conclusion of the second thesis (the last ten pages or so) that Cavaillès delineates a philosophical position. This position is still very much influenced by Brunschvicg, and Cavaillès himself acknowledges he has taken his model from Brunschvicg’s 1912 work, Les Étapes de la philosophie mathématique (The stages of mathematical philosophy). The posthumous work, “On Logic and the Theory of Science”, takes a new turn. Abandoning the history of mathematics, Cavaillès aims here to investigate the philosophical tradition in order to find a philosophy that is faithful to mathematics. “On Logic and the Theory of Science” does not, however, set forth a philosophical theory. The book is purely critical. It only presents a tradition that ends with Husserl and, according to Cavaillès, one that calls for a philosophy of the concept, instead of Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness. To set up this movement, Cavaillès starts with Kant’s analysis of logic. As is well known, Kant defines logic as the science of the form of thought and he separates mathematics from logic since mathematics relies not on a logical analysis but on constructions in intuition. To prove that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals two right angles, the geometer does not analyze the concept of a triangle; he draws a figure and reasons on the basis of this figure. The status that Kant gives to logic leads to several difficulties. In particular there is the question of how one is to obtain the logical form from the concrete thought. Quite generally, Kant’s position opens up two paths for the philosophy of mathematics. On one side, one may emphasize that mathematical development is irreducible to logical analysis. One then comes to what Cavaillès calls the “philosophies of immanence,” Brouwer and Brunschvicg.14 On the other side, one may concentrate on logical

14. Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer (1881–1966) was a Dutch mathematician best known for his work in topology and as the founder of the mathematical philosophy of intuitionism.

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analysis and try to build a logic that would recapture mathematical development. On this side, one is led to Bolzano’s theory of science.15 Cavaillès defers the critical examination of Brouwer and Brunschvicg’s positions. He mentions a single, but essential difficulty. In different ways, Brouwer and Brunschvicg put aside logic and analyze reflexively the acts of the consciousness that does mathematics. It is in this manner that they intend to account for the development of mathematics: by describing the acts of the subject. The question that Cavaillès then raises is how one passes from mathematics to consciousness. Mathematics does not speak of the acts of consciousness. So how, with what philosophical hypothesis, may one see in a mathematical development a series of subjective acts? This discussion takes only one long paragraph. Instead of examining Brouwer and Brunschvicg’s positions more thoroughly, Cavaillès follows the second path, through Bolzano’s theory, which leads him eventually to logical positivism. The problem with logical positivism, according to Cavaillès, is the following. The aim of reducing mathematics to tautologies eliminates the need to refer mathematical propositions to an independent objectivity. However, logical positivism (like Hilbert’s program) uses a formalization of mathematics and metamathematical reasonings that considers mathematical signs as independent objects. Cavaillès argues that mathematical signs, signs as they are used in a mathematical activity, are the products of the history of mathematics. Therefore, logical positivism happens to reintroduce an independent objectivity in the foundations of mathematics, and the status of this objectivity (the objectivity of the signs) is far from clear. Logical positivism then calls for a general theory of the relationship between our acts, in mathematics, and their objects, and, according to Cavaillès, this is what Husserl’s phenomenology offers. So Cavaillès engages in a detailed examination of phenomenology, which takes about half of the entire book. The last part of “On Logic and the Theory of Science” is one of the first discussions in French of Husserl’s phenomenology. From the viewpoint of the philosophy of mathematics, Cavaillès finds several points of disagreement with Husserl. But the point that leads up to the call for a philosophy of the concept is Husserl’s theory of history in his later writings, in particular, as it is found in “The Origin of Geometry.”16 As is well known, in “The Origin of Geometry,” Husserl discusses the nature of the history of mathematics by means of the example of geometry. Geometrical concepts are constituted on the basis of the lifeworld. What then happens in the development of geometry is that the orig15. Bernhard Bolzano (1781–1848) was a Czech logician whose work was a major influence on Brentano and Husserl. 16. In Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, David Carr (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

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inal meaning of the concepts is, to use Husserl’s word, “sedimented.” The original meaning is, in a way, forgotten. It no longer appears in the way we use our concepts. However, it has not completely disappeared. It is still there but it is hidden, implicit in our geometry. Thus it is possible to reactivate the original meaning of geometrical entities. One does not need to study in concreto the history of geometry. One rather has, by a phenomenological analysis, to reenact the process of the constitution of geometrical entities. By reflection, one rediscovers the acts that first produced geometrical entities and, in this way, clarify their original meaning. In the phenomenological view, the history of mathematics is a process of growth in which the foundations are “sedimented,” not reshaped but buried by progress. In a way, nothing changes. The past, the origin of geometry, is still present in our geometry. Cavaillès’s contention is precisely that the history of mathematics shows changes, or a real becoming, where the past is literally erased from the present. For example, when a new theory is introduced that generalizes a former one, the meaning of the concepts is radically modified. The former concepts now appear as specifications of more general ones. Their original meaning is irremediably lost: “One of the essential problems of the doctrine of science is that progress itself may not be augmentation of volume by juxtaposition, in which the prior subsists with the new, but a continual revision of contents by deepening and eradication.”17 Cavaillès’s conclusion is that the reflexive analysis, on which phenomenology is based, is of no interest for the understanding of the history of mathematics. What one must understand is the internal workings of the becoming of mathematics, the way in which concepts call for one another and transform themselves. This “dialectic” has nothing to do with an analysis of consciousness. As we have seen, “It is not a philosophy of consciousness but a philosophy of the concept that can give a theory of science. The generating necessity is not the necessity of an activity but the necessity of a dialectic.”18 Although we understand better the movement leading up to a call for the philosophy of the concept, in fact what we have seen is a movement that splinters, with one branch ending with Husserl’s phenomenology, and the other with Brouwer’s and Brunschvicg’s positions, which also represent philosophies of consciousness. As we noted, in “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” Cavaillès does not discuss in detail their positions, but we can find elements that explain 17. Cavaillès, “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” 409. Derrida comments on Cavaillès’s interpretation of Husserl, although he seems to minimize their disagreement; see Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, John P. Leavey, Jr. (trans.) (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 143. See also Leonard Lawlor, Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 60. 18. Cavaillès, “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” 409.

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his rejection of Brunschvicg’s “critical idealism” in some of his other writings. Brunschvicg thinks that the foundation of mathematics lies in its history. In fact, “science [namely, mathematics] taken outside its history is an abstraction.”19 New methods, or new theories, always appear as answers to specific problems in the existing fields. They have, so to speak, a context. In fact, the various steps of the history of science have, in Brunschvicg’s epistemology, the same structure. There is an open problem. “Human reason,” in Brunschvicg’s words, invents a new concept, leading to a new theory. But this concept must then be verified in experience; in the case of mathematics, it must prove its fruitfulness in the existing theories, or, in the case of physical science, in the empirical world. The history of science is then a “dialogue,” a “mutual reaction” between human reason with its faculty of invention, and experience, where new concepts must be tested.20 Like Bachelard, Cavaillès inherits Brunschvicg’s historical perspective. However, he will try to dispense with Brunschvicg’s reference to “human reason.” Already, in the 1938 thesis, Cavaillès argues that the history of mathematics has an “internal necessity.” That is, Cavaillès believes that new methods, or new theories deriving from them, are entirely determined by the open problems of the existing fields. Each step in the history of mathematics can be accounted for by considering the problems that were raised immediately before, as Cavaillès demonstrates with the example of Cantor’s set theory, which seems to stem from an attempt to solve certain problems in the analysis of Fourier series.21 Thus there is no need to refer to Brunschvicg’s “reason” or to any subjective motivations (such as the psychology of the mathematician). Cavaillès thus gives a kind of autonomy to the history of mathematics: since its development can be explained internally, by analyzing the open problems in the existing theories, one can consider the history of mathematics in abstraction from the fact that it is produced by mathematicians or that it may refer to something else (such as the physical world). It has an objectivity that is independent both of the physical world and of the human mind: “There is an objectivity of the becoming of mathematics, an objectivity that is itself grounded mathematically”;22 or: Science [in fact, mathematics] is no longer considered as a simple intermediary between the human mind and being in itself, depend19. Léon Brunschvicg, Les Étapes de la philosophie mathématique (Paris: Blanchard, 1912), 458, my translation. 20. Ibid., 574. 21. In particular, “La Pensée mathématique,” in Cavaillès, Œuvres complètes de philosophie des sciences, 600–601. 22. Cavaillès, “Remarques sur la formation de la théorie abstraites des ensembles,” in Œuvres complètes de philosophie des sciences, 226, my translation.

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ing as much on one as on the other, and not having its own reality. Now science is regarded as an object sui generis, original in its essence of its own, autonomous in its movement.23 The philosophy of mathematics then becomes the analysis of this historical development. We find against Brunschvicg a point similar to that made against Husserl, namely, that the philosophy of consciousness misses the main problem, which is to understand the “becoming” of mathematics, its necessity and its transformations. This necessity in mathematics cannot be accounted for by an analysis of our acts. It depends on relations internal to mathematics, between the concepts or between former problems and new methods. A closer reading of Cavaillès’s texts would certainly show other elements in his criticism of the philosophy of consciousness.24 Cavaillès questions the possibility of reflection on lived-experience (“vécu” in French, “Erlebnis” in German; “Erlebnis” is a key term of Husserl’s phenomenology, usually rendered in English as “lived-experience,” but sometimes as “mental process”). Some of his analysis also seems to point toward a constitution of subjectivity through the historical development of mathematical concepts, therefore reversing the phenomenological perspective (which describes the constitution of concepts in subjectivity) and anticipating structuralism. However, the root of Cavaillès’s rejection of the philosophy of consciousness lies, as we have seen, in the uselessness of the philosophy of consciousness: it cannot account for the becoming of mathematics. We must add two remarks on Cavaillès. The first concerns his relationship with Spinoza. In his remarks at the inauguration of the amphitheater Jean Cavaillès, Canguilhem alluded to Cavaillès’s Spinozism. However, the importance of Cavaillès’s reference to Spinoza does not come from his writings, but from a spoken remark to Raymond Aron. Although one may see a “Spinozistic atmosphere”25 in all of his writings, Cavaillès mentions the name “Spinoza” and the derivative “Spinozistic” only once. But, when summoned to explain his involvement in the underground, Cavaillès answers, “I am Spinozist. I believe in necessity. The necessity of mathematical inferences, the necessity of the history of mathematics, the necessity also of the struggle in which we are engaged.”26 In his Ethics, Spinoza posits two parallel developments, in the ideas that call 23. Cavaillès, “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” 371. 24. See my De l’expérience mathématique: Essai sur la philosophie des sciences de Jean Cavaillès (Paris: Vrin, 2001), ch. 4. 25. Gilles-Gaston Granger, “Jean Cavaillès ou la montée vers Spinoza,” Études philosophiques 2 (July–December 1947), 278. 26. To Raymond Aron, quoted from Canguilhem, “Inauguration de l’amphithéâtre JeanCavaillès,” 674.

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for one another, and in the things themselves that lead to one another. Now Cavaillès seems to relate the history of mathematics to the developments of ideas, in Spinoza’s system, and to allude to a parallel development in history itself. Therefore, just as mathematical problems require certain solutions, historical situations require certain actions. And, as the mathematician does what is required to solve an open problem, Cavaillès acts according to what the situation requires from him. This oral remark to Aron lies at the bottom of Canguilhem’s reference to Cavaillès. It, indeed, establishes a link (although not a necessary relation) between Cavaillès’s philosophy and his action during the war. In that sense, it seems indeed to refute the existentialists’ argument that a philosophy without subject was condemned to “passivity before what has been accomplished.” In fact, Spinoza, against Descartes, will remain the tutelary figure of the philosophy of concept. He will be particularly important for Althusser and his school.27 Our second remark concerns the importance that Cavaillès himself gives to the expression “philosophy of the concept” or “dialectic of concepts.” Although the call for a philosophy of the concept concludes what Cavaillès called his “philosophical testament,” it is not clear that it represents the center of Cavaillès’s outlook. Indeed, one year before writing “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” Cavaillès mentions in a shorter essay called “Transfini et continu” (Transfinite and continuation) that “The relationship between the dialectic of concepts and intuitive superposition remains the central problem of the philosophy of mathematics.”28 “Intuitive superposition” describes the way in which different modes of expression in mathematics – such as figures in geometry, formulas in logic or in algebras, the drawing of graphs in analysis – interact and, in this interaction, acquire meaning. The problem that Cavaillès raises concerns the attempt to understand how new concepts can, so to speak, “incarnate” themselves in new modes of expression. The mathematician does not invent a new concept, a new theory, and then devise a way to express the new domain of thought that he has opened. This is so because a concept, or a theory, can only be used, or is only truly possessed, when it is transcribed into an appropriate medium of expression. But how can a concept find its expression when one already needs this expression in order to truly possess the concept? In any case, in the passage we just quoted, the “dialectic of concepts” appears as only one level of the philosophy of mathematics, while a second level seems to be the study of the “intuitive superposition,” 27. See, in particular, Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, Grahame Lock (trans.) (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1976). See also the “Prologue,” in Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, Jason Barker (trans.) (London: Verso, 2006), 1–9. [*] For a detailed discussion of French and Italian Spinozism, see the essay by Simon Duffy in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 7. 28. Cavaillès, “Transfini et continu,” in Œuvres complètes de philosophie des sciences, 471.

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that is, the study of transformations and interactions in the mathematical modes of expression. It could be that, in his last work, Cavaillès concentrates on one aspect of what is for him the full problem of the philosophy of mathematics. If so, one may doubt that the expression “philosophy of the concept” already had for Cavaillès the importance that it will acquire in the French postwar philosophy.

iii. canguilhem and structuralism Whereas Cavaillès’s call for a philosophy of the concept expresses (at least in part) his later philosophical standpoint, Canguilhem’s analysis in the passage we quoted above is not clearly related to his own philosophy. In fact, the philosophy of the concept, in this passage, is basically identified with “structuralism.” The word “structuralism” could be deciphered by a whole array of philosophies that relate subjectivity to structures. To put this simply, “structuralism” would mean that the subject is considered as an effect of a structure. Against phenomenology, such a structuralism would claim that there are structures independent of the subject and that they determine our subjectivity. One can include under this structuralism authors such as Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault.29 This is not to say that these authors hold the same position. On the one hand, for example, although Althusser relates his concept of ideology back to Lacan, Althusser’s concept of “ideology” constitutes the subject in its very existence. The ideology, which means the implicit conceptual background of our society, is based on a process of “interpellation” (“hey you”), that gives rise to the existence of individuals. Indeed, Althusser never mentions a notion of subjectivity that would precede the ideological individuals that we are.30 On the other hand, Lacan recognizes a primordial “I,” the subject of the enunciation in “I think,” or “I lie.”31 This “I,” for Lacan, is devoid of content, and only gains its content through the imaginary and symbolical structures that are imposed on it by the Other. In the same way, Foucault’s The Order of Things describes the genesis of Man in the modern epistēmē, without touching on the existence of a subject.32

*29. For further discussion of Althusser, see the essay by Warren Montag in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6; for Lacan, see the essay by Ed Pluth in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 5; and for Foucault, see the essay by Timothy O’Leary in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6. 30. See, in particular, Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Essays on Ideology, Ben Brewster and Grahame Lock (trans.) (London: Verso, 1984). 31. See, in particular, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, JacquesAlain Miller (ed.), Alan Sheridan (trans.) (New York: Norton, 1981). 32. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970), ch. 9.

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As we seen, the philosophy of the concept, for Cavaillès, is a project, a philosophy that does not yet exist. For Canguilhem however, the philosophy of the concept is a self-asserting movement in contemporary philosophy. Besides, in “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” the call for a philosophy of the concept is first motivated by the inability of the philosophy of consciousness to understand the development, the very “becoming” of mathematics, even though Cavaillès may elsewhere intend to relate the constitution of the subject to the becoming of science. By Canguilhem’s time, this point – relating the constitution of the subject to the becoming of science – occupies the center of the “philosophy of the concept”: the constitution of the subject in structures that are independent of the subject. One could say that this point explains the shift in terminology from the philosophy of “consciousness,” in Cavaillès’s texts, to a philosophy of the “subject” or of the “person” in Canguilhem’s analysis. The “philosophy of consciousness” refers to a methodology. It refers to the idea of explaining the origin and the development of mathematics by a reflection on our acts. Above all, it is this methodology that Cavaillès rejects. Yet, the opposition between the philosophy of the concept and the philosophy of the “subject” puts into question, rather than the methodology, the fundamental domain of philosophy, the domain of being on which it bases its account. Thus, one may note differences and shifts between Cavaillès’s call for a philosophy of the concept and Canguilhem’s analysis. Nevertheless there is a marked continuity, and the authors of the “philosophy of the concept,” above all others, Althusser and Foucault, refer to Cavaillès.

iv. foucault’s ambiguity Foucault transforms more deeply the opposition between the philosophy of the concept and the philosophy of the subject. The philosophy of the concept, with Foucault, has become a deep trend of French philosophy, dating back to the Enlightenment. But let us look again at the name of the authors that, as we saw in the French version of the passage from his Introduction to Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault relates to the philosophy of the concept. It is hard to see how Poincaré and Bachelard could be said, in Cavaillès or Canguilhem’s sense, to side with the concept as opposed to the subject. As is well known, in his controversies with Couturat, Russell, or Hilbert, Poincaré stresses the role of the subject in mathematics.33 In particular, Poincaré argues

*33. Some of these controversies are discussed in the essay by Babette Babich in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3.

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against nonpredicative definitions in arithmetic or analysis.34 Nonpredicative definitions, which define an object by referring to the set to which the object belongs (as in “the tallest tree of the forest”) presuppose, according to Poincaré, that the objects exist independently of our definitions (just as trees in a forest do). For, if one considers that objects are created by our definitions, there is a circle in claiming to create an object on the basis of a collection in which the object already appears. But nonpredicative definitions seem to lead to paradoxes. This outcome is, for Poincaré, a sign that nonpredicative definitions are illegitimate. Mathematical objects must be treated as the mathematician’s creations, and that implies certain restrictions on mathematical rationality. Poincaré anticipates Brouwer’s intuitionism. He would be placed, in Cavaillès’s opposition, with Brouwer on the side of the philosophy of consciousness. In the same way, Bachelard is a direct heir of Brunschvicg. He takes up Brunschvicg’s description of the history of science as a “dialogue” between reason and experience.35 Reason invents new concepts that must be tested in experience, as if Reason was asking questions to Experience, and Experience answering by a yes or a no. It is true that Bachelard introduces a domain that does not appear in Brunschvicg’s writings: the imagination. The prime objective of science, according to Bachelard, is to break with the imaginary, the poetical description of the universe, and develop conceptual schemes that may be precisely verified. In another series of writings, Bachelard analyzes in detail our imagination, which is built around the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire. Bachelard describes his two-sided philosophical project as a “bi-psychoanalysis”: a psychoanalysis of science that describes its break with imagination, and a psychoanalysis of imagination that describes science’s structure. Althusser will relate his notion of ideology to Bachelard’s imagination. He will in particular borrow the idea that science emerges from its prehistory (in imagination or in ideology) by a break or by what Althusser calls an “epistemic cut.”36 However, it is again clear that, in Cavaillès’s opposition or in Canguilhem’s opposition, Bachelard would belong with Brunschvicg on the side of the philosophy of the subject. The reference to “psychoanalysis,” in Bachelard’s project, confirms the central character of the subject. One must then conclude that Foucault gives a new meaning to the opposition between concept and subject. But, in Foucault’s text, the opposition, although it clearly refers to Canguilhem and Cavaillès, concerns a wider set of terms: “experience, meaning, and subject,” on the one side, and “knowledge, rationality, 34. See Henri Poincaré, Science and Method, F. Maitland (trans.) (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1914). 35. Gaston Bachelard, Le Rationalisme appliqué (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), 4. 36. Louis Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic,” in For Marx, Ben Brewster (trans.) (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969).

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and concept” on the other. In fact, Foucault seems to conflate two different oppositions. He certainly takes up the opposition, inaugurated by Cavaillès, between the philosophy of the concept and the philosophy of consciousness. But Foucault brings together this first opposition with a second one: an opposition between a philosophy that aims at describing experience, at “bringing experience to expression,” in the words that Merleau-Ponty uses in The Visible and the Invisible, and a philosophy that rather sees itself as an analysis of knowledge, in its plurality, or an analysis of the history of science. In the English version of the quote from the Introduction to Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, immediately after the passage we quoted above, Foucault describes the second filiation, Cavaillès, Bachelard, and Canguilhem, as a completely different way to take up phenomenology, “heterogeneous” to the way MerleauPonty and Sartre had taken it up.37 However, it seems that, here, Foucault refers to the idea of phenomenology rather than to phenomenology’s classical texts. The examination of Husserl’s phenomenology, which takes up about half of “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” is certainly crucial for Cavaillès. But one would not make the same claim for Bachelard and Canguilhem. In fact, in the remainder of his article, Foucault opposes Canguilhem’s idea of the living with the lived-experience of phenomenology.38 Thus it seems that the second network, Cavaillès, Bachelard, and Canguilhem, if related to phenomenology, appear as a completely different way to do phenomenology, or a completely different acceptation of phenomenology. The analysis of knowledge played very little role in French phenomenology (in Sartre or Merleau-Ponty). This tradition of philosophies of science, which reconsidered experience in light of knowledge, offered a means to break with phenomenology. Let us add two more remarks. First, if Foucault brings together two different oppositions – concept against subject, knowledge against experience – the examples of Poincaré and Bachelard show that the two oppositions are by no means equivalent. By conflating them, Foucault truly changes the opposition put in place in the writings of Cavaillès and Canguilhem. Second, Foucault’s view has the effect of hiding certain possibilities on the checkerboard of French philosophy. One of these possibilities, which finds no place in Foucault’s opposition, is a phenomenology of mathematics, such as that of Jean-Toussaint Desanti in Les Idéalités mathématiques (Mathematical idealities).39 Another possibility, which 37. Foucault, “Introduction,” in Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 8–9. 38. See Lawlor, “Un écart infime: la critique du concept de vécu chez Foucault,” in Le Concept, le sujet et la science, Pierre Cassou-Noguès and Pascale Gillot (eds) (Paris: Vrin, 2009); an English translation, “Un Écart Infime: Foucault’s Critique of the Concept of Lived-Experience,” is found in Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). 39. Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Les Idéalités mathématiques (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968).

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the relation between philosophy of the concept and the philosophy of knowledge seems to erase, is a philosophy of experience that would not be a philosophy of consciousness. This nonconsciousness philosophy of experience would be the exact counterpart to Poincaré and Bachelard’s positions, which are philosophies of knowledge but also philosophies of consciousness. One example would be Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology. In the notes for The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty, in 1961, is one of the first, after Cavaillès, to explicitly oppose his philosophical project to the “philosophies of consciousness.”40 Another example could be Deleuze, in particular in the period of his collaboration with Guattari. Anti-Oedipus can hardly be seen as a philosophy of consciousness in the sense that Cavaillès rejects. But nor is it a philosophy of knowledge in the sense of Foucault’s opposition.

v. conclusion We have reviewed three steps in the opposition between the philosophy of the concept and the philosophy of consciousness or the philosophy of the subject. This opposition is a polemical one, and its terms do not always have a precise meaning. Nevertheless, we have seen that each of these three steps gives different values to this opposition and delineates different responses to phenomenology. For Cavaillès, the philosophy of the concept first means a change in methodology: it is useless to investigate the becoming of science by a reflection on the acts of the subject. For Canguilhem, the philosophy of the concept seems to refer essentially to the structuralist idea that the subject is constituted as an effect of (social or psychological) structures that the subject does not determine. For Foucault, finally, the philosophy of the concept becomes the philosophy of knowledge, a philosophy that centers itself on the analysis of knowledge, in opposition to a philosophy that finds its foundations in the description of our immediate experience.

40. Merleau-Ponty, unpublished manuscript from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. See my “La Définition du sujet dans Le visible et l’invisible,” in Merleau-Ponty aux frontières de l’invisible, M. Cariou et al. (eds) (Milan: Mimesis, 2003).

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11 analytic philosophy and continental philosophy: four confrontations Dermot Moran

The relationships between phenomenology and the analytic tradition – the main rival to phenomenology in the twentieth century, which eventually became the dominant approach in anglophone academic philosophy – are complex and became increasingly fraught over the course of the century.1 Early in the twentieth century, there was considerable interaction between both phenomenological and analytic European philosophers. Husserl, for instance, was one of the first philosophers to recognize the philosophical significance of Gottlob Frege (arguably the founder of analytic philosophy). Similarly, Bertrand Russell read Frege and Meinong, and corresponded with them in German; Wittgenstein moved between Austria and Cambridge; Moore read Brentano and chaired one of Husserl’s lectures in London; Ryle lectured on Austrian philosophy at Oxford; Carnap attended Husserl’s seminars in Freiburg in 1924–25; and so on. On the other hand, there was lack of knowledge of the different traditions: for instance, Paul Ricoeur lamented that he could find no one in Paris from whom to learn Russell’s philosophy in the 1930s and Russell’s History of Western Philosophy

1. On the development of the analytic tradition in the twentieth century, see Anat Biletzki and Anat Matar (eds), The Story of Analytic Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998); Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh (eds), Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); and especially the essays in Michael Beaney (ed.), The Analytic Turn: Analysis in Early Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2007). For a discussion of the development of both traditions in the twentieth century, see my “Introduction: Towards an Assessment of TwentiethCentury Philosophy,” in The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy, Dermot Moran (ed.) (London: Routledge, 2008).

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(1946) is notorious for its poor treatment of European philosophers such as Nietzsche and for ignoring twentieth-century developments apart from “the Philosophy of Logical Analysis.”2 While there was interaction and discussion between the various schools and traditions, the Second World War seemed to have had a decisive impact and, in the postwar years, the two traditions grew apart and developed separately from one another, leading eventually to a kind of détente, although one based largely on mutual ignorance. Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, and Paul Ricoeur are rare examples, in the period under discussion, of European philosophers who sought to incorporate the insights of Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle, and others. Meanwhile, anglophone analytic philosophers, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, simply paid no attention to phenomenology and its European followers.3 It was not until the end of the 1970s that analytically trained philosophers such as Richard Rorty began to pay close attention to Husserl, Heidegger, and the phenomenological tradition.4 The “analytic” response to phenomenology in fact has to be found largely on the European continent and then within the larger neo-Kantian tradition. Some of the sharpest critical responses to phenomenology (primarily, the work of Husserl and Heidegger) came from within the loosely organized phenomenological movement itself; and indeed many of these criticisms anticipated those made subsequently by analytic philosophers. As Ricoeur put it, phenomenology is “both the sum of Husserl’s work and the heresies issuing from it.”5 In this chapter, however, I shall be concerned with what may be broadly construed as the analytic reception of phenomenology. Because neo-Kantian criticisms of phenomenology in many ways anticipated and indeed inspired the analytic criticisms, it will be necessary to discuss the neo-Kantian reaction to phenomenology en passant. Furthermore, I will begin my narrative a little earlier than 1930, since critical responses to phenomenology began to appear especially after Husserl published his major book on phenomenological method, the programmatic Ideas I in 1913;6 and, owing to the absolute dearth of interrelations between the 2. See Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1946). 3. A noteworthy exception is Wilfrid Sellars, who allowed some room for phenomenology, albeit without the Wesensschau, and who had studied Husserl with his teacher Marvin Farber, who himself had studied with Husserl in Freiburg. 4. In this regard, Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature groups Russell with Husserl as epistemological foundationalists and links the later Wittgenstein with Heidegger as critics of foundationalism and representationalism. [*] For a discussion of Rorty, see the essay by David R. Hiley in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6. 5. See Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Philosophy, Edward G. Ballard and Lester Embree (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 4. 6. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, F. Kersten (trans.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983). Since Ideas I was the

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traditions during the 1960s, I will end my survey a little later than 1970 with the Searle–Derrida debate that began in 1977. I take this encounter to be one of the paradigmatic cases, although Searle himself denied that this debate represented “a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions.”7

i. challenges to phenomenology in europe Phenomenology was inaugurated as a specific method at the outset of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), especially in the Introduction to the second volume of his massive “breakthrough” work, Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations; 1900/1901).8 Husserl systematically developed phenomenology in his subsequent publications, that is, Ideas I (1913), Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929), Cartesian Meditations (1931), and the articles of The Crisis of the European Sciences that appeared in the journal Philosophia (1936). In the period from 1913 to 1929, Husserlian phenomenology vied with neo-Kantianism (Windelband, Rickert, Natorp, Cassirer)9 as the most prominent philosophical movement in Germany, with phenomenology gradually challenging and eventually eclipsing the once dominant neo-Kantian tradition, while the tradition of “life philosophy” (Lebensphilosophie; Dilthey, Simmel) remained a somewhat minor voice until the revival of Nietzsche’s work in the 1930s. The neo-Kantians took phenomenology seriously and engaged critically with it: Paul Natorp, for instance, reviewed both Husserl’s Logical Investigations and his Ideas I, and was prescient in predicting that Husserl would move closer to neo-Kantianism. When, in 1916, Husserl moved from the University of only book Husserl published between 1901 (Logical Investigations) and 1929 (Formal and Transcendental Logic), it is impossible to overestimate its importance as the primary source (outside Husserl’s own lectures and seminars) for those wishing to engage with his phenomenology. As such, it is cited by Carnap, Ryle, and others. 7. John Searle, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Glyph 1 (1977), 198. 8. Husserl originally published his Logische Untersuchungen in two volumes in 1900–1901. He published a revised second edition of the Prolegomena and the first five Investigations in 1913, and a revised edition of the Sixth Investigation in 1921, a third edition with minor changes in 1922, and a fourth edition in 1928. A critical edition, which includes Husserl’s written emendations and additions to his own copies (Handexemplar), has appeared in the Husserliana series in two volumes: volume XVIII, Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Text der 1. und der 2. Auflage, and Volume XIX, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis (2 vols). The only English translation (of the second edition) by J. N. Findlay is Logical Investigations, Dermot Moran (ed.), 2 vols (London: Routledge, 2001). [*] Husserl’s work is discussed in detail by Thomas Nenon in his essay in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3. *9. For a detailed discussion of German and French neo-Kantianism, see the essay by Sebastian Luft and Fabien Capeillières in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3.

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Göttingen to take up the Chair of Philosophy in Freiburg (previously occupied by Heinrich Rickert), phenomenology became installed in the neo-Kantian heartland. In the following decade or so, from 1916 to 1928 (the year of his official retirement), Husserl established himself as the most influential philosopher in Germany. His protégé Martin Heidegger was his preferred successor and, with Husserl’s support, succeeded him to the Chair of Philosophy in Freiburg in 1928. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time; 1927), which Husserl himself had arranged to be published in his Jahrbuch, had immediate impact, but the ground for his fame had already been prepared by his lectures at Marburg (1923–28), which had already made him famous with a generation of students, as Hannah Arendt would later recall.10 Heidegger’s own intellectual formation owed much not only to Catholic neoThomism (through which he encountered Brentano’s work on Aristotle, which led him to Husserl),11 but also to neo-Kantians such as Rickert (his Doktorvater) and Emil Lask. Despite his ten-year exposure to Husserl, in his magnum opus Heidegger deliberately linked phenomenology to hermeneutics, as found in the German tradition of Schleiermacher and Dilthey, as well as drawing on Kierkegaard’s and Jaspers’s existentialism, and thereby changed phenomenology radically from within. Presuppositionless, descriptive eidetic insight, gained under the rigorous application of the epochē, gave way to interpretation, historical situatedness and an appreciation of human finitude and of the anxiety involved in personal existence. Husserl’s term “consciousness” (Bewusstsein) was replaced by Heidegger’s “Dasein” (existence).12 Soon after, with the publication of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger deliberately distanced himself from neo-Kantianism, very publicly in his famous Davos debate with Ernst Cassirer in 1929.13 When he eventually came to read Being and Time in 1929, Husserl was deeply disturbed by Heidegger’s distortion of transcendental phenomenology. He was also especially disturbed after he read Georg Misch’s 1931 study, Lebensphilosophie 10. See Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” New York Review of Books (October 1971); reprinted in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, Michael Murray (ed.) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), esp. 293. 11. See Martin Heidegger, “My Way to Phenomenology,” in The Phenomenology Reader, Dermot Moran and Tim Mooney (eds) (London: Routledge, 2002). 12. For an interesting discussion of the relation between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of phenomenology, see Steven Galt Crowell, Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning: Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), and his essay “Does the Husserl/Heidegger Feud Rest on a Mistake? An Essay in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies 18 (2002). See also Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). 13. For Heidegger’s debate with Cassirer, see Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Richard Taft (trans.) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 171–85.

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und Phänomenologie,14 which discussed Husserl, Heidegger, and Dilthey in terms that suggested it was Heidegger who was the leading new voice of hermeneutical phenomenology insofar as he had absorbed the best impulses of life philosophy: the attempt to grasp life itself. Husserl embarked on a series of responses to the Heideggerian challenge that culminated in his 1936 The Crisis of the European Sciences.15 But his young assistant Eugen Fink also sought to defend Husserl’s phenomenology against its critics – in particular in his 1933 Kant-Studien article “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism,”16 which Husserl himself explicitly endorsed – in which he responded to the accusation that with Ideas I, Husserl had drawn closer to neo-Kantianism. By 1930, phenomenology had become something of an orthodoxy in Germany and was already beginning to experience a backlash. Thus, for example, Max Horkheimer, in his speech inaugurating the newly emerging Frankfurt School, had characterized phenomenology as belonging to “traditional” rather than “critical” theory.17 The neo-Kantians, following Rickert, had renewed their attack on phenomenology, precisely because they claimed there was no pure given back to which phenomenological intuition could turn. They were effectively challenging what Sellars would later call the “myth of the given.” Scheler’s sudden death in 1928 and Heidegger’s “turning” (die Kehre) away from the constraints of academic philosophy during the 1930s also contributed to the decline of phenomenology, as did the Nazi purge of Jewish academics from the universities. Even younger German philosophers sympathetic to phenomenology – including Gadamer and Fink – believed that Husserlian phenomenology needed to be wedded to something more fundamental: in Gadamer’s case, it was hermeneutics and the nature of language; in Fink’s, it was Hegelian speculation. After the Second World War, interest in phenomenology sharply declined in Germany. Husserl had died in isolation in 1938; Heidegger was under a teaching 14. Georg Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie: Eine Auseinandersetzung der Diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl (Leipzig: Teubner, 1931). Misch, Dilthey’s sonin-law, sent a copy of his book to Husserl, who was deeply disturbed to find that his version of phenomenology was presented in a bad light in contrast with Heidegger’s absorption of Dilthey. 15. For Husserl’s responses to Heidegger, see Edmund Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–31), The Encyclopaedia Britannica Article, The Amsterdam Lectures “Phenomenology and Anthropology” and Husserl’s Marginal Notes in Being and Time, and Kant on the Problem of Metaphysics, Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (trans.) (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997). 16. Eugen Fink, “The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Contemporary Criticism,” in The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings, R. O. Elveton (ed.) (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1970). 17. See Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (trans.) (New York: Seabury Press, 1968).

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suspension and was giving private talks on German poets such as Hölderlin; Fink was developing his own philosophy, writing about Nietzsche; Gadamer was developing hermeneutics (and reviving Hegel); and critical theory would eventually be revived when exiled members of the Frankfurt School (including Adorno) returned to Germany. In addition, emerging young philosophers such as Habermas were shocked by Heidegger’s lack of self-questioning regarding his National Socialist activities, as instanced by the fact that in his published 1935 lectures Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger had left standing remarks concerning the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism.18 Moreover, Heidegger’s invocation of “metaphysical” concepts such as the “being of beings” was considered anathema by philosophers who follow the positivist rejection of metaphysics as nonsense. Phenomenology’s legacy was now tainted both by Heidegger’s connection with fascism and by the unfashionable specter of reviving metaphysics! As we have seen, phenomenology was being challenged in Germany by neoKantian and Frankfurt School thinkers during the 1930s–1950s. But phenomenology also came under attack from various offshoots of the neo-Kantian tradition, especially the Vienna Circle movement that gradually evolved into logical positivism.19 I will now turn to the analytic challenge to phenomenology, which I will present in the form of four paradigmatic confrontations.

ii. four confrontations The first confrontation: phenomenology (Husserl) and Viennese logical positivism (Schlick) plus neo-Kantianism (Natorp and Rickert) Phenomenology, itself the child of the Austrian tradition of philosophy founded by Bolzano and Brentano,20 did have a specific line of influence in Vienna

18. See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (trans.) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 213. Habermas’s review of the 1953 Heidegger lectures can be found as Jürgen Habermas, “Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of the Lectures of 1935,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, Richard Wolin (ed.) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993). 19. On the complex history of the Vienna Circle, logical positivism and logical empiricism, see Thomas Uebel, “On the Austrian Roots of Logical Empiricism: The Case of the First Vienna Circle,” in Logical Empiricism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Paulo Parrini et al. (eds) (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), and Alan Richardson and Thomas Uebel (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 20. See Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1994).

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during the development of logical positivism.21 Felix Kaufmann (1895–1949),22 a graduate in jurisprudence and an enthusiastic reader of Husserl’s phenomenology, attended meetings of the circles around Hans Kelsen (his doctoral supervisor), the economist Von Mises, and the group that eventually became known as the Vienna Circle. Kaufmann had a significant influence on the social phenomenology of the young Alfred Schutz,23 and his book on the Infinite in Mathematics and its Exclusion (1930)24 was highly regarded by Husserl. Kaufmann often discussed Husserl at meetings of the Vienna Circle (supposedly much to the annoyance of Schlick and some others) and also wrote on the relations between phenomenology and logical empiricism. In 1938, Kaufmann emigrated to the United States where, as an academic (teaching law and philosophy) at the New School for Social Research, he wrote several papers on the relation between phenomenology and analysis and, indeed, debated with his fellow émigré Rudolf Carnap on the nature of induction and truth in the pages of the newly founded Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.25 It is clear that Carnap respects Kaufmann and that Kaufmann was recognized as an influential mediator between phenomenology and the emergent logical positivist tradition.26 In particular, Kaufmann defended Husserl’s concept of Wesensschau against Moritz Schlick’s criticisms (which I will discuss below), and argued that Husserl’s concept of evidence (Evidenz) had been misunderstood by those critics who regarded it as a subjective feeling of certainty. During the early 1930s, critical philosophical responses to phenomenology came especially from Vienna Circle logical positivists such as Schlick and 21. See the essays collected in Arkadiusz Chrudzimski and Wolfgang Huemer (eds), Phenomenology and Analysis: Essays on Central European Philosophy (Frankfurt: Ontos, 2004). See also Friedrich Stadler (ed.), The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism: Re-evaluation and Future Perspectives (New York: Springer, 2004) and Stadler, The Vienna Circle – Studies in the Origins, Development, and Influence of Logical Empiricism (Vienna: Springer 2001). 22. See Harry P. Reeder, “Felix Kaufmann,” in The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, Lester Embree et al. (eds) (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1997). See also Wolfgang Huemer, “Logical Empiricism and Phenomenology: Felix Kaufmann,” in The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism, Stadler (ed.). 23. On the influence of Kaufmann on Schutz, see Michael D. Barber, The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schutz (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004), 16–17. 24. For an English translation, see Felix Kaufmann, The Infinite in Mathematics, Brian McGuinness (ed. and trans.) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978). 25. See Rudolf Carnap, “Remarks on Induction and Truth,” Felix Kaufmann, “On the Nature of Inductive Inference,” and Rudolf Carnap, “Rejoinder to Mr. Kaufmann’s Reply,” all in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 6(4) (June 1946). The dispute was reviewed by Carl Hempel in “Review of Carnap-Kaufmann Debate,” Journal of Symbolic Logic 11(4) (1946). 26. See especially Felix Kaufmann, “Phenomenology and Logical Empiricism,” in Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl, Marvin Farber (ed.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940). For a full list of his works, see Harry P. Reeder, “A Chronological Bibliography of the Works of Felix Kaufmann,” appendix in Kaufmann, The Infinite in Mathematics.

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Carnap.27 Admittedly, Schlick had already challenged Husserl’s phenomenology in the first edition (1918) of his Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (General Theory of Knowledge).28 Husserl responded to Schlick’s criticisms in the foreword to his second edition of the Sixth Investigation (which was published as a separate volume in 1921). Here Husserl asserts that many criticisms drawn from outside phenomenology fail to understand the effect that bracketing has on one’s opinions and convictions. He dismisses as absurd the view that Schlick attributes to him: How readily many authors employ critical rejections, with what conscientiousness they read my writings, what nonsense they have the audacity to attribute to me and to phenomenology are shown in the Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre of Moritz Schlick. On page 121 of that work it is said that my Ideas “asserts the existence of a particular intuition, that is not a real psychic act, and that if someone fails to find such an ‘experience,’ which does not fall within the domain of psychology, this indicates that he has not understood the doctrine, that he has not yet penetrated to the correct attitude of experience and thought, for this requires ‘peculiar, strenuous studies.’” The total impossibility that I should have been able to utter so insane an assertion as that attributed to me by Schlick in the above italicized sentences, and the falsity of the rest of his exposition of the meaning of phenomenology, must be plain to anyone familiar with this meaning.29 The tone of Husserl’s dismissal of Schlick indicates that there is a certain hostility in his attitude to him. Husserl is incredulous that Schlick apparently believes that his eidetic intuition is not also a real psychic act. Husserl goes on to remark: “I must expressly observe that, in the case of M. Schlick, one is not dealing with irrelevant slips, but with sense-distorting substitutions on which all his criticisms are based.”30 Husserl is particularly annoyed that a doctrine of special 27. Moritz Schlick (April 14, 1882–June 22, 1936; born in Berlin, Germany; died in Vienna, Austria) was educated at the University of Berlin. His influences included Carnap, Planck, and Wittgenstein, and he held appointments at the University of Vienna. 28. The second edition of Schlick’s Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre is translated as General Theory of Knowledge. Schlick dropped most of the Husserl discussion and condensed his criticisms into a single paragraph in the second edition; Moritz Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge, A. E. Blumberg and H. Feigl (trans.) (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1985), 139. For an interesting discussion, see Roberta Lanfredini, “Schlick and Husserl on the Essence of Knowledge,” in Logical Empiricism, Parrini et al. (eds). 29. Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, 179. 30. Ibid.

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or indeed mystical intuition is being attributed to him and to phenomenology. Husserl believes the meaning of the epochē has been completely misunderstood by Schlick. Phenomenology is not a Platonic gazing at essences given in a kind of intellectual intuition; it is based on hard work, akin to mathematics. In fact, Schlick had been targeting Husserl’s account of essential intuition (Wesensschau) in the Logical Investigations from as early as 1910.31 In general, Schlick was opposed to the idea that knowledge (which he conceived of as essentially propositional) could be any kind of intuition. As he puts it in a 1932 paper, “Form and Content: An Introduction to Philosophical Thinking”: “Intuition is enjoyment, enjoyment is life, not knowledge.”32 For him, the pure content of intuitive experience was inexpressible. He writes, “The difference between structure and material, between form and content is, roughly speaking, the difference between that which can be expressed and that which cannot be expressed.”33 And he goes on to say: “Since content is essentially incommunicable by language, it cannot be conveyed to a seeing man any more or any better than to a blind one.”34 For Schlick, one can see a green leaf and say that one sees the green leaf, but one’s saying it does not communicate the intuitive content “green.” This is his position against phenomenology. Schlick maintained that all knowing involved seeing-as and hence conceptualizing and judging. Pure intuiting, for Schlick, could not have the status of knowing. Ironically, Schlick does not challenge Husserl on the basis of any kind of verificationism. Both Husserl and Schlick were advocates of kinds of empiricism whereby knowledge is founded on perceptual experience, but Husserl always rejected positivism on the grounds that it overly narrowly restricted the content of experience (to sense data) and did not grasp the nature of what Husserl termed “categorial intuition.” Nevertheless, the brief but acrimonious debate between Husserl and Schlick more or less set the tone for future confrontations between phenomenology and the nascent analytic movement. Schlick returned to attack Husserl’s phenomenology again in 1930, this time attacking Husserl’s defense of synthetic a 31. See Paul Livingston, “Husserl and Schlick and the Logic of Experience,” Synthese 132(3) (2002). Schlick targets Husserl in his 1910 essay “Das Wesen der Wahrheit nach der modernen Logik,” Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Soziologie 34 (1910); published in English as “The Nature of Truth in Modern Logic,” in Moritz Schlick: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, Henk L. Mulder and Barbara F. B. Van de Velde-Schick (eds) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979). For further discussion of the Schlick–Husserl relationship, see Jim Shelton, “Schlick and Husserl on the Foundations of Phenomenology,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48 (1988), which itself is a response to M. Van de Pitte, “Schlick’s Critique of Phenomenological Propositions,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (1984). 32. Moritz Schlick, “Form and Content: An Introduction to Philosophical Thinking,” in Moritz Schlick: Philosophical Papers, Mulder and Van de Velde-Schick (eds), vol. 2, 323. 33. Ibid., 291. 34. Ibid., 295.

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priori propositions (Husserl’s “material a priori”), which Schlick regarded as empty tautologies, rather than significant eidetic insights.35 For Schlick, as for logical positivism in general, there is no synthetic a priori. Schlick followed Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in holding that a priori statements were simply tautologies and as such did not “say” anything. For Husserl, on the other hand, there are certain truths that are a priori but that depend on the nature of the matter in question.36 Thus, something being blue and at the same time yellow is not, for him, a purely formal truth based solely on the law of noncontradiction, but rather an a priori synthetic truth grounded in the essential nature of color as essentially dependent on surface. Interestingly, as we will see below, the mature Wittgenstein would side with Husserl against Schlick on this issue of the synthetic a priori.37 Husserl may have been particularly irked by Schlick precisely because the latter was repeating a criticism of phenomenology’s reliance on intuition that was to be found not just in the nascent logical positivist tradition to which Schlick belonged but also in orthodox neo-Kantianism. For neo-Kantianism, it was a matter of orthodoxy that intuitions without concepts were blind. Prominent German neo-Kantians of the day, including Rickert and Natorp, as well as other prominent philosophers such as Hans Cornelius (one of Adorno’s teachers), had also criticized phenomenology’s assumptions concerning pure unmediated givenness. Phenomenology was seen as a new form of irrational or nonconceptual intuitionism, and, as such, would be doomed to failure. Indeed, Rickert and others said as much in their criticisms of Husserl. It is one of the ironies of the history of philosophy that in his early lectures at Freiburg, Heidegger, himself a student of Rickert, takes up the challenge of defending phenomenological intuition against both Natorp and Rickert. In his 1919 lecture course, “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview,” Heidegger takes issue with Natorp’s criticism that phenomenology’s claim to be founded in immediate intuition is bankrupt since all immediacy has to be mediated by concepts and since consciousness, which is the basis for all objectification, is itself something that escapes determination. For Natorp, original experience can at best be “theoretically regained” or “reconstructed” by some 35. Moritz Schlick, “Gibt es ein materiales Apriori?” (1930), published in English as “Is there a Factual a priori?,” in Moritz Schlick: Philosophical Papers, Mulder and Van de Velde-Schick (eds), vol. 2, 161–75. The original paper appeared in a Viennese philosophy journal in 1930/1931 and is reprinted in Schlick, Gesammelte Aufsätze 1926–1936 (Vienna: Gerold, 1938). The German title of the paper actually refers to Husserl’s concept of the “material a priori.” 36. For a recent discussion, see Jocelyn Benoist, L’A priori conceptuel: Bolzano, Husserl, Schlick (Paris: Vrin, 1999). Benoist carefully distinguishes the question of the nature of analyticity (as raised by Quine) from the question of the nature of the synthetic a priori. *37. For a discussion of the transformation from the early to the late Wittgenstein, see the essay by Bob Plant and John Fennell in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3.

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kind of working back through the original “construction” process whereby the experience was subsumed under generalizing concepts.38 Natorp, then, challenges the view that phenomenology can recover direct unmediated experience. Phenomenology can at best be a “reconstruction” of experience.39 Against Natorp’s critique, the young Privatdozent Heidegger defends phenomenological viewing by arguing that conceptual description is in fact founded in an original experience that is originally nontheoretical in character.40 Furthermore, it is a mistake to consider phenomenological “signification” to be itself another kind of standpoint; it is in fact the attempt to free thinking from standpoints. The “original sin” against phenomenology, as Heidegger puts it in the same lecture course, is to assume that the phenomenological stance is merely another standpoint.41 For Heidegger, phenomenological meaning-apprehension goes along with the life process itself and grasps the essential “worldliness” of experience in a nonfalsifying way. According to Heidegger, now embarking on his own original conception of phenomenology, phenomenology essentially operates with what he terms in 1919 “hermeneutical intuition” (hermeneutische Anschauung).42 Heidegger is, as we can clearly see, already on the road to the hermeneutic transformation of Husserlian descriptive phenomenology. In later lecture courses, Heidegger offers a similar defense of phenomenology against his former teacher Rickert. In agreement with Natorp, Rickert also maintained that experience necessarily involves conceptualization and he would soon afterward (in 1920) publish a virulent critique of the “vitalism” of the then popular life philosophy (which Rickert understood broadly as including Nietzsche, Simmel, Dilthey, Bergson, Scheler, et al.) on the grounds that life had

38. See Heidegger’s critique of Natorp in his 1919 lecture course, in Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, Ted Sadler (trans.) (London: Continuum, 2002), 87–8; in his collected works, Gesamtausgabe 56/57 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987), 103–5. 39. Natorp had been a major influence on Husserl and reviewed both Husserl’s Logical Investigations and Ideas I. They were in regular correspondence until Natorp’s death in 1924. Natorp reviewed the first volume of the Investigations – Prolegomena to Pure Logic – favorably in Kant Studien in 1901, portraying Husserl as broadening the essentially Kantian inquiry into the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience. See Paul Natorp, “Zur Frage der logischen Methode. Mit Beziehung auf Edmund Husserls Prolegomena zur reinen Logik,” Kant Studien 6 (1901), 270ff.; published in English as “On the Question of Logical Method in Relation to Edmund Husserl’s Prolegomena to Pure Logic,” J. N. Mohanty (trans.), in Readings on Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, J. N. Mohanty (ed.) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977). 40. Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 94; Gesamtausgabe 56/57, 111. 41. Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 93; Gesamtausgabe 56/57, 109. Interestingly, at various points in his own lecture courses, Husserl himself designated the original sin of philosophy as the fall into psychologism and naturalism. 42. Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, 99; Gesamtausgabe 56/57, 117.

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to be conceptualized in order to be understood.43 Rickert attacks those supposed life philosophers who argue for the need to remain “true to life.” This is simply impossible for Rickert, since reality is grasped not just through sense impressions, but is mediated through language. Language, with its generalizations and “species names,” is, according to Rickert, precisely a necessary reduction of the complexity of the world of sensuous experience. It is conceptualization that brings order and system into the world of sensory experience that otherwise would be a chaos of fleeting sensations (as Kant had pointed out). Rickert concludes that “what is directly experienced as reality cannot be known. Thus, there is no metaphysics of life. … Life, as the unmediated reality, can only be lived through. As immediate life it mocks any attempt to get to know it.”44 Of course, Rickert shared Husserl’s disdain for what they regarded as irrationalist “life philosophy,” brimming with “enthusiasm” but lacking solid argumentation and conceptualization. Indeed, it was largely owing to Heidegger and Jaspers that more existentialist figures such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were reclaimed by the philosophical tradition. Scheler too had been responsible for a new appreciation of the role of personhood, emotions and feelings, in philosophy, but neo-Kantianism resisted the lure of life philosophy and continued to insist that the business of philosophy was the clarification of scientific knowledge, not the celebration of life. Even the term Erlebnis, dear to both Dilthey and Husserl, is a concession to vitalism, according to Rickert, and he identifies and criticizes the urge toward life that is to be found in Heidegger’s philosophy (inspired by Dilthey). The attack of the positivists was essentially a reprise of the original criticisms of phenomenology made by the neo-Kantians. Yet Husserl remained well disposed to the neo-Kantians, especially Natorp. During his Freiburg years, he also maintained formal but cordial relations with Rickert and corresponded with him frequently. Indeed, as he pointed out to Rickert, both were in agreement in opposing the increasingly dominant naturalism. Both phenomenology and neo-Kantianism understood philosophy to be primarily an a priori and transcendental enterprise and resisted all attempts at naturalism. On the other hand, Husserl was more antagonistic toward the new positivism. Having originally been an admirer of Ernst Mach, one of the forerunners of the Vienna Circle, and having characterized phenomenology, with its unprejudiced viewing, as 43. See Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens: Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit [The philosophy of life: Exposition and critique of the fashionable currents of contemporary philosophy] (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1922). 44. The German reads: “… was als Realität unmittelbar erlebt wird, kann nicht erkannt werden. Also gibt es keine Metaphysik des Lebens. … Das Leben als das unmittelbar Reale lässt sich nur erleben. Es spottet als unmittelbares Leben jedem Erkenntnisversuch” (Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens, 113; my translation).

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the genuine positivism in Ideas I §20, in later years Husserl went on to claim in The Crisis of the European Sciences that “positivism, in a manner of speaking, decapitates philosophy,”45 by ignoring the role of the subject in the constitution of knowledge.

The second encounter: Carnap reads Husserl and Heidegger The second encounter between phenomenology (this time represented by Husserl and Heidegger) and analytic philosophy (this time represented by Carnap) was even sharper in tone than the earlier dispute between Husserl and Schlick. Heidegger’s famous Antrittsrede, “What is Metaphysics?,” delivered at the University of Freiburg in July 1929, was deliberately provocative and evoked very strong reactions. Carnap, who was present at the talk, was, reputedly, appalled by Heidegger’s claims. His reply, entitled “The Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language,” appeared in the new journal of the logical positivists, Erkenntnis, volume 2, in 1931.46 Carnap’s essay was actually a programmatic manifesto against traditional metaphysics involving the supposed demonstration of the meaningless of metaphysical claims based on a “logical analysis” of meaning. With this essay, the battle between a certain tendency in phenomenology (regarded by Carnap as a kind of obscurantism) and logical analysis (later transformed into “analytical philosophy”) had begun.47 Indeed, the journal Erkenntnis had been explicitly founded by Carnap and Reichenbach to preach the logical positivist message and explicitly advocate “scientific philosophy.”48 Carnap’s attack on Heidegger was in effect a deliberate declaration of war, just 45. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, David Carr (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 9. 46. Originally translated as “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” in Logical Positivism, A. J. Ayer (ed.) (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), this translation has been reprinted – with a more accurate title – as “The Overcoming of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, Murray (ed.). 47. For a discussion of some of these battles see the essays in Parrini et al. (eds), Logical Empiricism; see especially Gottfried Gabriel, “Carnap’s ‘Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’: A Retrospective Consideration of the Relationship between Continental and Analytic Philosophy.” 48. As Carl Hempel recalled in 1975, “The old Erkenntnis came into existence when Hans Reichenbach and Rudolf Carnap assumed the editorship of the Annalen der Philosophie and gave the journal its new title and its characteristic orientation; the first issue appeared in 1930. The journal was backed by the Gesellschaft für Empirische Philosophie in Berlin … and by the Verein Ernst Mach in Vienna, whose philosophical position was strongly influenced by that of the Vienna Circle; a brief account of these groups, and of several kindred schools and trends of scientific and philosophical thinking, was given by Otto Neurath in ‘Historische Anmerkungen’ [vol. 1, 311–14]” (Carl Hempel, “The Old and the New ‘Erkenntnis,’” Erkenntnis 9 [1975]).

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as Heidegger’s own Inaugural Address was meant to challenge both Husserl and neo-Kantianism. For subsequent followers of analytic philosophy, Carnap’s essay has been seen as effectively unmasking Heidegger’s nonsense (literally). Indeed, the significance of Carnap’s criticisms of Heidegger may be compared with Heidegger’s own criticisms of Cassirer in his famous Davos debate of 1929. Just as Heidegger’s debate with Cassirer had the eventual result of elevating phenomenology over neo-Kantianism in Germany, Carnap’s debate with Heidegger had the eventual result of elevating analytic philosophy over Heideggerian phenomenology in the anglophone world.49 In fact, however, Carnap was actually much closer to Husserlian phenomenology than many analytic philosophers have been willing (until recently, for example, in the work of Michael Friedman50) to acknowledge. Carnap had been a student of the neo-Kantian philosopher Bruno Bauch at Freiburg, and had even attended Husserl’s seminars in 1924–25, when he was living near Freiburg and assembling the material that would become Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The logical construction of the world; 1928).51 Carnap became associated with the Vienna Circle after he moved to take up a position in Vienna in 1926, introduced through his friend Hans Reichenbach.52 In 1929, Carnap, along with Hans Hahn and Otto Neurath wrote the manifesto of the Vienna Circle, which aimed at propagating a “scientific conception of the world [wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung]” in opposition to traditional metaphysical and theological worldviews.53 This manifesto suggested that the survival of metaphysical outlooks could be explained by psychoanalysis or by sociological investigation,

49. Carnap participated in the debate at Davos. Michael Friedman claims that Carnap’s virulent attack on Heidegger in “Overcoming Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language” essay grew directly out of his encounter with Heidegger in Davos in 1929 (A Parting of the Ways. Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger [La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2000], x). *50. See, for example, the essay by Michael Friedman and Thomas Ryckman in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3. 51. The translation of “Aufbau” as “Structure” is less apt than “Construction.” Hereafter cited as Aufbau followed by the section number and the page number in the English translation (see Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudo Problems in Philosophy, Rolf A. George [trans.] [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967]). For an interesting study of Carnap, see Alan Richardson, Carnap’s Construction of the World: The Aufbau and the Emergence of Logical Empiricism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 52. See Thomas Uebel, “Carnap and the Vienna Circle,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rudolf Carnap, R. Creath and M. Friedman (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 53. See Friedrich Stadler, “The Vienna Circle: Context, Profile, and Development,” in The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism, Richardson and Uebel (eds).

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but most advanced was the “clarification of the logical origins of metaphysical aberration, especially through the works of Russell and Wittgenstein.”54 Husserl, Heidegger, and Carnap all shared a view of philosophy as attempting to clarify certain basic matters and getting beyond certain traditional philosophical problems that they regarded as “pseudo-problems” (Scheinprobleme).55 Husserl himself often made derogatory remarks about “windy metaphysics” not grounded in intuition and indeed his clarion call “to the things themselves” was meant to be a repudiation of metaphysical speculation. So the rejection of metaphysics alone did not single out Carnap’s approach from that of the phenomenologists. Furthermore, Carnap cited Husserl in positive terms in several places in the Aufbau, as he had earlier done in his dissertation published as Der Raum (1922), where he discusses Husserl’s views on the intuited nature of space.56 There is even some debate about the extent of Husserl’s influence, especially on Carnap’s central conception of “construction” (Aufbau). Carnap certainly played down the influence in later years but it is clear that, in the mid-1920s, he was well disposed toward the Freiburg phenomenologist. In general, the Aufbau shows strong neo-Kantian influences, although Carnap is also deeply in debt to the new Russellian “logistics,” which he regards as the “most comprehensive” (Aufbau §3). Following on from the tradition of Meinong, Husserl, and others, who were also seeking a “theory of objects,” Carnap is seeking to identify various forms of object and begins broadly from the division between physical objects, psychological objects, and cultural objects. Like Husserl, Carnap operates with a very wide conception of an “object” – an object is anything about which a statement can be made (and hence includes relations, events, etc.). Carnap confirms the positive connection between his approach and Meinong’s theory of objects as well as Husserl’s “mathesis of experiences” (as he finds explicated in Husserl’s Ideas I).57 Analytic philosophers may be surprised to learn that Carnap even invokes Husserl’s epochē approvingly in Aufbau §64. In speaking about beginning from one’s personal experiences (which Carnap, adapting the term “methodological

54. See Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hahn, and Otto Neurath, “The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle,” in Philosophy of Technology: The Technological Condition, An Anthology, Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek (eds) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 230. 55. For a discussion of the relation between Heidegger and Carnap see Abraham D. Stone, “Heidegger and Carnap on the Overcoming of Metaphysics,” in Martin Heidegger, Stephen Mulhall (ed.) (London: Ashgate, 2006). 56. See Richardson, Carnap’s Construction of the World, 153–4. Carnap wanted to maintain both that purely geometrical space was a formal construct, derivable from mathematics, and that physical space was experienced in intuition, albeit it in a limited way. 57. Carnap, Logical Structure of the World, 9. Carnap refers to Husserl’s Ideas I (1913), §75, but this does not seem to be the right reference for “mathesis.”

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individualism,” calls “methodological solipsism”), Carnap says that he will suspend belief as to whether the beliefs are actual or not: At the beginning of the system, the experiences must simply be taken as they occur. We shall not claim reality or nonreality in connection with these experiences; rather, these claims will be “bracketed” (i.e., we will exercise the phenomenological “withholding of judgment”, epochē, in Husserl’s sense (Ideas I §§31, 32).58 Interestingly, perhaps inspired by the Humean approach (which Husserl himself, following Brentano, adopted in the first edition of the Logical Investigations until convinced by Natorp of the need to recognize the “I”), Carnap believes that original experiences are given in a non-egoic manner (Aufbau §65). They do not have to be related to a “subject” or a “self,” concepts that Carnap believes are higher “constructions” in his sense. Some kind of “I-relatedness” is not an original property of the basic experiences, Carnap claims, since to invoke the “I” is already to invoke “others” and these are higher-order entities, outside the original given. Departing from the mature Husserl of Ideas I (who had restored the pure ego as the transcendental source of all experience), Carnap believes that the assumption that experiences must be related to a subject is actually a prejudice driven by the subject–predicate structure of our language. Carnap acknowledges that in divorcing experiences from subjects he is departing from certain philosophical “systems,” including that of Husserl (Carnap refers to Ideas I, 65; presumably §37).59 The Aufbau then offers the kind of building-up or construction of objects from experiences that Husserl’s phenomenology also tried to trace, but it does so by avoiding the introduction of the pure or transcendental ego.60 58. Carnap, Logical Structure of the World, 101. 59. Ibid., 106. 60. In an illuminating article, Abraham Stone has summarized the correlations between Husserl and Carnap in the Aufbau as follows: “Carnap’s initial realm of the ‘autopsychological’ clearly corresponds (as he explicitly points out [Logical Structure, §64]) to Husserl’s region of pure consciousness; its fundamental objects are called Erlebnisse. Next comes the physical realm, where, as in Husserl, the fundamental objects are ‘things.’ Carnap even follows Husserl on the detailed steps by which such ‘things’ are constituted: first, a level of visual things (Sehdinge), i.e., mere colored surfaces moving in space (Husserl, Ideas I, §151; Carnap, Logical Structure, §128); then, a narrowly ‘physical’ level of quantitative description in which movement is determined by strict causal law (Husserl, Ideas I, §52; Carnap, Logical Structure, 180–82); finally, the level of ‘intersubjective’ objects (though in this case, as both make clear, there is a kind of interweaving by which higher-order, psychological objects are used to complete the constitution of lower-order, physical ones) (Husserl, Ideas I, §151; Carnap, Logical Structure, §§148–9). After the physical realm comes a ‘heteropsychological’ one (corresponding to Husserl’s psychological region), and finally a realm or realms of Geist. Carnap follows Husserl, moreover, in referring to the process responsible for this structure, by which one object is

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In his 1931 article “Overcoming Metaphysics,” Carnap continues in the spirit of the Vienna Circle manifesto to apply the methods and procedures of the new logic (which Heidegger himself had written about as early as 1912) to show that Heidegger’s “metaphysical” claims about nothingness were not just false but literally nonsensical. It is worth noting that Heidegger is but one target of Carnap’s analysis. Carnap makes clear that he could have drawn his nonsensical statements from any one of a number of “metaphysicians” and, indeed, those cited in the paper include Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Bergson, as well as Heidegger. Carnap uses the concept of “pseudo-statements” in order to criticize Heidegger. A “pseudo-statement” is a sentence that has a surface grammatical sense but which on analysis turns out not to assert anything that is meaningful (capable of verification) and hence that is literally meaningless. As Carnap puts it, such pseudo-sentences accord with “historical-grammatical syntax” but violate “logical syntax.” In “Overcoming Metaphysics,” Carnap argues that there is a fault in human language that admits sentences (both meaningful and meaningless) that possess the same “grammatical form.” Carnap suggests that sentences in Heidegger’s 1929 essay – Carnap places Heidegger in “the metaphysical school” – such as “The Nothing nothings” (Das Nichts selbst nichtet) bear a superficial grammatical resemblance to acceptable sentences such as “The rain rains.”61 But this sentence is misleading because, Carnap asserts, “nothing” cannot function like a name. He points to the difference between the “is” of predication (e.g. “he is hungry”) and the “is” of existence (e.g. “he exists”) and asserts that the correct logical form of the “is” of existence is that it is applicable only to predicates, and not to signs for objects. Carnap writes: To be sure it has been known for a long time that existence is not a property (see Kant’s refutation of the ontological proof of the existence of God). But it was not until the advent of modern logic that full consistency on this point was reached: the syntactical form in which modern logic introduces the sign for existence is such that it founded on another, as Konstitution (Carnap, Logical Structure, §§1–2)” (Stone, “Heidegger and Carnap on the Overcoming of Metaphysics,” 230). Stone’s page references are to the 1974 German edition of the Aufbau. 61. Heidegger’s text is quoted by Carnap: “What is to be investigated is being only and – nothing else; being alone and further – nothing; solely being, and beyond being – nothing. What about this nothing? … Does the Nothing exist only because the Not, i.e., the Negation, exists? Or is it the other way around? Does Negation and the Not exist only because the Nothing exists? … We assert: the Nothing is prior to the Not and the Negation … Where do we seek the Nothing? How do we find the Nothing … We know the Nothing. … Anxiety reveals the Nothing. … What about this Nothing – The Nothing itself nothings [Das Nichts selbst nichtet]” (“The Overcoming of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” 24).

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cannot, like a predicate, by applied to signs for objects, but only to predicates …62 This extends the Frege–Russell treatment of the existential quantifier. According to Carnap in his essay “Overcoming Metaphysics,” Heidegger makes the logical mistake “of employing the word ‘nothing’ as a noun [Gegenstandsname]” instead of recognizing it is a negative existential sentence or assertion. Carnap’s approach, of course, is precisely an application of Russellian logical analysis (as exemplified by Russell in his “On Denoting” [1905]) to a typical sentence of metaphysics to show that its apparently meaningful grammatical form masks an underlying logical nonsense. Carnap’s attack on Heidegger has been seen in some analytic circles as devastating. His views were popularized in the anglophone world by A. J. Ayer, especially in his Language, Truth and Logic, published in 1936, shortly after Carnap’s visit to London. But the original target for the logical positivists had been Hegel and, when logical positivism moved to Britain, neo-Hegelians such as Bradley and Greene.63 Carnap’s article, however, went much further in its attacks, not just targeting Hegel (who also writes about the Nothing), but even criticizing Descartes for his supposed pseudo-statement “I am,” presented as the conclusion of his cogito ergo sum. Most analytic philosophers would not follow Carnap in his analysis of the supposed logical flaw in Descartes’s famous dictum, yet he was treated as having effectively dismissed Heidegger.64 In fact, between the 1930s and the 1970s, analytic philosophy was largely defined by its overt hostility to all forms of metaphysics, but the situation has changed rapidly since the 1970s and something called “analytic metaphysics” – inspired by the work of Roderick Chisholm, Peter Strawson, David Lewis, David Armstrong, and others – is now a leading branch of analytic philosophy. Moreover, Carnap’s rejection 62. Ibid., 28. 63. In Language, Truth and Logic (1936), for instance, A. J. Ayer quotes a sentence from Bradley’s Appearance and Reality as nonsensical: “the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress.” In the same work, Ayer also criticizes Heidegger’s assumption that “Nothing” is “a name which is used to denote something peculiarly mysterious,” but he himself makes clear that he is repeating Carnap’s analysis in his “Overcoming Metaphysics” article of 1931. See A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1952), 36. 64. In large part, the debate between phenomenology and logical positivism was about the meaning and status of the a priori. As Friedman, among others, has pointed out, Carnap’s reaction to phenomenology, and indeed to Heidegger, was complex. Husserl’s account of the a priori comes close to that of the logical positivists. Of course, both Carnap and Heidegger had received their initial training in neo-Kantianism. See Friedman, A Parting of the Ways, and his essay “A Turning Point in Philosophy: Carnap-Cassirer-Heidegger,” in Logical Empiricism, Parrini et al. (eds); see also Gabriel, “Carnap’s ‘Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language.’”

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of Heidegger has in fact been revisited by analytic philosophers, many of whom now acknowledge the limitations of Carnap’s approach. In 1935, Carnap delivered three lectures in London, published as Philosophy and Logical Syntax. In these lectures, he states that the only proper task of philosophy is logical analysis and offers as his example the logical analysis of metaphysics. Carnap defines metaphysical statements as follows: “I will call metaphysical all those statements which claim to represent knowledge about something which is over or beyond all experience, e.g., about the Essence of things, about Things in themselves, the Absolute, and such like.”65 He includes statements by ancients such as Thales (“the Essence and Principle of the world is water”), Heraclitus, Anaximander, Pythagoras, and Plato, as well as moderns such as Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel, and Bergson. According to Carnap, all the statements of metaphysicians of this kind have no empirical content, hence no possibility of being verified and are thereby literally nonsensical. The supposed problems of metaphysics were, for him, in reality pseudo-problems. Carnap does allow for metaphysical statements to have a function, namely, an expressive one, similar to the function of “lyrical verses”: “The metaphysician believes that he travels in territory in which truth and falsehood are at stake. In reality, however, he has not asserted anything, but only expressed something, like an artist.”66 Although Heidegger never directly replied to Carnap, he does seem to have been affected by Carnap’s criticism. Thus, in his 1943 “Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics?’” Heidegger insisted that one of the chief “misconceptions” concerning his position was that it “declares itself against ‘logic.’”67 Heidegger goes on to claim that logic has degenerated into “logistics” and that “exact thinking” is not really the most rigorous or penetrating form of thinking: “exact thinking merely binds itself to the calculation of beings.”68 Calculative thinking is in pursuit of mastery; in opposition to this, there is another form of thinking, which Heidegger here calls “essential thinking,” whose aim it is to find the word that speaks “the truth of being.” The question “How is it with the nothing?” is not a question of logic. The “nothing” is more originary than the logical concepts of “not” and negation. The fundamental mood of anxiety reveals the nothing in a

65. Rudolf Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Syntax, excerpts reprinted in Twentieth-Century Philosophy: The Analytic Tradition, Morris Weitz (ed.) (New York: Free Press, 1966), 209–10. 66. Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language,” 79. Interestingly, in these lectures, Carnap takes issue with Wittgenstein’s claim in the Tractatus that his own statements were without sense. For Carnap, the sentences of the Tractatus have sense as logical analysis but not as a competing metaphysics. *67. For further discussion of Heidegger’s early work on logic, see the essays by Miguel de Beistegui and Babette Babich in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3. 68. Martin Heidegger, “Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics?,’” in Pathmarks, William McNeill (ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 235.

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way that is more primordial. Heidegger simply shifts the ground for the entire discussion. Issues from within formal logic cannot affect a kind of thinking that is more originary than logic.

The third encounter: Cambridge (Wittgenstein) and Oxford (Ryle) consider phenomenology In general Ludwig Wittgenstein69 seems to have been uninterested in phenomenology, just as he was uninterested in or impatient with other philosophical movements of the time – including the logical positivists, whom he himself had influenced and who continued to admire him, even after he had abandoned the position that they embraced! There have been suggestions that his work of philosophical clarification has much in common with the kind of method pursued by Husserl in his Logical Investigations, but the precise nature of Wittgenstein’s knowledge of that book has not been established.70 Occasionally, especially in the late 1920s and early 1930s, Wittgenstein employed the term “phenomenology” in a positive sense, with an entire chapter of his so-called “Big Typescript” (1933) entitled “Phenomenology is Grammar.”71 Similarly, in some remarks made in 1929, Wittgenstein offered apparently sympathetic reflections on Heidegger’s Being and Time, wherein he recognized the importance of “anxiety” or “dread” (Angst) and related the notion of the experience of astonishment concerning the experience of running up against the limits of language.72 In remarks that were recorded by Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein said: I can readily think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread. Man has the impulse to run up against the limits of language. Think, for example, of the astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also *69. For a detailed discussion of Wittgenstein, see the essay by John Fennell and Bob Plant in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 3. 70. See Merrill B. Hintikka and Jaakko Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). 71. For a full discussion of Wittgenstein’s relation to phenomenology see N. F. Gier, Wittgenstein and Phenomenology: A Comparative Study of the Later Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1981); but see also his “Wittgenstein’s Phenomenology Revisited,” Philosophy Today 34(4) (1990), and “Never Say Never: A Response to Harry P. Reeder’s ‘Wittgenstein Never Was a Phenomenologist,’” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 22(1) (January 1991). 72. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, “On Heidegger on Being and Dread,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, Michael Murray (ed.). The original German text entitled “Zu Heidegger,” is to be found in Brian F. McGuinness, Ludwig Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 68–9.

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no answer to it. Everything which we feel like saying can, a priori, only be nonsense. Nevertheless, we do run up against the limits of language. … This running up against the limits of language is Ethics. I hold that it is truly important that one put an end to all the idle talk about Ethics – whether there be knowledge, whether there can be values, whether the Good can be defined, etc.73 Heidegger had discussed the nature of Angst in Being and Time §40, but he returned to it also in his July 1929 lecture “What is Metaphysics?,” which we have already discussed. Around this time also, in 1930, Wittgenstein made a comment, recorded by his friend Maurice O’Connor Drury, concerning Schlick’s upcoming presentation at the Moral Science Club in Cambridge, where he had been asked to speak about phenomenology. Wittgenstein commented acidly: “You ought to make a point of going to hear this paper, but I shan’t be there. You could say of my work that it is ‘phenomenology.’”74 In several of his remarks, Wittgenstein speaks of a kind of phenomenology of color experiences, for instance, that cannot be contradicted by physics; and he acknowledges the appeal of phenomenology in his Remarks on Color. But more than that, in his later career Wittgenstein was developing an appreciation for a priori synthetic propositions that Schlick has explicitly rejected as part of the phenomenologist’s toolbox. Meanwhile, at Oxford, the ordinary-language philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976),75 who was responsible for lecturing on phenomenology and Austrian philosophy, had his own way of reading Husserl and others.76 Initially, Ryle was reasonably well disposed toward phenomenology, both for its descriptions of conscious states and for its conception of philosophy as independent of the sciences. But by the late 1930s, he had come to reject it in favor of a kind of linguistic behaviorism that repudiated most “internalist” accounts of the stream of consciousness.

73. See Wittgenstein, “On Heidegger on Being and Dread,” 80–81. 74. See Maurice O’Connor Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in Personal Recollections of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rush Rhees (ed.) (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1981), 131. See also Herbert Spiegelberg, “Wittgenstein Calls his Philosophy ‘Phenomenology,’” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 13(3) (October 1982). 75. Ryle was a graduate of Oxford in classics and philosophy, who spent his entire academic life at Christ Church, and he eventually became Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy. 76. For an interesting discussion of Ryle’s reading of phenomenology, see Amie L. Thomasson, “Phenomenology and the Development of Analytic Philosophy,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 40 (2002 Supplement).

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Very early in his lecturing career, Ryle reviewed Husserl’s Polish student Roman Ingarden’s Essential Questions (Essentiale Fragen)77 in Mind in 1927 and Heidegger’s Being and Time78 in Mind in 1929, just two years after that work had originally appeared in German, and, in 1929, he even visited Husserl in Freiburg and discussed phenomenology with him.79 Ryle initially seemed to have been quite favorably disposed to phenomenology, which he saw as offering the same kind of conceptual analysis that he favored. In 1932, Ryle contributed a fairly detailed article explaining phenomenology to the Supplementary Volume of the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,80 and his later articles on phenomenology (especially his review of Husserl’s American student Marvin Farber’s The Foundations of Phenomenology81) are extremely valuable and insightful with regard to the initial reception of phenomenology in the anglophone world.82 In his 1932 article “Phenomenology,” Ryle points out that phenomenology, which he defines as the “science of the manifestations of consciousness,” is not to be confused with phenomenalism. He explains Brentano and his fellow phenomenologists as asking the question: “What is it to be a case of remembering, judging, inferring, wishing, choosing, regretting, etc.?” (CP1 167). This, for Ryle, is a conceptual question totally distinct from empirical inquiries into what causes one to remember, and so on. Ryle therefore explicitly endorses the phenomenologists’ separation of their discipline from empirical psychology. He further agrees with Husserl that the discipline of phenomenology is a priori. Phenomenology, for Ryle, is a kind of a priori conceptual analysis. He disagrees, however, with Husserl’s claim that phenomenology is a rigorous science, since Ryle simply thinks that philosophy generally, as the “analytic investigation of types of mental functioning,” has nothing to do with science: “Philosophical methods are neither scientific nor unscientific” (CP1 168). Philosophy is sui

77. See Gilbert Ryle, “Review of Roman Ingarden’s Essentiale Fragen: Ein Beitrag zum Problem des Wesens,” Mind 36 (1927). 78. See Gilbert Ryle, “Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit,” Mind 38 (1929): 355–70; reprinted in Ryle, Collected Papers, Volume One: Critical Essays (London: Hutchinson, 1971). Hereafter Ryle, Collected Papers, Volume 1 will be cited as CP1. 79. See Karl Schuhmann, Husserl-Chronik: Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 340. 80. Gilbert Ryle, “Phenomenology,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 11 (1932); reprinted in CP1. 81. Gilbert Ryle, “Review of Marvin Farber: The Foundations of Phenomenology,” Philosophy 21 (1946); reprinted in CP1. 82. In the postwar years, Ryle became more emphatic in his criticisms of many aspects of phenomenology’s manner of proceeding. While Ryle’s quirky writing style may sound today somewhat chauvinistic in its championing of Anglo-Saxon values over those he styles “Teutonic,” there is no doubt that he makes every effort to understand phenomenology as well as to criticize it.

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generis, although that does not mean that it is occupied with special sorts of entities such as abstract objects, sense data, and other philosophical terms of art. Interestingly, in endorsing Husserl’s apriorism, Ryle agrees with Husserl’s opposition to various forms of naturalism and empiricism. Ryle further agrees with Husserl that philosophy should not engage in the construction of speculative systems. While he does find some metaphysical constructions in Husserl, Ryle goes on to assert: “But with his [Husserl’s] official view, that the business of philosophy is not to give new information about the world but to analyze the most general forms of what experience finds to be exemplified in the world, I completely agree” (CP1 170). On the other hand, Ryle explicitly disagrees with Husserl’s account of ideal entities (abstract objects, propositions, and so on), which he thinks is close to Meinong’s. He opposes the view that one can have essential or eidetic insight in the manner of a supposed direct inspection of essences. As Ryle sees it, Husserl often speaks as if one simply inspects or “constatates” (Ryle’s word) essences.83 This is misleading because he also talks about identifying the eidetic laws. Ryle writes: Philosophy is, accordingly, a kind of observational science (like geography); only the objects which it inspects are not spatio-temporal objects but semi-Platonic objects which are out of space and time. These are correlates to acts of conception and judgment, though whether it is essential to them to be so correlative or whether it is accidental is left rather obscure by Husserl’s writings. (Ibid.) Ryle supposes that Husserl conceives these ideal objects as something independently subsisting (akin to Meinong), although for Ryle, Husserl is not clear enough on this point. In his later writings on phenomenology, Ryle continues to dismiss Husserl’s Platonism concerning these ideal entities (CP1 219). He believes it is both an “impropriety” and a “nonsense” to speak of seeing essences in this manner (CP1 220). Taking his cue from the later Wittgenstein, Ryle notes that “we elucidate their significations by fixing the rules of their uses and not by any operation of gazing at any wearers of labels” (CP1 221). For Ryle, thought does not begin with a vocabulary and then develop a syntax; rather, “its vocabulary is syntactical from the start.” In his 1946 review of Farber’s The Foundations of Phenomenology, Ryle is more emphatic: The proprietary method claimed for Phenomenology is a sham, and Phenomenology, if it moves at all, moves only by the procedures by 83. See Ryle, “Review of Marvin Farber,” CP1 221.

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which all good philosophers have always advanced the elucidation of concepts, including consciousness-concepts. Husserl’s practice bears this out. He does often produce acute original and illuminating elucidations of such concepts. (Ibid.) Ryle concedes that Husserl engages in conceptual clarification, but in general, as he puts it in his review of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, he fears that the phenomenological approach will end in a “windy mysticism.” In “Phenomenology,” Ryle thinks that Husserl does not have to cling to the doctrine of eidetic intuition. Indeed, for Ryle, the main doctrine of phenomenology is the thesis that all consciousness is consciousness of something; in other words, that all consciousness is intentional, or, in Ryle’s terms, “transitive” (CP1 171). Although he is deeply interested in Husserl’s account of intentionality, Ryle ends up criticizing its conception of mental acts as “consciousness-of.” Rather, Ryle thinks (following the former Wykeham Professor of Logic, John Cook Wilson’s views), mental acts such as believing involve reference to knowledge; and hence “knowledge-of ” should replace Husserl’s locution of “consciousness-of.” In his “Phenomenology” of 1932, we already see phenomenology being criticized from the standpoint of the newly emerging analytic philosophy of language. Furthermore, Ryle is explicitly unhappy with Husserl’s turn to a kind of “egocentric metaphysic” (CP1 174), having gone beyond its original purpose of providing conceptual analyses of mental acts or states.84 In his main work, The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle rejected all philosophical efforts to postulate an ego or Cartesian-style mind as some kind of “ghost in the machine,” favoring instead a behaviorist, “dispositionalist” account of sentences that purported to involve mental predicates. Ryle writes: It is being maintained throughout this book that when we characterize people by mental predicates, we are not making untestable 84. In the 1950s, Ryle participated in the famous Royaumont conference in France, along with Merleau-Ponty. Unfortunately, there does not appear to have been much useful exchange of views. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Ayer, who was stationed in Paris attached to the British Embassy, and Merleau-Ponty were known to have had lengthy conversations and to have radically disagreed. In one encounter in 1951, recorded by Georges Bataille, Ayer, Bataille, and Merleau-Ponty took opposing sides on the meaning of a sentence such as the “sun existed before humans were on earth,” with Ayer insisting it was completely meaningful and Bataille being incredulous. Unfortunately, we know little more about these conversations. See A. J. Ayer, Part of My Life: The Memoirs of a Philosopher (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 285. For an interesting analysis of the Ryle–Merleau-Ponty debate, see Juha Himanka, “Does The Earth Move? A Search for a Dialogue between Two Traditions of Contemporary Philosophy,” The Philosophical Forum 31(1) (Spring 2000), esp. 58–9.

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inferences to any ghostly processes occurring in streams of consciousness which we are debarred from visiting; we are describing the ways in which those people conduct parts of their predominantly public behavior.85 As a result, Ryle was characterized as a logical behaviorist and his views strongly influenced his student Daniel Dennett, who employs the Rylean strategy of the “category mistake” to diffuse ontological commitments with regard to mental entities.86 Ryle was now rejecting the very concept of a stream of consciousness and was advocating that our mental categories (what he calls “category habits”) be replaced by new “category disciplines” that are purged of Cartesian myth. Ryle’s views on the ego, of course, are actually not far removed from those of Jean-Paul Sartre, especially as given in his 1936 essay The Transcendence of the Ego, where Sartre too tries to dissolve reference to the ego in sentences such as “I am chasing a street-car.” For Sartre, the immediate conscious experience has the form “street-car to be chased.” Ryle’s criticism of Husserlian approaches to consciousness, then, might not have extended to all phenomenology’s exponents. The problem with the encounter between phenomenology and ordinarylanguage philosophy as exemplified by Ryle at Oxford, is that the confrontation was one-sided. The phenomenologists and their continental followers rarely showed interest in what was happening in the anglophone world. For all intents and purposes, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Feigl, and others, were completely absorbed into anglophone, Anglo-American philosophy, and their roots in European thought were ignored until a new subject, the history of analytic philosophy, emerged in the 1980s.87

The fourth dimension: John Searle and Jacques Derrida arguing over Austin The fourth paradigmatic encounter I will discuss in this essay is the confrontation that took place between the American philosopher John R. Searle and the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the late 1970s. While this is somewhat outside the parameters of the historical period under consideration in this volume, it has to be acknowledged that the 1960s perhaps represents a particularly barren period in terms of the relations between analytic and continental philosophy (understood here as the legacy of phenomenology) generally. On the one hand, it was only in the postwar years that many of the classics of the continental 85. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), 51. 86. See, for instance, Daniel C. Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge, 1969). 87. A milestone in the development of the history of analytic philosophy was Michael Dummett’s Origins of Analytical Philosophy, originally delivered as lectures in Bologna in 1987.

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tradition – Husserl’s Logical Investigations (translated 1970), Heidegger’s Being and Time (translated 1962), Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (translated 1958), and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (translated 1962) – first began to be discussed seriously in the anglophone world. Philosophers such as John Wild, J. N. Findlay, Hazel Barnes, and others played an important intermediary role here. On the other hand, a growing hostility to continental philosophy and an increasing insistence that philosophy as such was analytic become particularly strident in the English-speaking world during that decade. Philosophically, the 1960s is a period of apartheid and separate development, and it is difficult if not impossible to find a fruitful encounter between analytic philosophy and phenomenology. Within the analytic tradition there were lone voices – such as those of P. F. Strawson (defending descriptive metaphysics), and Wilfrid Sellars – that were relatively favorably disposed to certain kinds of post-Kantian philosophy,88 but there was no serious effort to engage with phenomenology or its continental followers. Hence the need to look to the 1970s to round off our narrative. The confrontation that I want to consider ostensibly took place over Derrida’s interpretation of the Oxford philosopher’s John Austin’s account of performatives, but it reaches to the very heart of Searle’s and Derrida’s versions of what constituted the nature of language, the practice of philosophy, and indeed the standards governing textual interpretation. This debate continues to generate controversy as to its importance for the confrontation between so-called “analytic” and “continental” ways of philosophizing, and represents a convenient place for us to end our story in this essay. Searle studied at Oxford in the 1950s with Austin and others. He initially worked on philosophy of language and became well known for his book Speech Acts (1969), which systematized Austin’s work on performatives and other kinds of illocutionary acts. In Europe, Searle’s work had a strong influence on both Habermas and Apel. Searle then moved to write on issues in the philosophy of mind and especially on the nature of intentionality. Searle’s Intentionality (1983) is modeled on his earlier analysis of speech acts. Just as, in speech acts, there is a distinction between propositional content and illocutionary force, in intentional states there is a similar distinction to be found between the propositional content and its propositional attitude or what Searle terms “psychological mode.” Searle claims that in researching his book Intentionality, he could find nothing useful in the analytic literature:

88. See, for instance, Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), and Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968).

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So I turned to the phenomenologists, and the book that I was urged to read was Husserl’s Logical Investigations. Well, I read the First Logical Investigation, and, frankly, I was very disappointed. It seemed to me that it was in no way an advance on Frege and was, in fact, rather badly written, unclear, and confused. So I abandoned the effort to try to learn something about intentionality from previous writers and just went to work on my own. … I learned nothing from Husserl, literally nothing, though, of course, I did learn a lot from Frege and Wittgenstein.89 Searle, then, claims to have rediscovered intentionality and to have made it intelligible within analytic philosophy of mind without further reference to the phenomenological tradition. In contrast to Searle’s, Derrida’s intellectual formation came primarily through his engagement with the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger in particular. He wrote three early, formative studies on Husserl.90 Derrida’s work was deeply inspired by a “linguistic turn” that took place in French philosophy in the 1960s largely through the influence of Heidegger’s later essays on language, on the one hand, and the renewed interest, starting with the later Merleau-Ponty, in the protostructuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, on the other.91 While most often associated with poststructuralism, by his own account, Derrida remained deeply indebted to Husserlian phenomenology and the practice of the epochē in particular. It is true that for me Husserl’s work, and precisely the notion of epochē, has been and still is a major indispensable gesture. In everything I try to say and write the epoché is implied. I would say that I constantly try to practice that whenever I am speaking or writing. 92 89. John Searle, “The Phenomenological Illusion,” in Experience and Analysis: Erfahrung und Analyse, Maria E. Reicher and Johann C. Marek (eds) (Vienna: OBV and HPT, 2005), 320. 90. Derrida’s three major Husserl studies (written in 1953/4, 1962, and 1967, respectively) are: The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, Marian Hobson (trans.) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, John P. Leavey, Jr. (trans.) (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); and Speech and Phenomena, David B. Allison (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972). 91. For a discussion of Derrida’s philosophical formation and influences, see my Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000), 435–73. [*] See also the essay on the linguistic turn in continental philosophy by Claire Colebrook in The History of Continental Philosophy: Volume 6. 92. Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility,” in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (eds) (London: Routledge, 1998), 81.

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Derrida’s controversy with Searle was occasioned by the publication of an English translation of his essay “Signature Event Context” in the first issue of a new journal of textual studies from Johns Hopkins University – Glyph – in 1977.93 As Searle recalls, there was a reading group at Berkeley, of which he was a part, and someone proposed reading this Derrida essay. He was very critical of the paper and was invited to submit his comments to the new journal. His reply, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” appeared in the same volume of Glyph.94 In his original paper, Derrida offers a complex and often enigmatic discussion of Austin’s use of performatives. Derrida’s paper in general is a meditation on the supposed centrality of the communicative function of language and involves discussion of the views of Condillac (taken as maintaining the classical view of language as a representation of ideas) and Husserl, as well as Austin. Derrida’s topic is the multiple nature or “polysemy” of communication, and his essay introduces many of his more familiar themes, including différance, the absence of the signified, and so on. Indeed, part of his aim is to explain and apply aspects of Husserl’s analysis of language. Sentences (even observational sentences) have sense even apart from the experience that is being described. The experience may be absent. Similarly, in written language, the “speaker” may be absent. A key feature of linguistic acts is their “iterability,” by which Derrida means that linguistic statements need to be repeatable and be able to function outside their immediate context, and especially beyond the purview of the immediate range of receivers, listeners, readers, and so on. The essay begins with a short quotation from Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962), where Austin states that for simplicity he will restrict his discussion to spoken utterances, and indeed literal speech, excluding such things as an actor pronouncing words on stage, or other “parasitic” forms, such as playful speech, metaphors, and so on. Austin writes: “Language in such circumstances is in special ways – intelligibly – used not seriously, but in ways parasitic on its normal use – ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language.”95 93. Derrida’s essay was originally delivered as a paper at a Canadian conference in 1971, whose overall theme was “communication,” and was published in Marges de la philosophie in 1972. 94. See Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context” and John Searle, “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” both in Glyph 1 (1977). Derrida in turn replied to Searle in “Limited Inc.,” Glyph 2 (1978). See also John Searle, “The World Turned Upside Down,” in Working through Derrida, Gary B. Madison (ed.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993). The papers of the Derrida–Searle exchange are all reprinted in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., Samuel Weber et al. (trans.) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). This debate has engendered an enormous critical literature including articles by Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, and others. 95. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1955, J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (eds) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 22.

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In his essay, Derrida challenges the view that there is a single meaning to communication, and indeed points to the complex nature of what is supposed under the notion of “literal meaning” and the complexities introduced by metaphorical uses of language. For Derrida, the true complex nature of language where metaphor, and so on, are in play from the beginning is being ignored here, making Austin’s otherwise interesting analysis beside the point. Derrida carefully focuses on Austin’s apparently innocent use of the metaphorical term “parasitical,” which suggests that metaphorical and analogical uses of language are extensions of the basic literal function of language, as if that “literal” function was itself perfectly clear. Metaphor, fiction, and so on, are seen by Austin and others as some kind of (perhaps dispensable) add-on to the literal use of language.96 In his reply, Searle simply dismissed Derrida’s interpretation of Austin as a misunderstanding, owing, he claims, mostly to Derrida’s ignorance of postWittgensteinian developments in linguistics and the philosophy of language. Searle denies that iterability is a specific feature of written rather than spoken language. Rather, permanence is what distinguishes the written mark. In reply, Derrida claims he has been misunderstood, his statements taken out of context, ignoring the larger claims of his other work, and so on. Derrida’s evasion, his play on the very notion of seriousness in philosophy, all indicate that he was not seeking to seriously engage with his opponent. Searle regarded his “debate” with Derrida as a non-event and refused to continue it. He later commented: With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida.97

96. For a criticism of Austin/Searle and an argument in support of Derrida in this regard, see Jonathan Culler, “Convention and Meaning: Derrida and Austin,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism, R. C. Davis and R. Schleifer (eds) (New York: Longman, 1989). 97. John Searle, “Reality Principles: An Interview with John R. Searle,” interview with Steven R. Postrel and Edward Feser, Reason Online (February 2000), http://reason.com/archives/ 2000/02/01/reality-principles-an-intervie (accessed June 2010).

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iii. conclusion: more of the same To be sure, the context of analytic philosophy had changed considerably as the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations replaced the earlier Wittgenstein of the Tractatus.98 Where the backdrop to Carnap’s approach had been the Tractatus view, the backdrop to the Oxford ordinary-language philosophy of Ryle and Austin – which Searle encountered in the 1950s – was the view that what ordinary speech enshrines makes sense and is somehow “right.” Nevertheless, the exchange between Searle and Derrida in many ways resurrects a point at issue between earlier opponents such as Heidegger and Carnap; namely, whether language can be exact and also precisely refer to the real world in some literal way. Both Carnap and Searle begin from the literal use of language, which they see as fundamental to science as the articulation of truth. Both Heidegger and Derrida, on the other hand, see language as essentially and inescapably symbolic and metaphorical. For them, the poetic function is not one function among many of language, but is rather the primary force that makes language possible at all. It is precisely because language points beyond itself and indeed beyond what is immediately indicated that it is capable of functioning for the transmission of meaning. At the time of his dispute with Heidegger, Carnap was trying to fix the meanings of language, or at least to have a scientific language that was logically purified and unambiguous and which picked out the one true world (although later Carnap moved to recognize the multiplicity of irreducible “conceptual schemes,” as his pupil Hilary Putnam terms them). Heidegger, on the other hand, was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the stultified language of the philosophical tradition and wanted to exploit the poetic resources and ambiguities in language, especially the German and ancient Greek languages, as ways of expressing the manner in which Being reveals and conceals itself across history. In what has come to be known as analytic philosophy generally, enormous emphasis is placed on the values of clarity, accuracy, precision, and rigor in argumentation. From that point of view, Heidegger and Derrida are seen as needlessly obscure, engaged in “rhetoric” or literary allusion, offering bad arguments or even no arguments at all. Indeed, as we have quoted above, Searle even used the phrase (which he claims he took from Foucault’s assessment of Derrida) “terrorist obscurantism.” Even Rorty, who agrees with much of what Derrida has to say, is quite willing to concede that “Searle is … right in saying that a lot of Derrida’s arguments … are just awful.”99 On the other hand, Heidegger, 98. Wilfrid Sellars spoke about Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations having moved analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian phase. 99. Richard Rorty, “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93–4.

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as we also saw, regarded such demands for exactitude as part of calculative rather than originary thinking. Phenomenology privileged eidetic insight and description over argumentation. Of course, the later Wittgenstein had a similar view of philosophy as presenting a particular view on matters or perhaps escaping from the grip of a prevailing mistaken picture of things. This does not require argumentation but rather what Husserl would call a “change of attitude” (Einstellungänderung) or what Thomas Kuhn would call a “paradigm shift.” There is no doubt that there is obscurity in Derrida and Heidegger; but this is seen as necessary in relation to the complexity of the thought and its need to break its relation to its tradition. Rigorous argumentation, moreover, is but one aspect of philosophical inventiveness. The Platonic dialogues show how discussions can lead to aporias and to insights that are not quite what was intended in the argumentation. Hermeneutics, for Heidegger, had exactly this function. Indeed, Husserl’s own position was that phenomenology came through insight and attention to what is given and gained by insight, rather than through argumentation and deduction. In a sense, the encounters between analytic philosophy and phenomenology have constantly returned to this battleground originally staked out by the neo-Kantians: the relation between sensuous intuition and conceptualization (which itself requires language). This tension between what can be intuited and what must be deduced continues in the latest versions of the debate. For example, influential commentators, including Hubert L. Dreyfus, have interpreted Searle himself as pursuing a kind of phenomenology with his close description of the essential conditions of intentionality and his interest in consciousness, perception, and other themes familiar to phenomenology. In reaction, Searle has attempted to distinguish his practice of (what he terms) logical analysis from what he takes to be phenomenological analysis.100 This distinction largely repeats the kinds of distinction of approach made by Schlick against Husserl, Ryle against Husserl, Carnap against Heidegger, and so on. Yet, it would be wrong to think that the encounters are simply indications of incorrigible misunderstandings and misconnections. Phenomenology continues to develop and mutate and analytic philosophy has discovered that it is not just a method but a tradition that has its own hermeneutical dimensions. Indeed, there is little agreement today as to what constitutes the core of analytic philosophy, and there are challenges to the whole idea of philosophy as a priori analysis of intuition. One positive gain is that many analytic philosophers have recognized that phenomenology does have some 100. See especially, John Searle, “The Phenomenological Illusion”; “The Limits of Phenomenology,” in Essays in Honor of Hubert Dreyfus, Volume 2: Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science, Mark A. Wrathall (ed.) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); and “Neither Phenomenological Description Nor Rational Reconstruction: Reply to Hubert Dreyfus,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 55(217) (2001).

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dermot moran

value. Searle, for instance, is critical of phenomenology, and yet, in a certain sense, has written approvingly of what phenomenology tries to do: “I want to emphasize at the start that if phenomenology is defined as the examination of the structure of consciousness, I have no objections whatever to phenomenology. My misgivings are about some specific authors and their practice of this method.”101 Searle goes on to say. and perhaps we should leave this as a suitable last word for this essay: “Properly understood, there is no conflict between analytic philosophy and phenomenology. They offer noncompeting and complementary methods of investigation and anybody prepared to do serious work should be ready to use both.”102

101. Searle, “The Phenomenological Illusion,” 317. 102. Ibid., 323.

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chronology

philosophical events

cultural events

political events

1620 Bacon, Novum organum 1633

Condemnation of Galileo

1634

Establishment of the Academie Française

1637 Descartes, Discourse on Method 1641 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy 1642

Rembrandt, Nightwatch

1651 Hobbes, Leviathan 1662 Logique du Port-Royal 1665

Newton discovers calculus

1667

Milton, Paradise Lost

1670 Pascal, Les Pensées (posthumous) Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus 1675

Leibniz discovers calculus

1677 Spinoza, Ethics 1687

Newton, Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica

1689 Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (–1690) Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

267

English Civil War begins

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

political events

1689 (–1690) Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government 1695

Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, vol. I

1714 Leibniz, Monadologie 1739 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature 1742

Handel, Messiah

1748 Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 1751 Diderot and D’Alembert, Encyclopédie, vols 1 & 2 1755 Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes 1759

Voltaire, Candide

1762 Rousseau, Du contrat social and Émile ou de l’éducation 1774

Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther

1776 Death of Hume

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

American Declaration of Independence

1781 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft 1783 Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik 1784 Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” 1785 Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten 1787

US Constitution

1788 Birth of Arthur Schopenhauer Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft 1789 Death of d’Holbach

Adoption of La Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen

1790 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France

1791

Mozart, The Magic Flute Tom Paine, The Rights of Man

French Revolution and the establishment of the First Republic

1792 Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1794

Creation of the École Normale Death of Robespierre Supérieure

268

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

political events

1795 Schiller, Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen 1797 Schelling, Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur als Einleitung in das Studium dieser Wissenschaft

Hölderlin, Hyperion Vol. One

1798 Birth of Auguste Comte

Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population

1800 Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus

Beethoven’s First Symphony

1804 Death of Kant

Napoleon Bonaparte proclaims the First Empire

1805

Publication of Diderot, Le Neveu de Rameau

1806 Birth of John Stuart Mill

Goethe, Faust, Part One Reinstatement of the Sorbonne by Napoleon as a secular university

Napoleon brings the Holy Roman Empire to an end

1815

Jane Austen, Emma

Battle of Waterloo; final defeat of Napoleon

1817 Hegel, Encyclopedia

Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy

1818 Birth of Karl Marx

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus

1819 Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung

Byron, Don Juan

1807 Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes 1812 (–1816) Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik

1821 Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts 1823

Death of Napoleon Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony

1830 (–1842) Auguste Comte, Cours Stendhal, The Red and the Black de philosophie positive in six volumes 1831 Death of Hegel

Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame

1832 Death of Bentham

Clausewitz, Vom Kriege

1833 Birth of Wilhelm Dilthey

Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

269

Abolition of slavery in the British Empire

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

1835

The first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is published in French

1837

Louis Daguerre invents the daguerreotype, the first successful photographic process

1841 Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums Kierkegaard, On the Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates

R. W. Emerson, Essays: First Series

1842

Death of Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)

political events

1843 Kierkegaard, Either/Or and Fear and Trembling Mill, A System of Logic 1844 Marx writes EconomicPhilosophic Manuscripts

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

1846 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript 1847 Boole, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic

Helmholtz, On the Conservation of Force

1848

Publication of the Communist Beginning of the French Manifesto Second Republic

1851

Herman Melville, Moby Dick Herbert Spencer, Social Statics The Great Exhibition is staged at the Crystal Palace, London

1852

Napoleon III declares the Second Empire

1853

(–1856) Crimean War

1854

H. D. Thoreau, Walden

1855

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

1856 Birth of Sigmund Freud 1857 Birth of Ferdinand de Saussure Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil Death of Comte Gustav Flaubert, Madame Bovary 1859 Birth of Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Edmund Husserl Mill, On Liberty

Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

(–1860) Italian Unification, except Venice (1866) and Rome (1870)

1861

Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht

Tsar Alexander II abolishes serfdom in Russia

270

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

political events

1862

Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

1863 Mill, Utilitarianism

Édouard Manet, Olympia

Abraham Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation

1865

(–1869) Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Surrender of General Robert E. Lee signals the conclusion of the American Civil War

1866

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and The Peace of Prague ends the Punishment Austro-Prussian War

1867 Marx, Das Kapital, Vol. I 1868 Birth of Émile Chartier (“Alain”)

Birth of W. E. B. Du Bois Creation of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE)

Completion of the Suez Canal 1869 Mill, The Subjection of Women (–1870) Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (–1876) Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen 1870

1871 Lachelier, Du fondement de l’induction

(–1871) Franco-Prussian War Establishment of the Third Republic Darwin, The Descent of Man Eliot, Middlemarch

Paris Commune Unification of Germany: Prussian King William I becomes Emperor (Kaiser) of Germany and Otto von Bismarck becomes Chancellor

1873 Death of Mill

(–1877) Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

End of German Occupation following France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War

1874 Birth of Max Scheler Émile Boutroux, La Contingence des lois de la nature Brentano, Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt

First Impressionist Exhibition staged by the Société anonyme des peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs (Cézanne, Degas, Guillaumin, Monet, Berthe Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley)

1875

Premiere of Georges Bizet’s Carmen

1876

Death of George Sand (Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin)

1877

Henry Morton Stanley completes his navigation of the Congo River

1872 Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie

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chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

1878

political events King Leopold II of Belgium engages explorer Henry Morton Stanley to establish a colony in the Congo

1879 Frege, Begriffsschrift

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House Georg Cantor (1845–1918) becomes Professor of Mathematics at Halle Thomas Edison exhibits his first incandescent light bulb

1882

Premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal in Bayreuth

Death of Wagner 1883 Birth of Karl Jaspers and José Ortega y Gasset Cantor, “Foundations of a General Theory of Aggregates” Death of Marx Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (–1885) Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra 1884 Birth of Gaston Bachelard Frege, Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

1886 Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse 1887 Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral 1888 Birth of Jean Wahl 1889 Birth of Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience 1890 William James, Principles of Psychology 1891 Birth of Edith Stein 1892 Frege, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” 1893 Xavier Léon and Élie Halévy cofound the Revue de métaphysique et de morale 1894

1895 Birth of Max Horkheimer

Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935), a Jewish-French army officer, is arrested and charged with spying for Germany Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovers X-rays

272

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

1895

The Lumière brothers hold the first public screening of projected motion pictures

1896

Athens hosts the first Olympic Games of the modern era

political events

1897 Birth of Georges Bataille 1898 Birth of Herbert Marcuse

Zola, article “J’accuse” in defense of Dreyfus

1899 1900 Birth of Hans-Georg Gadamer Death of Nietzsche and Félix Ravaisson (–1901) Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen

Start of the Second Boer War Freud, Interpretation of Dreams Planck formulates quantum theory

1901 Birth of Jacques Lacan 1903 Birth of Theodor W. Adorno, Du Bois, The Souls of Black Jean Cavaillès, and Hans Jonas Folk 1904 (–1905) Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus 1905 Birth of Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre

Einstein formulates the special Law of Separation of Church theory of relativity and State in France

1906 Birth of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas

Birth of Léopold Sédar Senghor

1907 Birth of Jean Hyppolite Bergson, L’Evolution créatrice

Pablo Picasso completes Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

1908 Birth of Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and W. V. O. Quine 1911 Victor Delbos publishes the first French journal article on Husserl: “Husserl: Sa critique du psychologisme et sa conception d’une Logique pure” in Revue de métaphysique et de morale

The Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group of avant-garde artists is founded in Munich

1913 Birth of Albert Camus, Aimé Césaire, and Paul Ricoeur Husserl, Ideen Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida

Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Swann’s Way, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past First performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring

273

The Dreyfus Affair ends when the French Court of Appeals exonerates Dreyfus of all charges

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

1914 Ortega y Gasset, Meditaciónes del Quijote 1915 Birth of Roland Barthes

political events Germany invades France

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

1916 Publication of Saussure’s Cours James Joyce, A Portrait of the de linguistique générale Artist as a Young Man 1917 Death of Durkheim

Lenin, The State and Revolution

Russian Revolution

1918 Birth of Louis Althusser Death of Georg Cantor and Lachelier

Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief

Proclamation of the Weimar Republic End of the First World War

1919

German architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969) founds the Bauhaus School

1920

Ratification of the 19th amendment to the US Constitution extends suffrage to women

1921 Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land 1922 Birth of Karl-Otto Apel Wittgenstein, Tractatus Herman Hesse, Siddhartha Logico-Philosophicus James Joyce, Ulysses Bataille begins his twentyyear career at the Bibliothèque Nationale Kahil Gibran, The Prophet 1923 Buber, Ich und Du Institut für Sozialforschung (Frankfurt School) is founded 1924 Birth of Jean-François Lyotard Sartre, Raymond Aron, Paul Nizan, Georges Canguilhem, and Daniel Lagache enter the École Normale Supérieure

André Breton, Le Manifeste du Death of Vladimir Lenin surréalisme Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

1925 Birth of Gilles Deleuze, Frantz Franz Kafka, The Trial Fanon, and Zygmunt Bauman First Surrealist exhibition at the Galerie Pierre, Paris 1926 Birth of Michel Foucault Jean Hering publishes the first French text to address Husserl’s phenomenology: Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse

The film Metropolis by German director Fritz Lang (1890– 1976) premieres in Berlin The Bauhaus school building, designed by Gropius, is completed in Dessau, Germany

1927 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit Marcel, Journal métaphysique

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

1928 Birth of Noam Chomsky Death of Scheler

The first television station begins broadcasting in Schenectady, New York

274

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

1928 The first work of German phenomenology appears in French translation: Scheler’s Nature et formes de la sympathie: Contribution à l’étude des lois de la vie émotionnelle

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) writes The Threepenny Opera with composer Kurt Weill (1900–1950)

1929 Husserl lectures at the Sorbonne Birth of Jürgen Habermas Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik and Was ist Metaphysik? Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, “Phenomenology” in Encylopedia Britannica Wahl, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel Cassirer and Heidegger debate in Davos, Switzerland

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

political events

(–1942) Robert Musil, The 1930 Birth of Pierre Bourdieu, Man Without Qualities Jacques Derrida, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, and Michel Serres Levinas, La Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas 1931 Heidegger’s first works appear Pearl Buck, The Good Earth in French translation: “Was Gödel publishes his two ist Metaphysik?” in Bifur, and incompleteness theorems “Vom Wesen des Grundes” in Recherches philosophiques Levinas and Gabrielle Peiffer publish a French translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations Husserl’s Ideas is translated into English 1932 Birth of Stuart Hall Bergson, Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion Jaspers, Philosophie, 3 vols Wahl, Vers le concret

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World BBC starts a regular public television broadcasting service in the UK

1933

André Malraux, Man’s Fate

275

Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

political events

1933 University in Exile is founded Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. as a graduate division of Toklas the New School for Social Research (–1939) Alexandre Kojève lectures on Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études 1935 Marcel, Être et avoir

Penguin publishes its first paperback

1936 Husserl, Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie Mounier, Manifeste au service du personnalisme Sartre, “La Transcendance de l’égo” in Recherches philosophiques, and L’Imagination

Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” First issue of Life Magazine

1937 Birth of Alain Badiou and Hélène Cixous

Picasso, Guernica

1938 Death of Husserl

Sartre, La Nausée

1939 Sartre, Esquisse d’une théorie Joyce, Finnegans Wake des emotions John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath Establishment of Husserl Archives in Louvain, Belgium Founding of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (–1941) Hyppolite publishes his translation into French of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

(–1939) Spanish Civil War

Nazi Germany invades Poland (September 1) and France and Britain declare war on Germany (September 3)

Richard Wright, Native Son 1940 Death of Benjamin Marcel, Du refus à l’invocation Sartre, L’Imaginaire: Psychologie-phénoménologique de l’imagination 1941 Death of Bergson Marcuse, Reason and Revolution

Death of James Joyce Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon

1942 Birth of Étienne Balibar Death of Edith Stein Camus, L’Étranger and Le Mythe de Sisyphe: Essai sur l’absurde

276

Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, and the US enters the Second World War Germany invades the Soviet Union

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

political events

1942 Merleau-Ponty, La Structure du comportement Lévi-Strauss meets Roman Jakobson at the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York 1943 Death of Simone Weil Farber, The Foundation of Phenomenology Sartre, L’Être et le néant

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

1944 Marcel, Homo viator: Prolégomènes à une métaphysique de l’espérance

Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

Bretton Woods Conference and establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Paris is liberated by Allied forces (August 25)

1945 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception

George Orwell, Animal Farm Sartre, Beauvoir, and MerleauPonty begin as founding editors of Les Temps modernes

End of the Second World War in Germany (May); atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; end of War in Japan (September) Establishment of the United Nations

1946 Hyppolite, Genèse et structure de la “Phénoménologie de l’esprit” de Hegel Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme and Réflexions sur la question juive

Bataille founds the journal Critique Eugene O’Neill, The Iceman Cometh

Beginning of the French Indochina War Establishment of the Fourth Republic

1947 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté Heidegger, “Brief über den Humanismus” Levinas, De l’existence a l’existant Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur: Essai sur le problème communiste Mounier, Qu’est-ce que le personnalisme?

Camus, The Plague Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

Creation of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) (–1951) Marshall Plan

1948 (–1951) Gramsci, Prison Notebooks Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens Sartre, Situations II: Qu’est-ce que la littérature?

Nathalie Sarraute, Portrait of a The United Nations adopts the Universal Declaration of Man Unknown Debut of The Ed Sullivan Show Human Rights

277

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

political events

1948 Althusser appointed agrégérépétiteur (“caïman”) at the École Normale Supérieure, a position he holds until 1980 1949 Beauvoir, Le Deuxième sexe Levinas, En decouvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger Lévi-Strauss, Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté Marcel, Le Mystère de l’être. Vol. 1: Reflexion et mystère Heidegger’s Existence and Being is translated

Foundation of NATO Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman George Orwell, 1984 Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort found the revolutionary group and journal Socialisme ou Barbarie

Beginning of the Korean War

1950 Marcel, Le Mystère de l’être. Vol 2: Foi et réalité Ricoeur publishes his translation into French of Husserl’s Ideas I 1951 Death of Alain and Wittgenstein Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism Camus, L’Homme révolté Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for 1952 Death of Dewey and Godot Santayana Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs Merleau-Ponty is elected to the Chair in Philosophy at the Collège de France 1953 Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (posthumous) Lacan begins his public seminars

Death of Joseph Stalin Lacan, together with Daniel Lagache and Françoise Dolto, Ceasefire agreement (July 27) founds the Société française de ends the Korean War psychanalyse Crick and Watson construct the first model of DNA

Aldous Huxley, The Doors of 1954 Jaspers and Bultmann, Die Frage der Entmythologisierung Perception Lyotard, La Phénoménologie Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy appears in English translation 1955 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la dialectique

278

Following the fall of Dien Bien Phu (May 7), France pledges to withdraw from Indochina (July 20) Beginning of the Algerian revolt against French rule

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

political events

1955 Cerisy Colloquium Qu’est-ce que la philosophie? Autour de Martin Heidegger, organized by Jean Beaufret 1956 Camus, La Chute Sartre’s Being and Nothingness appears in English translation

Hungarian Revolution and Soviet invasion

1957 Chomsky, Syntactic Structures Jack Kerouac, On the Road Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie Camus receives the Nobel structurale Prize for Literature Founding of Philosophy Today

Rome Treaty signed by France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg establishes the European Economic Community The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 1, the first man-made object to orbit the Earth

1958 Arendt, The Human Condition Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch Elie Wiesel, Night (–1960) The first feature films by directors associated with the French “New Wave” cinema, including, in 1959, Les Quatre Cent Coups (The 400 Blows) by François Truffaut (1932–84) and, in 1960, A bout de souffle (Breathless) by Jean-Luc Godard (1930– ) The Sorbonne’s “Faculté des Lettres” is officially renamed the “Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines”

Charles de Gaulle is elected president after a new constitution establishes the Fifth Republic

The French colonies of Morocco and Tunisia gain independence

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum 1959 Lévi-Strauss is elected to the Chair in Social Anthropology Gillo Pentecorvo, The Battle at the Collège de France of Algiers 1960 Death of Camus Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement

Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird First issue of the journal Tel Quel is published The birth control pill is made available to married women

1961 Death of Fanon and Merleau-Ponty

Joseph Heller, Catch 22

279

Erection of the Berlin Wall Bay of Pigs failed invasion of Cuba

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

political events

1961 Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre, with a preface by Sartre Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique Heidegger, Nietzsche Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité France grants independence Rachel Carson, Silent Spring 1962 Death of Bachelard Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the to Algeria Deleuze, Nietzsche et la Cuban Missile Crisis Cuckoo’s Nest philosophie Heidegger, Being and Time appears in English translation Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception appears in English translation First meeting of SPEP at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 1963 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique The first artificial heart is implanted

Assassination of John F. Kennedy Imprisonment of Nelson Mandela

1964 Barthes, Eléments de sémiologie Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible (posthumous)

Lacan founds L’École Freudienne de Paris The Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show

Gulf of Tonkin Incident US Civil Rights Act outlaws discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin

Truman Capote, In Cold Blood Assassination of Malcolm X 1965 Death of Buber Alex Haley, The Autobiography Althusser, Pour Marx and, with Balibar, Lire “Le Capital” of Malcolm X Ricoeur, De l’interprétation: Essai sur Freud Foucault, Madness and Civilization appears in English translation 1966 Adorno, Negative Dialektik Deleuze, Le Bergsonisme Foucault, Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines Lacan, Écrits

Alain Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour Jacques-Alain Miller founds Les Cahiers pour l’Analyse Star Trek premieres on US television

280

(–1976) Chinese Cultural Revolution Foundation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale

chronolo gy philosophical events 1966

cultural events

political events

Johns Hopkins Symposium “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” introduces French theory to the American academic community

1967 Derrida, De la grammatologie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One La Voix et le phénomène, and Hundred Years of Solitude L’Écriture et la différence

Confirmation of Thurgood Marshall, first AfricanAmerican Justice, to the US Supreme Court Assassination of Martin Luther King Events of May ’68, including closure of the University of Nanterre (May 2), police invasion of the Sorbonne (May 3), student demonstrations and strikes, and workers’ occupation of factories and general strike Prague Spring Tet Offensive

1968 Deleuze, Différence et répétition and Spinoza et le problème de l’expression Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse

Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey The Beatles release the White Album

1969 Death of Adorno and Jaspers Deleuze, Logique du sens Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Stonewall riots launch the Gay Woodstock Music and Art Liberation Movement Fair Neil Armstrong is the first person to set foot on the moon

Millett, Sexual Politics 1970 Death of Carnap Founding of Diacritics Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie Foucault, The Order of Things First Earth Day appears in English translation Husserl, The Crisis of European Philosophy appears in English translation Founding of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology Foucault elected to the Chair of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France Ricoeur begins teaching at the University of Chicago 1971 Lyotard, Discours, figure Founding of Research in Phenomenology

Reorganization of the University of Paris

1972 Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique

Shootings at Kent State University Salvador Allende becomes the first Marxist head of state to be freely elected in a Western nation

End of the gold standard for US dollar Watergate break-in

281

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

political events President Richard Nixon visits China, beginning the normalization of relations between the US and PRC

1972 Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie. 1. L’Anti-Oedipe Derrida, La Dissémination, Marges de la philosophie, and Positions Colloquium on Nietzsche at Cerisy 1973 Death of Horkheimer Lacan publishes the first volume of his Séminaire

Chilean military coup ousts Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s and kills President Salvador Rainbow Allende (–1978) Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago Roe v. Wade legalizes abortion

1974 Irigaray, Speculum: De l’autre femme Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence

Creation of the first doctoral program in women’s studies in Europe, the Centre de Recherches en Études Féminines, at the University of Paris VIII–Vincennes, directed by Hélène Cixous

1975 Death of Arendt Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un Foundation of GREPH, the Groupe de Recherches sur l’Enseignement Philosophique Derrida begins teaching in the English Department at Yale Foucault begins teaching at UC-Berkeley

Death of Francisco Franco The Sixth Section of the EPHE is renamed the École Andrei Sakharov wins Nobel des Hautes Études in Sciences Peace Prize Sociales Fall of Saigon, ending the Vietnam War First US–USSR joint space mission

1976 Death of Bultmann and Heidegger Derrida, Of Grammatology appears in English translation Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité. 1. La Volonté de savoir Barthes is elected to the Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France

Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of Death of Mao Zedong an American Family Uprising in Soweto Foundation of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature

1977 Death of Ernst Bloch Deleuze and Guattari, AntiOedipus appears in English translation

The Centre Georges Pompidou, designed by architects Renzo Piano (1937– ) and Richard Rogers (1933– ), opens in Paris

282

Resignation of Nixon

Egyptian president Anwar al-Sadat becomes the first Arab head of state to visit Israel

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

political events

1977

240 Czech intellectuals sign Charter 77

1978 Death of Kurt Gödel Arendt, Life of the Mind Derrida, La Vérité en peinture

Edward Said, Orientalism Birmingham School: Centre for Contemporary Culture releases Policing the Crisis Louise Brown becomes the first test-tube baby

Camp David Accords

1979 Death of Marcuse Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir Prigogine and Stengers, La Nouvelle alliance Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now Edgar Morin, La Vie de La Vie The first cognitive sciences department is established at MIT Jerry Falwell founds Moral Majority

Iranian Revolution Iran Hostage Crisis begins Margaret Thatcher becomes prime minister of the UK (the first woman to be a European head of state) Nicaraguan Revolution

1980 Death of Barthes and Sartre Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie. 2. Mille plateaux

Murder of John Lennon Lacan officially dissolves the École Freudienne de Paris Cable News Network (CNN) becomes the first television station to provide twentyfour-hour news coverage

Death of Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito Election of Ronald Reagan as US president Solidarity movement begins in Poland

1981 Death of Lacan Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns Bourdieu is elected to the Chair in Sociology at the Collège de France

First cases of AIDS are discovered among gay men in the US Debut of MTV

Release of American hostages in Iran François Mitterrand is elected first socialist president of France’s Fifth Republic Confirmation of Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman Justice, to the US Supreme Court

Debut of the Weather Channel Falklands War 1982 Foundation of the Collège International de Philosophie in the US by François Châtelet, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Pierre Faye, and Dominique Lecourt 1983 Death of Aron Alice Walker, The Color Purple Lyotard, Le Différend Founding of Hypatia Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft 1984 Death of Foucault Lloyd, The Man of Reason

Marguerite Duras, The Lover

283

Assassination of Indira Gandhi Year-long strike of the National Union of Mineworkers in the UK

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

political events

1985 Habermas, Der philosophische Don Delillo, White Noise Diskurs der Moderne Donna Haraway, Cyborg First complete translation into Manifesto French of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit

Mikhail Gorbachev is named General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A 1986 Death of Beauvoir Establishment of the Archives Survivor’s Tale Husserl de Paris at the École Normale Supérieure

Chernobyl nuclear accident in USSR Election of Corazon Aquino ends Marcos regime in Philippines

1987

Toni Morrison, Beloved Discovery of Paul de Man’s wartime journalism damages the popularity of deconstruction in America

In June Gorbachev inaugurates the perestroika (restructuring) that led to the end of the USSR The First Intifada begins in the Gaza Strip and West Bank

1988 Badiou, L’Être et l’événement

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Benazir Bhutto becomes the first woman to head an Islamic nation Pan Am Flight 103, en route from London to New York, is destroyed by a bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland

1989 Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska Tim Berners-Lee submits a proposal for an information management system, later called the World Wide Web

Fall of the Berlin Wall Students protest in Tiananmen Square, Beijing

1990 Death of Althusser Butler, Gender Trouble

The World Health Organization removes homosexuality from its list of diseases Beginning of the Human Genome Project, headed by James D. Watson

Nelson Mandela is released from prison Reunification of Germany Break-up of the former Yugoslavia and beginning of the Yugoslav Wars Lech Walesa is elected president of Poland

1991 Deleuze and Guattari, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie?

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism The World Wide Web becomes the first publicly available service on the internet

First Gulf War

1992 Death of Guattari Guattari, Chaosmose

Maastricht Treaty is signed, creating the European Union Dissolution of the Soviet Union

284

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

1993 Death of Hans Jonas Gilroy, Black Atlantic

1994 Publication of Foucault’s Dits et écrits Grosz, Volatile Bodies

Dissolution of Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel is named the first president of the Czech Republic The Channel Tunnel opens, connecting England and France

1995 Death of Deleuze and Levinas

1996

political events

Genocide in Rwanda End of apartheid in South Africa; Nelson Mandela is sworn in as president North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed in 1992, goes into effect End of Bosnian War World Trade Organization (WTO) comes into being, replacing GATT

Cloning of Dolly the Sheep (died 2003)

Death of Mitterrand

1998 Death of Lyotard Death of Iris Murdoch 1999 Badiou leaves Vincennes to become Professor and Head of the Philosophy Department at the École Normale Supérieure

Introduction of the Euro Antiglobalization forces disrupt the WTO meeting in Seattle

2000 Death of Quine Negri and Hardt, Empire

The Second Intifada

2001 Balibar, Nous, citoyens d’Europe? Les Frontières, l’État, le peuple

Terrorist attack destroys the World Trade Center

2002 Death of Gadamer and Bourdieu 2003 Death of Blanchot and Davidson

Completion of the Human Genome Project

Beginning of Second Gulf War Beginning of conflict in Darfur

2004 Death of Derrida and Leopoldo Zea Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?

Asian tsunami

Madrid train bombings

2005 Death of Ricoeur

Hurricane Katrina

Bombings of the London public transport system

2006 Badiou, Logiques des mondes. L’Être et l’événement, 2.

Bombings of the Mumbai train system

2007 Death of Jean Baudrillard and Rorty 2008 Publication of first of Derrida’s Death of Robbe-Grillet, Aimé Césaire, Seminars: La Bête et le Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn souverain

285

Election of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the US International banking collapse

chronolo gy philosophical events

cultural events

2009 Death of Lévi-Strauss, Leszek Kolakowski, Marjorie Grene

Death of Frank McCourt and John Updike

2010 Death of Pierre Hadot and Claude Lefort

Death of Tony Judt and J. D. Salinger

Arab Spring uprisings begin in Tunisia Death of Václav Havel US special forces kill Osama Bin Laden Occupy movement

2011 Death of Michael Dummett and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl SPEP celebrates 50th anniversary 2012

political events

Death of Eric Hobsbawm and Adrienne Rich

286

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index

a priori 246, 252n, 255–6 apriorism 257 material 244 synthetic 243–4, 255 absurdism 45, 49–50, 53, 56; see also Camus Adams, Karl 211n Adorno, Theodor W. ix–x, 103, 107, 240, 244 and continental aesthetics 87–9, 103–6 aesthetics viii–ix, 1–2, 88, 92, 103–6 anti-aesthetic 100–101 Foucault on 106–9 Gadamer on 101–3 Heidegger on 8–9, 166 Merleau-Ponty on 6–8, 93–100, 127–8 as a philosophical discipline 1–2, 5–9, 87–9 Sartre on 6, 70, 95–100 see also art Albérès, René Marill 75 Alcan, Félix 69 alienation 5, 77, 127, 143n, 160 of modern social life 19 self-alienation 105, 181 through serialization 59 Alquié, Ferdinand 75 alterity 38, 145, 153 Levinas on 12, 14, 62 Althusser, Louis x, 84, 229–32 analysis (logical) 13–14, 224–5, 236, 247–54 and continental philosophy vii, 13–14 of knowledge 233–4

in mathematics 226–9, 232 and phenomenology 241, 256, 265 analytic philosophy vii, ix, 13, 15, 218, 235–66 and aesthetics 109 and phenomenology 235–6, 240–63 post-analytic xii see also logical positivism Anaximander 253 Anselm 197n anthropocentrism 74, 196 anthropology 19, 35, 81, 200, 213 anti-phenomenology 103–6 anti-Semitism 60–61; see also Nazism anxiety see dread Apel, Karl-Otto 151n, 236, 260 Aquinas, Thomas 17, 179, 196, 210, 212 Arendt, Hannah x, 75, 238 Aristotle 17, 20, 126, 204 Brentano on 238 Gadamer on 102, 146 Heidegger on 133–4, 157n, 162n, 188n arithmetic see mathematics Armstrong, David 252 Arnaud, Antoine 206n Aron, Raymond 67–8, 228–9 Aronson, Ronald 63 art viii, xii, 117, 186, 195, 205, 257 antiphenomenological attitude toward 103–9

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index aura of the work of art 103–4 experience of 2, 17, 88 Gadamer on 101–3 Heidegger on 88–93, 159, 164–73 and history 5, 17, 181n Levinas on 100–101 Merleau-Ponty on 6, 33, 88–9, 93–100, 114, 118–21, 124 ontology of 89 philosophy of 87 Promethean view 90–91 Sartre on 6, 70, 89, 95–100 Zen 171 see also painting; aesthetics associationism 69 Augustine 135, 157n Austin, J. L. 236, 260, 262–4 Ayer, A. J. 75, 247n, 252, 258n Bachelard, Gaston 12, 220, 227, 231–4 Badiou, Alain 218, 229n Barnes, Hazel 260 Barrett, William 75 Barth, Karl 196, 199, 201–2, 205, 215 revelation 196–200, 202, 210–11 Barthes, Roland 89, 99–100 Bataille, Georges x, 19, 23–6, 258n Baudelaire, Charles Pierre 95, 105 Bauer, Bruno viii Beaney, Michael 235 Beaufret, Jean 75 Beauvoir, Simone de 6, 48, 53–4, 57–8, 95 The Coming of Age 61 The Ethics of Ambiguity 29–30, 49, 53–4 existentialism 44, 57 identity politics 56, 60 influence 31, 33, 43, 49, 96 and Merleau-Ponty 5, 11n, 19, 56, 59, 96 and Sartre 5–7n, 11n, 19, 59, 63, 71, 96 The Second Sex 29–30, 55, 61, 71 Beethoven, Ludwig van 88 behaviorism 81, 255, 258–9 being 8n, 10–11, 97, 146, 160, 240 and art 88, 101–3 bringing-into-being 161–2, 164 brute (or wild) 4, 126 and consciousness 47–8, 52, 58, 61 and disclosure 92, 132–9, 147–9, 154–5, 171–4

embodied 203, 208–9 Hegel on 21, 33–6 historical 202, 264 increase in 102 Merleau-Ponty on 93–4, 112, 121, 123–7 non-being 213 and ontology 45, 109 and potentiality 136–7, 139–40 pure 203 question of (meaning) 1, 3–4, 6, 33, 134, 178 and technology 159–65 and theology 177–93 Wittgenstein on 254–5 Being and Time (Heidegger) 9, 44n, 174, 179, 259 and Heidegger’s other work 158n, 161n, 166n, 171, 178n and hermeneutics 2, 8, 131, 137–42 Husserl on 238–9 influence on French philosophy 3, 48 influence on religious thought 11, 187–8 influence on Wahl 46 and language 171–2 Levinas on 55 and phenomenology 26, 133 Ryle on 256 Sartre on 28, 29n, 51, 55, 57, 71 Stein’s interpretation 178n–9 Wittgenstein on 254–5 world 90 being-ahead-of-itself 140 being-along-side 141 being-fallen 140 being-for-itself 32, 50–52, 72 being-for-others 68, 72 being-in-general (il y a) 54 being-in-itself 4, 48, 50–52, 72, 227, 251n being-in-the-world 11, 27–8, 32–3, 38n, 137, 139–40, 143, 154, 165 being-there 131, 134, 136, 139–41, 154 being-toward death 140 being-with 3, 27, 29, 55 Benjamin, Walter x, 88–9, 103–7 Bentham, Jeremy xii Bergson, Henri ix, 24, 32, 69, 210n, 220, 245 and Carnap 251, 253 and Mounier 206–8 Bergsonism 3, 13

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index Bernard, Émile 113 Bernard, Paul 217n Betti, Emilio 132, 149–50 Biran, Maine de 220 Blanchot, Maurice 100 body 73, 105, 124–5, 203, 211 Descartes’s conception of 94, 112, 184 and flesh 52, 123–8 as an instrument 203, 205–6 and the person 208–9 relation to mind 52, 120–21, 184, 212 relation to world 121, 125, 203 Bolzano, Bernhard 225, 240 Bondone, Giotto di 166n Bourdieu, Pierre x Bourdonnaye, Alain de la 93 Bradley, Francis Herbert 183n, 252 Breda, Herman Leo Van 114n–15n Brentano, Franz 235, 238, 240, 250, 256 Breton, André 19, 22–4, 23n Brouwer, Luitzen Egbertus Jan 224–6, 232 Brunschvicg, Léon 218–19n, 224–8, 232 Buber, Martin 12, 55, 182–5, 199n philosophy of dialogue 180–81 Buddeus, Johann Franz 210 Buddhism 212n Bultmann, Rudolf 11, 177, 187–90, 192 existential hermeneutics 149 and theology 183 calculability 10, 160, 163, 167, 181, 253, 265 Calder, Alexander 88, 95 Campbell, Robert 75 Camus, Albert 5, 54, 61, 79, 100 and existentialism 43, 45, 49–50, 56–7 and Sartre 56, 79 Canguilhem, Georges 12, 217–23, 228–34 Cantor, Georg 224, 227 capitalism 103, 180, 195 Carnap, Rudolf vii, 241–2, 247–53, 259, 264–5 and Husserl 235, 237n, 247 “Overcoming of Metaphysics” 14, 247, 248n, 251–2 Cartesianism 4, 87, 112, 114, 124, 184 rationalism 94 Ryle’s critique of mind 258–9 see also Descartes Casey, Edward S. xi

Cassirer, Ernst 46, 237–8, 248, 252n categories 96, 127, 166, 183, 259 causality 4, 161, 186, 250 Cavaillès, Jean 12–13, 46n, 217, 219–34 Cavell, Stanley 262n Césaire, Aimé 44n Cézanne, Paul 88, 99, 113–17, 124–5 and Heidegger 93 Chaplin, Charles Spencer (“Charlie”) 105 Chartier, Émile-Auguste (“Alain”) 212 Chisholm, Roderick 252 Chrétien, Jean-Louis 204n Christianity 17, 126, 148, 197–202, 205–7, 210–12 and existential theology 2, 183–4, 187–93 Heidegger’s investigation of 11, 135, 177–8, 187–93 Kierkegaardian critique of 211 Marcel on 183–6, 202–6 and mysticism 179n, 180n personalism 180–81 and scripture 199–200, 206 Stein on 177–9 Cohen, Hermann 65, 197n Cold War 1, 79–80 Comin, Jacopo 95 communism 56, 77, 180 anticommunism 56, 80 French 80 Italian 78 and surrealism 23 Comte, Auguste 220 concealment 8–10, 90–92, 133–4, 154, 164, 264 and artwork 11, 102, 166–7 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 262 Congar, Yves 211n Conrad-Martius, Hedwig 179 consciousness 154, 198n, 206, 221, 223, 244 and being 4, 58, 61 Camus on 49, 100 Gadamer on 145, 150–52 historical 136n, 142–3, 145, 155 Husserl on 71–2, 97–8, 103n, 132–3, 181, 238, 258–9 immanence of 12 and mathematics 225–6 Merleau-Ponty on 6, 21–2, 52, 112–17, 122, 125

307

index and phenomenology 21, 256, 265–6 philosophy of 13, 217–219, 223–4, 228, 231–4 prereflective 47–8 pure 47, 255n Sartre on 11n, 28, 50–54, 58, 62–4, 68–70, 73, 84 self 4, 22, 24–30, 33–4, 54 transcendental 107–8, 131 unhappy 3, 24–5, 33–5 construction 68, 73, 97, 133, 138 of experience 27, 116, 244–5 logical 248–50, 257 of reality 108, 212–13 in science 114–15, 224 Contat, Michael 68 Cornelius, Hans 244 Couturat, Louis 220, 231 critical theory x–xi, 103, 239–40 Dahlstrom, Daniel 140n Dasein/Dasein 8, 50n, 57, 136–42, 154–5, 192 and being 178 and consciousness 28, 238 existential analysis of 25, 131 hermeneutics 134 phenomenology of 134, 136 and world 165 Dastur, Françoise 187n death 9–10, 26, 51, 54, 65, 140–41 of God 12, 191 deconstruction 19, 37, 153–4 deduction 73, 265 Deleuze, Gilles x, 15, 36, 219, 234 influence 61, 119 Delpech, Jeanine 45n demythologization 12, 189–90 Dennett, Daniel 259 Derrida, Jacques x–xi, 38, 91n, 119, 132, 158n figure in French philosophy 61, 84 and hermeneutics 153–4 influence of Hegel 20, 23, 37, 40 influence of Husserl 37–9, 226n influence of Hyppolite 37, 39 influence of Lacan 31 on language 36 and Levinas 14

neglect of Marcel 204n obscurity 265 and Searle (debate) 237, 259–64 and structuralism 15, 19 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint 233 Descartes, René 28n, 72, 77, 81, 107, 212, 229 freedom 5 notion of self 73, 184, 252 Optics 94 rationality 114 vision 111–12 determinism 5, 59, 74, 80, 83, 179 différance see Derrida Dilthey, Wilhelm 24, 65, 237, 245–6 and hermeneutics 135, 142–3, 238–9 dispositionalism 258 Dostoevsky, Fyodor viii, 43, 49 dread 72, 254–5 Drury, Maurice 255 Dufrenne, Mikel 88–9, 98 Dürer, Albrecht 166n Durkheim, Émile ix Earle, William xi earth (Heidegger) 9–10, 90–92, 165–8, 170 Ebeling, Gerhard 187n écart 118–19, 121–2, 126, 233n and flesh 36, 94 Edie, James xi ego 47, 54, 127, 250, 258–9 Sartre on 4, 27, 63–4, 259 transcendental 25–6n, 27–8n, 38, 68, 108 Elkaïm-Sartre, Arlette 76, 79 emotion 70, 97, 246 Engels, Friedrich viii, 59 Enlightenment 84, 88, 144, 198 Foucault’s estimation of 218, 221, 223, 231 epistemology see knowledge epochē 238 and Husserl 4, 26n, 243, 249, 250, 261 essence 9–10, 37, 48, 92, 108, 183n of artwork 90, 93, 98, 101, 102 of personal being 213n and body 203 carnal 128 de-essence 160 of divinity 187 and existence 57, 97, 127, 207n

308

index of freedom 62 of God 182 of the holy 187 and language 257 of metaphysics 166n Platonic 243 of science 228 of technology 161–4 of things 253 and truth 92, 166n, 167 essentialism 60, 103 ethics ix, 2, 6, 12, 173, 255 of the absurd 49–50 Kantian 186 and ontology 179, 187n, 214 and religion 195–215 Sartre on 58, 61–3, 76–7 existence 12, 55, 59–60, 72, 100, 230 absurdity of 56 ambiguity of 52 and art 1–2, 11 and the “aura” 104 Beauvoir’s analysis of 53–4 conditions of 184 and the divine 177, 183, 185–6, 190–92, 201–2, 214 and essence 57–8, 97, 127, 207n and existentialism 31n, 44–8, 51, 57–8, 222 and freedom 52, 55, 62, 207 of God 199 role of Hegel 3–4, 35, 51 and Husserl’s originality 1 and history 12, 131, 135–6, 141, 168 incarnate 120–21, 203 and “is” of predication 251 and limit situations 48 literary 97 and Marxism 59, 81 Mounier’s conception of 181, 207–8 paradox of 196, 207–10 problem of 1, 184–5 and theology 189, 192 uncertainty of 191–2 see also Dasein/Dasein existence, Heidegger’s conception of 8–9, 11, 50n, 139–41, 154–5, 178 and alētheia 133 dimensions of 165 facticity 135, 140, 188

historical 135, 141, 168, 188, 238 and language 172 see also Dasein/Dasein existentialism ix–x, 1–2, 11–12, 35, 97, 186 black x, 45 Christian 183 essential texts 49–55 German 19 Hegel’s influence 19, 21n Heidegger on 74, 238 as an ideology 81 Nietzsche on 191 origins in France 43–8 and phenomenology 40, 75 political dimensions 56–61 Sartre on 4–5, 11, 28, 31, 44, 55 in Spain 64–5 experience, lived (vécu, Erlebnis) 44, 48, 56, 60, 228, 233 experience, primordial 114–15, 117, 119 facticity 29, 50–54, 73, 188 and Dasein 137, 139–41 hermeneutics of 131, 135–6, 143, 155 Fanon, Frantz 44, 48, 59–61 black existentialism x, 45 identity politics 56 Farber, Marvin 236n, 241n, 256–7 fascism 105, 207, 240 Feigl, Herbert 259 feminism x, xii, 19, 30, 60–61 Feuerbach, Ludwig viii, 196–7 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb viii, 251 Findlay, John Niemeyer 260 Fink, Eugen 46n, 239–40 Flaubert, Gustave 61, 81, 95 Flesh (la chair) 94, 126 Foucault, Michel x–xi, 36, 61, 84, 119, 231 and aesthetics 88–9, 106–8 and archeology 14–15, 81 and Canguilhem 218–23 and Cavaillès 224–30 and Derrida 263–4 philosophy of concept 12, 219–23, 231–4 structuralism 15, 230 Fourier, Charles viii Fourier, Joseph 227 Frankfurt school ix, 89, 239–40 freedom x, 3–4, 186, 191–2

309

index Beauvoir’s concept of 29, 53–4 and history 22, 35 Levinas on 54, 61 modernity, critique of 186 Mounier’s account of 208–9 ontological 5, 52 freedom, Sartrean 51–2, 55–6, 58–9, 61–4, 84, 208 criticism of 6, 96, 208–9 and ethics 77 and existential psychoanalysis 74 and Marxism 80–81, 84 and responsibility 10 Frege, Gottlob vii, 235, 252, 261 Freud, Sigmund 23, 30, 44n, 74, 81, 152 see also psychoanalysis Friedman, Michael 248, 252n Friedrich, Caspar David 166n Fuchs, Ernst 187n Gadamer, Hans-Georg x–xi, 89, 144, 146, 158 aesthetics 88–89, 101–3 criticism of 149–54 hermeneutic circle 9, 144n–5 hermeneutics 131–2, 142–6, 150–51, 240 language 132, 142–3, 147–9, 150 and phenomenology 155, 239 Truth and Method 9, 102, 131, 142, 147, 149–50 Gandillac, Maurice de 75 Gasquet, Jacques 113 Geffroy, Gustave 116 Geiger, Moritz 179n Geist 21, 26, 250n gender xii, 59–60, 163n Genet, Jean 78 geometry see mathematics Gestell 163–5, 169, 171, 173n Giacometti, Alberto 88, 93, 95 gift 9–10, 77, 204, 208, 212–14 Giotto see Bondone, Giotto di globalization xii God 11–14, 75, 173n, 187, 189–92, 209–15 Buber on 182–3 death of 191 Greek conception of 91, 100 relation to humanity 195–202, 206, 211 Kant on 251

Marcel on 184–5 Merleau-Ponty on 94, 100 and revelation 12, 34, 211–12 Stein on 179 Gödel, Kurt 224 Godet, Paul 75 Gogarten, Friedrich 181 Gogh, Vincent van 9–10, 90–91n, 167–8 grace 101, 186, 196, 206n, 212–14 Green, Thomas Hill 252 Gruenheck, Susan 84 Guattari, Félix 234 Gurvitch, Georges 46 Gurwitsch, Aron x–xi, 26 Habermas, Jürgen x–xi, 132, 150–51, 236, 240, 260 Hahn, Hans 248 Heckman, John 34n Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich viii–ix, 21–5, 31–41, 51, 207, 218 and aesthetics 88, 102, 168 and analytic criticism of 251–3 and existentialism 3–5, 25–31, 46 and Gadamer 143n, 145–6, 153–4, 239–40 and history 21 influence on French philosophy 2–3, 17–21 and Marx 77 and phenomenology 3, 20–37, 29n and Sartre 84 Science of Logic 18, 21n, 35–6 as a systematic thinker 81 and tragedy 105 Heidegger, Martin vii–ix, 11, 108, 157–74, 177–9, 237–40 aesthetics 8, 88–92, 98, 101 and analytic philosophy 236, 247 artwork 2, 9, 88–93, 98, 101–2, 168–71 being-in-the-world 38n being-with-others 55 Carnap’s critique 14, 247–54, 264–5 and Cassirer 46, 50n existence 2, 33 existentialism 1, 28, 34, 43–6, 246 freedom 29 and Gadamer 144, 147 Greek thought 133, 134, 159, 162 and hermeneutics 9, 131, 135–9, 141–2, 149, 152–5, 265

310

index history 104, 139–42, 155 humanism 187 influence on Beauvoir 43n influence on Hyppolite 35 intentionality 47, 133, 140n and language 35, 132, 147, 171–4 and Levinas 54 and Merleau-Ponty 33 obscurity in 159, 170, 265 ontology 45, 61, 74, 131, 136, 185 “Origin of the Work of Art” 2, 9–10n, 89, 91n, 166–71 and phenomenology 3, 35, 132–135, 138, 179, 244–5 existential 25, 131 hermeneutical 8, 154 influence 19–20, 25 ontological approach 35 opposition to Husserl 26n and religion 2, 11–12, 177–8, 187–92, 198, 201 and Ryle 256, 258 and Sartre 57–8, 67n, 71–4 and Searle 259, 261 and technology 10, 159–65, 183–4 and truth 10, 90–92, 134, 167–8 and Wittgenstein 254–5 world 90, 92 see also Being and Time Heidegger Circle xi Hempel, Carl 247n Heraclitus 92, 253 Hering, Jean 46n hermeneutics 132, 142, 146–7, 151–5, 245 and artwork 8, 101–3 debate concerning 149–54 development of ix, 240 of facticity 131, 135–6, 143, 155 Heidegger on 2, 138–42, 152, 265 and history 141–3, 145, 155 and logocentrism 154 as methodology 149 and phenomenology 131–2, 134–5, 154, 238–9 and psychology 142, 150 and religion 188–9 and social praxis 150 hermeneutic circle 9, 131, 137–40, 144n–5, 155

Hilbert, David 225, 231 Hinduism 212n historicity 11, 107, 131, 135, 139–45 of human existence 9, 12, 131 and understanding 142, 155 Hölderlin, Friedrich 88 and Heidegger 92, 159, 164, 166n, 171–2, 187, 240 holy 10–11, 61, 92, 102, 187 Horkheimer, Max ix, x, 239 humanism 35, 40, 58, 61, 180, 187 Heidegger’s rejection of 74 Hume, David 250, 264n Humphrey, Hubert 78 Husserl, Edmund vii–ix, xi, 1–4, 20, 114–15, 237–40 and analytic philosophy 235–6, 241–50, 252n, 265 Carnap on 247–50, 252n Cavaillès on 217n, 223–6, 233 Conrad-Martius on 179n Derrida on 37–40 ego, transcendental 108 and existentialism 19, 45 Gadamer on 143n Heidegger on 26n, 131–3, 138, 140n, 154, 157n, 178, 187, 238–40, 245 hermeneutics 131, 154, 245 idealism 47, 97, 103 influence 25, 65, 190 by Bolzano 225n on Merleau-Ponty 33, 111n, 114–17, 119, 121, 125–6 by Natorp 245n Levinas on 54, 181 Marcel on 183–5 and mathematics 2, 13, 225–6, 228 notion of intentionality 47–8, 67, 133, 138, 140n and ontology 72, 74 phenomenology as a science 8 phenomenology, transcendental 25, 27 Ricoeur on 28 Ryle on 255–9, 265 Sartre on 27–9n, 47–8, 67–74, 84 Searle on 259–62 Stein on 177n–8, 187 Wittgenstein on 254, 265 Husserl Circle xi

311

index Hyppolite, Jean 3–4, 19n, 39 and Hegel 19, 25, 33–37, 40–41 idealism 32, 47, 68–9, 72, 78, 184 critical 218–19, 227 German viii, 3, 154, 218 Husserl’s 97, 103 illocution 260 imagination 65, 69, 87, 96, 102, 232 as a philosophical category 88 against convention 23 distinct mode of consciousness 70 immanence 25, 38, 93–4n, 133, 224 of consciousness 12 and transcendence 98, 184, 206, 210n immorality 76 immortality 64–5 individualism 12, 57, 180, 186, 205, 249 Ingarden, Roman Witold 89, 97–8 intentionality 122, 133, 140n, 260–61, 265 Husserl’s notion 1, 47, 138, 258 interpretation 31, 134, 145, 169, 203, 260 existential 11–12, 189–90 Gadamer on 144–7, 149–53 Heidegger on 138–40, 144n, 149 and hermeneutics 2, 8–9, 139–40, 143n, 149–55 objectivity 149–50 and reading Hegel 20, 41 Ricoeur on 143n, 151–3 intersubjectivity 26, 53, 55, 74, 79, 82 and objects 250n Sartre’s notion of 29, 55, 59, 79 intertwining (entrelacs) 97, 124, 128 intuition 119, 133, 138, 239, 243–5 eidetic 242, 258 and metaphysics 101, 249 relation to concepts 13, 224, 265 intuitionism mathematical 224n, 232 nonconceptual 13, 244 Irigaray, Luce x Izard, Carroll 75 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich viii Jacopo see Comin, Jacopo Jakobson, Roman x James, William 24, 64 Jaspers, Karl ix, 43–6n, 48, 184

existentialism 238, 246 influence 98n Jansenism 206n Jeanson, Francis 57 Jesus 188, 191, 200–202, 205 Judaism 61, 195, 210 judgment see pre-judgment Kabbala 106 Kafka, Franz 105–6 Kandinsky, Wassily Wassilyevich 106 Kant, Immanuel vii–ix, xii, 81, 186, 218, 224 and aesthetics 87–8, 102 ego, transcendental 108 experience, possibility of 245n–6 and God 199, 251 mathematics, philosophy of 224; see also neo-Kantianism Kaufmann, Felix 241 Kelsen, Hans 241 Kennedy, John F. 78 kerygma 189 Khrushchev, Nikita 80 Kierkegaard, Søren Aabye viii, 46, 49, 72, 141, 191 critique of Christianity 211 existentialism 24, 238, 246 influence 24, 43, 64, 157n, 181n, 190n, 197 Kirkpatrick, Robert 68 Klee, Paul 88, 94n, 95, 99, 106 and Heidegger 93, 169–71 knowledge 13, 196–7, 208, 227, 234 analysis of 233–4 and art 101 and belief 258 Cavaillès’s 224–30 as critique 62 and experience 233, 253 and God 183, 215 of grace 212 historical 135, 155 Husserl on 28n, 68 its ignoring of the subject 247 and intuition 243 and language 255 moral 146 objective 132, 142 and rationality 219–20, 232–3 and reduction 119

312

index scientific 246 of self 146, 200 theoretical 133, 142 Kojève, Alexandre 3, 19n, 27, 33–5 and Hegel 18–19, 25–7, 30, 35–6, 77 Koyré, Alexandre 36, 220 and Hegel 18–19, 24–5, 40–41 Kuhn, Thomas 265 Lacan, Jacques 19, 230 and Hegel 19, 23, 26, 30–31, 40 Lachelier, Jules 220 language 14, 27, 31, 34–6, 139, 243 and aesthetics 109 and analytic philosophy 258 and art 89, 166, 171 Buber’s concept of 182–4 Carnap’s view of 14, 250–51, 264 and creativity 119, 199 Derrida on 40, 261 and difference 118, 217 enigmatic character of 159 Gadamer’s concept of 147–51, 153, 155, 239 Hegel’s concept of 26, 35 Heidegger’s theory of 171–4, 264 hypostatization of 150 Lacan on 31, 39 as a medium 132, 147, 150, 155 Merleau-Ponty on 6, 99, 113, 118 and metaphysics 154 and neo-Kantianism 265 noncausal 186 ordinary 255, 259, 264 and phenomenology 99, 237 and poetry 97, 172 and reality 100, 246 Sartre on 6, 99 Searle’s analysis of Derrida 260–64 and speaking 118–23 tacit 118–23 as a tool 173 Wittgenstein’s view of 254–5 see also Saussure Lapoujade, Robert 95 Lascaux 17, 124 Lask, Emil 157n, 238 Lavelle, Louis 210n Lawrence, D. H. 114

Lefebvre, Henri 81 Leonardo see Vinci, Leonardo da Lepp, Ignace 75 Leuven (Husserl Archives) 114–15 Lévi-Strauss, Claude x, 19 Levinas, Emmanuel 2, 12, 43, 61, 68–89 and art 100–102 and Buber 181–2n, 184–5 Existence and Existents 54–5 and freedom 62, 181 and Husserl 47 identity politics 56 influence 24, 28, 45 and intentionality 47 Jewish experience 60–61 the Other 181 and the phenomenological movement 46 and phenomenology, existential 48 and Sartre 55, 61–4 concept of self 207 and “theological turn” 14 Totality and Infinity 214–15 Lévy, Benny 63, 78 Lewis, David 252 liberalism 56, 67n, 186 lifeworld (Lebenswelt) 114, 225 linguistic turn x, 132, 147, 261 linguistics 31, 33, 119, 152, 263 Saussure on 6, 19, 99, 118, 217, 261 structural 19, 40, 118n, 261 see also language literature viii, xi, 1–2, 5–6, 60, 119–20 and engagement 79–80, 89, 95–100 and existentialism 5, 45, 49 Heidegger’s concern with 173 incarnate existence 120 Lyotard on 108 and reduction of speaking language 119 Sartre on 6, 70, 75, 95–100 structuralist theory of 100 logic vii, 1, 47, 161, 224, 251 of the aesthetical world 128 and Cavaillès use of 222, 224, 229 and Heidegger 253–4 and mathematics 224–5, 229 logocentrism 154 logos 35n, 133–4, 188, 200 look (le regard) 28n, 51, 59, 73–4 love 65, 74, 172, 181, 185–6, 212–13

313

index as devotion 209 and revelation 199 Löwith, Karl 188 Lubac, Henri de 196, 212–15 Luther, Martin 17, 135, 157n, 187 Lyotard, Jean-François x–xi, 88, 108 Mach, Ernst 246–7n machination (Machenshaft) 160 Magnus, Albertus 17 Magny, Claude-Edmonde 75 Magritte, René 88, 106–7 Maimon, Salomon viii Malraux, André 120, 121 Maly, Kenneth 93n, 160n Marburg University 65, 149n, 157n, 188, 190n, 197 Marcel, Gabriel 43, 75–6, 177, 196, 204–6, 213 and attention 215 and Catholicism 179, 181, 202, 212 and “existentialism” 12, 44 influence of phenomenology upon 46 and personal existence 207 and Ricoeur 203, 209 theology, existential 183–6, 212 see also Mounier; existential theology Marcuse, Herbert x Mariana (queen of Spain) 107 Marinetti, Filippo 105 Marion, Jean-Luc 204n Maritain, Jacques 177, 179–80, 186, 212 Martin, Henri 80 Marx, Karl viii–ix, 23, 29n and existentialism 45–6 and Foucault 107 and Hegel 19, 23, 26, 34 influence on Trân Duc Thao 26n and Kojève 19n, 77 and Sartre 28n, 59, 67n, 81–2 Marxism 29n, 56, 78, 195 and Christian philosophy 180 and existentialism 55, 58–9 Marcel’s critique of 186 Sartre on 49, 56–9, 69, 80–81, 84 materialism ix, 59, 69, 80, 206, 210 mathematics viii–ix, 2, 88, 116, 224, 231–3 Cavaillès concept of 12–13, 222, 224–31 and definition 232

and geometrical concepts 225–6 and geometric space 116, 125, 249n Kant on 224 and necessary truths 37 and the origin of geometry 38–9, 225–7 and Platonic essences 243 see also set theory mathesis of experiences 249 Matisse, Henri 93, 122 matter 55, 71, 90–91, 124, 206, 209 and flesh 94, 126 and form 90, 166 inert 82 recalcitrant 82 reduction of reality to 210 Meinong, Alexius 235, 249, 257 Mercier, Jeanne 75 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice ix, 6, 31, 54, 61, 118, 259 and aesthetics 5–9, 11, 88–9, 93–5 and Cézanne 113–18 “Cézanne’s Doubt” 7n, 95, 113, 115–17, 121–2, 124, 127 and Derrida 40 on Descartes 111–13 and Dufrenne 98 and existentialism 1–2, 43, 45, 47, 49 flesh 125–8 and Hegel 3–5, 19–21, 26, 31–3, 37 and Husserl 47–48 influence on Fanon 56, 60–61 and language 99, 118–23, 261 and Levinas 51, 63, 101 and Lyotard 108 and mathematics 39 and ontology 33, 35–7, 95, 234 and painting 99, 111–13 philosophy of concept 219–20, 233 and politics 56, 59 and Ryle 258n and Sartre 28, 52–3, 56–9, 70, 80, 95–6, 99 and vision 123–8 metaphor 31, 182, 262–4 metaphysics 6, 57, 169–70, 186–7, 206, 246 descriptive 260 Heidegger’s critique of 58, 166 history of 65, 153, 159–60, 166n implied by painting 113 and language 153–4

314

index as nonsense 240, 247–53 and vision 94, 112 Michaux, Henri 95 Middle Ages 180 Miller, Arthur 277 Miller, Jacques-Alain 230n mind 101, 142, 149, 158n, 186, 227 Descartes’s conception of 73, 94, 107, 112, 258 life of 19 Merleau-Ponty on 118n, 120, 124, 126 other 71 philosophy of 260–61 unity of 90 Minkowski, Eugene 46 Mises, Ludwig Heinrich Edler von 241 modernity, problem of x, 195, 207, 212, 214 Moore, George Edward 235 morality 78, 143, 146, 222 Mounier, Emmanuel 177, 181, 205n–6, 211n–12, 215 biographical information 202n existence, personal 180–81, 196, 205, 207–10 experience, fundamental 12 religious invocation 186 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 88, 268 myth 80, 189, 239, 259 narcissism 127 Natorp, Paul Gerhard 65, 237, 244–6, 250 naturalism 245n–6, 257 Nazism 1, 95, 114n, 174, 239 neo-Hegelianism 252 neo-Kantianism 28, 65, 190n, 198n, 246–9, 265 and Bergsonism 3 and Bultmann 190n and logical positivism 2, 13, 244, 252 and phenomenology 236–40 and religion 198n Sartre on 28n neo-Thomism 196, 238 neo-Socraticism 44, 186 Neurath, Otto 248 Newman, Barnett 95, 102, 108 Nietzsche, Friedrich viii–ix, 19, 49, 152–3, 197 death of God 12, 191

and existentialism 43, 45, 246 and Heidegger 89, 92, 240 and popular life philosophy 245 and Russell 236 Nietzsche Society xi Nizan, Paul 46n Nohl, Hermann 24 non-sense 160 nonsense 242, 257 Heidegger on 14, 240, 248, 252, 255 nothingness 4–5, 50, 72, 201, 251 objectivity 114, 135, 142–4, 149–50, 155, 185n historical 198 and mathematics 225, 227 and subjectivity 120, 198 O’Connor, Maurice 255 ontology 37, 152, 185, 202, 214–15 of art 88–89, 95, 97, 109 Heidegger on 45, 61, 90, 131, 136–9, 171, 187n of the human person 178–9, 201 Merleau-Ponty on 52, 59, 93–5, 113, 123–8, 234 Sartre on 49–50, 52–3, 55n, 57–9, 71–2, 74, 77 organism 83, 125 Ortega y Gasset, José 43, 64–5 Other (the) 27, 53–5, 62–3, 73, 181–5 Lacan on 230 Levinas on 45, 101 the look of 51 Otto, Rudolf 197n–8n overlapping (empiétement) 124–5 see also intertwining painting 5–11, 90–97, 105–8, 111–12, 114–17, 168 Cézanne 88–9, 93 classification of 6, 99 Greek 166n Klee 88–9, 93, 170–71 and language 97, 99, 119, 122–3, 172 and metaphysics 101, 112–13 modern 124 and objectivity 119 peasant shoes 9–10, 90–91, 167–8 and perspective 120–21

315

index of the Renaissance 95 and stylization 121–2 and vision 7, 94, 124, 126–8 Panofsky, Erwin 114, 116–17 paradigm shift 265 Pascal, Blaise 206n Paul, Saint 17, 20, 178n, 188, 206, 210–11n Péguy, Charles 180n Peiffer, Gabrielle 68 performatives 260, 262 person 180–81, 201, 207, 213, 222–3, 231 and anxiety 238 and art 117 and Christianity 180–82, 200 connection to phronesis 146 decentered 205 and existentialism 97, 246 experience of 12, 249 and horror 54 and the human body 196, 206 metaphysical conditions of 184–5 and moral responsibility 222 and ontology 178–9, 185 paradox of 196, 207–10 and religion 12, 215 Sartre’s critique of 70, 81 and sensation 204 and theology 211n and vision 108 see also self personalism 180–81, 205–6 Petzet, Heinrich Wiegand 93 Philip IV (king of Spain) 107 phronesis 146 Picasso, Pablo 97, 105 Pietism 196, 198, 210n Planck, Max 163n, 242n Plato 17, 101–2, 154, 253 dialogues 265 Heidegger’s reading of 162, 164 and phenomenology 243 Platonic objects 257 Platonism 257 poetry 5, 101, 127, 205–6 classification of 6, 88, 97 Heidegger on 92, 171–3 language of 6, 99, 171 poiesis 92, 162, 164 Poincaré, Henri 220, 231–4

political theory ix, xii, 45, 56–61, 90–91 aestheticization of 104–5 and collectivism 211 and Hegel’s role 19, 22–3 and phenomenology 46 Sartre’s 2, 49–51, 53, 64, 80–82, 99 and structuralism 222 Pollack, Jackson 95 Port Royal philosophy 206n positivism, logical 2, 13, 225, 240–47, 252 postmodernism xi, 15, 106, 108 poststructuralism x, 15, 261; see also structuralism pragmatism ix, 218 praxis 28n, 82, 83, 150 prayer 77, 183, 215 pre-judgment 144, 155 Presocratic philosophy 126, 159 proposition 10, 185, 225, 257, 260 synthetic a priori 243–4, 255 Protestantism 189–91, 195–6, 211 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph viii Proust, Marcel 105, 114, 116–17 pseudo-problem 249, 251–3 psychoanalysis ix–x, 60, 74, 76, 232 and cameras 105 as an explanatory model 151 Hegel on 19, 22, 30–31, 40 influence on Fanon 60 Lacan on 19, 30–31, 33, 39–40 Merleau-Ponty on 33, 127 and metaphysics 248–9 psychologism 245n Pythagoras 253 Queneau, Raymond 26, 100 Quine, Willard Van Orman 244n Rahner, Karl 213n Raskolnikov, Rodion Romanovich 98 rationalism 32–3, 94; see also reason rationality 21–3, 25, 31, 114, 144, 219–20 and art 100 mathematical 232 see also reason realism 32, 47, 72 reason 21–5, 31, 159, 199, 232 and alien 23, 35 critique of technological 159, 161, 165

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index deductive 73 and faith 64 and fear of death 64–5 irrationality of 19 and logos 133 and mathematics 224–5, 227 and nausea 48 as a product of living 65 static faculty of 3, 21 see also rationality, rationalism reconstruction see construction Reichenbach, Hans 247–8 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard viii relativism 6, 149 religion 11, 143, 182, 186, 195–215 and art 105, 109 of the beautiful 96, 100–103 central question of 184, 186 and existentialism ix, 2, 177 and faith 190 figure of the saint 210 and freedom 209 Hegel on 19, 22, 24 and hermeneutics 188 and history 202, 211 and liberal theology 199 and medieval philosophy 88 and modern individualism 12 and personalism 180–81 phenomenology 135, 196 and responsibility 181 and revelation 197, 211 and the revelation of God 34 and sacrilege 103 and the visible 210–15 wars of 195 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van Rijn 111–12, 124 Renaissance 17, 88, 94, 95, 112, 116 Richardson, William 158n Richier, Germaine 93 Richir, Marc 112n Rickert, Heinrich John 157n, 237, 238, 239, 244–6 Ricoeur, Paul x–xi, 143n, 183, 207, 235 and Gadamer 132, 142n, 143n, 151–2 and Husserl 28n, 236 and Marcel 184n, 203, 209n Rilke, Ranier Maria 88, 114–15

Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur 102 Rodin, Auguste 93 Rorty, Rorty x, 236, 264 Rosenzweig, Franz 196–9, 207n, 213 and revelation 198–9, 202, 210 Rothko, Mark 95 Royce, Josiah 183n Russell, Bertrand vii, 231, 235–6, 249, 252 Russia 18n Rybalka, Michel 68 Ryle, Gilbert 235, 237n, 255–9, 264–5 sacred 11, 91–2 Saint-Simon, Henri viii Salanskis, Jean-Michel 218 Sartre, Jean-Paul ix, 2–4, 24, 50–51, 61–4, 79 aesthetics 88 and anti-Semitism 60–61 and artwork 88–9, 101 and bad faith 29, 73–4 and Beauvoir 29–30, 43n–4, 53–4, 59, 63 and Camus’s absurdism 45, 49–50, 56–7 central figure of existentialism 1, 4, 30, 43–6, 49, 54, 76 and the Cold War 80 and conflict 51 and consciousness 47 critique of Cartesian thought 4, 28n, 77 Critique of Dialectical Reason 80–84 and Fanon 44n, 59–60 and freedom 10, 51–2, 58, 62–3, 74, 80 and Husserl 28n, 47, 67–72 influence of Hegel 19, 27, 29, 31, 51 influence of Heidegger 11, 27, 57 rejection of Heidegger’s being-with 55 and intentionality 47 and knowledge 233 and Kojève 77 and Levinas 28, 47–8, 55, 60–64, 101 and literature 1, 5–6, 75 and Marcel 185–6 and Marxism 49, 56–9, 80–81, 84 and Merleau-Ponty 5–8, 11n, 31, 33, 52–3, 56, 59, 95–100 and Mounier’s view of freedom 207n–9 and nausea 48 and negation 72–3 Notebooks for an Ethics (Cahiers) 76–9 and ontology 49, 52–3, 55n, 58

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index the Other 27–8, 45, 51, 55, 62–3, 73 and the philosophy of concept 219–20, 233 and politics 2, 56–61 psychoanalysis 74 and responsibility 5, 10 and Ryle 259 and situatedness 28n, 73 see also existentialism Saussure, Ferdinand de x, 4, 217, 261 influence of his linguistics 6, 19, 40, 99, 118 notion of “sign” 38, 118–19, 121 Scharff, Robert xi Scheler, Max ix, 15, 47, 179, 239 origin of existentialism 45 personalist philosophy 207, 245, 246 Schelling, Friedrich viii, 183n, 190n, 251, 253 Schiller, Friedrich viii Schilpp, Paul 184n Schlegel, Friedrich viii Schleiermacher, Friedrich 142, 149, 197n, 198n, 238 Schlick, Moritz 13, 240–44, 247, 255, 265 Schmitt, Carl x Schopenhauer, Arthur viii Schrader, George xi Schrag, Calvin xi Schutz, Alfred x, 241 science viii–xii, 5, 179n, 195–7, 227 and aesthetics 88 becoming of 231, 234 Bolzano’s theory of 225 as constructed 114–15 and existentialism 44 Foucault on 218 history of 227–8, 232–3 human sciences 131, 135–6, 142–4, 149, 152 Husserl on 47, 114, 132 and language 264 and logic 224 New Science 195 and phenomenology 8, 12, 13, 21, 233 philosophy of concept 223, 226, 231 Ryle on 255–7 social sciences ix, x, 60, 150 and theology 183n, 188, 190, 199, 211 Searle, John 236–7, 259–63, 264–6 Seaver, Richard 23

self 50, 64, 101, 118n, 173, 203–4 alienation of 105, 181 and creativity 209 and Dasein 140 distinct from the concept of person 207 and experience 24, 250 and faith 190–91 and history 64 and intersubjectivity 26 knowledge of 146, 200 and love 186 and negation 201 opposition to world 33, 94 situated character of 28n temporal 26n transcendence 125, 186 see also person self-consciousness see consciousness Sellars, Wilfrid 236n, 239, 260, 264n semiology 31 sensation 6, 101, 120, 166, 203–4, 246 Serres, Michel x set theory 227 sex x, 60, 74 sexuality 31 shadow 7, 100–101, 126 Shapiro, Meyer 91n sign 38, 118–19, 121, 148 Simmel, Georg 237, 245 socialism 77, 180, 206 National Socialism 56, 91, 159n, 240 solipsism 28, 250 soul 60, 184, 212 Sophocles 104, 172 Soviet Union 1, 82 space 112, 122, 183, 214 of appearance 164, 167–8 and art 105, 124 Husserl’s conception of 249–50n and language 99, 118–19 lived experience of 48, 115 and mathematics 125, 249n and mirrors 108 semi-Platonic 257 Spinoza, Baruch 179n, 210n, 228–9, 253 Spinozism 228–9n spirit 99, 135, 160, 170, 206, 209 Hegel’s concept of 21–2n, 26, 31n spontaneity 10–11, 62, 96; see also freedom

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index Staël, Nicolas de 93 Stalin, Joseph 80, 82 Stein, Edith 177–9, 185–7 Straus, Erwin xi Strauss, David Friedrich viii Strawson, Peter 252, 260 structuralism x, 4, 19, 40, 221 and Canguilhem 222, 228, 230–31 and phenomenology 15, 218 see also poststructuralism subjectivity 28, 98, 120, 123, 127, 228 collective 183 empty 49 engaged 62 immanent 154 and revelation 198 Sartre 27–8, 62, 68, 98 and structuralism 230 transcendental 3, 133 sublime 96, 108 substance 90, 94, 126, 140, 166 supernatural 180, 196, 211n, 212–14 surrealism 19, 23, 25, 31, 106 technē 146, 164 technology xii, 104–5, 195, 206 and calculation 10, 167 Heidegger’s criticism of 10, 11, 159–65 and progress 202, 205 relation to art 168–9, 171, 173 relation to history 202 temporality 25, 38, 73, 136, 141 and Heidegger’s notion of Care 131, 140 Teresa of Ávila 177n Thales of Miletus 253 theology, existential 2, 183–4, 187–93 theology, liberal 196, 199, 210 Thomism 179, 196; see also neo-Thomism Tillich, Paul 12, 177, 187–92 time 96, 103, 165, 201 and art 101, 122, 168, 170 autonomous 103 and crisis 160 of decision 135 and eternity 210n Hegel’s understanding of 25, 34 passage of 102 and the perceived object 122 physical 73

and Platonic objects 257 and progress 84 Sartre’s philosophy of 11, 96 Tintoretto see Comin, Jacopo tragedy 34, 105–6, 172 Trakl, Georg 159 Trân Duc Thao 26n, 29n transcendence 12, 25, 29, 202, 214–15 and facticity 50–51 and immanence 94n, 98, 184, 202, 206, 210n Troisfontaines, Roger 75 truth 10, 142, 152, 154, 211, 215 a priori 244 as alētheia 8, 10, 133, 134, 162 and artwork 88, 90–92, 102, 109, 118, 166 and the aesthetic object of artwork 98 and the event character of artwork 10, 168 of being 187, 253 Carnap’s conception of 241 Descartes’s conception of 112 essence of 92, 167–168 and freedom 35n, 74 and Hegel’s conception of the irrational 21–2, 168 of history 79, 93, 168 and intersubjectivity 79 of the kerygma 189 and language 264 and mathematics 37 and metaphysics 253 and revelation 198, 200 and technology 164 Unamuno, Miguel de 43, 64–5 unconscious 31, 105, 108 vagueness 218 Valéry, Paul 59 Velásquez, Diego 88–9, 107, 108 verbum (“Word”) 148 Vienna Circle 240–41, 246–9n, 251 Vinci, Leonardo da 94 vision 11, 111, 141, 215 Cartesian 94, 112 Merleau-Ponty on 7, 11, 93–4, 123–8, 128n ontology of 123–128 and painting 7, 111

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index psychological interpretation of 116 vocation 168, 205, 208–10, 214–15 Waelhens, Alphonse de 75 Wahl, Jean 2, 19, 24–5, 41, 75 and Hegel’s Phenomenology 18 influence 18, 24 significance of 18n, 40 and “the Unhappy Consciousness” 3, 24–6, 33–4 and Vers le concret 2, 46 Waismann, Friedrich 254 Wartenburg, Hans (Count Yorck) 143n Weil, Eric 19n, 26, 34n Weil, Simone 211–12, 215 Wild, John x–xi, 260 Williams, Forrest 68

Wilson, John Cook 258 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 17 Windelband, Wilhelm 237 Wittgenstein, Ludwig ix, 235, 244n, 249, 253n, 257, 259 a priori 244 and analytic philosophy 264–5 encounter with phenomenology 254–5 influence 236, 242n, 261 Wright, Georg von vii writing (philosophy of) 6, 38–40, 97, 99–100, 122–3 Würzburg School 69 Yangtze (river) 83 Zubiri, Xavier 43, 64–5

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