Scientific Conceptualization and Ontological Difference 9783110605303, 9783110603736

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Dimitri Ginev Scientific Conceptualization and Ontological Difference

Dimitri Ginev

Scientific Conceptualization and Ontological Difference

ISBN 978-3-11-060373-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-060530-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-060386-6

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck Cover Image: Drew Walker, Orange Ship, Prussian Room www.degruyter.com

For my dear wife Maya

Acknowledgements At the final stage of preparing this book I was diagnosed with deadly form of cancer. Without the help of Mr. Christoph Schirmer, Senior Acquisition Editor in de Gruyter publishing house, I would not be able to finish my work. I can hardly express my thanks enough in words. My thankfulness is also directed at the two anonymous reviewers whose comments and ideas helped in improving the initial version of the manuscript. From the end of January 2019, my dearest friend Paula Angelova took the responsibility for bringing the publication to a successful conclusion. Paula has always provided valuable assistance to me in critical situations. I know that she will do her best to conclude my work.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110605303-001

Contents Introduction  . . . . . .  . . . .

1

Animalizing the human and humanizing the animal: the ontological 21 difference in scrutinizing the living Synthetic biology and the status of the living 21 25 Animal life and human existence Philosophy of biology, philosophical biology, and critique of 33 biology The existential conception of science and biological holism 44 The trouble with the temporalization of the animal forms of life 52 Tentative conclusions 61 Conceptualizing practices beyond the paradigm of discreteness 72 72 A short historical excursus Overcoming the paradigm of discreteness 93 From a Wittgensteinian to a hermeneutic anti-essentialism Scrutinizing the everydayness of concerted practices 118

101

. .. .. .. .

129 Disclosing authentic lifeforms Manifolds of practices: thresholds and types 129 143 Ongoing contextualization and inter-contextuality Towards a phenomenology of the facticity of practices capable of disclosing lifeforms 149 165 Early Cubism as an authentic cultural lifeform 165 The initial configuration of Cubist practices The characteristic hermeneutic situation of early Cubism 177 184 From tactility to existential spatiality 189 The concept of existential agency

 . . . .

Existential agency and the authenticity of the self 197 197 Introduction The trans-subjective being of subjective agency 203 Approaching the Self’s authenticity 224 Trans-subjective possibilities and existential choices 237

 . . .

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Contents

. . References

Existential agency and the production of the dialogical self 245 256 Conclusion 262

Index of Names Index of Subjects

274 278

Introduction “Certainly we all stand in the ontological difference and we will never be able to overcome it.” (Gadamer 2007, 370)

In 1986, my mentor and best friend Azarya Polikarov (1921– 2000) and I were invited to contribute to the volume of the Library of Living Philosophers dedicated to Sir Alfred Ayer. We prepared an essay in two parts. The first part discusses Ayer’s achievements in his critical reception of logical empiricism, while the subject of the second part is an examination of the resources of his philosophy for responding to main criticisms raised against the empiricist program from the viewpoint of post-empiricist trends. We defended (a) the claim that Hanson’s thesis that observations become empirical facts only within theoretical frameworks does not eliminate Ayer’s verifiability criterion, and (b) the claim that the kind of historicism implied by Kuhn-Feyerabend’s incommensurability thesis does not contradict Ayer’s empiricist analysis of knowledge, since this analysis does not support the idea that there are universally valid and historically invariant epistemological standards by means of which scientific knowledge can rationally be reconstructed (Polikarov and Ginev 1992, 417– 421). We concluded that Ayer’s moderate logical empiricism is compatible with (and even complementary to) the agenda of the historical reconstruction of scientific rationality. In his reply to our essay, Professor Ayer specially praised the quest for reconciling his philosophy with post-empiricist historicism. Due to his polyvalent attitude to the orthodoxy of the Vienna Circle, Ayer has been able over the years to develop conceptions that are resilient enough to master challenges working effectively against this orthodoxy. This is why the following statement of his reply should be taken at face value: Both Hanson’s view that causal connections could not be expressed in a pure sense-data language and the views of “such writers as Kuhn and Feyerabend are not only acceptable to me but show a deeper command of the philosophy of science than I am able to claim for myself.” (Ayer 1992a, 425). Yet this tolerance may also produce dangerous effects for the strong division between science and metaphysics on which he insisted. He had an ambivalent attitude towards this danger. Sir Alfred was willing to accept the postempiricist trends (including their metaphysical assumptions), but completely unwilling to make any concession to hermeneutic phenomenology. Of course, there is nothing strange in his position. Hermeneutic phenomenology rests upon unverifiable metaphysical principles, and it poses questions “to which it is so easily shown that there can be no answers.” (Ayer 1992b, 345). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110605303-002

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Introduction

The philosopher who outlined the program for hermeneutic phenomenology was famous for his destructive overcoming of (the tradition of) the metaphysics of presence, and infamous for his dictum that science does not think. The possibility of overcoming the metaphysics of presence within and through forms of scientific conceptualization would run against the intent of this philosopher. But strangely enough, this possibility would be in agreement with the strategy we employed in reconciling the theses of theory-ladenness and incommensurability with Ayer’s logical empiricism: If science proves to be capable of “thinking” and constituting its empirical basis by means of an ontological engagement that roots in the principles of the same “metaphysics of non-presence” which grounds hermeneutic phenomenology, then these principles can become verifiable through a certain criterion for verifiability. Consequently, the meaningless (in Ayer’s eyes) principles formulated by the “worst metaphysician” would become principles for the construction of theories capable of conceptualizing phenomena and empirical processes that the purely objectivist theories are unable to approach. This is really dangerous consequence for a radically empiricist program. The most important among the principles that can become verifiable is that one which differentiates between the ontic status of procedurally constituted entities within scientific research and the ontological status of the phenomena revealed by means of existential analytic. Distinguished by ontic status are not only empirical entities whose procedural objectification makes them into experimentally manipulable objects of inquiry, but all entities identifiable by means of criteria defined by a strategy of scientific conceptualization. Thus, purely formal objects – say, those to which the theorems of axiomatic set theory refer – are characterized by ontic status too. Depending on the criterion (constructivist, finitist, algorithmic, etc.) for existence adopted by the respective formal theory, these objects are procedurally and epistemologically identifiable. (A procedural identification is, for instance, the use of transfinite induction for identifying wellordered sets, while the proof based on transfinite induction provides criteria for epistemic identification. By the same token, using primitive recursive functions allows the identification of finite mathematical objects, while theorems regarding the consistency of axiomatic systems based on primitive recursive arithmetic specify the epistemic status of these objects.) The founder of hermeneutic phenomenology admits that the difference between entities with ontic status (including those entities whose empirical way of being is not present-at-hand, but is contextually ready-to-hand) and the “formally indicated” phenomena as phenomenologically studied by existential analytic is a dichotomous difference. Postulated in this way, the ontic-ontological difference turns out to be an unsurmountable barrier to the dialogue between scientific conceptualization and existential ontology. Yet Heidegger also argues

Introduction

3

that the ontological reflection (upon the meaning of being) starts with posing the question of how the world-as-horizon transcends all entities distinguished with ontic status within-the-world. Arguing in this way leaves an interesting avenue open: Those who are preoccupied with the procedural objectification and theoretical conceptualization of “ontic entities” are, “in principle”, in a position also to handle (in accordance with the specificity of their research) the issue of transcendence. Thus, (a possible non-orthodox reading of) Heidegger’s approach does not definitely rule out the dialogue between scientific conceptualization and existential ontology.¹ But where does the necessity for such a dialogue come from? One can assume that the procedural constitution of objects of inquiry and the way of thinking about the “meaning of being” are entirely incompatible enterprises. Under this assumption, Heidegger seems to be correct in concluding that science is fully engaged with research (theoretical explanations of procedurally objectified phenomena), and has nothing to do with thinking about “entities” that can never

 Heidegger makes in Being and Time at least two proposals for scientific research programs based on a dialogue between existential analytic and empirical inquiry. These are (1) a grammatical theory that does not treat the morphosyntactic structure as determined by first order logic, and (2) a historiographic research program based on the existential-ontological conception of “authentic historicality”. Section 34 of this work offers a sketch for a “grammar of discursive articulation”, which in contrast to the “ontical grammar” of morphological and syntactic paradigms of language takes into consideration discourse as an existentiale characterized by a plurality of ecstatic forms of temporalizing. Following his reading of Aristotle’s Rhetoric from the beginning of the 1920s, Heidegger seems to adhere to the viewpoint that the primary outcome of discursive articulation are not linguistic paradigms but discursive genres, each of them predicated on a specific interconnectedness of “ethos” (the authority of articulation), “pathos” (the mood expressed by this articulation), and “logos” (the logical dimensions of the articulation’s outcome). Accordingly, the theory of grammar has to be built upon an existentially interpreted rhetoric. Heidegger’s concept of grammar is also closely related to his views about logos, predication, communication, and the interplay between hermeneutic and apophantic “as”. (See also Pöggeler 1990, 57– 59.) His proposal for an ontologically designed linguistics is guided by the conviction that the “task of liberating grammar from logic requires beforehand a positive understanding of the basic a priori structure of discourse in general as an existentiale.” (Heidegger 1962a, 209). Section 76 of Being and Time offers the scenario for developing an “authentic science of historiography”. According to this scenario, the point of departure of the theory of historiography should be the observation that there is a history because of the ecstatic temporalizing of temporality. Past history is not a container of past events, but is a dynamic reality that hinges on this temporalizing qua historizing (Geschehen). The characteristic hermeneutic situation of doing authentic historiographic research rests on the way in which one reflects/rationalizes the hermeneutic fore-structuring of historical events as a process of historizing withinthe-world. (For a reconstruction of these two outlines for research programs based on a dialogue between existential analytic and empirical inquiry, see Ginev 2010 and Ginev 2015b.)

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Introduction

be manifested in its methodologically organized control area. The main deficiency of this approach – the approach assuming a dichotomous character of the ontological difference – consists in ignoring the role of science’s own “existential structure”. Scientific inquiry is a mode of being-in-the-world that can be studied in terms of existential analytic. In the perspective of such a study, what becomes constituted as objects of inquiry is “always already” fore-structured by the very mode of being. Accordingly, the entities distinguished with ontic status within scientific conceptualization are always in a certain hermeneutic situation that has to be analyzed in ontological terms. Reaching this conclusion tentatively integrates (a version of) the ontic-ontological difference – the difference between procedurally constituted objects and the mode of being of the very constitution – with scientific conceptualization (Ginev 2016a, 138 – 156). More importantly, the conclusion alludes to a possible non-dichotomous reading of this difference. This claim ought to be carefully worked out. Scientific inquiry has always the possibility of making its own way of being a subject of investigation. But it rarely undertakes such an initiative. To be sure, starting to reflect upon its own way of being does not mean that scientific inquiry will develop a kind of existential analytic within its research programs. Scientific inquiry takes into consideration its way of being always when it becomes evident that the conceptualization of what is studied cannot be disentangled from its ongoing fore-structuring via this way of being. Roughly, this happens when the researchers come to the conclusion that the situation of inquiry intrinsically belongs to the conceptually delineated object of inquiry. In the experimental sciences, this fusion of situation of inquiry and object of inquiry always takes place when one realizes that (1) there are no inherently determined properties of the individual entities under study, and (2) any property manifested in the situation of inquiry cannot be manipulated (in particular, measured) independently of manipulating properties with which it correlates in a certain way. Accordingly, the ontic status of the objects of inquiry is co-determined by the way in which the (experimental, conceptual, and formal) research apparatuses are intervening the existence of these objects. Phrased differently, the mode of being of objectifying inquiry is always taken into consideration when the procedural objectification proves to be inseparably ensnared in what becomes objectified. To take this mode into consideration amounts to reflexively revealing the hermeneutic situation in which one constitutes objects of inquiry by employing criteria for ontic identification (like experimental verification and the interpretation of a theoretical model by data models). Thus, for instance, when at issue is the question of whether the phase space modelling the behavior of a dynamical system is characterized by ergodicity, one has to reflexively analyze the situation in which one has constituted the system as an object of inquiry. It is the uniform

Introduction

5

distribution of microstates (as a condition for ergodicity) that depends on the way in which the system is constituted as amenable to procedural objectification. Or to take another example: If the objectified dynamics of a system is mathematically modelled by a linear equation that describes the system’s behavior under the assumption that the system is perfectly isolated from its environment, then the emergence of entanglements of the system and environment changes the whole scenario of procedural objectification. In this case, the reflexive analysis of the hermeneutic situation in which the object of inquiry is constituted should be focused on how the constituted object becomes transformed due to the reduction of the superposition of states (as implied by the linear character of the equation) to a single observed state. (Notoriously, in quantum mechanics this transformation results from the wave function collapse.) In some cases, the alteration of the research scenario may result not in modifications of theory’s formalism and the empirical interpretations of theoretical concepts, but in the replacement of the whole hermeneutic situation (as related to the world-picture, basic categories, and underlying logical presuppositions). Exercising reflexivity about one’s own hermeneutic situation of objectifying inquiry is more an ontological than an epistemological enterprise. In making this observation, I should right away specify the sense in which the adjective “ontological” is used here. In the traditional philosophy of science, when one is referring to the ontology of the objects of inquiry, one has in mind a generalized picture of the ontic status of these objects. In the sense of such a generalization, John Worrall (1989) drew his celebrated conclusion that structural realism suggests the best picture combining the argument of scientific revolutions and the realist attitude towards the accepted theories. General ontological claims of this type are also formulated when one argues that (1) scientific theories do not specify the intrinsic natures of unobservable individual objects (French and Ladyman 2011, 27); (2) quantum particles are not individuals and quantum mechanics disproves haecceitism (French 2010); (3) scientific objects are not assumed to be individuated independently of the nexus of relations in which they stand; (4) the objecthood of quantum-mechanical objects cannot be undermined by the fact that from exact permutation symmetry follows particle indistinguishability (Saunders 2003, 131). These formulations refer to ontological pictures already contained in (or implied by) the initial mathematical idealizations of procedural objectification. No doubt, making the hermeneutic situation of being-in-the-world-by-carrying-outprocedural-objectification-of-the-world an ontological theme within the process of inquiry has crucial implications for the ontic status of the objects of inquiry as this status is addressed by the above cited formulations. Nonetheless, reflexivity about the hermeneutic situation of objectifying inquiry is completely different

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Introduction

ontological initiative as compared with generalizing the ontic assumptions (involved in the initial mathematical idealizations) of the theory construction. (I am by no means trying to suggest that any of these initiatives is more important than the other.) In asking about its own hermeneutic situation, scientific inquiry becomes a reflexive undertaking that investigates its own “existential-ontological” possibility. The ontological difference between the hermeneutic situation of procedural objectification and the status of procedurally objectified entities is a non-dichotomous difference within the strategy of conceptualization of every reflexively designed program of objectifying inquiry. But there are in these programs no objects of inquiry inherently characterized by ontological difference. Genes, molecules, electromagnetic fields, or bosons are not self-interpretive entities, requiring a sort of “dialogical conceptualization”. For some champions of the cultural studies of science, however, the procedurally objectified entities of natural science are to be treated as “cultural artefacts”. Hermeneutic phenomenology strongly opposes this absurd position. No matter how severely dependent is the constitution of objects of inquiry in objectifying science on interpretive practices and procedures, any attempt at addressing these entities as “cultural artefacts” would be no more than a pure nonsense. Scrutinizing scientific-conceptualization-as-objectifying-inquiry in terms of a special mode of being-in-the-world should not be based on a combination of cultural relativism and social constructivism. Relativism and constructivism are simply wrong philosophical positions. The philosophy of science based on hermeneutic phenomenology shares with conventionalism the position that the meaning of theory’s primitive terms is fixed by theory’s conceptual framework and mathematical formalism. But fixing the meaning in this way occurs within the particular “texts” constituted in scientific inquiry. The “texts” (empirically interpreted mathematical structures) are semantically complete (or complete in ontic sense), but they remain ontologically open for a further contextualization. In the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology, this contextualization is spelled out in the terms of ongoing fore-structuring of “texts”, which does not leave any room for relativism. (Any kind of relativism presumes semantic enclosure/fixture of conceptual frameworks. The ongoing fore-structuring keeps intact the open horizon beyond any fixed framework. In so doing, this fore-structuring brings the basic presumption of relativism to naught.) More importantly, the hermeneutic situation of the process of inquiry and the ongoing fore-structuring of what becomes textualized are written down in the “text”. From the viewpoint of hermeneutic phenomenology, the ontic relativism about the plurality of “texts” is surpassed by a kind of ontological anti-relativism. The philosophy of science based on hermeneutic phenomenology can approach objectifying inquiry if it succeeds in defending the tenet that there is a

Introduction

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dynamic unity of the articulation of meaning (within and through scientific practices) and the procedural objectification of what becomes meaningfully articulated. It is the former that fore-structures the latter. But fore-structuring must not be misunderstood as something that chronologically precedes what becomes structured. The articulation of meaning and the procedural objectification in scientific inquiry are involved in a hermeneutic circularity that also plays the role of the temporalizing of the temporality of scientific practices disclosing, articulating, and objectifying domains of inquiry (Ginev 2016a, 38 – 55). Since the unity of articulation and objectification is of hermeneutic nature and has ontological status, I call the position defending this unity hermeneutic realism. The hermeneutic realist claims that there is no other (conceptualized) reality but the one disclosed and articulated within and through the configurations of scientific practices. The disclosure-and-articulation of the conceptualized reality is always already in a characteristic hermeneutic situation. All considerations developed in this book are based on the position of hermeneutic realism. According to another tenet of this position, any particular program of objectifying inquiry constitutes the ontic presence of the world-as-an-objective-theme, while the world-as-horizon-of-possible-conceptualization remains ontologically open.² Differentiating between the world-as-theme and the world-as-horizon provides a reliable means for making sense of the ontological difference as it will be explored in this book. Due to the hermeneutic circularity uniting meaningful articulation and objectification, the world of conceptualized entities and the world as a horizon of possible conceptualization coexist as a non-dichotomous difference within that circularity which takes various forms in objectifying inquiry. Yet the present book is not a study about objectifying inquiry and its strategies of conceptualization. In what follows, the strategies of conceptualizing “objects inherently characterized by ontological difference” are at stake. In order to clarify the expression put in quotation marks I now turn to a debate that gained momentum at the beginning of the 1990s – the debate on whether the spread of in-

 Scientific inquiry indispensably starts out in a certain social milieu of non-scientific practices. In this sense, the starting point of inquiry is inescapably within the horizon of a pre- and nonscientific world. But in disclosing through its practices a domain, scientific inquiry discloses the world anew, which means that the world – through the conceptualization of the disclosed domain – becomes projected upon a completely new ontological horizon of possibilities. By the same token, by projecting the world upon a new horizon, the interrelatedness of the practices of scientific inquiry – through which the domain exists – becomes fully emancipated from the practices of that social milieu in which its starting point takes place. The world-as-a-projected-horizon and the world-as-ongoing-articulation-of-revealed-domains coexist within the reality disclosed, articulated, and procedurally objectified in scientific inquiry.

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Introduction

terpretative practices and procedures in all types of scientific inquiry abolishes any interesting difference in kind between the natural (objectifying) and the human (interpretive) sciences. At that time, the view that there is no epistemically distinctive domain of interpretive conceptualization was typically held by Richard Rorty and Joseph Rouse. The quest for a difference in kind is brought to naught when one realizes that the reality of the objectifying sciences – the reality of the “natural world” – should be described in the same way in which the human scientists identify sociocultural-historical reality as inseparable from the language and practices they employ in conceptualizing social and cultural phenomena. There is no place for a difference in kind since those who are “anti-essentialist all the way” treat all kinds of inquiry in terms of ongoing re-contextualization. Holding this view implies that (1) there is nothing (in the thematic fields of scientific research) beyond re-contextualization accomplished within and through discursive practices (or, more laconically, there is no remainder persisting after the total de-contextualization of what is the subject of inquiry), and (2) there is no kind of inquiry in which the essentialist (advocating the difference in kind) has a point (Rorty 1991, 70 – 71). (Re-contextualization here is conceived in a factual manner that can be described in terms of what Rorty calls “epistemological behaviorism”, rather than in accordance with a scenario of hermeneutic phenomenology. Notoriously, Rorty is eager to avoid any kind of hermeneutics that pretends to occupy the place of traditional epistemology.) In displaying discontent with the controversial (neo-pragmatist) universalization of hermeneutics, the opponents of this view (such as Charles Taylor) argued that despite the universality of re-contextualization-as-interpretation in all types of scientific inquiry, the human sciences are in a sense “more interpretive”, since the phenomena they study are brought into being through self-interpretation: Recontextualizing the inquiry of “cultural entities” like political actions, symbols, texts, narratives, documents, juridical laws, institutions, traditions, styles, patterns of interactive behavior, monuments, myths, doctrines, artworks, rituals, ceremonies, customs, archeological artefacts, and so on inescapably presupposes that all of them are already contextually constituted by self-interpretive agents, thereby encoding self-interpretation in their symbolic expressivity. But does the emphasis upon this distinctive feature – the inseparability of the producers’ self-interpretation from the way of being of the entities they produce – provide an epistemological argument for a constitutive distinctiveness of the sciences dealing with cultural phenomena and artifacts? For the radical anti-essentialist who answered this question in the negative, singling out a special kind of interpretation (different form that of re-contextualization-as-interpretation viewed in terms of epistemological behaviorism) and making it into a kind of double herme-

Introduction

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neutic (interpretation of phenomena constituted via self-interpretation) would only rehabilitate essentialism in a new disguise – as a hermeneutic defense of a kind of ontological distinctiveness. For the radical anti-essentialist, self-interpretation does not ontologically cut the world into two essentially different realms, and does not require two epistemologically distinctive strategies of scientific conceptualization. The debate between the “new deconstructionists of any difference in kind” (presumably, the “old deconstructionists” were those who signed the manifesto of the Vienna Circle) and the “old-guard Diltheyans” is nowadays of historical interest only. The conflicting positions are hopelessly obsolete. Their arguments are disproved. And most importantly, both parties ignored the role of the ontological difference in formulating the issues of the controversy, which was their principal deficiency. Ironically, both parties appeal to Dilthey – the philosopher who decisively opposed the reduction of the issue about the human sciences’ distinctiveness to a purely epistemological issue – when they portray the epistemic specificity of human-scientific interpretation as the controversy’s main issue. They all ignored the fact that Dilthey does not derive his argument for distinctiveness from the mere observation that the objects of the Geisteswissenschaften are self-interpretive entities (or entities in which agents’ self-interpretation is incorporated). Dilthey developed – especially in his final work The Formation of the Historical World within the Human Sciences – a conception of how the human sciences “constitute the historical world” (as a diversity of interpretive objects of inquiry) by constituting themselves as institutionally organized disciplines.³ The conceptualization of “the expressivity of the lifeforms” is what should make the historically oriented human sciences a distinct kind of research. Not the entities distinguished by self-interpretation, but the cultural lifeforms with a potential for interpretive self-constitution should be counted as possible objects of inquiry by these sciences. This observation shifts the lifeforms to the foreground. A kind of hermeneutics that reveals the contextual conditions under

 It is not an accident that Bernhard Groethuysen – the cultural historian who transformed several ideas of his master into research programs – is the editor of the Volume VII of Dilthey’s collected works where The Formation is published. Groethuysen supplies the volume with an introduction (Vorbericht) in which he calls into question the possibility of grounding intellectual and cultural history in an “articulating” (zergliedernde) psychology. In other words, he disputes his teacher’s structural psychologism. However, Groethuysen (1927, VII) contends that precisely this final opus of Dilthey opens the door to conceiving of hermeneutics as “the proper foundation of the human sciences” (die eigentliche Grundlage der Geisteswissenschaften). Groethuysen alludes to a caesura in Dilthey’s work leading to the replacement of structural psychology with hermeneutics – a claim that subsequently enjoyed a rich history of discussions.

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Introduction

which lifeforms become disclosed and articulated is unavoidable in the human sciences (Ginev 2014d, and Ginev 2017a). It is the appeal to Dilthey’s work in the debate over the “interpretive turn” that gives me the opportunity to elucidate the notion of “objects that are inherently characterized by ontological difference”. For Dilthey, the human-scientific conceptualization presupposes the basic relationship (das Grundverhältnis) of lived experience (Erlebnis), expression, and understanding of one’s being in a certain historical form of life. Any thematic field of human-scientific inquiry rests on this presupposition, but the basic relationship never becomes fully conceptualized. This is why the triad of experience, expression, and understanding can be made intelligible with regard to any of its contextual manifestations, but a complete deductive-explanatory theory of “life’s expressivity in cultural forms” cannot be achieved. Life always remains unfathomable. Following Dilthey’s lead, one can argue that before becoming constituted as objects of these sciences the cultural entities are meaningfully articulated within particular lifeforms. Moreover, the already mentioned interpretive self-constitution of cultural lifeforms should be substituted for unspecified self-interpretation when the distinctiveness of the human sciences is at issue. Any cultural entity that potentially is an object of inquiry exists within the horizon of a lifeform. It would be wrong to say that the symbolic meaning of such an entity is semantically enclosed in the lifeform’s structure of meaning, simply because there is no structured meaning of a lifeform that (pace structuralist semiotics) can be made present (or formally reconstructed) as a semantic structure. One may state – not in a strictly Diltheyan manner – that any cultural lifeform exists within its open horizon of possibilities, and is in a process of articulation via the performances of configured practices. The cultural lifeform’s way of being is the potentialityfor-being in practices of articulation and possibilities for articulation. The existence of an entity within a cultural lifeform is predicated on the same potentiality-for-being. By implication, its existence cannot be conceptualized as a strictly localized presence, or as an isolated existence determined in itself and for itself. Against the background of the foregoing considerations, I am in a position to undertake the first step towards specifying the notion of “objects inherently characterized by ontological difference”. Any cultural entity is factually present in diverse contexts, on the one hand, and amenable to ongoing contextualization by the lifeforms’ practices in which it exists, on the other. A particular factual manifestation of such an entity takes place within a context in which the entity is meaningfully constituted. The cultural entity (a symbol, a material artefact, a norm, a text, a local narrative, a technique, a custom, a ritualized activity, a stylistic figure, a pattern of communication, and so on), once contextually constituted, becomes part and parcel of the agential behaviour which performs the con-

Introduction

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textualizing practices. Moreover, it becomes a special “actant” but in a quite different sense from Bruno Latour’s one. Within any particular context, the cultural entity-as-actant is subjected to the context’s pragmatic teleology: The entity factually manifests itself as serving the task of reaching certain purpose of the contextualized agential behavior. The purposefulness of the latter determines the entity’s way of being within any one context (regarded as an enclosed unit). One may assume that such a context is a self-sufficient unit. Under this assumption, the ontic manifestations of the entity within the context would also attest to the entity’s factual (ontic) self-sufficiency. Seen in this way, a particular cultural entity has a plural ontic presence in diverse contexts. Yet the cultural entity also exists beyond the particular contexts within the ongoing contextualization carried out by the lifeforms’ practices. With regard to the observation that the lifeform’s way of being is the potentiality-for-being in practices of articulation and possibilities for articulation, one has to conclude that there are no delineated and ready-made contexts preceding the ongoing articulation in practices and possibilities. Roughly, there are no contexts before the ongoing contextualization-as-articulation. It is this contextualization that ontologically reveals the lifeform’s mode of existence-within-open-horizon. In the ongoing contextualization-as-articulation the cultural entity’s way of being is no longer subjected to the logic of pragmatic teleology. In this ongoing process, the cultural entity is constantly changing its roles as signifier and signified. The entity is at once a producer of meaning and a meaningful product. Furthermore, it is the process of contextualization that disperses the cultural entity over (potentially innumerate) interwoven contexts. The ontological dimension of the entity’s way of being is irreducible to the plurality of its ontic manifestations in particular contexts. Because of this irreducibility, the onticontological duality in the entity’s way of being turns out to be unsurmountable: The entity exists both as located “actant” within the agential behavior (and is contextually ready-to-hand), and as something characterized by its nonlocality and indeterminacy within an ongoing contextualization that transcends any particular context. The conceptualization of this ontic-ontological duality is a main task of the interpretive human sciences. To stress again, the duality of (a) finite-discrete factual manifestations and (b) the potentially infinite contextualization of lifeforms is inherent not only in the lifeforms’ way of being, but also in the being-in-practices of any cultural entity. Taken separately, discrete factuality and potentialityfor-being can be conceptualized by pursuing two completely different strategies. The factual presence of the entity’s manifestation enclosed in a properly delineated context is, for instance, amenable to a semiotic proceeding and a con-

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Introduction

ceptualization in structuralist terms,⁴ or to a theory of symbolically mediated agential behavior. The continuous articulation – through practices of re-reading, re-utilizing, and re-constituting – of meaningful entities within an open horizon of possibilities requires a treatment in hermeneutic-ontological terms. But in view of the observation that the cultural lifeforms have a unitary way of being that encompasses the factual presence of symbolically expressed meanings and the ongoing contextualization of the articulation of meaning, the departmentalization of the strategies of conceptualization cannot be accepted. The duality inherent in the unitary way of being demands an integral approach capable of integrating in its strategy a non-dichotomous ontic-ontological difference. In tackling this task, the present study systematically transforms Heidegger’s question about the “meaning of being” into a question about the “being of meaning”. Heidegger introduces the ontic-ontological difference in On the Essence of Ground by addressing the problem of transcendence. He assumes that approaching the way in which the world is transcending inaugurates a transcendental reflection that should disclose the “ontological truth” about the fundamental meaning of being. It is this reflection that vindicates the dichotomous division between the empirical and the transcendental. But the problem of transcendence may also receive a solution that is not based on this rigid division. According to the alternative solution, what becomes disclosed – through reflecting upon the way in which the world is transcending – is not the fundamental (meaning of) being, but the contextually manifested potentiality-for-being of meaning. In each particular context of being-in-the-world, this potentiality-for-being comes to the fore as a shifting horizon of revealed and concealed possibilities. Thus considered, the being of meaning is the ongoing contextualization corresponding to the shifting horizon. This transformation of the problem of transcendence is no longer based on classical transcendentalism and does not justify the dichotomous reading of the onticontological difference. As will be shown, what one needs in dealing with the “being of meaning” is the use of contextual transcendental arguments. Some of the earliest critics of Being and Time (in particular, Misch, Plessner, and Groethuysen) stressed that posing the very question of the “meaning of being” is a metaphysical gesture that – despite the superb criticism of that form of metaphysics which takes its point of departure from the “apophantic as” in this work – tacitly hypostatizes the “copula is”. These critics were the  In the structuralist tradition, any of the semiotic structures analyzed in terms of mythical, political, artistic, ideological, etc. texts is taken as a self-sufficient entity. The exclusive attention to the text’s structural codes in this tradition is at the cost of ignoring the issues of contextualization that enables the textual articulation. It is precisely these issues that will be addressed in the present study.

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first to insist on the shift from the meaning of being to the being of meaning, recognizing that the accurate dealing with the latter issue makes any preoccupation with the former issue redundant. Thus, they opposed not only the recasting of metaphysics in terms of “fundamental ontology”, but also the dichotomous reading of the ontological difference. The present study had received its impetus from various programs suggested by these early critics of Heidegger. In examining the ways in which the ontic-ontological difference operates within scientific conceptualization, the study aims at proper scenarios for interpretive-reflexive inquiry of “objects that are inherently characterized by ontological difference”. As Babette Babich (2017) argues, a version of the double hermeneutic is indispensable for integrating this difference with strategies of interpretive conceptualization. The thematic motifs developed in this book are on a par with the agenda of “operationalizing the being of meaning”, thereby preventing a dichotomous reading of the ontological difference. The idea of “hermeneutic logic” developed in Dilthey-school concerns, among others, the logic of the discursive articulation of meaning within the cultural forms of life, provided that the ontological difference is intrinsic to the hermeneutic circularity of this articulation.⁵ In this regard, hermeneutic logic became a program for transforming Lebensphilosophie into a hermeneutic theory of culture. But the idea turned out to be also methodologically productive: Hermeneutic logic became implemented on the constitution of interpretive objects of inquiry. A case in point is Groethuysen’s already mentioned program in cultural history. The specificity of this program is informed by the kind of historical hermeneutics he adopts from Dilthey. The view that no theoretical-explanatory (or philosophical) reflection can deductively derive the facticity of the lifeforms’ meaningful constitution (from “more fundamental” natural or mental structures) receives in Groethuysen’s program an extended interpretation: There are no principles of rational historical explanation that can subsume – either in a speculative-metaphysical way or in a deductive-derivative manner – the interpretive articulation of a cultural-historical lifeform disclosed by specifically configured practices.⁶

 An aspect of hermeneutic logic consists in studying the pre-predicative articulation of meaning as enabling predication and the structures studied by predicate logic. The conditions of possibility for the structuration of discourse through predicates are contextual, and lie in the hermeneutic circularity of discursive articulation.  The historiographic genre he invented might be called a historical hermeneutics of the ways in which historical actors – in experiencing and interpreting their historical situations and forms of life – constitute historical worlds. The worldviews spelled out by these actors vindicate what becomes constituted within their cultural lifeforms. Thus, the history of the worldviews and the

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Groethuysen could, without reservation, be subscribed to the critique which Hayden White directs against scientistic historiography envisioned by the Annalistes. According to White (1987, 174), the search for anonymous forces behind the historical dynamics is “not so much wrong as simply able to tell only a part of the story of human beings at grips with their individual and collective destinies. It produces the historiographical equivalent of a drama that is all scene and no actors.” Interestingly enough, Groethuysen combines the criticism of hidden anonymous forces operating in history with the insistence on the “anonymous thinking” generated by the performances of the lifeforms’ routine practices. This insistence, however, implies neither essentialism nor historical determinism. In making use of White’s metaphors, one can argue that the “anonymous thinking” Groethuysen refers to is a part of a drama in which there is a fusion of scene and actors. In exploring the ways in which configured practices disclose historical lifeforms, he makes no use of “hidden structures” operating behind the meaningful articulation resulting from practices’ performances. There is no essence determining the historicity of actors’ modes of being-inconfigured-practices. An anthropological theory that quests for a meta-historical “nature of man” beyond historicity and the diversity of historical situations is doomed to failure. The cultural being of humans essentially depends on how humans as historical actors are constituting their identities through their reflexive being-in-practices-projected-upon-possibilities. When these practices disclose and articulate lifeforms, reflexivity becomes a reflexive self-expressivity of humans in worldviews and attitudes towards the meaning of life (Groethuysen 1931, 206). An individual achieves her personal individuality by reflexively participating in the articulation of her cultural lifeforms. At stake in this project for cultural history is not only the actors’ reflexivity, but also practices’ endogenous reflexivity that is not to be disentangled form the hermeneutic circularity of lifeform’s articulation. It is precisely the collaboration of various forms of reflexivity that will be brought to the fore in the present study.

views about the meaning of life is tantamount to a cultural history of the worlds constituted within particular lifeforms. Groethuysen’s historiographic genre has something in common with the history of mentalities, historical sociology, the history of ideas, the archaeology of knowledge, and historical anthropology. It also anticipates in a sense the history of emotions. Yet it cannot be reduced to any of these genres, or to a combination of them. A great merit of Groethuysen’s program consists in the arguments he provides for the irreducibility and authenticity of his new historiographic genre. He elaborated on such arguments by historicizing philosophical anthropology, and by working out an anti-relativist concept of historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) with regard to the diversity of cultural forms of life.

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This book grew out of an effort to combine my studies into hermeneutics of scientific inquiry with studies into hermeneutic theory of culture. Each of the chapters offers a special reading of the ontological difference devised to serve the conceptualization of particular entities. Here is a short list of these entities: forms mediating between nonhuman life and ecstatic existence, configurations of social practices, inauthentic and authentic lifeforms, the kind of agency that stems from agential behavior and the subjectivity of existential choices but succeeds in transcending both of them, personal authenticity, and the dialogical Self. Let me say a few words about the chapters that follow. The shift in focus from the “meaning of being” to the “being of meaning” implies a basic revision of Heidegger’s way of addressing the nonhuman lifeforms as standing in sharp contrast to human existence. Seen in the perspective of the ontological difference, there is a spectrum of intermediate forms characterized by interplay of biological specifics and existential phenomena. This spectrum fills the ontological gap between “animal life” and ecstatic existence that creates cultural worlds. Since it is not a spectrum between nonhuman and human biological lifeforms, it cannot directly be addressed in terms of established biological theories. The first step in working out the spectrum of intermediate forms consists in an “ontological extension” of certain biological domains of inquiry – an extension that prompts the implementation of a phenomenological analysis in the constitution of biological objects of inquiry. In this regard, (the critique of) the phenomenological theory of the living which Heidegger develops in connection with the fundamental conceptual triad “worldlessness – deprived of world – world-formation” plays a pivotal role in Chapter One. Instead of reconstructing (ontic) presuppositions of existing biological theories, this theory seeks to bring to light ontological meanings of phenomena characterizing the living that are at odds with the “background metaphysics” of these theories. The analysis of the spectrum of the intermediate forms is prepared by a reconstruction of the implicit “critique of biology” in Heidegger’s lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. The phenomenological theory of animality (as a form of life distinguished by having and not having world) orients this critique towards a reformulation of the characteristic hermeneutic situations in several biological domains of inquiry. Special attention is devoted to those aspects of the “critique of biology” which make it essentially different from Heidegger’s earlier existential conception of science. The chapter discusses the possibilities of integrating the non-dichotomous ontological difference (between objectified factuality and phenomenological facticity) with strategies of biological conceptualization, which is an indispensable step in working out scientific research programs relevant for studying the spectrum of intermediate forms. The significance of this step is illustrated by means of a criticism of the main def-

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icit in Heidegger’s phenomenology of the living: In addressing the animal organism’s poverty in world and the leeway the organism possesses in its “structure of drives”, Heidegger fails to suggest a scenario for properly coming to grips with the temporalization of the animal’s life. This failure leads to troubles cogently addressed by Derrida in his critical appreciation of the conception of animality from The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. The “being of meaning” is enabled by the cultural forms of life as projectedupon-possibilities and articulated within and through changing configurations of practices. Thus, the theme “practices and possibilities” turns out to be a central subject in dealing with the being of meaning. At issue in Chapter Two is the theoretical conceptualization of social practices. The chapter treats the relations between the (inter)subjectivity of agential behavior and the trans-subjectivity of concerted practices in terms of interpretive circularity. It is argued that the theorization of the hermeneutic circularity (of the articulation of meaning) operating within properly arranged social practices helps one to find a way out of the depressing dilemma between agency and structure. Actions and activities as constituents of interrelated practices neither causally determine nor impose norms on the interrelatedness as it sustains practices’ recurrent performances. An autonomous ensemble of social practices projects its being upon a horizon of possibilities, and maintains its irreducibility to the constituent actions and activities via the articulation of novel meaning arising out of the possibilities’ actualizations. Basically, agential subjectivity entangled with what in each and every context transcends this subjectivity is (what Heidegger calls) “thrown projection”. The unity of configured-practices-and-behavior-entangledwith is enabled by the hermeneutic circularity of the articulation of meaning within this unity. Both practices’ trans-subjectivity and agential (inter)subjectivity have no independent existence apart from the hermeneutic circularity. Conceptualizing configured practices within the circularity of the articulation of meaning excludes any threat of hypostatizing the interrelatedness of practices. The same goes for agential subjectivity: The subjectivity of actors (as embodied in intentions, reasons for action, motivational structures, desires, aspirations, feelings, etc.) exists through actors’ choices of possibilities that invoke shifts in the trans-subjective horizon of the articulation of meaning. A special attention is paid to the status of a particular practice-entangledwith-configured-practices. Such a practice is regarded in terms of (a) a point of inflection enabling the transition from the teleology of agential behavior to the interpretive circularity characterizing the modes of being-in-configured-practices, and (b) a source of producing differences within the whole of assembled practices. In view of the nonlocality of any single practice integrated with configured practices, one can hardly resist the temptation of ascribing a quasi-quan-

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tum-mechanical status to such a practice. Put another way, thanks to its dual way of being, any one practice-entangled-with-configured-practices acquires (within the facticity of practices) such a status. It is simultaneously a spatiallytemporally localizable object (a “particle” with clearly determined parameters within the interrelatedness of practices) and something scattered in the interfering configurations of practices. Considered in terms of physically identifiable entity, the practice consists in the factual manifold of its components. Considered in terms of its nonlocality as a practice-entangled-with-configured-practices, the practice is dispersed over various contexts of the articulation of meaning within the whole ensemble of practices. By implication, it is impossible to describe a practice-entangled-with-configured-practices in terms of spatially bounded presence that is determined by reasons and motives, normative enclosure, and goalorientedness – that is, in terms characterizing (the performance of) an isolated practice. Yet treating a particular practice that is interwoven with configured practices does not preclude the right and the reasonability of treating the practice as an entity per se. Thus, the conceptualization of the dual status of a single practice within an ensemble of configured practices faces the difficulty of coping with mutually exclusive properties. Depending on the research interest – whether one is interested in the practice per se or in the role it plays in an ensemble of configured practices – one can focus on one or another class of properties. Yet there is always the opportunity of finding a proper complementarity between the ways of investigating the mutually exclusive properties. This is also a complementarity between the first-person perspective of actors who in performing the practice apprehend it as a self-sufficient entity and the perspective-from-transsubjectivity approaching the practice in its situated transcendence. Chapter Three is chiefly devoted to the concept of authentic lifeforms. It also introduces the concept of existential agency as agency that transcends individual and collective behavior, without becoming disentangled from agents’ dispositions, beliefs, desires, and intentions. The traditional concept of agency – as introduced in the social sciences, on the one hand, and moral philosophy, on the other – refers to individual and collective sources of organizing actions and activities. In this regard, agency is unavoidably human agency. As is well known, post-humanist theories ascribe agency to all nonhumans capable of constituting meaning within networks of relations. Without disputing these theories, the way in which I am going to address “the transcending of human agency” differs from post-humanism. My aim is to show that within configured practices human agency undergoes a transformation that makes it a trans-subjective power – a power initiated by the subjectivity and inter-subjectivity of actions and activities, but nevertheless having the capacity to become partially emancipated from human agency. By implication, agency-operating-in-configured-practices is no longer to-

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tally reducible to human agency. This conclusion does not justify, however, the position that there is another source of agency, different from actors’ actions and activities. Agency-operating-in-practices is unavoidably agency that stems from agential behavior. In alienating from agents, human agency becomes embodied in configurations of practices. The fact that it operates in configured practices does not make it agency produced by practices. By gaining a relative independence from human agency, existential agency is neither a subjective nor an intersubjective, but a trans-subjective reality. Agential-behavior-entangled-with-ensembles-of-practices is a medium of the articulation of meaning irreducible to the meaning produced by actions and activities. As mentioned, there are various hermeneutic circles operating in this articulation. Existential agency is a special kind of trans-subjectively alienated human agency the distinctiveness of which consists in its capability to bring the work of these circles into unity. From that point of view, existential agency always operates within a characteristic hermeneutic situation. I said that this kind of trans-subjectively alienated agency works in the medium of agential-behavior-entangled-with-ensembles-of-practices. Yet the converse is also true: The entanglement of agential behavior with configured practices is enabled by existential agency. My primary task is to show how existential agency works in articulating authentic cultural lifeforms. The chapter offers a kind of case study designed to exemplify the basic notions of the hermeneutic conceptualization of practices. It analyzes the initial configuration of pictorial practices that discloses the stylistic distinctiveness of early Cubism. A leitmotif is that the difference between the treatment of a pictorial practice (such as reducing the painted scene through tonal manipulation) as an elementary unit of artistic expressivity and the treatment of the same practice as integrated with an ensemble of configured pictorial practices is a difference that makes sense within the relations of mutual interpretation between “the particulars” and “the whole”. It is a difference within a hermeneutic circularity. Early (analytic) Cubism is approached as a lifeform in terms of the interplay of the shifting horizons of possibilities for artistic expressivity and changing configurations of artistic practices. In scrutinizing the hermeneutic situation in which the stylistic distinctiveness of Analytic Cubism is disclosed, the chapter reaches the conclusion that what is basically at stake in Cubist “geometrical experimentation” is the pictorial interpretation of existential spatiality. Since the latter is intimately related to the spatial meaning of pre-reflexive tactility, this interpretation cannot be reconstructed in terms of empirical (objectifying) psychology. Pre-reflexive tactility is not amenable to objectifying conceptualization. A parallel is drawn between the Cubist pictorial interpretation of tactile space and the phenomenological treatment of the constitution of existential spatiality.

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Chapter Four explores how the concept of existential agency allows one to develop a position of non-individualist (trans-subjective) existentialism in the human and social sciences. It is argued that existential agency operates within ensembles of configured practices. In this modus operandi, existential agency mediates between the trans-subjective horizons of lifeforms’ articulation and the ongoing existential choices. This agency cannot be conceptualized as a factual presence. In operating within and through configured practices, the Self’s cooperation with existential agency is a requisite for achieving personal authenticity. Since the dialogical Self is not to be separated from existential agency, the conceptualization of the dialogical Self cannot be accomplished without having recourse to the ontological difference between the factuality of agential behavior and the facticity of practices. The pluralization of (narratively achieved cultural) identities gained by a person due to the participation in various forms of social life is often investigated in a purely factual manner. Some studies in cultural psychology leave the impression that the dialogical Self is a manifold of discrete positions that by entering into conversation maintain their spatial localizations. By the same token, the “inner-others” who the person presumably “internalizes” during her contextual interactions with “outer-others” are regarded as factually present discrete entities that can be represented by objectified factuality. In criticizing these views, the chapter suggests a conceptualization of the inner-others as well as the I-positions (and their “mini-society”) in terms of trans-subjective existentialism. According to trans-subjective existentialism, the Self encounters opportunities to escape from the inauthentic anonymity of the public life’s practices by participating in the articulation of authentic lifeforms. This claim is spelled out in connection with the problematic of narrating the Self. From this standpoint, the chapter addresses the concept of the dialogical Self. The view is defended that the Self – in being in a diversity of cultural lifeforms – is condemned to pluralize her I-positions and narrative identities. (In participating in various cultural lifeforms, the person is dialogically positioning her Self towards existential agency in a manner that leads to a proliferation of these identities and I-positions.) Under these conditions, the dialogicity of the multi-voiced Self becomes unavoidable. Yet trans-subjective existentialism opposes the division between internal dialogues among the Self’s I-positions and external dialogues which the Self carries out with her social partners. Deconstructing the firm division between the two types of dialogues provides the opportunity to approach the dialogical fusion of horizons in terms of a modality of existential agency. The Self’s positioning opens up the dialogical possibilities for entering into dialogues with the significant others by “activating” proper dialogues among her I-positions. Both types of dialogues are – through the fusion of horizons – promoting

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each other’s initiation. Thus, the dialogues among the I-positions of the Self do not preexist the fusion of horizon, since they are part and parcel of it. Trans-subjective existentialism also rejects any kind of interiorizing-exteriorizing binary schematism in studying the temporality and the spatiality of the dialogical Self. The chapter argues that the Self’s dialogicity is enabled by the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. By implication, the dialogue of the dialogical Self has an unavoidable trans-subjective dimension. The present book is part of a trilogy that started with Hermeneutic Realism: Reality within Scientific Inquiry (2016) and was continued by Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices (2018). The former book is entirely devoted to the characteristic hermeneutic situations, the hermeneutic unity of meaningful articulation and procedural objectification, and the constitution of “texts” in the natural sciences. In developing a theory on the border zone between existential analytic and social theory, the second book deals with central methodological and ontological issues of the human and social sciences. Although united in the insistence on the non-dichotomous character of the ontic-ontological difference, both books implement this difference in essentially different ways. The present study offers a kind of meta-discussion that approaches scientific conceptualization by complementing the interpretations of the ontological difference developed in the two previous books.

1 Animalizing the human and humanizing the animal: the ontological difference in scrutinizing the living 1.1 Synthetic biology and the status of the living In asking the question of how synthetic biology makes sense of life, Evelyn Fox Keller examines in an excellent study the two senses – corresponding to two research branches – in which the borderline between natural and artificial is transgressed or at least problematized through the very concept of artificial life. (She calls these branches “computational biology” and “biological computation”.) The first branch aims at constructing artificial organisms through computer simulation for explanatory purposes. In another formulation, this branch of synthetic biology develops automatic methodologies to design biological parts and devices using computational design. Researchers working in this branch “expect a new approach to understand the rules that govern the structure, function and natural evolution of complex biological networks by using automatic design coupled with experimental validation.” (Suarez, Rodrigo, Carrera, and Jaramillo 2009, 56). The most extended format for doing synthetic biology in this way is the so-called System Biology Markup Language offering representations of biochemical reaction network in different software. (There is also an interesting paradigm shift that has taken place in this research branch: Creating “digital organisms” serves not only the task of the computer simulation of organic life. The biological models of processes like adaptation, natural selection, genotype-phenotype mappings, and the epigenetic regulation of inheritance are also to be used as a conceptual base for better designing digital evolution.) In her analysis, Fox Keller (2003, 281) stresses that in spite of the enthusiasm over implementing computer models of artificial life as explanans in explanatory scenario of natural processes, there is a tendency toward losing the explanandum: Is it “the architecture and development of organisms or the architecture and development of computers?” The second research branch makes use of artificial organisms in trying to synthesize living matter. Creating artificial life in this branch constitutes an engineering discipline that should put life into technology. At stake here are synthetic lifeforms made from material components and assembled in real space by drawing from work on lifelike simulations in cyberspace. Arguably, breakthroughs in biotechnology due to automated techniques that allow designing biological systems also belong to this branch. The biochemical transformations https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110605303-003

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(including the construction of whole metabolic pathways incorporating enzymes not found in nature) induced by these techniques create in a sense digitally designed artificial life. Transcending the gap between cyberspace and real space – or the gap between computer simulation as a symbolic form and material substances – is the biggest issue of engineering artificial life by means of digital organisms. (More on this transcending will be said in a moment.) In a nutshell, one is looking for an extension of the scope of theorizing, which is the first branch’s perspective, and a simulation of the living that can serve goals of engineering construction, which is the second branch’s perspective. In the former case, “digital organisms” should contribute to working out new explanatory scenarios in theoretical biology, while in the latter, one is searching for technological construction of self-sustainable living machines. Analyzing how these two branches of synthetic biology conceptualize the division between non-life and life amounts to scrutinizing how biological research programs make sense of life through their strategies of conceptualization. More specifically, the shifts of the meaning of simulating the living – shifts induced by interactions between the two branches – have changed the meaning of the reality of biological life, and have inspired visions for an “alternate reality” (Fox Keller 2003, 274). In the perspective of the theoretical-explanatory branch of synthetic biology, artificial life (achieved through computer programs) refers not only to what biology actually studies, but also to the possible lifeforms that can be conceptualized. In this regard, computer simulation is a further step in modeling biological systems and processes of reproduction, development, and evolution through differential equations. Fox Keller (2003, 267) considers this step as following directly from the historical development of the practices of simulation in the physical sciences, where the earliest incarnation of modeling practices consists in the “use of digital computer to extract approximate solutions from pre-specified but analytically intractable differential equations describing the dynamics of thermonuclear processes.” It is a simulation that epistemologically proceeds from principles to conclusions, trying to create programs for computable temporal evolution of complex systems.¹ However, computer simulation in the biolog-

 According to the most optimistic version of creating artificial lifeforms through computer simulation, the algorithms expressing a “genotype” of a complex organism (composed by little computer programs) can – through their interactions – model the phenotype understood as unfolding structure in the course of organism’s development. Thus, the simulation of developmental mechanisms observed in biological organisms seems an achievable objective. However, Fox Keller (2003, 281) make no secret of her skepticism by stating that “despite the proximity to biolog-

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ical sciences is from the outset not only a continuation of the attempts to extract and reduce the complexity in the dynamics of physical systems. In the sciences of the living, it is also a creation of something essentially new – artificial life existing in cyberspace. The mathematical models are no longer imitations, but examples of sui generis lifeforms. The division between real biological life and digitally simulated artificial life progressively becomes problematized with the transformation of cyberspace from a purely virtual space into a kind of real space. In other words, the artificial life could become alternate real life not only by being able to leave cyberspace whereby becoming material embodiment, but also due to its intrinsic development within cyberspace.² In contending that the demarcation between life and non-life ought to be viewed as a product of cultural history than of evolutionary history, Fox Keller adopts a Foucauldian perspective on the distinctiveness of the living. This distinctiveness is contextually produced (and exposed to changes) within configurations of cultural practices. Life is not a “natural kind” but a meaningful entity undergoing constant reconstitution in such practices. She also adopts Foucault’s (and François Jacob’s) view that the birthplace of the concept of life is Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s work. Lamarck is the first biologist who tried to define life by approaching a positive characterization of the properties of living organisms. Thus considered, the treatment of the specificity of the living amounts to finding “a defining property of living beings that is not in itself alive but nonetheless absent from non-living things.” (Fox Keller 2003, 292). Life is positively defined via a taxonomy of objects by singling out a privileged distinction and relegating all other taxonomic distinctions to insignificance. The living is contrasted not with dead – as this has been the case before Lamarck – but with the inorganic. Yet Fox Keller is aware that this approach to the distinctiveness of the living simultaneously works toward its dissolution. A new configuration of research practices bringing into play a new inter- or trans-disciplinary program may transcend current boundaries (and the whole taxonomy of distinctions).

ical processes suggested by all the talk of genomes and programs, the results have so far been disappointing.”  In discussing the so called cellular automata as “artificial universes” evolving in accordance with local but uniform rules of interaction, Fox Keller (2003, 272) observes that their persuasiveness “depends on translating formal similitude into visual similitude”, which, in its turn, depends on the progress in computer visualization techniques. This observation is interesting and important, since it blurs the strong boundary between explanatory-theoretical simulation of biological processes via computer programs, and the engineering construction of artificial life.

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In Fox Keller’s (2003, 293) imaginative example, transcending boundaries and changing the current taxonomy might “conjoin computers and organisms; thunderstorms, people, and umbrellas; or animals, armies, and vending machines.” The question of what is life is always posed within and through configured (research, technological, political, administrative, juridical, clinical, educational, and so on) practices that put into operation relevant taxonomies of distinctions. But Fox Keller is also aware that the Foucauldian perspective does not vindicate a trivial kind of cultural-historical relativism. This perspective has a hidden appeal to an ontology that is beyond the totality of ontic taxonomies of distinctions contextually defining the distinctiveness of the living. The distinctiveness itself has to be spelled out in terms of “non-taxonomical” ontology. Leaning on Fox Keller’s critical considerations, a series of questions comes to mind when the meaning of the living is at stake. Let me formulate some of them. How the synthetic biological lifeforms are positioned (in Plessner’s sense of “positionality”) within the (natural and/or artificial) world? Does any one of them possess its own (environmental) world? Are the “artificialized natural lifeforms” and the “naturalized artificial constructions” capable of constructing their own worlds? Are they articulating “the world” of the human being-in-the-world or they are simply adjusting themselves to the worldness of human existence in which any synthetic construction takes place? Where in “the world” of the human being-in-the-world the “living as resulting from man-made artificialization” is starting to take shape? Is there a firm dividing line between meaning-constituting existence and biological life, given that artificial biological lifeforms are produced within existence? Taken together, these questions are hardly forming a consistent discourse of philosophical interrogation. Not all of them are provoked by the progress of synthetic biology. But all of them stress the need of an ontology of the living. To be sure, ontological questioning (transcending the conceptual frameworks of empirical theories) is not alien to the research work of great biologists, even to those who are or were extremely skeptical about a dialogue with phenomenological ontology. A case in point is Peter Medawar’s approach to the evolutionary meaning of senescence. In contrast to the notion of ageing, the very concept of senescence is not a neutral and objective concept, since it includes the moment of experiencing the decline as a lowering fitness by those who are in an advanced phase of ageing. It goes without saying that Medawar asks the question about the meaning of senescence with the intent to formulate it in terms of evolutionary theory. The answer is obtained in a purely ontic-objectivist manner within the framework of Medawar’s mutation accumulation theory of ageing (Charlesworth 2000). Yet the impetus for questioning about the mean-

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ing of this biological phenomenon – a meaning that cannot be disentangled from the way in which it is experienced – does not come from inquiries into evolutionary mechanisms and mutations causing detrimental effects. In addressing the issue about the meaning of senescence as an “unsolved problem of biology” – so my speculation goes – Medawar is aware that it will find a solution within apt biological theories, but nonetheless this solution will not make the original “horizon of phenomenological-ontological questioning” disappear. Solving a problem in terms of the population genetic mechanisms of natural selection does not help us in dealing with the meaning of senescence as part and parcel of the ontological structure of life. I said “a dialogue with phenomenological ontology”. A highly controversial lecture course held by Heidegger in 1929/30 seems to be pioneering initiative in developing such an ontology. Reaching this goal requires a “critique of biology”.

1.2 Animal life and human existence In what follows, I will offer a reading of a critical program that follows from Heidegger’s conception of animal life developed in the winter semester 1929/30 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. It is not my aim, however, to embark on a study of the intermediary status of this conception – and the role it plays – in the lecture course. (Within the course, the conception of animal life mediates between circles of problems about the meaning of philosophizing.) I will primarily deal with certain possible consequences for the constitution of biological objects of inquiry following from the course, and not with a reconstruction of its structural whole. To be sure, a “critique of biology” is not an explicitly formulated idea in the text published in the volumes 29/30 of the Gesamtausgabe. It is an idea that can only be derived from Heidegger’s way of elucidating the ontological concept of world by analyzing the sense in which “the animal has and does not have world”. Seen from a broader perspective, a critique of basic biological concepts that supposedly are inherited from – or are at least consonant with – the metaphysical tradition which Heidegger tries to subject to Destruktion is consistent with his “path of thinking”. Yet I should clearly state that it is beyond any doubt that Heidegger has never been engaged in an attempt to contribute to a “better biology”, provided that such an improvement can be spelled out in epistemological, methodological or logical terms. A “rational reconstruction” of biological theories has never been on the agenda of Heidegger’s preoccupation with the distinctiveness of the living. According to the central thesis of the lecture, man is world-forming, whereas the animal is poor in world. This is a metaphysical thesis that has to be worked

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out in traditional philosophical terms, but at the same time also in a (phenomenological) manner that calls into question the tradition determining the meanings of these terms. Thus, Heidegger sets the post-metaphysical task of overcoming traditional interpretations of fundamental metaphysical concepts. (The metaphysical tradition should be overcome by recasting its fundamental concepts.) More specifically, world-formation is addressed as the ground of the possibility for having the logos, granted that one can proceed “from the unitary structure of the logos back into the essence of man.” (GA 29/30: 486; Heidegger 1995, 335). Apophantic logos is regarded in terms of the concealed essence of man. Yet Being and Time demonstrates that the apophantic as is grounded upon the hermeneutic as which provides the “as structure” of world-formation. It is this structure – or better fore-structure – that enables the revealing and concealing of what can potentially be predicated and expressed by means of apophantic logos. Addressing animal behavior as constantly proceeding in a “captivated and taken manner” brings into focus the way of being which lacks the “as structure”. On the lecture course’s scenario, world-formation based on human beings’ free holding themselves toward the “pre-predicative manifestness” of world replaces the captivated behavior, which – in taking place within the sphere of instinctual drives – becomes disinhibited while remaining captivated. Thus considered, what gets replaced is the non-human biological lifeform as “absorbed in its encircling ring”. Since world is the total manifestness of “beings as such” (in the sense of both the hermeneutic and the predicative as), the focus in studying how man is world-forming lies with the as which is conceived to be the distinctive feature of man’s openness for being-in-the-world. As belonging to world-formation, the hermeneutic as structure is fore-structuring man’s ability of predication and articulation in sentential manner. Following the tenet of Being and Time that interpretive understanding is always attuned, Heidegger adds a further dimension to this picture: The as structure cannot be disentangled from the “fundamental attunements” of man. Thus, world-formation is indispensably “attuned”. This claim is exemplified by Heidegger’s detailed interpretation of boredom – as Giorgio Agamben notes, the most extended treatment of a mood one can find in his whole corpus. But the interpretation of this attunement also has – though indirect – relevance to the treatment of the animal form of life. Let me briefly clarify the issue of this relevance. Heidegger makes the case that the “fundamental emptiness” of human Dasein is what bores humans. This emptiness is provoked by the absence of any essential oppressiveness in the totality of human existence. According to his argument, the (hidden) absence of essential oppressiveness in Dasein implies that the emptiness of human existence makes humans capable of believing that they

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should concern themselves “only with learned competencies that can be instilled … Strength and power, however, can never be replaced by the accumulation of learned capacities …” (GA 29/30: 245; Heidegger 1995, 164). This statement expresses the final moment of Heidegger’s analysis of “profound boredom”. The analysis makes clear that profound boredom trans-subjectively transcends individual emotionality and manifests itself as ontologically pertinent phenomenon. By implication, this attunement means “being delivered over to beings’ telling refusal to themselves as a whole.” (GA 29/30: 243; Heidegger 1995, 162). It is the transcendence of individual emotionality that ontologically makes the attunement of boredom “essential absence of oppressiveness” and “emptiness”. In contrast to the individualistic experiences of particular emotions, the attunements always keep a trans-subjective character. Dasein as world-forming thrown projection is also thrown into trans-subjective attunements. Can one ascribe attuned behavior also to the animal form of life? This question is different from the question of whether animal emotionality should be interpreted in terms of organized psychological processes. It is a question that does not belong to ethology or animal (and comparative) psychology. I will return to it at the end of the chapter where at stake will be the basic deficiency of Heidegger’s conception of animal life – the refusal to take into consideration the attuned character of the animal way of being.³ My reading of the “biological part” of the lecture course will be guided by a “productive misunderstanding” of the accents set in the text. To reiterate, it is beyond any doubt that the critical analysis of how traditional metaphysics is related to the basic concepts of holistic disciplines like ethology and ecology was not on Heidegger’s agenda. Moreover, his skepticism towards critical projects of “philosophical biology” – even when they are phenomenologically inspired – is well documented, and goes back (at least) to the period of his Cologne talks (1927). But regardless of the intentions behind the course, Heidegger offers an elaborated conception of the living that potentially leads (1) to a substantial revision of basic theoretical concept of biology, and more importantly, (2) to alternative ways of theorizing in basic biological disciplines. It is my contention that these consequences for a “critique of biology” ought to be studied in their own rights, independently of the fact that Heidegger – though not excluding the possibility – had never been interested in developing an alternative (“ontologically grounded”) biological science. An additional argument for laying emphasis on  There is in earlier Heidegger’s work a persistent tendency toward a treatment of animals in terms of organisms guided by drives and not distinguished by Befindlichkeit. William McNeill (2015, 55) traces back the beginnings of this tendency to the lecture of the Summer Semester 1926.

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the biological aspects of the lecture course concerns an important – but usually neglected – development in Heidegger’s views about the specificity of scientific (objectifying) inquiry. This development, which will be at issue in the upcoming sections of the chapter, consists in a significant revision and extension of the existential conception of science developed in Being and Time. What I am going to suggest is not only based on a productive misunderstanding of the ideas worked out in Heidegger’s lecture course. To a great extent, my considerations follow a direction that has constantly been rejected by Heidegger – the integration of the ontic-ontological difference with strategies of scientific conceptualization. Roughly, a phenomenological and ontological critique of biology provides the opportunity for a (critical) biological science that is not only capable of doing research, but also capable of “thinking” why and how it constitutes (or prevents from constituting) certain objects of inquiry.⁴ Starting with the “hermeneutics of facticity”, Heidegger had never abandoned the insistence on a strong dichotomy between science’s ontic questioning and the ontological task of phenomenology that consists in revealing the meaning of being. However, I will try to show that there is in the Fundamental Concepts a hidden tendency to reformulate the science of the living in a manner that would allow the constitution of ontic (theoretically envisioned empirical) objects that can directly be interpreted in terms of phenomenological ontology. The reflexive integration of the ontic-ontological difference with kinds of conceptualization in biology would enable research programs that can master their hermeneutic situations of constituting relevant objects of inquiry.  According to the (in)famous dictum announced in What Is Called Thinking, science does not think in the sense in which thinkers think. I am not going to discuss here the dictum. My only intention is to draw the attention to one aspect of science’s inability to think: For Heidegger, every science rests on presuppositions which cannot be established scientifically. A scientific program that is not only engaged with doing research, but is also capable of reflexively conceptualizing its presuppositions would display an “essential closeness” (in the sense discussed in What Is Called Thinking) of its way of constituting objects of inquiry and thinking. Though this claim does not necessarily express Heidegger’s position, a science “capable of thinking” would be that one which can (1) call into question its ontic presuppositions, and (2) conceptualize the ontological meaning of the objects of inquiry it reflexively constitutes. A critically reflexive science would also be able to take a critical stance on – what Heidegger admits to be the most essential feature of modern science – its groundedness in the essence of technology. In particular, a critical-reflexive biology would be able to control the reasonability of its own participation in biotechnological initiatives. A science “capable of thinking” would owe its critical potential to the possibility of combining procedural objectification with phenomenological interpretation of the meaning of the objects of inquiry it constitutes. It is this combination that I have in mind when speaking of an integration of the ontic-ontological difference with scientific conceptualization.

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The reading of Heidegger’s conceptualization of animal, organism, and life in the lecture course in terms of a possible critique of biology essentially differs from three highly influential readings of this conceptualization, suggested accordingly by Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. Roughly, in contrast to these readings which are seminal for the post-metaphysical reception of the lecture course, my reading is only guided by the interest in the consequences Heidegger’s conception has for (what I will call) the characteristic hermeneutic situations in certain domains of biological inquiry. This restrictedness of my interest notwithstanding, several aspects of Derrida’s, Agamben’s, and Esposito’s approaches to the lecture course are of prime importance for what follows. The point is that Derrida, Esposito, and Agamben – however different their analyses are – allude to the need of making the temporalization of the animal’s life a theme in its own right. Derrida (1989, 48) explicitly deals with the claim that “biological and zoological sciences presuppose access to the essence of the animal creature, they do not open up that access.” He hints at Heidegger’s intention to formulate the three theses about worldlessness, poverty in world, and world-formation as scientifically pertinent metaphysical theses. The access to the metaphysical dimension they open is closed for scientific programs that are entirely committed to the ontic objectification. However, the animal’s way of being as poverty in (privation of) world – though not characterized in terms of a quantitative relation to the entities of the world – is not a metaphysical observation that resists a treatment in terms of an ontologically reformulated biological research program. Derrida does not exclude such a conclusion. But his analysis of Heidegger’s view of animality goes rather in the opposite direction, thereby inviting a special kind of biological inquiry that would thematize the animal-human caesura both in a non-reificationist and a non-dichotomous manner. Derrida focuses on the special character of potentiality involved in the animal’s being-able-to-have a world. In so doing, he criticizes Heidegger’s “awkward description” of the animal’s behavioral absorption. In Derrida’s argument, one “cannot say that the animal is closed to the entity. It is closed to the very opening of the entity. It does not have access to the difference between the open and the closed.” (Derrida 1989, 54). What Derrida – who deepens his criticism by also analyzing “the brutal formula” of the Introduction to Metaphysics that the animal has no world, nor any environment – calls into question is no more and no less than the absolute limit Heidegger draws between the living creature and the human Dasein. At the same time, his analysis raises the question as to whether the caesura taking place between animal behavior and existence can be thematized by avoiding any kind of humanist teleology.

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Another great question following from Derrida’s criticism of Heidegger’s “awkward description” sounds as follows: “Can one not say, then, that the whole deconstruction of ontology, as it started in Sein und Zeit and insofar as it unseats, as it were, the Cartesian-Hegelian spiritus in the existential analytic, is here threatened in its order, its implementation, its conceptual apparatus, by what is called, so obscurely still, the animal?” (Derrida 1989, 57). Of course, the solution to this question Derrida is looking for does not consist in figuring out a smooth transition from animality to Dasein, but in deconstructing the traditional dividing line – an initiative that he more decisively undertakes in The Animal That Therefore I Am, and which I will address later. Derrida’s approach is by no means immune to a criticism. David Farrell Krell argues that Derrida does not capture important nuances of Heidegger’s conception of biological life. In discussing Section 63 of The Fundamental Concepts in connection with Heidegger’s claim (from Being and Time) that life is neither pure presence-at-hand nor Dasein, Krell (2013, 105) notes that “both the sphere of human life and the ring of animal behavior are in an essential way shattered by death.” He deliberately focuses on “human life” instead of existence, since it is the distinctiveness of the former that resists conceptualization through both categories and existentialia (Existenzialien). For him, this resistance “might open a space in which other lifeforms, precisely in their exposure to shattering, could join Dasein as commourans.” (Krell 2013, 107). The important nuances Derrida fails to take into consideration concern Heidegger’s efforts to break down “the monolithic barrier” between humans and other living beings with regard to the essential moments of anxiety unto death. Krell’s sophisticated criticism actualizes the question of how to counter metaphysical separationism between the animal and the human way of being without admitting one or another form of anthropomorphism.⁵ What becomes of the animality of man in post-history is a guiding question of Agamben’s work. (In Agamben’s reading, the concept of “post-history” uniquely combines Kojève’s philosophical-political idea of the end of history and a Hegelian interpretation of Heidegger’s event-appropriation, Ereignis [Agamben 1998, 59 – 62].) In drawing insightful parallels between the view of

 It is my contention that the radical overcoming of anthropomorphism in studying the distinctiveness of animal life can be achieved by putting the theme of “poverty in world” in the horizon of its treatment as a theme of hermeneutic ontology. The forms of animal life will then be addressed, in their own rights, as ways of being-towards-possibilities that are not “deficient modes” or “preliminary stages” of the human mode of being-in-the-world. (Strangely enough – as I will argue – the phenomenological ontology of The Fundamental Concepts has little to do with hermeneutic ontology.)

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the living being elaborated in the 1929/30 lecture course and Heidegger’s later distinction between the earth and the world, he argues that the human being is the place of ceaseless divisions and caesurae. Agamben places his reading of the course’s biological part in the context of criticizing the “anthropological machine”: The older version of this machine works through the humanization of animality (an outside like slaves and barbarians is incorporated in the human nature), whereas the modern version produces the outside through the politics of animalizing the human. The modern anthropological machine functions “by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human.” (Agamben 2004, 37). For Agamben, studying this machine is of prime importance, since its functioning grounds any kind of modern biopolitics (including its most brutal forms in the 20th century totalitarian regimes, making the perfect conditio inhumana into reality). The task of comprehending how the anthropological machine works under the conditions when “the post-historical animals of the species Homo sapiens” are experiencing new kinds of dramatic instability is now more important than ever. Coping with this task is a prerequisite for becoming able to stop the machine in the time of post-humanism. A biological inquiry that is in a position to scrutinize in its own terms the ways in which the anthropological machine works seems to be indispensable for opposing the politically motivated reduction of life to biopolitics.⁶ In Agamben’s perspective, “biopiliticss” – as defined through the distinction between bios and zōē (bare life) – is exclusively burdened with negative connotations, all of them centered around the technological manipulation of what modernity has constituted as “biopolitical body” by means of an “inclusive exclusion” of zōē from political life. But biopolitics can be understood in positive terms as well. Roberto Esposito, another author of a profound interpretation of The Fundamental Concepts, firmly believes in the possibility of an “affirmative biopolitics”.

 Agamben’s reading of the concept of animality from the lecture course is focused on the way in which Heidegger oscillates between the pole of interpreting animal captivation as a radical openness (more intense than the openness founding the cognition in human Dasein) and the pole of construing captivation as not being able to reveal the entities of its own disinhibition (Enthemmung), and accordingly, as being doomed to be closed in a total opacity. Agamben’s own conception of “the open” heavily depends on how to cope with this oscillation in The Fundamental Concepts. His search for the place “in which human openness in a world and animal openness towards its disinhibitor seem for a moment to meet” (Agamben 2004, 62) actualizes the question of what kind of political engagement an ontologically reformulated biological science should have, if Western politics is in its origin also biopolitics.

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In contrast to Agamben, Esposito (2006, 12) tries not so much to think life as a function of politics, but to think politics within forms of life, thereby “bringing life into relation with biopolitics not from the outside – in the modality of accepting of refusing – but from within.” In this account, the affirmative meaning of biopolitics consists in opening life to the point at which something emerges – something hidden until now because it is held in the grip of its opposite. Esposito’s suggestions for an affirmative biopolitics are closely related to his interesting reading of Heidegger’s critique of naturalism (biologism). Because Heidegger’s ontological thought is radically impolitical and radically anti-naturalist – so his argument goes – only this thought enabled in the first half of the 20th century the philosophical confrontation with biopoltics. He convincingly underscores that the “biological part” of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics advances a counterposition to Nazi biopolitics, in which existence is regarded only in terms of something that is deficient in relation to life taken in its biological fullness. Yet the “contrastive symmetry between Heidegger and Nazi biopolitics” explains why in both cases one privileges the experience of death. Esposito makes a further step in exploring this contrastive symmetry by comparing the Nazi view of animality as the nonhuman part of the human being with Heidegger’s way of situating the human being on the outside of the animal’s way of being. Situating humans in this way opposes Nazis theoretical and socio-political-practical “animalization of man”. But, at the same time, the hiatus between animality and ek-static existence (ontologically radicalized humanity beyond the orbit of modern humanism) is the reason of why “the black box of biopolitics remained closed with Heidegger.” (Esposito 2008, 157). Against the background of this conclusion, Esposito criticizes Heidegger’s dealing with contemporary biology in the lecture course. The “untranslatability between Heidegger’s language and that of biologists” is due to the description of life as “ontologically defective” by the former language. Heidegger’s anti-biologism – understood both as a kind of anti-naturalist philosophical position as well as a devaluation of basic theoretical concepts of biology – is inspired by the inability of biological science to capture life’s defectiveness. Esposito is right when he argues that this kind of critique of biology is intimately related to a radicalized version of modern humanism – a version insisting on the uniqueness of human being. He finds some evidence for Heidegger’s commitments to such a version in Letter on Humanism. But Esposito wrongly identifies the target of Heidegger’s critique of biological concepts. To a certain extent, Esposito’s argument as sketched above is the opposite of the argument I am trying to outline in this chapter: Heidegger is not accusing biology of inability to handle the defectiveness of life, since the ontological opposition between biological life and human existence does not imply such a defectiveness. In criticizing biology for its deficiency to

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conceptualize ontological aspects of life, Heidegger tries to demonstrate that the received scientific image of life cannot cover the fullness of life.

1.3 Philosophy of biology, philosophical biology, and critique of biology In 1929, the same year in which Heidegger began to deliver the lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics at the University of Freiburg, Joseph Henry Woodger (a famous embryologist) published the book Biological Principles. Leading figures in science like Joseph Needham and Conrad H. Waddington, but also philosophers of the caliber of Karl Popper, immediately recognized this excellent and highly illuminative book as the first genuine work in the philosophy of biology. Woodger was a champion of axiomatic theorizing. He developed the philosophical study of biology as a quest for metaphysical, epistemological and methodological tenets along the lines of this kind of theorizing. Written in a succinct and elegant style, Woodger’s book set the standard for (what at the dawn of logical empiricism was called) the “rational reconstruction” of biological knowledge in the analytical philosophy of science. (Working biologists discussing how philosophy might be of service to the advancement of biology are still guided by Woodger’s idea that axiomatically explicating tacit presuppositions in theory construction – an explication through which heuristic research strategies may arise – is the best way in which this service can be done. Thus, Benedict Griesemer [2011] argues that the explication of the presupposed differing nature of reductionism in molecular epigenetics and in evolutionary dynamics – especially when at stake is the investigation of the phenomena of the epigenetic inheritance – is a necessary condition for constructing a full-fledged theory of epigenetics.) There is no indication that Heidegger has been acquainted with Woodger’s book. This fact notwithstanding, his 1929 – 30 lecture course provides enough arguments that discard the type of the philosophy of biology advanced in Biological Principles. In the light of these arguments, the quest for making explicit tacit assumptions in the established theories – Woodger’s main philosophical preoccupation – would imply a vindication of bad prejudices concerning the specificity of biological life. Basically, these prejudices – grounding notorious controversies such as those between mechanism and vitalism, structure versus function, preformism versus epigenesis, and genetic versus epigenetic programs – are deeply rooted in the metaphysics of presence, and making them explicit axioms would not reform but rather would deform biology. For Heidegger, the reconstruction of scientific theories by means of logical analysis is a gesture of affirm-

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ing the metaphysical tradition he tries to overcome. The tenor of his denunciation of any philosophy of science based on such an analysis is unequivocal: The task consists not in unearthing the assumptions behind, say, the dichotomy between mechanism and vitalism for the sake of achieving theories’ strong axiomatization, but in debunking these assumptions as belonging to the tradition in which the question about the meaning of being has been forgotten.⁷ By discarding any appeal to conceptual dichotomies rooted in the metaphysics of presence, the ontologically reformulated biological science – that is, the outcome of the phenomenological critique of biology – should be guided (in its constitution of objects of inquiry) by fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-conception that cannot be manifested through the factuality of the objectifying theories. Roughly, Heidegger’s ideas imply a critique of biology that problematizes and eventually unsettles the groundedness of biology (as a theoretical conceptualization of life) in the metaphysics of presence. He epitomizes the agenda of such a critique by picking out phenomena for which “biology knows absolutely nothing.” (GA 29/30: 393; Heidegger 1995, 271). A pertinent example is the class of phenomena related to the specificity of the animal’s way of being as characterized by “poverty and deprivation of world”. The existing biological disciplines – from physiology and classical zoology to ecology and ethology – are not able to think, for instance, “captivation” (Benommenheit) as the condition of the possibility of poverty in world, since they lack proper ontological assumptions. Captivation stands first and foremost for the instinctual determinateness of the animal organism within its environment that is adequate to meet the animal’s ethological needs. The concept of captivation is a classical case in point for a concept that should be defined by taking into consideration a phenomenological view of what world is. The purely biological meaning of instinctual determinateness within a specific environment should be supplied with a phenomenological meaning of the animal’s way of being characterized by having and not-having world. In another formulation, the biological conceptualization of the animal behavior is to be complemented by a phenomenological account of how the animal has – within the environment of its ethological needs – accessibility to a limited number of entities, but nevertheless does not have – in the sense of not being able to apprehend – entities that are ready-to-hand or present-at-hand. An ontologically reformulated biology – so the argument following from Heidegger’s  Heidegger’s arguments against axiomatics and the related position against logical analysis are best documented not in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, but in Heidegger’s later “polemics” with Rudolf Carnap. See in this regard Michael Friedman’s (2000, 11– 25) celebrated study.

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considerations goes – would be capable of studying how captivation as a general characteristics of the organismic constitution of the animal is the condition of the possibility of “a not-having of world in the having of openness” for whatever satisfies the animal’s ethological needs (or, whatever “disinhibits its drives”). Prima facie the critique of biology under scrutiny bears a resemblance to Marx’s critique of political economy, de Saussure’s critique of linguistics, or Garfinkel’s critique of objectivist sociology. However, such analogies are not very instructive. To be sure, the critique of biology must be examined against the background of Heidegger’s hermeneutic critique of scientific objectification in general, which, in its turn, is a step in overcoming the hypostatization of the copula “is” and the de-privileging of predication (and formal logic) conceived of as the source of the metaphysics of presence.⁸ To stress again, the critical examination of biological concepts preludes the analysis of apophantic logos within the overall lecture course’s structure. The logical operations as well as the syntheses achieved through sentential predication are enabled by the freedom of choosing possibilities within the world which is already revealed before any predication takes place. In dealing with the environmental enclosure of animal life, the critical analysis of biological views negatively defines the ontological conditions for having a revealed world in which the logos can operate. This is why the methodological dimension of this analysis – as I will try to show in what follows – has a greater significance than an attempt at detailing the picture of scientific objectification as depicted in various lectures from Heidegger’s Marburg period.⁹ Vis-à-vis the proper contextualization of the critique of biology in Heidegger’s work, the conclusion that in the 1929 – 30 course he seeks to ground the contemporary biological theory of animal life philosophically (McNeill 2006, 35) cannot be accepted without reservation. William McNeill’s otherwise superb comments suggest that Heidegger tries to enrich the existing theoretical frame-

 Since the mid-1980s there has been a growing number of studies devoted to the subject of “Heidegger’s interpretation of science”. In distinguishing five of these studies (Kockelmans 1985; Böhme 1993: 38 – 49; Babich 1995; Glazebrook 2000; and Crease 2012) as playing pivotal role in the discussion of science’s openness to the ontological difference, I have to notice that Heidegger’s reflections on biology are totally missing in the whole tradition of these studies.  Thomas Kessel (2011) is, in my knowledge, the only study exclusively devoted to Heidegger’s critique of biology. The author offers an excellent contextualization of the way in which Heidegger elaborates biological concepts within the pertinent historical developments of biological disciplines. In so doing, Kessel (2011, 16) raises the interesting claim that Heidegger undertakes in The Fundamental Concepts a “destruction of the history of biology”. Kessel’s proposal resulting from the analysis of Heidegger’s confrontation with biology and anthropology amounts to launching a “phenomenological anthropology” that would combine ontic and existential dimensions.

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works by showing the ontological presuppositions concerning the concept of biological life. McNeill implies that what biology presupposes can be further “painlessly” grounded in a phenomenological theory of the experience of world. If this were the case, then – to take up the starting point of this section – Heidegger and Woodger would turn out to be close bedfellows. Their programs would have differed only with regard to the kind of grounding analysis: Instead of Woodger’s logical analysis of biological knowledge, Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of the biological objects of inquiry should provide the ultimate grounds of theorizing. On the conception I am advocating, Heidegger is not looking for a deeper grounding of the existing biological theories. Overcoming biological science’s intrinsic commitment to metaphysical tradition requires a kind of (post-metaphysical) shaking (Erschütterung) of established grounds that would substantially revises the conceptual structures of the existing theories. Such a revision is unachievable without scenarios of theorizing that invoke the ontic-ontological difference when constituting proper objects of inquiry.¹⁰ According to a motif already mentioned, Heidegger’s approach to the animal life assumes a conceptualization in which ontic objectification and phenomenological interpretation should be involved in a relation of mutual reinforcement. To be sure, the complementary cooperation of procedural objectification and phenomenological interpretation within biological inquiry might be construed as a kind of grounding. (Heidegger himself often speaks of such a grounding.) Yet, when applied to a kind of scientific research, the central connotation of the term “grounding” is to legitimize an established status quo by revealing its roots. In contrast to this initiative, Heidegger aims at a radical reformulation of the biological science’s fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping of the objects of inquiry, i. e. a reformulation of the hermeneutic situation in the constitution of such objects. Thus, Heidegger’s phenomenological grounding of biological inquiry consists in defining a new hermeneutic situation of conceptualizing biological life-forms.  The revision should bring into play that kind of critical reflexivity which was mentioned in footnote 4. The reflexive questioning of uncritically accepted presuppositions, however, is a dangerous enterprise. It is a questioning that proceeds on the level of conceptualization by scrutinizing the constitution of any possible object of inquiry. In so doing, reflexive questioning threatens to destroy the production of objectified factuality in biological inquiry. The only way of turning critical reflexivity into a non-destroying initiative is by committing the conceptualization to something that cannot be represented as objectified positivity of inquiry. It is the ontological meaning of the constituted objects of inquiry that resists any procedural objectification and factual representation. As already mentioned, pursuing this strategy leads to the integration of the ontic-ontological difference with scientific conceptualization, which for Heidegger seems to be an “impossible possibility”.

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The ambiguity of Heidegger’s position towards the need of the ontic-ontological difference in conceptually coping with the specificity of the living comes to the surface when he displays his discontent with the projects for philosophical anthropology and philosophical biology. In the programs of philosophical anthropology (from the late 1920s), one may find various versions of the so-called “compensatory thesis”: The supra-biological (meaning-constituting, cultural, human) existence phylogenetically comes into being as a result of a non-biological compensation of the biological deficiency – supposedly consisting in an insufficiency of the instinctual organization – of the proto-human species from which homo sapiens originates and evolves. Since the human being is a deficient biological being (biologisches Mängelwesen [Arnold Gehlen]), the supra-biological way of its biological (phylogenetic) survival involves the replacement of the instinctual behavior (as enclosed in its peculiar environment and deprived of world-openness) by a comportment that interpretively constitutes human being’s (open, non-determined) cultural milieus as opposed to the instinctually determined kinds of environmental spatiality like ecological niche, adaptive zone, habitat, etc. On the compensatory thesis, interpretation (as a basic mode of meaningconstituting existence) compensates for the insufficient instinctual organization. By implication, the existence in interpretively constituted cultural (meaningful) worlds can be analyzed in terms of an existential theory of interpretation (conceived of as interpretive mode of being). Yet, in contrast to Heidegger, the champions of philosophical anthropology – Helmuth Plessner in the first place, who in this regard follows the lead of Georg Misch’s criticism of Being and Time – do not prioritize this theory.¹¹ The existential ontology of interpretation (if possible at all) should only be conceived of as an integral part of a general theory of (biological and cultural) life. In Heidegger’s counterargument, by putting the compensatory thesis first, philosophical anthropology is condemned to confuse the ontic (factual) studies into the animal life and the phylogeny of homo sapiens with the ontological analytic of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. This confusion leads to completely illegitimate research scenarios, since the concept of world is an ontological concept that cannot be interpreted by means of ontic (procedurally obtained) factuality. When criticizing philosophical anthropology (in particular, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics) as an enterprise that cannot aspire to be something more than a “regional ontology of man”, Heidegger argues that the ontological difference must not be compromised in favor of the search for a

 In his initial reception of Being and Time, Plessner stressed the fact that prioritizing the existential analytic over the philosophy of the living simply furthers the tradition of subjectivism.

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new worldview that will define once for all the “position of man in the cosmos”. In trying to bridge biological life with human existence within this worldview, the “idea of philosophical anthropology is not only insufficiently determined, its role within philosophy as a whole remains obscure and indecisive.” (GA 3: 212; Heidegger 1962b, 219). Heidegger’s criticism of philosophical anthropology goes hand in hand with a criticism of the idea of “philosophical biology” – an idea hinted at by Max Scheler, unfolded by Plessner, and advocated within biology by Frederik J. J. Buytendijk. Roughly, this idea consists in the need of articulating – through a kind of phenomenological Wesensschau – the essential moments of biological (vegetable, animal, and human) life. Being independent of the disciplinary departmentalization of biological science and the theoretical-experimental research programs, philosophical biology should function as a prelude to developing philosophical anthropology. The weak point of this phenomenologically inspired initiative is that it metaphysically assumes a hierarchy of biological life-forms ending with the top position of the biologically determined supra-biological life of the human being. Heidegger adduces a twofold argument against such a hierarchy. On the one hand, he stresses (contra Scheler) that the construal of humans as uniting in their mode of being all the lower levels of being is a fundamental error that prevents one from having access to existential ontology as metaphysics (GA 29/30: 282– 83; Heidegger 1995, 192). On the other hand, he supplies the argument with a moral dimension. The animal does not know the states of moral baseness and misery. Because the animal’s mode of being is not distinguished by fallenness (as an existentiale), the non-human biological species cannot be regarded as morally lower than the human being. While philosophical biology determines the position of human being in a hierarchical manner, the theory of life Heidegger tries to figure out defines the peculiarity of biological life-forms in terms of their “accessibility of world”. For him, the animal life does not represent “something inferior or some kind of lower level in comparison with human Dasein. On the contrary, life is a domain which possesses a wealth of openness with which the human world may have nothing to compare.” (GA 29/30: 372; Heidegger 1995, 255). The specificity of human Dasein within the totality of biological life is to be addressed not in ontic terms – in particular, through a narrative unfolding of a compensatory motif – but via developing the ontological concept of world. This is why the biological forms of life are to be conceptualized with regard to their relatedness to the world, whereby the phenomenological conception of animality becomes, as it were, congruent with Heidegger’s earlier concept of facticity. Thus (ontologically) reformulated, the science of the living would consider biological life and human Dasein in a philosophically unified perspective, which would not imply,

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however, a unified theory of the non-human and human lifeforms. This would be a phenomenological science of the living relevant to the agenda of Being and Time, but by no means a continuation of hermeneutic phenomenology. Moreover, this science would retain its status of empirical (experimental) inquiry. In other words, a science of the living – centered around the ontological concept of world, and understood as a theory of life’s basic phenomena that can be further developed in various research programs – would be able to construct anew its pertinent (experimental) factuality by making sense of the distinctiveness of life in relation to human existence. The research programs of existing biology – as predominantly rooted in the metaphysics of presence – are more or less unable to see and “save” (theoretically and experimentally) the phenomena mentioned. The ontologically reformulated theory of biological life is, of course, not looking for proto-cultural modes of the world’s meaningful articulation within the animal behavior – an initiative that belongs to the post-war programs for naturalizing social and cultural theory. (Nonetheless, such a theory has much better chances for conceptually coping with the proto-cultural forms of animal life than the purely naturalist-objectivist theories.) One might assume that the task of the phenomenological theory of the living is to assist the existential analytic by properly addressing features of biological life presupposed by the ontological position claiming that human existence is distinguished by world-formation. (To reiterate, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics does not support this task.) Yet Heidegger supports the view that a phenomenologically reformulated theory of life must in its own terms reflexively conceptualize not the (ontic) contrasts between animal and human biology, but those contrasts which make human existence ontologically distinctive. The preceding considerations suggest that the lecture course introduces the triad of worldlessness, poverty in world, and world-formation in order to make the conception of animal life germane to the ontological turn of phenomenology. It is by means of this triad that the phenomenological concept of world has to be implemented in the reformulation of concepts like organ, biological capacities, living body, animality, the self-production of organism, the internal teleology of the living systems’ self-preservation, the openness within the captivity of behavior, and the living being as a self-regulating whole. All non-organismic entities are worldless since their way of being lacks accessibility of other entities. At the other pole is human existence which is by no means determined (instinctually) from within or (manipulatively) from without, and is characterized by a freedom of constantly forming and articulating world. While the animals are doomed to have a purely behavioral mode of being enclosed in (captured by) their respective environments, the humans are doomed to have a being-in-the-

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world by interpretively articulating the world. The critique of biology has to elucidate life’s poverty in world as an intermediate state between the worldless entities and human existence’s world-formation. “Accessibility of world” is an expression that provides a cue for coming to grips with this intermediate position. The talk of accessibility (as involving potentiality and temporality) is directed against philosophical biology. On a basic claim of Plessner’s philosophical biology, the nonhuman living creatures are characterized by either passive (plants) or active (animals) positionality to their environments.¹² None of them is able to achieve “eccentric positionality” as a characteristic of wittingly reflexive life. Heidegger replaces the controversial notion of positionality with that of accessibility of other beings. Though the animals have accessibility of things in their respective environments, they do not have world in the sense of a totality of meaningfully constituted things that can manifest themselves as things. The things involved in the animal behavior – by playing a role in disinhibiting and releasing the inhibitedness of the instinctual drive – are always withdrawing themselves. The animals have world only within the “encircling ring” of their behavior. The animal surrounds itself with a disinhibiting ring which prescribes what can affect or occasion its behavior. This encircling belongs to the innermost organization of the animal. The instinctual encircling of animal behavior makes possible the relatedness to (or, the accessibility of) a class of things. Yet the instinctual behavior becomes “absorbed” in the totality of entities to which it has access. The way of its absorbing is the way of producing a peculiar form of behavior. The animal’s behavior is not encapsulated within its specific environment, but open to what disinhibits its capability for being absorbed in a certain way.¹³ The animal’s relatedness to a class of things consists in a kind of being taken by that toward which the animal directs itself in its orientation. With regard to this kind of being taken, the animal’s behavior is spatially characterized, but

 Plessner characterizes the plant’s positionality as offene Positionalität which means that the plant’s way of being is without a center of positionality. By contrast, the animal is determined by its geschlossene Positionalität that enables “the animal withdrawal (Abhebung) from itself within the animal life in a manner that allows the animal to control itself within its own life.” (Plessner 1965, 243).  Speaking in a more conventional scientific terminology, to say that the organism is first and foremost a particular way of being is to assert the priority of the ethological standpoint over the other scientific standpoints on organism which are – as tendencies of inquiry – more or less reductionist. Heidegger insists that the entirety of the animal’s being must be comprehended as behavior. It is the ethological standpoint that helps one to see how the eliminative character of behavior makes possible an appropriate leeway in the animal’s way of being. In spite of its captivation, the animal’s behavior displays openness. (See also footnote 24.)

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does not constitute spatiality of meaningful appropriation and articulation. (Put in terms of Being and Time, the animal is not able to make room as a kind of spatializing its own mode of being. The “existential spatiality” does not only consists in the spatiality of the bodily activities, but also involves the spatiality created by the ready-to-hand equipment with which the human body is ecstatically united. Existential spatiality is always already constituted by Dasein’s being-thrown in interrelated practices.) The space of the animal’s behavior belongs to its captivation, and cannot be taken up in isolation. To reiterate, this behavior is eliminative in the sense that it relates itself to things, but the beings to which it is related can never manifest themselves as things. The claim that the intrinsic self-encirclement of the animal is not a kind of encapsulation is of crucial importance to Heidegger’s conception of animal life. The behavior’s leeway and plasticity are to be accounted in terms of the organism’s potentiality and specific regime of temporalizing. I will discuss this subject in more detail in another section. Yet an aspect of it should be addressed now. Heidegger raises the claim to a non-Darwinian understanding of behavioral adaptation. The process of adaptation is not an external and additive, but an intrinsic process. Furthermore, he is discontent with the claim that the organism is an independent entity that in its independence subsequently seeks to adapt itself. In criticizing Darwinism, Heidegger accepts Jakob von Uexküll’s line of argument.¹⁴ The organism’s self-retention within its interaction with entities of its environment and the absorption of the animal into itself are expressions that supposedly describe a non-Darwinian scenario of adaptation – a scenario in which the animal organism plays active role in adapting the environment to its ethological needs. Doubtless, like several other phenomenologists – Max Scheler and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to mention two of them – Heidegger is influenced by Uexküll’s pioneering ideas about the environment-world (Umwelt) as constituted by the specific way of uniting the spaces of all sensory perceptions (Kessel 2011,

 Heidegger does not do enough justice to Darwin’s view of adaptation. He is completely right in interpreting adaptation as a process of the organism’s self-production in a specific environment that comes into being through this self-production. There is no room for anything that is present at hand in this process. From this standpoint, Heidegger argues that Darwinism is guided by the misconceived idea that the animal is present at hand, and subsequently adapts itself to a world that is present at hand. In fact, he trivializes Darwin’s idea of local adaption within branching evolution. Precisely because this idea opposes the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters, it does not need to assume a presence at hand prior to natural selection and adaptation. The Darwinian adaptive scenarios explain how divergent branches move off from a common starting point that is itself a dynamic state and not a static givenness of organisms. Thus, Darwin is not far away from Heidegger’s interpretation of adaptation. (See also Hatab 2012.)

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198 – 202). Yet his reception of the Estonian biologist’s ideas is essentially critical. Heidegger’s criticism of Uexküll involves an accusation of a non-radicality in the treatment of the relational structure between the animal and its environment. The question of whether the animal is able to apprehend something as something is the one which Uexküll’s approach cannot resolve. It remains to be seen, however, whether Heidegger’s own approach can suggest an appropriate solution to that question. Be this as it may, the criticism of Uexküll provides an important clue of the way in which Heidegger figures out a solution to the issue of behavior’s plasticity within its captivity. In his early work, Uexküll (1909, 6) admits that beside the environment-world the animal possesses an inner world. It consists of all effects on the nervous system caused by the environmental factors. Like the environment-world, the animal’s inner world depends on (what Uexküll calls) “constructional plan” (Bauplan). The admission of the animal’s Innenwelt follows from Uexküll’s Kantian worldview. In his later work, he maintains the view that non-reductionist biology “has ultimately established its connection with the doctrine of Kant, which it intends to exploit in the Umwelt theory by stressing the decisive role of the subject.” (von Uexküll 1957, 13). For Heidegger, this is an example of a misuse of the concept of world in biology. Addressing behavioral openness in animal’s captivation does not bring into play the possibility of an inner world. Organism is neither a complex of instruments working in concert, nor a union of organs, nor a bundle of capacities. It is a “particular and fundamental way of being” (GA 29/30: 342; Heidegger 1995, 235). He insists that the unit of biological life is not the cell. We are told that both “unicellular and multicellular living beings have a specific essential wholeness by virtue of the fact that they are organisms.” (GA 29/30: 312; Heidegger 1995, 212). Only organism can possess organs. There are no organs without organism. Heidegger’s treatment of animal organism as distinguished by poverty in world is informed by his argument for the irreducibility of the organ to an instrument.¹⁵ In this argument, serviceability as a  Heidegger denounces a view – typically represented in the late 19th century biology by Wilhelm Roux – that the organism is a complex of instruments. The reduction of organs to instruments was a commonplace view in the nineteenth century mechanistic (anti-vitalistic) biology. Yet the elaborated conception that motor organs are a kind of tools, utensils and pieces of equipment (Werkzeuge) goes back to Jakob von Uexküll’s celebrated work on the concepts of “environment world” (Umwelt) and the “functional circle” specifically characterizing the mode of behavioral being of every biological species. Von Uexküll places the treatment of organs’ functionality within the context of his discussion of species-specific environment. In so doing, he mentions the instrumental character of motor organs. But in general, von Uexküll’s approach is radically anti-reductionist. This is why the further development of his conception and the subsequent elaborations on the concepts of functional circle and environment are rather

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potentiality – i. e. being serviceable by having a possibility – is the common denominator of the instrument and the organ. At the same time, the specific possibility of serviceability within the organism is what makes the organ distinct. The possibilities of serving a function are quite varied in their character of potentiality, depending on whether the function is accomplished in or out of the organism. The organ is not serviceable because it is equipped with a functional and instrumental property. The organ can serve a function within the organism since its way of functioning is “in accordance with its own essence that having possibility lies in its functioning in this way.” (GA 29/30: 321; Heidegger 1995, 220). Heidegger calls the identity of the organ’s potentiality-for-serviceability and the way of its functioning in the organism “capacity”. Since the possibility of capacity does not amount to the possibility of readiness to be implemented, the organ is irreducible to the instrument. Heidegger elucidates what is capacity by arguing, in particular, that the possibility of seeing is itself the condition of the possibility of the eye as an organ. Thus considered, the eye in itself does not have the capacity of seeing. The eye taken independently no more possesses a capacity than does any piece of equipment. The eye emerges from the organism where the capacity of seeing is a condition of possibility for a having an organ of vision. Only by belonging to the organism, does the eye have a capacity. Accordingly, it “is the potentiality for seeing which first makes the possession of eyes possible, makes the possession of eyes necessary in a specific way.” (GA 29/ 30: 319; Heidegger 1995, 218). In a classical transcendental fashion, he states that the possibility of seeing is itself the condition of the possibility of the eye as an organ. The capacities have organs. The eye grows from the capacity of vision which belongs to the organism. This is why Heidegger rightly concludes that it is, as a matter of fact, the organism which has capacities.¹⁶ By contrast, the serviceability of an instrument excludes its belonging to something else. With regard to this line of argument, an instrument can never become an organ that is in a possession of a capacity.

related to arguments for the irreducibility of organs to instruments (Buchanan 2008, 30 – 34). See in this regard also the cogent analysis of Carlo Brentari (2015, 97– 104).  In advocating this claim, Heidegger follows a biological line of argument. He refers to unicellular organisms like the amoebae and infusoria, which form their necessary organs “individually in each case, only to destroy them again in turn.” (GA 29/30: 327; Heidegger 1995, 224). From the observation that the organs of these unicellular organisms are dependent upon the protoplasm, he draws the conclusion that we are confronted with changing organs that replace one another in a specific sequence. Leaning on this conclusion, he posits that the capacities for serving physiological functions are prior to the organs in each case.

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1.4 The existential conception of science and biological holism My task now is to probe the extent to which the critique of biology which follows from Heidegger’s conception of animal life is coherent with the existential conception of science as developed in Being and Time. According to this conception, scientific inquiry is a secondary mode of being-in-the-world based upon the mode of average everydayness. Thus, scientific inquiry is distinguished by existential genesis. Analyzing this genesis allows one to throw light on the steps of the constitution of the domains of inquiry. The existential conception asserts that mathematical projection and objectifying thematization are the necessary initial steps in releasing domains (regions) of inquiry from practical contextures of equipment, whereby these domains become representable as manifolds of formally determined positions. Scientific objectification as a way of making present such domains – as they are procedurally delimited and released from the practical work-world – is itself based on a certain kind of the temporalizing of temporality, namely a temporalizing that makes intra-worldly entities objectively present (GA 2: 359; Heidegger 1962a, 410 – 411). On this account, the possible objects of inquiry are determined by mathematical structures. By the same token, the experimentally constructed phenomena can be saved (explained) if they – as units of measurable data – are embeddable in such structures. Phrased alternatively, a domain of scientific inquiry becomes disclosed by delimiting it through the projection of a mathematical structure. All domains that are (in principle) reducible to mathematical physics are disclosed through such projection and objectification. Obviously, a domain of biochemical research that deals with the kinetics of metabolic reactions and describes the phenomena investigated through quantifiable parameters presents a perfect illustration of how the existential conception of science addresses the meaning of objectifying theorizing. The preceding discussion demonstrated, however, that in The Fundamental Concepts Heidegger is interested in that kind of biological inquiry which successfully combats against (in his words) the “tyranny of physics and chemistry”. Since scrutinizing animality (Tierheit) is of prime importance for determining where exactly the difference between being deprived of world and world-formation lies, holist zoology and ethology are paradigmatic domains in Heidegger’s considerations. (Some scattered short notes indicate his view on taxonomy as a holist domain of biological inquiry in which the inquiry has to approach species with regard to the specific encirclement that belongs to the species.) The holist domains of biological inquiry are not formalizable because the phenomena they investigate are not entirely presentable by measurable and quantifiable variables. This is why he jettisons the existential conception of science when treating the domains in which the question about the specificity of biological life is

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scrutinized in a non-reductionist manner. At stake are – besides the already mentioned – domains that focus on the uniqueness of organism, the morphogenesis of organs, or the distinctiveness of animality with regard to the animals’ environmental behavior. All of these domains are not disclosed by means of mathematical projection. They do not derive their explanatory models from systems of equations or other formalisms. Thus, when addressing the irreducibility of organism to a machine, Heidegger stresses that organism is driven in advance, i. e. subjected to that “structure of drives” for which there is no mathematical expression, “and it is one which is incapable in principle of being mathematized.” (GA 29/30: 335; Heidegger 1995, 229). Another appropriate example for the irrelevance of mathematical models Heidegger adduces concerns the ethological aspect of predator-prey relationship. He insists that one “cannot explain escaping and pursuing simply by applying theoretical mathematics or mechanics, however complex. Here a quite primordial kind of movement reveals itself. The escaping worm does not merely appear within the context of a sequence of movements which begin with the mole.”¹⁷ (GA 29/ 30: 346; Heidegger 1995, 237). The non-mathematical disclosure of domains provides a methodological argument that what becomes constituted as objects of inquiry is irreducible to physical and chemical entities, because a reduction to such processes would unavoidably ignore the ways in which the animals are temporalizing – within their captivation in encircling rings – their modes of being. This is an argument that Heidegger presupposes, but – for reasons that will become clear in the next section – does not make explicit. The argument should not be confused with the fact that – in contrast to the physical and chemical theories which are applying mathematical time reversibility – most of the biosciences are working with evolutionary (irreversible) time. Of course, Heidegger could not be blamed for not having seen the possibilities for a formalization of, say, morphogenetic processes based on differential topology, catastrophe theory, dissipative structures, and so on. The point is  Indeed, one can revoke this assertion by appealing to the so-called Lotka-Volterra non-linear equations that serve as a mathematical model of the dynamics in the growth rates of the prey and the predator populations, granted that various parameters describing the prey-predator interaction are taken into account in the model. Yet the reference to this model is by no means evidence against Heidegger’s claim. The non-linear equations can establish the states of population equilibrium and ecological stability in prey-predator relationship, but they can say nothing about the formation of that ethological spatiality (of prey’s and predator’s behavior) through which the behavioral movement “reveals itself”. To take up Heidegger’s example, no mathematical model can explain why the escaping worm behaves as fleeing in a particular way with respect to the mole, whereby das Sichbenehmen (the behavior’s non-reflexive selfhood) of the worm becomes revealed.

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that even such kinds of formalization does not refute Heidegger’s claim that the biological domains he is interested in are disclosed not by means of mathematical projection. The formalization here is due not to an initial mathematical idealization. Rather, it is a procedure that comes upon a domain’s non-mathematical disclosure. The mathematical models subsequently introduced capture the dynamics of complex biological processes, but have nothing to do with the temporalization of the organism’s mode of being. Generally speaking, the new forms of mathematizability in biology do not provide arguments against the non-mathematical projection of the biological life’s nature in the disclosure of the domains of non-reductionist inquiry. Now, an important specification of what has been said is necessary. It concerns Heidegger’s attitude towards neo-vitalism, taken both as a scientific worldview and a methodology. Neo-vitalism was a widespread research paradigm in the 1920s and 1930s. It strongly promoted non-reductionist approaches and promised to radically change the characteristic hermeneutic situations of inquiry even in biological domains close to chemistry and physics. (The spirit of non-reductionism is felt even in programs that aimed at describing the basic phenomena of life in terms of chemistry and physics. Thus, Niels Bohr’s famous lecture “Light and Life” – held approximately at the time when Heidegger delivered The Fundamental Concepts, and considered by many historians of science as a herald of molecular biology – appealed to implementing the principle of complementarity when studying the relations between the organism’s chemical basis and its organizational hierarchy. Applying this principle in biological inquiry is an anti-reductionist gesture, since it makes the physical and chemical explanatory models based on classical causality invalid in studying living systems.) It seems justified to assume that in searching for a non-mathematical projection of biological life, Heidegger would have had to support neo-vitalism. However, he appears to be an opponent to Hans Driesch’s philosophical methodology, not to mention the more underdeveloped versions of neo-vitalism at that time. Driesch’s famous experiments with the embryos of sea-urchins are mentioned several times in the lecture course. In developing his criticism, Heidegger focuses his attention primarily to the unsubstantiated turn to the cell “as the primal element of living things”, and the attempts prompted by developments of cytology and cell biology “to put together the organism”. The result of this attempt is a misunderstanding of the organism which is “shattered into a heap of fragments, while the cell itself was still considered in a chemico-physical fashion.” (GA 29/30: 380; Heidegger 1995, 261). The neo-vitalists shift the focus from sub-cellular physico-chemical processes to cellular morphology, but – in trying

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to ground biology anew – they do not leave the territory of the metaphysics of presence.¹⁸ In proceeding in this manner, the neo-vitalists are inserting the supposedly experimentally provable “entelechy” as an irreducible morphogenetic factor into the reality governed by physical and chemical laws. Furthermore, Heidegger stresses that neo-vitalism’s idea of wholeness is confusing. The wholeness is (mis)understood as a subsequent result of proven interconnections. The whole is a determining force imposed on the cellular physical and chemical processes. In trying to elaborate an alternative view, Heidegger alludes to the need of conceptualizing the wholeness in its state of ongoing temporalizing. (Unfortunately, as I will show, this view remains essentially underdeveloped.) Experimentation inspired by neo-vitalism should design experimental systems showing how the whole of living cells produces sui generis organizing forces. In pursuing this strategy, Driesch and his followers willy-nilly adopt a bad approach to teleology – purposiveness determined by a presupposed aim. Consequently, neo-vitalism lacks resources to solve the problem of purposive behavior. Against this approach, Heidegger holds that the main task of biology is “to recognize the full import of purposive striving before appealing to some force which, moreover, explains nothing.” (GA 29/30: 381; Heidegger 1995, 262). The organism’s purposiveness does not precede the way in which the organism is driven in advance. As already mentioned, Heidegger consistently advocates the priority of organism over cell. By putting the cell first and trying to “derive” the organism’s distinctiveness from what happens on cellular level, neo-vitalism is not capable of taking into consideration that the relation to the environment is included in (Heidegger’s words) “the fundamental structure of the organism”. It is the organism that asserts itself at every stage of biological life. Heidegger’s quest for emerging properties of biological life on the level of organism resonates with the aforementioned position of Bohr, who also tries to escape the impasse of vitalism-mechanism controversy. Like Bohr, he strives for a kind of anti-reductionism without hypostatizing any essence (and purpose) of life or assuming that different physical laws operate in the living systems.¹⁹

 Interestingly enough, the metaphysical bias in Driesch’s vitalism was also a critical target in Ernst Cassirer’s critical epistemological reconstruction of the basic debates of the early 20th century biology. Nevertheless, Cassirer acknowledges that “there is no denying that through his experiments and the questions that he raised in connection with them, Driesch contributed greatly to defining the characteristic methodological principle and problem of biology.” (Cassirer 1969, 197). The reason for this positive evaluation is doubtless Driesch’s strongly Kantian position.  There is in the early 1930s a remarkable development of the quantum-molecular speculations about the nature of life that starts from Bohr’s view, then passes via Delbrück’s “molecular

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Unlike Bohr, however, Heidegger admits a kind of purposiveness that is not to be objectified and formalized as pure empirical presence at hand. It is an “anticipatory purposiveness” that is driven from behind, from the already mentioned “structure of drives”. The organism as being capable of producing itself by adapting its environment to its instinctual drives is the primary object of inquiry that manifests most typically this purposiveness as “driven directedness”. The view of intrinsic teleology without hypostatizing essence and purpose attributes purposiveness to the way in which the organism is self-retaining. In contrast to the “equipmental teleology” of the ready-made instruments, the teleology of organism’s self-production is always embedded in possibilities of changing the relation to its environment (without destroying the encircling ring). These possibilities are generated by the organism’s capabilities to vary its regime of adaptation within its mode of being. Though the animal organism is deprived of world, its mode of being is characterized by potentiality. Yet by being “taken by the things” of its disinhibiting circle, and by not having the possibility of apprehending something-as-something, the animal’s captivation excludes freedom. Or, in an alternative formulation, captivation stands outside the possibility of forming a free relation to things that can be apprehended. This is why the animal is not able to project its being upon possibilities, which would imply a release from any kind of teleology. The intrinsic teleology of the animal organism correlates with a leeway and potentiality that are not based on freedom. From a methodological point of view, Heidegger’s starting question is how the biological domains which are not disclosed by means of mathematical projection are constituted as regions of objects ready to be theoretically and exper-

picture of the gene”, and finally reaches Schrödinger’s non-Bohrian speculation that there are in the living substance “other laws of physics hitherto unknown”. Prima facie it seems that Schrödinger’s approach – as developed in the brochure What is Life – brings back the reductionist paradigm. Actually, this approach completes Bohr’s line of anti-reductionist reasoning. In ascribing to (what he supposes to be) a gene the character of an aperiodic solid and trying to explain the spontaneous mutations in a quantum-mechanical manner, Schrödinger appeals to Heitler-London theory of hydrogen molecule which marks the beginning of quantum chemistry. (Schrödinger had expected that the quantum theory of the chemical bond would provide models on molecular level explaining bio-energetic flows.) It would be a bit of exaggeration to say that Heitler-London theory is “phenomenologically grounded”. But one should not forget that up to the mid-1920s Fritz London was a phenomenological philosopher (a pupil of Husserl), and his approach to the physical-chemical phenomena was essentially informed by the spirit of phenomenology. Schrödinger himself maintains a view that bears closer resemblance to Heidegger’s view of the organism’s active role in designing its environment: The living organism – so Schrödinger’s argument goes – delays the decay into thermodynamic equilibrium by creating order in its environment, i. e. by producing “entropy with a negative sign”.

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imentally investigated. (In the perspective of the existential conception of science, this constitution can be called a “projection of nature” accomplished not by means of objectifying thematization.) In observing that all biological disciplines are “caught up today in a remarkable transformation” that opens up new ways for constituting objects of inquiry, Heidegger claims that the “task of confronting biology as a science is to develop an entirely new projection of the objects of its inquiry.” (GA 29/30: 278; Heidegger 1995, 188). For him, adequate to this task would be a projection of biological life through a transposition in the diversity of animal life-forms. The aim is not to imitate or emulate nonhuman modes of being, but to attain understanding concerning the way in which the animal life is “poor in world”, granted that the poverty in world stands for the animal’s alterity. Though sounding dubiously from a scientific viewpoint, the transposition Heidegger speaks about is a methodological procedure that is rich in ontological consequences. The transposition should enact (what Heidegger calls) a formally indicative conceptualization of the animal’s life. Phrased differently, the transposition as supplied by the method of formal indication should warrant an understanding of “the otherness of the animal”, thereby leading to concepts based upon a “phenomenological insight” of how the indicated phenomena (or entities, or structures) of biological life exist in their potentiality, and not as a fixed presence. In undoing firm references of the theoretical terms of the phenomenologically informed biological theories, the formally indicative understanding of the animal’s otherness only indicates the way of approaching this otherness.²⁰ The biological objects of inquiry can only be constituted when the sense of life is properly explicated. The transposition takes the form of a procedure that

 Daniel Dahlstrom argumentatively unfolds the claim that between 1919 and 1930 Heidegger is preoccupied with a kind of “methodical reflections” that lies between a full-blown methodology and the method he pursues in the hermeneutic and ontological reorientation of phenomenology. These reflections are predominantly concentrated on the formal-indicative character of his method (Dahlstrom 1994, 779). Though rarely mentioned, the method of formal indication – as a method of phenomenological explication – plays a crucial role in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. All concepts of the ontological theory of life lack any firm referents that can be described by means of predicative assertions. In contrast to Being and Time where formal indication is restricted to revealing ontological structures by picking out features of one’s firstperson singular being (Shockey 2010), the concepts discussed in the course are formally indicating in a manner closer to eidetic phenomenology. Another aspect of the formally indicative concepts entertains the potentiality (as opposed to the actual presence) of what is referred to. On a criticism of the method of formal indication, see Ginev (2015a, 122 – 126). The main deficiency of this method consists in its residual essentialism. The formal indication still preserves the idea of (at least regulative) invariants.

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can be called a “methodical empathy” of the living beings – a procedure that enables one to phenomenologically study the “essential nature of life in and out of itself”. The task of this transposition also consists in capturing the sense in which biological life occupies an intermediate position between material nature and human existence. The deepest methodological entitlement of the transposition, however, is to reformulate (what I call) the “characteristic hermeneutic situations” in which holist domains of biological inquiry are disclosed and articulated.²¹ A domain of scientific inquiry is originally disclosed as a thematically delimited region that contains a potentially infinite number of research objects that might be constituted in the process of inquiry. Thus disclosed, the domain is indispensably prepared-to-be-articulated within a certain tendency to fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping the potentially existing research objects. Following this tendency, the process of inquiry – in actualizing the appropriated research possibilities – reveals and conceals what has been disclosed in a specific manner. The specific revealment and concealment of a scientific domain resulting from the tendentious choosing and appropriation of possibilities for doing research in the process of inquiry is the characteristic hermeneutic situation in which the domain exists. Being within such a situation, the process of inquiry selectively appropriates possibilities for doing research at the expense of ignoring and sedimenting possibilities that would reveal (and conceal) the domain in an alternative way. Thus considered, the scientific domain is approached not in epistemological terms but in terms of hermeneutic ontology. The ontological reformulation of the scientific conceptualization of life implied by Heidegger’s critique of biology requires revisions of the characteristic hermeneutic situations of several domains of biological inquiry. These revisions can be accomplished by changing the tendencies toward choosing and appropriating possibilities of doing research, and accordingly constituting new objects of inquiry. Let me sum up. Indeed, William Richardson (1968, 511) is absolutely right when many years ago stated that on the longest day Heidegger ever lived, he has never been a philosopher of science. Heidegger has never been interested

 The concept of characteristic hermeneutic situation is actually developed through a critique of Heidegger‘s existential conception of science. This conception still suffers from essentialistobjectivist prejudices concerning scientific inquiry. In admitting that the process of inquiry is not determined by a “mathematical projection of nature” but unfolds itself as interplay of changing configurations of practices and shifting research possibilities, one focuses on the articulation of scientific domains within this interplay. Accordingly, one begins to study the characteristic manner in which the articulated structures are fore-structured by the interplay. (See Ginev 2011a, 65 – 76; and Ginev 2016a, 132– 156.)

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in the epistemological rationality of science as this rationality can normatively be evaluated in the “context of justification”. But another claim turns out to be true as well: Beginning with the “hermeneutics of facticity” in the early 1920s, the critique of science was for Heidegger a sine qua non for posing the question of being anew. The Fundamental Concepts sets up a twist in the orientation of this critique. The science of life is conceived of not simply as ontic objectification, but – if properly interpreted – as a necessary counterpart of existential ontology. Heidegger devotes three pages on the “methodological reflections” about the science-ontology interplay in the lecture course. A prerequisite for carrying out the critique of biology is the proper way of working out the “inner unity of science and metaphysics”. It is my contention that the lecture course approaches this unity from a unique vantage point. Heidegger calls the unity of science and metaphysics a “matter of fate”, and it is precisely the dialogue between the two that enables the integration of the ontological difference into the constitution of objects of inquiry. At issue is a critique as ongoing reflection upon the inquiry’s characteristic hermeneutic situations with the intent to retrieve ignored research possibilities whose appropriation might lead to break with the groundedness of biology in the metaphysics of presence. It is not by chance that Heidegger refers to Hans Spemann’s work when discussing the “fateful unity” of science and ontology. In developing his research program and introducing a new concept of embryogenesis, Spemann was successful in overcoming the depressing dilemma between preformation and epigenesis in embryology. The way in which he constitutes the morphogenetic field as an object of experimental inquiry, thereby opening the path to the studies into experimental morphogenesis, illustrates exactly the unity of science and ontology Heidegger aspires to. It is with regard to Spemann’s transformation of embryology’s characteristic hermeneutic situation that Heidegger reached the conclusion that the “relation between metaphysics and positive research is not a matter of an organized operation or prearranged coordination. Rather, it is a matter of fate, and this means that it is always determined in turn by an inner readiness for communal cooperation.” (GA 29/30: 280; Heidegger 1995, 190). With respect to the critique of biology, Heidegger specifies the “fateful unity” by formulating a kind of complementarity: Metaphysics must define in ontological terms the sense in which the animal’s life is distinguished by poverty in world, whereas biology must specify – primarily in physiological, ethological, and ecological terms – the empirical manifestations of how animality is deprived of world. These manifestations – so Heidegger’s argument goes – are not attainable through the existing research programs of biology. Only ontologically reformulated biological inquiry is able to apprehend them.

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1.5 The trouble with the temporalization of the animal forms of life A negative consequence from the critique of biology is that the exceptionality of existence cannot be addressed in scientific terms – a consequence that scientists like Gregory Bateson, Jane Goodall or Donna Haraway (to mention only a few of a very long list) would by no means accept. I believe that all philosophical criticisms that one can direct to Heidegger’s way of opposing biological life to existence should be grounded on the following observation: There is too much eidetic phenomenology and too little hermeneutics in the theses about worldlessness, poverty in world, and world-formation. This observation becomes even stranger in view of the fact that the apparatus of hermeneutic phenomenology is virtually not applied in scrutinizing the differences between biological life and existence. I am not saying that the existential analytic of Being and Time can contribute to the deconstruction of the life-existence opposition. The exceptionality of existence is much stronger advocated in this work than in the lecture course. My point is that one needs a special kind of hermeneutics (different from that of existential analytic) when treating the biological forms of life. It is this hermeneutics that should complement (and possibly revise) the phenomenological ontology legitimizing the three theses of the lecture course. And it is this kind of hermeneutics that has to be integrated with various strategies of biological conceptualization. Heidegger’s conception of animality serves the task of creating a unifying phenomenology capable of addressing – without conceptual ruptures – the animal form of life and the human way of being as existence. (In saying “without conceptual ruptures”, I refer to the necessary methodological unity and unified conceptuality of the phenomenological approach implemented to animality and human existence. Heidegger’s insistence that there lies an abyss between the animal behavior characterized as poor in world and the existence enabling world-formation requires such a unifying approach. Otherwise the abyss could not be accounted for. The methodological unity is based on a conceptual complementarity in treating the life and existence.²²) The unifying phenomenology should license the constitution of objects of inquiry presumably harboring the ontic-ontological difference in their intrinsic structures – objects bringing into  From today‘s “post-humanist point of view”, the search for a phenomenological approach to non-human and human lifeforms should take into account the proliferation of technological settings creating artificialized lifeforms due to the human interventions in animal life on different biological levels. The artificialized biological lifeforms challenge the classical way of demarcating between the animal and the human form of life.

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play the conceptual complementarity. Heidegger’s approach fails to reach this goal. Indeed, The Fundamental Concepts succeeds in making a phenomenology of animal life partially commensurable with the analytic of humans’ world-forming. Yet without developing a hermeneutics of animality and extending the onticontological difference to the animal forms of life, the task of avoiding conceptual ruptures in treating the relatedness of (biological) life and existence cannot properly be addressed. In this regard, the deficiency of Heidegger’s approach is especially palpable when at stake is the issue of temporality. Heidegger clearly realizes that the extension of phenomenology to cover the living is in need of biological (empirical, ontic) theories and research programs that are able to “save” (to give accounts of) experimentally constructed phenomena as these phenomena are ontologically – by means of the analysis of the animal’s state of poverty in world – envisioned (“formally indicated”). Were this condition not met, the quest for an ontologically reformulated theory of animal life would be an empty exercise. The integration of a kind of phenomenology into biological conceptualization and inquiry consists precisely in envisioning objects of empirical (ontic) research whose procedural constitution ought to take place in an ontologically informed hermeneutic situation that is commensurable with the situation of studying world-formation. Yet Heidegger’s conception fails at the crucial point of properly taking into consideration and spelling out that facet of the ontologically reformulated theory of life which concerns the temporalization of the way of being in poverty in world. Without working out this facet, no constitution of ontologically relevant objects of inquiry could take place. I will conclude this section with an attempt to examine the reasons of this failure. To begin with, Heidegger operates in The Fundamental Concepts with a concept of world that skips the main dimension which Being and Time attributes to this concept – the world is neither present-at-hand nor ready-to-hand, but it is constantly transcending. In the 1929/30 lecture course the world is reduced to something that is (or is not) accessible. The world’s transcendence is totally replaced by the world’s accessibility. But when Heidegger concludes that the animal cannot articulate its environment into things that are either ready-to-hand or present-at-hand – and its poor access to world does not rest on identifying and perceiving something-as-something – he tacitly appeals to the world’s transcendence. He makes it clear on several occasions that though there is no transcending world in the animal behavior, a sort of temporalization takes place in the animal’s absorption in itself as captivation and disinhibition. This conclusion is not to be reached if one entirely operates with a notion of world as accessibility of things. It invokes the broader concept of the world from Being and Time. Though there is no transcending world in the way of being of the nonhuman animals,

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there are several characteristics in this way of being that parallel existential characteristics of human Dasein. How do these characteristics come into being? The answer lies not in the analysis of the accessibility of world, but in the analysis of something that absorption, adaptation, captivation and disinhibition have in common with transcendence. The common denominator is the possibility of temporalizing the respective way of being. Strangely enough, it is only via the concept of the transcending world that one can arrive at the proper temporalization which distinguishes the animal’s way of being as deprived of having world-formation. Heidegger’s conception of animality does not sufficiently specify the animal’s leeway for mastering the immediate environment of its behavior, or the leeway for adapting the environment to the organism’s drives that are to be disinhibited. It goes without saying that the animal behavior masters its immediate environment not by having a reflexive stance and cognitive images. There is neither hermeneutic nor apophantic “as” operating in this mastering. Nevertheless, the animal possesses ethological and ecological plasticity – openness within its captivation – just because its organism is able to temporalize the way in which it adapts its environment to its organism.²³ The plasticity of animal behavior goes hand in hand with animal emotionality. (The animals’ expressivity of emotions – as “surpassing” the instinctual determinacy of animal behavior – shows how animals are experiencing their environments by forming a sense of their individualities. Though not performed within transcending world, the expression of emotions “surpasses” the “structure of drives”. The 1929/30 course dramatically lacks resources for approaching the issues of the animals’ emotions and their expressivity.) It is exactly the nexus of the temporalization of the animal’s life and the attuned plasticity of animal behavior that remains barely noticed in the lecture course.²⁴

 The animal body also has a degree of openness within its specific encircling ring. Because of its openness, “the animal is always more than it already is: it exceeds every ‘already’ in an incalculable manner that can never be theoretically discerned.” (McNeill 2016, 43). The exceeding of every “already” is also an aspect of temporalization.  Heidegger (GA 29/30: 385; 1995, 265) acknowledges that captivation is “not a static condition, not a structure in the sense of a rigid framework inserted within the animal, but rather an intrinsically determinate motility which continually unfolds or atrophies as the case may be.” Treating captivation in this way opens the door for studying the intrinsic temporality of animal life. Biological life is not simply organism – so Heidegger’s argument goes – but is essentially a process. It seems as if this temporality becomes “generated” by a non-human form of being-towards-death – a view that Heidegger denies. Yet he makes an interesting step by asking the question of what kind of history distinguishes the life of the particular individual animal. Posing this question resonates the existential-analytic nexus of temporality and historicality. Heidegger

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The possibility of this temporalization lies somewhere between the pure presence of lifeless entities which in their worldlessness cannot temporalize and the existence’s ecstatic-horizonal modes of temporalizing within the temporality of the transcending world (Kessel 2011, 207– 208). Heidegger pays much attention to the intermediary position which the animal’s poverty in world occupies between worldlessness and world-formation. Yet he says almost nothing about the intermediary kind of temporalizing corresponding to this position. Without scrutinizing such a temporality, however, the development of a theory of life is doomed to incompleteness. Notoriously, in Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger (GA 65: 276 – 278; 1999, 194 – 195) criticizes his own account of the animal’s being in a poverty in world. The meager considerations in this work suggest that he is no longer inspired by the idea of an ontological reformulation of the basic biological concepts of life, animality, and organism. (A biological science built upon such phenomenologically reformulated concepts cannot help one in resisting the “destruction of nature”.) Interestingly enough, this far-reaching self-criticism still misses the subject of the temporalization of animal life. It is my contention that several notions Heidegger tackles – those like the structure of drives, the disinhibition of instinctual drives, the access of world without having world in the encircling ring, the adaptation of environment in organism, and most of all the potentiality for having individuality (a notion Heidegger avoids) – should be recast in a manner that leaves enough room for a concept of temporalizing plasticity in animal life. Seen in this way, temporalizing plasticity would be a counterpart of Dasein’s transcendence as a feature of human existence. The animal organism temporalizes in the midst of what it meets in its specific encircling ring. Of course, this is a kind of temporalizing that essentially differs from the temporalizing of temporality (i. e. the temporal-

does not definitely exclude the possibility of individual history of animal life. However, he seems to ignore the question about the possibility of such a history when drawing the conclusion that the “species-character” is what matters when one approaches the temporality and the history of animal life. As a consequence, the infamous generalization comes to the fore: Though possibly having an individual history, the animal is not individually dying, but it is only coming to an end. The animal’s individuality is most definitely excluded. Thus, Heidegger does not cross the threshold of a phenomenological description of processes of development as they have naturalistically been objectified in various branches of developmental biology. (See also McNeill’s [2015, 57– 59] cogent criticism of Heidegger’s reduction of the temporality of animal life to “the purely biological or vegetative phenomena of birth, growth, maturation, aging, and death”.) At this point the lack of a proper approach to animal emotionality is most palpable in Heidegger’s conception. He would probably have developed a special view about the animal’s individuality/ individualization (including the individual temporalizing of being-captivated), if he had approached issues of animal life’s attunement.

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izing within a horizon of meaningful articulation). It is a temporalizing that demands for its analysis a concept of time that is different from both the objectivist (quantifiable and measurable) time and the hermeneutic-ontological (ecstatichorizonal) time. In fact, Heidegger already presupposes the sui generis temporalization of life when discussing the irreducibility of the organ to the instrument. He argues that it is a mistake to ascribe a particular kind of presence to the organs only because one fails to consider their functioning in terms of the organism. For him, although the organs are constantly present-at-hand, they are “only given in that way of being which we call life.” (GA 29/30: 330; Heidegger 1995, 225). Seen from the perspective of life, the capacity takes the organ into its service. On the level of the living organism, there is an emergent kind of “in-order-to” that is untranslatable into the kind of functional serviceability of the instrument. Following this line of reasoning, the instrument-organ distinction becomes specified by the claim that the ready-made instrument is serviceable for carrying out a practice in a contexture-of-equipment, whereas the organ which arises through the capacity of a living organism is subservient. Accordingly, the organ does not exist without belonging to the capacity which forms the organ in subservience to that capacity. The organ’s subservience has its own leeway for temporalizing its functioning. In Heidegger’s account, the capacity possesses an “originarily subservient character”, and this character precisely provides the decisive argument for the distinctiveness of capacity as compared with readiness. Being subservient by belonging to a capacity is a temporalization of a particular biological function. The functioning of an organ as arising out of a capacity of the organism has a specific regime of temporalizing the fulfillment of the respective function. This temporalization is not to be attained from the purely naturalistic study of the “biological clocks” as related to various biochemical and physiological cycles in the organism. The temporal functioning of organs is the temporalization of capacities’ formation as belonging to the organism adapting its environment to its needs. In reaching this conclusion, one should move from the temporalization of organs’ functioning to that of the organism’s way of being. To say that the animal’s way of being is distinguished by temporal organization is to assert that the animal is rendered capable of temporalizing its ecologically proper behavior. For the non-human animals, this is the way of temporalizing the united ethological and ecological spatiality, granted that the latter is the spatiality of (what Heidegger calls) the “originary structure of animality”. The temporalization achieved by the animal organism is what makes this organism something more than a “bundle of drives”. Seen ontogenetically (in the sense of the biological ontogenesis), this is a temporalization that corresponds to the organism’s potentiality to artic-

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ulate itself into capacities creating organs. Seen ethologically, the temporalization concerns the behavior’s leeway of accomplishing different scenarios. Appropriating and actualizing possibilities – though without reflexively choosing them – is a temporalization. The animal’s capability of articulating itself into capacities creating organs is the temporalization of (what Heidegger calls) “proper peculiarity” (Eigentümlichkeit), or the self-like character of the organism. Heidegger’s approach implies that this character is always in statu nascendi. Because of its leeway and potentiality, the organism in its encircling ring is constantly producing itself, and the temporalization of this self-production cannot be expressed by the measurable dynamics – and its quantifiable variables as they are functionally dependent on mathematical time – of metabolic, physiological, and behavioral processes. The animal organism’s temporalization is also not to be confused with the (positive and negative) feedback time of self-regulation. If this were the case, then Heidegger’s conception of animality would have resulted in a doctrine that would be on a par with something like Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s theory of organism as an open system. In admitting that life is a dynamic equilibrium in a polyphasic system, this theory posits that the metabolizing organism fundamentally contrasts with the chemical equilibria of non-organismic systems. This contrast must be captured by completely different dynamical models invoking alternative mathematical idealizations of time. More specifically, the idealization of quasi-steady state must be brought to bear on the organism’s openness. Yet, thus understood and conceptualized, the metabolizing organism does not differ from any (“worldless”) non-organismic system of chemical reactions in not being able to temporalize its mode of being. Von Bertalanffy’s theory simply introduces new types of mathematical time in the formal objectification of the metabolizing organism as an open system. This theory does not even touch upon the problematic of the organism’s temporalization. However, without scrutinizing this temporalization, the biological part of Heidegger’s conception of the living is at risk of being fully translatable into von Bertalanffy’s “general theory of systems” developed in the period from 1929 to 1934. Brett Buchanan (2008, 101) is right when observes that “Heidegger rarely speaks of a temporal dimension of animals.” Buchanan develops a deep and interesting criticism of Heidegger’s inability to conceptualize animals and organisms in conjunction with time. For him, the most pressing question is “whether animals are temporal beings as well. If they do not have an ecstatic character of time, then transcendence, world, language will fall into place for Heidegger’s analysis. Either a coherent image of animal life will emerge or we will be presented with only the outline of pieces that together form a disrupted picture of animals.” (Buchanan 2008, 104). However, Buchanan seems to subscribe to the

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view that animals have a sense of time to the extent that they are “within time”, but not constituted by ecstatic time. Accordingly, the animal does not temporalize itself.²⁵ In opposing this view, I contend that – albeit not constituted by ecstatic time – animals have a sensibility of time that surpasses their mode of living within time. The question to be asked is how the constitution of the animal’s way of being – as a being of the organism’s self-production – is characterized by a kind of non-ecstatic-horizonal time. To reiterate, the kind of temporalization I am speaking about must not be confused with the timing of the various biological cycles taking place in the animal organism and its relatedness to environment. Doubtless, there is a sense of time in animal life that should be studied by analyzing how the organism experiences these cycles. It is a sense that can also be discovered by “collective organisms” of animal life: The annual periodicity in the migration and reproduction as it occurs in the flocks of birds is a case in point. But this (purely biological) kind of having a sense of time does not exhaust the subject of the way of temporalizing accomplished by individual animals. There is another “sensitivity to time” in animal life, which one – in full agreement with McNeill’s (2015, 58) suggestions – should strongly relate to the animals’ emotional memory. The latter does not operate by means of temporalizing mechanisms of selective forgetting, but nonetheless succeeds in placing the animal’s reactive (and responsive) behavior (including the spontaneous emotions accompanying the reactions) within states of attunement that concern the animal’s sensitivity of having a temporalized way of living. It is this sensitivity that enables the individualization in the animal’s way of being. Hence, there is a theme whose treatment promises a furthering of Heidegger’s “critique of biology”. To stress again, the main shortcoming of his controversial treatment of animal life consists in the fact that – in dealing with the relation of the human Dasein’s attunement to world-forming in a detailed manner – he fully ignores the issues of the animal’s attuned relatedness to its whole way of living. In conceiving of this relatedness as a dimension of animal life that is poor in world, one has also to address it in terms of a “non-human kind of Befindlichkeit”. The animal experiences-and-expresses emotions within the “minimized world” it possesses and within the attuned relatedness to its

 Von Uexküll (1957, 12– 14) discusses another interesting aspect of biological time that, however, is again not to be equated with the issue of the animal life’s temporalizing. I have in view his claim that “without a living subject, there can be no time”. He reaches this conclusion by comparing the human way of experiencing the moment and the tick’s ability “to endure a never-changing world for eighteen years” – a case observed at the Zoological Institute of Rostock.

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way of living. Experiencing and expressing emotions is by no means a side-effect of disinhibiting animal’s instinctual dives. By the same token, animal emotionality is not a mere epiphenomenon of its ecological and ethological determinacy. As already mentioned, the experiential expressivity of this emotionality is rather “surpassing” the animal’s instinctual nature without enabling world-formation. The animal’s experiences and expressions of emotions could take place, only if the animal’s way of being were able to temporalize the “minimized world”. When my cat expresses her sympathy to me, she “opens” a leeway for possible interactions with me by “activating” her emotional memory of how I have had intervened in her limited world. An alternative “regime of temporalizing” – a leeway for interactive behavior that in being put into effect activates a trajectory of emotional memory – comes into play when my cat becomes jealous because I am flirting with the cat of my wife. Interestingly enough, Heidegger ignores the subject of animal emotionality, but nevertheless he briefly addresses the way in which the animal is in a mood as “poverty in mood”. According to his cogent note, animals’ kind of being in a “poverty in mood” is to be distinguished from the way of being in a “mood of poverty” which in turn is to be understood in “analogy with ‘in a mood of melancholy’ or ‘in a mood of humility’.” (GA 29/30: 288; Heidegger 1995, 195). Heidegger is absolutely right when insisting that the difference of the human mood of poverty and the animal poverty in mood does not express a purely quantitative difference. But being in a poverty in mood (as a “kind of deprivation”) is still a kind of being in a mood. (The animal way of being in a mood corresponds to the way in which the animal reveals itself as being which “both has and does not have world”.) Animal behaving in its limited world is indispensably an attuned behavior. What “surpasses” the animal’s instinctual nature – without tearing the encircling ring of animal behavior – is precisely the animal’s being in a mood. In continuing this line of reasoning, one may state that the animal’s way of experiencing-and-expressing emotions presupposes the animal’s peculiar way of constantly being-in-a-certain-mood. To say that animal behavior is attuned is to state that this behavior takes place in an “attuned captivation”. Animals’ attunement belongs to the encircling ring and plays a role in the temporalizing of the captivated behavior within a minimized world. Chimpanzees and dolphins perhaps most clearly show how the attuned-behavior-within-encircling-circle is a requisite for exercising the ability to communicate emotions through vocalization. It remains an open question as to whether these species – via their “attuned communication” – are crossing the threshold of being in “poverty in mood”. Is the animal’s way of being characterized by Befindlichkeit? The author who finds the best way of approaching this issue is Donna Haraway. She does this by involving herself in a critical dialogue not with Heidegger, but with Derrida, who

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in The Animal That Therefore I Am describes his (thereafter widely discussed) experience of how “a little female cat” in a bathroom looked back at him (at Derrida in his nudity). The little cat (as concrete “irreplaceable living being”) is not only behaviorally reacting to the situation in the bathroom, but she is also responding to phenomena she encounters in the presence of another living being. The motif of “intersecting gazes” seems to allude to a possible answer to the question about the attuned character the animal way of being. Haraway (2008, 22) makes the point that “to respond to the cat’s responds to Derrida’s presence would have required his joining that flawed but rich philosophical canon to the risky project of asking what this cat on this morning cared about, what these bodily postures and visual entanglements might mean and might invite …” Only creatures whose modes of being are characterized by Befindlichkeit are capable of intersecting their gazes, thereby responding to each other. Although Haraway highly appreciates Derrida’s conclusion that the little cat is responding and not reacting, she is not happy with his avoidance of seriously considering an alternative – not based on a verbal communication – form of engagement that would be adequate to cat’s responding. One can only gain access to the animal attuned responsivity by means of studying such alternative forms of possible engagement.²⁶

 Having expressed my admiration for Haraway’s superb plea for addressing the meeting between animals and humans in terms of an “attuned encounter”, I have to note that I do not share her naturelcultural universalism possibly leading to a kind of alter-globalization. Roughly, I basically agree with the way in which she approaches the crucial boundary breakdown between animals and humans, but strongly disagree with her visions about the breakdowns between organism and machine, and the physical and the non-physical. For reasons (including ideological ones) which cannot be discussed here, I am not quite sympathetic with her “ontological choreography in technoscience” in which reproductive bio-techno-politics can become a nice surprise. Of course, this disagreement has implications for my reading of her approach to the first boundary breakdown. More specifically, the philosophical discourse through which naturecultures have to be conceptualized should offer more than “contingent foundations”. This statement is an appeal not to a new kind of foundationalism, but to a deeper concept of the world. To be sure, “biological and cultural determinism are both instances of misplaced concreteness – i. e., the mistake of, first, taking provisional local category abstractions like ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ for the world and, second, mistaking potent consequences to be preexisting foundations.” (Haraway 2016, 98). No doubt, the only way of differentiating between nature and culture is through scrutinizing the play of contextual differences between (what in the particular contexts counts as) the natural and the cultural. Yet, in denouncing pre-constituted subjects and objects, and subscribing to Karen Barad’s agential realism and Whitehead’s philosophy, Haraway needs a view of the world that can account for the difference between the ontological play of contextual nature-culture differences and the ontic manifestations of nature and culture.

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1.6 Tentative conclusions I should like to place in a broader context the discussion of the preceding section. One can assume that the validity of Heidegger’s abyss implied by his second and third theses depends on the progress of biosciences. Thus, for instance, one can expect that new phylogenetic reconstructions, new discoveries in evolutionary psychology, or new results in paleontology might help in devising missing links between poverty in world and world-formation. Needless to say that such an expectation wrongly admits that empirical results can directly approve or disapprove theses of ontological phenomenology. Ruling out confusions of this sort also means that new explorations in the family of hominid species through phylogenetic inference methods cannot directly contribute to the issue of where and when the caesura (if any) separating the poverty in world and world-formation took place, simply because the concept of world cannot be introduced as coexisting with concepts referring to morphological data, data about the evolution of important macromolecules, or data about various types of mutations.²⁷ If one were to apply evolutionary biology to the emergence of “world formation”, one would face the need of a profound “ontological reorganization” of the relationship between phylogenetic reconstruction and the synthetic theory of evolution – a reorganization that would provide phylogenetic scenarios for the emergence of “ontological traits” that, in their turn, should allow proper interpretations of the ontologically reorganized relationship in scenarios of biological conceptualization. (In contending that the cultural diversity of human existence is constrained and promoted by the human genome, the reductionist theories of gene-culture coevolution are the exact opposite to the reorganization mentioned.) To be sure, a parallel reorganization has to be undertaken with regard to the ontological conceptualization of the caesura between poverty in world and world-formation. This conceptualization should be able to specify the conditions under which its concepts would become amenable to empirical interpre-

 In the same vein, the purely ontic level of phylogenetic inference methods – the level on which the evolutionary process leading to the emergence of Homo sapiens can (ex hypothesi) be reconstructed without discontinuities and disruptions – must not be regarded as a terrain on which one can finally find solutions to the issues of the ontological analysis of the links (or the lack of links) between the animal way of being and the human way of being. By the same token, results from evolutionary genetics, paleontology, ethology, or primatology showing that there is no difference in kind between anatomically modern humans and their closest nonhuman hominid relatives cannot be implemented for disproving ontological claims about the humans’ distinctive way of being.

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tations. Yet the dialogue and convergence between the two types of conceptualization would by no means lead to a “synthesis” of empirical theories of phylogeny (as based, for instance, on distance-matrix methods) and the ontological theory of world formation. Such a “synthesis” will remain – regardless of the future progress in the dialogue between science and ontological phenomenology – a mere conceptual confusion. Integrating the ontological difference with scientific approaches to biological evolution ought rather to reveal a “third reality” beyond the reality depicted by theories conceptualizing data models and the reality depicted by ontological speculations. The principal significance of The Fundamental Concepts is nicely summarized by Leonard Lawlor. According to him, the “whole structure of Heidegger’s thought is at stake when we make the separation between human existence and animal life uncertain.” (Lawlor 2007, 45). Leaning on a far-reaching interpretation of Derrida’s earlier mentioned critique of the The Fundamental Concepts, Lawlor seeks a way out of the dilemma between biological continuism (humans and animals are fundamentally the same as the most champions of animal rights claim) and metaphysical separationism (humans are fundamentally distinct even from chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans). The (in)famous note in the “Letter on Humanism” that humans’ “ek-sistent essence” separates them from animals by abyss makes Heidegger a typical supporter of metaphysical separationism. (And yet, characterizing Heidegger’s position in this way is incorrect, since the abyss he addresses by no means implies metaphysical dualism of separated realms.) Seemingly, biological continuism presupposes a strong kind of objectivist naturalism. Paradoxically enough, however, the most interesting version of continuism is suggested from a naturalist position that – in contrast to objectivism – puts normativity first, and advocates its tenets by invoking a cultural theory of practices. I have in view Joseph Rouse’s position of normative naturalism which in the next chapter will be discussed in another context. According to Rouse (2015, 161), an adequate account of conceptual normativity – as the basic feature of the human way of articulating the world – “requires the integration of biological teleology and social practice; neither alone is sufficient.” He puts forward an approach to “the biological evolution to conceptual understanding” that has nothing to do with sociobiology or evolutionary epistemology. The crucial element in this approach – the element which also provides the argument for continuism – is the scenario in which all forms of symbolically articulated activity are conceived of in terms of “behavioral niche construction”.²⁸ Accordingly, conceptual-

 Mark Okrent provides further arguments for continuism. Interestingly enough, his well ela-

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ly articulated understanding that involves conceptual normativity of practices is continuous with evolutionary-biological processes of niche construction. Since Rouse elaborates on the distinctiveness of conceptual-normative understanding, his naturalist position is strangely commensurable with anti-naturalist positions (like that of Lawlor) that are looking for a way out of separationism-continuism dilemma.²⁹ Lawlor (2007, 119) convincingly suggests that humans are not continuous with animals, and nonetheless humans are not separate from animals. From an essentially different position and with another type of arguments, I should like to defend the same thesis. My task will consist in demonstrating that there are intermediate forms of life between the “captivated lifeform” deprived of world and human existence (that is not only sufficiently autonomous from, but also holds sway over the human biological lifeform). These intermediate forms are neither “filling the gap” between human and nonhuman animals, nor is their conceptualization supporting metaphysical speculations about the difference in kind between the two types of animals. Rather, they concern the forms of life in which the hermeneutic “as” and the apophantic logos are gradually beginning to take shape. In a first step, I will return to Derrida’s critique – this time, however, the critique not from Of Spirit but from The Animal That Therefore I Am. Derrida insists that the three theses of The Fundamental Concepts – qua theses about the world, and about the possibility of articulating the world – have to be formulated without any concession to the Cartesian tradition. (Like Lacan’s borated philosophical program is also based on a kind of naturalism compatible with normativity about rational human behavior. Okrent adopts a biological perspective to instrumental rationality, while arguing that humans “have good instrumental reasons to come to adopt the practical form of reasoning in addition to the instrumental.” (Okrent 2007, 183). Nonetheless, his conception is not quite convincing when at stake is the issue of the passage from the social nature of human biology to the need of developing the ability to act on principle in Kantian sense. In addressing this issue, he often is blurring the difference between living together in groups as a collective organism that is a continuation of the individual organism and social existence. The passage from biological teleology to social existence is the Achilles’ heel of all programs advocating continuism. Rouse’s program is exception that proves the rule. His combination of naturalism and normativism does not suggest a scenario for treating the passage in question. Yet it succeeds in developing a continuist scenario that avoids this passage.  Missing in Rouse’s reconstructive scenario is a concept similar to that of Umwelt. He tries to conceptualize (in evolutionary terms) the phenomenon of “conceptual understanding” by tracking developments from (a) evolved behavioral patterns regulating adjustments to biological environment to (b) the comportment guided by “conceptual normativity” within cultural worlds. Rouse makes enormous efforts to naturalize existence, without distorting – as this is the case with the traditional naturalist approaches to culture – the ontological specificity of existence.

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claim that the animal could not itself have an unconscious, some of Heidegger’s arguments are still affected by this tradition.) The crux of his disagreement with the conception of animality lies in the observation that “insofar the animal is concerned Heidegger remains, in spite of everything, profoundly Cartesian.” (Derrida 2008, 147). He is not quite definite in making this accusation. But generally, Heidegger’s description of the way in which the animal is “deprived” (of mood and world) has a Cartesian character. Be that as it may, Derrida links his accusation with the claim that there is no pure and simple “as such” that can determine a difference in kind between the animal and the human mode of being. By implication, he insists – and this is the final chord of The Animal That Therefore I Am – that one should pursue the strategy of “pluralizing and varying the ‘as such’.” (Derrida 2008, 160). Pursuing this strategy would deconstruct the dichotomous differentiation between animality and humanity, which is Derrida’s (and Lawlor’s) aim. Could the strategy of pluralizing and varying the “as such” bestow on animals certain forms of experiencing boredom, mourning, melancholy, pleasures, anxiety, Mitsein enabling solicitude, or the mental anguish that comes with freedom? Could this strategy – following Derrida’s critical analysis of Lacan – present the animal as responding instead of only reacting? Could this strategy change the image of the animals’ life as something predetermined? Kelly Oliver (2009, 194) nicely argues that to suggest a missing link between the animal and the being distinguished by freedom “is to reduce the ontological difference to which Heidegger is aiming to a merely ontic difference between beings that can be pointed to by the sharp finger of the anthropologist or paleontologist.” Yet there is an unstated premise in this conclusion: In reducing the ontological difference to an empirical difference, one can discover the missing link if the anthropological, or paleontological, or ethological, or evolutionary psychological approaches to this link were capable of conceptualizing the very reduction as a dimension of what would become conceptualized. The formulation of this premise alone implies that the reduction of the ontological difference is a possible scenario that should take place within a conceptualization that is based on the ontological difference. It is the human life that – in its substrate, embodiment, and organismic reality per se – is always a biological life like the life of any other species. Nonetheless, human biological life is unavoidably carried out as existing within-the-world. The ontological difference that has to be reduced to an empirical difference is within the biological-human-life-as-existing. Even the metabolic reactions in human organism are dependent on the way of existing within-the-world. Human biology is the biology of an existing life that articulates meaning whereby even the most intimate processes in human organism become embedded in horizons of the constitution of meaning.

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Having biological life in a variety of configured cultural practices articulating meaning implies that the biological processes are not isolated from, but are part and parcel of the articulation of meaning. (Notoriously, the culturally/existentially artificialized human biology is a central theme of many post-humanist research programs.) Thus considered, the reduction Oliver has in view is not (only) a philosophical procedure or gesture, but a possibility in the facticity of existence. The possibility of presenting the ontological difference between the two ways of life in terms of an empirical difference – a task requiring philosophical and scientific efforts – rests on the possibility of reducing the life within the transcending world to what Agamben would call “sacer life” or life characterized by its biological “bareness”.³⁰ This is an existential possibility, though – pace Agamben – an impossible possibility. The possibility of reducing the difference between biological life and existence to an empirical difference never becomes – even in Agamben’s “state of exception” – actualized in the human way of being-in-the-world. Even the most “animalistic” human way of living is “always already” within a horizon of existential possibilities and contextualized by strategies of appropriating these possibilities. By the same token, even the most “animalistic” kind of satisfying biological needs in human life always already takes place within cultural practices. There is no human biological life that can escape the destiny of being always already existentialized (placed in the horizon of existence). I said that the difference between biological life and existence resides in the human way of being. But does not the animal life also harbor this difference, if – to pick up again a motif from Derrida’s critique on Lacan – the animal “can cover its tracks”? It is my contention that the missing link is not between two ontic entities – two forms of life describable by one or another common theoretical framework (say, population genetics) – but between biological life (including that of the humans) and the way of being-in-practices-and-possibilities. In other words, it is a missing link within (a version of) the ontological difference. Hence, the task that follows from Derrida’s critique is to discover a missing link that enables forms of

 Despite all the differences, Agamben’s position is not far away from a Derrida-like deconstruction of metaphysical separationism. In analyzing hypotheses about the phylogenetic reality of Homo alalus, Agamben (2004, 36) points out that the “animal-man and the man-animal are the two sides of a single fracture, which cannot be mended from either side.” He also points out that the ontological analysis of the difference between animalitas and humanitas not only makes the former utterly unfamiliar, but also unsettles the latter “as something ungraspable and absent, suspended as it is between a ‘not-being-able-to-remain’ and a ‘not-being-able-to-leaveits-place’.” (Agamben 2004, 51).

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biological life experiencing moods, being-with, the temporalizing of temporality, and even enabling the capability for dying (instead of merely deceasing) within the way of being characterized by poverty in world. Coping with this task can only be successful by integrating non-dichotomous versions of the ontological difference in the empirical conceptualization of the dividing line not between the nonhuman and the human animals, but between biological life and the way of being-in-practices-and-possibilities. In another formulation of the same statement: To put Derrida’s strategy into operation amounts to undertaking a proper (perhaps non-Heideggerian) reading of the ontological difference, since varying the “as such” requires no more and no less than varying this difference, which in Derrida’s perspective should have meant putting it into a play of differences. Hypothetically, one can discover degrees of having the “as such” within the play of differences without (a) succumbing to any form of separationism, and (b) implying that there is a hierarchy of the biological lifeforms. Derrida stresses the need of attenuating the “as such” as the grounding trait of the mode of being that is not deprived of world. Georg Misch, the first significant critic of Being and Time, made the same point in the end of 1920s. Misch criticized the tendency to oppose in a dichotomous way the hermeneutic and the apophantic “as” in existential analytic. This criticism has repercussions for the reading of the ontological difference as a difference between interpretive articulation and predication. Instead of opposing the two forms of presenting something-as-something, one ought to unfold a spectrum of intermediate forms between the ideal pole of a discursive articulation entirely guided by the hermeneutic expressivity and the ideal pole of discursive articulation strongly dominated by predicate logic. The intermediate forms would be characterized by their degrees of attenuation [Abschwächung] of apophantic logic, which should bring into play an extension of logic beyond its traditional boundaries and internal distinctions. Accordingly, the ontological difference between prepredicative interpretation and predication would be relativized and integrated with discursivity and discursive expressivity. This step would pave the way for substituting the “hermeneutic logic of discursivity” for the search for a fundamental ontology which, according to Misch, is still a metaphysical venture. Derrida’s appeal to a strategy of pluralizing and varying the “as such” is completely in line with Misch’s project for a hermeneutic logic – a project that has essentially inspired Plessner’s philosophical biology.³¹ To sum up, at stake in (Plessner’s, Derrida’s, Lawlor’s, and Oliver’s) criticisms of Heidegger’s concept of animality is the view that the animal lacks

 See in this regard Ginev (2011b).

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the as-structure, since the animal’s behavior is never grounded on an apprehending of something as something. (Apprehending something as something is the prerequisite for moving from Umwelt to Welt. Yet this movement is by no means an “immediate ontological switch”. It can and must be thought as passing through various stations.) From von Uexküll’s perspective, the perceptual and motor signs (marks) prevent the animal from taking a distance from the functional cycle of its perceptive-reacting behavior. Roughly, the (apophantic) “as such” is what would enable such a distance. (Of course, von Uexküll does not make this conclusion. But it is completely in line with his Kantian stance.) Despite his controversial concept of animality, Heidegger does not jump from the way of being in encircled rings to the way of being guided by apophantic judgments. The constellation of world-formation, openness, freedom, and experiencing a mood comes into being with the hermeneutic “as”. In another formulation, ecstatic existence capable of forming world “starts” with the interpretive articulation of something-as-something. Using the word “starts” implies an essential ambiguity. One could suppose – again at the expense of confusing empirical with onto-phenomenological claims – that the “initial stage” in the transition from the enclosed way of being to the interpretive-articulating way of being – the way of being condemned to be open – can phylogenetically be identified. This would be a supposition as absurd as the “synthesis” of phylogenetic reconstructions and ontological speculations. Pace Heymann Steinthal and many others, there is no evolutionary stage in anthropogenesis characterized by a prelinguistic human world, that is, a world meaningfully articulated not by means of logos. As it will be shown in the upcoming chapters of this study, the forestructuring is due to the humans’ being-in-interrelated-practices as these practices project their totality upon possibilities. Hence, the fore-structuring is not a mysterious pre-linguistic articulation of the world. There neither is abstract thinking capable of logical articulation, nor human activity (as opposed to instinctual behavior) without language. The fore-structuring of agential, cognitive, and discursive structures takes place within the medium of practices interplaying with the possibilities (for a meaningful articulation) that the configurations of these practices at once project and appropriate. In this perspective, language is also a medium of discursive practices and a horizon of possibilities for discursive articulation. It is the medium in which the projection and appropriation of these possibilities is fore-structuring explicit linguistic structures. Heidegger assigns ontological priority of the hermeneutic “as” over the apophantic logos within the discursive articulation of the world. This priority is by no means referring to events in chronological order. It does not imply that in their existence humans first articulate the world in a pre-predicative interpretive

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way, and subsequently put into operation the apophantic “as”. There is no hermeneutic fore-structuring operating independently from the structuring power of apophantic logos. Following the tenets of existential analytic, both kinds of “as” always already work in concert, but are nonetheless dichotomously contrasted, which provoked Misch’s criticism. More specifically, the hermeneutic “as” is forestructuring the (linguistic, cognitive, and agential) structures established by the apophantic logos. They both are involved in the hermeneutic circle of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Fore-structuring within a hermeneutic circle is what makes existence open, transcendent, distinguished by freedom and capable of temporalizing itself within its own horizon of possibilities. One has good reasons to assume that this fore-structuring is the missing link between biological life and existence. (Presumably, there are biological lifeforms characterized by minimal degrees of fore-structuring.) Attributing this status to the missing link has crucial consequences for conceptualizing intermediate forms of life between those which are completely enclosed and captivated in their encircling rings and human existence. The “as such” taken as a synonym of the apophantic “as” stands, in the first place, for the epistemic distance (from all kinds of signs in von Uexküll’s sense). This distance is enabled by the predication based on apophantic “as”. Taking such a distance leads to (a) breaking the functional cycles of perceptual and motor signs, and (b) cognitively recognizing (through images of) discrete entities replacing the totality of projected signs (as Umwelt of coordinated visual, tactile, olfactory, auditory, and other sensory spaces in conjunction with operational space). The living organism gains by means of (a) and (b) images of cognitively delineated environments that are never reachable within a certain Umwelt, no matter how rich of signs it could be. This is why the distance taken in this way is an epistemic distance. The images of cognitively delineated environments are endowed with symbolic meaning – understood as meaning transcending the umweltliche “significance” contained in the sensory signs/disinhibitors – that is contextually encoded and could contextually be decoded. Symbolic meaning can be designated, and thanks to the epistemic distance it is referential. The space opened by symbolic meaning is where the “as” of predication begins to operate. It is the space that unites abstract (discursive) thinking, semiosis (designation and signification), and reflexively organized actions and activities. Thinking operating through the production of signs designating symbolic meaning indispensable for organizing purposive action (contrasting reactive and instinctual behavior) alludes to a triangle of interdependent cognition, semiosis, and action. This

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triangle is another figure for what the apophantic “as” of predication determines.³² Starting from the apophantic “as” offers a convenient standpoint for addressing the triangle of cognition, semiosis, and action in a classical-transcendental manner. All cognitive, semiotic, and agential structures constituted by the work of this “as such” build “structural-semiotic worlds” that can hypothetically be conceptualized from the position of an extended transcendental epistemology. (It is this position that most typically is illustrated by Cassirer’s transcendental theory of the symbolic forms of cultural existence. Yet the assumption that there are transcendentally primordial symbolic functions of the constituting human mind runs against the assumption that all mental functions have existential genesis. Due to his debate with Heidegger, Cassirer started to insist in the 1930s on the role of what he calls “grounding phenomena” – existential structures that ontologically precede the symbolic functions. For Cassirer, however, this ontological gesture – performed beyond neo-Kantian transcendentalism – is closer to philosophy of life and Scheler’s phenomenology than to existential analytic.) When Heidegger contends that the animal way of being is deprived of the “as such”, he is not trying to suggest that the abyss between poverty in world and world-formation is tantamount to the abyss between behaving within encircling rings and acting in accordance with the apophantic logos. He rather aims to show that the basic deficiency of captivated behavior is its lack of interpretively articulating something as something. Because pre-predicative interpretive articulation goes together with predication that forms cognitive, discursive, and agential structures, the way of being that is poor in world cannot unfold that hermeneutic circle which characterizes existence. The abyss is between (a) disinhibiting and releasing the inhibitedness of the instinctual drive, and (b) interpre-

 Why the animal is not capable of transcending its own Umwelt whereby starting to constitute meaning instead of having only “disinhibitors”? According to the simple philosophical answer of Heidegger (repeated by Agamben), because the animal is not able to see the open. To see the open means to have ongoing articulation of meaning instead of having fixed and firm marks (perceptual and motor signs, disinhibitors). Seeing the open becomes possible for a living creature that is deprived of its own functional cycles in von Uexküll’s sense – a creature capable of de-concealing all possible disinhibitors. Freeing from particular environments-worlds marks a caesura that precedes and enables the human way of living characterized by the triangle of signifying, cognizing, and having a goal-oriented agency. The functional cycles become replaced by interpretive symbolization that creates the unity of signifying, cognizing, and having a behavior based on rationally organized actions. The creature without specific Umwelt – the fugitive from the purely biological life, Plessner’s Homo Absconditus – is doomed “to see the open” in its being-in-the-world. It is doomed to exist by symbolizing.

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tively fore-structuring the structures mentioned. But according to Misch’s and Derrida’s criticisms, there is no abyss at all between (a) and (b), since between them intermediate forms can take place. These forms must not be confused with empirically identifiable (extant or extinct) forms of life that either cannot be specified as entirely animal and entirely human, or are in one or another sense hybrid forms of life. Depending on whether one follows an intrinsic revision of Heidegger, or Misch, or Derrida, the identification of intermediate forms has to be accomplished either in hermeneutic-phenomenological terms, or in hermeneutic-logical terms, or in terms of deconstruction.³³ The intermediate forms located between biological life and existence are capable of constituting particular contexts, but they cannot disclose a whole intercontextual world. (Sometimes, these are highly sophisticated contexts. Think, for instance, of the context-of-expressing-mourning in which a famous grieving orca whale has been holding on her dead calf for seventeen days. This is a context that transcends orca’ Umwelt.) The intermediate forms are not capable of projecting the world as potentially inexhaustible interwovenness of contexts (or intercontextuality). But they are also not forms of protoculture. The ethological concept of “protoculture” chiefly refers to learned behavior that can be passed from one generation to another. With regard to the way in which the intermediate forms were introduced and defined, this concept can play a little role in the present discussion. The intermediate forms are ontologically defined in a manner that allows various biological interpretations of them. The scenarios of these interpretations depend on how the ontological difference will be integrated with the pertinent kind of biological conceptualization. But it would be wrong to assume that the intermediate forms can definitely be identified with (a) ethological patterns of resilient animal behavior, (b) entities of evolutionary taxonomy, and (c) the forms of manifested behavior of species belonging to a certain taxonomic rank. The intermediate forms are defined by means of contextual differences,

 There is also another possible way of addressing the intermediate forms. It is a way that bridges hermeneutic phenomenology with the philosophy of symbolic forms. Existence is characterized by the total replacement of all disinhibitors and environmental circles with perceptual and cognitive images of what one encounters and perceives within the world. Each of these images is an outcome of interpretive symbolization. In this regard, one may conclude that existence replaces the instinctually determined environmental spaces of coordinated sensory perceptions with interpretive symbolization. This is why existence is free from underlying cycles of sensory and motor signs. But elementary forms of symbolization are generated – independently of existence – by forms of biological life. It is these forms that mediate between biological life and existence.

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and the concept of them gets meaningless beyond the play of these differences. Depending on the context that will be brought into focus, an intermediate form can become apparent in the behavior of different organisms (including humans) belonging to different levels of the taxonomic hierarchy. To stress again, the intermediate forms are not betwixt animals and humans, but mediate between biological life and the way of being-in-practices-and-possibilities.

2 Conceptualizing practices beyond the paradigm of discreteness 2.1 A short historical excursus The question of what practice theory is about was for the first time indirectly posed and answered by Harold Garfinkel. In stressing that the main topic of ethnomethodology is the “contingent ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life,” Garfinkel (1967, 11) actually implies a research program broader than the scope of ethnomethodology. If the latter should exclusively be preoccupied with the descriptive-phenomenological minute study of the accountable methods through which the social actors construct the local orders of their routine activities and situated actions (including their whole life-worlds), the program originally sketched out by Garfinkel would have had to deal with an issue that cannot be addressed in a purely descriptive manner. This is the issue of how social actors organize their daily activities in practices that in turn manage to emancipate a kind of everydayness as a stable lifeform. It was, historically seen, the study of the transformation of regular and repeatable activities building contingent and unstable manifolds of practices into a sustainable everydayness of recurrently interrelated practices that set the scene for an independent practice theory. I mentioned the concept of (cultural) lifeform which will play a pivotal role in this and the next chapter. The complicated history of this concept requires a separate investigation. In entering various theoretical discourses, the concept has always been associated with concepts like practices, phronēsis, authenticity, habitus, lifeworld, ethos, practical intelligibility, Sittlichkeit, tradition, non-imposed normativity, and so on.¹ Like the ethnomethodological studies of everyday

 Because of the close relations with the concepts mentioned, the discussion of the cultural forms of life has been often placed on the borderline between political philosophy and culture theory. An example in this regard is Burkhard Liebsch’s (2001) profound study of the “fragile lifeforms” (zerbrechliche Lebensformen). This study meticulously analyzes the resources which Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophy offer for approaching in ethical terms issues about conflicting cultural identities, the “morality of antagonism”, the explicit and implicit kinds of violence within the plurality of lifeforms, and so on. Paradigmatic for the interpretation of the cultural lifeforms in terms of a critique of modern politics is also Agamben’s conception of the bare life. Agamben makes the difference between “the bare life of homo sacer” and the qualified forms of life into a basic distinction of his conception. In contrast to the bare life, the forms of life are subjected to the rules of the political systems. However, the bare life (in modern states) is also politically produced. As a result, the threshold of articulation between https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110605303-004

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life, the concept of lifeform – as it nowadays circulates in the philosophical and human-scientific literature – is inspired by Wittgenstein’s use of the term. G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker (2009, 218 – 221) draw attention to the fact that Wittgenstein’s expression “form of life” is not a technical expression. They also point out that the naturalist reading of this expression in terms of a unique human form of life reflecting the human animal’s biological nature is mistaken. (Wittgenstein uses the expression “multiple forms of human life”.) His concept of form(s) of life is a cultural concept, a concept stressing the variety of lifeforms in different cultures and epochs. Another important characteristic underscored by Baker and Hacker is that the forms of life cannot fully be rationalized, since they lie beyond epistemic justification. In this regard, David Kishik (2008, 7) convincingly argues that Wittgenstein’s concept is strongly dependent on his view of life as something that cannot be defined “because it remains in a certain zone of indetermination.” Nevertheless, the concept of forms of life mediates between epistemology and the studies of social phenomena, which – historically seen – paved the way for a Wittgensteinian social philosophy (Winch 1958, 42). It is the connotations which Wittgenstein bestows on the “forms of life” that allow a reading of the concept in connection with the notions of “embodied agents” and “engaged agency”. In Charles Taylor’s (1995, 62) cogent formulation, the world of the embodied agent is shaped by one’s form of life. “Engaging the world” (in Taylor’s sense) amounts to shaping a lifeform. Because human agency is engaged and rooted in existential finitude, the world in which it operates cannot be conceptualized as neutral factuality, but rather as (what in the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics starting with Dilthey is called) facticity (Nelson 2007). As is well known, Heidegger repeatedly interprets and reformulates Dilthey’s ideas in his lectures from the Marburg period. An important reformulation receives – along with the concept of life – the concept of facticity. Following the principle of the “unfathomability of life” (die Unhintergehbarkeit des Lebens), Dilthey conceived of facticity as the Empirie of life related to the unity of understanding, experience, and expressivity – an Empirie imbued with conditions for possibility of constituting particular forms of life. In progressively differentiating between life and existence, Heidegger criticized precisely the indistinguishability of the empirical and the transcendental, and the main outcome of his criticism was the introduction of the ontic-ontolog-

nature (bare life) and the cultural forms of life is what biopolitics regulates. By implication, Western politics is a biopolitics from the very beginning. Following this line of reasoning, Agamben (1998, 181) reaches the famous conclusion that today “the camp is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.” See also Bubner (1984), and Ginev (2003b).

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ical difference.² In the lecture course from the Summer Semester of 1923, Heidegger develops a hermeneutic approach to “the self-interpretation of facticity”. The very formulation alludes to the idea of double hermeneutic which is the alternative to the attempts at representing facticity by means of manifolds of discrete facts. Interpreting is already conceived of as an ontological phenomenon that belongs to “the being of factical life” itself. Against this background, Heidegger states that the ownmost possibility of facticity is existence. The conceptual explications resulting from interpreting the way in which interpreting is constitutive for existence are to be designated as existentialia. As characteristics of the self-interpretation of facticity, existentialia are only to be conceptualized with regard to the fore-having and the fore-conception of what is at stake in this self-interpretation. The “hermeneutics of facticity” reveals existentialia as “moments” of the facticity’s being-possible. What is revealed in this way is first and foremost the impossibility of reducing facticity to an actually present object. In paying attention to the fore-having and the fore-conception of facticity’s self-interpretation, the hermeneutics of facticity deals with the issue of how the “anticipatory leap forward” (as achieved through the self-interpretation) “and the running in advance should be undertaken and can only be undertaken.” (Heidegger 1999a, 13). In its self-interpretation, facticity temporalizes itself within its own horizon of temporality. Facticity temporalizes itself within its “average everydayness”. A generalized formula of these claims that can be found in an appendix to the 1923 lecture course sounds as follows: “Facticity – ontology – being – the awhileness of temporal particularity – Dasein in its beingthere: each related to hermeneutics.” (Heidegger 1999a, 81). As is well known, the path from this formula of the “hermeneutics of facticity” to the full-fledged project of hermeneutic phenomenology is highly complicated, and related to various re-interpretations of the concept of facticity (Kisiel 1993, 275 – 308). But even the preliminary project from 1923 already appeals to what is most essential for the present study – the ontological difference between factuality and facticity.³  Heidegger tacitly makes use of the ontic-ontological difference in Being and Time when outlining the “exposition of the question of the meaning of being”, but explicitly refers to it in Vom Wesen des Grundes. Yet already “in 1923 in Freiburg and then in 1924 in Marburg, the term ‘ontological difference’ was at that time like a magic word.” (Gadamer 2007, 357; see also Vetter 2014, 153 – 154).  The proliferating studies on Heidegger’s concept of facticity demonstrate the multifariousness of this concept. Accents in the studies are placed on Heidegger’s encroaching on facticity via thrownness and state-of-mind as this approach anticipates the introduction of the concept of Ereignis after the “turn” (Agamben 2000, 202– 204); the relation between the concepts of facticity and historicity (Nelson 2001); the young-Hegelian motives in Heidegger’s treatment of facticity (Grondin 1994); the links between Heidegger’s concept and the concept of alterity (Visker

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For reasons that will be explicated below, the world of interrelated practices capable of constituting various forms of everydayness in which human agency operates ought to be addressed in terms of facticity. But is this statement to be extended to human agency itself? To undertake this extension – and to work out a special concept of the “agency of lifeforms” qua a prolongation of human agency – is a controversial initiative. (I will provide several arguments against such an extension.) According to the approach that will be developed in this chapter, there is nothing wrong with the objectivist theories that conceptualize human agency as it is incorporated in agential behavior. In this case, human agency can theoretically be represented via explanatory models whose explananda refer to pure factuality. Yet if at issue is human-agency-within-theworld-of-practices, any objectifying conceptualization is doomed to failure. The world in which human agency operates is designed as configurations of practices and a diversity of lifeforms. More specifically, within this world the relation of human agency to (cultural) lifeforms is mediated by configurations of practices. The role of agential behavior (in articulating lifeforms) is attenuated in favor of these configurations. Shifting the focus from agential behavior to configured practices has profound consequences for the strategy of conceptualizing the “being of meaning”. It is my contention that the way of studying the transformation of routinized activities into sustainable forms of everydayness and lifeforms requires an ontological approach to social practices, or better a conceptualization capable of implementing the ontological difference. At stake in this transformation is the distinctiveness of concerted practices that through their interrelatedness constitute the everydayness of a lifeform emancipated from the “anomie” of the public life. I said that the birthplace of practice theory is Garfinkel’s initial project for ethnomethodology. However, the task of conceptualizing concerted practices capable of constituting everydayness of a lifeform is doubtless irrelevant to the agenda of ethnomethodology. In the eyes of those who support this agenda, an ontological approach to practices would restore the “bias towards explanatory theory” which Garfinkel and his followers strongly oppose. By the same token, an account of how a cultural lifeform can become emancipated through its routine practices suggests (again in the eyes of ethnomethodologists) an – if not essentialist, at least – explanatory form of conceptualization that is at odds with the very idea of presuppositionless description. Conceptualizing situated accom2008); the relevance on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology to spelling out aspects of facticity that are underdeveloped in Heidegger’s concept (Flynn 2008; Rogozinski 2008). On the concept of facticity as mediating Heidegger’s passage from the hermeneutics of facticity to hermeneutic phenomenology, see Kisiel 1993, 227– 275; Caputo 1994; and Campbell 2012, 103 – 140.

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plishments by introducing the ontological difference between factuality and facticity is also not on the list of admissible initiatives. And yet, there are several valuable consequences for practice theory that follow from Garfinkel’s original program. To mention one of them, practice theory ought first and foremost to deal not with ready-made structures, but with the ongoing construction of orders within practices whose performances contextually create cultural identities of practitioners as “members” of these orders, provided that practitioners never take for granted normatively fixed identities, and are constantly capable of calling into question the normative roles and scenarios they should supposedly follow. In engaging chiefly with actors’ reflexivity – as something that disqualifies any attempt at treating actors as “judgmental dopes” – students in ethnomethodology acknowledge the fact that contextual reflexivity is always exercised within horizons, but they tend to ignore the issue of how actor’s reflexive activities are embedded within these horizons that are ever transcending them.⁴ In failing to address the issue of transcendence, they miss the opportunity to orient the ethnomethodological description toward the facticity of being-in-practices. No matter how successfully they deconstruct traditional sociological factuality (as this is determined by explanatory schemes), their descriptive studies are dealing with a kind of non-hypostatized factuality, but not with facticity. Reflexivity enabling behavioral plasticity within a horizon of anticipations and expectations is empirically manifested as a dimension of the facticity of existing. Of course, the statement that ethnomethodological description has no resources to cope with facticity does not necessarily amount to making a diagnosis of a severe deficiency. Ethnomethodologists have good reasons for arguing that facticity (as conceptualized by hermeneutic phenomenology) assumes a holistic view about the interpretive articulation of meaning, which is precisely what they struggle against. But there is a much deeper difference lying behind the contrast between the “micro-factuality” (or factuality-as-indexicality) of ethnomethodology and the holist facticity of existence which has by no means – as it will become clear – a (hypostatized) “macro” character. The factuality of ethnomethodological description consists of “the vast domain of interpretive and ‘accommodative’ activ-

 In contravening ordinary presumptions and conventions (and even the whole “natural attitude”), Garfinkel’s (1963) “breaching experiments” – aiming at a disruption of background understanding in order to make them explicit – do indeed concern horizons of routine activities and conversations. But arguably, the subsequent analyses of the experiments’ outcomes have paid little attention to the conceptualization of the members’ being-within-horizons. The arising orders of actions and interactions are only scrutinized in their indexicalities, but not in their interpretive relatedness to horizons.

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ity through which ‘order’ and ‘organization’ is sought and found in everyday affairs as ‘percievedly normal’ courses of conduct.” (Heritage 1984, 103). Describing the located organization of scenes of conduct follows a certain “scheme of concatenation”. It is a concatenation of situated actions organized by ethnomethods as routine activities that by establishing interactive networks and orders can take shape of practices expressing courses of conduct. As an alternative to this scheme of concatenation, the conceptualization of practices in terms of the facticity of existence suggests that any human (cultural) world is disclosed as an interrelatedness of practices in which actions and activities take place in a manner that makes them situated in and transcended by this interrelatedness. As compared with ethnomethodology, the “genealogical” order of having a being-in-practices is completely reversed: Existentially primary is the disclosure of a world of interrelated practices in which the concatenation of actions, accommodative activities, and courses of conduct take place. According to this reversal, factuality-as-indexicality is always produced within facticity as the ongoing constitution of meaningful entities within the horizons of interrelated practices. An interrelatedness of practices that sustains the facticity of existence does not result from a process of networking of actions and activities. By implication, the reality of interrelated practices is ontologically different from the reality which is entirely determined by human agency. Ethnomethodology fails to recognize and conceptualize this difference. Here is a hypothetical example that should throw light on this claim. Imagine an alien who asks an ethnomethodologist what is cooking. (The alien presumably has an alternative lifeform that does not need the consumption of food.) As answer he receives the advice to go in a setting called “restaurant” and to look for a room called “kitchen”. In the kitchen he should embark on meticulous observations on what practitioners are doing. The alien has to locate organized activities and emerging orders of actions and interactions. He should find and document intelligible patterns in carrying out activities involving constituent actions and interactions. In the next step, the alien has to pay attention to how the actors’ reflexive control in performing actions and activities “contributes to the sense of the scene which is undergoing development as a temporal sequence of actions.” (Heritage 1984, 104). The scene should be perceived as normal when the reflexively organized activities are understood as predicated on intelligibility and accountability. The alien should carefully observe actions that reflexively reconstitute the scene, since these actions invoke situations of choice. Cooking is not algorithmically achieved orders and organizations. Actions and activities of cooking constantly generate situations of choice. When the alien begins to document courses of reflexive conduct (orders of actions organizing activities), he will get the opportunity to compose a picture – by matching the

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documented intelligible patterns – of what cooking is: Discovering intelligible normative patterns of reflexive conduct amounts to discovering “materials through which, via the documentary method of interpretation, the reflexive determination of the ‘whatness’ of conduct is possible.” (Heritage 1984, 109). The ethnomethodologist would warn the alien against the risk of treating the actors’ reflexive control in terms of rules guiding or causing the orders of actions. The alien is advised not to explain courses of conduct by determining rules. If the alien proceeds in this way, he would get a very poor image of cooking as a set of rules. The alien agrees. I am not sure whether the alien will be able to understand what cooking is by following the ethnomethodologist’s instructions and advice. But I am sure that all components of the picture which the alien would get belong to something (“the domain of cooking”) disclosed and being in a state of ongoing articulation within the interrelatedness of subsistence-oriented, culinary, technological, dietary, ceremonial, religious, aesthetic, and many other kinds of practices. All “courses of cooking conduct” are meaningful by being situated within the disclosed domain of sociocultural life. What the alien would not receive by following the instructions is an answer to the question of how the domain of cooking is disclosed and articulated in configurations of such practices that also constitute settings such as “restaurant” and “kitchen”. Yet the suspension of theory in ethnomethodology should not be trivialized. It is not an empiricist gesture, but rather an invitation for theorizing without placing in a conceptual framework the descriptions of indexicalities. The initiative of deconstructing the ready-made sociological facts (the facts constructed through standard sociological analyses) by describing how sociologists’ professional ethno-methods work alludes to such a form of theorizing. Deconstructing theoretically laden facts – in accordance with the program of “working out Durkheim’s aphorism” about sociology’s fundamental phenomenon – reveals a texture of social reality that is much denser than the texture obtained through explanatory sociological theories. In another formulation, deconstructing the analytically prepared sociological factuality reveals a new “fundamental phenomenon” consisting of the neglected field details of phenomena composing “Durkheim’s immortal, ordinary society” (Garfinkel 2002, 169). Michael Lynch (1999, 213) argued two decades ago that the refusal to articulate a set of theoretical presuppositions “is not motivated by a naïve attempt to proceed without presuppositions.” Lynch himself figures out a kind of ethnomethodological conceptualization based on a quite idiosyncratic understanding of inductive logic. He is not referring to the inductive methods employed in “the analytical world of science”, but to the incrementally growing knowledge about the ways in which “members” build their everyday life-worlds, thereby reflexively constructing their identities via practices they perform. Of course, the “induc-

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tive theorizing” of a lifeworld-in-the-making has nothing to do with statistical proceeding of data. Lynch’s inductive logic is in fact a sort of hermeneutic logic: The more scrupulous is the description of members’ involvement in lifeworld practices, the greater is the revealing of the lifeworld as a horizon of members’ being. This “logic” cannot work without ontological difference – the ontic factuality of indexicalities and the ontological horizon are mutually presupposing each other in a common hermeneutic circle. Accordingly, a research based on Lynch’s inductive-hermeneutic logic appeals to facticity rather than to factualityas-indexicality. Paradoxically formulated, Garfinkel’s followers cannot avoid (interpretive) presuppositions when claiming that all human activities can be described in a presuppositionless manner. A great achievement of this tradition is the way of treating the actors’ identities not as labeling signs already made, but as identities-in-the-making inseparable from the reflexive attainment of orders and organizations. If the researcher presupposes (before starting the minute description of the courses of conduct) something (say) about the actors’ mindset, then she would distort her description by seeing “facts” that exclusively follow from what is presupposed. Yet ethnomethodologists take into consideration that there is a constant reflexive enactment of local and contextual presuppositions in actors’ identities-in-the-making. Studying these presuppositions cannot be accomplished in a presuppositionless (and in a purely descriptive) manner. Gadamer’s arguments for the ineliminability of prejudices are most relevant to the studies of how actors’ presuppositions operate during the implementation of ethno-methods. Ethnomethodologists also need to constantly subject their own presuppositions to radical reflexivity in order to keep alive their sensitivity to contextual indexicalities and the actors’ contextually enacted presuppositions (Pollner 1991). Melvin Pollner essentially extends the scope of ethnomethodology – in a manner relevant to practice theory – by linking the need of radical reflexivity in studying actors’ judgmental reflexivity with deconstructionist initiatives. Accomplishing the task of studying the reflexive resilience of actors/members’ ways of creating local orders by getting to grips with presuppositions (prejudices) at work in actors’ practical understandings and expectations cannot be restricted to the description of situated actions and particular contexts. Taking into consideration the actors’ horizons of understanding and expectation again extends the field of ethnomethodological work to the facticity of practices. Tentatively, this facticity is the common terrain of situated actions and changing presuppositions (involved in actors’ judgmental reflexivity). Like the play of signified and signifier, the outcomes of performing practices (organized by ethno-methods) are constantly open to be implemented as means in the perform-

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ances of newly emerging practices. The play of outcomes of performances and means of performances as embedded in a shifting horizon of possibilities is a basic feature of the facticity of practices. Thus, I return to the point of departure: Garfinkel’s initial formulation of the task of ethnomethodology entails the need for a (non-explanatory) theory of practices that is capable of conceptualizing facticity of being-in-practices. The formation of practice theory significantly resembles the development of ethnomethodology in having been also promoted by the anti-essentialist reading of Wittgenstein’s concept of rule-following. In contrast to ethnomethodology, however, practice theory gained its distinctive profile due to an ontological turn in the strategy of conceptualization. In trying to make sense of this statement, let me briefly address a famous dictum of Lynch. He argues that the “praxeological orientation” dominating the studies in ethnomethodology prompts the researchers to conceive of what becomes meaningfully articulated in various sociocultural settings “not as ontological entities, foundational processes, parts of society, social structures, cultural systems, behavioral mechanisms, or cognitive faculties, but as situated accomplishments by the parties whose local practices ‘assemble’ the recurrent scenes of action that make up a stable society.” (Lynch 2001, 140). Doubtless, Lynch offers a perfectly anti-essentialist formulation that justifies the avoidance of explanatory models in his research tradition. Those who welcome the ontological turn in practice theory do not dispute this cogent formulation of ethnomethodology’s anti-essentialism. But they tend to ask the question of whether there is room – despite the rejection of any form of theorizing that reifies practices – for a “non-essentialist ontological approach” in conceptualizing the “situated accomplishments” (and the orders they institute). What Lynch definitely denies is the “ontology of presence-at-hand”. But what about an ontology of the potentiality-for-being of all entities described within the scope of ethnomethodology?⁵ Insisting on a non-essentialist ontological approach – as it  This question is raised even in Lynch’s tradition by those who believe in the possibility of a “Heideggerian ethnomethodology”. Alec McHoul (1998) discusses this possibility by taking into consideration the ontological difference. He goes on to draw a strong parallel between Garfinkel’s distinction between ethnomethodology and formal sociological analysis, and Heidegger’s differentiation between coming to presence and that which is present. Although highly imaginative and full with interesting suggestions, McHoul’s undertaking can be criticized in two respects. Firstly, he avoids essential aspects of the ontological conceptualization. In order to take these aspects into consideration, one has to transform the description of what is coming to presence through implementing ethno-methods into a kind of interpretation of facticity. Yet the upshot of this transformation would no longer be ethnomethodology (Ginev 2013c). Secondly, McHoul too easily equates the non-explanatory description of indexicalities with the ontolog-

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proceeds through double hermeneutic – is to be seen as an antidote to the tendency to take the outcome of analysis as prepared within the source of analysis. (According to those who support this tendency, applying ethno-methods methods generates native conceptions, taxonomies, terminologies, and explanations about the created social orderliness. In other words, the know-how of implementing ethno-methods enacts knowledge about this implementation and the reflexive organization of everyday practices. The role of the analyst should be restricted to descriptions of the native “theoretical work” producing this knowledge. Any further conceptual reconstruction of native knowledge would prevent one from dealing with what Garfinkel calls “the in vivo local production and natural accountability” of social orderliness.) Dispensing with the tendency towards deriving the outcome of analysis from the source of analysis is a prerequisite for developing strategies of conceptualization proceeding through the ontological difference. I argued elsewhere that the combination of gaining a reflexive distance from what is under study and avoiding explanatory essentialism can be attained by means of a kind of double hermeneutic that has much to do with the attempt at integrating the ontological difference into practice theory (Ginev 2018, 92– 125). In line with the distinction between factuality-as-indexicality and holist facticity, I come now to the following conclusion: If one takes into consideration that ethnomethodology’s accent on the “situated accomplishments” should go with a parallel accent on the horizons which transcends these accomplishments, one would realize that the conceptualization of (what I called) situated transcendence cannot avoid the “implantation” of the ontological difference in this conceptualization. Practice theory deals with practices, and not with praxis as opposed to theory. It should conceptualize not the presence of emergent properties in social dynamics, but the sui generis reality arising out of the performances of interrelated practices. Any one social practice becomes meaningful through those practices with which it is configured. Any one practice ceases to be an enclosed structure of actions and activities, when it is placed, contextualized, and transcended by that interrelatedness of practices which makes it a meaningful practice. I will try to show that an assemblage of practices that has the capacity to make any constituent practice a meaningful unit is a particular manifestation of the facticity of

ical study of what becomes meaningfully articulated. The ontological study of the constitution of meaning is much more than studying in situ processes of coming-to-be. The description of how ethno-methods work in creating orders is an entirely ontic initiative. Ethnomethodology successfully embarks on that subject which traditional sociology fails to address – the local production of social facts. But ethnomethodology does not offer resources to integrate the ontological difference into its research scenarios.

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practices. According to a further claim, the performance of (and the outcome of performing) a single social practice gains the character of a meaningful unit within the horizon of meaningfulness projected by the interrelatedness of concerted practices constituting an assemblage. Analytically seen, (the performance of) such a single practice loses essential aspects of its meaningful character when treated isolated in terms of a self-sufficient discrete unit. A single practice-entangled-with-ensemble-of-interrelated-practices is much richer of meaning than the same practice treated in isolation. Moreover, certain forms of interrelatedness of practices manage to articulate – via the routinization (as everydayness) of practices’ configurations – special meaningful entities (material artifacts, social relations, discursive genres, cognitive images, symbols, and so on) that in their totality and potentiality-for-being bring into being a cultural form of life. The interrelatedness of practices (as facticity) is the milieu of ongoing articulation of meaning. The articulation of meaning is a hermeneutic phenomenon. In accordance with the claim of the meaningfulness stemming from the interrelatedness, the constitution of particular meaningful entities (by performing single practices) takes place within a horizon (the potential totality of meaningfulness) persisting the changing configurations within the interrelatedness of practices. It is the relationship between the (ever shifting) horizon and the particular units of meaning that is predicated on a potentially never-ending hermeneutic circularity. The conclusion that “no particular cultural practice has authority that is beyond individual judgment and possible rejection” (Kymlicka 1989, 50) seems completely acceptable for any particular practice. But this conclusion is not to be extended to an interrelatedness of concerted practices. The interrelatedness of properly arranged practices has trans-subjective autonomy that is beyond the control scope of individual (subjective) and collective (inter-subjective) agency. Although in a sense completely different from the Durkheimian objectivism, one may argue that such an interrelatedness has a reality of its own (Ginev 2018, 30 – 38). The ontological difference between (the factuality of) human agency and (the facticity of) practices articulating meaning resides in this reality. Though the impetus for ontological approach was already existing in the classical programs of practice theory (suggested by Giddens, Bourdieu, and Charles Taylor), the ontological turn in this theory should be traced back to Joseph Rouse’s (1996, 160 – 178) conception of the narrative fields of interrelated practices. Such a field is a “continual reconstruction” of what practices constitute (in the case of scientific practices, for instance, the theoretically interpreted experimental results of inquiry). A narrative field is not a cognitive structure (something like a narrative organization of experience), but “a situation in the world”. The reason why Rouse appeals to an ontological interpretation of narra-

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tives inherent in practices is that the way in which practices are configured temporalizes the “continual reconstruction” of what becomes constituted. In other words, it is not narrative time (or the temporal organization implied by narration) that determines the temporality of a narrative field of practices. In reconstructing its own outcomes, such a field of practices opens future, makes present, and selects past whereby a plot (as a configuration of past, present, and future events) of being-in-a-field-of-practices becomes created. The way of the temporalizing of what takes place within a narrative field of practices is an ontological phenomenon. At this point, I have to extend the present discussion by taking into consideration Ricoeur’s conception of (pre-narrative) prefiguration concerning the temporality of narrative emplotment. As mentioned, the narrative fields of configured practices result from practices’ intrinsic capability to temporalize their dynamics. In this sense, their temporality is also configured independently of the way in which practitioners narratively organize their experience of performing configured practices. Actually, Rouse’s narrative fields of interrelated practices are to a great extent pre-narrative configurations. However, pre-narrative temporalizing of practices’ temporality and practitioners’ narrative organization of their experience are not separated processes. They run together in a highly complex way that reveals another site of the ontic-ontological difference. Following Ricoeur (1980), I take “narrative time” to denote the experience of time that escapes the dichotomy between the chronology of sequence and the a-chronology of nomological models. He argues that the conceptualization of narrative time demands a movement back and forth between a theory of narrative and a (phenomenological) theory of time. In being tied to narration, the experience of time manages to create the intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in a story. Ricoeur calls this intelligible whole a “plot” distinguished by a dual status: (1) insofar as it is produced via the operation of narrative emplotment (the “operation of configuration”), it is a cognitive construction, and (2) insofar as it reflects a temporalization that precedes narration, the “plot” has a pre-narrative dimension. It is my contention that the hermeneutic-ontological theory of practices can apply the notion of plot to the regimes of temporalizing enacted by the fields of practices. Yet applied in this way, the notion is no longer identical with Ricoeur’s concept as it (stylized in the formula of mimesis1) refers to the “pre-understanding of the world of action”.⁶ Roughly, pre-narrative prefiguration in Ric In his work in the 1980’s, Ricoeur moves from the concept of narrative time to the ontological concept of pre-narrativity. For him, narration that enables the temporal organization of human experience is a “transcultural form of necessity”. He also offers the formulation that “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains

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oeur’s perspective is a prefiguration of agential factors that informs the way of configuring events in the process of narration. In his theory of the threefold mimesis that aims, among other things, at explaining the narrative-temporal structures in historiography by comparing them with structures of fictional narrative, Ricoeur deals in detail not only with the temporal structures arising out of narration but also with the kinds of pre-narrative temporalized structuring of actions and interactions. He argues that emplotment is the operation that draws a configuration out of a simple succession (or operation that extracts figure from succession). The compositional configuration created through emplotment brings together agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, etc. But before being narratively involved in such a configuration, action organized by practical understanding is not a simple succession of events and incidents. It is already pre-figured before putting the operation of configuration into effect. Pre-narrative prefiguration fore-structures emplotment, and is distinguished by a dimension of inherent temporalizing. In this regard, Ricoeur speaks of “the prefiguration of practical fields”. By focusing on prefigured time of prenarratively organized action, the theory of mimesis tracks the “destiny” of this time that becomes a refigured time (through the reception of emplotted narratives) via the mediation of a configured time (resulting from the operation of emplotment).

its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.” (Ricoeur 1984, 52). Against the background of this formulation, he turns to the issue of the “prefiguration of practical fields” understood in terms of a pre-narrative preparation of narrative plots. The latter come into being via “acts of textual configuration”. Pre-narrativity unites “pre-understanding of the world of action, its meaningful structures, its symbolic resources, and its temporal character.” What Ricoeur calls “prefigured time” corresponds to (but is by no means identical with) the regime of the temporalizing of temporality as incarnated in the facticity of practices. Ricoeur’s starting point is from determining agency, granted that inter-subjectivity is involved in agency, since to act is always to act with others. Narrative understanding and practical understanding should be explored with regard to the relation between the theory of narrative and the theory of action. He further specifies this relation in terms of a relation of presupposition and of transformation. In a classical-phenomenological fashion, he puts accent on intentionality guiding the actions of historical actors. Ricoeur’s concept of pre-narrativity (pre-figuration of narrative plots) draws on the assumption that historical actors are capable of prefiguring their lives as stories that can be emplotted. It is human intentionality (and the teleology of action) that enable pre-narrativity. Phrased differently, teleological intentionality embedded in actions creates kinds of prefiguration that are pre-given to the construction of historiographic (and fictional) narratives. The fact that the starting point of a historiographic narrative is to be sought in actors’ intentionality restricts – but does not eliminate – the historian’s imaginative freedom associated with emplotment. (Ricoeur appeals in this regard to Kant’s productive imagination.)

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Ricoeur’s perspective differs from Rouse’s ontological approach to the narrative field of practices. According to this approach, pre-narrative temporality stands for temporalized configurations of practices as they are irreducible to the teleology of agential behavior. Ricoeur’s conception of pre-narrative prefiguration entirely draws on a conception of human agency and the immanent teleology of actions and activities. By contrast, Rouse’s ontological approach to practices conceives of narrativity inherent in the fields of practices as a facet of practices’ potentiality-for-being that cannot be derived from the world of action. In a further distinction that is not made by Rouse, narration is inter-subjective (since narrating experiences presupposes the other as a recipient of what is narrated), while pre-narrativity is trans-subjective (horizon of articulating meaning within fields of practices). There are several other aspects of Rouse’s theory that stimulated the ontological turn. In taking up a motif indicated in the preceding chapter, I should mention that this theory successfully epitomizes the spirit of doctrines defending the primacy of normativity by avoiding both the postulation of regularities – consisting in communal normative patterns for the appropriateness of the doings of individual members – and the commitment to a certain anti-naturalist stance. The author achieves this position of theorizing by arguing that “as naturalists, we must understand the normativity of scientific practice from within the natural world as disclosed through scientific research.” (Rouse 2015, 383). This is why the position he advocates might be called “naturalist normativism”. According to him, since the world is disclosed through normatively organized social practices – and these practices are not to be disentangled from the disclosed world – normativity possesses ontological primacy. Integrating normativity with the disclosure of the world through practices allows Rouse to prevent the reification of normative units, without sacrificing the holistic approach to the regulative force practices are exerting. On his account, the constitution of normativity (as related to games, rituals, organizations, laws, social properties, and so on) takes place in the fields of social practices that, by their very nature, are also discursive practices. To be sure, Rouse’s “naturalist normativism” differs in several respects from the position I defend in the present study. Nonetheless, both positions share significant commonalities with regard to the need of overcoming the hypostatization of normativity. Rouse suggests that the identification of the performances of particular practices should not be based on independently specifiable rules or norms. A special emphasis in his approach is laid on the interactions among the “constitutive performances” of any particular practice. Normativity proves to be rooted in the mutual accountability of performances, or in the way in which “one performance can respond to another, for example, by trying to correct it, drawing inferences

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from it, iterating the ‘same’ performance in different circumstances, circumventing its effects, and so on.” (Rouse 2015, 163). Or, put differently, normativity is generated by a “network of practices’ mutually interactive performances”. Accordingly, the conceptualization of normativity requires taking into account the variability, inherent interpretability, and indeterminacy of practices’ performances. More importantly, it requires working out resources for coming to grips with the intrinsic temporality of mutually interactive performances: Performances’ mutual accountability is “an essentially temporal phenomenon, an interactive accountability toward an unsettled future continuation.” (Rouse 2015, 167). Reflecting upon how practices continue in the future (of their open-ended performances) essentially illuminates the normativity of social life. The intrinsic temporality involves “conflicting continuations” of prior patterns of practices’ performances. This is why Rouse tends to speak of “open-textured” (and not determinate or fixed) normativity. Such a concept of normativity is to a great extent similar to what I address elsewhere under the heading of “hermeneutic pre-normativity” (Ginev 2013a; Ginev 2013b, 67– 104). Another step in the ontological turn was undertaken by Schatzki’s ambitious task of working out a version of practice theory that is capable of tackling the issue of the “site of the social”. The ontology of this site could not be derived from individualist and collectivist (“socialist”) ontologies developed in social theory. Schatzki argues that the site ontology he works out is essentially inspired by Heidegger’s existential analytic. For him, “a site is a context, some or all of whose inhabitants are inherently part of it,” (Schatzki 2002, 146) and the social site is the site of human coexistence as a hanging-together of human lives. Practices enable this hanging-together by enacting inter-subjective relations, communicatively shared practical intelligibility, and chains of actions situated in diverse material settings. Some open problems in Schatzki’s approach result from the unhappy marriage between a Heideggerian ontology of practices and the use of objectivist notions of space and time (and “timespace”).⁷ The ontological turn in practice theory stimulated – and was stimulated by – post-humanist ideas in the social sciences. Paradigmatic in this regard is the way in which Andreas Reckwitz (2002) champions the irreducibility of practice theory to “human-

 Schatzki makes no secret of his ambition to develop a version of practice theory as a Heideggerian theory. A sine qua non in this regard is to take leave from any objectivist notion of time. However, Schatzki repulses the implementation of a hermeneutic-ontological concept of temporality, and this, in my view, creates methodological troubles for his project.

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ist” social theories centered around the notions of homo oeconomicus or homo sociologicus. ⁸ The views that will be presented in this chapter are basically on a par with Rouse’s and Schatzki’s ontological approaches. Yet the theory – or, more correctly, the strategy of theoretical conceptualization – I am going to sketch out more decisively denounces any kind of essentialist assumptions (including those about temporality and spatiality) in the conceptualization of social practices. According to a methodological tenet that will be followed, defining social practices as resulting from shared conceptual frameworks amounts to committing practice theory to essentialism. In an essentialist perspective, the organization and performance of social practices are determined by frameworks. Since the latter are normative structures, practices prove to be normatively determined. However, treating shared conceptual frameworks as an absolute (inscrutable) presupposition in conceptualizing practices is simply wrong. These frameworks are rather formed and reformed within interrelated practices. Consequently, the formation of conceptual frameworks should be regarded as a special issue of practice theory. Approaching conceptual frameworks in terms of outcomes of properly configured practices implies that any particular framework is situated in and transcended by configurations of practices. A framework determines semantic meaning that is always fore-structured by hermeneutic meaning (Ginev 2018, 105 – 106). The criticism of the commitment to essentialist assumptions in conceptualizing social practices is by no means a new enterprise. Interestingly enough, the versions of practice theory developed in the last 20 years have directly or indirectly tried to cope with Stephen Turner’s (1994, 13) claim that a conceptually independent practice theory would be an irrecoverably essentialist undertaking that reifies habits, thereby making them “object-like shared entities.” Turner unfolded a kind of criticism of (essentialist) practice theory before the latter was even developed as a theory with a proper conceptual structure.⁹ The hermeneutic approach to the conceptualization of social practices that will be outlined in

 More recent versions of practice theory essentially draws on Reckwitz’s generalization of practice theory as a sort of culture theory as well as on Schatzki’s ontological approach. These versions have been proven successful in making practice theory a new area of applied social studies. See in this regard Dubuisson-Quellier and Plesz (2013), Maller (2015), Maller and Strengers (2015) Shove (2015), Shove, Pantzar, and Watson (2012), Reckwitz (2017a).  See also Schatzki (1996, 106 – 110); Rouse (2007, 658 – 660). Both authors meet Turner’s criticisms by developing non-reificationist scenarios about the being of practices. In developing these scenarios in terms of explanatory strategies, however, their conceptions are facing other difficulties (Ginev 2018, 96 – 100).

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what follows is in line with Turner’s argument that practices cannot be endowed with causal power, and accordingly, the concept of practices is not to be implemented (as referring to explanatory factors) in designing theoretical explanations in the social sciences. But this argument does not rule out the possibility of constructing an independent (epistemologically and inter-theoretically irreducible) practice theory that would be capable of unveiling the ontological difference between the factuality of human agency and the facticity of practices. Thus, though not constructed in terms of an explanatory theory, the theoretical conceptualization of social practices can gain its irreducibility, thereby defending the unique character of what becomes conceptualized.¹⁰ Invoking the ontic-ontological difference – in the form of a difference between facticity (of configured practices) and factuality (of agential behavior) – in the present discussion is alternative to the explanatory hypostatization of both actors’ agency (as this is the case with methodological individualism) and social structures. It is my contention that the attempts at bridging habitus with reflexivity (produced not only by actors but also by an interrelatedness of practices) – for instance, the attempt of Andrew Sayer (2010) who suggests a mutual moderating of Bourdieu’s and Archer’s positions – cannot avoid the integration of this difference into the strategy of conceptualization. From a hermeneutic point of view, habitus is dispositions, anticipations, inclinations, and expectations that are “structuring the structures” resulting from the performances of interrelated practices. The resilience of habitus is due to the open-endedness of this ongoing structuring that belongs to the facticity of practices. With regard to the fact that the ongoing structuring cannot be objectified as factual presence, actors’ “mutual possession of habitus and the social world” can only be spelled out in ontological terms. Agential behavior determined by habitus (bodily cultivated skills and dispositions) is a purely factual reality that can be objectified via various explanatory theories. But in a broader perspective, habitus is fore-structuring the outcomes of practices’ performances within an open horizon of possi What Turner fails to take into account is the fact that the ontological turn in practice theory does not make practices a sort of social substrate. For him, an explanatory independent practice theory rests on two assumptions: (a) practices constitute Durkheimian social facts, and (b) sociality owes its possibility to shared practices. In rejecting both assumptions, one is in a position to reduce practices to habits by invoking the inseparability of habitualization from human activity. Thus, for Turner, there is no way out of the dilemma of either reifying practices (as entities endowed with causal power) or reducing practices to habits. But the ontological turn in practice theory shows that there is a way out of this dilemma: Practices are neither factually present entities that could be used for explanatory purposes nor are they reducible to habits and habitual behavior. The arguments for autonomous reality of the interrelatedness of practices should be sought by scrutinizing the facticity of existence.

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bilities. In this perspective, habitus ceases to be reduced to an ontic presence, which does not mean that it is bereft of any ontic dimension. Habitus – no longer taken only as bodily skills and dispositions – is a characteristic of the agential behavior’s entanglement with endogenously reflexive practices. Conceptualizing habitus in terms of the trans-subjective facticity of practices provides the opportunity for overcoming both the gap between subjectivism and objectivism as well as their conflation. Even more importantly, this conceptualization paves the way for further bridging the factuality of bodily organized agential behavior with the facticity of practices. The theoretical conceptualization that will be outlined is at odds with any form of “substantializing” an ultimate layer of primitive (or primordial) practices. In this regard, it opposes all versions of the view of “background practices”. In replacing the post-empiricist doctrines of “tacit knowledge” and “implicit knowledge” (but retaining several of their explanatory motifs), the champions of this view admit that background practices enable actors to make sense of what takes pace in their social worlds. Their source of inspiration is Heidegger’s treatment of the “average understanding of being” as a persistent background of all human activities. Yet when dealing with the question of where background practices come from, they refer to past experience, which suggests a non-Heideggerian way of answering the question. In their account, the background itself is formed by the sedimentation of routine practices, each of them related to particular skills. Within Dreyfus’s school of thought, the concept of background that cannot fully be made explicit was developed “as a response to a cognitivist model of the mind.” (Wrathall 2000, 94). Treating the background in this way prioritizes the cultural past of agential behavior as relying on learning processes. Accordingly, the understanding of being is embodied in background practices as sedimented past of the cultural dynamics of social practices. An additional rationale for insisting on background practices is that they assure shared normativity on which particular normative structures of social life are based. Hubert Dreyfus, who is an ardent champion of the view under discussion, warns that any attempt at deriving background practices from rules, beliefs, conceptual frameworks, or tacitly working principles would reify them. Background practices are manifested through the interpretive articulations they achieve, and the only way to make sense of them is via interpreting these articulations (Dreyfus 1991, 21– 22). But even this essential revision of the standard concept of background seems to be insufficient for overcoming the prioritization of the past in translating the understanding of being in terms of background practices. Unfortunately, Dreyfus does not elaborate on the role of these practices in the temporalizing of the temporality of being in socio-cultural worlds. Even his concept – otherwise well designed for avoiding the pitfalls of substantializing practices –

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portrays background practices as something static, and deprived of the role of temporalizing and fore-structuring what becomes meaningfully articulated within practices. Strangely enough, the champions of background practices view are eager to deconstruct the dualist assumption of mentalism, the cognitivist models of mind, and the forms of theoretical holism. But for this aim, they introduce a new firm distinction – that between background practices and ordinary practices. The distinction is methodologically and ontologically vulnerable. In particular, it provokes two questions that are especially important for developing an alternative view. How is the distinction between the two types of practices to be justified from the viewpoint strongly defended in Dreyfus’s school – the viewpoint of radical philosophical anti-essentialism? Which is the theoretical discourse that can precisely define where the demarcation between both types of practices should be drawn? Anticipating my further discussion, I state that all practices are involved in the interpretive articulation of meaning, and no “subclass” of them can be privileged with assigning to its members the status of background practices. As a rule, the authors working out the concept of background practices are impressed by Dreyfus’s way of contrasting practical with theoretical holism. Basically, they substitute “social skills” handed down to current actors for conceptual frameworks. These skills do not presume mental representations (Stern 2000). Yet replacing one type of holism with another one without revealing the hermeneutic circularity of interpretive articulation operating within the “holist reality” leads only to a new form of (practical) essentialism. There is a constant reference to “the skillful articulation of agents’ understanding of the world”, but too little is said about how this articulation proceeds, and how the very articulation is to be thematized. It is hard to see what kind of explanation one has in view when arguing that the background of coping practices “explains how things in our world show up as meaningful and how we are able to act intelligibly.” (Wrathall 2000, 97). Since within Dreyfus’ school of thought practices are closely related to (but not identical with) skills, one is allowed to admit that a whole tradition of learnt and inherited skills constitutes a whole web of background practices underlying a domain of social life. Wrathall cogently summarizes the way in which the view of background practices draws a distinction between skills and practices. In his account, skills enable the actors to participate in practices fluidly. But background practices are nor reducible to skills. Any particular practice is “the standing condition of the possibility of acting skillfully in a domain”, or a practice is “a complex structure that sustains action.” (Wrathall 2017a, 4). The “background of coping practices” cannot completely be made explicit for two reasons: (1) no-

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body is able to reproduce in detail the pertinent tradition of learnt and inherited social skills, and more importantly (2) the procedures of making them explicit indispensably presuppose their own background practices. In reactivating and enacting past experience in actual skillful activities, background practices help the actors to make sense of the whole of entities they meaningfully articulate within their ordinary practices. Accordingly, “the average understanding of being” hinges on the effective transmittance of embodied past experience to actors’ present states of affairs. In transmitting this experience, background practices function as a kind of knowing-how that enables ordinary practices to articulate the contexts of activities as contexts in which actors produce various forms of knowing-that. To resume the discussion of an abovementioned motif, the champions of background practices view tend to accept that the different kinds of human activity – qua modes of being-in-the-world – are ensnared in practices. Thus considered, the special arrangement of practices should account for the ontological distinctiveness of any mode of being-in-theworld. Temporalizing and spatializing belong to this distinctiveness. But if the performances of practices are crucially dependent on skills, then temporalizing and spatializing should be regarded as practitioners’ skillful spatio-temporal arrangements. Needless to say that making skills the source of temporalizing and spatializing would compromise the ontological approach to practices. As I argued earlier, interrelated practices are capable of constituting a sui generis reality. But they can do this because they project their interrelatedness upon possibilities. The appropriation of possibilities temporalizes and spatializes human agency. Their sui generis reality is not enabled by a background of deeply ingrained skills in agential behavior. In a nutshell, my criticism of the view of background practices is directed at three significant deficiencies that bring the view close to a kind of “non-cognitivist essentialism”: (a) the assumption of passive background, (b) the prioritization of the past and the neglect of the problematic of how practices temporalize agency, and (c) the unjustified division between background and ordinary practices. The alternative view I will develop in the remainder of this chapter is looking for a practice theory in which the ongoing interpretive fore-structuring of the modes of being-in-practices is substituted for the background of coping practices. This fore-structuring succeeds in temporalizing the modes of being, provided that each of them has its characteristic horizon of temporality. The fore-structuring is carried out by the hermeneutic circularity of practitioners’ being-inpractices by contextually articulating what is within-the-world-of-practices. According to the position developed in Dreyfus’s school, background practices exercise a twofold effect: They enable “the understanding of being” as well as they operate in a manner that generates and spreads actors’ “practical under-

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standings” (construed in a sense close to Heidegger’s “circumspective deliberation”). Obviously, these are two mutually reinforcing, but nonetheless significantly different types of understanding. The view of background practices does not answer the question of how the two types are interlinked. Existential analytic gives a definite answer: The horizon upon which Dasein projects its being-upon-possibilities is understanding that involves both ontological understanding (as related to the nexus of finitude and potentiality-for-being) and understanding operating in any particular contexture-of-equipment in which Dasein articulates meaningful entities that are contextually ready-to-hand. Here again the figure of the hermeneutic circle is unavoidable: The ontological horizon of understanding (the potentially inexhaustible whole of meaning) is always already projected when the articulation of meaningful entities takes places. Neither the projected horizon (ontological understanding) nor the practical understandings (of the utility) of the articulated units can exist per se. They are presupposing each other. In any particular contexture-of-equipment, the circle of projected whole of meaning and articulated units fore-structures the skillful behavior of actors. This is a circle that does not leave any room for a passive background. Coming in the hermeneutic circle in the right way allows one to see that all practices of human existence are “ordinary practices” generating practical understandings within that horizon which is specific for the mode of being-inthe-world in which the world is specifically articulated. Conceptualizing the way in which the circularity of “horizonal understanding” and practical understandings articulates meaning within practices should substitute the ongoing temporalizing of articulated meaning for any alleged background of learned skills.¹¹

 As is well known, Bent Flyvbjerg entirely bases his “phronetic social science” on Dreyfus’s model of background practices. In developing the concept of phronesis to include issues of power – and thus, linking it to Foucault’s discourse – he chooses the view of background practices (seen as a “phenomenology of human learning”) for his project since this view “is especially useful for understanding the linkage between knowledge and context, and because it directly addresses the question of whether knowledge about human activity can be context-independent.” (Flyvbjerg 2001, 9). In his reading of “the Dreyfus model” (his expression), the cognitivist interpretation of rationality is insufficient for coming to grips with “the total spectrum of human activity.” Acquisitions of skills enabled by background practices are the only game in town. Thus, researchers involved in normal-scientific everydayness are able to perform their skillful activities thanks to relevant background practices. No context-independent rules are in need for practicing normal science (in Kuhn’s sense). Rationality based on the phronesis of experience and tacit skills (and not instrumental rationality based on explicit rules) should be in the focus of social scientists. Conceptualizing the contextual work of phronesis cannot be accomplished through a formal-semantically complete explanatory theory with strong deductive

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2.2 Overcoming the paradigm of discreteness The assumption that all phenomena of human existence consist of manifolds of discrete units, and that these manifolds can be conceptualized by embedding data models in theoretical models – where both kinds of models are treated as algebraic structures – is the quintessence of the paradigm of discreteness. This paradigm plays a prominent role in conceptualizing various types of behavior by means of data models. Think, for instance, of Shannon’s use of stochastic approximations as a modelling of linguistic behavior, and the idea – overwhelmingly approved in the 1950s – that this behavior can be described in terms of information theory (Hockett 1953). According to the basic assumption of this conceptualization, any particular set of verbal units activated in linguistic behavior is generated by other verbal units that surround this set. Another well-known implementation of the paradigm of discreteness in conceptualizing linguistic behavior is Markov modelling of stochastic processes generating discrete symbols, granted that the appearance of each symbol can be associated with a certain probability. It should be noted that Chomsky’s well-known observation that frequency (of symbols, morphemes, or utterances) has no relevance to grammaticality is directed against the possibility of using the stochastic theory of information in linguistics, but not against the paradigm of discreteness in describing linguistic behavior. The very assumption that syntactic analyses can be carried out without recourse to the constitution of meaning is a prime example of employing this paradigm. Chomsky’s critical stance towards behaviorism does not break with the paradigm of discreteness, but aims at using it in accordance with the tenets

structure. Accordingly, the human and social sciences are preoccupied with “registration, administration, control, and redistribution of resources among various social groups.” (Flyvbjerg 2001, 167). It seems to me that Popper’s vision for local social engineering finds its full realization in this program. There are two assumptions in the Dreyfus-inspired project for phronetic social science that I cannot accept. According to the first one, since the sociocultural life consists of skillful activities that can be controlled and administrated, one can exactly localize the relevant activities (for tackling a social-engineering task), thereby delineating and isolating the context one will deal with. This assumption reflects the idea that background practices are already departmentalized and the corresponding skillful activities build up contexts that phronetic science has to find and make explicit. According to the second assumption, the collapse of any conceptualization of human activity by means of abstract rules and laws incorporated in nomological theories implies that the only reasonable strategy of conceptualizing skillful activities and ordinary practices is through meticulous studies of the pragmatic ways in which social actors execute their action and perform their roles. My further considerations in this chapter show why I am not accepting these assumptions.

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of a rationalist constructivism. In this perspective, the evaluative function of linguistic theory consists in determining “the best grammar” for a given corpus of discrete elements (utterances). The investigation of the validity of competing grammars is the complete form of studying linguistic behavior in terms of behavior determined by structures. The models of economic behavior – the models of costs and benefits – devised in terms of rational choice theory provide a further exemplification of conceptualizing behavior through the paradigm of discreteness which in this case is indispensably combined with the explanatory strategy of methodological individualism. The proliferating criticisms of this theory primarily focus on the deficiencies resulting from theory’s commitment to instrumental rationality. Yet replacing the latter with (for instance) a kind of bounded rationality does not affect the way in which the theory is based on the paradigm of discreteness. Without going into detail, I should make the general point that the most effective criticism of rational choice theory (as a conceptualization of economic behavior) can be achieved by disputing the theory’s unquestioned starting point from goaloriented actions. In anticipating the further discussion, one could contend that treating these actions as unavoidably situated within (but not determined by) configured practices of economic lifeforms would not only lead to a disavowal of the centrality of instrumental rationality, but more importantly, would enable the overcoming of the paradigm of discreteness. Now, how a practice theory entirely based on the paradigm of discreteness should look like? I will begin with an artificial example that should indicate the direction of answering this question. A widespread view among analytical philosophers is that the relation of meaning and intention to future action is a normative relation. Suppose that there is an (extremely reductionist) practice theory that accepts this view and treats any particular practice in terms of action that – via agent’s intention – produces meaning-normatively-related-to-futureaction. In addition, the theory is founded upon Max Weber’s thesis that human behavior can be regarded as action if and insofar the agents attach subjective meaning to it. In the framework of this theory, an assemblage of practices is a network of actions the meanings of which normatively determine future actions. The network of interconnected discrete (meaning-intention) relations completely represents the interrelatedness of practices. This “discrete theory” would allow the detachment of the network (from the dynamics of practices) whereby the models of possible connections among the particular normative relations within the network would represent the structure of the assemblage. Now suppose that there is a critic of the theory who asks the following question: Does not the assemblage “contain” excessive meaning that is not amounting to mean-

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ing standing in normative relation to intention to future action? It is this question that will be repeatedly tackled in the remainder of this study. Applied to the conceptualization of practices, the paradigm of discreteness consists in the extrapolation of the picture of a single (isolated) practice – as a manifold of discrete elements capable of preserving invariance over repeated performances – to any assemblage of concerted practices. According to such an application of the paradigm, ensembles of practices constituting artistic styles, scientific programs, religious forms of life, historical forms of life (such as the bourgeois form of life in the French monarchy from the mid of 18th century or the working class’ lifeform in the late Victorian era), and even whole ethniccultural life-worlds are no more and no less than extensions of what human agency creates in a teleological manner when organizing a single practice. By implication, any assemblage of practices is viewed as a (habitualized) system of actions and activities determined by actors’ agency and organized by patterns and rules. The recurrent performance of this system makes it persistent over time. (If one would argue that such a system is always codetermined by social structures, this would run against the overestimation of agency, but not against the paradigm of discreteness. The latter is shared by methodological individualists and methodological holists who – in devising explanatory scenarios – advocate the indispensability of invoking institutionalized structures determining agential behavior.) For the supporters of the paradigm of discreteness, the ontic reducibility of assembled practices to actions with a clearly identifiable source of agency fully corresponds to a kind of methodological (inter-theoretical) reducibility. Accordingly, (1) all ensembles of concerted practices are entirely reducible to recurrent actions and activities as they are completely determined by human agency, and (2) the theory of social practices is inter-theoretically derivable from action theory and the theory of human activity, granted that both theories are explanatory and deductively structured. If the ontic condition (1) and the methodological condition (2) can be satisfied, then practice theory would presumably be built in accordance with the explanatory conceptualization of patterned data capturing observable phenomena of human agency. Practice theory would be constructed (as a complete theory in that analytical sense) by conceptualizing the way in which human agency organizes practices as discrete units that step by step – via growing connections and formation of nexuses – compose assemblages. I will try to show that this reductionist approach to practice theory faces serious troubles and encounters decisive objections. It should be acknowledged that those who adhere to the paradigm of discreteness do not deny that there is in the passage from particular practices to ensembles of configured practices (a) a growing complexity of the structural factors

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(supposedly regimenting the interrelations among various actions and activities) as well as of the behavioral models which the actors follow; (b) an increasing sophistication of the immanent teleology manifesting itself via a diversification of positive and negative feedbacks; and (c) a multiplication of normative structures. What they tend to denounce, however, is a qualitative leap in the transition to ensembles of practices disclosing (through practices’ interrelatedness) domains of cultural life. They also reject practices’ ability to reflexively enact their own autonomy (from underlying agency) through their mutually evoking and reinforcing performances. Concerted practices – so their argument goes – cannot have a way of being not determined by agential behavior. Even the claim that this way of being is partially autonomous because of being underdetermined by human agency seems to be unacceptable by the supporters of the paradigm of discreteness. According to this paradigm, the patterned actions and activities bring into play a particular practice that can be performed in various contexts. Any assemblage of practices is no more than the sum of the particular practices’ performances. Certain rules may cross the performances of several practices, thereby promoting patterns of synergy among these performances. Cooperative performances, on their part, may induce emergent properties within the assemblage. But these developments have again to be addressed in terms of discrete events and processes (like transmissions and migrations of particular practices). For those who follow the paradigm of discreteness, the assemblages of practices are conceived of as extended goal-oriented networks of bodily actions and patterned activities expressing collective intentions and we-attitudes organized in a manner that allows units’ migrations from one network to another. (Studies exemplifying consequent applications of the paradigm in practice theory are Maller 2015, Shove 2015, Tuomela 2002, Dubuisson-Quellier and Plessz 2013, and Hui 2017.) On a further assumption informed by the paradigm of discreteness, if each of the assemblages of practices could be reconstructed in terms of a structure that resists changes when certain variations in the performances of practices take place, then the way of being of the assembled practices would be conceptualized in a quasi-algebraic manner. (For instance, there is an invariant structure of assembled ritual practices expressing a rite of passage, no matter how the exact order of performing them and the technical details of any particular performance may vary from one cultural context to another. In another classical example, “the structure of potlatch” remains invariant in all kinds of “gift economy” organized by exchange practices, although the cultural variations of these practices are significant.) According to the paradigm of discreteness, if the assemblage remains stable over time and capable of reproducing its effect when performed at different places and settings by culturally different agents, then

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it is distinguished by a certain “encoding structure”. The structure also serves a normative function: Not every variation in the performances is admissible by it. The structure of the assemblage constrains and excludes performances, thereby allowing a leeway in performing concerted practices. The structure imposes rules not only for the organization and performance of any particular unit, but also for the way of executing the whole assemblage. Theoretically represented in such a manner, the assemblage of practices is amenable to empirical interpretations whereby its encoding structure should supposedly become a factually manifested manifold of discrete elements (the performances of single practices). In the theoretically ideal case, the possible transformations with respect to which the structure remains invariant should form an (algebraic) group that formally regiments the theoretically admissible and empirically identifiable variations in the performances of practices.¹² An assemblage of practices is theoretically conceptualized, if the empirically observed variations in the practices’ performances – for instance, variations in the performances’ chronological order or in the spatial organization of the assembled practices – do not violate the invariance as defined by the group of transformations. The methodology of conceptualizing assemblages of practices via the paradigm of discreteness does not imply per se a solution to the philosophical problem of where to locate the site of the reconstructed structure. Yet the paradigm provides a clue towards solving this problem. The performance of each practice is a self-sufficient unit, organized by mental activities. The assemblage must also be structured and encoded by something like collective mentality of practitioners. Consequently, the structure is to be found located in forms of “social mind” such as “collective representations”, “cultural codes of consciousness”, or even “collective unconscious”.¹³ In stating this, I do not exclude the possibility of constructing practice theory in accordance with the paradigm of discreteness without committing to mentalist presuppositions – a case that will be addressed in a minute. In fact, the historical novelty of several initial versions of this theory was the way of combining the paradigm with anti-mentalist social philosophy.

 As is well known, the methodology of post-war structuralism – starting with Claude LeviStrauss’s The Elementary Structures of Kinship – most typically epitomizes the paradigm of discreteness with respect to the idea of invariance expressed by transformations. The idea of invariance implies that practices are codified by the rules of their collective performances, and that these rules permit certain variations in the order of performances.  The discussion of whether one can invoke such structures for explanatory purposes without hypostatizing them still occupies an essential place in the controversy between methodological holists and methodological individualists.

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Being “assimilated” (learned, internalized) by any particular practitioner, the encoding structure strongly determines practitioners’ assembled performances. In the objectivist version of mentalism, it determines through causal relations, while in the transcendental version – by means of posing conditions for the possibility of having social effects by performing concerted practices. Thus, mentalist essentialism and determinism turn out to be important – but, as it will be shown, not indispensable – counterparts of the paradigm of discreteness. Historically seen, there are important versions of practice theory that implement models of objectified factuality but do not interpret them in terms of structuralism. Andreas Reckwitz provides good arguments for treating these versions as a conceptual alternative to (what he calls) culturalist mentalism, especially when at stake are the “singularities” in social life. These singularities are existing in the space of performance of singularly concerted practices (Reckwitz 2017b, 72– 74). By contrast, the theories developed in the tradition of culturalist mentalism – so his argument goes – connect social dynamics with symbolic and cognitive structures in a manner that advances the idea that “mind is the place of the social” because mind is the site where these structures are generated (Reckwitz 2002, 247). Since the emergence of the classical programs of Giddens, Bourdieu, and Charles Taylor in practice theory, the rejection of this idea – and more generally, the idea that mind is “structuring substance” of all social actions and activities – has been providing the main impetus for conceptualizing the embodiment of practices as well as their embeddedness in material settings. This conceptualization problematizes the paradigm of discreteness, but does not definitely reject it.¹⁴ One can agree with Reckwitz’s conclusion that practice theory gets rid of mentalism – without needing to eschew the paradigm of discreteness – by accentuating the role of “routinized bodily activities”. In conjunction with the view of background practices, one may approach the “products of the socially trained human body” in terms of skillful activities that do not need mental representations to be performed. According to Reckwitz (2002, 251), “if practices are the site of the social, then routinized bodily performances are the site of the social and of ‘social order’.” In opposing practice theory to culturalist mentalism – whose objectivist incarnation is the structuralist programs in ethnology, anthropology, and semiotics,  It should be noted that each of these classical programs has resources for conceptualizing practices without appealing to the paradigm of discreteness. In Giddens’s program, this is accomplished by means of the double hermeneutic. Bourdieu succeeds in surmounting the paradigm by taking into account the phenomenological continuity of habitus, while Taylor borrows resources for such a conceptualization from philosophical hermeneutics.

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while phenomenological sociology might be regarded as its subjectivist incarnation – Reckwitz essentially draws on Bourdieu’s way of thinking the social being of the human body: Embodied routine practices enable habitus as ongoing structuring of social structures. To reiterate, Bourdieu’s “logic of practice” is most definitely a theoretical approach directed against the paradigm of discreteness. By mediating between its own dispositions and the processual formation of structures, the human body conceptualized in terms of the theory of habitus evades reification. Yet this is not the case when practice theory is not designed in accordance with the phenomenological continuity of practices’ performances. In practice theories based on the paradigm of discreteness, practitioners’ bodies are reified, since they are treated as particular discrete units along with all other types of such units taking place in the dynamics of practices. There is no place for Bourdieu’s continuity – as related to phenomenological temporality – of the structuring of structures in these theories. To sum up, avoiding mentalism in the controversial manner of accentuating routinized bodily activities enhances the methodological weight of the paradigm of discreteness by moving the concept of structure from mentality to bodily routine. By implication, mentalist structuralism becomes “dynamic structuralism” about factually present variables (quasi-naturalistically) describing processes of practices’ arrangements. In making objectivist use of the paradigm of discreteness without subscribing to mentalist assumptions, one is recasting mentality in terms of embodied practical consciousness (understandings and intelligibility) inducing variations in organizing and performing practices. Distinguishing between diverse types of variations – any of them also conceived in terms of discrete units – is the next step in tracking the structuring of assembled practices as determined by embodied agency. The discrete units of shared meanings that are constructed and reproduced by practitioners are limiting in important ways the possible variations within practices (Hui 2017, 58 – 64). The world of social practices becomes conceptualized as a spatially and temporally evolving structuring (diachronic transformations within the manifolds of discrete elements). This world exists in its actual presence as a world “in itself” and occasionally becomes something “for itself” when practitioners reflexively react to dissonances between particular practices. Conceptualizing the evolving structuring in accordance with the paradigm of discreteness prevents one from (1) studying the potentiality-forbeing of assembled practices in their ever varying performances, and (2) thematizing the continuity of the evolving structuring – a continuity that allows discontinuities – by laying bare practices’ regimes of the intrinsic temporalizing of the horizon of temporality in which the performances of these practices take place. One needs the integration of the ontological difference with the strat-

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egy of conceptualization for coming to terms with (1) and (2). A practice theory ignoring the ontological difference is doomed to remain an objectivist-empirical enterprise that conceptualizes assembled practices by reducing them to patterns, structural units, elements of agential behavior, habits, organizational components, and material instruments. Following a strategy of conceptualizing the facticity of practices beyond the paradigm of discreteness, one realizes that the factuality of human agency and agential behavior – as schematized by sets of objectified discrete facts – can only procedurally be isolated from this facticity. Factuality consists of facts about conceptualized phenomena as these facts are represented by models of data (say statistical data about particular social behavior guided by specific cultural values and norms). The expression “conceptualized phenomena” stands for phenomena explained through theoretical models. Factuality comes into being due to the conceptualization of phenomena via embedding models of data into theoretical models (Ginev 2016a, 209 – 219). This conceptualization produces procedurally objectified (manifolds of discrete) facts representing “theoretically saved” phenomena. As a methodological guide, the paradigm of discreteness ensures both the empirical operationalization of theoretical models and the theoretical interpretation of data models. In fact, however, the correlation of these processes is grounded upon the production of (discrete) factuality within (interpretively continuous) facticity. More specifically, the objectifying procedures required by the paradigm of discreteness tacitly extract data (about behavior and agency) from the temporalizing continuity of the facticity of practices. Reaching this conclusion does not imply that the facticity of practices resists a direct empirical investigation. Although not representable by discrete factuality, the manifestations of facticity can be studied and conceptualized in an empirical manner, without implying any form of reductionist objectivism or Durkheimian essentialism about the nature of the “social facts” or anti-theoretical stance à la ethnomethodology. The empirical studies of facticity demand a proper interpretive conceptualization of the articulation of meaning within a characteristic hermeneutic situation. The empirical being of the interpretively conceptualized facticity is the contextualized appropriation of possibilities by configured practices. When an ensemble of configured practices enables the articulation of specific meaningful entities, the performances involved in the ensemble are manifestations of both human agency and the very process of articulation that constantly goes beyond the intentions and agential behavior. Thus, each particular performance contains, as it were, the ontological difference between agency’s empirical manifestations and the articulation of meaning within an ever transcending horizon. Performing a practice within practices with which it is config-

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ured makes this difference immanent to the ensemble of configured practices. Despite the qualitative leap between the discreteness of agential behavior and the continuity implied by the interrelatedness of practices, there is no gap between subjectivity behind agential behavior and (what I will call) the trans-subjectivity of practices. The way of being of any single practice integrated into an autonomous ensemble of practices mediates between the agency of its performances and the way of being of the ensemble’s configured practices. In playing the role of a mediator, the performances of a single practice incorporate agential subjectivity, but serve the modus operandi of a special kind of trans-subjective agency stemming from practitioners’ agency. The next section spells out this view in more details.

2.3 From a Wittgensteinian to a hermeneutic anti-essentialism In analyzing the way in which the nexus of grasping a rule and interpretation is approached in Philosophical Investigations, John McDowell (1984, 342) reaches the conclusion that “Wittgenstein’s point is that we have to situate our conception of meaning and understanding within a framework of communal practices.” Stating that following (and obeying) a rule is a practice – the famous dictum of Wittgenstein (1953, § 202) – implies a central methodological issue of practice theory. This is the issue of how rules are related with practices in regulating them. Are the rules regulating and regularizing by having an independent way of being and an independent mode of operation, or are they inextricably embedded in practices without having separate existence? One may assume that any particular practice has a particular rule. By implication, performing a practice consists in following its rule. Yet this assumption is too simplistic, and can hardly be applied in conceptualizing assembled practices characterized by specific regimes of performing them. Without breaking with the paradigm of discreteness, one can register different kinds of rules effective in complex assemblages of practices – rules restricted to performing particular practices, rules governing connections between performances, synchronic rules governing the whole assemblage and determining the loci of particular practices, and diachronic rules about the reproducibility of the assemblage in time and space. Vis-à-vis this growing complexity of regularizing, the issue of how rules are related with practices in regulating them seems to be much more complicated. Theoretically seen, there are two approaches to dealing with this issue. The first one is in a full harmony with the paradigm of discreteness: Rules are special elements in the organization of practice(s), and they are entirely de-

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tachable from this organization. Yet once they have been detached, rules – isolated as a manifold consisting of different kinds of elements – form something like an “algebra of rules”. In this approach, a manifold of rules regulating and regularizing the performances of an assemblage of practices is manifested by the possible regulative operations defined over the set of performances. The detachability of a whole “algebra of rules” from the assemblage of practices makes the former into a determining structure and the empirical set of performances into a determined factuality. (The more restricted this algebra is, the greater the codification of practices. Configurations of practices building up rituals and ceremonies display the strongest codification. The more elaborated the codes of assembled practices are, the greater the leeway of innovations and creative deviations in the performances.) The second approach (at least partially) transgresses the paradigm of discreteness, and insists that (all kinds of) rules are not isolable from (the assemblages of) practices. According to this approach, rules can only be scrutinized by investigating the whole “grammar of practices”. Thus, the opposition between the two approaches is cast in terms of (detachable and determining) “algebra of rules” versus “grammar of practices” in which following rules and performing practices are inseparable.¹⁵ The notion of language game is introduced in the Philosophical Investigations to prevent, inter alia, one from disentangling rules from practices, each of them understood as following (obeying) a particular rule. The “rules of grammar” regulate linguistic practices and the use of expressions from within. (In the perspective of Wittgenstein’s later work, the concept of the rules of grammar can easily be extended to a concept of “grammar of practices”. The rules of particular  In fact, the contrast between the algebra of rules and the grammar of practices reflects Wittgenstein’s contrasting interpretations of the concept of rules developed respectively in the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. The leading assumption of the former work – the assumption that there are hidden rules existing independently of the performances and awaiting discovery – invites the application of the paradigm of discreteness. In the Tractatus, the treatment of language as a calculus of rules determining the use of words to conceivable cases is entirely in the spirit of this paradigm. Following rules that the agents obeying them cannot formulate entails that the rules have their own way of being, and (possibly) they are detachable from what they govern. Baker and Hacker point out that in the transitional period (1929 – 1931) between the two major works Wittgenstein continued to insist on the determining role of the calculus of rules, though he was no longer committed to metaphysical essentialism about meaning. In this period, he placed the accent on rules that determine internal relations within a propositional system, admitting that “the meaning of an expression is not an object in reality but the totality of rules which determine its use within the calculus of language.” (Baker and Hacker 2009, 44). Wittgenstein’s transitional period did not last long because of the unhappy marriage between anti-essentialism about meaning and determinism about the way in which rules govern the use of language.

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forms of life are – in accordance with the Philosophical Investigations – rules of particular languages at particular times. Since these rules regularize practices, Wittgenstein’s notion of “autonomous grammar” is extendable to the regularized practices. In this case, grammar would determine the possible arrangements of performances within the assemblages of practices.) There is no causal relation between a rule and a practice that follows this rule. Grammar is autonomous since linguistic practices and language games are not determined from without. Rules are perhaps a kind of entities. But by no means are they Platonic entities. Regardless of how rules-formulation would be accomplished, rules are not to be separated from rules-following that, in its turn, coincides with performing interrelated practices.¹⁶ Although not accepting a nominalist view about rules, theorists working in the Wittgensteinian tradition resist declaring that rules are abstract entities. For them, “a rule is what is expressed by a rule-formulation.” (Baker and Hacker 2009, 47). But they also state that rule-formulations – understood not as mere linguistic expressions – are not rules. Rules are identified through regularities in behavior. One should also resist the temptation of searching for “behavioral laws” behind the plurality of forms of guidance by rules. Defining such laws would transform rules into Platonic entities. An issue of intrinsic debate within the Wittgensteinian tradition is whether rules can serve an explanatory function. Needless to say that ethnomethodologists most definitely reject any explanatory aspect of rules. But for many Wittgensteinians, appealing to rules is connected with the possibility of devising non-causal, rational-teleological explanations. These are explanations – also capable of making predictions – about the course of actions embed Following David Lewis (2002, 100 – 107), one may state that – from analytical point of view – most rules are conventions (in Lewis’s sense). But he also cites important counterexamples: (a) some mathematically formulated generalizations in natural science are regarded as rules; (b) hypothetical imperatives as rules expressing strategic maxims; (c) rules for cultivating taste; (d) rules as warnings issued by some authority; (e) rules codifying regularities; and (f) rules enforced with strong sanctions. I completely agree with this distinction between rules that can and cannot be regarded as conventions. Yet there is another distinction that – with respect to practice theory – turns out to be more important. This is the distinction between rules governing units of agential behavior and rules generated and operating within the interrelatedness of practices. A rule belonging to the former class can be made explicit through the formulation of a particular instruction. Rules of the second class can only be made explicit through the descriptions of how agential behavior is entangled with interrelated practices. In this case, one has to take into account a whole “form of life” in order to formulate the operating rules. A case in point is the rule of the prohibition of exogamy. To be sure, this rule can clearly be formulated as an instruction. Yet the rule operates in essentially different ways in communities and societies studied by cultural anthropologists. Accordingly, to explicate it requires a full description of the form of life in which it operates.

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ded in rule-governed practices. In stressing the need of such explanations, they deny any kind of “hidden rules buried in unconscious mind or encoded in the brain, for what is thus hidden has no place in any normative activity.” (Baker and Hacker 2009, 52). Authors like Charles Taylor (1995, 165 – 180), Jeff Coulter (1979, 45 – 51; 1983, 64– 69), Anthony Giddens (1984, 21– 25), Michael Lynch (1993, 159 – 202), and Theodore Schatzki (1996, 154– 159) adopt and apply in conceptualizing social practices the perspective on the rule following from the Philosophical Investigations. Thus, Taylor (1995, 178) widely opens the door for extending Wittgenstein’s reading of rule-following to a version of practice theory by holding a rule only exists in the practice it guides, whereby the practice fulfilling the rule “gives it concrete shape in particular situations. Practice is a continual interpretation and reinterpretation of what the rule really means.” The views of the above mentioned authors prescind from approaching rules as explicit formulations, treating them as present “in practices only in the practical consciousness through which actors participate in practices.” (Schatzki 1996, 156). In criticizing Giddens for the way in which he likens the procedures of action to formulas in elaborating on the concept of practical consciousness, Schatzki radicalizes the position insisting on the underdeterminedness of behavior by rules – a radicalization that is also a typical tendency in ethnomethodology. The Wittgensteinian “grammatical” tendency of avoiding extraction of rules from practices stresses the continuity and situational plasticity of regularization, and opposes the paradigm of discreteness. Against the background of this tendency, one might conclude that the possibility of constructing practice theory in accordance with the paradigm of discreteness stands and falls with the separability of rules from practices. The separability is a requisite for conceptualizing actions and activities governed by rules in terms of determining invariant structure (algebra of rules) and determined factuality. A practice theory subjected to the paradigm of discreteness is necessarily tied with the metaphysics of presence. More precisely, such a theory is unavoidably committed to objectivist metaphysical presumptions since its mode of conceptualization is deprived of the capacity to situate the rule-governed behavior in the facticity of practices. As a result, every object of inquiry of a theory committed to the paradigm of discreteness is exclusively represented by means of constructing discrete factuality. The validity of the opposite thesis is also undisputable: A theory that succeeds in getting rid of the paradigm of discreteness does not constitute its subject matter as discrete factuality. In a further thesis that will be defended in this chapter, such a theory cannot avoid making use of the ontological difference.

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A tentative illustration of the theses just formulated can be gained from the preceding discussion about the status of the rules. If the rule following is embedded in the performances of social practices – as Wittgensteinian social theory since Peter Winch’s classical work The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy has claimed – then the phenomenality of these performances can be conceptualized in various empirical ways that are more or less distanced from the paradigm of discreteness. But the empirical studies accorded with versions of Wittgensteinian social theory leave open the ontological issue of the very “embeddedness” of rules-following in practices’ performances. Though the regularization of practices is nicely described in Wittgenstein’s terms, coping with the continuity of regularized practices is in need of a research strategy that does not belong to the Wittgensteinian investigatory repertoire. This is the strategy of hermeneutic interpretation that also promises to properly handle the issue of “embeddedness”. As mentioned, the paradigm of discreteness may only be supported if one presupposes that the social practices’ being-towards-possibilities can totally (without remainder) be represented by procedurally objectified factuality. It is my contention that the basic features of practices’ potentiality-for-being are untranslatable into theories (like the cognitivist and behaviorist theories) objectifying human agency in terms of “ultimate source” of organizing practices. Among these features are (a) the capacity of interrelated practices to transcend each and every context in which human agency operates (thereby revealing themselves as trans-subjectivity that is not to be confused with inter-subjectivity), (b) practices’ endogenous reflexivity, and (c) practices’ capability to create regimes of temporalizing of the articulation of meaning. For the sake of illustration, I should like to briefly discuss (a). The reason of my choice is that this feature of practices’ being-towards-possibilities is most relevant to meeting Turner’s criticism of practice theory mentioned earlier. Trans-subjectivity arises out of the way in which configured practices project their being upon possibilities that are potentially inexhaustible. In this regard, it is an indispensable dimension of the facticity of practices. Trans-subjectivity consists in practices’ ability to project transcending horizon of possibilities that practitioners’ agency contextually appropriates and actualizes. Thus considered, trans-subjectivity is irreducible to normative inter-subjectivity. It is the trans-subjectivity of practices in which the inter-subjectivity of a community takes shape, and not the other way around. Communal inter-subjectivity is situated in and transcended by practices’ being-towards-possibilities. But the scenario of situated transcendence is not sufficient to do justice to all aspects of the relationship between practices’ trans-subjectivity and agential (inter)subjectivity. This relationship is distinguished by its own interpretive circles (for in-

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stance, the circle between the meaning resulting from the performance of a particular practice and the potential whole of meaning revealed by the transcending horizon of possibilities). Due to these circles, agential subjectivity turns out to be contextually entangled with configured practices. Insisting on the entanglement of agency with configured practices is, as it were, threatened to become a target of that criticism which critical realists level at Giddens’s theory of structuration. However, this kind of entanglement is quite different from the conflation of agency and structure. Yet I will postpone the discussion of this difference. In the coming chapter, the argument against the conflation will be developed in line with the concept of existential agency.¹⁷ If the collective character of practices were understood in terms of hypostatized inter-subjectivity, then Turner’s argument against practice theory would be most relevant. The price one would have to pay for putting normative inter-subjectivity first is both the substantializing of normativity and the reification of practices. But if one admits that the “collectivity” of practices is due to a trans-subjective horizon of possibilities upon which concerted practices project their interrelatedness as possible configurations, then neither the treatment of normativity as a “substantive layer”, nor a reification of practices as self-sufficient entities would take place. According to this formulation, the assumption that interrelated practices “project a horizon” ought to be understood as referring to two things: (a) The horizon is projected through the actual and potential co-references among practices; and (b) these practices project their potentialityfor-being upon a horizon of possible configurations. Starting from the trans-subjectivity of configured practices that project their interrelatedness upon possibilities (instead of from normative inter-subjectivity) distinguishes the cultural-hermeneutic position of conceptualizing in the social sciences. As a rule, social scientists begin their research by clearly delineating “collective bodies of social agents” that can factually be objectified. These bodies – as constituted by their codes of normative inter-subjectivity – are already “out there in the objective social world”. Think, for instance, of the sociological research of the electoral attitudes in voters’ behavior. Electorate and constituencies are clearly defined and delineated groups of agents through the norms and rules of the voting system. Accordingly, voters’ behavior can be specified by constructing relevant empirical indicators, and the measurable data collected through these indicators would be the objectified factuality necessary for study-

 For the moment let me only point out that the concept of existential agency as a trans-subjective (but not a meta-subjective) agency helps one to clearly distinguish among the modes of operation of agential behavior, habitus, and normative structures in social life.

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ing the electoral attitudes. Any particular group of voters expressing such an attitude would constitute a particular research object within the sociological theory implemented in the research process. A group expressing an electoral attitude is a collective body organized by inter-subjective norms, values, and goals. For the research that starts from the trans-subjectivity of practices, there are no “ready-made bodies” determined by intrinsic norms and rules. A researcher who engages the cultural-hermeneutic position initially faces only floating practices of different kinds. She observes that some of these practices form unsustainable networks characterized by ad hoc configurations. In continuing her “thick description” of unstable associations and arrangements among the floating practices, she begins to discover tendencies of forming more stable configurations that become recurrent entities. These configurations may include strange combinations that from the positions putting normative inter-subjectivity first are hardly to be identified. For instance, she may discover a recurrent configuration of political, administrative, religious, educational, publicist, and academic practices that lacks any proper authority responsible for the creation of this configuration. (Needless to say that the case of proliferating strange configurations of practices of essentially different sorts is symptomatic for postmodern societies.) Yet she discovers that – in spite of not having an identifiable social creator – the assemblage of configured practices articulates specific meaning that has no other source of production. In other cases, she may discover that the trans-subjectivity of recurrent configurations of practices might form a kind of everydayness in which the articulation of meaning is at the same time the articulation of a new cultural form of life. The preceding considerations allude to the strategy of defending an ontological approach to practices beyond the metaphysics of presence. (I prefer to say “ontological approach” instead of “ontology”, since my aim is to show that the distinctiveness of the facticity of practices is not gained through a special ontology, but by means of the integration of the ontological difference into the kind of conceptualization which the hermeneutic approach to practices inaugurates.) In a nutshell, the notion of trans-subjectivity stands in this study for the unity of agential subjectivity and configured practices as this unity enacts the articulation of meaning distinct from the meaning constituted by the agents’ actions and activities only. It is a notion that is at odds with any use of the paradigm of discreteness. Assemblages of interrelated practices are always capable of transcending practitioners’ behavior and agency. The hermeneutic circularity of the articulation of meaning within configured practices is untranslatable into a teleological process determined by actors’ (individual and collective) intentionality. The discussion of the trans-subjectivity of configured practices hints at the opportunity of developing a non-explanatory – but nevertheless conceptually in-

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dependent (irreducible) – practice theory. This opportunity hinges on the successful development of the argument for the irreducibility of configured practices to agency involved in any particular practice. When the overcoming of the paradigm of discreteness is at stake, the expression “configured practices” does not denote a plural form of a single practice. The distinction between a normatively organized single practice and an ensemble of concerted practices is not a matter of a purely grammatical difference (as certain versions of practice theory seems to admit). Beyond the paradigm of discreteness, the expression “configured practices” stands for a distinctive reality that must properly be conceptualized. The difference between a single practice and configured practices is an ontological difference. Conceptualizing a coherent ensemble of practices whose routine performances articulate specific meaning should make this ontological difference a non-dichotomous one – a difference that by taking place within the ensembleas-everydayness-of-performances promotes the distinctiveness of the meaningful reality disclosed by the ensemble. An important presupposition of the foregoing considerations sounds as follows. Agential behavior consists of actions and activities. This behavior is fully determined by human agency. Practice theories guided by the paradigm of discreteness are engaged with the difference between a single activity and a single (isolated) practice. As a rule, they make the case that a particular activity (swimming, reading, arranging flowers, writing, walking, riding a horse, etc.) is something performed by an individual. (Even activities that require cooperation among individuals do not lose their individualist character. The cooperation is due to the coordination of individual motives and intentions.) By contrast, a practice is acting on a we-attitude. Several further distinctive features follow from this approach to the specificity of any particular practice – a delineation of a contexture, an irreducible spatio-temporal organization, and so on. To be sure, this is a completely correct approach. Yet, the difference between a particular practice and a particular activity – regardless of how exact and precise it will be described – is always an ontic (factual) difference. Like any particular activity, any isolated practice is fully determined by human agency. Furthermore, the interrelatedness of practices corresponds to the webs of activities. However, the difference between the interrelatedness of practices and the webs of activities is no longer a factual difference. It is an ontological difference. The principal reason for this conclusion is that the interrelatedness of practices crosses (what I will call) the “threshold of facticity”, and can no more be recast in a vocabulary describing the factuality of human agency. The autonomy of properly configured practices is due not to (what critical realists call) emergent properties that are distinguished by actual presence-athand, and available for procedural objectification furnished by a kind of explan-

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atory theory. Tentatively, if the autonomy of configured practices is due to such properties, then the interrelatedness of practices would entirely be approachable as a factuality that is present-at-hand. However, since the being-towards-possibilities of practices cannot be conceptualized by means of objectified factuality – that is, data-models that (semantically) interpret (and are theoretically interpreted by) explanatory principles – the way of making sense of the autonomy of configured practices requires a conceptualization in terms of facticity. A significant step in overcoming the paradigm of discreteness is the observation that any particular practice can fully be described in its factual presence – that is, as something actually given in physical space and time – whereas an ensemble of concerted practices can only be captured in its potentiality-for-being, which means that the ensemble is deprived of factual presence, and the appropriation and actualization of the possibilities (upon which practices project their interrelatedness) temporalize the ensemble’s way of being. One can advocate a claim of the irreducibility of concerted practices to the manifolds of agential behavior’s discrete units in a twofold sense – (a) the irreducibility of concerted practices articulating meaning to actions and activities as it is due to the fact that this meaning is not contained in (or produced by) the constituents of particular practices (actions, activities, motivations, rule-following, equipment, patterns, beliefs, desires, etc.); and (b) the irreducibility of the conceptualization overcoming the paradigm of discreteness to any kind of conceptualization proceeding through theoretical construction of factuality. (Irreducibility in the sense [a] can also be formulated in terms of a non-derivability of the facets of properly arranged ensembles of practices from the characteristics of “entities” like human agency, goal-oriented actions, temporal and spatial characteristics of human activity, collective intentionality, and habitual behavior. Irreducibility in the sense [b] should not be confused with a conventional intertheoretical relationship, since such a relationship can only take place between explanatory theories entirely built upon the paradigm of discreteness [Ginev 2018, 95 – 97].) Defending the irreducibility of concerted practices through (a) and (b) essentially differs from the anti-reductionist strategy suggested by Mark Wrathall. For him, a practice “is not an action nor reducible to a set of actions.” (Wrathall 2017a, 5). What he calls “practice” is, in my view, a normatively organized kind of human activity. For him, a practice (like playing soccer) gives rise to actions, but it is found not in those actions. (Soccer – to stick to the example he comments on – is for me not a monolithic practice, but an assemblage of practices. Depending on how they are configured in their performances, one is able to distinguish, for instance, between various styles of playing soccer – “Dutch total soccer”, “Latin American soccer based on the individual players’ technical abil-

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ities”, “Italian catenaccio style”, or “the German collective-mentality based style of playing”.) For Wrathall, a practice becomes apparent through skills, objectifications, and shared meanings that support and give structure to those actions. Thanks to the combination of these components, a practice can persist in culture without being performed. In this account, an isolated practice is already a selfsufficient normative structure in virtue of which certain actions are incarnating the practice’s ends. Ontologically seen, there is in Wrathall’s conception no interesting difference in kind between an ensemble of configured practices and the mere summation of the same practices. The criterion of irreducibility advanced in this study states that only configured practices have autonomous character. To stress again, an isolated practice (extracted from assembled practices in which its performances usually take place) is completely reducible to its constituent actions and activities.¹⁸ All features of a single practice are determined by agency. More specifically, (a) the relations among the practice’s elements are encoded in accordance with the intentionality of those who perform it; (b) the sequence of actions is patterned by actors’ behavioral models; (c) the goals and aims the actors are pursuing determine the practice’s teleological design; and (d) the practice’s flexibility and resilience entirely depends on actors’ reflexivity. By contrast, an interrelatedness of configured practices is underdetermined by agency and agential behavior. On a central tenet of the hermeneutic theory of practices (as suggested in Ginev [2013b, and 2018]), such an interrelatedness – which in contrast to any particular practice can no longer be treated as purposive entity – becomes ontologically autonomous, if (1) it is capable of opening up a horizon of possibilities that configurations within this interrelatedness appropriate and contextually actualize, and (2) the actualized possibilities articulate specific meaning.¹⁹

 This statement presupposes the isolability of any particular practices from the assemblages of practices in which it takes part. Yet the issue of isolability is not an easy subject to tackle. There are complexes of assembled practices (like those of ritual practices) which proscribe the isolation of any particular practice. If such an isolation take place, the complex will be deprived of the capacity to articulate proper meaning. At the same time, the performance of the isolated practice becomes a meaningless sequence of actions. Generally, the isolability hinges on the degree of coherence of the assemblage. But there is a circle of complicated problems hidden behind this general observation. The point is that the coherence of an assemblage of concerted practices has to be defined with respect to the meaning it is able to articulate. In other words, the coherence (and the isolability of particular practices) depend on the hermeneutic circularity which articulates meaning within concerted practices. Thus, the issue of isolability is a hermeneutic-ontological issue.  The articulation of meaning is always characterized by a certain attunement. The “attuned discourse” (in the sense of Being and Time) does not simply refer to the fact that linguistic mean-

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The argument of irreducibility may also be formulated as follows: Conceptualizing configured practices in their potentiality-for-being resists re-presentation through models of actions, activities, and collective behavior. Acknowledging a qualitative leap in the transition to ensembles of configured practices vindicates the search for an irreducible theoretical level in conceptualizing social practices. But this formulation contains an ambiguity. Does the qualitative leap entail a separation between the reality of configured practices and the reality of human agency? The idea of such a separation seems to be akin to critical realists’ differentiation between strata. Assuming that the way of being of practices projecting their own trans-subjective horizon of possibilities is ontologically autonomous justifies, as it were, the idea of separating the two realities. Since the difference between trans-subjective practices and (inter)subjective agential behavior has ontological character, separating the two realities implies treating their ontological difference as a dichotomous one. Fortunately, there is – an already mentioned – way out of this predicament. The hermeneutic circularity through which the articulation of specific meaning takes place within the interrelatedness of practices not only prevents any factual presence of what becomes articulated, but also unites configurations of practices and the particular components of agential behavior.²⁰ (To reiterate, the articulated meaning is not derivable from constituent actions and activities.) With regard to this hermeneutic circularity, the chance arises to defend the ontological autonomy of practices’ transsubjectivity without any form of hypostatization. A sine qua non for pursuing this strategy is to treat the ontological difference (between agency and trans-subjectivity) as a non-dichotomous one or, more specifically, as a difference inherent in the hermeneutic circularity of articulating-meaning-within-and-through-practices.²¹ But the question still remains: Where exactly is the point at which the

ings and feelings go together. Since both attunement and discourse are existentialia, attuned discourse is not an ontic interwovenness of feelings and meanings, but an ontological characteristic of discursive articulation. See on this point also Taylor (2016, 218 – 221).  The argument of irreducibility is more than the insistence of the non-derivability of practices’ trans-subjectivity from routine actions and goal-orientated activities as well as from motivational structures and patterns embedded in agential behavior. This argument should also specify how the hypostatization is to be prevented.  These considerations show that the argument for irreducibility should not be misunderstood as a plea for a separation of practices’ autonomy from human agency. Assuming such a separation would run against the hermeneutic tenet that agential subjectivity is always entangled with what transcends it – practices’ trans-subjectivity. Practices are not a reality that is somehow imposed upon agential behavior. Practices do not have their own driving force that can produce causal effects. If practices could have had the capability to generate such a force, then the con-

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non-dichotomous ontological difference makes practices – in their potentialityfor-being – ontologically autonomous? If one rejects the paradigm of discreteness, and ceases to look at the particular practices involved in an ensemble of concerted practices as discrete units, one would face the problem of how to address the status of any one of these practices. Resolving this problem also provides the answer to the question about the ontological autonomy of configured practices: I will claim that a non-isolated practice situated within and related with configured practices is the site where the non-dichotomous ontological difference is “at work” in constituting the distinctive trans-subjective reality of practices. Any single practice belonging to an ensemble exists simultaneously (1) in itself (in and through its own teleological organization of actions, rules, spatial arrangement, temporal dynamics of its performance, and material resources) and (2) through its multiple relatedness to other practices with which it is configured in a variety of contexts. With regard to (2), one should keep in mind that the configurations are ever changing in the process of contextualization. Taken together, (1) and (2) indicate the nonlocality of any locally organized practice: The latter is stretched over multiple relations. In fact, (2) poses serious ontological difficulties that should be taken into account. Any one practice involved in an ensemble of concerted practices exists in changing configurations, granted that the everydayness of recurrent practices distinguishing the ensemble’s way of being consists not only of repetitive performances but also in small (but significant as far as the articulation of meaning is concerned) innovations in the configurations. Under this assumption, any single practice is dispersed over the changing configurations, and its way of being is defined through the differences in its relatedness to other practices within diverse configurations of the ensemble’s everydayness. Going a step further I will propose that such a practice exists within and through these differences as they progressively proliferate through the new arising configurations. Rejecting the paradigm of discreteness amounts to prioritizing (2) over (1). Any single practice taking place in the routine (everyday) articulation of meaning within an ensemble of practices is first and foremost not a self-sufficient element, but a unit of producing and spreading differences within the continuity of slightly changing configurations. To prioritize (2) means to insist on the ontological primacy of configured practices over any one practice. But again, one should refrain from an essentialist and/or determinist reading of this claim. It should be read in connection with

struction of a causal-explanatory practice theory that draws heavily on the paradigm of discreteness would be the only legitimate option for conceptualizing practices.

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the claim that a practice integrated with configured practices is the site of the non-dichotomous ontological difference. It would be wrong to say that the ontological difference dissolves itself in constantly proliferating contextual differences. Nonetheless, the difference (between a practice determined by agency and the same practice-as-configured-with-other-practices) is essentially dependent on contextually produced differences. A corollary to the prioritization of (2) states that the ongoing differing in the relatedness of a particular practice to practices with which it is configured amounts to practice’s way of deferring in the milieu of interwoven contexts. By implication, in each of these contexts the non-dichotomous ontological difference between (1) and (2) is shifting by means of the differences – emerging in that context – in the relations of any one practice to the practices configured with it, which implies that the very ontological difference exists though a play of contextualized differences, but nonetheless does not become dissolved in this play. This claim needs some further clarification. Re-configuring interrelated practices implies a re-contextualization of what becomes meaningfully articulated within the practices’ performances. In every new context, the produced differences (in the interrelatedness) redefine the status of any particular practice by altering its relatedness to the other practices. Thus, these differences also indicate the “absent presence” of any one practice (as its status has been defined by the preceding configurations). The absent presence also concerns that agency which is incarnated in any one practice through its performance within a configuration. Though in every new context/configuration the practice seems to be “numerically identical”, it only exists as absent presence in the differences in its relations to the other configured practices. Thus, re-contextualization might be regarded as a process of leaving traces (through the emerging differences) of any single practice (and its performative agency) in any particular context of the articulation of meaning.²² The argument for the irreducibility of concerted practices to units of agential behavior (as they are recognizable in the organization of an isolated practice) draws precisely on the way in which the non-dichotomous difference (as engendered by the entanglement of a single practice with configured practices) creates

 It could also be said that the traces are left by the contexts with which the context-made-present is interwoven, provided that the single practice one is tracking has been operating in these contexts. Since each particular context does not preexist the process of (re)contextualization, and is not an entity present-at-hand but is made-present through the temporalizing of temporalization, the process of leaving traces and the temporalizing of temporalization are intimately connected: A particular context within the everydayness of recurrent and slightly changing configurations of practices is made-present through a “trajectory” of temporalizing.

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a “point of inflection” that prohibits the reduction of configured practices to their constituents (as they can be found in agents’ actions, activity, and behavior). This point of inflection – as attached to any one practice-integrated-with-ensemble-of-practices – is not a fixed point. It is constantly deferring via the proliferation of contextual differences. In this reading, a practice-integrated-with-ensemble-of-practices (or a practice-entangled-with-configured-practices) is that deferring point of inflection in the continuity of slightly changing configurations which enables – to anticipate a problematic that will later be discussed – the “production” of trans-subjective agency as partially emancipated from agency driving agential behavior.²³ Since any one single practice-entangled-with-configured-practices that is a constituent of an ensemble of practices provides a point of inflection, the generation of ensemble’s irreducibility is accomplished by the whole process of re-contextualization. One can figure out a pertinent heuristic analogy that may further elucidate the status of a single practice within (the everydayness of performances of) configured practices building a coherent ensemble. With regard to the duality in the way of being of a single practice within an ensemble of practices – the duality referring to (1) and (2) – there is a striking similarity between this way of being and the dual status of the linguistic sign as it is treated in Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiology. According to Saussure (or more correctly, to the editors of the lectures Course de linguistique generale), the linguistic sign – considered under the assumption that language is the norm of all other manifestations of speech – unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and an acoustic image. It is a duality that creates identity of the linguistic sign within language conceived of as providing integrity to speech. It allows a treating of any linguistic sign as a clearly identifiable entity, which does not mean, however, that the sign has a self-sufficient existence. For Saussure, there are in language only differences without positive terms.²⁴ By the same token, the changing configurations of

 This partially emancipated agency becomes spread out via the performances of particular practices. Accordingly, it transmits desires, beliefs, and intentions involved in these performances over the process of contextualization. In transcending the performers’ subjectivity and intersubjectivity, this agency gains a trans-subjective character.  Defining the sign through its differential relativity scatters it over the system of relations and differences, while in defining it through its intrinsic (sensory-abstract) relation one localizes the sign as a self-sufficient and fixed entity. Saussure distinguishes between these two ways of approaching the being of an individual sign by appealing to the contrast between external and internal. The former way of defining the sign has a priority: The specification of an individual sign through the differences it creates within the linguistic system “constitutes the general enabling conditions for the specific relationship that holds between any given signifier and signified in the linguistic system.” (Thibault 1997, 215).

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assembled practices and the shifting horizons of possibilities for articulating meaning foreclose the possibility of identifying a practice-entangled-with-configured-practices in “positive terms” (that is, in terms of a factual presence). The symmetric duality of signifier and signified vindicates a methodological autonomy of both the particular linguistic signs and the language as a system. In stressing that the “linguistic sign unites a signified and signifier”, de Saussure (2011, 66) argues that signifier (standing for sound-image) and signified (standing for concept) are symmetrical to each other and inseparable, provided that the bond between them is arbitrary, which is the meaning of Saussure’s well-known principle of the arbitrariness. (Only the symbols as a special class of semiotic units are not subjected to this principle.) However, because the two parts of the sign are always already situated within – and transcended by – a system that exists through ever generating differences, their unity as (to make use of Saussure’s metaphor) the front and back sides of a single sheet of paper cannot be objectified, that is, thematized beyond its contextual manifestations (Ginev 2013d). In the Course, Saussure deals with the “inner duality of all sciences concerned with values”, and reaches the conclusion that always when at stake in scientific conceptualization is a system for equating things of different orders (like signifier and signified), the differentiation between the “axis of simultaneities” and the “axis of successions” is indispensable. Following further the analogy, one observes that the double referentiality of performing a single practice – a reference to the agential subjectivity involved in its organization, and a reference (multiple relatedness) to the ensemble of concerted practices – makes the practice an identifiable entity without reifying it. It is identifiable as a “deferring differential” in changing configurations. In practice theory, however, Saussure’s inner duality should not necessarily lead to the differentiation between the two axes, each of which grounded upon the objectivist concept of time. Focusing on the constitution of meaning within interrelated practices invokes the need to implement a phenomenological concept of time. The hermeneutic-phenomenological alternative to the (purely ontic) synchrony-diachrony distinction is the regimes of the temporalizing of temporality within an ensemble of practices. It is my contention that the progressive proliferation of contextual differences is on a par with the diversification of the regimes of temporalizing within an ensemble of configured practices. In stating this, I believe that the heuristic analogy with the duality of a linguistic sign producing differences within a semiotic system can be extended to cover poststructuralist motifs too. To stress again, the analogy is basically between the conceptualization of the linguistic sign’s leading to the production of differences within a linguistic system and the conceptualization of the way of being of a practice-entangled-with-

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configured-practices within and through the contextual differences the practice’s performances create. The linguistic sign is capable of engendering differences because of its inherent duality. By virtue of its arbitrariness and inherent duality, the sign exists through its “value” (in Saussure’s sense) in the differences that the system of language produces. Any individual linguistic sign is firstly defined by the differences it generates within the overall system of relations to which it belongs. The dictum that “in language there are only differences” is completely applicable to the ensembles of configured practices. But this dictum can be radicalized. In moving from a more Saussure-like to a more Derrida-like reading of the heuristic analogy, one realizes that what is at stake – in approaching a linguistic sign as well as a practice-entangled-with-configured-practices – is a kind of sameness which is not identical. Accordingly, Derrida’s “differance” can be brought to bear to the way of being of a particular social practice within the texture of practices with which it is configured. The “middle voice” of differance is at work in the way of being of a practice-entangled-with-configured-practices. The “small modification” of Saussure’s way of uniting arbitrariness and differential in the project for semiology – a modification leading to de-privileging the signifier-signified differentiation in favor of the “play of differences which is no longer simply a concept, but the possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual system and process in general” (Derrida 1979, 140) – is of crucial significance not only for elucidating the dual status of a practice-entangled-with-configured-practices but, first and foremost, for specifying the character of the qualitative leap from the reality of agential behavior to the trans-subjective reality of configured practices. Roughly, agential behavior constantly produces contextual differences, but differance transcends any one of them, thereby creating trans-agential reality that, however, has no being beyond the ongoing proliferation of contextual differences. In transcending agential behavior, what acquires a trans-agential status does not constitute a “transcendental signified”, but creates a non-dichotomous difference – a difference within hermeneutic circularity – with agential behavior. Thus, pace Derrida who most definitely rejects the possibility of ontological difference beyond the play of differences, the hermeneutic conceptualization of practices prompts a scenario in which the ontological-difference-within-hermeneutic-circularity and the play of contextual differences are presupposing each other. It is my contention that this mutual presupposition is also implied by the poststructuralist reading of Saussure.²⁵

 To stress again, the non-dichotomous ontological difference between (1) and (2) does not refer to something that is beyond the differences produced within and by the ensemble. The constitution of the interrelatedness of configured practices through the play of difference is prior to

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In erasing “the radical difference between signifier and signified”, one is able to show that the play of differences suffices for organizing the system of language which, in its turn, produces the play of differences. Prima facie the very formulation of this strategy is dangerously close to a vicious circle. On a close inspection, however, one can realize that this is a circularity between transcending differance and the articulation of units in the system of language. The question of whether the introduction of the play of differences as “the possibility of conceptuality” vindicates – in spite of Derrida’s intention – a kind of hermeneutic circularity that “cultivates” a non-dichotomous difference (irreducible to the contextual differences, but also not tantamount to differance) in the system of language should be answered in the affirmative. Answering the question in this way would mean that a consistent implementation of Derrida’s strategy (in the ontological approach to configured practices) involves a hermeneutic justification of a non-dichotomous (but nevertheless privileged) ontological difference. This is exactly the important outcome of the heuristic analogy. Arguing against the presence of transcendental signified is also directed against any kind of (not only semantic but also hermeneutic) meaning that supposedly can be constituted beyond or behind the play of differences. On a thesis whose discussion will take place in the next section, the articulation of lifeforms within configured practices presupposes a kind of “transcendent meaning” (characterizing the lifeforms’ authenticity) in whose horizon all contexts of articulation become meaningful. It is by no means a kind of meaning that play the role of a transcendental signified. (Like the non-dichotomous ontological difference, the only way of being of this meaning is within and though the play of contextual differences.) But nonetheless the transcendent meaning of a lifeform can solely be conceptualized by aptly addressing various forms of hermeneutic circularity in which the non-dichotomous ontological difference resides. Thus, the proliferation of differences does not dissolve the centrality of the ontological difference. The way of denouncing a transcendental signified in the hermeneutic theory of practices is closer to arguments developed in Dilthey’s

both – the interrelatedness as an identifiable system, and the practices (as identifiable entities) involved in it. With regard to the dual status of any one practice, an autonomous ensemble of practices manages to preserve its autonomy through the constant generation of differences in performing the same practices in varying configurations. In stating this, the analogy moves closer to Derrida’s well-known radicalization of Saussure’s semiological difference: There is no power external to an ensemble of concerted practices that can command the production of differences within the interplay of practices and possibilities. But again, regardless of how the production of differences is advanced, the ontological difference between the factuality of human agency and the facticity of practices could never be erased.

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school than to poststructuralist deconstruction: The ontological difference remains immanent in “life’s dynamic”, and its conceptualization with regard to the articulation of meaning demands the use of contextual transcendental arguments. Stressing the indissolubility of the ontic-ontological difference in differance alludes to the need of prioritizing the hermeneutic aspect over the poststructuralist one when treating the whole of the articulation of authentic meaning within an autonomous ensemble of practices. With regard to the way of being of a practice-entangled-with-configured-practices, differance works in concert with that kind of fore-structuring of discursive and cognitive structures which the interplay of practices and possibilities initiates, provided that the difference between the facticity of fore-structuring and the factuality of structures is a manifestation of the non-dichotomous ontological difference. Derrida (1997, 47) has good reasons for arguing that the sign within the play of differences presents itself “as irreducible absence within the presence of the trace”, granted that each induced trace is an operation and not a state. The “present absence” also characterizes the way of being of a practice-entangled-withconfigured-practices. Recurrent performances of such a practice leave only one possible way of its identification – through the traces it leaves in proliferating configurations in which this practice takes part. But one should not forget that these performances-within-the-ensemble are in a hermeneutic situation of articulating meaning. Conceptualizing the dual status of a practice-entangled-withconfigured-practices with regard to this situation cannot avoid the ontological difference.

2.4 Scrutinizing the everydayness of concerted practices Hannah Arendt’s study of the “banality of evil” is famous with its rejection of the view that Nazis created an evil political reality because they are insane monsters and beasts in human form. At stake in her study is the controversial claim that Eichmann never realized what he was doing. (In Arendt’s profound observation, he was simply incapable of thinking.) Eichmann’s personal motivation (if any) has been extinguished in the performances of administrative practices he has been obliged to perform. Eichmann was not capable of hearing the call of conscience, since he (his personality) was totally absorbed by the interrelatedness of these practices. It is these practices that exert not only trans-subjective but “inhuman forces” – the forces which bring into play the “banality of evil”. Thus, the answer to the question of where are the roots of the banality of evil is already formulated. It goes without saying that any form of evil is stemming from and remains tied with a certain “economy” of personal motives. Yet when the evil

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takes the form of everydayness, it becomes dispersed in such a manner over institutionalized practices and policies that it is no longer discernible as a phenomenon emanating from particular persons. In this account, the evil becomes produced and reproduced by the interrelatedness of these practices in their everydayness. In making use of Arendt’s argument, one can state that the banality of evil – as dispersed over institutionalized routine practices (like the political-administrative and punitive practices of the Third Reich) – is deprived of depth and demonic dimension (Bernstein 1996, 137– 149). The banality of evil is by no means arising from the vice of selfishness. It is not rooted in the unpredictable spontaneity of morally distorted individuals who have succeeded in imposing their personal pathologies on the everyday public life, thereby making the latter into pathological social reality. The banality of evil is a machinery that works beyond the particular minds of those who care for its “normal functioning” – a machinery whose “normalcy” is normatively guaranteed by the anonymous practices of das Man. Furthermore, the banality of evil is a repressive trans-subjectivity of routine practices that makes the Nazi institutional-administrative policies a “normal everydayness” (for the officers who perform these practices). Evil’s omnipotence in an everydayness of routine practices and policies transforms the individual bearers of evil consciousness into – by no means superfluous, but only – accurate and conscientious public officers of an already established everydayness that surpasses agential motivations. By the same token, the banality of evil does not eliminate the role of the engineers of evil social systems. Yet it makes this role into a particular – although not insignificant – component of assemblages of practices through which evil is produced and reproduced on a regular base. In the everydayness of such practices, evil personal motives no longer play a decisive role in organizing repressive policies. (These motives may even enter into conflict with regimented mechanisms of repression.) Similarly, personal resentments are important psychic motivation for participating in such assemblages, but they are not the site where the banality of evil originates. On Arendt’s view, however perverse the sadistic behavior might be, it is humanly understandable. She makes this point in connection with the “blind bestiality” of the SA who predominantly run the concentration camps in an initial phase. One can clearly recognize personal motives such as hatred and resentment behind their abnormal mentality. Yet Arendt argues that the “real horror” began when the SS took over the administration of the camps. At that point, the everydayness of administrative practices performed by “perfectly normal men” turned out to an everydayness of systematic destruction of human bodies. For Richard Bernstein, it is this view of Arendt that most essentially anticipates

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Foucault’s bio-political conception of power. The systematic destruction of human bodies guided by the administration of the camp is created and re-created by the complex interrelatedness of practices of biopolitics.²⁶ To recapitulate, one should stress that the ingenuity of Arendt’s account of the banality of evil consists in its capacity to reveal the existential-ontological meaning of the ontic manifestations of extreme political pathologies enabled by a routine of concerted practices. (Roberto Esposito [2008, 150 – 152] suggests an alternative interpretation in this regard. According to him, Arendt’s discourse tracks in a direction diverging from that initiated by Foucault. In affirming that where there is an authentic politics [in the sense of the Greek polis] a space of meaning for the production of life cannot be opened, Arendt’s discourse makes the concept of biopolitics devoid of any sense. In contrast to Foucault – so Esposito’s argument goes – Arendt’s conception considers political activity as heterogeneous to the sphere of biological life. It goes without saying that a proper reading of The Human Condition can successfully counter this argument.²⁷) Another apt example of how trans-subjective everydayness of practices with entangled in them subjective political motifs succeeds in creating a perfect mechanism for destroying even a minimal form of authenticity is provided by the routine (personal and public) life in the postwar East European totalitarian societies of “real socialism”. Paradoxically enough, the everyday practices of these societies were arranged in a manner that destructed from the very begin-

 Approaching the everydayness of assembled practices generating repressive mechanisms in terms of practices’ anonymous control over agential behavior is on a par with Foucault’s answer of the question of why the analytic of power is not to be restricted to a functional analysis of institutions (understood as normatively organized forms of inter-subjectivity). According to one of the arguments Foucault suggests, in absolutizing this analysis, one unavoidably explains power in terms of power since the explanation derives the origin of power relations from the functioning of institutions. However, this argument is not raised against the view that power relations originate from an independent (trans-institutional) source. This is why a “society without power relations can only be an abstraction.” (Foucault 1982, 791). By the same token, one can conclude that it would be wrong to imagine a society whose institutions of exerting power are not formed within changing configurations of practices generating power relations. It follows from the analytic of power that the forms of institutionalization rest on configured practices that are mixing traditions, predispositions, customs, and temporary social structures whereby they are able to create apparatuses for distributing power relations. Developing this analytic allows Foucault to circumvent the reification of institutional structures of power, thereby addressing the latter in terms of elaborated, transformed, and organized practices.  Arendt’s scenario of the defeat of homo faber and the victory of the animal laborans leading to the elevation of the laboring activity and to the fact that life (and not the world) overruled all other dimensions within the diversity of human condition invites an elaborated biopolitical discourse.

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ning any initiative for authentic life. Bureaucrats and administrators were promoted to organize imitative quasi-authentic forms of artistic, ethnic, intellectual, professional, and even religious life. This is why the most compact formula characterizing this case is “societies without life-worlds”, provided that the lifeworld (pace Schutz and Habermas who put strong emphasis on inter-subjectivity) is first and foremost the trans-subjective milieu of practices in which initiatives for authentic life (as characterized by a proper intersubjective ethos) can be generated. The lifeworld of a society governed by institutionalized political authority is the site where authentic cultural lifeforms can be disclosed and articulated by autonomous ensembles of practices. The paradoxical situation historically leading to the life-worlds’ destruction in the abovementioned societies can be summarized as follows. Initially, the political authorities in the East European totalitarian societies were entirely committed to the use of direct repressive mechanisms of control. The model of Soviet concentration camps was the most significant means for exercising this control. The political authority did not have any idea of how the everyday life in the revolutionary-socialist societies will look like. They were preoccupied only with the demolition of the class enemy. Nonetheless, the everyday life in these societies began to take shape. This was a process that came into being behind the backs of both authorities and victims. The grey everydayness of routine practices of “socialist life” composed itself in a manner that prohibited the emergence of authentic cultural lifeforms. To stress again, this was a desired but not a planned achievement of the political authorities. The reality of this everydayness was most welcome by them. They started the political engineering of organizing quasi-authentic forms of socialist cultural life, because they were aware that the life-worlds in these societies were irreversibly destructed. The everydayness of trans-subjectively interrelated practices that prohibits and inhibits the disclosure of authentic lifeforms – distinguished by their own kinds of everydayness – is the sparse routine reality of a society without a lifeworld. This statement should further be detailed. Any trans-subjective everydayness – however inauthentic and repressive it might be – can be transgressed in a manner provoking a configuration of practices that may disclose an authentic lifeform. It goes without saying that the history of the post-war totalitarian East European societies displays plenty of transgressions of the depressing everydayness. In many cases, the political authorities were not extremely repressive, allowing, for instance, dissident artistic creativity. The toleration of individual dissidents or even small groups of dissidents was not a threatening problem for the status quo. However, the emergence of lifeforms with alternative everydayness was a phenomenon that could not have been tolerated by the political authorities. They developed highly inventive “methods” for detecting and de-

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stroying configurations of practices promising to constitute authentic lifeforms. But the methods were very effective only because they were perfectly implanted in the (self-constituted) inauthentic everydayness of these societies. It was the routine of practices that worked for the totalitarian regimes. The inauthentic everydayness (equipped with the “methods” mentioned) in the East European post-war societies was strong enough to kill the autonomous ensembles of practices capable of articulating authentic lifeforms. Again, I am not trying to underestimate the fact that the systematic destruction of life-worlds in the societies of “real socialism” owed much to the efforts of armies of “operative workers” and secret agents – in Bulgaria, for instance, they were more than 10 % of the whole working population. But like the “conscientious Nazis”, these workers and agents – some of them enthusiastically serving their functions – were only a component of the trans-subjective mechanisms that succeeded in destructing the life-worlds. This example provides the opportunity for developing a more general view about the lifeworld’s distinctiveness.²⁸ The lifeworld is not a reality continuous with the inter-subjectivity that is inherent in the communication media of various social groups. (In stating this, I am referring to the programs which aim at extending the concepts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity of classical transcendental phenomenology to basic concepts of phenomenological social theory.) As a horizon in which a plurality of authentic lifeforms comes into being, the lifeworld transcends any kind of normatively designed inter-subjectivity. Approaching the lifeworld in terms of a “province of subjective corporeal acts” and “stratification of the zones of operation” prevents one from seeing and conceptualizing the trans-subjective everydayness of concerted practices. Spelled out in these terms, the lifeworld is the everyday reality of reciprocal understanding between “me” and those who share the goals behind my corporeal performances. This subjective-intersubjective perspective on the constitution of the everyday reality of a lifeworld cannot handle the issue of how authentic lifeforms become disclosed and articulated within routine (but properly configured) practices. There is a place only for banal lifeforms in “the meaning-structure of everyday reality” within this perspective – lifeforms constituted by means of routine typification. Innovative deviations in the performances of “my” corporeal acts may “enrich” my personal life, but they cannot account for the emergence of trans-subjective lifeforms.  The destruction of the lifeworld is not a mandatory condition for establishing an authoritarian or totalitarian political regime. Thus, Franco’s Spain in the period 1962– 1975 (and especially after Manuel Flaga’s press law of 1966) was a unique combination of a severe political dictatorship and a growing plurality of authentic (artistic, academic, religious, and even political) lifeforms.

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These innovations are only variations within an established “intersubjective style of lived experience”. Following this subjective-intersubjective (and still mentalist) perspective, one prefers to speak of “forms of sociality”, each of which is “based on the experience of another fellow-man as endowed with consciousness, sharing with me a common intersubjective world of understanding and action.” (Schutz, Luckmann 1974, 36). The picture depicted from this perspective does not undergo essential changes – with respect to the possibility of tackling the issue of disclosing and articulating authentic lifeforms – when the concept of the lifeworld is tied with the distinction between social integration and systematic integration, and defined from the perspective of acting subjects forming a social group. The issue of how authentic lifeforms are (trans-subjectively) disclosed is again not properly handled, since the reality of the lifeworld is postulated as an inter-subjectively authentic reality contrasting the spheres of strategic rationality. The lifeworld’s authenticity hangs together with the resistance against the colonization of the social life guided by communicative rationality. In a transcendental formulation, the (symbolic) structures of the lifeworld lay down the conditions for possible communicative-dialogical co-understanding that resists manipulation from the forms of systematic integration (or more specifically, the encroachment of administrative and monetary steering mechanisms). A critical theory of social integration – that is, a theory constructed in accordance with this transcendental formulation – should reverse the tendency of “modernization processes” by anchoring money and power as media in the inter-subjectively constituted and rationalized lifeworld (Habermas 1987, 384). The task is not the proliferation of authentic lifeforms, but the expansion of the forms of social integration as they can be institutionalized by means of positive law. My position in this regard is as follows: The forms of (uncolonizable) social integration (as distinguished by their own intersubjective normativity) could only be of interest of a critical social theory, if they are capable of disclosing and articulating authentic cultural lifeforms. The authenticity of the lifeworld cannot be derived from intersubjective normativity, but ought to be scrutinized on the level of trans-subjective facticity of practices.²⁹

 Eschewing the trans-subjective facticity of practices and entirely concentrating on social pathologies exclusively related to the violation of the inter-subjective normativity of the forms of social integration make this intersubjective critical perspective blind against social pathologies generated by various kinds of assembled practices. I am unable to see, for instance, how can one address from this perspective the pathologies in the East European totalitarian societies stemming from the artificially created (and institutionally legalized) by the regimes “forms of social integration” that only effectuated more effective mechanisms of manipulation. Interest-

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From a political point of view, it is the plurality of authentic lifeforms that brings into being civil society. The most important trait of civil society consists in its capacity to cultivate productive policies that cannot be suffocated (or even regulated) by state authorities. These policies could be effective if they were protected through the everyday reproduction of those practices in which they are meaningful initiatives. More generally, the birthplace of such policies is an everydayness of practices generating deviations from and transgressions of the regimented public life – that is, the public sphere organized by the state as an apparatus. In this reading, the distinction between civil society and the state is not defined in post-Hegelian terms of (pre-political and political) societal organizations, but as an opposition between configured practices generating authenticity and the apparatus designed by a particular political authority. The state is the highest form of political subjectivity, whereas autonomous civil society is what always already surpasses this subjectivity, thereby expressing authentic trans-subjectivity. The latter can be regarded as “the political” (in JeanLuc Nancy’s sense) in contrast to the kind of “authorial politics”, granted that the difference between the political and politics is particular version of the ontological difference (Ginev 2003a; Ginev 2016b). The routine practices of the politically organized public life can effectively be opposed only by everyday ensembles of practices that are capable of resisting reintegration in the established public sphere. (In the course of this study, I will try to show that the expression “everydayness of practices that constantly creates innovations” is by no means an oxymoron.) Constituting alternative forms of everydayness that defy control by the politically regulated public life in liberal democratic societies creates “heterogeneity” that is not welcomed by the political elites, provided that the lifeforms distinguished by their own configurations of everyday practices might promote views and values conflicting with the political principles of these societies. Moreover, creating “heterogeneity” through autonomous ensembles of everyday practices that articulate specific meaning runs against the kind of unrestricted individualism enabled by lifeforms that do not call into question the absoluteness of negative liberty, which as a worldview is a requisite for the sustainable functioning of liberal democracy. The politics of dissolving all “heterogeneities” (lifeforms striving for meaningful existence predicated on positive liberties) seems to be indispensable for this functioning. Only “integrated heterogeneous lifeingly enough, Habermas wrote The Theory of Communicative Action at the time when the proliferation of such “forms of social integration” reached its apex. He viewed at this proliferation as a sign of how “Stalinist domination by force has in recent years been given way to more moderate, post-Stalinist regimes.” (Habermas 1987, 387).

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forms” – that contribute to the “multiplicity within homogeneity” – are admissible in liberal democracy. Policies of positive freedoms can enjoy limited scope of implementation if the established order is not disturbed. (Let me draw the attention to the fact that I am speaking of positive liberties related to the “ultimate meanings” of trans-subjective lifeforms. Thus considered, positive liberties have nothing to do with “liberties” codified in legislation and assured by a welfare state, and imposed by means of a political apparatus.) Any form of “non-assimilable heterogeneity” is dangerous for the “post-historically” established order of liberal-democratic societies. (For instance, a lifeform spreading practices of veganism and policies of respecting animal welfare, but not opposing the liberal-democratic paradigm of “sustainable growth” would be tolerated. Yet a lifeform releasing an everydayness of practices prompting degrowth and policies of deep ecology would be regarded as a manifestation of a politically “incorrect” worldview.) Cultural lifeforms creating uncontrollable heterogeneities has to be reabsorbed – so the political imperative of liberal democracy goes – in the everyday life “made up of free citizens”. It goes without saying that the politics of reabsorption and neutralizing heterogeneities assumes a political philosophy postulating the absoluteness of human agency (modeled on the image of “unencumbered self”). It is my contention that neither the models of “deliberative democracy”, nor the attempts at harmonizing the logic of democracy with the logic of liberalism, and nor even the model of “agonistic pluralism” as based on Derrida’s deconstruction (Mouffe 2000, 135 – 137) can reconcile the “homogenous demos” with “heterogeneous lifeforms”. The foregoing considerations provided examples of how the inauthentic everydayness of interrelated social practices generates social pathologies. To be sure, the Nazis “banality of evil” and the destruction of the lifeworld in real socialism are extreme cases that cannot be regarded as typical forms of everydayness. Tautologically formulated, the inauthentic everydayness of practices is spreading inauthenticity of agents’ existence. But this everydayness does not necessarily generate dramatic social pathologies. Inauthenticity should not be equated with politically pathological social life. If inauthentic everydayness generates pathologies, this could be only a side-effect of the routine practices’ power. The already mentioned power of biopolitics is a case in point. One can distinguish different types of biopolitics which are corresponding to different kinds of everydayness. The practices of the Nazi biopolitical apparatus took the form of a certain everydayness of “thanatopolitics”. But this everydayness was only a particular outcome of that development which Foucault describes under the heading of “massifying human biology” – the process in which the multiplicity of individual bodies became a “global mass”, and the biopolitics of human populations was established “as political problem, as a problem

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that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as a power’s problem.” (Foucault 2003, 245). Biopolitics became universal regulatory technology – distinct from the particular disciplinary technologies – just because it established itself in the end of the 18th century as a total everydayness of practices aiming at lowering the mortality rate, increasing life expectancy or stimulating the birth rate. The everydayness of the new regulatory technology restricted but did not replace existing practices for disciplining the particular human bodies by separating, aligning, serializing, and surveilling them. Through the expanding “bio-power” the individual body became a totally controlled entity that can be “rationalized” and “economized”. The culmination of this process was the emergence of the “disciplinary technology of labor”. In his analysis, Foucault draws attention to the way in which disciplining bio-power spread itself via configurations of routine practices beyond all human sovereignty. The trans-subjectivity of these practices enabled the circulation of bio-power – a process transcending the juridical form of sovereignty. However, when racism was merged with the everydayness of biopolitics, bio-power became an apparatus of a quite definite political subject. Accordingly, the anonymous regulatory-massifying practices were transformed into practices of a political everydayness that became instrumental for the authority claiming the right to decide what must live and what must die – a “biocratic” authority supplied by a transcription of a political discourse into biological terms. What authors like Roberto Esposito try to show is that the massifying everydayness of the regulatory practices of bio-power could have become an “affirmative biopolitics”. This is a politics revealing positive tendencies in the transition “from the politicization of the biological, which began in late modernity, to a similarly intense biologization of the political that makes the preservation of life through reproduction the only project that enjoys universal legitimacy.” (Esposito 2008, 147). Esposito refers to the protection of biological life. On a motif developed by him, an affirmative bio-power consists in forms of everyday life that are well-equipped for participants’ individuation. It is through these forms that the “social body of human life” would become continually “reborn in different guises”. However, an affirmative biopolitics should also promote lifeforms evading the inauthentic everydayness of politically institutionalized practices imposing “consumatory regimes” on human lives. The imposition and cultivation of habits of (and desires for) consuming goods that brings immense profits for those who produce them is in a sense also a part of today’s biopolitics. The “hyperreality” of the imposed habits of consumption that have nothing in common with the real needs of humans’ biological lives can only be counterbalanced by the spread of lifeforms capable of restoring these real needs.

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Does the inauthentic everydayness of institutionalized practices exert compulsory effects on the performers of these practices without implementing means of manifested repressiveness designed by an authority with an interest in oppressing these performers? Perhaps in some cases it does. Compulsory heterosexuality is the best candidate for exemplifying “normalizing” everydayness of a large array of various practices not organized and governed in accordance with program, agenda, or political will of a certain authority. On the original argument, heterosexuality is a political institution cultivated and enforced by patriarchal society. To develop this argument means to oppose the view that heterosexuality is an innate (“natural”) orientation (Rich 1980). Seen in terms of trans-subjective arrangements of practices functioning as regulatory apparatus, however, compulsory heterosexuality is not a political institution, that is, an organization that – in accordance with a specifically elaborated agenda – creates and enforces a normative order that marginalizes people with deviant sexualities, and promotes heterosexual behavior. In a view that tacitly draws on Foucault’s ideas, heterosexuality – being neither innate normativity nor a natural phenomenon – is orientation, preference, and behavior generated by disciplining practices, spaces of circulating power, established discourses propagating recipes for ethical choices, behavioral models, therapeutic decisions, regulations, and so on. Endowed with such a status, “hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations.” (Butler 1993, 125). Thus considered, heterosexuality needs the medium of disciplining practices in order to constantly make the effort to achieve its own (unachievable) idealized image, thereby excluding those sexual possibilities that actually or potentially threaten the (re)production of heterosexualized gender. Actors socialized and personalized in such disciplining practices and “discursive formations” are “unwittingly coerced” to meaningfully constitute their preferred objects of sexual desire within the normative authority of the transsubjective order of practices and discourses. Even in the most tolerant, anti-patriarchal societies, there are concerted practices propelling this order, and no political institution opposing compulsory heterosexuality can rearrange the configurations of practices supporting and transmitting it. Paraphrasing a celebrated dictum of Michael Warner, trans-subjectively arranged social practices have thousand ways to govern the sex of people including the most personal dimensions of pleasure and identity. This is why humans “live with sexual norms that survive from the Stone Age.” (Warner 2000, 5). Though not repressive in the usual sense, heterosexuality is a “compulsory everydayness”. But sexuality changes (in the perspective of cultural history) just because this compulsory everydayness of complexly configured practices constantly generates its intrinsic alternatives – deviant configurations that enable ways of constituting objects

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of sexual desire, and new modalities of sexual orientation. Each of these novelties can survive as a “form of sexual life” if its configurations of practices are capable of enacting an everydayness occupying a specific cultural niche. Here again Warner makes a nice observation that sexual autonomy has grown (not only through) regressing to infantile pleasure – as this Freudian dimension of sexual autonomy was strongly stressed by the sexual liberation and gay liberation movements in the 1960s – but also by making room for new configurations of practices generating “new freedoms, new experiences, new pleasures, new identities, new bodies”.³⁰ The few examples adduced in this section show that assemblages of concerted practices organized as everydayness of recurrent configurations might be repressive, coercive, compulsory, manipulative, spreading instrumental control and regulatory technologies. But in certain cases, alterations, deviations, transgressions, or “spontaneous mutations” in the normatively organized everydayness might induce articulation of specific meaning. Actors participating in this articulation get the chance to shape their lives anew by repeating the emergent configurations of practices. No doubt, this would be only a first step in establishing an “authentic everydayness” capable of articulating an “authentic cultural form of life”. (The primary characteristic of authentic everydayness is to produce a discourse that can define what should be counted as a state of “normalcy”. Since this state is engendered by specifically configured recurrent practices, no normative criteria for normalcy can be imported from discourses produced outside the everydayness of these practices.) Supporting and transmitting inauthenticity or generating existential authenticity are processes that depend more on trans-subjective configurations practices projected-upon-possibilities than on actors’ agendas, initiatives, plans, desires, and intentions. The types of everydayness provisionally distinguished so far were predominantly subsumed under categories such as instrumentality, neutrality, massification, regularization, destruction, banality, inauthenticity, and authenticity. The next chapter will attempt to offer a more systematic taxonomy.

 Compulsory heterosexuality is also a controversial theme for the theorists of queer studies. Theoreticians like Judith Butler and Leo Bersani are struggling against essentialist identities, thereby trying to relocate the sexual orientation’s identities within the practices of cultural politics. According to them, the homosexual body cannot be constructed entirely outside the heterosexuality it would subvert. (See, in particular, Bersani 1995, 43 – 76.)

3 Disclosing authentic lifeforms 3.1 Manifolds of practices: thresholds and types In what follows, the expression of the facticity of practices (already mentioned several times) will be reserved for assemblages that in their potentiality-forbeing are capable of constituting sustainable everydayness of repeatable configurations of practices that contextually actualize possibilities, and in the course of their repetition undergo changes that – in shifting the horizon of possibilities – open new contexts for actualizing possibilities. Some assemblages may turn out to be able to disclose and articulate (inauthentic and authentic) cultural lifeforms. Analytically seen, the two preceding sentences contain three distinctions. First, there is the distinction between assemblages that do not cross the threshold of facticity and assemblages that have the capacity of constituting everydayness, but do not disclose lifeforms. Second, the assemblages deprived of the capability to disclose lifeforms has to be distinguished from those that have this capability. Finally, depending on the lifeforms’ (authentic or inauthentic) character, the assemblages capable of disclosing lifeforms are divided into two groups. I will use the expression ensembles of practices (again already mentioned several times) for referring to assemblages disclosing and articulating authentic lifeforms. Here are some preliminary considerations regarding the taxonomy that results from the three distinctions. (See Figure 1 on the next page.) The third distinction is the most important one. At this stage, I will refrain from defining the difference between the two types of cultural lifeforms. This chapter will deal extensively with the notion of authentic lifeforms. To a great extent, non-authentic cultural lifeforms might be regarded as “deficient modes” of what an authentic lifeform should be. Since diagnosing deficiencies presupposes a “non-deficient lifeform”, the concept of non-authentic lifeform will take shape in the course of the further analysis along with the discussion of the notion of authentic lifeform. For the moment, it suffices to recall an example for such a deficiency: The forms of socio-economic life totally guided by instrumental rationality do not provide opportunities for authentic personal life, but they constitute kinds of everydayness distinguished by (individual and collective) style of living, professional ethos, specific normativity, and spatial-temporal organization of configured practices. Thus characterized, the trans-subjective everydayness of these concerted practices enables inter-subjectivity that makes those who are involved in this everyday life into practitioners of special lifeforms. I am aware that this provisional example suffers from the vagueness of the expression “socio-economic life totally guided by instrumental rationality”. Instead of trying to clarify https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110605303-005

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Fig. 1: Types of Concerted Practices

the meaning of this expression, I will only invoke the opposite case: There are forms of life whose ethos is related to values different from those of profitability, economic efficiency, and immediate effectivity. Moreover, the values of such lifeforms play the role of a “transcendent authority” in a sense that will later be clarified. Tentatively, a form of life guided by such ethos and authority instantiates the concept of authentic lifeform. As a rule, an authentic cultural form of life (its ensemble of practices) begins to take shape within the milieu of unstable overlapping assemblages. Thus, there are many arbitrary and idiosyncratic combinations of practices of preparing and consuming vegetarian meals, related to various medical, ethical, and strongly personal practices. Most of these combinations are structured around sophisticated recipes and organized in “algorithms” that include multiple steps of preparing the meal. Any one combination of vegetarian culinary practices is fully determined by particular intentions and interests. Some combinations reflect special diets, some others manifest cultural-ecological, ritual, or ceremonial as-

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pects of ethno-cultural traditions. Yet certain configurations of these culinary practices enmeshed with practices expressing particular styles of living may disclose an authentic form of life, if the whole ensemble of practices supports and activates moral obligations and duties that, in their turn, become coupled with political practices and policies of defending animal rights and avoiding any kind of animal exploitation, deep-ecological environmental initiatives, and social practices that promise to reverse climate change by breaking with the illusory paradigm of “sustainable growth”. It is the configuration of all these practices that projects itself upon possibilities that can be appropriated by practitioners. The “ultimate (transcendent) meaning” – the meaning of living in union with Nature by striving for the preservation of her biodiversity – of the new cultural lifeform becomes “inscribed” on the horizon of these possibilities. What would warrant the authenticity of the disclosed form of life is not only the proper configuration and the recurrent performances of the concerted practices in which and through which the possibilities will be actualized. There is also another important condition for authenticity stipulating that when the performances of the practices involved in the whole ensemble become a “regular enterprise”, then the way in which they are arranged should support practitioners’ ethos of struggling for an “authentic everydayness” that resists any manipulation from without. Against this background, a preliminary criterion for authenticity sounds as follows: When the practices of a disclosed form of life are (in their everydayness) capable of transforming step-by-step the lifeform’s potentially attainable ultimate (transcendent) meaning into something meaningfully identifiable and ready-to-hand within their configurations, then the lifeform is (ontologically) authentic. The articulation of an authentic cultural lifeform consists in the continuous transference of the ultimate meaning to ready-to-hand meaningful entities resulting from the actualizations of possibilities within configurations of everyday practices. According to this criterion, the lifeform creates meaningful reality by appropriating possibilities from a horizon in which the ultimate meaning is inscribed. Put otherwise, the lifeform is authentic when it manages to create new reality by turning its ultimate meaning into readiness-to-hand within configured practices. An authentic form of life is distinguished by the combination of (1) a belief – on the part of its practitioners – in the reality of the lifeform’ transcendent meaning that can be “brought down to the earth” through day-to-day efforts; (2) the everydayness of properly configured and recurrent practices articulating the disclosed reality; and (3) the lifeform’s ethos which excludes the control of any external moral or political authority in the process of this articulation. As mentioned, there are among the possibilities upon which an autonomous ensemble projects its being such ones that encode the ultimate meaning of the

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lifeform disclosed and articulated by the assembled practices. The actors who participate in the lifeform and perform its everyday practices are convinced that in so doing the ultimate meaning they pursue will make their lives meaningful and significant. Yet the ultimate meaning of a lifeform resides in the lifeform’s practices and possibilities. The actors have to single out the lifeform’s ultimate meaning as inscribed on the same horizon of possibilities in which the lifeform becomes disclosed and articulated. To identify the ultimate meaning as projected upon possibilities is the primary condition for assigning authenticity to a lifeform. The only way of being of a lifeform’s ultimate meaning is the being-projected-upon-possibilities. Because the possibilities encoding this meaning are integrated with the open horizon of possible meaning that can be articulated in the lifeform’s everydayness, they are revealed and concealed anew in each particular context constituted by configured practices. As a consequence – to suggest an extended formulation of a claim already stressed – the appropriation of the lifeform’s ultimate meaning within the growing contexts of everyday articulation remains “inexhaustible”, and in each context the way of presenting/visualizing this meaning also indicates the essential absence of it. In other words, the ultimate meaning of an authentic cultural lifeform can never be fully transferred to the everydayness of recurrent and innovatively changing configurations of practices, thereby becoming totally incarnated in meaningful entities that are ready-to-hand within these practices. The ultimate meaning is always open to be appropriated within the lifeform’s everydayness, but the possibilities encoding it can never become completely actualized. As will be shown, the actors’ belief in the ultimate meaning as a transcendence that can continuously be made immanent in the lifeform’s everydayness is a further condition for assigning authenticity to a lifeform. It is this belief that helps the actors to cope with the fact that in any particular context of the lifeform’s articulation, the transcendent meaning is an “absent presence”. It is (made) present as a readiness-to-hand within the configuration of practices that succeeds in appropriating and actualizing (in the particular context) possibilities encoding the meaning. Once these possibilities have been actualized (and the meaning has contextually been “visualized”), the horizon is shifted and the ultimate meaning becomes projected upon, inscribed on, and encoded by further possibilities that require a new context (a configuration of practices) for their appropriation and actualization. This is why the ultimate meaning of an authentic lifeform is ever transcending any particular context in which it can (partially) be made present. Within the lifeform’s everyday articulation, transcendent meaning and contextually actualized meaning are hermeneutically united in accordance with the figure of situated transcendence.

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One faces more serious difficulties with locating the borderline when at issue is the distinction between assemblages of practices disclosing lifeforms and assemblages capable of constituting unique everydayness without disclosing cultural lifeforms. This distinction essentially hinges on stipulating proper conventions for each particular case. The examples discussed in the preceding chapter show that assemblages constituting “inauthentic everydayness” are, for the most part, serving controlling, manipulative, and repressive functions, although rarely producing drastic kinds of social pathology. In some cases, these are assemblages that transmit and spread public power emanating from various sources of political authority. In these cases, they are continuation of the “King’s political body”, the Parliament as the social body expressing the universality of wills, the state apparatus, the hidden political authority of manipulative mass media, and so on. But in other cases, there is anonymous power generated within the assemblages themselves. The everydayness in which this power circulates is coercive, but it itself – to reiterate a claim formulated earlier – could hardly be governed and ruled even by the authorities for whom it is instrumental. Hegel’s List der Vernunft (the cunning of reason) is transformed into Die List der Macht within this everydayness. Having said this, however, I should add that – in line with Foucault’s conception – the everydayness of a widespread circulative power is much more than a repressive force. Within the assemblages of practices that constitute everydayness powerfully regulating agents’ lives, “power would be a fragile thing if its only function were to repress, if it worked only through the mode of censorship, exclusion, blockage and repression, in the manner of a great Superego, exercising itself only in a negative way.” (Foucault 1980, 59). The everydayness of circulating power produces “effects at the level of desire”, thereby combining its repressive function with the function of promoting desires and plans for their satisfaction that create the feeling of being situated in “normal public life”. Assemblages of practices generating power that cannot be localized in “visible” political apparatuses are the dominant kind of assembled practices in modern societies. (The proliferation of new configurations of practices spreading diverse kinds of anonymous power is also the source of living under conditions of risk society – a subject I will later touch upon.) Roughly, the diversity of overlapping assemblages of practices characterized by the combination of spreading power, promoting desires, and generating risks builds the everydayness of public life in today societies. These assemblages are in an ontic sense the soil on which various cultural lifeforms grow up. I come now to the topic of “the threshold of facticity” as it concerns the first distinction between kinds of assembled practices. Only assemblages that constitute a sustainable everydayness cross this threshold. Constituting everyday life

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through recurrent configurations of practices is a sign that the interrelatedness of these practices independently operates beyond the operative capacity of the constituent actions and activities. Put another way: An everydayness cannot be constituted by actions and activities unless they are organized as configured practices. A necessary condition for crossing the threshold of facticity is the relative independence of configured practices from underlying agency. “Relative independence” means that practices transcend the operative power of agents’ behavioral agency in each and every context of the everyday life whereby their ongoing transcendence prevents the “derivability” of the everyday life’s progressive structuring from agential factors (reasons, motives, beliefs, aspirations, etc.). Configured practices are able to transcend the operative power of agency due to the possibilities that they open up in each and every context. The horizon of these possibilities is ever transcending agential behavior. The possibilities become actualized not by the agents’ activities alone, but through the way in which the power of agency is entangled with configurations of practices. Thus, two further necessary conditions for crossing the threshold of facticity come to the fore: (a) configured practices have to open up within and through their interrelatedness trans-agential (or better, trans-subjective) possibilities that are not dependent on subjective and intersubjective contingencies, and (b) the configurations have to enable the entanglement of agents’ driving (cognitive, discursive, affective, volitional) forces with the dynamics of configured practices, which does not necessarily imply that the agents will be in a position to control this entanglement. The condition (b) stipulates that there is trans-subjective facticity of practices only when agential subjectivity is integrated with it. This condition is valid for the constitution of authentic as well as inauthentic everydayness that, as a rule, serves a repressive function. A routine of repressive practices becomes an inauthentic everydayness if its configurations can “absorb” the driving forces behind agents’ activities. Absorbing these forces has nothing to do with political repression.¹ Nevertheless, I insist on the repressive character of inauthentic everydayness: An everydayness that trans-subjectively “distracts” any particular agent involved in it creates all necessary conditions for employing policies of effective repression and manipu-

 According to existential analytic, “the They is the subject of average everydayness.” (Heidegger 1962a, 150). On this account, the They is anonymous horizon of everyday being-in-the-world, but the They is not a “hidden source of power”. The practices of inauthentic existence might become such a source only when an authoritative agency is integrated with them. If these practices were per se a source of power, then power – in accordance with existential analytic – would have to be regarded as a primary existential phenomenon, i. e. as an existentiale. However, pace Foucault, existential analytic prohibits such an interpretation of power.

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lation. This is why I disagree with those interpretations of Heidegger’s das Man – in particular, that of Stephen Mulhall (2001, 215 – 218) – which simply equates inauthentic with undifferentiated modes of being.² One needs a stronger distinctive feature of inauthentic everydayness than the feature of indifference. When Heidegger analyses the phenomenon of “distraction” (die Zerstreuung) in connection with the phenomenon of curiosity in inauthentic everydayness of the public life, he makes the point that through this distraction “Dasein is constantly uprooting itself.” (Heidegger 1962a, 217). It is precisely this uprooting that is a prerequisite for deploying policies of manipulation and repression. If the assemblage of repressive practices does not cross the threshold of facticity, and is imposed on agential behavior solely by an authority, then the assemblage’s configurations are fully regulated by the will of authority. In this case, there is no chance for making the assembled practices into a routine day-to-day life, regardless of how persistent is the authority in its efforts. The authoritarian political will can maintain an established everydayness, but cannot constitute it. As already discussed, this seems to be well known to politically repressive authorities who are trying to “engineer” the “absorbing” capacity of inauthentic everydayness, instead of directly exercising controlling power on agential behavior. The politically organized undoing of configurations of practices that promise the disclosure of authentic lifeforms illustrates precisely such a kind of engineering. If an assemblage of interrelated practices does not constitute a sustainable everydayness, then the interrelatedness fails to meet the conditions of relative independence, the transcendence of agential behavior’s agency through opening trans-subjective possibilities, and the entanglement of this agency with particular configurations. Accordingly, such an assemblage fails to cross the threshold of facticity because the interrelatedness is totally determined by human agency. The assemblage can be described (“without remainder”) in a manner congruent with the paradigm of discreteness since the interrelatedness is reducible to the  To be sure, Mulhall (2001, 216) is absolutely right when reaching the conclusion that “Heidegger is elucidating the exitentialia of Dasein through the phenomenology of an inauthentic existentiell state.” The point, however, is that this conclusion does not do full justice to the ambiguity involved in the inauthentic mode of being. The “inauthentic existentiell state” provides, on the one hand, the empirical terrain for carrying out existential analytic. In this case, it is average everydayness chiefly characterized by undifferentiatedness that should not be confused with primitiveness. (Mulhall rightly stresses in this context Heidegger’s way of differentiating between primitive and non-primitive forms of average everydayness.) But, on the other hand, in fulfilling the methodological function of enabling the phenomenological study of existentialia, the inauthentic existentiell state of the They does not cease to repress and “distract” the impetus for authenticity.

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factuality of the constituent actions and activities. In this case, the interrelatedness does not project its being upon a transcending horizon of possibilities. An assemblage of practices that does not cross the threshold of facticity is ineluctably serving the will of particular agents and authorities, and it has only ad hoc character. Being deprived of projecting its being upon possibilities, such an assemblage lacks resources for its own reproduction. Having a being-projectedupon-horizon-of-possibilities is a sine qua non for facticity (of practices) irreducible to factuality (of agency). Stating this brings the nexus of facticity and factuality within the various types of assembled practices into discussion. However, this discussion will be postponed. My task now is to specify further the concept of authentic cultural lifeforms by formulating a relevant criterion for authenticity. The changing configurations in an ensemble of social practices and the shifts in the horizon (projected by these practices) are mutually reinforcing events. The actualization of a possibility within a context of configured practices reveals new possibilities (along with precluding some of the existing), while any shift in the horizon provokes a new configuration constituting a particular context of behavior. Accordingly, there is ongoing interplay of practices and possibilities that does not leave any room for allegedly unchangeable social normativity. Within this interplay, the normatively fixed (personal and social) roles are constantly undergoing changes. By the same token, normatively established identities do not remain unaffected by the shifting horizons. Practitioners’ decision making process depends on how the interplay opens futural possibilities that can contextually be appropriated. The meaning of all entities, events and states of affairs involved in configured practices varies in the process of re-contextualization induced by the interplay of practices and possibilities. The formation of what Bourdieu’s calls “motor schemes and body automatisms” is only possible within the interplay of practices and possibilities. There is no privileged “bodily involvement in the world” pre-existing this interplay. Habitus can essentially exerts influence on the organization of any particular practice, but it is “always already” situated in and transcended by the interrelatedness of practices. Accordingly, a theory of habitus cannot ignore the primacy of the facticity of practices. The enactment of “habitus’ generative principles” hinges on how the interplay opens futural possibilities. More often than not, the choices of such possibilities create distance between practitioners’ reflexive attitudes and positions and the automatisms of their habitual dispositions.³

 Margaret Archer (2007, 276) argues that “the ‘positional’ and the ‘dispositional’ are not so tightly bound together as Bourdieu and his followers have represented them to be.” In analyzing

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The contextual articulation of meaning proceeds within the circularity of the opened horizon of possibilities and the actualization of any particular possibility within a configuration of practices. In other words, the ongoing interplay of practices and possibilities is characterized by a continuous hermeneutic circularity. This is the same circularity that operates in the transference of the lifeform’s ultimate meaning to contextually ready-to-hand entities. The interplay is between (1) the changing configurations that constitute contexts of the articulation of meaning and (2) the shifting horizons of possibilities that can contextually be appropriated. The kind of hermeneutic circularity operating within this interplay consists of several interpretive circles, each between a specific whole of meaning and particular units. Against this background, it is obvious that the interplay cannot be equated with hermeneutic circularity. The latter is exclusively pertinent to the articulation of meaning, while the interplay of practices and possibilities comprises phenomena that can hardly be expressed in terms of this articulation only. However, the interplay gains its distinctive way of being by means of the hermeneutic circularity involved in it. It is the circularity of the articulation of meaning that discloses the being of a cultural lifeform. Though this circularity works within and through the interplay of practices and possibilities, it is the former that enables the autonomy (from underlying human agency) of the latter. An ensemble of concerted practices autonomously exists through and within this circularity if (and only if) it is capable of disclosing and articulating an authentic cultural lifeform. The way in which the hermeneutic theory conceptualizes the circularity (and the non-dichotomous ontological difference within it) brings into focus the qualitative leap in the transition from human (individual and collective) agency that determines behavior to the articulation of meaning within-configured-practices which is essentially underdetermined by that agency. According to existential analytic, facticity is the empirical manifestation of existence that in its finitude (being-towards-death) is projected upon infinite possibilities. Furthermore, facticity is the ongoing – and potentially never ending – articulation of meaning characterizing the modes of being-in-the-world. These existential-analytic facets of facticity can be extended to the facticity of the ensembles of practices. Yet this extension would not, ipso facto, assign au-

the forms of reflexivity taking place in the processes of communication, she stresses that the reflexive interlocutors are capable of maintaining their positions without following the automatism of their habitual dispositions. I agree with this conclusion. But in contrast to Archer who looks for social-psychological factors responsible for the growing emancipation of the positional from the dispositional, I lay emphasis on the role played by the interplay of practices and possibilities in this regard.

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thenticity to the lifeform disclosed and articulated within any particular ensemble of practices. In searching for a proper criterion for authenticity of cultural lifeforms, I will plead for a “non-individualist revision” – that rests on an intended “culture-theoretical misunderstanding” – of the existential-analytic tenets that relate the being-towards-death to the articulation of meaning taking place in the authentic mode of being. In this chapter, I am only going to indicate the general direction of this revision. The revision of the existential-analytic criterion for authenticity will be brought to an end in the next chapter, when at stake will be the issue of the Self’s authenticity. According to this revision, the analytic of facticity has to be extended to cover the articulation of meaning as it takes place within the potentiality-forbeing of the cultural forms of life – for instance, the lifeform of a religious community as a routine everydayness of ritual, ceremonial, moral, exegetical, congregational, dietary, and other practices in whose configurations the agential behavior is situated, granted that this everydayness enables that union with God which makes the lifeform’s everyday articulation into practitioners’ righteous life.⁴ The revision states that a cultural lifeform can be conceived as a non-individual Dasein that is the site of the ontic-ontological difference. To be sure, the concept of Dasein of Being and Time has an important nonindividual dimension. As thrown projection Dasein simultaneously “lags behind” the projected possibilities and is always “ahead-of-itself”. Thus, the possibilities are both part of the individual existence and beyond the subjectivity that always makes choices. Individual existence “is in each case mine.” (Heidegger 1962a, 67). But the ontological meaning of existence can only be revealed by the ecstatic unity of individual existence with transcending possibilities. This unity is Dasein as projecting-its-being-upon-possibilities.⁵ Nonetheless, I agree

 The religious forms of life in which there is a clear demarcation between the sacral and the profane, provide, of course, the most typical example of how the transcendent meaning becomes immanentized in everyday (congregational, exegetical, ceremonial, ritual, dietary, etc.) practices of a confessional community. However, the quasi-religious belief in a transcendent authority who can – via “righteous practices” – be immanentized in a manner allowing the “growing power of epiphany” of this authority in everyday life characterizes the kind of trans-subjective agency operating in any authentic cultural lifeform.  According to a statement that is often-repeated in Being and Time, the site at which the being gets revealed is existence that “is in each case mine”. This statement and the concept of die Jemeinigkeit seem to be in stark contrast to Heidegger’s efforts to de-subjectivize, de-psychologize, and eventually de-anthropologize existential analytic. Notoriously, these efforts are enhanced in his later thought when at stake is the theme of the critique of classical humanism. The individualist-subjectivist construal of Dasein turns out to be invalid when one takes into consideration the distinction between factuality and facticity which plays a crucial role in existential analytic.

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with Michael Theunissen that in Being and Time the non-individual dimension of Dasein is insufficiently discussed, which leaves the impression that Dasein falls under the concept of subjectivity that is only inadequately determined through the expressions of “I” and “individual”. According to him, “Being and Time does not describe a self-becoming of the I but only a becoming-I of the self, that is, of that Dasein structured like a self.” (Theunissen 1984, 367). He is absolutely right when insisting that only in On the Essence of Ground Heidegger would admit the possibility that the dialogically constituted self (as being capable of responding to Dasein-with-one-another) is a requisite for winning itself as authentic self. The revision I have in view extends the non-individual dimension of Dasein by refraining from deriving ontological consequences from individual existence as being-towards-death. Proceeding in this manner, however, does not mean that – in bringing to the fore the “ontic concept” of cultural forms of life – the intended revision is not looking for important existential-ontological consequences. It would also be wrong to construe the insistence on extending the non-individual dimension as an appeal to a “collective or communal Dasein”. As is well known, there is a highly controversial and politically dubious tendency in Heidegger’s work in the early 1930s toward linking the central concept of Being and Time with collective entities including “the Dasein of the state”.⁶ Speaking of non-individual Dasein in this study has nothing to do with collective actors, institutional bodies, or social organizations. The expression exclusively refers to lifeforms disclosed in the everydayness of practices. Non-individual Dasein stands for (the trans-subjectivity of) configured practices, and not for communities or collectives. Thus considered, the adjective “non-individual” has only transsubjective connotations, and not any sociological or socio-political (factual) content. It goes without saying that a cultural lifeform does not have a being-towardsdeath in the sense of existential analytic. Of course, every cultural lifeform is

Against the background of the facticity-factuality distinction, Heidegger (1962a, 312) extends his definition of Dasein in the following manner: “Dasein’s Selfhood has been defined formally as a way of existing, and therefore not as an entity present-at-hand. For the most part ‘I myself’ am not the ‘who’ of Dasein; the they-self is its ‘who’.”  Bret Davis (2007, 74) nicely summarizes the effect of this tendency by pointing out that its pivotal moment is “the transference of the locus of authenticity from the individual to the group, from the Dasein that is in each case mine to the communal Dasein of the Volk.” Davis also pinpoints the main open problem with such a transference: The nexus between Dasein’s facing its non-transferable death and Dasein’s possibility of gaining authenticity obviously cannot be transferred to “the collective Dasein who inherits the destiny of the German nation”.

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sooner or later doomed to die. But this “death” is always caused by particular (contingent) factors like a political persecution of the lifeform’s practitioners, or a change of the economic conditions supporting the lifeform, or the lifeform’s incapability to survive in the competition with more attractive lifeforms, or simply because of its anachronistic character. These factors can be explored in terms of cultural history, cultural studies, microhistory, ethnology, social anthropology, political theory, historical anthropology, religious studies, and many other disciplines. In other words, the death of a lifeform is always a “purely factual death” (or factual decline, demise, Verendung) that does not invoke existential analytic for its conceptualization. If the Dasein of a cultural lifeform does not have a being-towards-death in the existential-analytic sense – that is, the sense in which Dasein is dying as long as it exists, and “it does so by way of falling” (Heidegger 1962a, 295)⁷ – then the criterion for distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic existence is no longer applicable to its non-individual way of being. In order to bring the intended revision into being, one needs an alternative criterion for deciding whether a certain lifeform has an authentic existence. Since it should be a criterion allowing interpretations in terms of the human- and social-scientific disciplines mentioned, the concomitant rereading of existential-analytic tenets ought to aim at integrating the ontological difference in the scientific conceptualization of cultural lifeforms. The non-individualist revision stipulates that the transition from inauthenticity to authenticity should be conceptualized as the coming-intobeing of an everydayness of configured practices the performances of which transform/transfer/immanentize the ultimate meaning of a lifeform into meaningful entities that are ready-to-hand for the practitioners in their everyday life. A cultural lifeform qua trans-subjective Dasein has authentic character thanks to the potentially unceasing contextualization of its ultimate meaning. It is this meaning that in the process of its ongoing transformation/transference plays the role of a transcendent authority for those who participate in the lifeform’s everyday articulation. This kind of authority exerts its power within hermeneutic circularity, and essentially differs from Durkheim’s moral authority of social norms that has sacred roots. The transcendent authority of an authentic lifeform is not based on normative obligations. It does not oblige the actors to obey commands. Any particular practitioner of an authentic lifeform perceives its ultimate meaning as a transcendent authority because s/he projects the

 In this sense, “Dasein’s dying” cannot be conceptualized as a purely factual end of life. Dying is a phenomenon of the facticity of existence, and for this reason – as discussed in Chapter One – Heidegger argues that the animal is not dying.

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meaningfulness of her/his existence upon the possibilities of lifeform’s articulation. As will be shown, this projection is a pre-normative phenomenon. The rationale behind the revision I suggest is that the transcendent authority of an authentic lifeform is also a trans-subjective “call” that precedes and enables (within the existence of every practitioner of this lifeform) the call of conscience and the hearing of the voice of conscience. For Heidegger, the Self who is able to hear the voice of conscience is enjoined to take into consideration the whole disclosedness of Dasein’s potentiality-for-being-its-Self. The call of conscience has the character of an intrinsic appeal to Dasein within Dasein’s mode of being. What becomes invoked is Dasein’s ownmost being-guilty. The call of conscience has no other source aside from Dasein’s existing. It is this tenet of existential analytic that can be extended without violating its meaning: There is a call of a transcendent authority that enables the call of conscience, but the former call is not external to Dasein’s existence. In participating in an authentic lifeform, Dasein is in an ecstatic unity with the contexts in which the lifeform’s ultimate meaning becomes envisioned by means of contextually constituted entities. The call of the transcendent authority takes place and is heard by Dasein within this unity. Nonetheless, this originary call has a transsubjective source. Ascribing authenticity not only to a mode of Dasein’s existence, but also to the trans-subjective Dasein of lifeforms has important repercussions on the issue of how the Self’s listening away (Hinhören) to the They in her inauthentic existence can be broken off. For Heidegger (1962a, 316), the possibility of its getting broken off lies in Dasein’s being appealed to without mediation. According to the revision I suggest, the originary call of the lifeform’s transcendent authority has the character of such a mediation that is not external to Dasein’s existence. More specifically, Dasein can hear the voice of conscience if it partakes in a lifeform that has already “broken off” the average everydayness of the inauthentic existence. It is the listening away to the lifeform’s transcendent authority that allows Dasein to break off the listening-away to the They. Thus, Dasein can achieve an authentic mode of existence by being in ecstatic unity with the articulation of an authentic lifeform. Depending on the character of the authentic cultural lifeform, the ultimate meaning might be specified as symbolic, sacral, hypothetical, utopian, ideal-theoretical, or aesthetic-fictional meaning. Before trying to define the concept of authentic lifeform in hermeneutic terms, let me give two examples for lifeforms’ ultimate meaning amenable to the indicated transformation: (a) the meaning of exotic theoretical objects – tied both with non-standard mathematical idealizations and complicated experimental situations for their empirical identification – in the existence of which only those believe who are members of a community with a certain normal-scientific everydayness as a form of life; and (b) the mean-

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ing encoded in an idiom of painting that only the works of those who believe in the expressive power of this idiom can visualize, granted that the configured pictorial practices enable the everydayness of practitioners working in this style as an artistic form of life. In both examples, the ultimate meaning is “inexhaustible” which means that normal-scientific everydayness and the “working everydayness” of developing an artistic style cannot fully envision the meaning of the theoretical objects and the meaning encoded in the aesthetic manifesto. In any context of visualizing the ultimate meaning, there is an unreachable “transcendent remainder” (not to be confused with a transcendental signified) that requires a re-contextualization of the ongoing work. The inexhaustibility of the meaning is a feature of the lifeforms’ articulation within the facticity of practices. The conceptualization of the transition from inauthenticity to the authenticity (of a lifeform) should take into account both the factuality of agential behavior and the facticity of practices. The former consists of discrete units that can procedurally be objectified. But, at the same time, these units are meaningful when they are involved in a hermeneutic circularity with the lifeform’s horizon (understood as the whole meaning that can potentially be articulated within the everydayness of lifeform’s practices). The same circularity enables the facticity of an ensemble of practices. I will address this facticity in terms of a continuous interplay of practices and possibilities by means of which the lifeform’s articulation enters into force. (“Continuous” in this formulation is opposed to “discrete” in the sense of the paradigm of discreteness.) The way in which the lifeform’s practitioners become aware of the contextual multifariousness of the ultimate meaning of their lifeform plays a crucial role: It is this way of becoming aware that enacts the everyday articulation of this meaning in contextualized meaningful entities. Accordingly, the hermeneutic circularity of articulation becomes specified as a circularity between the lifeform’s ultimate meaning and the meaningful entities ready-to-hand in everyday practices. A lifeform is authentic if its ultimate meaning enables potentially infinite everydayness capable of revealing ever new facets of this meaning. An authentic lifeform conveys – in each particular context of its articulation – to the practitioners its ultimate meaning in a specific manner. It is this multiple-contextual and progressively innovative revealing of lifeform’s ultimate meaning that maintains its transcendent authority. To sum up, realizing the multifariousness of the authentic lifeform’s ultimate meaning is a requisite for engaging in the everydayness of recurrent practices articulating that meaning. But, at the same time, the realization of that multifariousness is only possible within the everyday performances of these practices. The mutual reinforcement of the articulation of lifeform’s ultimate meaning and the constitution of the everydayness of configured practices

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defines the characteristic hermeneutic situation of the lifeform’s articulation. ⁸ Before exemplifying this observation, I have to address an extended vision of the interplay of practices and possibilities that takes into consideration the totality of assemblages crossing the threshold of facticity.

3.2 Ongoing contextualization and inter-contextuality A context of meaningful articulation is made present through a particular configuration of practices. Within the facticity of practices, the horizon of possibilities is also a horizon of temporality. The contextual actualizations of possibilities temporalizes this horizon. The temporalizing of temporality is a basic characteristic of the interplay of practices and possibilities. In the perspective of this characteristic, any context of configured practices is not a pure and static presenceat-hand or something delineated once and forever. The earlier claim that there are no contexts pre-existing the ongoing contextualization can be specified as follows. The context is made present thanks to the actualization of possibilities within the configuration that actualizes them. The shift in the horizon induced by this actualization opens up new possibilities whose appropriation can be contextualized by upcoming configurations. Future contexts that can potentially be made present by these configurations are in a sense already involved in the context-made-present because the possibilities they can actualize are revealed by the context-made-present. A similar conclusion can be drawn with regard to past contexts. Since all contextually actualized possibilities – within a limited interrelatedness of practices – belong to a unitary horizon that is also a horizon of temporality, one can track the trajectory leading to the context-made-present. This trajectory refers to possibilities the contextual actualizations of which have been enabling the revealing of the possibilities appropriated and actualized in the context-made-present. By the same token, one can track the contexts that have been leading to the

 Anticipating my further discussion, I will suggest an extended formulation: The constitution of an autonomous ensemble of practices and disclosing an authentic lifeform within the public life’s diversity of routine practices is due to a constellation in which every component presupposes the others. The constellation includes a trans-subjective agency mediating between practices’ endogenous reflexivity and practitioners’ judgmental-interpretive reflexivity, an initial configuration of practices capable of initiating the lifeform’s articulation, actors who strongly believe in a transcendent meaning, and envisioned possibilities promising that the transcendent meaning might be brought down to earth. Once this constellation has taken place within a characteristic hermeneutic situation, the everydayness of configured practices starts to articulate the lifeform.

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appearance of the context-made-present. These contexts also are in a sense involved in the context-made-present. In a nutshell, a particular context is made present via a regime of the temporalizing of the temporality of the interplay of practices and possibilities. I would like to generalize the idea of interplaying practices and possibilities for the totality of practices crossing the threshold of facticity. Supposedly, this totality is tantamount to Heidegger’s “worldness of the world”. The fact that in any context some possibilities become appropriated and actualized whereby the contextual shift in the horizon invites the formation of a new configuration of practices means that the meaning resulting from actualized possibilities is always already temporalized. In view of the observation that the temporalizing of temporality is the way of being of the interplay of practices and possibilities, the very interplay turns out to be the ongoing temporalizing contextualization of the articulation of meaning in the facticity of practices. Since the ongoing contextualization has a priority over any particular context that is made present, the particular contexts made present within the interplay are “moments” of the temporalizing of temporality, provided that a “moment” is not a point in linear image of time, but a shift in the horizon opening up possibilities the actualizations of which make-present. As “moments” of ongoing contextualization, the contexts are not separated from one another as cells in an organism. (This would be a picture depicted in accordance with the paradigm of discreteness.) The contexts are always already inter-contextualized whereby traces of past and future contexts can be found in any one of them. The last observation can be extended in the following manner. When the emphasis is placed on the ongoing contextualization, all contextual boundaries are relative to the situated transcendence of the articulation of meaning. By implication, the contexts taking place within the interplay are intrinsically interwoven, thereby building up a tissue that I called elsewhere “inter-contextuality” (Ginev 2018, 149 – 153). A further specification has to be added in this regard: Within the ongoing contextualization, there is only inter-contextuality, and no texts (articulated meanings) surrounded by (and contained in) contexts. What can be treated in terms of texts is – within the process of ongoing contextualization – dissipated over inter-contextuality.⁹ From a semiotic viewpoint, all cultural entities can

 To be sure, the text exists within the process of its reading process – a thesis most consequently defended by the program of reception aesthetics. The text’s meaning is always an event related to how the reader receives the text, and the reading process is part and parcel of the text’s ongoing construction. The claim that the meaning of a text is always inter-contextualized, and placed within the ongoing contextualization is an extension of the thesis that reception interpretively completes the text. The ongoing contextualization implied by the interplay of prac-

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properly be “textualized” with regard to the symbolic meanings they express. Reading these meanings intrinsically belongs to the “textualization” of cultural entities. Moreover, the process of reading is a dimension of the ongoing contextualization which deconstructs any firm (factually present and semantically fixed) demarcation between text and context, which, of course, does not annul the necessity of differentiating between text and context in various non-essentialist manners.¹⁰ I have to underline once again that the deconstruction of any firm demarcation between text and context comes to the fore when the interplay of practices and possibilities is foregrounded. The classical picture of a text that is strongly demarcated from its context retains its validity when the context becomes isolated from the process of contextualization. As is well known, various structuralist programs try to represent the changes arising from this process as intrinsic variations of the text’s semiotic codes. Regardless of how significant these variations are, they do not call into question the text’s structural-semiotic invariance. From this structuralist viewpoint, the ongoing contextualization can fully be internalized in the text’s variational structure.¹¹ Seen in the perspective of the totality of practices (constituting “the worldness of the world”), inter-contextuality “contains” potentially innumerable possible contexts. No one of the contexts-made-present is endowed with factual

tices and possibilities is a sui generis reading process, but it is not reducible to a process of reception. The interplay occurs on the territory of what Ricoeur addresses in terms of pre-narrative prefiguration.  Let me point out how the notion of text can be saved when the ongoing contextualization is at stake. Bakhtin’s “primary speech genres” (at least some of them) might be regarded as the most elementary texts constituted within the interplay of discursive practices and possibilities. He includes among these genres the kinds of everyday narration, rejoinders of daily dialogue, and the elaborate and detailed orders. According to Bakhtin (1987), a primary speech genre is a relatively stable type of utterances produced in a certain horizon of possible (stylistically specified) linguistic expressivity. A primary speech genre can be regarded as a text characterized by thematic content, style, and compositional structure. (The style occupies a privileged position in this triad since it is simultaneously within the text and beyond the text as contextually dependent possibilities for expressivity of the meaning.) These three characteristics are constantly exposed to contextualization. The elementary text of a primary speech genre can – in a non-essentialist manner – be identified by the “family resemblance” of its contextual implementations. Thus, the text of a primary speech genre is network of contextual similarities without hidden essence.  The classical picture of drawing univocal demarcation between text and its context presupposes a description of the text’s semantic structure. One should not forget, however, that Jonathan Culler’s (1975, 88) observation that semantics still does not have resources to characterize the meaning of a text continues to be valid.

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presence per se. The conceptualization of the ongoing contextualization and inter-contextuality can succeed in describing a particular context only if its strategy would be capable of tracing the way of making the context present, which amounts to reconstructing a trajectory (regime) of the temporalizing of temporality. This conceptualization aims at capturing the contextual articulation of meaning by avoiding any procedural objectification of contexts within the facticity of practices. Inter-contextuality is the ontologically primary state of human existence. To put it differently, human existence “begins” with disclosing the world in its intercontextual totality (Ginev 2018, 51– 59). Yet this claim is posing more problems than it intends to solve. Inter-contextuality is ongoing structuring of “the worldness of the world” of concerted practices that are capable of articulating meaning because they are organized beyond the threshold of facticity. But what kind of primacy should be assigned to this structuring? Following the initial taxonomy of assembled practices, two scenarios are possible. One may assume that inter-contextuality “starts” with assemblages of practices that are sustaining the ongoing contextualization in the articulation of meaning. The interrelatedness of these practices constitutes forms of inauthentic everydayness, but is not able to disclose lifeforms. This assumption and the corresponding scenario are well corroborated by existential analytic: Falling and thrownness as well as inauthentic (average) everydayness are existentialia, that is, primordial characteristics of existence. Assuming that the interrelated practices of inauthentic everydayness are the “original state of existence” implies the need to account for the genesis of the other types of assembled practices. According to this scenario, two processes (going in opposite directions) are constantly running in the interrelatedness of practices that is beyond the threshold of facticity, but lacks the capacity to disclose lifeforms: (a) a degeneration of this interrelatedness to assemblages of practices that are beneath the threshold of facticity, that is, ad hoc assembled practices serving particular interests, and fully guided by the immanent teleology of agential behavior; and (b) a disclosure of lifeforms (including authentic ones) via emerging configurations of practices within the primordial interrelatedness. The second scenario assumes that inter-contextuality only then takes place when proper configurations are able to cross (at least) the threshold of facticity and the threshold of lifeforms. Accordingly, inter-contextuality exclusively concerns the contexts of the lifeforms’ meaningful articulation. The assumption implies that there is only one constantly running process – the degeneration of everyday lifeforms to inauthentic everydayness. This (pessimistic) scenario assigns ontological primacy to configured practices capable of articulating existentially

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significant meaning that is doomed to get lost in inauthentic everydayness. I will later provide arguments in favour of the first scenario. Making inter-contextuality a special theme of inquiry has important consequences for the (post-metaphysical) recasting of a traditional methodological distinction in the human and social sciences. I am referring to the micromacro distinction which in many cases is postulated as a dichotomy. Societal trends, mentalities persisting over long historical periods, social structures organizing functional systems that regulate the social dynamics of large human populations are among the prominent examples of a hypostatized macro-level of theoretical conceptualization. Statistical methods and mathematical models are successfully applicable to this conceptualization. What is hypostatized and formalized on a macro-level is then stylized as explanans enabling various explanatory scenarios for the diversity of particular cases. I am not going to discuss the flaws of such macro-approaches which are largely criticized from different viewpoints. It suffices to point out that the hypostatization of trends, structures, mentalities, systems, human populations, etc. mingles diverse agencies of actors in order to construct a “resultant” that as such is not existing in the diversity of agencies. This is a completely incorrect theoretical idealization that might serve only the political function of gaining the opportunity to exert more effective control over the particular groups of actors. Mingling agencies of different human actors and nonhuman actants prevents one from studying the synergy of these agencies as the latter is the central subject of actor-network theory. In criticizing “the sociologist of the social” who tend to explain the social phenomena with hypostatized social forces, Bruno Latour warns of this danger, and consistently insists that one needs to carefully identify any particular agency. But this identification is not for the sake of an accurately differentiation between social, material-technological, biological, psychological, and economical connections within the actor-network. All agents or actants are imbued with the effects of all of these connections building up a network. The rationale for identifying the particular agencies operating within a network is to prevent one from jumping from the recognition of local interactions to the existence of a social force resulting from the synergies of agencies. This is why Latour often makes the case for dissolving the notion of social force as an integral agency and replacing it with contextual interactions based on the many entanglements of humans and nonhumans. Let me also only point out a further “ideological” motif inherent in the criticism against the separation of the “macro” from the contextual “micro” by means of postulating macro-social forces: All macro-levels posited through conflating normative systems, social structures, goal-oriented agencies, and regular processes – as this conflating is an initiative stretched from classical Marxism to

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neo-functionalism – serve “explanations” in which historical meta-narratives are already ingrained. The uncritical acceptance of such narratives makes these explanations dubious political instruments. A criticism should be levelled at several micro-programs as well. A dominant position in the research programs concentrated on a micro-level of conceptualization admits that one places what one is going to study in a certain pre-delineated context as it has been laid down by a particular social agency. This position does not reject the existence of a multitude of relevant contexts. It stresses, however, that all of them are already present-at-hand before starting the research process. Depending on his investigatory interest, the researcher has to “find” the most appropriate context. Studying, for instance, in a micro-historical perspective the engineering practices in Dutch society of the late 16th century implies that the researcher has to choose among a variety of contexts, each of them prioritizing specific technological, scientific, economic, administrative, religious, and several other factors. But the (configuration of) engineering practices one is studying has been interrelated with many other practices constituting possible contexts in which these factors have been taken place. The point is that many possible contexts can be figured out within the whole interrelatedness, but none of them is ready-made, pre-prepared, or pre-delineated. In the same way in which the meaningful outcome of performing configured engineering practices is in a state of ongoing contextualization, the researcher should be led by the methodological principle that any procedural delineation of a micro-context is only a “moment” of what the research process conceptualizes in terms of ongoing contextualization. (In this regard, Giovanni Levi [2014, 68] makes the case that studying biography-in-a-context does not amount to distilling practices representing typical behaviour determined by contextual factors. For him, “interpreting biographical vagaries” and constituting a relevant context are mutually reinforcing each other, thereby making each other possible.¹²) Conceptualizing inter-contextuality taking place in the facticity of practices capable of disclosing cultural lifeforms opposes the metaphysical hypostatization of both macro-structures (trends, mentalities, etc.) and micro-contexts (allegedly laid down by a particular social agency). The basic assumption of this conceptualization is that one can envision macro-scenarios of research by “trac-

 In referring to the perspective that hypostatizes historical contexts, Levi (2014, 69) argues that one can “regret that the context is often represented as rigid, coherent and that it functions as a static background against which the biography can be explained. The individual paths of life have roots in a context, in this way, but they have no influence on it, nor do they alter it.” The (trans-subjective) formation of a particular context entirely depends on the process of contextualization as it takes place within the interplay of practices and possibilities.

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ing inter-contextual traces” that the ongoing contextualization (the interplay of practices and possibilities) leaves in any context, regardless of how it would procedurally be constituted as an object of inquiry in the research process. Thus, a diversity of “macro-images” can be achieved without any hypostatization of meta-contextual structures. More specifically, by “discovering” in any context the trajectory of the temporalizing of temporality through which the context is made-present, one brings in one’s range of investigation all possible contexts involved in the trajectory. Following the trajectory of the temporalizing of temporality through which the context is made present amounts to envisioning a macro-scenario of research. The constitution of a context-as-object-of-inquiry by conceptualizing the way in which a context is made present in the interplay of practices and possibilities ineluctably involves tracing the traces which future contexts and contexts that have been leave in the context made present. It is through the trajectories of the temporalizing of temporality that the “macro” is contextually encoded in the “micro”. Decoding the “macro” by means of tracing the traces left – in a context made present within ongoing contextualization – by future and past contexts involved in a unitary horizon of temporality implies a deconstruction of the metaphysically postulated micro-macro dichotomy.

3.3 Towards a phenomenology of the facticity of practices capable of disclosing lifeforms The facticity of practices disclosing lifeforms involves the trans-subjective phenomena of hermeneutic situation, endogenous reflexivity, and pre-normativity. (These three are phenomena in the sense of hermeneutic phenomenology.) A minimal condition for identifying facticity characterizing an ensemble of practices is that the disclosed lifeform enables agential behavior (of the lifeform’s participants) that differs in kind from – what social scientists address through the expression – habitual behavior. Philosophers like Michael Oakeshott firmly believe that most human behavior is guided by habits. Oakeshott supports this belief with the intent to contrast “habitual morality” to morality based on reflective application of a moral criterion. His conservatism prioritizes the former kind of morality since only the person who unreflectively follows patterns of habitual behavior is capable of avoiding destructive questions arising from the efforts for making moral criteria explicit (Oakeshott 1989, 189 – 191). In my view, the dominance of habitual behavior is by no means a sign of a conservative tendency in social conduct, since the conservative attitude requires reflexivity that invokes the reflective application of moral criteria. Oakeshott’s line of argument has much to do with the distinction between the everydayness of an ensemble

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of practices and habitual behavior. (It is my contention that when Oakeshott insists that a “tradition of customary behavior” is characterized by a constant local variation, he actually refers to behavior entangled with configured practices.) Although habitual behavior may occasionally takes place in (inauthentic) cultural lifeforms, it is shaped not by configured practices, but entirely by agents’ habits. The everydayness of practices in which an authentic cultural lifeform gets articulated rules out habitual behavior. Thus, the everydayness of normal-scientific practices that articulate a domain of scientific inquiry shows – to take up again a previous example – how small changes in the configurations of research practices bring into play important experimental discoveries without casting doubt on the expectations of normal-scientific work. In their “normal-scientific conservatism” – as related to the projected horizon of expectations about the articulation of the domain of inquiry – scientists never habitualize their activities. Normal-scientific work continuously introduces innovations in the research process. The same innovativeness distinguishes the work of artists who in repeating performances of configured practices incrementally articulate a certain style.¹³ I agree with the view that habits are functioning as “a switchpoint between individuals and the social.” (Poovey 2013, 269). Yet this view is in need of an important specification: Habits are the switchpoint between individual and collective agency. They belong to – or better reside in – “the social”, in so far as they are integrated with forms of collective intentionality or communal actions and activities. To a great extent, agents take part in larger social dispositions (expressing collective agency) through their individual habits. In many cases, collective agential behavior assumes coordinated and harmonized habits of agents participating in it. However, it is an objectivist-behaviorist delusion to believe that the “collectivization” of habits can unveil something interesting about the nature of sociality as some authors working in the tradition of post-Durkheimian sociology and social theory are inclined to admit. This tradition is credited with developing conceptions about the irreducibility of social behavior based on collective habits of acting, thinking, and expressing feelings to instinctual behavior. There is a qualitative leap between instincts and habits that determines the difference in kind between non-human and human animals (White 2013, 241). Because collective habits are the starting point of sociality, habitual behavior – as composed by orchestrated associations of sustained individual ways of acting

 Alison Hui (2017, 58) makes a similar point – although her approach does not leave the territory of the paradigm of discreteness – when stressing that the same set of practices “can never be enacted in exactly the same way, making even ‘routine’ practices the site of ongoing reproduction and change.”

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and interacting – should create the substantive ground for historically reproducible social life. It is the accent on the collective habits that legitimizes the most significant methodological step in several post-Durkheimian conceptions: Since collective habits determine a difference in kind between conditio humana and animality, the social can be hypostatized as a sui generis reality of collective habits. Though the latter do not precede “the social facts”, these irreducible facts are existing within the milieu of collective habits. By assuming that all forms of sociality can be represented in terms of collective habits, the theorists are able to conceptualize the factuality of these habits in line with Durkheim’s celebrated requirement: The conceptualized factuality ought to be considered as showing the “things” characterizing the different forms of sociality. For Durkheim (1982, 70), social-facts-as-things are not products of agents’ will, and they are like moulds into which agents are forced to cast their actions. Collective habits do not enable the formation of such moulds. They are enabled by symbolically mediated “collective representations” and “collective sentiments”. But collective habits play the central role of maintaining them. Yet the social facts are not immediately given. One has to achieve these facts by making use of a proper method. It is the methodological reconstruction of social-facts-as-things that privileges habitual behavior. The “ontological fallacy” of admitting that this behavior warrants the sui generis character of social reality can be avoided by confining the Durkheimian position to the claim that there are good reasons for conceptualizing habitual behavior as the primary – both in genetic and structural sense – form of sociality within the theoretical frameworks studying social reality by means of procedural objectification and its methodological criteria for objectivity. In accepting this confinement, one can reasonably argue for the ontic-factual primacy of habitual behavior within one’s explanatory framework, given that this way of arguing refrains from any ontological claims. A purely objectivist position that has no resources to take into consideration the ontological difference should not be criticized for epistemologically uniting the methodology of objectification with the ontic hypostatization of the social. Yet any hypostatization of the social is excluded when the strategy of conceptualization takes into consideration the ontological difference between the factuality of habitual behavior and the facticity of practices. This is a strategy that sharply contrasts the post-Durkheimian tradition. Procedural objectification (of habitualized elements of action and interaction) has quite limited applicability in such a conceptualization. It is not my aim to dispute the observation that habitual behavior is an important ontic distinctive feature of human life. Seen ontologically, however, habitual behavior only promotes inauthentic routine

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that takes place either in various (inauthentic) cultural lifeforms or in the anonymous public life that – in an ontic sense – preexists the formation of lifeforms. However, habitual behavior does not have the capacity to morph itself into agential behavior entangled with configured practices. It can only “parasitize” on forms of everyday life already constituted by assemblages of practices. Habitual behavior is not a “deep layer” of social existence upon which more complex forms of sociality are grounded. It is my conviction that one has to resist the temptation to conceive of the configurations of practices (capable of constituting structures of everyday life) as a second-order switchpoint between the factuality of human agency (as manifested in habitual behavior) and the facticity of practices, provided that the passage from individual to collective-habitual agency is the first-order switchpoint. Such an approach would only restore the agency-structure dualism and all depressing dilemmas related to it. The interrelatedness of practices is also not a superstructure built over the socialized individual habits (as some critics of practice theory seems to admit). The basic contrast between behavior entirely tied with agents’ habits and the everydayness of recurrent and properly configured practices is that the latter articulates (within a characteristic hermeneutic situation) new meaning. With regard to the ontological difference, one can put a dual focus on the relationship between habitual behavior and the everydayness of configured practices. On the one hand, habitual behavior of human populations is a privileged state of affairs in the objectivist human studies, since this behavior presumably manifests patterns and regularities that can be used in explaining various social events and processes. Yet the subject of the habitualization of human activity also occupies a central place in anti-objectivist programs like phenomenological sociology. Sociologists of this kind raise the claim that even “the solitary individual on the proverbial desert islands habitualizes his activity.” (Berger, Luckmann 1991, 71). Phenomenological sociology focuses on the issue of how habitualization narrows the actors’ choices and creates stable background in which human activity may proceed with a minimum of decision-making, thereby designing the social behavior as amenable to typification, structuration, and institutionalization. In studying the structures of inter-subjectivity, the champions of phenomenological sociology presuppose the primacy of habitualization. Thus, the insistence on this primacy seems to be a shared position of objectivists and (transcendental) subjectivists in the social sciences. On the other hand, however, it seems plausible that one can specify in the ontological terms of existential analytic conditions for the possibility of habitualizing behavioral elements. The possibility of addressing habitualization and habitual behavior in terms of a “deficient mode” of the facticity of practices re-

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mains a controversial issue. To be sure, one may approach habitual behavior in this way by drawing an analogy with what Heidegger tackles on various occasions under the heading “deficient/privative modes of being-in-the-world”. Yet this analogy turns out to be superficial, since there is no existential-analytical scenario through which one can show how the facticity of practices (as constituting “the worldness of the world”) can degrade to (the factuality of) habitual behavior. Indeed, configured practices of compromised lifeforms – that is, lifeforms falsely promising authenticity – can degrade to residual collective habits. But this degradation can by no means be addressed in existential-analytical terms, and regarded as a deficient mode of the facticity of practices.¹⁴ An autonomous ensemble of practices can only disclose and articulate an authentic cultural form of life if its configurations of practices are sustainable enough to constitute an “authentic everydayness” of continuous articulation of meaning. The autonomy of configured practices rests on the articulation of new meaning that otherwise cannot be brought into being. By definition, an everydayness of recurrent performances of configured practices is authentic if it – in transferring the lifeform’s ultimate meaning to what becomes ready-to-hand in these practices – is immune to influences that can destruct the horizon of articulation opened by these practices. This immunity becomes enabled not by drawing – in a factual (and a semantic) manner – demarcation lines between internal and external (configurations of) practices that subsequently are normatively

 Against the background of these considerations, the notion of habitus (as constituted in practices and always oriented towards performances of practices) might be approached in a new way. Roughly, the “system of durable and transportable dispositions” – Bourdieu’s shortest definition of habitus – is “something more” than concerted habits within a social group because the former involves “embodied understanding”. Habitual behavior reduces embodied understanding to a pre-reflexive resource for executing (collective) bodily habits. But habitus (as a “spontaneity without consciousness or will”) is able to resist such a reduction. When dispositions to bodily comportment encode meaning that this comportment gradually articulates, then embodied understanding taking place in agential behavior mediates between the encoded meaning and the comportment’s meaningful outcomes. In this case, embodied understanding works within a horizon in which practitioners – in whose behavior an appropriated habitus is inculcated – articulate their everyday form of life. This hermeneutic reading of habitus is, in my view, on a par with what Bourdieu addresses in terms of a “dialectic of opus operatum and the modus operandi”. Yet the hermeneutic reading of habitus differs in certain respects from Bourdieu’s concept. According to him, habitus (as “embodied and internalized history”) produces individual and collective practices. For the hermeneutic reading, habitus is unavoidably generated within the hermeneutic circularity operating in concerted practices. It remains an open question as to whether the hermeneutic reading may specify intrinsic transformations of habitus that would allow one to approach habitual behavior as a “deficient mode of being-inthe-world”.

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fixed and imposed in a prescriptive manner. If this were the case, then the conceptualization of authentic lifeforms should be based on essentialism about firm factual differences in kind (demarcation lines) between configurations of inauthentic and authentic everydayness, granted that these differences dissect the factuality of the social world. Holding this view amounts to an absurd position about the social world. (The very opposition between “internal” and “external” practices is quite dubious from an anti-essentialist viewpoint.) The hermeneutic conceptualization of practices reveals the immunity of an authentic everydayness in a quite different way. The configurations constituting such an everydayness not only shift existing horizons, but they project a new horizon within which a new meaningful reality becomes disclosed and begins to take shape. Thus, the disclosed reality is not encapsulated and enclosed from the rest of the social world, but open and potentially infinite in its own horizon of articulation. The configured practices of the everydayness in which this articulation takes place do not need to form protective belts and walls. It is the projection of a new horizon and the disclosure of a new reality that warrant the ensemble’s autonomy. To stress again, any form of isolationism of the everyday life from the rest of the social world is strongly rejected by this hermeneutic approach. (Moreover, the autonomy of concerted practices is not preserved in a normative manner, but via that hermeneutic circularity which meaningfully articulates the disclosed reality. The autonomous ensemble of practices constitutes its everydayness as the place where this circularity operates.) Connectedness with various external practices and their configurations is completely harmless (for keeping the constituted everydayness intact) if this connectedness does not threaten to destroy the horizon in which the new reality becomes articulated. Diverse interconnections between “internal” and “external” practices may take place without damaging the lifeform’s articulation. Consequently, those who participate in the autonomous ensemble do not need to cultivate the spirit of escapism. In its factual functioning and dynamics, this everydayness can successfully coexist and interact with assemblages of practices of various sorts. Let me now focus on the nexus between the ensemble’s autonomous character and the lifeform’s authenticity. The resistance of the repeatable configurations taking place in an ensemble of practices to destructive effects coming from various sources is the primary condition for autonomy. If this condition is met, one can speak of an autonomous ensemble of practices whose way of being is projected-towards-possibilities. Authentic everydayness can only come into being in an autonomous ensemble. But the autonomy of endogenously reflexive practices still does not warrant the authenticity of what becomes articulated in the interrelatedness of these practices. On the contrary, expanding configurations of practices often constitute themselves as uncontrollable anonymous authority, effectively killing any kind of ex-

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istentiell authenticity. This case which was already tackled under the heading “the cunning of power” will later be further analyzed by citing examples of interrelated practices (like those of stock market trading) that create the kind of irrational rationality which characterizes the anonymous authority mentioned. Generally, I strongly distinguish between autonomous ensembles of practices and autonomy of practices achieved through their endogenous reflexivity. While the former is always in a characteristic hermeneutic situation, the latter is a much broader category that refers to diverse assemblages of practices that in crossing the threshold of facticity do not disclose particular lifeforms but effectively hold sway over agential behavior. It is the characteristic hermeneutic situation that allows the practitioners to single out the possibilities on which the ultimate meaning is inscribed. No doubt, this line of specifying necessary conditions of authenticity is still insufficient for distinguishing between inauthentic and authentic cultural lifeforms. More specifically, the envisioned criteria for authenticity are still not able to accomplish an effective identification. Thus, one can hypothetically imagine an absurd lifeform that postulates completely conceited and idiotic “ultimate meaning”. The believers in this meaning – say, the members of an occult, esoteric or astrological community – may decide that the lifeform they pursue is disclosed through a certain configuration of silly practices that only they (the believers) are capable of performing properly. The initial configuration soon begins to proliferate in a multitude of configured practices. The believers are convinced that this proliferation progressively appropriates and “brings down to the earth” the ultimate meaning of their lifeform. As a result, the believers become participants in a routine everydayness of practices that resists the conventionality of public life and the absorption of their way of life in anonymous public practices. Accordingly, this everydayness becomes endowed with independence. Moreover, the practitioners may get the feeling that they have a perfectly authentic everydayness. Such a cultural lifeform would satisfy the indicated criteria for authenticity. Prima facie, the everydayness of this lifeform would seem as authentic as the incremental articulation of the style of an artistic movement, or the work of experimentalists who in their normal science articulate a new domain of inquiry. In order to prevent the nonsense of confusing absurd and idiotic lifeforms with authentic forms, one has to pose a stronger condition for the identification of lifeforms’ authenticity: The everyday articulation of a lifeform within configured practices that progressively appropriate and contextually make ready-tohand the lifeform’s ultimate meaning should also be capable of achieving ontological unconcealedness (aletheia) of a domain of cultural reality. This condition stipulates that the articulated meaning is not enclosed in the configurations of

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practices (and in the minds of those who perform), but surpasses itself by unconcealing such a domain of artistic work, religious life, scientific inquiry, civil activism, etc. Aletheia is an ontological condition for authenticity, but is specified by all empirically constitutive characteristics of the unconcealed domain as cultural reality. The condition also stipulates that the actors’ way of being-in-the-everydayness-of-practices not only articulates entities that are meaningful for the actors, but succeeds in unconcealing the being of meaning of a domain that is recognized by all who are able to perceive cultural reality. Only by satisfying the condition of ontological unconcealedness, a cultural lifeform may claim authenticity. (The issue of how this condition is satisfied by the lifeform of a particular artistic movement is discussed in the next section.) The constitution of a routine everydayness of repeatable practices that project a horizon of possibilities transcending each and every context of agential behavior situated within this everydayness is a capacity of any relatively autonomous assemblage of practices. In most cases, however, collective behavior entangled with the configurations of assembled practices does not lead to a distinctive (not to speak of an authentic) cultural form of life at all. Moreover, in many cases – to return to the problematic of habitual behavior – the everyday life in concerted practices institutes collective habits that systematically annihilate autonomous configurations that can induce an authentic everydayness. In these cases, the anonymity of the habitual-inauthentic way of being-distracted-in-anonymous-practices succeeds in systematically destructing authenticity. Examples of the preceding chapter show that more often than not this trans-subjective destruction works (at a certain stage) in concert with political motifs. (In saying “works in concert”, however, I continue to insist that the way in which interrelated practices that do not provide a chance for authentic existence are essentially underdetermined by subjective motives, desires, and intentions. As already discussed, this interrelatedness – once it has become established – may turn out to be quite instrumental for accomplishing repressive policies inspired by subjective political will and motives.) Conceptualizing the facticity of practices capable of disclosing lifeforms requires taking into consideration the hermeneutic situation characterizing the articulation of meaning within the circularity of interplaying practices and possibilities. In stating this, I resume the discussion of the concept of the hermeneutic situation occupying a central position in this study. This concept must not be reduced – in a mentalist way – to presuppositions ingrained in the practitioners’ “collective consciousness”. The hermeneutic situation amounts to the fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping – as this triad is embedded in practices, and not in mental structures – of the expected transference of the ultimate meaning to everyday contexts. Thus considered, the hermeneutic situation is defined

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with respect to the appropriation of possibilities on which a lifeform’s ultimate meaning is inscribed. Seen in this way, a hermeneutic situation of the articulation of meaning within the interplay of practices and possibilities belongs to this interplay, and has a trans-subjective status. A hermeneutic situation taking place within the facticity of practices consists in the tendentious fore-structuring of the meaningful entities within the disclosed lifeform’s everydayness. The concept of hermeneutic situation also stands for the tendentious choices and appropriations of those possibilities which supposedly most characteristically inscribe the ultimate meaning. I will provide various arguments for the thesis that only the articulation of an authentic lifeform is in a characteristic hermeneutic situation. It is the facticity of authentic everydayness articulating meaning within a characteristic hermeneutic situation that brings to the fore the nexus of autonomous ensembles and authentic cultural forms of life. Autonomy and authenticity are not emergent properties since they cannot be objectified as properties at all. Emergent properties – as conceptualized, in particular, by critical realists – are theoretically captured and “saved” factual phenomena. The concept of hermeneutic situation is an ontological concept. But it also refers to the tendentiously growing structuration of a behavior that can be conceptualized through discrete factuality. Accordingly, there is an aspect of the concept that covers the tendentious fore-structuring of behavioral factuality within the facticity of practices. Dealing with this aspect reveals that the ontological difference between facticity and factuality resides in any particular hermeneutic situation. The prefix “fore” (in the expression “tendentious fore-structuring”) has three special connotations. It connotes at once (a) something that is coming (possibilities that can be appropriated and contextually actualized), (b) something that has been but still playing the role of active background (already actualized possibilities that can be reactivated and repeated), and (c) possibilities appropriated and actualized in a context-made-present. With regard to these connotations, the tendentious fore-structuring of meaningful behavior is tantamount to a regime of temporalizing of the open horizon of possibilities whose appropriation and actualization by configured practices articulate a cultural lifeform. The insistence on tendentiousness in the fore-structuring is justified for the following reason: The orientation towards actualizing possibilities that most typically reveal facets of the ultimate meaning has a priority in every regime of temporalizing. The tendentious fore-structuring of agential behavior and its outcomes within an autonomous ensemble of practices articulating an authentic cultural form of life is another way of defining the concept of characteristic hermeneutic situation. The way in which assemblages of practices cross the threshold of facticity rests on practices’ endogenous reflexivity. Studies in ethnomethodology provide

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an observation that attests for the way in which this reflexivity operates: Practices display a propensity (“predilection”) to enter into certain configurations (while avoiding others), and this propensity is underdetermined by agency that is effective in practitioners’ collective behavior. The cross-references within the interrelatedness of properly arranged practices single out “preferences” in the formation of configurations, while the interrelatedness remains constantly open to the emergence of possible new configurations. To a great extent, the way of forming “preferred” configurations is independent of actors’ motivations, desires, plans, and intentions.¹⁵ The formation of such configurations takes place in a characteristic hermeneutic situation of disclosing and articulating meaning. Practices’ endogenous reflexivity that works within such a situation is basically promoting that trans-subjective agency which has been partially emancipated from human agency without becoming an independent force imposed upon agential behavior. Authentic everydayness of properly configured practices comes into being in a characteristic hermeneutic situation of disclosing and articulating meaning, but in most cases practices’ endogenous reflexivity works beyond the scope of authentic everydayness. Practices’ endogenous reflexivity that operates within characteristic hermeneutic situations is basically promoting a kind of agency that results from the partial alienation of human agency in configurations of an authentic everydayness. It is the characteristic hermeneutic situation that prevents alienated agency from becoming an independent force imposed upon agential behavior. At this point I should briefly discuss the idea of trans-subjectively alienated agency. It alienates from the agency of agential behavior, and becomes dissipated over concerted practices belonging to different types of assemblages. Transsubjective agency embraces all kinds of human agency alienated in the facticity of practices. When operating only within forms of inauthentic everydayness, trans-subjective agency contributes to the detachment of practices’ endogenous reflexivity from practitioners’ interpretive-judgmental reflexivity. In other words,  Practices’ endogenous reflexivity is to a certain extent a concept that has in common with the concept of self-referential mechanism. Many effects of what Niklas Luhmann addresses in terms of self-referential social systems are actually produced by practices’ endogenous reflexivity. For Luhmann, these systems are distinguished by (what he calls) non-agential communication. The self-referential mechanism constitutes the social systems’ identities and differences. Self-reference seems to be a trans-subjective mechanism that avoids, however, a purely objectivist construal. For Luhmann (1990, 8 – 14), this kind of self-reference does not result from the agency of agential behavior. It is to be attributed to the autopoiesis of the social-communicative systems. (In his critique of Habermas, he also treats communication as independent of agency.) A concrete manifestations of social systems’ self-reference are self-referential structural integration and self-referential constitution of elements.

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it contributes to making concerted practices unpredictable and uncontrollable by practitioners. When operating within forms of authentic everydayness disclosing and articulating authentic lifeforms, trans-subjective agency is indispensably within a characteristic hermeneutic situation, thereby serving the task of transferring ultimate meaning to meaningful entities ready-to-hand within the configurations of practices. Being subjected to a characteristic hermeneutic situation, trans-subjective agency mediates between practices’ endogenous reflexivity and practitioners’ reflexivity, thereby enacting a cooperation between agential behavior and the facticity of practices. I will reserve the expression of existential agency for that kind of trans-subjective agency which operates in the disclosure and articulation of authentic cultural lifeforms. The synergy of practices’ endogenous reflexivity and practitioners’ judgmental reflexivity is a dimension of the characteristic hermeneutic situation of a lifeform’s articulation as far as the articulation is carried out by the agential-behavior-entangled-with-configured-practices. As will be argued later, practices’ endogenous reflexivity does not attest that practices’ interrelatedness creates a mysterious “meta-agential” agency that supposedly has an origin different from the alienation of human agency in the facticity of practices. The “logic of practices” working in the disclosure of an authentic lifeform brings into unity the articulation of meaning within a characteristic hermeneutic situation and the reflexive formation of pertinent configurations without becoming a Hegelian logic. (In studying how “logic is related to practices”, Lynch [2001, 154] shows that actors’ judgmental reflexivity effectively works only in the medium of practices in which the existing configurations are revealing possible significance and relevance. Actors’ judgements single out what in any particular case is significant and relevant.) When the synergy of practices’ reflexivity and practitioners’ judgmental reflexivity takes place in the articulation of an authentic lifeform, this cooperation serves the tendentious appropriation of possibilities that makes the transcendent meaning immanent in the lifeform’s everydayness. In this case, the synergy of both forms of reflexivity supports the lifeform’s ethos, and is trans-subjectively regulated by a characteristic hermeneutic situation. The converse claim is also valid: It is the characteristic hermeneutic situation that institutes such a synergy which prompts the tendentious appropriation of possibilities. Furthermore, the synergy under discussion is a sine qua non for the nexus of autonomy and authenticity. The assemblages of configured practices whose routine performances elicit inauthentic everydayness are deprived of such a synergy. The relations between the two types of reflexivity gets more or less damaged and distorted. Thus, practices’ endogenous reflexivity may become strongly dominant, holding sway over actors’ reflexivity in a manner that prevents actors

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from taking rational decisions. Under these circumstance, unexpected configurations of practices massively produce unintended consequences. This case is typically instantiated by configurations of practices of market economy. As a rule, these configurations are hardly controllable by virtue of actors’ judgmental reflexivity. A symptomatic situation of market economy is that individual and collective agents who perform particular singular practices are unaware of the conigurations to which these practices belong. Roughly, it is this unawareness that causes the “irrationality of markets”. Consider, for instance, the practices of trading corporate shares under the conditions of the “anonymous” financial markets, i. e. the markets where buyers do not meet sellers. A manifold of practices – performed by dealers, position holders, investment banks, agency brokers, institutional investors, and so on – that are involved in this trading form configurations in which any particular practice is guided by a certain private or institutional interests. The participants try in a reflexive manner to bring into harmony the competing and conflicting interests (related to the distribution of profits on equities, the raising of capital, the re-organization of the issued capital, and the redemption of debt), but more often than not practices’ endogenous reflexivity overtakes their efforts. As a rule, the participants are successful in settling conflicts and tensions of various sorts within particular configurations/contexts. However, practices’ reflexivity recurrently re-configures the concerted practices, responding to the changing milieu in which the configuration is performed. The more the reconfiguring process is progressing, the more the participants are losing control over the effects of performing configured practices. It seems as if the configurations of practices – in which competing agential desires, intentions, and plans are infused – are “protecting themselves” from both the destructive effects of agents’ conflicts and tensions, and the challenges of an unpredictable milieu. This protection is the main achievement of practices’ endogenous reflexivity: Practices are matching and re-matching each other in a manner that is neither an arbitrary process, nor is this process guided by the performers’ intentions, beliefs, and desires. Furthermore, it is this achievement that shows that practices’ endogenous reflexivity may work by not serving the demand of a characteristic hermeneutic situation. By implication, this reflexivity is at odds with that tendency (in the articulation of a lifeform) which from the very outset results from the cooperation between the two forms of reflexivity. In working not in a hermeneutic situation, practices’ endogenous reflexivity can bring into play configurations that practitioners are hardly able to master. Always when discrepant motives and goals are infused in an assemblage of concerted practices that is arranged beyond a characteristic hermeneutic situation, endogenous reflexivity manages to prevent the assemblage from destruction by

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producing configurations governed by practices “matching logic” – a logic that, in particular, seems irrational for all players on the market. The fact that the endogenous reflexivity of practices may constantly bring surprises is also epitomized by practices propagating policies of protectionism. Here again the reflexive rationality of practitioners does not suffice to cope with the irrationality of unintended consequences. A case in point is a protectionist configuration of anti-dumping practices, practices of restraining trade, practices of imposing regulatory mechanisms, juridical practices of controlling the ownership of domestic firms, practices of subsidizing export, and practices of controlling exchange rate. Because this configuration immediately gets mingled with indefinite “invisible” configurations, the initial agential intention becomes dissipated in a manner that prompts the so-called risks of protectionism – effects that work in opposition to the initial agential intention. Here again unpredictable economic crises owe their growing frequency to the increasing inability of the players to reflexively adjust their behavior to new situations in coping with changing configurations of endogenously reflexive practices. To stress again, the cooperation of actors’ judgmental reflexivity and practices’ endogenous reflexivity is at once instituted by the characteristic hermeneutic situation and it serves the tendentious course of the articulation of authentic meaning. The preceding examples of configured economic practices refer to assemblages that in crossing the threshold of facticity do not constitute – because of lacking the cooperation in question – specific lifeforms. Under these circumstances, practices’ endogenous reflexivity holds sway over the behavior of the economic players. The lack of a characteristic hermeneutic situation forecloses not only the cooperation between the two types of reflexivity, but also the possibility to differentiate between risk and danger – a differentiation on which theorists like Niklas Luhmann and Ulrich Beck insist. When practices’ endogenous reflexivity strongly dominates over the driving forces of agential behavior taking place in the inauthentic everydayness of concerted practices, there is no possibility to decide whether the emergence of destructive effects is caused by hidden factors in agents’ intentions or by practices’ “matching logic”. More generally, the collapse of the cooperation between agents’ reflexivity and practices’ reflexivity is what makes today societies into “the risk society”. Notoriously, Ulrich Beck characterized “world risk society” in terms of “second reflexive modernity”. Paradoxically enough, the most essential feature of this modernity seems to be the proliferation of assembled practices that defy integration with characteristic hermeneutic situations whereby the probability of various sorts of accidents is increasing: Though individualization is becoming the social structure of the modern societies guided by a “second Enlightenment” and the new individualism is capable of resisting routinization, reflexive modernity

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dramatically suffers from a deficiency of reflexivity with regard to the facticity of its own practices. “Institutionalized individualism” (Beck) does not promote a more efficient level of reflexive control over the formation of unintended assemblages of practices that enhance the risk situations of societies supposedly characterized by reflexive modernity. A particular manifestation of the abovementioned deficiency consists in the growing inability (of modern societies) to bring into play the synergy of practitioners’ deliberative reflexivity and practices’ endogenous reflexivity. It is hard to believe that Beck would have accepted this conclusion. Nonetheless, the conclusion is in full agreement with his view that the task of the reflexive “sociology of risk” is to reconstruct networks of techno-social practices through which “the foundations of everyday life are in flux.” (Beck 2000, 214). He also acknowledges that risks are man-made hybrids of cultural and natural entities – hybrids that can only exist within configured practices. His scenario of how risk societies can become self-critical societies – a scenario that, in my view, has to be freed from the ideology of reflexive modernity – bears some resemblance to the idea that the facticity of practices has the potential for producing configurations capable of disclosing authentic lifeforms. Beck argues that different forms of critical reflexivity capable of tracking contexts in which normal consumption habits produce “organized irresponsibility” increase the society’s potential for identifying not only the local risks but also for gaining knowledge about the “global risk” (or perhaps more correctly, the risk of unstoppable globalization). It is my contention that the proliferation of authentic lifeforms (and not the changing institutions of reflexive modernity) can cope with unintended consequences and “manufactured uncertainties”. For Beck, intensifying the public recognition of risks is already an important step in instituting a self-critical society, since – according to his basic formula – the more risks are publicly recognized, the less risks are produced. Like all kinds of neo-Enlightenment ideologies, Beck’s ideological doctrine puts the rationally organized human agency first. It is evident however that many “dangerous risks” – and, a fortiori, the risk of unstoppable globalization – are produced not by intended or unintended actions and activities, but by trans-subjective arrangements of practices that can only be studied by means of those post-metaphysical (and post-humanist) discourses which Beck strongly denies. The hermeneutic conceptualization of the facticity of practices admits that all kinds of norms are contextually fore-structured, and the ongoing fore-structuring exerts a pre-normative power that should also be attributed to a trans-subjective agency that is entangled with agential behavior and has a modus operandi rooted in actors’ agency, but nevertheless is in an important sense autonomous. More generally, while (individual and collective) agency is determined by norma-

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tively organized dispositions and attitudes, the interplay of practices and possibilities engenders a kind of (what I call) hermeneutic pre-normativity that orientates and constrains the articulation of meaning within a characteristic hermeneutic situation (Ginev 2014b). Pre-normativity is the power of fore-structuring as specified by such a situation. Hermeneutic pre-normativity comes from the kind of interpretive circularity which – in constituting meaning – is fore-structuring what becomes constituted (including normativity) within concerted practices. Prima facie, pre-normativity is a function of two “controlling parameters”. On the one hand, it lays down constraints and limitations for performing actions and activities whereby any particular practice (as involving constrained actions and activities) is, as it were, designed to prefer practices (also matching these constrains and limitations) in forming configurations. This function is to be assigned to practices’ endogenous reflexivity. Performing a practice is already orientated towards the performances of those practices which seems to be “preferred partners” for having a configuration. On the other hand, pre-normativity as informed by the characteristic hermeneutic situation keeps intact the dominant tendency of the articulation of meaning within configured practices. A special aspect of the concept of hermeneutic pre-normativity concerns the fore-structuring of normative structures in agential behavior. Conceptualizing the pre-normative fore-structuring of normativity – as this fore-structuring releases its own constraining and orientational force – invokes the ontological difference. Normativity consists of entities (norms, rules, prescriptions, proscriptions, taboos, instructions, criteria, standards, sanctions, constraints, conventions, regulative patterns, etc.) that have ontic presence. These entities are not “natural objects” (or “natural kinds”),¹⁶ and more importantly, their way of being cannot

 I admit that normative entities are not natural kinds. Yet this statement is hardly to be defended in terms of scientific realism. Paradoxically enough, one can treat – via a scientific-realist ontology – normative units as natural kinds. Such an ontology does not dispute that natural kinds might be also man-made entities. From the viewpoint of scientific realism, natural kinds are kinds revealed by science. A class of clinical norms revealed in the scientific study of the etiology of an illness is a classic example for a “normative natural kind”. If one goes on to reduce the class of these norms to non-normative entities, one is jeopardizing the conceptualization of the illness under study. Yet one should also regard as normative natural kinds those classes of social norms, rules, standards, normative patterns, etc. which are revealed (in the sense of scientific realism) by means of objectivist social-scientific theories. There is a dubious moment in the scientific-realist approach to natural kinds that is quite relevant to the present discussion. It is science – so the argument of this approach goes – that is entitled to decide how to define the category of kinds and what can be accepted as constituting a natural kind. But if this is the case, then the whole approach to natural kinds crucially depends on the normative concept of scientific rationality: Science decides what should be counted as natural kinds by

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explanatory be derived – without committing a kind of naturalistic fallacy – from entities that are distinguished by ontic presence. Normativity is “prepared” within the facticity of practices. Since from the perspective of factuality-facticity distinction, normativity is a kind of factuality, the way in which normativity is forestructured within facticity should be addressed as a particular case of producingfactuality-within-facticity. It is a case that epitomizes the role of the ontological difference in the production of normativity. In this regard, normativity-integrated-with-configured-practices “harbors” the non-dichotomous difference between normativity-as-factuality of agential behavior and facticity’s hermeneutic prenormativity. The considerations of this section show that the distinction between facticity and factuality (including the factuality of normative entities) is in the first place a manifestation of the ontological difference that can subsequently be read in epistemological terms. However, there is a threat of placing the concept of factuality in a narrow epistemological framework if one ceases to treat it as a counterpart of facticity. Ontologically seen, the facticity of practices has so far been contrasted with the factuality of human agency as this always operates in a normative milieu. The (normative) factuality of human agency consists of all indispensable components of agential behavior – actions, activities, tacit knowledge, motivation, cognitive resources, desires, moods, rule-following, norms, patterns, etc. The empirical theories in sociology, social psychology, cultural anthropology and several other disciplines conceptualize the factuality of human agency by means of procedures that represent social normativity though scenarios for performing social roles, the functionality of social structure, interactive and communicative processes, consensual intersubjectivity, and so on. Normativity is tacitly postulated (and hypostatized) in all social-scientific theories in which the primacy of (social) action (as incorporated in structures, systems, and organizations) is taken for granted. But as is well known, this kind of representing the normative nature of human agency is not the only game in town. Moral and political theories dealing with the issues of autonomy, rights, and liberties are designed to reconstruct the intrinsic normativity of human agency, whereby they gain the status of normative theories (similar to that of normative jurisprudence). Yet studying the normativity of agency and agential behavior does not leave the territory of factual inquiry. In contrast to social-scientific theories, moral and political theories about the normative nature of human agency are more holistically orientated, and tend to

bringing to bear its own normative criteria and standards for objectification. By implication, all natural kinds are in a sense “normatively laden”.

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avoid the representation of normativity by means of discrete entities. But like the former, they hypostatize normative structures. The hermeneutic approach to practices I tried to sketch out in this chapter opposes both kinds of theories, since it conceptualizes social normativity with regard to the entanglement of human agency with the facticity of interplaying practices and possibilities. Seen in this perpectie, the argument against the hypostatization of normativity runs as follows. When specified by a characteristic hermeneutic situation, the pre-normative interplay of practices and possibilities elicits both constraining and orientational power. It constrains the subjective choices of possibilities that do not match the tendency of articulating a certain cultural lifeform within the open horizon of possibilities for articulation. The interplay orientates this articulation by bringing to the fore those possibilities to be appropriated which make the transcendent meaning of an authentic lifeform transferrable to the everydayness of its routine practices. The interplay succeeds in fore-structuring the formation of normative structures within the lifeform. It is this fore-structuring that should be regarded as the ethos of an authentic cultural lifeform – a subject that will be discuss in the upcoming section. In a nutshell, the ethos is the (hermeneutically pre-normative) constraining and orientational power that the interplay elicits in fore-structuring the articulation of an authentic cultural form of life.¹⁷

3.4 Early Cubism as an authentic cultural lifeform 3.4.1 The initial configuration of Cubist practices This section should exemplify in more detail the concept of authentic form of life. It is organized as follows. In the first subsection, I will elaborate on the initial configuration of practices that discloses the stylistic distinctiveness of early Cubism. The view will begin to emerge that not the convergence of individual idioms but the characteristic hermeneutic situation launched by the initial configuration makes the Cubist movement a unique cultural lifeform. The next subsection is devoted to the issue of how the intrinsic dynamics of changing

 Pre-normativity has an interpretive character because it works within and through the hermeneutic circularity characterizing the interplay of practices and possibilities. Interpretive prenormativity can be identified by means of the practitioners’ anticipations and expectations concerning the “visualization” of transcendent meaning in contexts of their everyday life. Pre-normativity also results from the synergy of practices’ endogenous reflexivity and practitioners’ judgmental reflexivity. (See also Christias 2015, and Crowell 2007.)

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configurations of pictorial practices circumscribes the iconography of early Cubism. The final subsection scrutinizes the meaning of Cubist “geometrical experimentation” in terms of the hermeneutic conceptualization of articulating an authentic cultural lifeforms within an autonomous ensemble of practices. The section argues that the aim of this experimentation cannot be accounted within the frameworks of empirical psychology. Since the Cubist quest for a “fourth spatial dimension” is a quest for revealing a kind of primordial spatial meaning, the geometrical experimentation is to be spelled out in hermeneutic and phenomenological perspective. Let me tentatively elucidate this claim. Leo Steinberg is credited with the idea that early Cubism is characterized by the striving for a visualization of “the ungraspable” – the spatiality which can never become a possession of perceptive experience. The attempts at visualizing “the ungraspable” amounts to inventing and designing pictorial practices capable of fusing perceptivity and tactility. It is an established view that early Cubist painting aims at surmounting the deficiencies of that artistic vision which uncritically exploits geometrical perspective. Pursuing this aim should enable one to restore the existentially primordial relation between tactility and spatiality. Tactility is the most rudimentary form of ecstatic unity with what is ready-to-hand. In this regard, it is the zero-point in the constitution of (what phenomenological philosophers call) existential spatiality. Thus considered, the “Cubist thought” around the year 1910 approached issues that two decades later philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty will address when dealing with forms of spatiality preexisting the subject-object cut. The pictorial rendering of tactility can be achieved through a particular configuration of artistic practices. Fusing vision and tactility paves the way to artistically revealing existential spatiality. I will try to show that making spatiality something ready-to-hand – which was especially Braque’s intention – opposes any kind of reifying space as something that embraces the entities taking place in it. In the 1960’s, Edward Fry alluded to an interesting (possible) philosophical interpretation of early Cubism, according to which the work of Braque and Picasso in 1913 – 14 has striking similarities with Husserl’s anti-psychologism as developed in connection with the method of eidetic reduction. However, Fry (1966, 39) cautiously notes that these similarities are historically coincidental. Like many other historians of Cubism, he tends to an interpretation in neo-Kantian terms. Fry outlines this interpretation in the introduction to his famous anthology of texts (articles, reviews, comments, manifestos, correspondence, etc.) on the movement. In their new reader from 2008 (that includes much greater variety of documents), Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten criticize Fry’s principles of selection as related to his position of “ahistorical formalism”. A particular aim of their anthology is to rehabilitate – in opposing the tradition in the historiogra-

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phy of modern art of canonizing Picasso and Braque as the only “essential” Cubists – the historical significance of those who for a long period have been treated as secondary figures in the movement (painters like Robert Delaunay, Henri Le Fauconnier, Albert Gleizes, and Jean Metzinger). Moreover, the new anthology provided new clues to understanding the Cubist impetus for visualizing a meaning of spatiality that remains hidden for those who admit that (starting with the transformation of Cézanne’s pictorial innovations) a kind of “neo-Kantianism informed the Cubism of Picasso and Braque.” (Antliff and Leighten 2008, 4). The section only aims at an examination of how the hermeneutic theory of artistic practices works, and has no pretension for offering a systematic case study of early Cubism. I will use fragments of well-known narratives developed by historians of the Cubist movement, partially recasting them in accordance with the tenets of the theory. Again, this initiative is not for the sake of revising the historiographic narratives about the movement, but only for having a proper empirical illustration of the theory. Being confined to this illustrative function, the upcoming considerations will provide new reading of phenomena already revealed in existing historiographic narratives. Of course, this statement does not imply that a genuine case study of the movement designed in terms of the hermeneutic theory of artistic practices would not be capable of revising existing or constructing new narratives about movement’s historical dynamics. The difference between the treatment of a pictorial practice (such as reducing the painted scene through tonal manipulation) as an elementary unit of artistic expressivity and the treatment of the same practice as integrated with an ensemble of configured pictorial practices is a difference that makes sense within the relations of mutual interpretation between “the particulars” and “the whole”. As isolated pictorial practice it incorporates an artist’s intention, motive, desire, or unconscious impulse. As integrated with an ensemble of pictorial practices, it partakes, in particular, in the growing specification of a stylistic distinctiveness. There might be a significant discrepancy between the practice expressing an artist’s initiative and the same practice trans-subjectively manifesting a style disclosed by configured pictorial practices. For instance, the artist may perform in his work a practice of reducing the light exclusively to a source of building forms with the intention of stressing the non-representational character of her/his painting, while the same practice can be configured with pictorial practices disclosing a style trying to replace the “passive realism” of the “immobilized eye” (Albert Gleizes) with an active realism that does not make use of the perspective mechanism. To reiterate a statement that was spelled out in the preceding chapter, a practice that takes place in an arranged interrelatedness of practices becomes meaningfully contextualized by the interrelatedness. In each particular configu-

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ration of this interrelatedness, the practice is endowed with a specific meaningfulness in accordance with its relational position within the configuration. Moving from one to another configuration makes the practice-integrated-with-the-ensemble a carrier of “differing meaning”. The performer of this practice is capable of (a) reflexively situating herself within the ensemble of practice, and (b) positioning herself towards what becomes disclosed within the configurations. For the sake of illustration, consider the pictorial practice of dispensing with modelling light and shadow within colors as a means for dispensing with the “illusion of perceptual space” (George Braque). This practice was typically implemented by several avant-garde artists at the Fin de siècle who otherwise were committed to essentially different aesthetic worldviews. More specifically, this practice was applied in works of painters like Paul Sérusier, Maurice de Vlaminck, Raoul Dufy, and George Rouault. But in styles like early Fauvism and Postimpressionism it was only vaguely related with the styles’ core pictorial practices. It was rather a “migrant” practice emerging in various individual artistic idioms. The performance of the artistic practice of dispensing with modelling light and shadow within colors challenged the use of established color techniques. But this practice began to occupy a central position in a new idiom when its performance was integrated in a configuration with practices such as the reduction of complex spatial structures to a geometric form approximating a cube, the minimal combination of colors in order to avoid the distraction of the emotions evoked by the abundance of color, the aggregation of geometric forms rhythmically in an extremely shallow space, the accentuation of the geometric shapes underlying the concrete subject matter, the decomposition of images into a series of interlocking planes, and the polymorphic portraying with shifts in perspective. The advent of (early, Analytical) Cubism was precisely distinguished by this configuration that supposedly succeeded in debunking the “illusion of perceptual space”. When Picasso proclaimed that Cubism has tangible goals, he referred to the possibilities of artistic expressivity engendered by the way in which the practice of dispensing with the illusion of depth was specified by the practices expressing the “Cubist thought”. The specification of the artistic practice by the configuration in which it takes place is not to be detached from the way in which it contributes to the specification of a style as expressed by concerted practices. It is this mutual reinforcement between a single practice and a stylistic configuration that is built upon the model of interpretive circularity. Yet this model, as will be shown below, has a much broader scope of applicability. Against the background of these preliminary considerations, the questions might be asked as to when and how Cubism qua an artistic movement consisting of changing

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and overlapping configurations of practices reaches the status of an authentic cultural lifeform.¹⁸ Before embarking on this task, however, let me tentatively accentuate on the difference between a single artistic practice and a whole of configured practices. Any one artistic practice is a discrete unit distinguished by (1) an intrinsic technique and (2) a scheme of repetitive performance that more or less has an algorithmic character. The Other as a potential recipient of the performance’s outcome – and in this sense, as an unavoidable partner of the artist – is always implied by the way of designing such a practice, irrespectively of whether the artist reflexively takes into consideration the contexts of possible reception. (Any single artistic practice is an inter-subjective entity, because its organization and performance assume an implied/implicit recipient.) It is the unity of (1) and (2) that makes any one artistic practice something more than an ad hoc maneuver. A single artistic practice gains this status by being an iterative performance of a technique. The effect of any performance is in a horizon projected by configured practices. A single practice is unavoidably organized in a teleological manner. The junction of intrinsic technique and algorithmic performance contributes to enclosing the practice in its own performative teleology. But however strong this enclosing might be, any artistic practice is open to enter into a configuration. The expected effect of performing a practice – and the intention of attaining this effect – belong to the artist’s imaginative creativity, but his horizon of expectation is always already fused with a trans-subjective horizon within which the performance of the practice-as-configured-with-other-practices takes place.

 Unlike Futurism or Dadaism, Cubism does not have a written manifesto. Metzinger’s paper “Note sur la peinture” (1910) makes him perhaps the first theorist of Cubism. This image of him has been confirmed by another excellent paper “Cubisme et tradition” (1911). Both papers are reprinted in Antliff and Leighten’s anthology. Metzinger theorizes, among others, the strategy of committing the “mobile perspective” whereby the overcoming of the shortcomings of traditional perspective would take place. But these papers are by no means a manifesto of a new style or movement. By the same token, Gleizes and Metzinger’s key text from 1912 Du Cubisme offers a theoretical analysis, but not a manifesto. Though disclosed as an autonomous style (and authentic cultural form of life) that developed the syntax of a new pictorial language, and, despite the fact that it was – in John Golding’s words – the most complete and radical artistic revolution since the Renaissance, Cubism remained an open interrelatedness of artistic practices and initiatives that forecloses a metaphysically closed and doctrinally systematized worldview. In a preface to an exhibition catalogue, Apollinaire made the case for the view that Cubism consists in a coherent whole of aesthetic attitudes and views, but it lacks a systematic unity of a doctrinal aesthetics.

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Thus, the practice of using striations for creating inconsistency in shading when representing the human body – as typically exemplified by Picasso’s Dance with Veils (1907) – belongs to the artist’s experimentation with undermining the sense of a three-dimensional body. At the same time, the expected effect is embedded in a proto-Cubist horizon of possible undoing any separation between the inhabited space and the body. The expectation of carrying out the space-body experiment in Dance with Veils is in the horizon of possibilities for expressing entities like embodied space and (tactile) bodily spatiality. In making this experiment, Picasso was still not fully aware that he is working within this horizon. His practice of using striations was combined with practices of intersecting geometrical planes that “hybridize” the female body and the inhabited space, but there was by no means a full-fledged configuration of pictorial practices that can promote the artist’s positioning towards the horizon mentioned. In experimenting with a new technique without being aware of the horizon in which the experimentation takes place, the artist expresses a “contingent intention” – as related to the immediate effect the technique can exercise upon the recipient – rather than a holist aesthetic ideology. Several paintings of Braque and Picasso as well as works of the group stemming from Abbaye de Créteil (the group of the salon Cubists) in the period 1907– 09 are characterized by proto-Cubist contingent intentions. The immediate effects they achieved – however important they might be – still do not convey an independent meaning concerning aesthetic doctrines, worldviews, basic motifs, philosophical attitudes, and so on. A configuration of artistic practices can communicate meaning of this sort if it is able to enter into interplay with the possibilities of a horizon that this configuration projects. Speaking in terms of a theory of aesthetic creation, only a configuration can express a Kunstwollen (in Alois Riegl’s sense of a synthesis of artistic intentions that are distinctive for a certain cultural-historical time and place).¹⁹ Speaking in terms of a theory of reception, a configuration of artistic practices enables the constitution of an implied recipient  Erwin Panofsky (1920) offered an interesting construal of Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen. According to him, this concept has to be exempted from superfluous psychological overtones. Once it has been stripped from psychologism, Kunstwollen is orientated towards expressing more trans-subjective than subjective artistic volition and motivation. Panofsky relates this kind of trans-subjectivity to arrangements of artistic techniques that can bring into play the aesthetic spirit of (a) a style, (b) a historical epoch or (c) a group of artists working in different genres. However, his appeal to such a construal of Riegl’s concept is combined with a resistance to any hypostatization of structures determining the individual artistic idioms. In Panofsky’s perspective, Kunstwollen has much to do with artistic experiences (Erlebnisse) within a particular historical context that – in transcending the artistic subjectivity – becomes expressed in a variety of artworks.

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who – not only (approvingly or disapprovingly) receives the immediate effects of techniques incarnating artist’s “contingent intentions”, but – is capable of “completing” the artwork by gaining its meaningful totality within her horizon of reception. For reasons that will later become clear, a configuration of artistic practices lacks a teleological organization. To stress again, taken alone an artistic practice is not able to express independent aesthetic doctrine or to convey a certain aspect of an artistic-philosophical attitude. But it contributes to achieving this when becoming properly configured with other practices. An artistic practice can analytically be separated (and described as a manifold of discrete elements), but it never exists per se in isolation. It is integrated with – and specified by – a configuration of practices. In stating this, I am not trying to imply that the interrelated practices of an artistic idiom are subjected to a governing structure. In contrast to the idea of contextualizing grammar in Wittgensteinian sense, the idea of governing structure presupposes context-independent syntactical rules and paradigms, which the hermeneutic theory I am putting forward strongly repudiates. As opposed to any kind of “structuralist reductionism”, the configured practices never become a pure presence-at-hand, waiting to be objectified as structures remaining invariant with regard to the syntactical rules and paradigms. Configured practices disclosing the idiomatic distinctiveness of an artistic style are constantly characterized solely by potentiality-for-being. A configuration of pictorial practices exists to the extent to which it can appropriate and actualize those possibilities of artistic expressivity which the practices involved in it generate via their interactive cross-references and project as a horizon for articulating new meanings. Let me now reintroduce in the present discussion some of the previously formulated ideas concerning the ontic-ontological status of practices. An interrelatedness of practices that discloses an artistic movement and articulates its stylistic specificity constantly remains projected upon possibilities engendered by the configurations which are formed and reformed within this interrelatedness. The engendered possibilities for artistic expressivity are existing as an open horizon that is potentially inexhaustible. Appropriating and actualizing particular possibilities through particular configurations elicits shifts in this horizon – new possibilities become revealed while some of the existing are concealed. The horizon is never statically present. The shifts in the horizon induce changes in the configurations of practices. The main focus of the hermeneutic theory of artistic practices is precisely the interplay of the shifting horizons of possibilities for artistic expressivity and changing configurations of artistic practices. It is this interplay that – ontologically seen – has autonomous being characterized by potentially never ending hermeneutic circularity between the whole of meaning (the horizon

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of all possibilities that can be actualized) and the particular actualizations singling out particular meanings of artistic expressivity. Since the hermeneutic circularity is irreducible to a teleological process determined by intentionality, the interplay has a sui generis being. I said that any one artistic practice is an inter-subjective unit (containing a tacit dialogical interaction between the artist and the intended recipient). By contrast, the interplay of configured practices and possibilities for expressivity “always already” transcends the artist’s creative subjectivity, thereby taking on the character of a trans-subjective process. The creative subjectivity of any participant in the artistic movement that is ever in a process of articulation within the interplay turns out to be at once situated in and transcended by this interplay. Moreover, the desires, intentions, creative inventions, value orientations, feelings, aspirations, idiosyncrasies, Lebensanschauungen, ideological preferences, etc. of any particular member of the movement are entangled with the interplaying artistic practices and possibilities for creative expressivity. The initial configuration of Cubist practices – that is, the one which “discloses” the authentic style of the movement – consisted of practices that fragmented the spatial forms into small cubes (and figures with cylindrical forms in the case of Fernand Léger’s “Tubism”). A further step in this fragmentation was the pictorial rendition of physical things as layered entities simultaneously viewed from many angles. (As I will later argue, the main achievement of the initial configuration that radically geometrizes the form consists in paving the way for coping with the complexity of existential spatiality. The ongoing revealing of the [transcendent] meaning of this spatiality is a process that attests the authentic character of the Cubist movement as a cultural lifeform. Reaching this conclusion is a step in the direction of introducing the ontological difference between the form of artistic behavior and the articulation of the Cubist cultural form of life. I will entertain the idea that what becomes ontologically disclosed in this lifeform became involved in a kind of innovative everydayness that has to be studied on its own terms.) Putting aside all debates about the point of departure of the Cubist movement – in particular, whether or not this point is Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) – the identification of an initial configuration disclosing Cubism as an authentic cultural lifeform suggests an approach that essentially differs from the semiotic reconstruction of the style’s specificity.²⁰ Accordingly, this identifi Characterizing Cubism as an authentic cultural lifeform means that it is a form of artistic life that through the recurrence of its configured practices creates its authentic cultural patterns of producing artworks. To reiterate, approaching the issue of the formation of an everydayness of such practices is a sine qua non for identifying an authentic cultural form of life.

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cation does not necessarily coincide with the way of identifying the historical inception of the idiom by recognizing all constitutive syntactic structures settled within idioms, intertwined symbols, and imagery. The “historical life” of an artistic movement within its interrelated practices differs from the semiotic reality of the respective artworks. Thus, one may hypothetically reach the conclusion that Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is still not a genuine manifestation of Cubism (as an imagery with a characteristic structuring), and nonetheless claim that this painting manifests the initial configuration of Cubist practices. Depending on how the initial configuration discloses the artistic movement, a tendency of appropriating and actualizing possibilities for articulating the style takes place. Following Guillaume Apollinaire’s estimation (from 1912) of the place of Cubist painting in modernism, one can argue that the characteristic hermeneutic situation of early Cubism is a tendentious appropriation of possibilities for an artistic “sensitivity of primordial drives” that shows how “the classic” can become established in the non-classical world of modernism.²¹ It was assumed at the time when the movement took shape that the act of reception of a Cubist painting would restore the whole of the fragmented profiles. This assumption was theoretically worked out, in particular, in Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s study entitled Du Cubisme (1912) – the first publication systematizing the artists-practitioners’ self-reflexivity in developing the new aesthetic worldview. For Gleizes and Metzinger (1964, 48), “the mind of the spectator” should be the birth place of those forms which remain implicit in the pictorial space of Cubist painting.²² (The ambition of these two theorists of their own style of painting was too radical. They wanted to present Cubism as a coherent doctrine – a presentation that contrasted the style’s status quo as being charac-

 Interestingly enough, Gadamer – the greatest theorist of “the classical” – offers a brief comment on the epochal significance of the Cubist movement, stressing on the one hand, the manifold of techniques calling into question the linear perspective, and on the other hand, the Cubist break with tradition. For him, it is due to this break that we have gradually ceased to expect linear perspective and stopped taking it for granted, whereby “our eyes have been opened to the great art of the High Middle Ages. At that time paintings did not recede like views from a window with the immediate foreground passing into the distant horizon. They were clearly to be read like a text written in pictorial symbols, this combining spiritual instruction with spiritual evaluation.” (Gadamer 1986, 8).  Metzinger (1910) describes the initial configuration in terms of techniques enabling a “mobile perspective”. The painter is moving around an object whereby combining various views of it into a synthetic image. The “mobile perspective” actually involves the geometric experimentation with faceting, and creating new edges and faces in rendering three-dimensional figures. In bringing into play abstractness in the pictorial space of concrete things, “mobile perspective” proves to be a core feature of the Cubist kind of “abstract realism”.

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terized by dynamically changing configurations of practices that precluded a firm doctrinal codification. In contrast to Gleizes and Metzinger’s ambition, Picasso and Braque insisted that Cubism is no more than an open research that avoids any kind of doctrinal aesthetics [Laude 1971, 8 – 9].) In addition, the initial Cubist practices managed to de-personalize the work of art, that is, to liberate it from the presence of the artist’s personality. Once accomplished, the work of art must become “self-contained”. Max Jacob argued in 1917 that Cubism has destroyed the post-romantic cult of individuality. In enabling and developing a new language of shapes, the initial configuration – as it gained its first coherent manifestation in Picasso’s works from 1908 such as Three Women and Seated Woman (both in Hermitage Museum) – brought into play reactions against Impressionism and Fauvism.²³ (To be sure, these reactions were for a long period heavily dimmed and attenuated by the wide range of criticisms against the way in which Les Demoiselles broke with the three-dimensional idiom of painting.) In contrast to the established styles mentioned, the initial configuration appealed to a realism freed from intuitive presumptions allegedly given by nature. The essence of reality consists of abstract geometric shapes, some of which are irreducible to elementary geometric figures. The initial configuration called into life a kind of “abstract realism” as an epitome of the search for artistic perception separated from the “naturally real” of what is immediately perceived as impression. The Cubist practices of “demonstrating the complexity of reality perceived as an experimental construct” (Bohn 2002, 28) launched a kind of pictorial coping with reality that at first succeeded in evading and later on in overcoming representationalist assumptions. For most of the artists who once became “immersed” in these practices, the Fauvist colorful abstractedness was no longer sufficient to radically get rid of such (epistemic) assumptions. The deconstruction of both epistemological representationalism and semantic essentialism ascribing a firm (fixed) reference to any particular sign is closely related to the way in which Cubist practices create new meanings through their interrelatedness.²⁴ Roughly, what acquires “pictorial meaningfulness” with this

 To be sure, the talk of various proto-Cubist configurations of practices in the period 1907– 1909 is completely justified. A case in point is the configuration that becomes apparent in the already mentioned work Dance of the Veils (1907). It is this configuration that anticipates the uncertainty of shapes which upcoming configurations of proper Cubist practices would deal with.  Doubtless, this deconstruction also had important semiotic consequences. Hall Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh (2004, 34) argue that “in attacking the epistemology of representation, Cubism underscored the gap separating reference and meaning and called for a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of signs.”

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interrelatedness is “entities that are ready-to-hand within a tactile space”. As I will try to show, early Cubist painting is closely associated with the emphasis on tactility and “tactile space” (Braque) that visualizes existential spatiality as an ecstatic unity of making room through the living body and the environmental regions in which the bodily activities take place. Cubist realism was a protest against the Impressionist practices of immediately depicting a momentary scene. It is realism about reality as it exists before imposing on it any structure (like geometrical perspective) that makes it a rational construct. Cubist realism is against both the “momentary dissolving” of reality, and the appeal to formal structures as representational mediation in catching reality. According to this position, the geometrical rendition of reality should arise out of the artistic experimentation. The movement’s members were aware that the search for a way out of impressionist sensualism – not to be confused with Bergson’s intuitionism, a position highly appreciated by several Cubists – and constructivist rationalism could only have enjoyed success if it were incorporated in a configuration of pictorial practices offering alternatives to impressionist spontaneity and Cartesian constructability. To reiterate, this was the historical role of the initial configuration of early Cubist practices.²⁵ The practice of making surfaces transparent, the practice of dissecting surfaces, the practice of stressing counter-intuitive balances and precarious equilibria, the practice of presenting volume and color as existing independently of each other, the practice of putting into formal interaction planes of pure color, and the practice of constructing additional surfaces contributed to revealing and expressing the abstract spatial structuration inherent in concrete objects. Decomposing the images of the latter in facets enables the revealing of the objects’ multifaceted structure that is in a tactile manner ready-to-hand, and never becomes manifested presence-at-hand. (The creation of compounds of polyhedra through faceting cubes was only the starting point of what Metzinger calls “geometrical experimentation”.) The initial configuration prompts one to substitute the “tactile vision” of unusual (non-metric) geometrical forms for the forms of direct visual perception. It is this substitution that guides the Cubist compositional experiments with the dissolution of the ordinary vision’s images into angular and incisive planes. Soon after the vision from a “mobile perspec-

 One can find in the critical-historical literature the interpretation that the initial form of Cubism contained the impetus to Akademisierung and the tendency to a transformation of the style into a conventional enterprise (Daniels 2012, 78 – 82). Without commenting on the political background of this interpretation, I will stress again that the critical potential of the initial configuration consists in the disclosure of a style (and a cultural lifeform) that was resistant enough to be reintegrated with the traditional culture.

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tive” has been launched, Apollinaire (2010, 8) wrote that the “vision will be entire, complete, and its infinity, instead of marking an imperfection, will only bring out the relation between a new creature and a new creator, only this and nothing more.” Working within the horizon of possibilities generated by the initial configuration of practices immensely enriched the Cubist vocabulary of shapes and forms. The possibilities for expressing the “Cubist thought” essentially informed the respective iconography. To a great extent, the practices which deconstructed the spatial grid of traditional painting “selected” their relevant images and motifs. The primary Cubist iconography was intimately related to the process of withering of the three-dimensional forms as this process took place in the initial configuration. (Besides bodily images indispensable for the geometrical experimentation with the spatiality of the human body, the primary iconography included various kinds of utensils – from musical instruments to a whole factory [Picasso’s Factory in Horta de Ebro, 1909] – that relate the spatial continuum of fusing objects to what actually or potentially can be activated [made ready-tohand] within the scope of the human body’s existential spatiality.) It was the initial configuration that directed the artists’ interest in objects that are most amenable to the kind of fragmentation which allows the multiple seeing of them. By the same token, one may state that the initial configuration was tied up with iconography that supports the primacy of the “touchable visibility” from one layer to another during the process of creating forms in planes. In stressing the contrast between the preference for concrete entities in the works of Picasso and Braque, on the one hand, and the growing abstraction in the paintings (including in still-life compositions) of the group formed by Gleizes, Metzinger, Léger, Le Fauconnier, and Robert Delaunay, on the other, art historians are prone to insist on a trend of divergence in the iconography.²⁶ In fact, this contrast provides evidence for the ambiguity of the images and motifs in the Cubist painting: Even the clearly identifiable images of concrete objects are implying concreteness and “touchability” that is capable of creating plasticity through uncertainty and indeterminacy.

 David Cottington (2004, 4) nicely summarizes the major difference in the socio-institutional existence between the bande à Picasso and the group centered on the studio of Le Fauconnier by arguing that if “the gallery Cubism of Picasso and Braque, with Kahnweiler’s astute assistance, furnished the movement with a reputation for an obscurantism and hermeticism that were soon seen to be among its chief characteristics, it was the salon Cubism of Le Fauconnier, Gleizes, Metzinger, Léger, and Robert Delaunay that secured its public profile.”

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3.4.2 The characteristic hermeneutic situation of early Cubism It is time now to turn the attention to the way in which Cubist practices disclose and articulate authentic meaning. To stress again, the (ontological) concept of the characteristic hermeneutic situation refers first and foremost to the tendency of appropriating and actualizing possibilities for artistic expressivity. The tendency comes into being with the way in which the distinct style is disclosed by the initial configuration of practices.²⁷ Phrased slightly differently, it is the initial configuration that makes apparent the stylistic distinctiveness by opening a characteristic hermeneutic situation. The situation of disclosing the style and articulating its imagery and forms – within the interplay of practices and possibilities – creates a trans-subjectivity beyond the plurality of subjective-artistic intentions, motivations, values, idioms, worldviews, preferences, etc. of the particular artists subscribing to the movement’s tenets. But “beyond” does not mean a detachment of artistic subjectivity from the style’s trans-subjectivity. The former constantly remains entangled with the configured practices as they proliferate within and through the interplay. The artistic intentions, aspirations, imaginations, and experiences become dispersed in the ever changing configurations. In this sense, the artist’s creative subjectivity is distinguished by a kind of nonlocality within configured practices that articulate the style of an artistic movement. Yet like any other kind of assembled practices, artistic practices do not possess their own agency. The individual practices – supposedly incarnating motives, beliefs and desires – of any artist partaking in this articulation become, over the period of style’s articulation, scattered in such a manner that they can no longer be disentangled from the trans-subjectivity of interplaying practices and possibilities. More generally, the characteristic hermeneutic situation managed to produce

 To be sure, the tendency could not have existed without the artists’ choices of possibilities. But these choices are not only made within the interplay of practices and possibilities. They are also heuristically orientated and constrained by the way in which practices tend to form configurations, thereby prioritizing certain possibilities they engender. By implication, the style of artistic expressivity becomes opened within a horizon marked by already prioritized possibilities. Put differently, the style’s articulation within the interplay of practices and possibilities is from its very inception characterized by choices of possibilities that are already prioritized. This line of reasoning presupposes that there is a kind of reflexivity operating within the changing configurations of practices. Although practices’ endogenous reflexivity ought not to be separated from artists’ judgmental reflexivity, it is the former that has primacy in the formation of configurations and the prioritization of possibilities. Thus, the tendency of appropriating and actualizing possibilities for stylistic expressivity emerges through the trans-subjective interplay, and only subsequently becomes affirmed through the subjective choices made by particular artists.

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the stylistic distinctiveness of the movement. The tendentious appropriation of possibilities created distinctiveness that goes beyond the individual expressivity of any participant, regardless of how important is her/his contribution to the movement. But profiling the movement’s trans-subjectivity is a requisite for the individual expressivity of any participant. It is my contention that the characteristic hermeneutic situation of early Cubism enabled the artists’ strongly individual idioms as participants of the movement. The tendency of appropriating and actualizing possibilities is also ongoing transference of what the artists admit to be a “transcendent regulative” (values, ideas, ideals, etc.) of their movement into the immediate reality of the artworks. The transcendent has to be visualized, which in the case of early Cubism amounts to a certain transformation: The painting ought to turn what transcends the geometric space of the perceptual experience into something touchable and “ready-to-hand” (Karmel 2003, 13). The transcendent is what is distorted through the “geometry” of this experience. Here again I follow the observation that the characteristic hermeneutic situation enables a typical visualization of the transcendent within recurrent configurations. This situation is constantly open to changes and revisions that might reformulate it by evoking a new tendency of appropriating possibilities. Due to the orienting and constraining role of the characteristic hermeneutic situation, the heterogeneous iconography and the plurality of individual artistic idioms did not lead to dramatic discrepancies in the development of the Cubist movement. But nonetheless, at a certain point the proliferation of configurations of Cubist practices gave birth and stimulated a split between two main tendencies of appropriating the possibilities engendered by its interrelated practices. This split can be addressed in terms of a divergence between two characteristic hermeneutic situations, accordingly related to the analytic and the synthetic branch of Cubism.²⁸ Several historians of modern art underscore the need for a more complex picture about the heteronomy of the history of the Cubist move-

 The transition from Analytic to Synthetic Cubism took place in the painting of Braque and Picasso, each of whom has had experienced the change of the characteristic hermeneutic situation in a highly complex manner. By contrast, the group formed by Gleizes, Metzinger, Léger, Le Fauconnier, and Delaunay started to work within the hermeneutic situation of Synthetic Cubism, which explains the tendency to abstractionism in their paintings. It deserves to be mentioned that Le Fauconnier was the first artist who tried to spell out the characteristic hermeneutic situation of Synthetic Cubism in a text written in 1910 for a catalog. The very division between an analytic and a synthetic phase in the development of Cubism goes back to Kahnweiler’s Kantian interpretation of this development. Those who – like Mark Antliff and Patricia Leighten – oppose the Kantian interpretation of Cubism tend to reject the differentiation between such phases.

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ment. To a great extent, this heteronomy results from the growing pluralization of characteristic hermeneutic situations after the First World War. I mentioned the socio-institutional divergence between (in Cottington’s terms) salon and gallery Cubism – a divergence independent of (and in a sense even deeper than) the split between the analytic and the synthetic branch. Yet this divergence can also be read as resulting from a splitting of the hermeneutic situation related to the initial configuration. A series of articles published by Metzinger and Le Fauconnier in 1910 – 12 show a fore-grasping of the ultimate meaning of Cubism quite different from that understanding of the meaning of the non-perspectival painting which guided the experimental work of Braque and Picasso. (Basically, the two groups tended to configure in different ways the practices constituting the initial configuration.) The engagement of salon Cubists with public activities and political practices contributed to the public image of this group as gravitating towards a sort of radical politics. Coping with this image had consequences for the way in which they tried to organize their “field of artistic production”, which historically coincides with the moment at which “the term ‘avant-garde’ first began to be applied to, and claimed by, certain groups of artists, both as declaration of cultural identity and as a promotional device in an increasingly crowded art marketplace.” (Cottington 2004, 27). As Peter Brooke (2001) shows in his valuable study, Albert Gleizes’s attempt at recapitulating the meaning of early Cubist movement seems to confirm the split of the two groups with regard to the very idea of Cubist painting. Gleizes stresses the independence of two tendencies, related respectively to the dramatism of human being (the group of salon Cubists) and the personal intimacy in the works of Braque and Picasso. Yet Gleizes also argues that this divergence did not preclude the shared horizon of possibilities for engaging “Cubism as a collective work” to which every artist had contributed his share. The tendency to a deconstruction of the central perspective by geometrizing bodily forms and/or minutely studying the “non-Euclidean” geometry of concrete physical entities and instruments informed the hermeneutic situation of the analytic branch. (The later practice of making use of printed letters – as manifested in canvases of Braque, Juan Gris, and Picasso – amplified the effect of transforming the three-dimensional space into a manifold of intersecting planes.) The tendency under discussion was not quite definite with regard to the use of colors in designing the pictorial space. To a certain extent, it is distinguished by an intensive elaboration on color techniques emphasizing sharp changes of local colors as these techniques paralleled the practices of melting shape and space and of dissecting and intersecting surfaces. (Fernand Léger cogently noted that Cubism began as “grey in grey” and subsequently became en-

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meshed with practices expressing the playfulness of colors.) Nonetheless, parsimony with regard to coloring (including the use of strongly monochromatic practices) prevailed in the Analytic Cubism. This peculiarity enabled the artists to (a) explore the possibilities of conveying aspects of objects’ structures through intensifying the play of nuances and the sense of chiaroscuro, and (b) combine various light sources in a manner that underlines the moving perspective. The trend of restricting the use of color was preserved in Analytic Cubism after 1910. Within the hermeneutic situation of the analytic trend, the “Cubist thought” was developed as a consistent reduction of the perceptual world to surfaces and figures subjected to a quite specific kind of “geometry”. It is a “geometry” that rejects the invariance of any kind of formally defined metric distance. In another formulation, it is a “geometry” of the “space” in which the objects are melted. Braque puts this in a simple formula: I am not painting things, but the spatial interrelations among the things. For him, it is this kind of painting that succeeds in transforming visual space into a “tactile space”. The most important feature of the latter is that it is not an embracing or enveloping space. Being always contextualized, tactile space is ever in a state of ongoing constitution (Verstegen 2014). Yet it would be wrong to assume that the practices of Analytic Cubism allude to a kind of non-Euclidean distance. They are rather promoting non-metric spaces in which subspaces with local symmetries take place.²⁹ (Though at the

 In Du Cubisme, Gleizes and Metzinger (1964, 47) argue that if one were to relate the space of Cubist painters to geometry, one would have to refer to “certain of Riemann’s theorems”. But the appeal to this kind of non-Euclidean geometry is only one aspect of the Cubist preoccupation with science. The history of Cubism is largely marked by the search for a “fourth dimension”, but not in the sense in which Hermann Minkowski mathematically codifies special relativity. In the Cubist perspective, the “fourth dimension” is a spatial, and not a temporal one. Are there indeed parallels between Riemann’s geometry (and/or Poincaré conjecture) and Cubism? This question must be carefully addressed, without any attempt at a “scientification of Cubism”. No doubt, the “geometrical experimentation” involved in the practices of faceting the forms was much more than a play of “ignorant geometricians” (Louis Vauxcelles). Tony Robbin reminds us that projective geometry, which is essentially important for all scientific theories invoking geometrical complexities, began as artists’ attempts to create the illusion of space and three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface. In scrutinizing Picasso’s Portrait of Henry Kahnweiler (1910), Robbin (2006, 30) draws the attention to how “multiple cube make up the head rather than a single cube defining it, and even taken all together, the head seems incomplete.” Like Linda Henderson before him, Robbin admits that Picasso’s “new idea of space” has much to do with Esprit Jouffret’s descriptive geometry of four-dimensional figures. (Notoriously, Jouffret’s illustrations of a hypercube visualizing the fourth dimension have had a great impact on Picasso.) The “geometry of Cubism” (and the role played by Maurice Princet’s ideas) is a widely discussed subject. Actually, each of the Cubist practices follows its own “geometrical pattern”. By

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end of 1912 Analytic Cubism – as it is embodied in works of Picasso and Braque in the first place – “officially” was out of fashion, configurations of practices initiated by it and even its characteristic hermeneutic situation still dominated important particular paintings even after the First World War. In my view, the two main branches of Cubism coexisted for about two decades. Moreover, means of expression introduced by the analytical branch “migrated” in various artistic domains [of scenography, design, and fashion], which vindicates the concept of the “culture of Cubism” used in several historiographic studies. To put it in the words of an art historian, “we have attributed a culture to Cubism, whether the art is root cause or not.” [Martin 1999, 16]. The impact the style has had on poetry and literature also belongs to this culture.) I already pointed out the growing contrast with Impressionism and Fauvism that the proliferating configurations of Cubist practices put into play. A celebrated formulation of Apollinaire states that by standing in front of Cubist paintings, one gains the feeling of “a sobering up after the Impressionist debauch”. Léger and Juan Gris regarded the practices of fragmenting the bodies in terms of a direct protest against the Impressionist doctrine of plasticity. Braque insisted on a shift from a mode of painting centered around immediate perception towards one guided by conception. But the question remains as to whether the quest for such a sharp contrast with the styles mentioned was an artists’ intention. There are good reasons for admitting that the opposition to Impressionism (and in part to Fauvism) was, first and foremost, launched by the way in which Cubist practices became configured, and not by certain elaborated initiatives of the painters.³⁰ It was the initial configuration of these practices that succeeded in superseding the moods of spontaneity and excitement triggered by direct visual sensation, thereby offering more space for metaphysical imagination (Karmel 2003, 49). Of course, it would be an exaggeration to claim that there was a discrepancy between artists’ desires and beliefs, on the one hand, and practices’ endogenous reflexivity (as operating independently of agential subjectivity), implication, a configuration of such practices cannot be reconstructed by means of a (metric or nonmetric) geometry that is able to preserve certain structures under certain transformations.  Braque’s reaction against Fauvism seems to be brought into being by a strongly personal motivation. Yet on closer inspection, one realizes that it was the way in which Braque’s work became gradually immersed in the initial configuration of the Cubist practices of painting that invoked an orientation away from Matisse and Fauvism (Reff 1992). The artist’s motives for breaking with the Fauvist idiom due to the lack of purpose and method in this style are rather a subsequent vindication of an event that has already taken place. Roughly, the gradual immersion in Cubist configured practices was a process that can hardly be explained by invoking personal motivation, while the justification of what has occurred was a subjective (motivational) process related to the unfolding of solutions to pictorial problems.

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on the other. However, several Cubist artists have been working during the years 1910 – 1917 also in Postimpressionist, Fauvist, and other stylistic idioms. For some of them, it is even impossible to define the threshold of becoming Cubist painters. It was the “logic of practice” (in Bourdieu’s sense) – and not an alleged unity of personal intentions (still less a “collective intentionality”) – that offered a comprehensive alternative to existing styles through engendering creative innovations leading to a new artistic idiom. An exhibition organized in Germany by the Sonderbund in 1912 showing canvases of Picasso, Gleizes, Léger, and Le Fauconnier presented early Cubism not only as a growing convergence of the stylistic devices of four artists, but as repeatable pictorial practices entering into various configurations among themselves. The same effect was achieved by another exhibition in Amsterdam organized a few months later at which also paintings of Braque and Metzinger have been shown. (Two earlier exhibitions – that took place respectively in Room 7 and 8 of the 1911 Salon d’Automne, and in Room 41 of 1911 Salon des Indépendants [an exhibition inspired by Apollinaire at which works of Braque and Picasso were not represented] – were much more preoccupied with the individual idioms of the artists than with the way in which the style’s uniqueness was disclosed through configured practices.) Though the artists whose works were included in the two 1912 exhibitions did not have the “collective self-consciousness” of building a coherent community practicing and championing an artistic form of life, the exhibitions succeeded in showing the already existing “everydayness of Cubist practices”. At this point, I have to stress again that it is the routine of configured practices that maintains a cultural form of life, regardless of whether or not a mentality of a “collective/group agent” on the part of practitioners would come into being. The formation of a community of Cubist artists can be reconstructed in terms of a history of the style’s social institutionalization. In such a reconstructive scenario, one has to pay attention to interpersonal relations, the role of art dealers, the activities of salons’ committees, the formation of informal and formal networks of artists, the impact of critical reviews (and of art critics’ attitudes) on artists’ individual idioms, the “geography” of centers at which the style’s manifestations take place, the role of exhibitions for the delineation of style’s specificity, the rise of periodicals propagating the style, the gallerists’ policies, the political reactions towards the iconography and stylistic idiom, and the style’s reputation in the public sphere. It is my contention that any scenario about the social institutionalization of an artistic style presupposes the way in which the style (qua an authentic cultural form of life) has been already disclosed within configured practices.

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The “everydayness of Cubist practices” over the years have become more and more tangible. But this by no means implied a unification of artists’ individualities (and, as already indicated, the particular groups of the movement). On the contrary, the more routine became the recurrent configurations of practices, the greater was the proliferation of differences among the artists’ individual idioms. To stress again, the routinization of Cubist configured practices was the most important prerequisite for a creative individualization.³¹ Thus, for instance, the essential differences of approach between Picasso’s and Braque’s only became apparent when there was enough room for innovative modifications in the routinized practices enabling the spectator of the canvases to discover different ideas behind the techniques of pictorial transitions from one fragment to another. I am referring to practices such as the continuing fragmentation of form, the de-formation by merging shapes and objects, and the delineation of a concrete object by revealing layers of tactile space surrounding the object. The artistic individualization of any significant Cubist painter resulted from idiosyncratic specifications of existing configurations of practices. To cite another example, Juan Gris – guided by the intention to approach Cubism in a more theoretical fashion – became a practitioner of the style by making more “disciplined” and methodically organized those configurations which were already apparent in works of Picasso and Braque. Beside the implementation of more colors, Gris’s deconstruction of perspective is more incisive, enhancing the effect of the figures’ merging with the background. It is the everydayness of Cubist routinized practices that allowed deviations and transgressions in the performances that brought into being new styles. This everydayness was in particular a sine qua non for the emergence of Orphism. John Golding characterized Delaunay’s work from 1912– 1913 as “more mouvemanté Cubist painting.” (Golding 1988, 23). Not without reason Apollinaire coined the expression “Orphic Cubism” to snapshot the very transformations as they have been manifested in woks of Léger, Picabia, Picasso, and others. (There was a time when Léger was regarded as an artist situated in-between the two styles.) The emergence of Futurism provides another example of how transformations of routine Cubist practices lead to a new style. Golding (1988, 28) summarizes the passage between the two styles by a simple formula: The linear Cubist grid turns into the Futurist “lines of force” – a transformation that is

 Even the routine which was enabled and supported by the initial configuration provided enough room for completely individual artistic idioms. An example in this regard is Piet Mondrian’s semi-Cubist paintings from the years 1910 – 1911 in which practices used in the works of Picasso and Braque became completely different in appearance.

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in line with Futurists’ conception of the transparency of objects. The common ground of both styles are the practices of fusing the figure and its surroundings.

3.4.3 From tactility to existential spatiality The idea of “tactile values” has been persisting in the studies on early Cubism since Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s pioneering work Der Weg zum Kubismus (1920). He was the first who took these values into consideration when analyzing how Picasso avoids a reduction of the two-dimensional visualization of form to ornamentation (Kahnweiler 1920, 20). Yet the idea of tactile values has gained a new focus in some recent studies on the Cubist movement. Thus, Ian Verstegen claims that this idea should be spelled out in terms of a preponderance of tactility over vision. He convincingly shows that the issue of how the artist can convey a full experience of space occupies a central place in the first theoretical writings within the movement. He also makes clear that by separating touch from vision, one “removes the playful reflexiveness in which the elements of analytic Cubism were employed, knowingly living bare the conditions of illusion.” (Verstegen 2014, 2). Verstegen explores, in particular, the theme of how the emphasis on tactility in early Cubist paintings is related to techniques of overcoming deficiencies caused by geometrical perspective. In arguing that these paintings “had found a shortcut to depth more powerful than Renaissance perspective”, he reaches the important conclusion that the Cubist criticism of scientific perspective is for the sake of restoring primordial spatial meanings that visual perception distorts (Verstegen 2014, 6 – 7). The search for a depth that cannot be rendered by perspectival convergence is the search for a “source” of spatial meaning. I will try to show that this source cannot be spelled out in terms of psychological theories. In a monographic study, Pepe Karmel (2003) – whose analyses are strongly committed to the epistemological contradistinction between optical representation and tactile perception – tries to give an account of why Cubism was a “tactile style”. He makes the case that the role of touch in expressing forms within this style is explainable through theories from the 19th century like the psychological theory of perception, the symbolic art theory, and the theory of decorative culture – theories that possibly have had impact on particular artists. It remains an open question whether these theories have been received by pioneers of the Cubist movement or they only indirectly played a role in the artists’ aesthetic doctrines. But independent of this question, Karmel’s line of reasoning seems to strengthen the motif of “Scientific Cubism”. Paradoxically enough, the allegedly “scientific preoccupation” with the role of touchability should compensate for

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what becomes displaced by the geometric (scientific) perspective. Yet Karmel is by no means suggesting that Cubist realism is a quasi-scientific reaction to illusions inspired by older scientific views. Furthermore, he is aware that the idea of “tactile values” does not amount to an epistemological construct. When turning his analysis on the interpenetration of bodies and space – thereby revealing further aspects of Cubist “tactility of space” – Karmel essentially breaks with the 19th century epistemological opposition between opticality and tactility. The task of visualizing what remains hidden within the perceptual space is a task that cannot be addressed in terms of representation. Cubist realism is not a new “artistic epistemology”. The tactile style has a greater historical significance than an experimentation that aims at overcoming the illusions and distortions of perception. It is the study of the “tactile space” that implies the impetus for revealing the “non-Euclidicity” and the “fourth dimension” as expressing spatiality before perceiving space that can be geometrically codified. Lynda Henderson (2004, 445) recaps her long-standing investigations of Cubist experimentation with space by stating that – in contrast to the interpretations that attempted to tie Picasso’s Cubism and Apollinaire’s criticism to the temporal fourth dimension of Einstein’s space-time world – “Cubism’s fourth dimension basically signified a suprasensible spatial dimension that might hold a truth higher than that of visible reality.” In my view, Henderson’s characterization of this dimension as a “suprasensible” one is epistemologically completely correct. But from the viewpoint of existential ontology, it is a dimension that precedes (and in a sense “prepares”) the formation of perceptual space. Since Cubist geometrical experimentation is not an epistemological undertaking but an attempt at unveiling hidden spatial meanings, privileging the viewpoint of existential ontology is quite reasonable. The perceptual space is grounded upon the tactile readiness-to-hand. From existential-ontological viewpoint, early Cubist paintings express a spatial dimension that corresponds to this readiness-to-hand. The “more complex reality beyond immediate perception” which enables “the interpenetration of form and space” (Henderson 2004, 455) is not displacing a supposedly primary reality based on the three-dimensional perceptual space. This view can be opposed by stressing that the interpenetration of form and tactile space manages to fore-structure all kinds of metric space. In trying to conceptualize this fore-structuring – as Heidegger did in his existential analytic – one should relate the bodily-tactile constitution of spatial meaning to a kind of topology that underlies the objectification of space. The constitution of existential spatiality by reflecting on this kind of topology is a task outlined in Heidegger’s Being and Time. In section 24 of this work, he makes it clear that there is no rift between the pre-reflective (circumspective-environmental) spatiality and the conceptually envisioned ho-

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mogenous space. Heidegger is interested in the “existential genesis” of metric space from the spatiality of the readiness-to-hand within the world. It is this – essentially tactile – spatiality that finds expression in early Cubist paintings. (See in this regard, Ginev 2012.) The statement that the initial configuration of Cubist practices enabled the visualizability of tactile space is not an observation that can be conceptualized in psychological terms. It is the characteristic hermeneutic situation of disclosing the movement in which a certain tendency comes into being – the tendency towards the appropriation of possibilities for visualizing tactility in a manner that overcomes the distortion of perceptual space. This situation cannot be recast in psychological terms since it concerns a non-psychological issue – the constitution of artistic meaning about existential spatiality. The deficiency of using psychological scenarios of explanation based on theories of space perception does not contradict the fact that psychological conceptions might have played heuristic role in artists’ creativity. To be sure, several early Cubist theoretical writings allude to such conceptions. There is serious evidence that experimental psychological studies have been motivated Cubist artists. Yet the immediate impact exercised by contemporary psychological theories should be distinguished from what the trans-subjectivity of the characteristic hermeneutic situation brought into play. Instead of “naturalizing early Cubism” (in terms of empirical psychology), the hermeneutic theory of artistic practices directs the attention to the circularity of configured techniques and possibilities for expression. Inquiring into this circularity allows one to address the meaning expressed in early Cubist paintings in a radically non-psychological manner. The interplay of artistic practices and possibilities for stylistically specified expressivity ought to be a subject of phenomenological studies. But in view of the fact that phenomenology is often preoccupied with perception, the question arises as to whether early Cubism as a radical critique of perceptual vision can be made such a subject. The short answer is that phenomenology – like early Cubism – is a critique of the objectification of perception. Even the phenomenological conceptions that emphasize the “primacy of perception” should not be misunderstood as a concession to psychologism. Of course, Merleau-Ponty’s conception is the most prominent case in this regard. The “tactile perception” is a persisting theme in his quest for demonstrating the primacy of perception. At stake in this quest is the kind of bodily perception that involves the readinessto-hand. Thus considered, perception prompts ecstatic unity, and does not presuppose foundationalist or dualist metaphysical tenets. Only against the background of this unity that fuses perceptivity with tactility, one can ascribe genetic priority to the perceptual world. In Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, the perceptual world cannot be separated from the tactile world. But since the pre-reflexive per-

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ception underlies the subject-object cut, it cannot be conceptualized within a framework of cognitive psychology. Merleau-Ponty states that before the epistemic relationships takes place, “the world exists”. But “expressing what exists is an endless task.” (Merleau-Ponty 2007, 75). The world exists through “the very texture of its qualities, and in the equivalence among all its sensible properties – which caused Cézanne to say that one should be able to paint even odors.” (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 6).³² Cubists are exploring existential spatiality by focusing on the fusing of the living body with its surroundings and contextures-of-equipment. The fusion stands for the irreducible dimension of transcendence involved in the existential spatiality. The practices of portraiture in Analytic Cubism convincingly document this observation. In breaking the living body into fragments and rearranging them in manner that leaves the impression of possible coming new rearrangements of the same fragments, these practices are capturing what potentially exists within the bodily space. The use of neutral color schemes enhances the effect of potentiality that transcends the actual presence. In addition, the practices of blurring the distinction between background and foreground are rendering the “shifting situatedness” of corporeality. Braque’s Man with a Guitar (1911), Roger de la Fresnaye’s The Bathers (1912) and The Man sitting (1914), Picasso’s Girl with Mandolin (1910) and Accordionist (1911), Metzinger’s Tea Time (1911) and Two Nudes (1911), Gris’s Harlequin with Guitar (1917), and Lyubov Popova’s Pianist (1914) are prominent cases in point. From a phenomenological viewpoint, each anatomic unit of the human body is a “source of spatial meaning”. The Cubist practices of deforming the body’s representation are – in an experimental manner – problematizing the bodily constitution of (spatial) meanings that are always already temporalized meanings. Picasso coined the expression of “correct deformation” to refer to the techniques of integrating temporal sequences with sections of spatial images. For him, deforming body’s images is a means

 To a great extent, the phenomenology of the perceptivity and tactility is guiding in MerleauPonty’s interpretation of Cézanne. The French phenomenologist examines precisely that period of Cézanne’s work which is most important for the formation of early Cubism. According to his interpretation, “Cézanne does not try to use color to suggest the tactile sensations which would give shape and depth. These distinctions between touch and sight are unknown in primordial perception.” (Merleau-Ponty 2007, 75). In fusing vision and tactility – so the argument goes – Cézanne’s paintings after 1890 restore the “lived perspective” of the ecstatic unity with nature. The artist has been working from nature instead of representing nature. The painting hand belongs to nature, and it paints that with which it is in touch. In working from nature, the artist can conform to nature (qua the perfect artwork) by pursing the touchable surface. In the perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation, Cézanne anticipates early Cubism by developing techniques of seeing the depth, the smoothness, the softness, and the hardness of objects.

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for creating a temporal rhythm of the picture. In a sense, the Cubist “correct deformation” should temporalize the spatiality of the living body. Pictorial studies into the existentially primordial moving spatiality should take as the point of departure the state of living body in ever changing environments that the body constitutes while being transcended by what enables the continuity of environmental changes. This is a state that lacks a three-dimensional characterization. (At stake in the portraiture of Analytic Cubism is the issue of how the topologically minimal spatiality is “welling up” from the body. Braque’s Woman Holding a Mandolin [1910] is perhaps the most typical example.) Three-dimensionality within the bodily being-in-the-world arises out of a more primitive spatiality. Speaking not in formal-geometrical but in phenomenological terms, any aspect of the three-dimensional space is rooted in – or better, has its existential genesis from – existential spatiality that has no metrics and dimensionality, and can be described in terms of a sui generis topology. Cubists were aware that a picture depicting the human body as located in a metric space precludes any pictorial access to existential spatiality. The practices of geometrical experimentation enabled them to deal with the topology of the moving corporeal spatiality, before corporeality becomes a body placed in three-dimensional space. Let me return for a moment to Gadamer’s brief note on Cubism. With his insistence on the resonances with the non-perspectival pre-Renaissance painting, Gadamer joins the tradition of questing for the non-modernist roots of Cubism. The efforts for associating Cubist idioms with various forms of primitivism also belong to this tradition. The Cubist de-formation (through geometrizing the forms) of anatomy provokes and makes visible something that otherwise remains invisible – the meaningfulness of the spatialized human body and the embodied spatiality. When the “normal” spatial meaning of human corporeality is deformed, the provoking de-formation makes this meaning visible. Otherwise, corporeality seems as a meaningless natural presence. But this is only the initial step achieved via the provoking de-formation. The second step is more essential. The outcome of the primitivizing de-forming is not restricted to the “didactic” function of making visible corporeal-spatial meaning that otherwise remains invisible. The Cubist task is to express this meaning as existentially primordial one. And vice versa: The existentially primordial corporeal-spatial meaning becomes “incorrectly” deformed and distorted when represented in a classical pictorial manner. Some historians of the movement speak in this regard of a “rationale for ugliness”. I think that the claim of primitivism has to be extended by taking into account the search for “existential primitiveness” in Cubist painting. Patricia Leighten (2013, 59) cogently observes that the turn-of-the-century modernists’

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political motivation was “to critique civilization by embracing an imagined primitiveness whose authenticity they opposed to a ‘decadent’ West.” She also stresses the complexity of this primitiveness as referring not only to the sauvagerie of the “non-civilized people”, but also the childhood of the European races, and the early stages of the personal development. Cubists’ search for the primordial (pre-perspectival) existential spatiality adds a further moment to avant-garde primitivism: The impetus for retrieving that kind of primitive existentiality which the conventional life of the “civilized world” has effaced or covered. De-formation is deconstruction of the primitive existentiality’s effacement through provoking the “normal forms” in their “normal meaningfulness”. The task of Cubist primitivism consists in re-primitivizing what is normalized in conventional forms of painting. Thus considered, the search for a revolutionizing style is much more than an artistic epitome of the political mythology for a paradise free from bourgeois constraint. In stating this, I am not trying to downplay the political and ideological impulses in Cubism. On the contrary, it is my conviction that the deconstructive return to the meaning of primitive existentiality is what makes the Cubist lifeform politically and ideologically interesting.

3.5 The concept of existential agency The quest for an empirically graspable driving force in social life that is not totally derivable from actors’ agency, and is not determined by normative structures has a long history in the social sciences. In reflecting upon the nonlocality of actions and activities within the interplay of practices and possibilities, I used the expression of trans-subjective (or trans-agential) agency, characterizing it as an agency partially emancipated from agential behavior. When this agency – stemming from human agency through its alienation in the facticity of practices – becomes subjected to the demand of a characteristic hermeneutic situation (of articulating an authentic lifeform), it takes the form of (what I called) existential agency. Roughly, existential agency is trans-subjective agency operating within a characteristic hermeneutic situation. Before embarking on some more detailed definitions of the concept of existential agency, I would briefly like to examine how similar concepts circulate in other theoretical discourses. The appeal to a (trans-subjective, but not a meta-contextual) driving force is to be found in all post-humanist programs that tacitly or expressly subscribe to the view that a contextualized and heterogeneously constituted actor (like actor-network) is “not the source of action but the moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it.” (Latour 2005, 46). According to this view, networking entities interact in a manner that unites the particular agencies of

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the human and nonhuman agents/actors/actants, without transforming – as already discussed – the united agency into a self-determining driving force. Being interactively united, cooperating agencies are a constant source of uncertainty about the origin of action. Uncertainty and nonlocality are facets of the network’s heterogeneous agency. Any attempt at localizing the source of action in actants’ behavior (as distinguished by a manifold of agencies) is doomed to failure. Such an attempt – carried out with the intent to rule out the uncertainty – unavoidably confronts the need to broaden the relevant network whereby the “source” is further displaced and dislocated. At the same time, “inventing a hidden social drive, an unconscious, would be a sure way of reintroducing this ether of the social” that the post-humanist social scientists try to dispense with (Latour 2005, 47). Uncertainty and indeterminacy concerning the exactly localizable source of agency are unsurmountable. I agree with this conclusion. But because of its ontic empiricism, the actor-network theory fails to address a very important dimension of the uncertainty, nonlocality, and indeterminacy of the heterogeneous agency – the dimension related to the way in which this agency constantly surpasses agential behavior (including the behavior produced by all networking entities). Without this surpassing capacity, any network-actor would be dissolved. I suppose that a possible response to this criticism would stress the impossibility to conceptualize this dimension in the same way in which one conceptualizes the assembled forces that constitute actor-network. The rationale for stressing this is identical with the rationale which the actor-network theorist provides when rejecting critical sociology as a discipline that puts aside the results offered by fieldwork and replaces them by a discourse about invisible things. Yet taking into consideration the surpassing capacity of trans-subjective agency (including that one which operates in actor-network) does not amount to dealing with invisible things. Trans-subjective agency is not a new “ether of the social”, and its conceptualization does not lead to a “conspiracy theory”. Its surpassing capacity is indeed invisible when one is entirely preoccupied with ontic fieldwork. But one gains “visibility” into the way in which trans-subjective agency surpasses contextualized agential behavior when one approaches the facticity of practices. It is my contention that without integrating the ontological difference with the way of carrying out fieldwork, the actor-network theory will be condemned to describe the collaboration of particular agencies (and the “concatenations of mediators”), thereby not having the opportunity to conceptualize trans-subjective (trans-agential) agency.³³ (To stress again, this agency is intrinsically het-

 Latour declares that (1) in spite of his efforts, the gaps between actor-network theory and

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erogeneous, and cannot be regarded as a “resultant” of the actants’ particular agencies.) Latour often points out that the network of human agents and nonhuman things-as-actants should not be conceived of as a mixture of two preexisting realms of social activities and material things. Human agents and thingsas-actants are from the very beginning in state of unity within the facticity of practices. Otherwise, an actor-network would not come into being. But there is no such unity without transcendence of what is united. To address this transcendence in ontological terms – thereby making the ontological difference unavoidable in the empirical fieldwork – amounts to studying the ecstatic unity of heterogeneous agency operating in actor-network with what becomes articulated within actor-network’s practices (Ginev 2017b). Critical realists offer another attractive attempt to conceptualize reflexivity in terms of a driving force irreducible to the agency of agential behavior and not determined by normative structures. (The work of reflexivity in this case has in common with the mode of operation of existential agency.) In their account, reflexivity in social life takes the form of “reflexive practices” building a “stratum of emergent properties” that prompts the human capacity of innovative action. Reflexivity produces innovations that are not accountable in terms of habitus and socialization. Thus considered, reflexivity is also an independent “mediatory mechanism”. Reflexivity dynamically mediates between agential subjectivity and various forms of collective behavior. Reflexive mediation between the two entities is a sine qua non for sociality. Neither agential subjectivity nor collectivity may claim an exclusive possession of reflexivity. In this regard, the driving force of reflexivity has much to do with the main task of critical realists – the task of striking “the right balance of personal, structural, and cultural emergent powers” (Archer’s expression). Yet, in spite of all non-subjectivist moments with which critical realists endow the concept of reflexivity, they still insists that the concept entirely depends upon a clear subject-object distinction. (In this regard, the actor-network theorist is in a much better position since he is not trying to reconcile presupposed Cartesian dichotomies. His dealing with the smooth continuity of heterogeneous entities and agencies “fills in precisely the space that is emptied by critical sociologists with the damning word of ‘reification’.” [Latour 2005, 77].)

phenomenology remain too wide because phenomenology is strongly concentrated on the human sources of agency, and (2) the description of actor-network theory as being half ethnomethodology and half narratologist semiotics (Greimas) is an accurate description. I belief that integrating in a hermeneutic manner the ontological difference with his theory would (a) bridge the gaps to which (1) refers, and (b) reveal new avenues for a dialogue between the two programs mentioned in (2).

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The mediatory mechanism of reflexivity remains enclosed in the subject-object relationship. This means that the driving force of reflexivity has no independent range of motion beyond agential subjectivity and the objectivity of social structures. For critical realists, admitting that there is such a range of motion would amount to conflating structure and agency (as this is the case with Giddens’s “duality of structure” and Bourdieu’s “structuring structures”). The main rationale for introducing the concept of existential agency consists precisely in envisioning the entanglement of agential subjectivity with trans-subjective configurations of practices as an independent driving force that cannot, however, be hypostatized as a “self-generated force”. It is the hermeneutic circularity involved in this trans-subjective-being-of-subjective-agency that precludes both any form of conflation and any form of hypostatization. Existential agency operates in an emancipated manner without hybridizing the way of being of situated actors with the way of being of social structures. However, existential agency – being partially emancipated – does not work as a regulative power that imposes itself over actors, actions, and contexts. Existential agency is also not a “relational agency” – a concept that supposedly unifies inter-subjectivity (as a network of relations generating agency) and structural conditions for the sustainability of these relations (Burkitt 2016). The notion of relational agency still exclusively draws on “the relational fabric in which bodily selves are embedded”, ignoring the situated transcendence of all intersubjective relations.³⁴ Existential agency operates within the interplay of practices and possibilities articulating particular lifeforms in accordance with their characteristic hermeneutic situations of articulation. Existential agency inter-contextually transmits the fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping of the lifeform’s ultimate meaning in the process of routine articulation of meaningful entities. The persistent transmission of this triad in the everyday articulation of a lifeform is another way of defining the concept of a characteristic hermeneutic situation. However, this definition is in need of an important specification. It concerns the nature of “transmission” that should not be construed as a factual process “taking place in time”. Transmitting fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping in the ongoing contextual constitution of meaningful entities is embedded in a shifting horizon of possibilities the appropriation of which temporalizes by opening the tendency of articulation. The transmission is distinguished by a regime of the temporalizing of temporality through which possible contexts are made present. Existential  Relational agency is attributed to inter-subjectivity embedded in social relationships that – by being put into operation – constitute “the very structure and form of agency itself.” (Burkitt 2016, 336). In line with a criticism of critical realism, the conceptualization of relational agency attenuates the role of reflexivity in favor of interactive inter-subjectivity.

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agency operates through regimes of the temporalizing of temporality within characteristic hermeneutic situations. Any attempt at identifying the modus operandi of existential agency as a factual process taking place in time is doomed to failure. I will further specify the concept via three definitions. Each of them presupposes the situated transcendence of agential-behavior-within-interrelated-practices. Existential agency is the way in which human-agency-entangled-with-practices operates within ensembles that in their everydayness constantly overtake the actors’ expectations about that reality which should become constituted by bringing-down-to-earth the ultimate meaning of actors’ lifeform. As resulting from that cooperation of actors’ reflexivity and practices’ reflexivity which the characteristic hermeneutic situation promotes, existential agency adjusts the actors’ expectations towards outcomes produced within the configurations of practices. In trying to cope with the uncontrollable effects of practices’ endogenous reflexivity, the actors strive – by means of their interpretive and judgmental reflexivity – for a mode of behavior that “visualizes” (makes into shared symbolic entities and images) the transcendent meaning of the lifeform in which they participate. Yet a general “visualization” – independent of the ongoing contextual visualizing of the lifeform’s transcendent meaning – is to be found in “documents” that, by spelling out this meaning, legitimize the way in which the actors as participants in the everydayness of a lifeform express their belief in the lifeform’s ultimate meaning as well as the belief in the successfulness of their strategy to bring this meaning down to earth.³⁵ Depending on the cultural lifeform, these “documents” provide discourses and narratives that may take the form of – only to mention some prominent cases – political utopia, scientific hypothesis, ideological narrative, historical worldview inspired by new ethical values, religious worldview and corresponding theological doctrine, or manifesto legitimizing a type of artistic imagery. In each of them, a kind of transcendent meaning is made into a sacred, a conceptual, an aesthetic, etc. image as well as a strategy is sketched out of how to make the transcendent meaning immanent in the everydayness of the lifeform’s practices. The elaborated images correspond to the actors’ expectations about the meaningful reality that would “materialize” (as everyday life) the lifeform’s tran-

 To reiterate, the actors become participants in a lifeform because they strongly believe in the reality of its ultimate meaning, and in the efficacy of the lifeform’s practices to “bring this meaning down to earth”. Admittedly, the lifeform is authentic if its ultimate meaning (as projected upon possibilities) transcends each and every context in which it becomes articulated within and through practices. By implication, visualizing/envisioning this meaning – as guided by existential agency – in particular contexts would be a potentially infinite process.

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scendent meaning. Existential agency should operate in a manner that shortens the distance between the image envisioned in the “document” and the contextual outcomes resulting from performing configured practices – outcomes that supposedly contextually visualize the transcendent meaning. The more effectively the image is spelled out (as corresponding to the expectations), the greater is the effectiveness of the modus operandi of existential agency. Russel Jacoby (2005, 41– 59) nicely argues for this formula in analyzing how utopian thought is functioning in our anti-utopian age. Utopias taking the form of blueprints are hopelessly ineffective in this age. Only utopias with “imperfect images” can assist the work of existential agency. The imperfect images have a greater effective power for political initiatives than blueprints, since they are open to more possible contexts in which the utopian meaning can in concreto be visualized. In transmitting the fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping of articulation, existential agency carries and carries out hermeneutic pre-normativity. As such a trans-subjective carrier, existential agency operating in an autonomous ensemble of practices disclosing and articulating an authentic lifeform demands from the lifeform’s participants to be resolute in their efforts to bring down to earth the ultimate (ideological, political, religious, moral, philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, etc.) meaning, granted that its appropriation within the everydayness of practices satisfies the ontological condition of unconcealedness. Thus, like existential agency the meaning of a lifeform is both ever transcending what is made present and progressively contextualized. The double status of the meaning of an authentic lifeform – being at once beyond any context of its articulation and becoming visualized in every particular context – hints at the second definition. Existential agency is a kind of agency that results from actors’ efforts to make the ultimate meaning immanent within the everydayness of their lifeform. In the process of this immanntization, this meaning plays the role of a transcendent authority for the participants in the contextual articulation of their lifeform. Existential agency is the driving force of immanentizing the ultimate meaning whereby it makes this meaning a pre-judgmental authority – that is, authority presupposed in all judgmental activities of the actors. Following Gadamer’s argument against Enlightenment’s disqualification of all prejudices, one may contend that without genuine – that is, related to “true prejudices” – authority, there is no authenticity. If one defies the authority of authentic lifeforms, one would have no choice but to become subjected to the anonymous authority of the inauthentic public life’s practices, thereby becoming fully “absorbed” and “lost” in the inauthentic everydayness. The immanentization of the ultimate meaning is hermeneutically characterized by fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping the contextual articulation of this meaning, that is, by the hermeneutic situation

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of appropriating and actualizing those possibilities that encode the meaning. This triad fore-structures any context of the lifeform’s articulation. Strongly tied to the actors’ belief in the transferability of the lifeform’s ultimate meaning to everyday practices, the characteristics of fore-having, fore-seeing, and foregrasping become a source of hermeneutic pre-normativity that – with respect to the process of immanentization – should be regarded as the ethos of the cultural lifeform (Ginev 2003b). At this point, I should briefly comment on Herbert Schnädelbach’s wellknown criticism of those philosophical positions which are prioritizing the hermeneutic concept of ethos. He is attacking precisely the way of treating the ethos in terms of a pre-normative articulation of normativity within a characteristic hermeneutic situation. Schnädelbach rightly ascribes the concept of ethos to the conceptuality of practical philosophy. Yet there is no need of opposing ethics (based on firm normative principles) to “lived ethos”, as this is suggested by him and all philosophers who bestow a priority on “morality” (Moralität) over “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit). By taking into consideration the fact that within the characteristic hermeneutic situation of articulating a lifeform the moral normativity accompanying this articulation is becoming ever more complex and elaborated, one is able to figure out how ethics and ethos can work in concert. Furthermore, moral normativity that goes beyond the plurality of cultural lifeforms is by no means to be excluded. But this normativity should also be treated as being in a state of ongoing articulation. If the talk of “normative foundations” should not imply a kind of foundationalism (not to speak of fundamentalism) then these foundations are to be conceptualized in their continuous movement within the hermeneutic circularity. This conclusion is not tantamount to Schnädelbach’s assertion that in the perspective of hermeneutics as practical philosophy “foundations signify hermeneutically guided arguments suggesting individual agreement on the foundations of any given lived-ethos.” (1987, 234). Arguing in this way implies normative essentialism in a plural form: Any lived-ethos has its contingent, ready-made, normative foundation. I counter this essentialist position by tying the concept of ethos to the phenomenon of hermeneutic pre-normativity. In this way, the nexus ethos-ethics does not need a normative grounding in the form of Kantian categorical imperative.³⁶ This conclusion has crucial consequences for the con-

 As an interesting alternative to Schnädelbach’s reading of ethos, one might point out Klaus Held’s phenomenological concept of ethos as a “basis for communicative understanding” (Verständigungsgrundlage). For Held (2010, 103 – 107), this basis is provided by “primitive customs” (Urgewohnheiten) that are independent of actors’ agency, and, for this reason, can be regarded as

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ceptualization of the Self’s being-in-practices that will be the subject of the next chapter. The third definition of existential agency anticipates the treatment of this conceptualization. Existential agency is the way in which the organized interplay of practices and possibilities allows the participants in an authentic lifeform to construct their relevant personal identities and to constitute their communal identity by following the ethos of that lifeform. (By “organized interplay”, I mean governed by a characteristic hermeneutic situation.) To sum up, in their interconnectedness the moments of (a) actors’ belief in the reality of a lifeform’s transcendent meaning that can be “brought down to the earth”, (b) the authority of what transcends actors’ agency, (c) the kind of hermeneutic pre-normativity elicited by the triad of fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping, and (d) the cultural lifeform’s ethos belong to the interplay of practices and possibilities that is governed by a characteristic hermeneutic situation of articulating an authentic cultural lifeform. Finally, let me point out that any single-practice-entangled-with-configuredpractices as the “point of inflection” (in the sense previously discussed) is the “transformer” of actors’ alienated agency into existential agency. By implication, the transformation is enabled by the non-dichotomous ontological difference between the facticity of practices and the factuality of human agency – the difference that resides in any particular practice-entangled-with-configured-practices. In the next chapter, the notion of existential agency will refer to human agency alienated in interplaying practices and possibilities as governed by characteristic hermeneutic situations.

“second nature”. However, these customs are not to be reified because they are effective within and through concerted practices.

4 Existential agency and the authenticity of the self 4.1 Introduction According to a conclusion already reached, no matter how effective practices’ endogenous reflexivity is, one cannot ascribe an independent agency to practices. Agency-operating-in-practices is unavoidably agency that stems from agential behavior. In alienating from agents’ subjectivity and intersubjectivity, it becomes embodied in configurations of practices. The fact that it operates in configured practices does not make it agency produced by practices. However, this statement does not preclude the possibility that there is agency capable of gaining a relative independence from agential behavior. It is agency that is rooted in agential behavior, but nevertheless capable of transcending that behavior. The totality of alienated human agency does not remain homogeneously dispersed over the whole interrelatedness of practices. Depending on the assemblages in which it gets incorporated, this trans-subjectively transformed human agency may manifest itself in various ways.¹ Thus, to take up a previous example, trans-subjective agency avoiding any control of judgmental reflexivity on the part of actors who trade corporate shares contributes to the strong dominance of practices’ endogenous reflexivity and constantly generates unexpected config-

 Does trans-subjectively alienated human agency scattered over various assemblages of practices represent a particular case of Deleuze and Guattari’s constellation of “assemblage, multiplicity, body without organs, rhizome, and plateaus”? I was initially enthusiastic about answering this question in the affirmative. I even scheduled a separate section devoted to this problematic. To be sure, trans-subjectively alienated agency has multiple roots, and the spread of this agency over assemblages of practices does not accord with the genealogical image of a root-tree whose branching follows the binary logic of dichotomy. Like a rhizome, trans-subjective agency ceaselessly establishes connections between configurations of practices. The images of de- and re-territorialization are quite relevant to the mode of operation of trans-subjective agency. This mode of operation constantly scrambles the genealogical trees. Trans-subjectively alienated agency is not amenable to any structural or generative model, and in this regard, it is an “antigenealogy”. It never can be localized as having a definite beginning and a definite end. Trans-subjective agency is always non-localizable middle which it overspills. Yet Deleuze and Guattari’s imaginary (as developed in A Thousand Plateaus) goes in too many directions. Some of them are incompatible with the positions I defend. But this is not the main reason of why I now tend to answer the above formulated question in the negative. My basic dissatisfaction is connected with the lack of an approach to the temporal dimension in the way in which Deleuze and Guattari address the constellation of assemblage, multiplicity, rhizome, and plateaus. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110605303-006

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urations of practices leading to the “irrational rationality of markets”. According to a more general claim I mentioned, the spread of trans-subjectively alienated human agency is an important source of enhancing the risk situations in the advanced societies. Existential agency is only a “small portion” of that kind of human agency which alienates in (and becomes scattered over) various assemblages of practices. A task of the hermeneutic conceptualization of practices is to demonstrate that the ecstatic unity of agential subjectivity and the trans-subjectivity of interplaying practices and possibilities, on the one hand, and the synergy of actors’ reflexivity and practices’ endogenous reflexivity, on the other, bring into play existential agency. In stressing that existential agency comes into being via alienation of human agency and becomes dispersed over configurations of practices, I do not exclude the possibility that the “source” of existential agency might also be other kinds of trans-subjectively alienated human agency. My point is that – regardless of the source of origin – crucial for the transformation of non-existential into existential agency is that this transformation is an intrinsic moment of the formation of a characteristic hermeneutic situation.² This chapter explores the issue of how the concept of existential agency allows one to develop a position of non-individualist (or trans-subjective) existentialism in human-scientific strategies of conceptualization. I advocated elsewhere the view that approaching the nexus of the Self and existential agency with regard to the regimes of temporalizing of temporality invokes this position (Ginev 2013b, 15 – 20; Ginev 2014a). The preceding chapter provided some clues to dealing with the issue of how existential agency constitutes itself within characteristic hermeneutic situations of the articulation of authentic lifeforms. Since existential agency mediates between the agency of those who perform configured practices and the being of these practices as projected-upon-possibilities, the conceptualization of existential agency implies the introduction of the ontic-ontological difference in any scientific theory dealing with the articulation of meaning within and through configured practices disclosing authentic lifeforms. Based on this observation, a special focus will be placed on the Self’s

 Though existential agency exclusively operates within characteristic hermeneutic situations, “traces” of how it works can also be tracked on the terrain of everyday practices belonging to strategies of spreading political power, policies guided by instrumental and strategic rationality, ad hoc assemblages designed by dubious motives and intentions, non-authentic lifeforms, and all other kinds of being-in-practices which are not protected from becoming inauthentic everydayness. These are traces showing how the everyday practices of authentic lifeforms modify their milieu of inauthentic assemblages of practices. Without modifying the latter, an ensemble of practices would not be capable of constituting authentic everydayness of practices.

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struggle for authenticity by participating in ensembles of practices articulating such cultural lifeforms.³ Giddens (1991, 75) defines the Self in terms of a “reflexive project for which the individual is responsible.” Yet the individual can only take this responsibility, if she were capable of designing this reflexive project as an authentic personal existence. It is my contention that the individual is able to achieve this goal only by participating in authentic cultural lifeforms. This chapter argues that the Self’s personal authenticity and the lifeforms’ trans-subjective authenticity find their dynamic unity in existential agency. A large part of the chapter is devoted to the nexus of the Self and existential agency. The ecstatic character of the Self is addressed by scrutinizing the Self’s way of simultaneously being within herself and thrown in the interplay of practices and possibilities. Because of this character, the existential possibilities upon which the Self projects her personal being and the possibilities which become trans-subjectively opened within this interplay are united through the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. It is argued that in participating in various cultural lifeforms, the person is ecstatically positioning her Self towards the meaningful articulation of these lifeforms in a manner that leads to a proliferation of the person’s cultural identities taking the form of narratively organized I-positions that are able to enter into a dialogue with one another. In touching upon some central aspects of the dialogical Self, the chapter extends the analysis of existential agency by examining how the latter promotes the process of attaining personal authenticity by appropriating possibilities for articulating the multiple lifeforms in which the Self participates. Saying that “the Self participates in a lifeform” does not mean that the lifeform is out there, and the Self is entering into its present-at-hand organization. The adequate depiction of this participation looks as follows: In appropriating the possibilities for articulating a lifeform as her own possibilities of existence, the Self appropriates this articulation as her own way of being. Participation is an ongoing process of making choices for how the Self should contribute to the lifeform’s articulation, whereby the Self projects her existence upon the lifeform’s “destiny”. The Self ek-sists as a practitioner of a lifeform through the choices of possibilities projected by the lifeform’s practices. The Self appropriates the lifeform’s trans-subjective horizon as her own horizon of existential possibilities. Yet in order to accomplish this “appropriating projection”, the Self co-operates with  In warranting its own autonomy on the level of everyday life, an ensemble of practices succeeds in organizing itself to serve the task of transferring the lifeform’s ultimate meaning. From this viewpoint, existential agency is that kind of agency alienated from the lifeform’s practitioners which manifests itself as the ensemble’s self-organizing capacity.

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the mode of operation of existential agency that articulates the lifeform. The Self’s ek-sistence in a lifeform is distinguished by a constant exercise of reflexivity. But the way of making sense of this reflexivity does not require the rehabilitation of the subject-object relationship as critical realists insist. Critical realists firmly believe that the self’s reflexive deliberation “can neither work nor be examined if there is any tendency to conflate” the subject and object as this tendency proves to be the epistemological condition for conflating structure and agency (Archer 2007, 34). For them, the self’s way of exercising reflexivity depends both on the self’s sufficient personal identity and the objectivity of the social circumstances which would encourage the self to follow one or another existential project. In adopting this position, critical realists are prone to describe the self’s reflexivity in terms of “reflexive internal conversation” requiring the strong separation between subject and object.⁴ By contrast, the position I will defend starts not from this separation, but from the synergy of the Self’s deliberative reflexivity and the endogenous reflexivity of the lifeforms’ practices. It is this starting point that enables one to focus on the ek-sistence that “always already” transcends the subject-object cut without leading to a conflation of structure and agency. Since the synergy of both forms of reflexivity takes place in a characteristic hermeneutic situation, one may conclude that the bearer of this synergy is the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. In participating in various lifeforms, the Self pluralizes the positions with which she identifies herself. In conversing with each other, these positions constitute the Self as a “mini-society” within her personal life. However, the discourse of a “mini-society of positions within the Self” – often employed in dialogical Self theory – presupposes the internalization of established “external” positions that the Self encounters in her social life, whereby these positions become (in full agreement with the paradigm of discreteness) “parts of the Self”. In opposing this discourse in several respects, I claim that the formation of a minisociety of I-positions takes place in the ecstatic unity of subjectivity and transsubjectivity, and cannot be enclosed in the Self’s mental life. Scrutinizing the ec-

 According to Margaret Archer (2003, 34– 35), reflexive internal conversation expresses three core features of the life of social agents’ minds – the inner dialogue as constituting a phenomenon underwriting a private life for the social subject, the first-person ontology of this subject, and the causal efficacy of internal conversation. She conceives of this conversation in terms of the source of reflexivity that mediates the role played by structural and cultural powers in influencing social action. Thus, the subjective internal conversation should regulate the role of objective socio-cultural structures. In this chapter, I will advocate, inter alia, the view that a clear demarcation line between the Self’s internal conversation and the Self’s external dialogues cannot be drawn within the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency.

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static unity of the Self and existential agency suggests an alternative to the controversial schematism of internalizing the voices of significant Others in one’s personal life. Moreover, there is a continuum between the dialogues within the Self and the dialogues with other persons. More often than not, the latter are a continuation of the former. The continuum of dialogues characterizing the dialogical Self is enabled and mediated by the cooperation with existential agency. When organized in a characteristic hermeneutic situation, the interplay of practices and possibilities produces a double effect: It is (a) dissipating the Self over a diversity of ensembles of configured practices, and (b) preserving the Self’s personal integral identity. In participating in various cultural lifeforms, the Self tends to multiply her I-positions – each of them presumably associated with a particular cultural identity – in a manner that intensifies the need for a dialogue. This dialogue is carried out by positions (including the voices of “inner-others”) within the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. Since the Self’s subjectivity partakes in (the articulation of) cultural lifeforms, she can come to terms with the plurality of her cultural identities by reflexively putting dialogues among her I-positions. Against this background, the chapter addresses the sense in which there are trans-subjective possibilities for personal authenticity. The ever arising opportunities for achieving authenticity in the Self’s existence are projected upon transsubjective horizons, while the “will for authenticity” is rooted in the Self’s subjectivity. What mediates between them is existential agency conceived again in terms of trans-subjectively alienated human agency within characteristic hermeneutic situations. The way of treating the Self in the perspective of her cooperation with existential agency is directed, in the first place, against the mentalistessentialist doctrine that “mind, consciousness, and self have all named the same thing, whatever it is that makes some individual a person … and that our minds, our consciousness, our selves are governed by natural laws.” (Flanagan 1996, 12). In opposing this doctrine, the authors who – with essentially different intents – speak of “the death of the subject” basically challenge the historical horizon of thinking opened up by the modern philosophy of subjectivity (Heller 1990). Mentalism holds that any conception dealing with the Self’s authenticity should be developed within this historical horizon. (Needless to say that today’s champions for a rehabilitation of the subject tackle this task beyond the Cartesian-Kantian horizon of philosophizing.) But if I would have to single out the genuine antipode of the conception that relates personal authenticity to existential agency, I would pick out not classical mentalism, but the so-called view of animalism about the self’s identity. Eric Olson (2007, 211) summarizes the essence of this view by claiming that “if there is a human animal located where you are, and it thinks just as you do,

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it is hard to see how you could be anything other than that animal.” Animalism states that (1) the personal identity of the Self over time has nothing to do with psychology as the latter supposedly identifies constitutive mental properties, and (2) facts about interrelated mental states cannot define the numerical identity of a human being. To put it more succinctly, each human being is numerically identical with a human animal. The main target of animalism is all views that are centered around the following conditional sentence: If persons and animals are distinct entities, and each particular human being is a person, then humans are not animals. But this sentence is senseless – so the argument of animalism goes – since the psychological approaches to identity are not equipped with criteria for the numerical identity of anything. A theory of personal identity has nothing to do with the persistence of whatever entity. The metaphysical issue concerning this numerical identity is best tackled by a naturalist approach that starts with the assumption that a “human animal can persist without any psychological continuity whatever.” (Olson 2007, 40). Since all features of the human being – as defined in psychological terms – fail to specify conditions for invariance, and humans do not persist by virtue of a certain sort of psychological continuity, it is exclusively “our being animals” that provides necessary and sufficient conditions for human organisms to persist. Two premises of animalism can easily be called into question: The personal ek-sistence could only be conceptualized as ongoing re-contextualization, and any identity of the Self is achieved within the shifting horizon of this re-contextualization, which annuls the very idea of persisting presence. Consequently, (1) a person (personal ek-sistence) does not persist (in the sense of animalism) over time, and (2) achieving personal identity (which is always contextualized) excludes assigning a numerical identity to a person. A person does not persist over time because she temporalizes (via existential choices) her existence within the temporality of interplaying practices and possibilities. A numerical identity can only be assigned to a thing that has a pure presence. The personal ek-sistence has no facet or aspect that is purely present. (It goes without saying that, in accordance with considerations developed in Chapter One, one should also avoid assigning numerical identity to several animal forms of life.) Existential agency comes into being through the way in which both personal subjectivity and communal collectivity (as distinguished by “collective subjectivity”) are transcended by the possibilities upon which actors (as individual persons and communities) project their being-in-concerted-practices as potentiality-for-being. The choices of possibilities are a dimension of one’s personal being within the world, provided that the world is a transcending horizon of possibilities. Appropriating trans-subjective possibilities and making them possibil-

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ities in one’s personal life is a unitary process constitutive for the way in which the personal existence projects its being upon a horizon of possibilities, thereby opening itself to trans-subjective forms of life. Due to the ongoing transformation of possibilities generated by practices into existential possibilities, the Self’s existence is doomed to be free in making choices within trans-subjective horizons. To reiterate, the Self never morphs into an actual presence-at-hand. One can state that the terrain on which the appropriation of trans-subjective possibilities takes place is the Self ecstatically united with contexts made present within the interplay of practices and possibilities. Since the transcending horizons of possibilities are projected by ensembles of concerted practices, the Self is also entangled with (contextualizing) configurations of practices as they meaningfully articulate lifeforms. The diversification of I-positions and cultural identities arises from the Self’s entanglement with configured practices.

4.2 The trans-subjective being of subjective agency Let me repeat from a slightly different perspective some of the conclusions already reached in the course of this study. In its modus operandi, existential agency transcends any contextual manifestation of individual and collective agency entangled with configured practices. In working within the interplay of practices and possibilities, existential agency is ontologically always characterized by potentiality-for-being. As a result, existential agency cannot be conceptualized as factual presence. Existential agency is part and parcel of the interplay, and accordingly has an important hermeneutic dimension. More specifically, existential agency meaningfully articulates authentic lifeforms disclosed by the ensembles of configured practices. Because this articulation takes the form of interpretive circularity, the way in which existential agency operates should be addressed in hermeneutic terms. Conceptualizing existential agency in such terms is at odds with two established philosophical positions about the implementation of hermeneutic theories in human-scientific inquiry. The first position states that this implementation has only a methodical sense, since “hermeneutic theory is a theory concerning the way in which meaning is interpreted.” (Ankersmit 1994, 99). The second position sees more than methodical significance in the use of hermeneutic theory, and commits this use to methodological individualism. In restricting the role of hermeneutics in scientific conceptualization to the formulation of rules for interpretive procedures, the first position is critically preoccupied with the presuppositions of those research programs which ascribe an intrinsic hermeneutic character to what they investigate. Assuming that the investigated entities – so the critical argument goes – are meaningful wholes com-

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mits the process of inquiry to essentialist presuppositions. More often than not, however, the investigated entity serves as a background for specifying conditions for the constitution of meaning, but is not meaning itself.⁵ It is not difficult to see that the epistemological presuppositions of criticizing the “essentialist presuppositions” of hermeneutic conceptualization are rooted in the classical transcendental distinction between conditions for possible constitution and entities constituted by meeting these conditions. Philosophical hermeneutics has (at least since Dilthey) disputed the dividing line implied by this distinction. Both (a) the conditions for constituting meaning, and (b) the meaningful entities resulting from the constitution of meaning have a united way of being within the interpretive circularity of constitution (Ginev 2007). The hermeneutic conceptualization of existential agency makes no exception in this regard: In specifying a “contextual condition for possible constitution”, existential agency at once stipulates what can be achieved in a certain context by performing the configuration of practices and articulates the meaningful entities in accordance with the way of performing these practices. The meaningful whole of the context (or the whole of possible contextual meaning) and the particular (ready-to-hand) meaningful entities cannot be kept separate from each other: The only way of being they have is the ongoing hermeneutic circularity between them – a circularity set out by existential agency. The “contextual conditions for possibility” are within the facticity of practices, and cannot be extracted from the ongoing hermeneutic circularity. As will be shown, in conceptualizing existential agency, one replaces the classical transcendental distinction with contextual transcendental arguments. A further concretization of the preceding considerations sounds as follows: In mediating between agential behavior and contextualizing configurations of practices, existential agency comes to the fore as specified (in each particular context) conditions for the appropriation of possibilities the actualizations of which constitute meaning. These conditions can only be singled out by formulat-

 This argument is most clearly stated by F. R. Ankersmit who insists that from important developments in the twentieth-century historiography, “we can conclude that meaning is less ubiquitous in the past investigated by the historian than hermeneutics suggests.” (Ankersmit 1994, 100). Thus, to cite the example he gives, studying mentalities in intellectual history unveils any particular mentality as a “background for meaning”, but not as meaning itself. In my view, this is an inconsistent position. Is it not the task of the intellectual historian to study the constitution of a mentality, granted that this constitution takes place in the (meaningful articulation of the) lifeforms of those who are engaged in cultivating that mentality? Separating meaning from the background of meaning would simply destroy what intellectual history is entitled to investigate.

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ing transcendental arguments relevant to the particular contexts. Conceptualizing the interpretive circularity operating in the contextual constitution of meaning by employing such arguments has nothing to do with essentialist presuppositions. On the contrary, this conceptualization which unavoidably proceeds by means of double hermeneutic offers the most consistent and radical way of overcoming any form of essentialism: There is no presupposed or hypostatized whole in studying the constitution of meaning, since all holistic entities (horizons, contexts, configurations, nexuses, and so on) exist only within and through the interpretive circularity of this constitution. It is interpreter’s own reflexivity that precludes the tacit introduction of essentialist presuppositions in conceptualizing this interpretive circularity – a reflexivity that is a requisite for practicing the double hermeneutic⁶ (Ginev 2014b). Conceptualizing by means of double hermeneutic is always indispensable when at stake is the study of a characteristic hermeneutic situation. In this case, one has to pay attention to two correlated interpretive processes. On the one hand, one focuses on the formation of particular contexts in the articulation of meaning. This “thick description” of the process of contextualization has more the character of an ontic study. One the other hand, one tries to come to grips with the tendentiousness in the appropriation of possibilities on which the lifeform’s ultimate meaning is inscribed. Singling out the fore-seeing, fore-having, and fore-grasping of what becomes articulated is an ontological initiative that takes into account the regimes of the temporalizing of temporality. It is the con-

 This picture can further be specified by taking into consideration the narrative dimension of conceptualizing the interpretive circularity operating in practices. The constitution of meaning that becomes incorporated in symbolic outcomes from the performances of practices is directly or indirectly related to the way in which the practitioners narrate their being in performing ceremonial, political, religious, ritual, academic, artistic, military, etc. practices. (Narrating here refers to the narrative organization of these practices.) Like all sorts of practical interpretation, the constitution of meaning-within-configured-practices presupposes narration. The inquirer who tries to conceptualize the constitution of this meaning is looking for relevant narratives that are of prime importance for the formulation of contextual transcendental arguments. More specifically, the inquirer can find the conditions for the constitution of the particular meaningful entities and symbolic expressions by reconstructing the plot-structures of these narratives. On this assumption, the way of emplotting the actors’ experience in practices-constituting-meaning is intimately related to the contextual conditions for the constitution of meaning (Ginev 2008, 30 – 45). Focusing on this narrative dimension does not rehabilitate a cognitivist perspective on configured practices, since – following my considerations developed in discussing Rouse’s narrative fields and Ricoeur’s prefiguration – narration is part and parcel of practices’ organization.

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textual transcendental arguments that specify the relatedness of the two interpretive processes within the scenario of the double hermeneutic.⁷ The second position dominates in the social sciences where one usually admits that a hermeneutic character has to be attributed to those theories which deal with agents’ beliefs and intentions. Theories that follow Max Weber’s form of methodological individualism are a case in point. The interpretation of the intentional states motivating the individual agents is a part of these theories’ explanatory scenarios. In devising “interpretive explanations” – so the usual argument of this position goes – the theories committed to the tenets of methodological individualism gain a hermeneutic character. The methodology of constructing such explanations is known as “interpretive intentionalism” – explaining social-behavioral phenomena through reconstructing the actors’ intentions. According to this methodology, only what is immediately understandable can be subjected to explanation. Immediately understandable are presumably the intended acts creating the “unchangeable meaning” as contrasted with the “historically variating significance”. The predicate “hermeneutic” in this explanatory strategy refers to the interpretive patterns persistently used in explanations of social phenomena caused by motivated actions manifesting themselves as intended acts.⁸

 The view of the double hermeneutic I am advocating has nothing in common with (constructivist) conceptions stating that the double hermeneutic is a strategy of legitimizing the essential difference between social and natural facts (Fuchs 2001, 95 – 104). According to the authors of these conceptions, all facts are socially constructed. By contrast, those who support the dualist strategy – the “weak constructivists” – hold that only the social facts are constructed, and the conceptualization of these facts needs the double hermeneutic. Taking into consideration that all social and natural facts are scientifically conceptualized in characteristic hermeneutic situations enables the universalization – from a non-constructivist position – of the application of the double hermeneutic in studying the interpretive constitution of all scientific facts (Ginev 2016a, 151– 156). Of course, reaching this conclusion does not imply that the double hermeneutic can be applied in the same way in studying the natural-scientific and the human-scientific kinds of such a constitution.  As a rule, the (psychologistic and anti-psychologistic) conceptions of interpretive intentionalism prioritize the epistemological problematic of the validity of interpretation. (See, in particular, Hoy 1982, 13 – 40, Ginev, 2013e, and Ginev, 2015c.) In the tradition of ontological hermeneutics, this problematic has a secondary character. One can quest for a validity of interpretation only within the context of defining the concept of hermeneutic truth as this truth becomes revealed in the historicity of ek-static existence. The concept of hermeneutic truth stands for that reality which underlies the idealizations of any kind of epistemic truth. No matter how it will be defined, the epistemic truth roots in the idealization of epistemic subject, that is, the idealized subject which is freed from the finitude of human being. Interpretive intentionalism wrongly assumes the primacy of epistemic truth when prioritizing the validity of interpretation.

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The hermeneutic conceptualization of existential agency breaks not only with the paradigm of discreteness, but also with the perspective on interpretation built upon the methodology of action theory. Putting the focus on the articulation of meaning within configured practices makes this theory a hermeneutic enterprise in an ontological sense. The ecstatic unity of agential subjectivity and practices’ trans-subjectivity is a unity within and through hermeneutic circularity. The units of meaning articulated by the agency of (individual and collective) agential behavior are embedded within the horizon (the open whole of meaning) of a lifeform’s articulation. But the horizon does not exist beyond – or independent of – its articulation. The only possible way of being of existential agency as mediating between agential behavior and configured practices is also within and through hermeneutic circularity. Thus, conceptualizing existential agency requires radical breaking with any form of interpretative intentionalism. Hermeneutic circularity as the way of being of existential agency reveals at the same time the “being of meaning” without “deriving” the latter from intentional acts or treating it as – to make use of E. D. Hirsch’s famous expression – “an affair of consciousness”. Now, countering the two traditional positions about the way in which hermeneutic theory should be implemented in scientific conceptualization still does not suffice to rule out a possible ideological misunderstanding about existential agency. On this misunderstanding, introducing a concept of agency that – by alienating from the motivational structures of actors’ behavior – allegedly operates “behind the backs” of actors seems to be a risky initiative. It jeopardizes both the autonomy and the authenticity of the Self. To be sure, this conclusion is completely justified for all kinds of trans-subjectively alienated human agency operating in kinds of inauthentic everydayness. My aim now is to show why the conclusion is invalid for existential agency. Notoriously, since Feuerbach and Marx the word “alienation” has been endowed with several pejorative connotations that are still intact in today social theory. These connotations are closely related to the eschatological vision of “the forces of human history that have alienated man from his being, from the products of his labor, from his true nature, and from the world in its totality, and all this to the point where his true social nature is lost for the sake of a technicist civilization.” (Axelos 1976, 17). Eschewing post-Marxist eschatology and the discourse of human (general and/or social) nature does not liberate the term “alienation” from its negative meaning. But it opens the avenue for conceptualizing various phenomena of alienation in a manner that allows one to take into account the trans-subjective character of these phenomena. This would be an avenue that is beyond the search for hidden forces whose analysis promises a solution to the riddle of the historical becoming of alienated man-

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kind. In a non-Hegelian-Marxist context, the nexus of alienation and agency is no longer an exclusive possession of “the forces of human history” that distort and corrupt the true nature of humans. A particular manifestation of this nexus is agency alienated in practices articulating a lifeform. This existential agency co-operates with the Self-entangled-with-configured-practices. But it is by no means a power that can divest the Self’s autonomy and authenticity. As human agency alienated in the articulation of cultural lifeforms, existential agency partakes in this articulation by conveying the lifeform’s ethos to the Self’s existence of any particular practitioner of this lifeform. The Self is the “ultimate source” of agency. But once the latter has been released from this source, it cannot be stopped to become trans-subjectively dispersed by the interplay of practices and possibilities. The downside of the dispersal of agency stemming from the Self is the entanglement of the Self with configured practices. The Self is cooperating with existential agency when this entanglement takes place within the articulation of authentic lifeforms. Accordingly, the release of agency from the Self does not imply alienation in the way in which, for instance, the worker gets alienated from the working process in the Capitalist mode of production. In contrast to the Marxian conceptions of alienation, the Self’s alienated agency (as self-alienation) does not transform itself into a demiurge that determines the Self’s actions, activities, and social roles she can play. As I will stress on several occasions in this chapter, because existential agency is always already in a characteristic hermeneutic situation, it never operates independently of the Self’s subjectivity and agency. Existential agency can cooperate with the Self only when the Self enacts – through making choices of possibilities – this agency in her existence. The concept of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency is immune not only to readings in terms of the speculative philosophy of alienation, but to purely psychological interpretations as well. A proper way of making sense of how the Self exists in cooperating with existential agency consists in reflecting upon events and phenomena that “belong neither to a first-person perspective as subjective acts that we perform, nor to the third-person perspective as an objective process registered or effected from the outside.” (Waldenfels 2011, 46). These events happen neither in the subjectivepsychological time of personal experiences, memories, affections, desires, hopes, etc., nor can they be rationalized by making use of objective time. Events like the Self’s sensitivity towards trans-subjective opportunities she faces in various contexts, or the Self’s positioning towards the meaning of a lifeform, or those which Bernhard Waldenfels – in drawing on Levinas – subsumes under the category of the Self’s “asymmetric responsivity” are temporalizing the Self’s being within the temporality of existential agency. Waldenfels discusses

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the non-localizable events (in particular) in connection with attempts to cross the borderline between phenomenology and psychoanalysis – a borderline marked by a kind of ontological difference. It is my contention that the events and phenomena produced by the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency can be achieved by integrating the ontological difference into empirical theories of the Self whereby these theories will undergo significant reformulations. Opening a perspective beyond the first-person and the third-person perspective of conceptualization is not to be based on a “circulative movement” between phenomenological description of subjective experiences and descriptions (in neutral terms) of how the Self constitutes her Self in her personal history. Conceptualizing the interpretive circularity I discussed a moment ago is tied to a doubly-hermeneutic perspective that is completely different from those of the subjectivist description of experiences and the objectification in neutral terms. In developing a concept of self-agency, Elisabeth Pacherie (2011, 442) critically refers to the classical view in the behavioral sciences that postulates the pervasive role of the self’s consciousness in action production. It plays this role prior to acting, while acting, and after accomplishing the action. In a corollary of this view, the sense of agency and (actual) agency may dissociate, but this does not happen beyond the terrain of the self’s consciousness. Preparing and executing any kind of action occurs only on this terrain. Dissociations of the sense of agency (the awareness of the self that she is the agent of her actions) and agency should only invite more sophisticated conceptions about the link between self-agency and “conscious mental causation”. Pacherie sums up the view – stemming from the folk-psychological picture that action is caused by mental states – in the following way: Self-agency is enclosed in the sphere of conscious deliberations, beliefs, and desires supplied by conscious decisions to pursue certain conscious goals accompanied by conscious intentions to realize those goals. The self’s consciousness provides the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem in action production. In criticizing this view, Pacherie draws the attention, in particular, to cases in which the agent has a sense of agency for actions he did not actually perform or did not consciously intend.⁹

 In citing Pacherie‘s work, I have to underscore that my position radically differs from her strong naturalism. My point is that even in the empirical studies of action and agency guided by strong objectivist standards of conceptualization there is a prolific trend of jettisoning mentalist determinism. In countering mentalist determinism about agency, I am not going to dispute that the Self’s “life of consciousness” is a pivotal (developmental-psychological) theme in studying the Self’s being in the medium of interplaying practices and possibilities. My point is that self-consciousness (not to be confused with reflexivity) plays a lesser role (than that implied

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It is my contention that the sense of agency is a strongly individual sense. But nevertheless, this sense correlates with the way of being of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. Depending on how the Self is reflexively aware of her co-operative unity with existential agency, there are different degrees of the Self’s awareness of action production. One can speak of indeterminacy of the sense of agency since in certain contexts the Self might be strongly aware that she is the subject of her actions, and in other contexts this sense of agency might get lost without this being caused by pathologies. But the talk of indeterminacy in this formulation is still more psychological than ontological. With regard to the facticity of practices, one can shift the focus to the ontological indeterminacy of the Self. Corresponding to – and in a sense underlying – this indeterminacy is the “nonlocality” of the Self’s agency (as integrated with existential agency): The Self’s current embodied activities are involved not only in the actual context of behaving, but also – due to inter-contextuality – take place in all non-actual (potential) contexts in which the actual context (as being made present in a trajectory of the temporalizing of temporality) leaves traces. It goes without saying that the Self cannot be aware of her “dispersed being” in potential contexts. To be sure, the psychologically and psychiatrically normal Self is characterized by “a self-referential, but normally pre-reflexive, proprioceptive awareness” of her own body and her embodied Self (Gallagher 2005, 73). It is this awareness for which Erving Goffman (1971, 316 – 318) coined the expression “normal appearances” to denote the link between the sense of agency and the agent’s feeling of normalcy in executing routine bodily activities. Empirical psychologists, neuroscientists, and researchers in cognitive science since many years have been engaging in discussions about the turning point between this pre-reflexive awareness and the reflexive-judgmental life of the Self.¹⁰ Regardless of how the turning point would be identified and where it will be located, however, the adult Self’s reflexive-judgmental life is no longer determined by proprioceptive awareness ei-

by mentalist determinism) in controlling agential behavior. The Self’s consciousness (and selfconsciousness) working in this medium is not a control center of the Self’s agency.  Following Shaun Gallagher’s quoted study, this turning point has much to do with several issues of how embodiment shapes the mind. More specifically, the way in which one’s body enters into “the content of one’s conscious experience” (Gallagher’s expression) essentially contributes to the passage from pre-reflexive awareness to reflexive-judgmental life (in particular, the reflexive structuring of intentional experience). Gallagher explores the contribution of embodiment to the “phenomenal field of consciousness” in a broad (significantly inspired by Aron Gurwitsch) phenomenological perspective that allows him to integrate the first-person phenomenology and the third-person empirical studies of embodied cognition.

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ther in the form of object-perception that reifies one’s own body within one’s subjective experience or in the form of non-perceptual and non-observational self-awareness which resembles a kind of “embodied version” of Kant’s transcendental apperception. The Self cannot come to grips with the inter-contextuality in which and through which her mode of being is dispersed. But in the adult Self’s life, the awareness of this deficiency tends to become a rational strategy for coping with multifariousness of the Self’s contextualized way of being. Psychologically seen, the adult Self has the feeling of “simultaneously participating” in several contexts of social life. The adult Self’s feeling of being involved in a diversity of contexts that she is not able to fully master does not displace, but essentially reduces – in the Self’s reflexive-judgmental life – the pre-reflexive proprioceptive awareness. The inability to master the contexts of behaving is often tied with unawareness of contextualized bodily activities. But this unawareness correlates with the fact that the Self is more or less prepared to rationally accept the feeling of being an (inter)contextualized embodied agent. The adult Self is aware that the contexts she cannot master are in a sense co-responsible for her bodily activities. In coping with this new awareness that contrasts with her inborn proprioceptive awareness, the Self devises various vehicles of keeping intact the “natural” feeling of continuous self-identity.¹¹ Again psychologically seen, only by preserving the feeling of continuous self-identity could the Self counterbalance the sense of being pluralized in contextually dependent positions that tend to diverge from each other. Both, the sense of being involved in contexts that can hardly be mastered, and the sense of continuous self-identity – as well as their balancing – should be attributed to the reflexive-Self-cooperatingwith-existential-agency.¹² There is a wide range of conceptions calling into question the pervasive role of consciousness in organizing human agency. Some of them are consonant with the ideas of agency’s nonlocality and indeterminacy. Narrativist conceptions, in  The inborn status of one’s proprioceptive awareness of one’s own body is a controversial subject. There is in developmental psychology the view that the infant is becoming pre-reflexively aware of its embodied self in the period from the middle to the end of the first year. Before that period, the infant is only rarely succeeding in integrating body parts with each other into a single embodied agents (Barresi and Moore 1996). The sense of having embodied self as well as the sense of distinguishing between one’s embodied self and the others as embodied selves are probably acquired rather than inborn.  The conception of the co-operative work of the reflexive Self and existential agency does not contradict the naturalist conceptions of the Self’s “inborn subjectivity” (inclinations). Quite on the contrary, the Self’s inborn subjectivity is a requisite for the trans-subjective being of the Self’s agency.

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particular, focus on the personal strategies for balancing the Self’s contextual dispersal and the Self’s biographic unity. A narrative approach to the personal Self is any approach that answers the question of what unites the diversity of contextual profiles of cognitive, emotive, and volitional dispositions attributable to one person by stressing that all of them are part of a single identity-constituting narrative (Schechtman 1996, 136). For the scientific conceptualization of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency, the Self exists through self-narrating. The Self’s experience of self-agency can hardly be attained as an immediate experience. In her narrative self-description the Self creates mediating local/contextual identities helping her to come to grips with her own agential power. Each of them is an identity of the Self-entangled-with-practices, that is, an identity of the Self as cooperating in a special manner with existential agency in “gaining access” to the way in which she biographically makes herself. But the Self does not only cooperate with existential agency. The Self also copes with a range of other kinds of human agency alienated in various assemblages of practices. In narrating her experience, the Self may document how she – in certain contexts – ceases to be aware that she is the agent of her actions because she cannot properly put into operation her interpretive reflexivity. But the fact that the Self performs practices without becoming aware of this does not necessarily mean that she is no longer a sovereign agent of her actions. It is my contention that the Self might become deprived of the sense of agency not only when the Self is “absorbed” in various assemblages of practices but also when taking part in the articulation of an authentic lifeform. The sense of agency is a purely psychological (ontic) phenomenon, and entirely depends on the individual (cognitive, emotional, and volitional) life of the personal Self. By contrast, the Self reflexive constitution of her (inauthentic or authentic) way of being is not a psychological phenomenon, since it belongs to the reflexive-Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. As a driving force within the ecstatic unity of agential subjectivity and configured practices the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency generates and contextually puts into operation motives, desires, intentions, plans, expectations, etc. – all factors that psychologists usually address under the heading “complex motivational economies” – within changing configurations of practices. The interplay of practices and possibilities articulates meaning that the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency may morph into her own meaning of existence. Otherwise put: Existential agency – operating in the lifeforms in which the Self participates – opens up horizons for achieving personal authenticity. Regardless of how resolute one is deciding to bring oneself back from one’s thrownness in the anonymous public life, there is no chance for directly gaining personal authenticity within the practices of inauthentic everydayness. Attaining personal

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authenticity demands the participation in cultural lifeforms disclosed and articulated in characteristic hermeneutic situations. (This observation still does not suffice for formulating a criterion for personal authenticity. I will resume in the next section the discussion of the nexus of existential agency and personal authenticity by shedding more light on the concept of making existential choices.) The way in which the Self “chooses her Self” by participating in an authentic lifeform refers first and foremost to the temporal dimension of authenticity. By focusing on this subject, I continue the discussion of the “non-individualist revision” of the existential-analytic criterion for authenticity suggested. When Heidegger in Being and Time analyzes “temporality as ontological meaning of care”, he directs the attention to Dasein’s “anticipatory resoluteness” through which Dasein understands its ownmost possibility of coming towards itself, thereby gaining the mode of being of authentic existence. This mode interpretatively articulates Dasein’s understanding of its coming towards itself. Resolutely confronting the ownmost possibility (as revealing the being of finite existing) enables authenticity. In this scenario, anticipatory resoluteness makes Dasein authentically futural existing (Heidegger 1962a, 372). The “moment of vision” (der Augenblick) at which Dasein is facing its ownmost possibility in a manner that enables it to resolutely choose itself cannot be reduced to a fixed “now”. It is a moment that opens up a new horizon of existing, and embraces the whole temporalizing of Dasein’s resoluteness of making this choice. In other words, the moment of vision – the most Kierkegaardian subject of existential analytic – involves a whole regime of temporalizing of the temporality of existing. At the moment when Dasein is authentically coming towards itself, thereby bringing itself back from falling, Dasein opens the horizon of authentic temporality (that is, the authentic futural existing which makes present in the process of having been). But temporality characterizes Dasein as “outside-of-itself in and for itself”, which means that it is a facet of the ecstatic unity of agential subjectivity and trans-subjectivity. The authentic existence can only be kept intact if the futural choices Dasein is going to make are within the horizon of authentic temporality opened up at the “moment of vision” when Dasein decides to come towards itself. In always already transcending these choices, the opened horizon discloses a trans-subjective potentiality-for-being. In other words, Dasein’s authentic existence is always already in trans-subjectively established hermeneutic situations. Phrased in a manner that deviates from existential analytic, the authentic temporalizing of temporality depends on what becomes disclosed as “trans-subjective authenticity”. It is the resoluteness of Dasein’s choice of the way of beingone’s-Self that is not situated in empty space. And it is the “hearing” of the voice

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of conscience that takes place in a proper medium. The existentialia of resoluteness and the calling-hearing of conscience imply the nexus of Dasein’s authentic existing and trans-subjective authenticity. What I am trying to dispute is the claim raised in existential analytic that the way of authentic being-one’s-Self results from a direct modification of They-self (Heidegger 1962a, 312). This claim denies any mediatory role played by an already established authentic everydayness in this modification. The caller and the receiver of the call of conscience is Dasein in its inauthentic everydayness. Existential analytic states that in conscience Dasein calls itself. In Heidegger’s (1962a, 317) succinct account, since the call of conscience appeals to – and brings to hear – only the Self of the They-self, the They collapses and becomes pushed into insignificance. On the alternative view I defend, the personal authenticity can be achieved by the Self’s participation in a medium of the everyday articulation of authentic lifeforms. As stated in the preceding chapter, the transcendent authority of an authentic lifeform has its own “call” that enables the call of conscience. In responding to this originary call, the Self hears the voice of conscience within her existence. The originary call of the transcendent authority is disproportionately stronger than the call of conscience. This claim alludes to a theological notion of transcendence. In fact, however, the call of the authority (of any profane authentic lifeform) only provokes the Self to listen to the voice of conscience within a medium of authentic everydayness. In this sense, the originary call mediates transsubjective authenticity to the Self’s existing as responding to the call of conscience. Like the latter, the originary call is not external to the Self’s existence, granted that this existence is entangled with the contexts in which the lifeform is articulated. The originary call enables the hearing of the voice of conscience, but its appealing is not independent of the call of conscience. The Self is summoned to herself by responding to the call of conscience which is mediated by the call of the lifeform’s transcendent authority. The Self’s responsibility in making choices – that is in accordance with the call of conscience – is provoked by the originary call of her authentic lifeform. This is why the Self experiences the unitary calling for responsibility as coming from herself (the voice of conscience) and from beyond herself (the transcendent authority of her lifeform). Heidegger (1962a, 323) argues that “we need not resort to powers with a character other than that of Dasein”, since recourse to such powers “is so far from clarifying the uncanniness of the call of conscience that instead it annihilates it.” His argument against “external powers” is that the “caller” – if treated as such a power – will be objectified as something present-at-hand. To stress again, however, the “power” of the transcendent authority of an authentic lifeform is intrinsic to the Self’s existence, and the response it requires is by no means a “fleeing in the face of the conscience”.

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Following this line of reasoning, the individual Dasein has to choose its ownmost possibility for authenticity within trans-subjectivity that is capable of supporting this authenticity by resisting the inauthenticity of das Man. According to Being and Time, Dasein can bring its authenticity back by summoning itself to its ownmost potentiality-for-being-its-Self. The inauthentic lostness of Dasein in anonymous public practices is not a particular (contingent) state of affairs. Being-thrown in these practices – and being-guilty within them – is a constitutive (ontological) feature of human existence. This is why Heidegger admits that the resolute attainment of authentic existence can only happen within the inauthenticity of the anonymous public life. On the scenario of existential analytic, Dasein is able to resolutely choose its Self (thereby gaining its authenticity) within the inauthentic public life. As already argued, the voice of conscience can only be heard by participating in an authentic cultural lifeform.¹³ (It is the presumption of immediate hearing of the voice of conscience that creates the feeling of a dilemma deeply rooted in existential analytic – a dilemma that will be addressed in a moment.) One could choose to come towards her authentic Self, if one would be able to temporalize her finite way of being through appropriating possibilities projected as a horizon of temporality by authentic cultural lifeforms. One is able to do this by participating in the everyday articulation of such a lifeform as this articulation is carried out by the lifeform’s configured practices. By implication, the Self gains authentic existence through participating in the everydayness of lifeform’s articulation which transfers the lifeform’s ultimate meaning to the contexts of routine life. Participating in the ongoing contextualization of the lifeform’s ultimate meaning makes the life of the Self – who resolutely believes in the immanentization of this transcendent meaning – an authentic personal existence. Since the “moment of vision” associated with the anticipatory resoluteness enacts a whole regime of authentic temporalizing within authentic lifeforms, this moment can only take place within a characteristic hermeneutic

 The Self needs the mediation of authentic lifeform for having her “moment of vision”. It is the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency who is capable of hearing the voice of conscience. In enabling an autonomous ensemble of practices and working in the articulation of an authentic lifeform, existential agency opens a horizon by pushing back the horizon of inauthentic existence. Stating this still does not contradict the main line of arguing for the possibility of Dasein’s authenticity in Being and Time – the line stressing the role of the angst before death understood as a “peculiar possibility-of-being in which the very being of one’s own Dasein is an issue.” (Heidegger 1962a, 284). Yet, as I argued in the preceding chapter, admitting that Dasein can achieve authentic mode of being within authentic forms of life de-privileges the role of the angst before death.

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situation of a lifeform’s articulation. The Self’s response to the originary call puts the Self in her own hermeneutic situation of searching for authenticity by listening to the voice of conscience. The Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency – so the argument goes – bridges the gap between individual authentic existence and the authenticity of lifeforms. The Self’s participation in the articulation of an authentic lifeform goes hand in hand with the modification of They-self within and through the medium of this articulation. But if the Self chooses herself by leaving behind her “fallen” existence in the average everydayness, can then this everydayness be counted as ontologically primary mode of existence? Is the transition to authentic existence a radical liberation from the routine practices of public life or the transition itself is accomplished by the Self’s special positioning towards these practices – a positioning that unavoidably takes place within inauthentic existence? A debate in Heidegger’s philology devoted to these questions has gained currency for nearly 40 years. I will briefly discuss this debate, since it is instructive for the way in which the authenticity of the Self should be linked to existential agency. At stake in the debate is the issue of whether the inauthentic average everydayness is only a “distorted/deficient/privative mode of being-with-one-another” – “an ontic corruption of something ontological” (Christensen 2012, 263) – or it is the ontologically primordial mode of being consisting of “background practices” that are the milieu of generating customs and conventions as they are indispensable for any kind of social normativity. Interestingly enough, there are passages in Being and Time that support both readings. The reading that regards das Man in terms of a privative (and secondary) mode and a (factual, ontic) stage in the socialization of human beings – as this reading is typically represented by Frederick Olafson (1994) – tends to transform existential analytic into a version of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis. By contrast, the second reading – in which Heidegger’s Mitsein (or better, Mitdasein, being-with-one-another) is interpreted as the source of “the sharedness of common tasks and comportments” (Dreyfus 1995, 425) – assumes that personal authenticity is always to be achieved within the milieu of background practices (as these were already discussed). In accordance with this assumption, the reading (too easily) tends to turn existential analytic into a theory of (anonymous) social normativity. The champions of this reading hold the view that the They is an ontological aspect of “Dasein’s positive constitution”. Accordingly, Dasein’s resoluteness in achieving authenticity is construed in terms of a resolute and reflexive recasting of Dasein’s way of being normalized by social normativity, which does not imply the need of breaking out the norms and rules of the anonymous social life. When Heidegger speaks of a “modification of They-self”, he is not alluding to overt conflict with (or struggle against) existing norms and

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conventions of public life. He is also not propagating an escapist ideology of fleeing from inautheticity. The modification of They-self concerns that kind of the Self’s self-identification which pushes the They into insignificance. By implication, “not-myself” (as belonging to They-self) is not to be interpreted in terms of ontic (existentiell) deficiency¹⁴ (Wrathall 2017b). Dreyfus’s approach hypostatizes normativity by treating the “averageness” of inauthentic existence in terms of ontologically primordial normative sociality. It deprives normativity of existential genesis within-the-world.¹⁵ For the champions of this reading of Being and Time, stressing the primacy of normative-average sociality is the antidote to the Kierkegaardian-existentiell-psychologistic interpretation of Dasein. (Basically, they correctly claim that this interpretation reduces existential analytic to an ontic conceptualization of “existentiell” phenomena. But the anonymous normativity embedded in routine practices on which they insist is also no more than an ontic factuality as this was already discussed. Addressing normativity in terms of existential analytic should reveal its

 According to Wrathall‘s interpretation, the difference between inauthentic and authentic self consists in the “mode of polarizing situations”. The expression in quotation marks refers to one’s positioning to the opportunities which one faces in the diverse situations of being-inthe-world. The inauthentic self is “polarizing situations” by acting like anyone else. In this case, anyone of us is lacking any distinct identity. By contrast, the authentic self “polarizes the situations” into a distinct set of solicitations that are responsive to her own way of being in the world (Wrathall 2017b, 26). Thus, the difference between inauthentic and authentic self is functionalized in a manner that allows one to have average existence in certain situations, and to be one’s own self in other situations. Wrathall’s interpretation permits a kind of peaceful coexistence of inauthentic and authentic being-in-the-world within the self’s life. Needless to say that this functionalization – reducing personal authenticity to situational individualization – cuts off the most important existential-analytic features of the authentic self. But precisely this interpretation turns out to be indispensable for the view that – in looking for authenticity – the self is determined by the established social normativity.  The They is anonymous horizon of everyday being-in-the-world, but the They is not a set of anonymous social norms that supposedly determine the individual existence. There is no room for essentialist determinism in existential analytic. This conclusion also specifies a claim discussed in the preceding chapter: If one defies the authority of authentic lifeforms, one would have no other choice but to become subjected to the anonymous authority of the They, thereby becoming fully “absorbed” in the habitual behavior of inauthentic existence. The habitual behavior involved in the They’s inauthentic existence is not determined by special normativity. This behavior – as taking place within its inauthentic horizon – is a pre-normative way of being within-the-world. It goes without saying that this is an existential-ontological claim that should not be confused with the empirical studies of habitual behavior. When in sociology or anthropology at issue are special (normatively organized) forms of such behavior (of particular social groups), the constitution of social normativity is studied, in particular, through observing the recurrence of typical situations of interaction.

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constitution within the facticity of existence.) In a nutshell, insisting that there is a dilemma of whether existential analytic is a version of existential psychoanalysis or a phenomenological kind of social theory (closely related to a Wittgensteinian version of social theory) misses the point of Dasein’s ek-static character of subjective agency within trans-subjective practices in an important way. Roughly, the dilemma can only be undone, when realizing that one is not obliged to choose between psychologizing and sociologizing Dasein when at issue is Dasein’s authenticity. Yet undoing the dilemma should not imply a trivialization of the ontological difference. There is an easy way to get rid of the dilemma by reading the “factical life” of the authentic Self as ontologically primordial mode of being, on the one hand, and the existence thrown in the practices of They’s everydayness (or the existence characterized by falling in inauthenticity) as having ontic primacy, on the other. Thus, the authentic Self is ontologically primordial, but nevertheless average everydayness is the primary ontic reality of social life – that is, the reality one immediately faces when looking at the Self’s social being. Accordingly, the Self always confronts the task of regaining her authenticity within the inauthentic routine of public life. It is my contention that one should refrain from the temptation of getting rid of the dilemma in such an easy way. The argument for this negative conclusion is as follows. Dividing the issues of ontological priority and ontic primacy might allow one to claim “equiprimordiality” – without committing a contradiction – of inauthentic everydayness and the authentic Self. Thus, one would have good reasons for arguing that they are really not placed on the horns of a dilemma. But ridding the dilemma in this way would imply a crucial separation between the (ontic) everydayness of public life and the (ontological) character of the authentic Self, which would preclude any scenario of how the Self-thrown-in-inauthentic-everydayness can gain authenticity. According to existential analytic, the authentic Self and the inauthentic everydayness have ontic manifestations, but they both are existential (ontological) structures.¹⁶ To be sure, Being and Time is not quite definite about the status of average everydayness. Albeit insisting on its ontological character, this work often describes it in purely ontic terms. Accordingly, one gains the impression that average everydayness is a particular (empirically distinguished) mode of being-with-one-another that can be studied with regard to its ontic (anthropolog This is why inauthentic everydayness cannot per se be characterized by means of positive and negative functions. The very characterization in terms of such functions makes the They an ontic entity, which runs against the tenets of existential analytic. By the same token, the search for a “middle ground between” both types of functions (Knowles 2017) turns out to be, in my view, an ontic analysis of average sociality.

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ical, sociological, social-psychological, etc.) distinctiveness. Stating that the ontic characteristics of average everydayness are empirically universal for all modes of being-with-one-another still does not suffice for attributing existential-ontological status to it. One can succeed in showing that the They is an existentiale not by invoking the empirical universality of average everydayness, but by demonstrating that the ontological analytic of the structure of care cannot be carried out without assuming that the They belongs to this structure. In so doing, one would be able to show that average everydayness is not an empirically distinguished social way of being, but an integral part of Dasein’s primordial mode of being-in-the-world. This statement should be further clarified. When, for instance, I argued in Chapter Two that the everydayness of a society without lifeworld is a routine life necessary for having a maximal manipulative and repressive effectiveness of a totalitarian political regime, I had in mind a quite distinctive, empirically describable, reality that can be conceptualized in terms of political theory, cultural studies, sociology, and so on. One cannot equate, in particular, the public life of das Man with the routine life (and its social normativity) of a society without lifeworld. By implication, the inauthenticity of average everydayness must not be confused with empirical phenomena like coercion, repressiveness, oppression, compulsiveness, terror, manipulative power, etc. In a sense, the inauthenticity of average everydayness is more “profound”, penetrating, effective, and perfidious than any politically installed mechanism for exercising control. At the same time, one can argue in a rather ontic manner that the inauthenticity of das Man has no lesser influence and importance in the public life of the liberal-democratic societies than in authoritarian and totalitarian societies. However, such observations concerns empirical states of affairs that can be treated as manifestations of the inauthentic average everydayness, but cannot constitute its distinctiveness. Existential analytic makes a strong case for the ontological primordiality of the They’s inauthenticity by putting emphasis upon “existential nullity” as a characteristic of the “structure of thrownness”. Existential nullity of Dasein’s being its Self “belongs to Dasein’s being-free for its existentiell possibilities.” (Heidegger 1962a, 331). Since the nullity of the mode of being of inauthentic Dasein as falling prevents Dasein from reaching freedom (by choosing the possibility of authentic existence) in its being-free for possibilities, Dasein as such is guilty (not able to hear the call of conscience). Dasein’s being-guilty is not a privative mode of being. It is ontological condition for any ontic theory of morality. Being-guilty is a primordial ontological characteristic of Dasein’s Self as projecting itself upon possibilities into which it has been thrown without being able to get the basis of this projection into its power. Thus considered, Dasein’s being-guilty is tantamount to Dasein’s lostness in the They’s inauthenticity.

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The crucial departmentalization between the mode of being of the authentic Self and the inauthentic everydayness of the They’s public life leads to a paradox. If the inauthentic everydayness has (only) ontic primacy, then the Self faces the task of gaining authentic mode of being in her factual (empirical, contingent) life. Yet this task would be no more than an existentiell challenge, if it is addressed exclusively in terms of the Self’s factual life. The “anticipatory resoluteness”, the “moment of vision”, and the Self’s resolute choice to come towards herself – the main prerequisites of gaining authenticity – would become contingent phenomena in one’s particular life, losing their character of existentialia. There is no transition from ontic contingency to existential necessity. Claiming that the Self’s existence is rooted in ontic everydayness makes this existence a factually present entity. But since one assigns to the authentic Self ontologically primordial mode of being, the paradox regarding the Self’s status is unavoidable: The personal Self’s existence is at once characterized by having and not having ontological meaning. The only way to escape from the dilemma of whether to ascribe primacy to the authentic Self or to the inauthentic They-self (without facing a paradox) consists in finding the “missing mediator” between average everydayness and authentic existence. (The quest for such a mediator, however, does not imply that there is a spectrum of forms of everyday existence stretched between the poles of authenticity and inauthenticity. Assuming such a spectrum would imply that authentic existence can be represented in varying degrees, which makes this existence into “empirically measurable” state of affairs. Achieving authenticity must not be confused with a process of individuation in the personal development.) The idea of mediator is justified by the observation that the Self’s authentic existence does not need a radical break with the inauthentic everydayness. Dreyfus is right in arguing that the Self is capable of emancipating from the public sphere of the They without radically breaking with the routine practices of public life. Yet he is wrong in assuming that anonymous social normativity provides the common ground of the Self’s authentic existence and the Self’s continuous belongingness to the inauthentic-average everydayness. As argued earlier, this normativity as an entirely ontic entity has no place among existentialia, and cannot play an ontologically pertinent mediatory role. It is not only existential agency but all kinds of trans-subjectively alienated human agency that serve as a missing mediator between the authentic Self and the inauthentic They. One might object at this point by stressing that human agency alienated in various assemblages of practices is an ontic entity that cannot mediate between ontological structures. Yet in alienating from the factuality of agential behavior, this agency becomes part of the facticity of practices. Human agency alienated in

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the interplay of practices and possibilities (and inter-contextually dispersed) is an ontological entity with several ontic manifestations. Let me summarize in a united formula the outcomes of two main lines of reasoning developed so far, and related respectively to lifeforms’ authenticity and the Self’s authentic existence: The transference of transcendent meaning to routinely configured practices in which this meaning becomes progressively visualized/envisioned by entities ready-to-hand within the configurations implies that the Self participating in the authentic lifeform’s articulation (via the same routinely configured practices) projects her existence on the horizon of possibilities on which this transcendent meaning is inscribed. In resolutely making these possibilities into her own existential possibilities, the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency succeeds in escaping from the They’s inauthenticity. The ongoing actualization of these existential possibilities paves the way for the Self’s authenticity. Accordingly, existential agency enables the processual unity of (1) the transference (immanentization, Veralltäglichung) of the transcendent meaning of an authentic lifeform to its everydayness of configured practices, and (2) the transformation of the lifeform’s horizon into horizon of possibilities upon which the Self projects her existence. The authentic Self is formed and constantly reformed at the crossovers of (1) and (2).¹⁷ The processual convergence of (1) and (2) in the existence of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency ought to be addressed against the background of the growing diversification of the Self’s being in various cultural forms of life. Tentatively, the painful search for the Self’s authenticity intensifies the diversification of I-positions, thereby leading to a “multiple escape” from the inauthenticity of the public life’s practices. Obviously, the success of this escape is at the price of such a pluralization of the Self that challenges the integral personal identity. Authenticity demands integral identity beyond the plurality of the Self’s positions, and in spite of the dispersal of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency in a diversity of contexts. Precisely this integral identity is endangered when the quest for authenticity disperses the Self’s existence in a plurality of lifeforms, thereby splitting the Self into a manifold of (supposedly internal) positions. In her search for authenticity, the dialogical Self is always under the pressure of setting priorities for deciding which lifeform is the “innermost” one in her existence.¹⁸ The dialogue among the Self’s particular positions related  The more actively the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency appropriates trans-subjective possibilities from the horizon on which an authentic lifeform projects its ultimate being, the more definitely the personal Self projects his being upon a horizon of authentic existence.  A further analytical complication arises from the fact that the Self is always trying to come to terms with the routine practices of the public life’s inauthentic everydayness. Participating in the

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to her cultural identities and supposedly enabling authentic existence is indispensable when there is a tension between these positions. It goes without saying, however, that this dialogue does not provide a guarantee for eliminating the tension. Imagine, for instance, a lawyer who constitutes his identity as a “true professional” by participating in a juridical lifeform that is articulated within the practices of textualism. This identity is brought into play through the lawyer’s belief that the meaning of the textually expressed laws is entirely within the text, and does not need to invoke extra-textual sources for its proper interpretation. (In his view, amorphous categories such as the intent of the lawgiver, social justice, or the rectitude of the legal system have no place in interpreting the law and taking legal decisions.) The search for justice plays an essential role in “our lawyer’s” legal practice, but he strongly believes that justice is not something that can be conferred on the law from a socialmoral (non-juridical) position. He is also convinced that justice is not “implanted” in law through legislative history. Justice should be revealed by properly interpreting the self-sufficient meaning of the legal text. In contrast to other lawyers who share the principles of textualism, however, our lawyer is not satisfied with the claim that the ordinary meanings of the words composing the legal text is the only thing that matters. For him, the meaning of the legal text always transcends the composition of the meanings of its lexical units. A transcendent authority is incorporated in juridical texts – a view inspired by religious feelings, though our lawyer tries to strictly separate his professional ethos from his religious position. It is because of this authority that the proper interpretation of the legal text can generate justice in the legal practice. At this point, however, an unsurmountable tension with his identity as devout Christian – that is, with the position inspiring his professional view of justice – begins to take shape. Imagine in this regard that our lawyer is not only a devout Christian but also that his religious denomination is a kind of non-Chalcedonian Christianity. Legal textualism might be entirely consonant with a Protestant theology based on the principle of sola scriptura, but not with a theology that does not restrict exegesis to that principle

articulation of authentic lifeforms quite rarely takes the form of classical escapism – committing to a lifeform (belonging, for instance, to the counterculture of the 1960s) that “has nothing to do” with the public life’s average everydayness. The dialogical Self is, in particular, a personal strategy that offers a way out of the predicament characterized by the limbo state of (indispensably) being in the inauthenticity of manipulative public practices and being-escaped from these practices by performing practices articulating authentic lifeforms. By multiplying one’s being in diverse ensembles of practices, one is able both to retain one’s “standard routine” of playing regimented social roles and to achieve one’s authenticity.

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only. According to the monophysitist theology supported by our lawyer’s Church – a theology chiefly based on a sophisticated reading of the Gospel of Luke – the nature of moral deeds is immediate expression of how humans are related to Divinity. Mediating deeds by employing various instruments for representations true morality deforms (or at least hides) the relatedness of humans to God. Non-canonical (in the theological sense) texts are also such instruments. Morality is grafted in the righteous intent for action and cannot truly be expressed by written words. Atonement can only be achieved – so the main ethical-theological argument goes – through emulation of comportment that avoids (non-canonical) written instructions. Humans can be reconciled to God if they become capable of immediately seeing and grasping the righteous deeds. A representations of the intents for righteous deed though written instructions – reflecting the laws of human reason and not stemming from canonical texts – are condemned as alienation from God’s moral law. In perceiving the conflict between his professional and religious positions, “our lawyer” unsuccessfully tried to convince significant priests of his own denomination that the legal texts should be regarded as having a status similar to that of canonical texts. Accordingly, the juridical hermeneutics of these texts should be built on the model of religious exegesis. In denouncing these proposals, a priest even threatened the lawyer with excommunication. To sum up, no dialogue between the positions of the lawyer’s Self can succeed in achieving peaceful coexistence. He tried to look for a kind of “narrating the Self” that avoids a religious legitimization of the profane professional life’s activities and initiatives. Yet this turned out to be a dubious solution, provoking a lot of new tensions and conflicts. The dialogical Self has its own limits when one is participating in practices of incommensurable lifeforms. Reflecting on the Self in connection with the ecstatic unity of personal subjectivity and lifeforms’ trans-subjectivity poses in the first place the issue about the status of existential possibilities that the Self chooses in making herself. Once these possibilities have been chosen, they become appropriated and actualized within the Self’s personal existence. In making choices, the Self is always in a certain hermeneutic situation when contextually making choices leading to the appropriation and actualization of possibilities. In other words, the Self’s choices – and the personal subjectivity propelling them – are continuously fore-structured by what projects (and anticipates the actualization of) the possibilities. The life of the adult Self is unavoidably immersed in the practices of the anonymous public life in which her person is thrown, and with which her subjectivity is entangled. The fore-structuring within a characteristic hermeneutic situation proceeds in a twofold manner – within the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency, and beyond the Self’s subjectivity as situated within the interplay

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of practices and possibilities. The Self’s struggle for authenticity can be successful if the trans-subjective fore-structuring of her choices of existential possibilities resists a “reabsorption” in inauthentic everydayness that would bring Theyself back. In partaking in the everyday practices of an authentic lifeform, the Self becomes embedded in its horizon of (trans-subjective) possibilities, trying to appropriate them as possibilities within her own life. Obviously, this line of reasoning implies two sorts of possibilities – personal and non-personal – in the Self’s existence. The non-personal possibilities come into being within the facticity of practices. The contextual revealing and concealing of these possibilities is due not only to the work of existential agency, but to all kinds of trans-subjective agency. The personal possibilities, in their turn, open the biographical horizon of the Self. One might assume that since the (authentic) Self is intrinsically involved in existential agency, the Self is capable of bearing responsibility not only for the choices of existential possibilities she makes whereby making herself. The Self should also bear responsibility for the trans-subjective articulation of those cultural lifeforms in which she participates.¹⁹ This conclusion (which will be spelled out in various upcoming contexts) is on a par with Sartre’s existentialism, but I will suggest a non-Sartrean reading of it.

4.3 Approaching the Self’s authenticity The rationale for introducing the concept of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency sharply contrasts with the agenda of transcendental moral normativism. According to this neo-Kantian position, if the Self were deprived of principle on which to act, the Self would be incapable of acting at all. To put it in Christine Korsgaard’s (1996, 123) original formulation, if “you have no normative conception of your identity, you could have no reason for action, and because your consciousness is reflective, you could then not act at all.” A normative conception of “practical identity” provides the basis of choice through which the Self constitutes and valuates herself. In governing the Self’s choice of action, this conception includes gender roles, friendships, significant emotional engagements, the basic social roles the Self performs, her memberships in all important  I agree with Frederick Olafson that there is in Heidegger’s thought a tendency towards a progressive elimination of the agency and the responsibility of human beings. After die Kehre, the perspective of “the history of being” leaves room only for the stance of Gelassenheit (Olafson 1998, 98). Spelling out the concept of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency is a way of countering this tendency.

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(religious, ethnic, political, etc.) communities of her life, and her institutional affiliations. (Each of these ingredients is related to a contingent practical identity and its special norms and obligations.) The conception of integral practical identity confers coherence and homogeneity on the whole of the Self’s identities whereby the Self gains a unitary basis for the choice of action. The Self owes to the normative conception her identity “as a role with a point” – an identity that is behind all particular (contingent) identities as they are tied only with special kinds of norms. Korsgaard (1996, 125) contends that the practical identity of a person depends for its normativity “on the normativity of our human identity.” Without this normativity, the norms related to the particular identities would be groundless. To formulate it as a normative principle: Any particular person must value her humanity as an “end in itself”. “Humanity as such” is intrinsic to any person, and humanity requires conformity with the moral norms it imposes. Humanity grounds the Self’s conception of practical identity, since it is the basic practical identity. Morality springs from the normativity of the basic practical identity as acting in the name of humanity. Korsgaard bases her analysis on the presumption that the “reflective structure of human consciousness” (as reflective consciousness about humanity) gives the moral agents authority over their actions. This authority is effective in the moral choice of any particular person through the conception of practical identity that activates the humanity as the only source of moral normativity. (Making a law for a choice of action – the function of the “reflective structure of human consciousness” – is tantamount to giving expression to one’s conception of practical identity.) Against this position, I tentatively argue that the formalist framework of the self as a self-sufficient moral agent equipped with the idea of humanity as a basis for choice prevents one from taking into consideration the “contextual content” of ethic life.²⁰ Contextual articulation of authentic cultural lifeforms is what provides the contextual content of the Self’s ethic life. Conceptualizing the Self-

 Steven Crowell (2007) develops an interesting criticism of Korsgaard’s position from a Heideggerian viewpoint. He conceives this position as a kind of personalistic ontology resembling Husserl’s and Scheler’s concepts of person, and claims that Heidegger’s arguments against phenomenological personalism are completely applicable to Korsgaard’s view of person as moral agent. In criticizing the “rationalistic-Kantian distortion of the phenomenology of agency”, Crowell also insists on the need of addressing the trans-subjective being of agency. The only point on which I disagree with Crowell’s criticism is his approach to authenticity in terms of a norm. Authenticity is a mode of being that is in a characteristic hermeneutic situation. As such a mode, it interpretively fore-structures contextually relevant norms of existing. Treating authenticity as a (non-moral) norm amounts to approaching it as an ontic state of affairs.

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cooperating-with-existential-agency paves the way for a non-formal moral philosophy, which, however, is not a theme of this study. The task of this section is only to show that the Self’s struggle for authenticity cannot be subjected to a basic moral principle, position, or identity. The life of any particular Self is involved in the configured practices of innumerable (informal or formally institutionalized) lifeforms as well as in administrative, technological, commercial, political, clinical, hygienic, and many other sorts of practices that shape the Self’s way of being without constituting particular lifeforms. The Self finds herself thrown in the practices of her hetero- or homosexual life, her professional practices, the practices of her religious life, the practices of informal communication within the various circles of friends and relatives she has, the practices of her family life, the practices of taking care of her financial savings and having the desired economic standard of living, the practices of exercising her hobby, the practices of being in harmony with fashion tendencies, the practices of making use of mass media, the practices of selecting and reading books, the practices of supporting and propagating her moral values and attitudes, practices related to her ethnic background, culinary and dietary practices, the practices of properly shaping her body, the practices of taking care of her pets, the practices of participating in public debates, … In the trans-subjective world of practices, the Self individualizes her life by partaking in a growing number of configured practices. But as Thomas Nagel (1986, 57) – from a completely different philosophical position – argues, the centerless “world cannot contain irreducibly first-person facts.”²¹ Though individualized through the growing participation in various practices, the Self’s person is destined to become dispersed in the world of practices. The Self is born as thrown in practices. The Self is condemned to have (predominantly inauthentic) existence within ever changing practices that project their being upon possibilities. Being-thrown in practices, the Self also has a being-towards-possibilities that, in accordance with Being and Time, is distinguished by the “ownmost possibility” of being-towards-death. There are several reasons for conceiving the interrelatedness of practices as a burden imposed on the Self’s existing. But since it is almost impossible for the Self to thematize – and to be deliberately reflexive about – the way in which this burden is imposed upon herself, the Self “most closely and mostly” (zunächst und zumeist) feels  Nagel draws this conclusion by stressing that everything about the use of first-person can be analyzed without using the first person. Needless to say that his notion of “centerless world” has nothing to do with the trans-subjective world of practices. The claim of the loss of first-person facts in this trans-subjective world rests on arguments essentially different from Nagel’s arguments.

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only the “unbearable lightness” of the interrelatedness of practices. Assemblages of practices are, for the most part, the source of the Self’s inauthenticity. Being-thrown in practices, the Self participates in and performs them in a manner that progressively enslaves her by inhibiting the willingness for taking full responsibility for the choices of possibilities she makes. (It seems as if practices impose limits on Sartre’s absolute responsibility that “involves all mankind”.) But precisely because the Self is thrown in the They’s everydayness of practices, the Self has a chance to escape from the state of inauthenticity via practices that resist the reabsorption in They-self. Thus, the chance for gaining authentic existence does not consist in an emancipation from the thrownness-in-practices – an emancipation that supposedly leads to the Self as a sovereign master of her actions, activities, choices, and decisions. Practices are enslaving the Self, but they also give the Self the chance for saving. (It is not by accident that this statement resonates a line of reasoning Heidegger develops in his famous essay “The Question of Technology”. In fact, Heidegger tacitly appeals to the middle position of technological practices – as situated between the accomplished technological artifacts and the essence of technology – when reaching the conclusion that the “saving power” grows there where the danger is. While the danger is brought into play by the “essence of modern technology”, this essence as “enframing” becomes revealed by the interrelatedness of technological practices. And yet, it is this interrelatedness that provides the opportunity for the saving power.²²) The Self’s struggle for authenticity cannot be modeled upon a reflexiveemancipatory ideology that tries to liberate the individual (as an accountable actor, a moral personality, and a rational subject of knowledge acquisition capa For Heidegger (1993, 326), the work of modern technology – as it is spread over the assemblages of technological practices – is “nether only a human activity nor a mere means within such activity.” Rejecting “merely instrumental” and “merely anthropological” definition of technology amounts to placing emphasis upon technological practices that – as practices of “enframing” – are capable of revealing “the essence of modern technology”. These practices do not succeed in revealing the essence in question beyond all human activities. But their revealing is neither happening exclusively in the realm of these activities, nor is it exclusively achieved through humans. Technological practices also harbor the danger of misconstruing the essence of technology. Since humans are thrown in these practices, they stand within the “essential realm of enframing”. The destiny in practices is unpredictable. At the same time, “man becomes truly free only insofar as he belongs to the realm of destining.” (Heidegger 1993, 330). The essence of technology lies in configured practices of enframing that technologically hold sway over humans whereby making them a part of the standing-reserve. But in experiencing “enframing as a destining of revealing”, humans are facing the opportunity to become truly free. Instead of rebelling helplessly against the growing power of modern technology, humans have to look for this opportunity that configurations of technological practices might provide. The “saving power” is hidden in these configurations.

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ble of making effective choices) from trans-subjectively imposed (or self-imposed) repressive mechanisms, whereby the individual self will fully enjoy his “natural liberties”. No radical reflexivity – presumably assisted by certain forms of critical psychoanalysis treating the super-ego as a compulsory web of practices imposed upon one’s personal way of being – can liberate the Self from practices’ routineness. The Self cannot exist beyond a routinized everydayness of practices.²³ The liberation from trans-subjective repressive mechanisms can only be attained by participating in an authentic everydayness of practices constituting an ethos that allows the Self to experience her thrown projection as meaningful existence. Let me take up the motif of the considerations with which this section started. The view that the only way in which the Self may achieve autonomy and authenticity is by participating in configured practices disclosing and articulating authentic cultural lifeforms is at odds with those conceptions which admit that there is a constant succession of self-creation, and the latter is exclusively an achievement of the individual agent’s active will. These (Kantian) conceptions accentuate the active will that is brought into existence by every moment of reflection, but is nevertheless accorded with universal moral law (Korsgaard 1996, 232– 235). In my view, “autonomous lawmaking” for a moral behavior cannot involve whatever kind of requirement of universalization as intrinsically constitutive of the activity itself, if this activity is produced by the Self-cooperating-withexistential-agency in the articulation of an authentic lifeform. The free will of the individual agent cannot be a source of formally universal moral normativity, since all volitional (individual and collective) activity is always fore-structured by the hermeneutically pre-normative interplay of practices and possibilities. By implication, the normativity of moral claims cannot be found in agent’s own will.²⁴ (As discussed in the preceding chapter, the “existential genesis” of

 Even the most individualized Self exists in the routine of highly personalized configurations of social practices. The individuality of the Self is measured against her unique style of performing recurrent practices that, as a rule, belong to diverse lifeforms. In this regard, creating individuality amounts to developing individual everydayness by participating in the everyday articulation of a variety of forms of life. Attaining “perfect individuality” does not make the Self notthrown-in-routine-practices. It goes without saying that such individuality essentially differs from the Self’s authenticity. Yet like the former, the latter is unthinkable without a proper everydayness of practices.  What I am strongly disputing is the position that the “normative question is a first-person question that arises for the moral agent who must actually do what morality says.” (Korsgaard 1996, 16). The “normative question” is a question that arises for agents who are always already situated in and transcended by configured practices. These agents become moral agents when cooperating with existential agency articulating authentic lifeforms.

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any kind of normativity involves the ongoing transformation of the fore-having, fore-seeing, and fore-grasping of the articulation of meaning into normative structures.) When the volitional activities of an agent are fore-structured by the inauthentic everydayness of interplaying practices and possibilities, the Self of this agent is doomed to inauthentic existence, regardless of how strongly his active will is supported by reflection. It is the ethos of the authentic lifeform – that is, the lifeform’s pre-normative articulation within a characteristic hermeneutic situation that regulates and orientates without imposing a rigid normative codex. Seen from a slightly different perspective, the Self’s struggle for authentic existence can only be successful if proper trans-subjective horizons of possibilities are opened up within a characteristic hermeneutic situation. In focusing on the (empirically manifested) articulation of meaning within the world (as a transcending horizon), hermeneutic phenomenology implies that there is a transcendental structure of Dasein’s existing – or, following Simon Critchley’s nice formulation, a structure in which the transcendental and the enigmatic coexist. (In “showing themselves”, the existential phenomena allude to something that remains unrevealed, no matter of how meticulously the existence’s transcendental structure is scrutinized [Critchley 2002, 159 – 164].) To stress again, the position of trans-subjective existentialism denies the possibility of revealing a whole transcendental structure in the existence of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency as taking place in the facticity of practices. In operating within and through the interplay of practices, existential agency transcends what becomes articulated in any particular context-made-present. By transcending the articulation of particular meaningful entities, agency-entangled-with-cofigured-practices poses contextual conditions for possible meaningful articulation. However, this does not mean that a transcendental structure is embedded in the very process of articulation. The talk of the transcendence-posing-conditions-for-possibility only makes sense with regard to the particular contexts of agential behavior. The conditions posed by existential agency are contextually specified (i. e., related to the contextual appropriation of possibilities). Accordingly, as already discussed, the conceptualization of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency should appeal to contextual transcendental arguments. This conclusion has important implications for the way in which the issue of the temporalizing of temporality is handled in the present study. In line with Being and Time, one may assume that the interplay of practices and possibilities reveals itself as a mode of temporality, and the latter makes up “the primordial meaning of Dasein’s being”. This temporality-as-a-horizon gets temporalized with regard to the ways in which possibilities become actualized through con-

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cernful dealing within-the-world. Existential analytic states that there are three basic “ecstatic schemes” of the temporalizing of temporality that build up “the constitution of the structure of care”. These schemes correspond to the temporalization of past, present, and future. In contrast to this kind of transcendental schematism, I admit that the regimes of the temporalizing of temporality characterizing the way of being of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency within the interplay of practices and possibilities are dependent on the characteristics hermeneutic situations of the lifeforms’ articulation. Since these situations are innumerable, any attempt at succumbing them to a transcendental schematism is doomed to failure. The Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency is existing in a plurality of regimes of the temporalizing of temporality. Furthermore, the Self constantly specifies any one of these regimes through her choices of possibilities. Because of the ecstatic unity of the contextually acting Self who makes choices and the transcending horizon of possibilities upon which the Self projects her existence, the Self is at once in herself and beyond herself. More specifically, the Self is at once in a position to reflexively deepen in her subjectivity, thereby (narratively) preserving her feeling of integral identity and holding sway on agonistic forces in her personality, and in a position to become aware of her “nonlocality” as being-thrown in practices opening up an ever shifting horizon. As a result, the motivational factors driving intentional actions (or the factors building up the Self’s agential subjectivity) cease to be exclusive possession of the Self. Since the complexity of interrelated practices cannot be mastered by the Self’s reflexive ability to hold sway on the way in which practices form and reform particular contexts in her life, the dispersal of the Self’s agency over growing number of contexts is beyond her control. By implication, the Self cannot fully master the ongoing contextualization of her subjective dispositions, motifs, beliefs, and desires driving her behavior. The Self’s “motivational economies” become dispersed in the same way. There is a constant risk of intellectual and emotional dissonances in the Self’s life due to this scattering. The pluralized Self strives for finding emotional balance by persistently looking for alterations in the motivational economy underlying the roles he plays and the positions he takes. Insisting on the dispersal of the Self’s agential subjectivity over configured practices looms large for the way of treating the issue of the Self’s authenticity. Since such practices are capable of disclosing and articulating cultural forms of life, this dispersal enables the Self’s being-in-a-plurality-of-cultural-lifeforms.²⁵

 The dispersal of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency in diverse contexts constituted by the interplay of practices and possibilities does not mean, however, that the Self is an “illu-

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With this conclusion in mind, I would like to resume the discussion of the “nonindividualist revision” of Heidegger’s scenario for gaining authenticity. In the preceding chapter, this revision was directed at the criterion of trans-subjective authenticity of a lifeform. In this chapter, the criterion is extended to cover the personal authenticity of the Self. For Heidegger, the angst before death takes place in the strongly individual way of existing. It is preconditioned by the non-relational character of death. The hidden certainty of holding death for true demands the Self in the full authenticity of her existence. This is the crux of Heidegger’s conception, according to which death individualizes.²⁶ By implication, the anticipatory resoluteness characterizing the being-towards-death “includes the possibility of taking the whole of Dasein in advance in an existentiell manner; that is to say, it includes the possibility of existing as a whole potentiality-for-being.” (Heidegger 1962a, 309). But this still does not provide the chance for gaining authentic way of being. It is the individual person who finds herself face to face with “the nothing of the impossible possibility” of her existing. This “nothing” is the totality of the individual person’s potentiality-for-being. In the Befindlichkeit of anxiety before death, the “nothing” is experienced as the chance to escape from the “impassioned freedom towards death” as Dasein feels this freedom in the inauthentic everydayness. According to the “non-individualist revision” of the existential-analytic criterion for authenticity, what individualizes is not the anticipatory resoluteness characterizing the being-towards-death, but the realization of the “accessible in-

sion” as Miri Albahari argues. In developing a non-egological view of consciousness, Albahari (2006, 91) contends that the very idea of the Self comes into being when the assumption prevails that the individual subject possesses the property of boundedness by virtue of which the personal identity is gained through separating the subject from all other things. To be sure, this is an illusionary vision of the Self. But criticizing this vision does not imply that the Self is an illusion. An illusion is – in line with Albahari’s criticism – only the image of “punctual self”.  Critchley disputes this conception by raising interesting arguments against the existentialanalytic scenario of gaining authenticity. For him, basing the fundamental experience of finitude on the non-relational character of death is wrong. As a consequence, Critchley tries to advocate the “fundamentally relational character of finitude”. In his account, “death is first and foremost experienced in a relation to the death or dying of the other and others, in being-with the dying in a caring way, and in grieving after they are dead.” (Critchley 2002, 169). There is a certain mixture of ontic and ontological motifs – a mixture that is perhaps not very well accorded to the ontic-ontological difference – in this view of the fundamentally relational character of finitude. But generally, Critchley cogently paves the way for a non-individualist revision of the existential analytic conception of authenticity as based on Heidegger’s death-analysis. Critchley’s superb discussion of (Heidegger’s conception of) the non-relational character of conscience specifies the aim of this revision: “The call of conscience is a voice within me whose source is not myself, but is the other’s voice that calls me to responsibility.” (Critchley 2002, 173).

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accessibility” of the most genuine meaning in one’s life. One faces this accessible inaccessibility by resolutely partaking in configurations of everyday practices that transfer transcendent meaning, thereby articulating authentic cultural lifeforms. In participating in the articulation of such a lifeform, one does not simply ignore the death in a trivial sense – as “impassioned freedom towards death” – but existentially makes the “ownmost non-relational possibility” into something relational with regard to the never-ending transference of genuinely transcendent meaning. The Self hears the voice of conscience when she is able to devote herself to the ultimate meaning of her lifeform. The anticipatory resoluteness characterizing the being-towards-death is in a sense “de-privileged”. The Self can choose herself when appropriates possibilities on which the ultimate meaning of her authentic lifeform is inscribed. The heard voice of conscience makes the Self’s existence an anticipatory resoluteness. The Self surpasses the state of being-guilty by making the transcendent meaning into the meaning of choosing herself, thereby provoking in her existence the responsibility to the voice of conscience.²⁷ The Self is constantly choosing possibilities by taking into account those dimensions of her subjectivity (like her wishes and desires) which – in her estimation – are fully controlled by her way of acting. In the perspective of traditional moral philosophy, the kind of having control over the conditions of personal choices is addressed in terms of a sufficient condition for authenticity. Thus considered, authenticity is the counterpart of moral responsibility. The Self is fully

 Here again the authentic religious form of life plays a paradigmatic role. Jean-Louis Chrétien (2004a, 16) argues that “the call” in a theological sense “does not provoke a response in the way that an action provokes a reaction.” This call is reflected in Saint Paul’s statement in the Epistle to the Romans that God “calls into being what is not”. There is in the authentic religious life always an absolute call that enables the call of conscience and the hearing of the voice of conscience. In contrast to the heard voice of conscience, the absolute call does not create (and redeem) by actualizing some prior potentiality. This is a call that comes from beyond. It constitutes every entity responding to it but never corresponds to what becomes constituted. The Self who is a genuine believer listens and has the ability to listen because her Self is called. To put it in Chrétien’s (2004a, 19) beautiful words: “Nothing in the one who is called remains or can remain intact in the face of the call, intact and as though separate from it, since the call gives him being already caught up in the call.” As Emmanuel Levinas makes it clear, the response to the absolute call is the true meaning of revelation. In serving a quasi-religious function, the transcendent authority of each authentic (non-religious) cultural lifeform acquires the status of an absolute call (in the Self’s existing) preceding and enabling the call of conscience. Of course, in contrast to the call of God, the absolute call of a non-religious lifeform appeals to the need of actualizing possibilities on which the transcendent meaning is inscribed. In this sense, the call of a non-religious lifeform lacks that constitutive asymmetry between call and response which characterizes the call of God.

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responsible for the choices she makes and for the decisions she takes. Yet moral responsibility is not to be located in the “punctual self”. The Self is morally responsible as co-operating with the existential agency of the lifeforms in which she participates. As already mentioned, stating this does not aim at diminishing the Self’s moral responsibility. It is the other way around: The cooperation with existential agency enhances the Self’s moral responsibility. The Self cannot excuse her choices and actions by invoking the trans-subjective power of existential agency. (One cannot justify, for instance, one’s wrong choice of action by blaming the influence of relatively autonomous existential agency on making this choice.) On the contrary: In co-operating with lifeforms’ existential agency, the Self is morally responsible not only for her personal choices and decisions, but also for all effects following from the articulation of the lifeforms in which she participates. Attributing moral responsibility to the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency is a position diametrically opposed to the position of the socalled Real Self View – the view postulating that the real self is “the self with which the agent is to be properly identified.” (Wolf 1990, 30). This view assumes that the responsible agent is a punctual self who is able to govern what he is doing only on the basis of his subjective will and his subjective evaluative system. In his genealogy of modern self-identity, Charles Taylor (1989, 507) sets the scene for the discussion of the moral responsibility of (what in his eyes should be) the non-punctual Self by observing that “our normal understanding of selfrealization presupposes that some things are important beyond the self, that there are some goods or purposes the furthering of which has significance for us and which hence can provide the significance a fulfilling life needs.” Yet his analysis says too little about how these “things” are important beyond the self. Do they exist separately from the self’s existence? Do they “from without” compensate for the subjectivist tendency towards emptiness? When Taylor (1989, 510) insists on “the search for moral sources outside the subject through languages which resonate within him or her”, he obviously answers both questions in the affirmative. Yet it seems to me that Taylor ignores the figures of (a) the ecstatic unity of the subjective and the trans-subjective, and (b) situated transcendence when discussing the moral sources. As a consequence, his search for new languages of personal resonance capable of making crucial human goods alive for modern humans presupposes the opposition between “from within the self’s life” and “from without the self’s subjectivity”. The concept of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency is worked out with the intent to break with this opposition in a radical way. (It is not my intention to take issue with Taylor’s powerful moral and political philosophy, which I share to a great extent. My con-

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siderations are only directed against the way in which he tries to conceptualize the non-punctuality of the Self. I will return to this subject in the next section.) Addressing the nexus of autonomy and authenticity in terms of the entanglement of the Self with the facticity of practices severely contrasts the usual scenarios about this nexus employed, in particular, in individualism-collectivism debate. As a rule, the point of departure in discussing the nexus of autonomy and authenticity within the frameworks of social theory is the concept of “authentic subjectivity”. In these frameworks, reflexivity plays a mediating role between achieving authentic identity and personal autonomy. A prominent case in point is Alessandro Ferrara’s treatment of the constellation of autonomy, authenticity, and reflexivity. In contrast to several moral and political theorists, he develops a concept of authenticity that cannot be generated within the perspective of autonomy alone. Yet, in associating autonomy with action theory and authenticity with moral theory, Ferrara does not break with the Weberian tradition of privileging subjectivity. Indeed, at stake in his treatment of the constellation of autonomy, authenticity, and reflexivity is an inter-subjectively constituted sort of subjectivity (Ferrara 1998, 50 – 53). However, Ferrara admits that the most important notion in this constellation – that of authenticity – has much to do with “the core of actor’s personality”. Authenticity refers to the unique personal identity which resists translation into culturally shared identities. The Self gains authenticity by reflexively constructing identity while recognizing the Other. Authentic subjectivity – as a source of responsible moral autonomy – is achievable via reflexivity that enables intersubjective commitment. A deficiency of this conception is that it – like Dreyfus’ conception – leaves no room for handling the issue of the origination of normativity, since norms are addressed as primordial entities and requisite for having authentic subjectivity. The scenario of gaining personal authenticity by participating in the everyday articulation of an authentic lifeform overcomes this deficiency by relating authenticity to the “accessible inaccessibility” of what as ultimate meaning is inherent in the lifeform’s articulation. Thus, one avoids any appeal to entities (such as intersubjective normativity) that are detached from the ecstatic unity of the Self’s subjectivity with the trans-subjective interplay of practices and possibilities. The Self’s authenticity is always inherently enabled within this ecstatic unity.²⁸  In view of this conclusion, I disagree – even though being a big admirer of his work – with the way in which Reiner Schürmann strongly connects inauthenticity and authenticity with the strategies of individual acting. According to him, to “exist authentically means to act with regard to my being in the way that is most proper to me; to seize my being as it is concretely mine. Inauthenticity means acting with regard to my being in a way that is not proper to me; a way which

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In traditional moral philosophy, the Self’s ability to govern her own choices and decisions is also a necessary condition for reflexive autonomy: One chooses possibilities by exerting judgmental reflexivity with respect to the reasonability of the choices and the reliability of what is chosen. But the question remains open of how to address the status of possibilities that the Self may contextually choose, granted that the emergence of these possibilities is due to agency that operates beyond the Self’s reflexive control. It hardly makes sense to ask this question in terms of an existentialist philosophy that strictly emphasizes the significance of personal choices. From a strongly existentialist point of view, all possibilities that can be appropriated in one’s personal life are exclusively existential possibilities – that is, possibilities that exclusively concern the individual Self’s existence as the terrain on which all choices are made. Phrased differently, the Self’s existence constitutes itself through the ongoing choices that the Self makes. The Self is nothing else but what she makes of herself through the chosen possibilities. (Following Simone de Beauvoir, it is even via choices that the Self makes her- or himself a female or male – a viewpoint that has gained currency in gender studies, though the latter tend to interpret this viewpoint in terms of social constructivism rather than Sartrean existentialism.) The position stressing the priority of choices can also be advocated by means of non-existentialist arguments. Thus, Korsgaard (2009, 19) argues – from her Kantian position – that there is no self prior to self’s choices and actions, because identity is “in a quite literal way constituted” by these choices and actions.²⁹ There is no “residuum” in personal existence produced outside the choices of existential possibilities. In the same vein, there are no existential possibilities preceding the acts of choosing, or being beyond the Self’s existence. Stating that there are options and opportunities before these acts take place, but not existential possibilities does

follows that of everyone else.” (Schürmann 1987, 238). The non-individualist revision I suggest is directed precisely against this interpretation of authenticity and inauthenticity.  Korsgaard defends this view by drawing a distinction between the “identity of a person” and the “identity of the human animal on whom the person normally supervenes”. It is not quite clear, however, which is the theoretical discourse in terms of which the distinction can be vindicated. All unsolvable problems Derrida and many others identified in connection with culturenature distinction are completely relevant to Korsgaard’s distinction. It is my contention that there is no firm (constant, constitutive, absolute) difference between the identity of a person and the identity of a human animal. To reiterate a motif I discussed on several occasions in this study: There is only a play of contextual differences between my “biological self” (and identity as a human animal) and my cultural self (and identity as a person). All of these differences are produced not by an isolated agent/actor (who is supposedly the common site of a person and a human animal), but by the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency.

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not contradict the strictly individualist-existentialist viewpoint, since this observation is irrelevant to the specificity of existence. Nonetheless, the observation poses new problems that can hardly be tackled from that viewpoint. In appropriating these options and opportunities – that can also be referred to under the heading of “trans-subjective possibilities” – the Self makes them into existential possibilities. The appropriation comes into being along with the acts of choosing, but is by no means reducible to them. The choices are fully dependent on the Self’s personal subjectivity. By contrast, the appropriation (the transformation of trans-subjective possibilities into existential ones) takes place within the mode of operation of existential agency, and becomes accomplished by the Self-cooperating-with-existential agency. Though the position of trans-subjective existentialism I defend opposes in several respects Sartrean existentialism, the motif of transforming trans-subjective possibilities into existential ones can be regarded as an extension of Sartre’s arguments against transcendental ego. The insistence that the intentionality of consciousness is not grounded upon a transcendental ego leads to an existentialist radicalization of classical phenomenology. In a similar manner, the insistence that the “possibility for having existential possibilities” lies in the way of being of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency – granted that this way of being does not have a hidden transcendental structure – radicalizes the phenomenological analysis of trans-subjectivity. According to the perspective that revises classical phenomenology, there is a transcendental condition of existing-through-choosing-possibilities that evades any appeal to transcendental ego. From the perspective of trans-subjective existentialism – to return to the argument against general transcendental structure embedded in existential agency – the transcendental conditions cannot be conceptualized and represented through a metatheory, since these are contextually valid conditions: In each context-made-present, there are conditions for appropriating trans-subjective possibilities and conditions for opening a leeway for existential choices. Accordingly, these conditions can be taken into consideration by making use of contextual transcendental arguments, which gives me the opportunity to discuss a further aspect of the problematic about these arguments. In any particular context-made-present, the arguments should specify the conditions in terms of a necessary relationship between appropriating a trans-subjective possibility and opening a leeway for making existential choices. Generally speaking, the transcendental is what by transcending the (manifested kind of) experience poses necessary conditions for the possibility of (that kind of) experience. Kantian transcendentalism rests on the correlation between absolute transcendence and invariant conditions for possibility. By contrast, a conceptualization appealing to the double hermeneutic and guided by trans-subjective existentialism pre-

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supposes a correlation between situated transcendence and contextually specified conditions for possibility: In each particular context, there is a horizon that specifically transcends – by opening certain trans-subjective possibilities and concealing others – what becomes constituted in that context. The contextual transcendental arguments make explicit the correlation between situated transcendence and contextually specified conditions for articulation of meaning. These arguments ought to be formulated by studying the regime of the temporalizing of temporality (of interplaying practices and possibilities) through which the context (including its conditions for articulating meaning) is made present.³⁰

4.4 Trans-subjective possibilities and existential choices Here is an example that should elucidate the difference between appropriating trans-subjective opportunities and making choices of possibilities. The decision one takes to change his form of life by moving from a big industrial city to a rural province can by no means be analyzed in terms of inauthentic and authentic existence. One simply looks for a radical change in his rhythm of life. The reason could be one’s total emotional exhaustion by being excellent professional, active trade unionist, unsuccessful husband, politically engaged person, etc. The spontaneous decision results in one’s positioning towards a new complexity of various assemblages of practices. It is through this positioning that one appropriates an initial opportunity (trans-subjective possibility) to restart his life in a rural province. Appropriating such an opportunity – say, the opportunity to organize a subsistence agricultural setting for his survival – contextualizes one’s being in

 David Carr meticulously reconstructs the “paradox of subjectivity” – a paradox related to the dual existence of the self as empirical and transcendental ego – in the transcendental tradition. He concludes that from the natural attitude’s standpoint, the transcendental subject is a mere fiction, whereas from the transcendental attitude’s viewpoint, “the world as a whole, including my (empirical) self within it looms as … reality placed in abeyance.” (Carr 1999, 135). This paradox exists only insofar as one posits a (methodological and/or ontological) primacy of the transcendental consciousness. Carr argues that the Daseinsanalytik also belongs to this tradition since Dasein is meaning-bestowing, world-constituting intentionality. In my view, existential analytic can only be represented in this (Husserlian) way, if the trans-subjective facticity of existence is completely ignored. Carr is right that the tradition which puts the transcendental consciousness first is a critique of metaphysics of the subject. Yet it is a critique based on the metaphysical presuppositions of the philosophical project of modernity. Overcoming the “paradox of subjectivity” by radically discarding these presuppositions implies a rejection of any absolute empirical-transcendental distinction on which the paradox rests. Within the interplay of practices and possibilities, this distinction is always already contextualized.

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the new complexity of practices. The positioning creates an initial context in which one faces a leeway of possibilities regarding his being as a smallholder farmer. Choosing and actualizing some of them (say, the use of techniques preserving the fertility of the soil, the use of organic fertilizers, the kind of cooperation with other farmers, and so on) opens a new context and leads to one’s repositioning towards the complexity of practices. The new context offers a new opportunity – say, the opportunity to situate oneself in a certain way within the local public life. This is a new trans-subjective possibility of existing as a farmer in a rural province. In taking the decision to appropriate the new trans-subjective possibility, one faces a leeway of possibilities regarding the organization of one’s social life (making friendships, communicating with the local administration, participating in festivals and ceremonies, accepting strange customs, and so on). Reflexive positioning, ongoing contextualization, appropriating trans-subjective possibilities, and making choices of contextual possibilities in each particular context run parallel and are mutually reinforcing. Since positioning in which opportunities arise is not only situated but also entangled with the interplay of practices and possibilities, the facticity of practices enacts both (a) the contextual revealing of trans-subjective possibilities and (b) the Self’s appropriation of these possibilities within her personal existence. From ontic point of view, (a) and (b) are completely separate events – the former is supposedly a socio-cultural event, while the latter expresses a psychological process in the personal development. Nevertheless, the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency ontologically unites them. Against this background, one can argue that the way of being of the Self in the facticity of practices is the way of transforming trans-subjectively generated possibilities into contextual possibilities. Sartre cuts off the dimension of transforming trans-subjective possibilities when, for instance, discussing the sense in which a war is my war. The war (as an inauthentic lifeform) becomes my war via my positioning towards trans-subjective contexts in which the war is meaningfully constituted. The existential possibilities of committing suicide or undertaking desertion, thereby avoiding a participation in the war – as well as the existential possibilities of becoming a war hero or serving the honor of my family by participating the war – are possibilities arising from my positioning towards certain contexts in which the war is existentially meaningful. These possibilities can be chosen or rejected because my positioning unveils to me the war as a possible lifeform. But in my positioning, I am always already transcended by the interplay of practices and trans-subjective possibilities. My Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency within this interplay contextually makes the war meaningful, without, of course, trans-

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forming the war into an authentic lifeform.³¹ Arguing that my positioning (and the appropriation of the war as my war) is from the very outset involved in the hermeneutic circularity of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity runs against Sartre’s doctrine that the human being’s state of passing-beyond belongs to the “universe of human subjectivity”. According to the alternative I suggest, the connection between subjectivity and transcendence belongs to the way of being of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. It is the claim that existence precedes essence that prohibits a splitting of the possibilities (as discussed so far) into two kinds. Assuming that (a) there are possibilities independent of personal existence, and (b) they are only subsequently internalized in this existence through the way in which the personal Self makes choices would violate this claim. As a result, the splitting turns out to be unavoidable. However, the assumption based on (a) and (b) is wrong. Its weak point is implied by the adverb “subsequently”. Using it suggests that the existential possibilities are produced through the internalization of another sort of possibilities generated prior to the personal existence. Moreover, if there are possibilities supposedly undergoing a certain transformation before becoming existential possibilities of the personal Self, then the doubt remains that there is something beyond existence – something capable of generating what personality can choose. By implication, this “something” would allegedly be able to determine (as essence) the Self’s choices (as existence). To be sure, thinking in this way – though intuitively justified – is in blatant conflict with the existentialist way of prioritizing existence. Existentialists of various sorts have good reasons for insisting on the unitary status of possibilities within the Self’s personal existence. Admitting that along with the possibilities revealed and chosen within the personal life – that is, the possibilities that are not preexisting the personal Self’s choices, but are in a sense generated by these choices – there are possibilities that are trans-subjectively generated would imply a dualism that threatens to open the door to essentialism. As already mentioned, from a strongly existentialist point of view, the social life in which the Self’s way of being is embedded provides various alternatives and opportunities, but only personal existence generates possibilities to be chosen. In making existential choices, the Self makes her existence. I agree with such an argument. But my contention is that it can be accepted only if one treats the subject of making choices in terms of the Self-cooperating-with-ex This statement implies that existential agency co-operates with the Self not only by enabling positioning towards contextually revealed opportunities within an authentic lifeform. Making non-authentic lifeforms or other assemblages of practices contextually meaningful in the Self’s existence also belongs to this co-operation.

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istential-agency (as embracing the unity of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity), and not as an enclosed self. Arguing in this way is the crux of trans-subjective existentialism. (Even when the personal Self is totally individualistically stylized, stripped of her being in practices, and shortened as trivial and formal biographic factuality – as opposed to what Dilthey and Misch scrutinize in terms of “biographic and autobiographic facticity” – the Self does not morph into a punctual self.³²) It is the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency that at once opens horizons of possibilities, and – by organizing ensembles of practices – appropriates and actualizes these possibilities. In line with the (strictly individualist-existentialist) claim that actors are condemned to be free, I will further elaborate on the concept of existential agency by holding the view that there is no horizon of possibilities opened before making choices (i. e., before existence). Yet holding this view does not exclude that the process of choosing implies – through its enactment – a transformation within what is chosen. The observation that the appropriation of trans-subjective possibilities and the choices of contextual possibilities are on a par (instead of being consecutive occurrences) implies that this transformation does not precede existence. Therefore, it is congruent with the tenets of trans-subjective existentialism. There is no chronological order between appropriating trans-subjective possibilities and making existential choices. Both processes are involved in the same hermeneutic circularity which – in enabling the ecstatic unity of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity – temporalizes the Self’s way of being within the interplay of practices and possibilities. The Self conceived in terms of trans-subjective existentialism appropriates opportunities and makes choices in concert with trans-subjectively alienated agency operating within the interplay of practices and possibilities. From the perspective of this existentialism, I should like to repeat with a slight modification a claim formulated in another context: The co-operation with trans-subjectively alienated agency does not diminish the radical responsibility which the

 Daniel Dennett (1981, 269 – 285) defines six necessary conditions for identifying the reality of personhood: rational behavior, intentionality, an attitude toward what person is (in the sense that the way of treating a human individual as a person is constitutive for her being a person), capability of responsiveness (or of reciprocating), capability of communication, and self-awareness. Taken together (without further qualification), these conditions exactly define the meaning of “punctual self”. This observation does not imply that Dennett – who is a prominent champion of a narrative approach to personhood, and a deconstructionist about any hidden essence of the self – is committed to a punctual view about the Self. (On his conception of the self as a “fictional character” who is always in a process of narrating itself, see especially Dennett 1992. See in this regard also Carr 1999, 123 – 124.)

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Self is condemned to take in her existing. The Self’s choices take place within the interplay, but the interplay does not “divest” responsibility from the Self for the choices made. The argument for radicalizing the responsibility of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency is simple: Without existential choices, there is no existential agency operating in the facticity of practices. The Self is responsible for enacting existential agency in articulating a lifeform. This claim ontologically assumes that without actors’ choices there would be no characteristic hermeneutic situations within the interplay of practices and possibilities, and the sui generis reality of the authentic cultural forms of life would not take place (Ginev 2018, 157– 160). On a further assumption, the particular choices cannot be regarded as atomistic acts, since making a single choice tacitly presupposes the hermeneutic circularity of (the meaningful units produced by) the Self’s activity and (the whole of meaning of) a configuration of practices. The same circularity puts into operation the transformation of trans-subjective possibilities into existential ones. The transformation occurs on the territory of existence, and is driven by the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. In operating in and through hermeneutic circularity, existential agency can never be exactly located. It enables the entanglement of the actors’ selves with the contexts constituted by the interplay of practices and possibilities. To reiterate, the appropriation of possibilities belongs to the trans-subjective being of the Self as existing through making choices and taking decisions. The Self is, on the one hand, thrown in an ocean of myriad trans-subjective possibilities contextually engendered by various assemblages of practices. On the other hand, the Self is in an ecstatic unity with horizons of possibilities she chooses and appropriates in her existence. Phrased slightly differently, the transformation under discussion is part and parcel of the ecstatic unity of the Self and the countless horizons of possibilities corresponding to assemblages of concerted practices in which the Self’s participates. Later I am going to defend the view that the transformation of trans-subjectively engendered possibilities into possibilities appropriated in the Self’s personal existence also contributes to the Self’s pluralization of I-positions. When one takes into account that the same ecstatic unity of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity also characterizes the status of possibilities, one would have good reasons to admit that the conceptualization of this status demands the implementation of the ontological difference. This statement does not amount to the simple claim that the possibilities open to personal choices and subjected to the Self’s subjectivity are of factual (ontic) nature, whereas the possibilities (opportunities) generated beyond the Self’s “motivational economies” of wishes, desires, intentions, and plans belong to the facticity of practices. The reading of the statement should be as follows: The unity of trans-subjective and existential

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possibilities has various factual manifestations, but its conceptualization can only be achieved through scrutinizing the facticity of practices. Hence, any kind of dichotomous dualism regarding the possibilities has to be rejected. Such a dualism might emerge only under the presumption that the two sorts of possibilities are two present-at-hand realms that “enter into a contact” via the choosing acts, whereby the acts are to be treated as a mediatory activity also present-at-hand. Since the two sorts of possibilities do not preexist the process of transformation as discussed above and the process of making existential choices, no one of them can be addressed separately from the ecstatic unity of the Self and the interplay of practices and possibilities. Accordingly, the only way of being of the two sorts of possibilities is within and through the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency the conceptualization of which does not leave any room for the metaphysics of presence. The conceptualization of the Self-integrated-with-existential-agency also rules out essentialist and objectivist presuppositions. In exerting judgmental reflexivity when making choices, the Self narratively organizes her experiences in a manner that allows the construction of narrative identities. “Narrating the Self” is accomplished by the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency, and is fore-structured by the interplay of practices and possibilities. Theorists of autobiography as a narrative genre draw the attention on narrator’s techniques of individualizing the protagonist’s story by attributing a crucial change in this story to a belief, a conviction, a thought (Bruner 2001, 31). They call the episodes of such crucial change “turning points”. One can extend the concept of turning points to cover all situations (episodes) in the Self’s life in which she unfolds special narratives for coping with the appropriation of a certain trans-subjective possibility (opportunity) that opens a new leeway for making existential choices. Making these choices prompts the Self’s positioning towards further contexts in which the Self might appropriate new trans-subjective possibilities. The Self individualizes her life by opening new horizons of existential choices. In so doing, the Self succeeds in gaining a specific narrative identity anytime when the appropriation of a trans-subjective possibility takes place. According to Jerome Bruner (2001, 32), the narrative representations of turning points are “a way in which people free themselves in their self-consciousness from their history, their banal destiny, and conventionality.” These representations also concern people’s reflexive positioning towards their entanglement with practices. A narrative identity of the Self is precisely a representation of a turning point that (a) brings into play such a reflexive positioning, and (b) opens a leeway for existential choices. Any narrative capable of creating identity at a turning point succeeds in emplotting (configuring) the entities enabling such a point. The most important

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among these entities are the positioning towards a context, the evaluative attitude towards a particular state of the Self’s entanglement with practices, the specification of an I-position, the preferences towards possible partners, the awareness of coming responsibilities, and the horizon of expectations. Accordingly, the Self gains through such a narrative a contextual-positional identity with regard to the way in which the Self affectively understands and assesses her entanglement with configurations of practices. In contrast to the integral personal narrative of the Self’s autobiography – as including patterns and cycling processes of growth and decay – a narrative that succeeds in constructing a turning point “documents” a particular transformation of trans-subjective possibilities into existential ones. Such a transformation can later become ignored from a perspective aiming at an autobiographic reconstruction of the Self. A narrative that constructs a turning point does not result from retrospective recapitulation, but belongs to the ongoing process of narrating the Self. To reiterate, it is not necessarily part and parcel of the post festum rationalization of the Self’s integral personal identity.³³ Finally, narratives about turning points “document” the ways in which the Self apprehends her involvement in characteristic hermeneutic situations in which possibilities for articulating lifeforms become opened. What marks a “turning point” in the Self’s personal life is the appropriation of a trans-subjective possibility for the lifeform’s articulation that coevally opens a leeway for making new existential choices. The example of “our lawyer” tacitly refers to two turning points in his life. The first one is not when he has participated the professional everydayness of practices articulating the juridical paradigm of textualism. The turning point has taken place when our lawyer has re This rationalization might be conceived in terms of “defensive, fictional strategies for convincing ourselves that our lives do indeed have some semblance of meaning.” (Freeman 2001, 294). Speaking of a narrative rationalization of one’s life in this way is completely on a par with that paradigm of conceptualizing narrative phenomena which assumes that the meaning one attributes to totalities like human lives and historical episodes entirely results from the imposition of emplotted narratives upon manifolds of occurrences, events, particular actions and interactions, etc. Doubtless, this constructivist paradigm has great achievements in historiography, social anthropology, cultural studies, and many other disciplines. Yet the paradigm’s champions tend to neglect that there is ongoing constitution of meaning before any imposition of a narrative takes place. As I already argued with regard to Ricoeur’s conception of mimesis: Since the constitution of meaning (in one’s life) is always characterized by a certain regime of temporalizing of temporality, one has good reasons to insist that the pre-narrative constitution of meaning involves phenomena that are already configured in a form resembling a temporalized plot. Arguing in this way opens the door for advocating a conception of pre-narrativity. The concept of the Self is intimately tied to (a) contextual narrative identities related to the construction of turning points; (b) pre-narrative entanglement with the interplay of practices and possibilities; and (c) continuous narration that mediates between (a) and (b).

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alized that not the meaning of words composing a legal text, but its whole meaning is what matters, since the whole meaning has the character of transcendent authority. (At this point, textualism has become for him an authentic professional lifeform.) By the same token, the other turning point in his life has not happened when he has started to perform ritualized and ceremonial practices of religious life, but when he, for instance, has undertaken an innovative Christological interpretation aiming at an enrichment of his profane life with new meanings. But if our lawyer is not able to eliminate the personal discrepancies arising out of the lifeforms he actively articulates, he has no chance of achieving personal authenticity. In contrast to the turning points which result from appropriated possibilities for participating in new lifeforms, the “moment of vision” is the moment at which the Self is capable of bringing in harmony the transcendent meanings in which he believes. As mentioned, the moment of vision cannot be reduced to a particular “now”. It involves a whole regime of temporalizing of the temporality of the Self’s existing. The Self can achieve authentic personal existence, if and only if she is existing through the unified temporalizing of the temporality of her personal life. Having incongruent regimes of the temporalizing of the temporality of one’s personal life due to one’s participation in incompatible – though authentic – lifeforms is a highly dangerous existential situation. The predicament is not provoked by the fact that the Self’s way of being is split into multiple independent trajectories of opening future that makes present by unveiling what has been. As stressed several times, the coexistence of such trajectories is a normal state for the Self’s plural existence in various lifeforms. The predicament is the Self’s inability to harmonizes these trajectories in united regime of the temporalizing of temporality of the personal life. If there is no way of bringing the trajectories into harmony, the Self’s personality is seriously threatened. The Self situated in and transcended by practices belonging to various cultural lifeforms is destined to morph into a dialogical Self. There is a trend in cultural psychology that conceptualizes the dialogical Self in connection with the growing multiplicity of person’s cultural identities evoked by the diversification of cultural forms of life. The focus in this trend is placed on the question of how the situation of expanding multiculturalism becomes reflected in the selves of individuals. In particular, it is a focus on “the mediations of multiple identifications within individual constructions of self in the context of migration that is characterized by rapid social and cultural change.” (van Meijl 2012, 99). In line with this trend, I will schematically adumbrate in the next section the nexus of the culturally pluralized dialogical Self and existential agency.

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4.5 Existential agency and the production of the dialogical self Charles Taylor is the theorist who has a historical priority in introducing and working out the concept of the dialogical Self. In connection with his criticism of the image of punctual self – as this image has been inherited by the modern human and social sciences from classical modern philosophy – he discussed the concept before the emergence and development of dialogical Self theory. Although not elaborated in details (as compared with the later psychological concepts of the dialogical Self developed in this theory), Taylor’s concept prompts a theorizing of the Self by means of the ontological difference. This is why I will start my considerations in this section with a brief analysis of his concept. As is well known, Taylor is preoccupied with a persistent criticism of modern (monological) subject as a philosophical image that presupposes an atomistic self disengaged from embodied agency and deprived of social embedding. For him, this disengagement is created by several practices promoting the cognitive discipline of looking at oneself as an isolated first-person-singular self. (Early modern philosophers like Descartes and Locke epistemologically stylized the notion of knowing subject in accordance with these practices, thereby inaugurating the figure of the self-sufficient epistemic subject capable both of representing the world and cognitively constructing the world by means of representations.) The monological subject “is in contact with an ‘outside’ world, including other agents …, but this contact is through the representations she or he has ‘within’.” (Taylor 1991, 307). Reducing the subject to a “mechanism capable of processing representations” makes the self as a counterpart to this subject into a “center of monological consciousness”. The image of the dialogical Self begins to emerge when one conceives of human being not as the site of representations, but as engaged in practices within the world. Seen in this way, representations cease to be the primary source of understanding, “they are just islands in the sea of our unformulated practical grasp on the world.” (Taylor 1991, 308). In Taylor’s account, understanding resides in practices and is embodied. In reaching this conclusion, he paves the way for making sense of the Self as living within and through conversation. Since understanding is embodied, the human body turns out to be the intersection of practices and that kind of primary understanding which does not rely on the “inner space of representations”. Putting the human body (and the “bodily know-how”) at the center of humans’ practical being in the world is Taylor’s main assumption for working out the concept of the dialogical Self. No doubt, he is not referring to the naturalistically objectified body. What he has in mind is the human body as conceptualized by theorists like Merleau-

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Ponty, Foucault, and Bourdieu. (For all of them, the bodily Self is a “non-thing”, since it never becomes a factually present entity. The factual non-presence of the embodied Self requires non-empiricist approaches for its conceptualization.) When Taylor elaborates on a conception of agency that should restore a “sense of embedding in body, world, and society”, he refers to the socially contextualized body of the Self whose conceptualization would lead to a fundamental departure from the “formal theories” deriving basic values from procedures, and detaching the right from any substantive notion of the good. Radically surmounting foundationalism through such a conceptualization of the embodied and embedded Self opens up an avenue towards a moral philosophizing that would cease to pay tribute to “the affinity to radical freedom and formal thinking”. Despite these elaborations on the non-individualistic conception of agency, however, Taylor presents the socially contextualized body as an absolute point of departure in philosophically coping with the Self’s being in social practices. The contextual embeddedness of the embodied Self is the starting point for understanding how “our practices shape our lives, the way they change in history, the way this change, or resistance to change, can figure in our moral and political striving.” (Taylor 2000, 123). This conclusion can hardly be accepted without reservation. Before taking issue with it, let me point out the basic assumption of Taylor’s approach: By being embedded in social practices, the embodied Self proves to be always already dialogically socialized. Since social practices constantly form the background of any action and activity of the Self, the latter is social by its very nature. The Self’s attitude to the world and to others becomes individualized via the construction of personal identities within the public spaces in which the Self is an interlocutor. A person is capable of achieving individuality by actively constructing her/his identities through the dialogues s/he carries out by being involved in social practices. Individuality is not a primordial (“naturally given”) facet of the Self, but something that she has to achieve in a dialogical manner. Thus, one should attribute an “inescapable role to the background of practices” when at issue is the Self’s dialogical individualization. Taylor’s way of dealing with this role is innovative and avoids the flaws of the already criticized view of background practices. Yet he has very little to say about the dialogicity implied by his concept of dialogical Self. He points out that human beings are constituted in conversation, and argues that for doing justice to this conversational nature much more apt is Bakhtin’s polyphony than Mead’s interactional behaviorism. But this still does not specify the kind of dialogue taking place in the practical life of the dialogical Self. If dialogicity only consists in the sharing of agency, then the concept aimed at is too amorphous to allow proper empirical studies on the dialogical plurality of the Self-involved-in-practices.

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Like Dreyfus, Taylor constantly underscores the role of “embodied background understanding” (or “practical understanding” enabled by “background practices”). Yet Taylor implements the term “background” in a more sophisticated manner. According to him, “the background is what I am capable of articulating, that is, what I can bring out of the condition of implicit, unsaid contextual facilitator – what I can make articulate, in other words.” (Taylor 1995, 69; see also Taylor 2016, 310 – 312). Used in this way, the term “background” connotes not simply implicit factors tacitly operating behind the agents’ backs. Agents can make the background articulate since the background is “at the same time” projected as a foreground of their activities. If the background is “at the same time” a foreground, then the unity of the former and the latter – in which agents’ embodied activities are embedded – hints at the hermeneutic-phenomenological conceptual figure of fore-structuring that temporalizes (to remain in Taylor’s terminology) the agents’ rule-following behavior. The unity of background and foreground has pretty much the same status as the phenomenological unity of temporality – a coming future that in having been makes present contexts of rule-following behavior. Thus, the consequent unfolding of Taylor’s idea of background understanding places the accent on the kind of fore-structuring of activities that temporalizes the performances of these activities. Yet if one goes on to decisively substitute ongoing fore-structuring for (passive) background, one should also take into consideration the consequences for the status of the body. The human body is also embedded in the temporalizing unity of background and foreground. Thus considered, the human body is no longer endowed with centrality. By being situated within and transcended by practices, the body is decentered in its state of situated transcendence. Like all entities situated in practices, the body – treated not as the biological body of the physically located and bounded individual agent, but in terms of the non-located bodily activities of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency – is not only contextualized, but is also subjected to the logic of inter-contextuality discussed in the preceding chapter. By implication, the performances of the embodied Self are dispersed over indefinite contexts constituted by configured practices. Like the strategy of conceptualizing the Self based on overcoming the centrality of the ego and self-consciousness, conceptualizing the human body in the perspective of situated transcendence should avoid privileging the ego’s bodily performances. (Heidegger [1962a, 141– 144] makes a strong case for such a view. In introducing the notion of existential spatiality, he argues that the way of spatializing attributed to bodily performances cooperates with a coeval spatializing resulting from the world’s transcendence of these performances. Existential spatiality is produced by the human-body-within-the-world.)

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In the same way in which the embodied Self is inter-contextualized within the changing configurations of practices, these practices are embodied entities. This statement sounds trivially true, but its reading should not be misread by arguing that configured practices are embodied because any particular practice is determined by agential behavior that for its part consists of agents’ bodily acts. In the light of the qualitative leap from an isolated practice (fully determined by agential behavior) and the interrelatedness of configured practices, the fact that the former is bodily organized cannot be used as evidence that the latter has “embodied character”. Configured practices have in a sense such character, but the argument for their “embodiment” cannot be devised by invoking the bodily organization of any one (isolated) practice. Any particular practice integrated with changing configurations of practices exists through the play of differences it creates via the alterations of its relatedness to other practices. This play also concerns the bodily components of practice’s organization. They cease to be located in the practice’s performance, and become dislocated within the changing configurations. Nonlocality is a significant feature of the bodily performance of a practice-integrated-with-configured-practices. Accordingly, the argument for the embodied character of an interrelatedness of practices lies in the observation that the bodily performances of the embodied Self are dispersed over configured practices and inter-contextualized. Seen in this way, the embodied Self (situated in and transcended by the practices of authentic lifeforms) is the embodiment of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency.³⁴ Giddens nicely addresses the problematic of the self’s embodiment in social practices. As is well known, he advocates the view that self-identity is not a distinctive trait, but is the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her biography. This view has important consequences for the unity of self and body as embodied self. Giddens is interested in the “miraculous occurrence” of the orderliness of everyday life. This orderliness rests on continuity in the reproduction of typical situations. Self-identity takes place both in the prolifera Insisting on the decentered and dissipated character of human-body-within-configured-practices does not preclude the conceptualization of human body in terms of a pan-cultural universal. This conceptualization is typical for Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s work. She argues that the (postmodern) disciplinary fragmentation of perspectives on the manifestations of human body exacerbates the neglect of unitary experience. The mission of phenomenology is to carry out analyses of fundamental bodily experiences, and to show “how fundamental cultural practices and beliefs, even those stretching back to stone tool-making, are in fact founded upon the pan-cultural universal that is the living hominid body.” (Sheets-Johnstone 2016, 257). In the light of Sheets-Johnstone’s conception, I would say that human body is a pan-cultural universal whose only possible way of being is the way of being-dispersed over innumerable assemblages of cultural practices.

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tion of situations and the continuity preserving the orderliness of everyday life. In presuming awareness about this duality of proliferation and preservation, self-identity is “something that has to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual.” (Giddens 1991, 52). Thus considered, self-identity ensures a consistent feeling of biographical continuity – a feeling that is lacking in several pathological states. An essential merit of Giddens’s approach consists in undoing the assumption that there is “the I” as the un-socialized part of the Self that somehow has to be connected with the “social self”. “The I” is always already integrated with the reflexively achieved biographic narrative of the social self. At this point the embodied Self again comes to the fore. Because the child learns about its body primarily in terms of its contextual interactions with entities within the world, the child has a contextualized image of its body from the very beginning of its reflexively organized life. For the adult, the body is a practical mode of coping with the situations in one’s life. The situations are meaningful for the embodied Self only against the background of her biographical continuity. In juxtaposing the last two statements, Giddens (1991, 58) contends that the “regularized control of the body is a fundamental means whereby a biography of self-identity is maintained.” In my view, it is the way of narrating the Self that copes with the inter-contextual dispersal of the embodied Self. In the perspective of biographical continuity (as uniting regimes of the temporalizing of temporality), the Self is all over (in all situations, contexts, and settings) where the Self’s embodied activities are inter-contextually spread. The feeling of biographical continuity goes hand in hand with the feeling of bodily integrity. Both feelings sustain through narrating the Self. I criticized Taylor’s concept of the dialogical Self for leaving little room for empirical (ontic) studies on the “multivoiced Self” and the dialogicity on which this multivoicedness rests. Paradoxically enough, in insisting on the dialogical background of personality’s existence, Taylor assumes the image of a unitary and homogenous selfhood. It is this assumption that dialogical Self theory strongly attacks. This theory is anticipated by George H. Mead’s view that the “me” of the socialized person represents the authoritative voice of the generalized Other in person’s psychic life. Leaning on the interdisciplinary tradition of dialogism, a lot of research scenarios have, in recent years, succeeded in conceptualizing empirical manifestations of the Self’s inherent dialogical polyphony. The greatest merit of dialogical Self theory is the approach to the Self as a “conversation”, instead of a monologically self-sufficient entity. A guiding thesis of this theory is that particular “relationships that emerge between people can also emerge within the self” without invoking pathological states such as a dissociative identity disorder (Hermans and Hermans-Konopka 2010, 120). Events

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like self-conflict, self-interrogation, and self-consultancy illustrate relationships between positions within the Self. I will try to show that the basic criticism which should be levelled at dialogical Self theory concerns the way in which it sticks to the internal-external opposition in conceptualizing the phenomena of positioning.³⁵ This criticism will be put forward in connection with the concept of the Self-cooperating-with-existential agency. According to trans-subjective existentialism, the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency progressively individualizes the personal Self. The nexus of growing personal individualization and the articulation of lifeforms is manifested as the Self’s ongoing positioning towards (a) contextually arising opportunities and (b) significant others playing important roles in the formation of a particular I-position. The enactment of positioning is inseparable from the existential choices through which the personal Self sustains her identities related to her I-positions. Like all other entities involved in the facticity of practices, the Self’s I-positions and identities are exposed to a constant re-contextualization. As a result, new Ipositions arise from participating in new lifeforms. Positioning is inseparable from the way in which existential agency opens up trans-subjective possibilities that can contextually be appropriated by the Self. By implication, positioning is performed by the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. Positioning enables and becomes enabled by the entanglement of the Self with configured practices in the contextual performances of which the Self partakes. With respect to the ontological difference, it would be wrong to say that positioning is an ontological phenomenon, while the explicit positions (and the cultural identities corresponding to them) are its ontic appearances. Indeed, the ongoing positioning of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency concerns the whole way of being of the ecstatic unity of the Self’s subjectivity and the trans-subjectivity of interplaying practices and possibilities. Nonetheless, positioning has several empirical manifestations that can be conceptualized in various ontic manners, ranging from developmental psychology to cultural history. The particular I-positions and identities seems to be factually present entities. But when one takes into account that these entities are not to be conceptualized by disentangling them from their ongoing re-contextualization, one realizes that

 On a critical analysis of the dialogical Self theory from the viewpoint of the hermeneutic theory of practices, see Ginev (2018, 157– 180) and Ginev (forthcoming). In a nutshell, the main point of this analysis is as follows: The mini-society is addressed in terms of a discrete manifold. The discourse of “differences between the parts of the Self” prompts descriptions that are entirely in accordance with the paradigm of discreteness. Though the dialogical theorists do justice to several hermeneutic aspects of the dialogue, their conceptualization of positioning rather takes the form of a dynamic structuralism.

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the alleged factual presence of the Self’s I-positions is rooted in the facticity of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. By implication, the temporal-spatial characteristics of these positions cannot be addressed by implementing physicalist notions of space and time. Like the ongoing positioning, the formation and reformation of the Self’s I-positions and narrative identities is on a par with the personal life’s temporalizing of temporality.³⁶ (But again, stating this is by no means an argument against the possibilities of studying the I-positions and identities in diverse ontic terms.) According to dialogical Self theory, the notion of I-position predominantly refers to the consequences of the unfolding process in which the significant Other becomes an emancipated voice in the phonicity of my Self. Along the same lines, “the I-positions of the imaginary inner landscape can be endowed with voices, can then become characters of a story, each voice telling her own story …” (Bertau 2004, 38). In the present chapter, the notion of I-position is implemented in a slightly different sense. The concept of I-position is associated, first and foremost, with the contextual constitution of a person’s cultural identity (as related to a lifeform). Such a position – and the corresponding identity – becomes apparent when even a relatively small change in the lifeform takes place, granted that this change shifts the horizon of making existential choices. Here is a relevant example. Paul’s identity as a “scholar who resists making compromises with his beliefs” underwent an essential repositioning when he – upon a painful hesitation – decided to appropriate the possibility to borrow a theoretical framework that does not belong to his paradigm of scientific work. In facing the challenge of making untypical choices in the new contexts of doing research, the I-position corresponding to Paul’s novel identity as a theorist entered into a fertile dialogue with positions represented and defended by his previous academic antagonists. Since he still retains limited ties with his original paradigm of scientific work, Paul’s integral identity as a researcher is in the new contexts in a limbo state. His entire professional way of being seems to become disunited. Upon the split each of Paul’s two positions as a researcher is trying to push the other into the background, narratively relegating it to a part of his “personal archive”. Neither of them, however, succeeds in totally eliminating the other, thereby “archiving” its competitor. This self-conflict can only be resolved by an apt dialogue between the I-position as a “conservative theoretician” and the I-position as an

 Elsewhere, I introduced the concept of chronotopes of the Self’s positioning – a concept that unites positioning and positions in terms of the temporalizing and spatializing of the Self-cooperating-with-existential agency (Ginev 2018, 135– 137).

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“intellectual adventurer”. Fortunately, the dialogue between the positions – in contrast to the much more complicated case with “our lawyer” – has a great chance for turning the tension into a smouldering conflict, thereby consolidating Paul’s identities as a researcher. Moreover, Paul can achieve this without needing a new “moment of vision”. The dialogical overcoming of the split between the I-positions suffices to prevent divergent regimes of the temporalizing of temporality in his personal life.³⁷ The “continuity of the Self” under the conditions of growing “departmentalization” of the Self’s cultural being is a prominent theme of several social-theoretical discourses. As early as the beginning of this century, there was consent that this theme is no longer discussed by presupposing an inborn essence of the self supposedly reflecting the essence of human nature (Wagner 2001, 61). The continuity of the Self under the conditions of diversifying I-positions is tightly interwoven with dialogicity as a strategy of self-preservation. In the perspective of trans-subjective existentialism, one should focus on how ongoing positioning mediates between the facticity of interplaying practices and possibilities in which the Self is situated, and the Self’s capacity to come to terms with the “turning points” in her existence. At stake in the studies guided by this perspective will be the way in which the Self experiences how reliable are her I-positions when (at certain “turning points”) the Self’s integral cultural identity becomes challenged due to the appropriation of new opportunities, and the choices of new existential possibilities. It is the Self’s co-operation with existential agency that assures continuity of the Self in the course of diversification of the Self’s positions. Tentatively, the dialogical Self is the Self who constitutes sociality or intersubjectivity within her own existence. In surmounting the contrast between

 In reflecting on a book devoted to self-therapy, Giddens (1991, 75) calls attention to how such a regime might be recast in terms of the Self’s “trajectory of development from the past to the anticipated future.” Are the regimes of temporalizing to be equated with trajectories of development? As mentioned several times, the figure of trajectory is quite appropriate for making sense of the integral temporalizing of the personal life’s temporality, granted that the whole temporalizing of temporality is carried out by the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. Spelling out the figure in this way prevents one from looking at the personal life course as a series of passages. Yet the traditional use of the figure of life’s trajectory – as Giddens’s comment on the self-therapy book shows – still presupposes (what Heidegger [1962a, 377] calls) the “ordinary understanding” of time as a linear development from the past to the anticipated future, which levels off “the ecstatic character of primordial temporality”. Taking into account this character should not to be confused with the self-control of time. The temporalizing of the personal life’s temporality is not something that is “at disposal” for the Self, ready to be controlled in accordance with the Self’s plans and intents.

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the “internal self” and the “external society”, dialogical theorists approach “the intrinsic nature” of the Self in terms of a societal process. In Hubert Hermans’s account, even the persons who the Self strongly rejects as belonging to her existence are “significant constituents” of the “societal process” through which the dialogical Self exists. Following Bakhtin’s celebrated treatment of polyphonic novel, dialogical theorists admit that the dialogue taking place in the dialogical Self’s existence relies on the way in which the Self narrates herself by transforming temporal relations into spatial relations whereby “temporally dispersed events are contracted into spatial oppositions that are simultaneously present.” (Hermans 2011, 659). According to this theory, the Self “internalizes” attitudes of her significant interlocutors at different times in her life.³⁸ But the Self is able to transform the temporal dispersal of the internalized attitudes/voices into a space in which these attitudes/voices and the Self’s contextually formed I-positions enter into a dialogue with one another. The specificity of dialogical Self theory consists in representing the Self as a mini-society of spatially synchronized positions. According to trans-subjective existentialism, the dialogicity of the dialogical Self is enabled and enacted by the way in which existential agency (and the kinds of trans-subjectively alienated human agency) prompt the Self’s positioning towards contextualized opportunities. The Self’s dialogicity does not occur independent of agency alienated in the interplay of practices and possibilities. The nonlocality and other characteristics of the existential spatiality characterizing the Self co-operating with this agency poses the task of defining the concept of the dialogical Self without assuming a border-zone between the self and the non-self. The metaphor of border-zone implies a physical localization of the self allegedly surrounded by non-self. Rejecting this metaphor does not mean that

 Lev Vygotsky is not among the most cited classical authors by the dialogical theorists. But their appeal to various processes of internalization seems to be heavily influenced by his work. (Perhaps the most important source of this influence is the study of van der Veer and Valsiner 1991.) More specifically, dialogical theorists are borrowing from the conception about the intertwining between natural and cultural lines of the person’s development. Mastering cultural tools makes the infant a being condemned to exist by internalizing culture whereby becoming a cultural being. The psychodynamic characteristics of this being can properly be investigated by conceptualizing the way in which the person externalizes herself over the whole course of her mastering linguistic, technological, and other symbolic tools. Mastering cultural tools not only transforms person’s mind, but in a sense also externalizes it. Vygotsky’s (and Luria’s) conception posits a division between a pre-cultural and a cultural stage in child development. More generally, any theory of the Self and person based on the scheme of internalizing culture and externalizing personal skills unavoidably – although in most cases only tacitly – invokes the suspicious dualism of nature and culture.

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the Self cannot be identified by means of spatial (topological) features. It only means that the Self’s spatiality cannot be treated by means of (a) usual geometrical intuitions, and (b) the metaphysical vision of extension as actual presence. Since the Self cannot be localized in “metric space” and “measurable time”, the talk of border-zone seems to be a non sequitur. The idea of a spatial separation of the self and non-self presupposes the picture of the self enclosed in itself – a picture that is still desired and employed in several research programs of the social and human sciences. For trans-subjective existentialism, the Self spatializes her being-in-the-world by positioning herself towards contexts opened up by transsubjectively alienated agency and made present by the interplay of practices and possibilities. When referring to spatial transformations of temporal relations – a central subject in dialogical Self theory – the theorists exploit physicalist notions of time and space. (Dialogical theorists are predominantly concentrating their attention on simultaneity as synchronic extension and succession as temporal extension, supposedly characterizing the spatial-temporal relations within the dialogical Self’s repertoire of positions.) Similarly, such notions come into play when this theory conceptualizes positioning-and-repositioning in temporal terms, and positioning-and-counterpositioning in spatial terms. Applying physicalist notions of space and time is consonant with the “topology” of “outside and inside the self” in dialogical Self theory. Recasting the processes of positioning, repositioning, and counter-positioning in terms of regimes (trajectories) of temporalizing and spatializing within the temporal and spatial horizons of the Self’s being in interplaying practices and possibilities enables an interpretation of the concept of the dialogical Self in terms of trans-subjective existentialism.³⁹ It is this interpretation that rules out any kind of a border zone between the self

 Several dialogical theorists are combining physicalist with psychological concepts of time and space (that is, time and space as functions of perception, memory, imagination, etc.). A case in point is John Barresi’s (2012, 48 – 51) three-dimensional model of the dialogical self. This model fails to address the temporality of positioning, repositioning, and counter-positioning, since this temporality cannot be captured by a combination of physicalist and psychological time. Barresi (2012, 47) is quite correct in asserting that “dialogue between I-positions is more implicit in their transitions and reorganization than explicit as inner voices of one I-position to another, or empathic representation of alter-positions through a meta-position.” Yet precisely this view provides a strong case for the insistence that dialogue takes place not in an abstract relational space of static positions (fully describable in accordance with the paradigm of discreteness), but in the ongoing positioning that – as an ontological facet of the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency – demands for its conceptualization hermeneutic-phenomenological concepts of temporality and spatiality.

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and the non-self by emphasizing the ecstatic unity of the Self with trans-subjective contexts-made-present via configured practices. According to trans-subjective existentialism, the formation of a “mini-society” of I-positions takes place in the ecstatic unity of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity, and sustains due to different kinds of agency alienated in the interplay of practices and possibilities. Phrased differently, the dialogical-Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency is a society of positions taking place in the ecstatic unity of the Self with the interplay of practices and possibilities. There is an expanding society of positions emerging from the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency, and this society cannot be enclosed in the consciousness of the physically-spatially bounded self. Thus considered, the formation of I-positions (including meta-positions) as well as the very process of positioning are to be found on the terrain on which the kinds of alienated agency operate. Stating this implies a further point of divergence: In the framework of the dialogical theory, the concept of meta-position refers to the Self’s capability to “centralize” her-self under the conditions of a culturally provoked decentralization of personality (Dimaggio, Salvatore, Catania 2004). Following the image of the Self as a discrete manifold of I-positions, some champions of this theory consider the emergence of a meta-position to be a response to the need of regulating the interactions between external and internal positions. In countering this view, I admit that the changing meta-positions are not mediators between external and internal positions. Meta-positions are rather the Self’s reflexive strategies of “narrating the Self”. Accordingly, meta-positioning reflexively accompanies the Self’s positioning in various cultural lifeforms, thereby creating a narrative-biographical integrity and integral identity of the Self. Dialogical Self theory – as a theory that favors the inclusive opposition between the Self’s unity and the multiplicity of the Self’s I-positions instead of the exclusive opposition between unity and fragmentation (Hermans 2011, 662) – came on the scene with a rich repertoire of methods for studying the polyphony of internalized voices, and examining the dialogue between the Self’s positions. But in thematizing the processes of positioning, repositioning, and counter-positioning – supposedly putting into effect the Self’s polyphony – dialogical theorists tend to objectify these processes, instead of treating them in terms of ongoing fore-structuring of the Self’s multivoicedness. Roughly, it is the ontological difference between (a) psychological traits and dispositions of particular positions – traits and dispositions fully describable as factual presence – and (b) the facticity of positioning as accomplished by the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency that these theorists fail to take into consideration. As compared with the criticism levelled at Taylor’s overwhelmingly ontological concept, the criticism of dialogical Self theory should be oriented towards the opposite direction:

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The empirical studies designed in accordance with this theory – as a rule, studies distinguished with quite interesting research scenarios – tend to neglect (the non-factual character of) the ecstatic unity of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity in connection with the interpretive being of the multivoiced Self. Assuming (in line with the paradigm of discreteness) that the Self is a manifold of I-positions interacting with “outer positions” commits the conceptualization of the dialogical Self to the epistemic standards of the objectification of factuality. By contrast, assuming that the dynamics of the dialogical Self’s formation is “always already” within the scope of existential agency requires a hermeneutic conceptualization that avoids the reduction of the facticity of what is under inquiry to objectified factuality. The line of argumentation that prioritizes existential agency eschews any kind of dichotomy between external and internal positions, and the corresponding strong demarcation between external and internal dialogues.⁴⁰ To be fair, the efforts to undo this dichotomy/demarcation have also prevailed in the recent developments of the dialogical theory. In substituting the opposition between others-in-the-self and otherness-in-the-self for that between external and internal positions, authors working in this theory succeed in mitigating the dualist assumptions. Nonetheless, they do not succeed in fully overcoming external-internal binarism. Dialogical theorists are still ignoring the (ontologically primordial) unity of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity.

4.6 Conclusion In contrast to Sartre’s existentialism, trans-subjective existentialism does not need the distinction between the Other-as-object and the Other-as-subject (as grounded upon my possibility of being seen by the Other). This distinction is indispensable if the philosophy of consciousness is adopted as a privileged point of reference. Sartre justifies his adoption of this philosophy by (wrongly) criticizing Heidegger for his attempt at bringing “human reality out of its solitude”. For Sartre (1978, 250), existential analytic “takes the ‘outside of self’ sometimes as ‘outside-of-self-toward-self’ and sometimes as ‘outside-self-in-others’.” He then concludes that the two interpretations of the “outside of self” are incompatible. In fact, what Sartre calls “outside-of-the-self-toward-self” is not to be disentan Making the dichotomy into a triple (Raggatt 2012) by differentiating between internal positions (the typical I-positions), external position (the voice of my father speaking in my Self), and outer positions (the real others as interlocutors) does not essentially change the image I am criticizing, since all of the three types are conceived of as spatially delineated entities distinguished by clear boundaries.

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gled from being-with-one-another (Mitdasein) within the transcending world. The Self’s relatedness toward her Self always takes place and becomes enabled by the trans-subjective being-with-one-another. By the same token, the Other-inmy-existence is not divided into the other-as-object and the other-as-subject. The unitary Other-in-my-existence is within my ecstatic unity with the world. More specifically, the Other exists for me insofar as I am positioned to her/him, granted that the positioning cannot be disentangled from the ecstatic unity. The Other’s existence is always already involved in the trans-subjective positioning of my Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. The processes of positioning, repositioning, and counter-positioning are anchored in the Self’s lifeforms, and proceed in accordance with the hermeneutic situations in which the Self’s appropriates trans-subjective possibilities and makes herself through existential choices. According to trans-subjective existentialism, the integrity of the authentic personal Self hinges on the achievement of an integral hermeneutic situation of personal existence that brings into play a unitary regime of the temporalizing of the personal life – a regime beyond the contingent temporalities of the particular I-positions. Narrating the Self seems to be the “mechanism” of reconciling the I-positions (and their narrative identities acquired through participating in diverse cultural lifeforms). As already discussed, narrating the Self fails to perform this task if the dialogue between I-positions participating conflicting lifeforms turns out to be impossible. The conceptualization of the inner-others and the I-positions in terms of trans-subjective existentialism should not be confused with the social-constructionist dissolving of the Self in relationships. In the perspective of social constructionism, the same relational differences which constitute the social world are constituting the self. The point is that the basic cognitive, emotional, and volitional functions through which the self can be identified are not only lodged within social relationships, but are enabled by the latter. The self’s reflexive stance towards these relationships is presented as a vehicle of self-construction within social reality. “The relational self” is able to construct his normal being in this reality as well as to contribute to the social construction of his psychopathological states (Quosh and Gergen 2008). Thematizing the continuity of the Self as temporalizing her social existence remains an open question in social constructionism. To be sure, relational constructivism is apt for portraying the synchronic states of the Self’s development. The views of the (social and self‐) construction of the relational self do not suffice, however, for conceptualizing the Self’s beingin-the-facticity-of-practices. It is precisely the processes of positioning, repositioning, and counter-positioning that release the continuous fore-structuring (within the interplay of practices and possibilities) of the structural relations through which authors like Kenneth Gergen are approaching the relational

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self. These processes are put into operation by the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency, and cannot be conceptualized in accordance with the paradigm of discreteness. As an alternative to the picture of a dialogue assuming strictly localized positions, I will invoke Gadamer’s figure of a dialogue enabled by – and carried out by virtue of – the “fusion of horizons”. According to a strangely sounding claim from Truth and Method, “a genuine conversation is never the one we wanted to conduct.” (Gadamer 2004, 353). The genuine conversation proceeds more as a fusion of interlocutors’ horizons, and less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. In Gadamer’s account, the partners involved in a conversation are far less the leaders of the dialogue than the led. Due to the fusion of horizons, the conversation – as “having a spirit of its own” – is always going beyond the partners’ subjective intentions and dispositions. By the same token, one can state that the interlocutors are led by (dialogically organized) existential agency. In analyzing the intrinsic “hermeneutic logic” of conversation, Gadamer reaches the conclusion that the language-as-dialogical-medium – in which the trans-subjective spirit of conversation holds sway over the participants’ particular intentions – bears its own truth.⁴¹ This is the hermeneutic truth of “the dialogue that we are”.

 “Language as medium of understanding” is a key concept of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Thus considered, the notion of language-as-medium is a requisite for arguing that all kinds of human experience of the world are linguistic in nature: “The articulation of the logos brings the structure of being into language.” (Gadamer 2004, 453). Moreover, in language the structure of being is revealed – so his argument goes – via the structuring (the changing structure) of human experience. The articulation of the logos as resulting in structured manifolds of discrete elements can be studied in ontic perspective by grammar (morpho-syntax), phonetics and phonology, lexicography and lexicology, stylistics, rhetoric, semiotics and semiology, comparative linguistics, prosody, etc. But how being becomes disclosed in the articulation of the logos is an ontological issue that cannot be recast in ontic terms. Yet it is an issue that cannot be approached independently of the ontic studies of language. At the same time, scrutinizing this ontological issue exerts important reverse effects on the conceptual organization of the linguistic disciplines and research programs. Language-as-medium “related to the totality of the world’s beings” mediates this finitude and “the historical nature of man to himself and to the world.” (Gadamer 2004, 454). As expressing the finitude of existence embedded in open horizons of experience, language-as-medium is potentially infinite. The interlocutors who are situated in language-as-medium belong to it, and cannot be treated as punctual subjects who exist in their own right and capable of making everything else an object. Gadamer (2004, 390) specifies his concept in an important way by stating that “language is the universal medium in which understanding occurs”, granted that all understanding is interpretation, “and all interpretation takes place in the medium of a language that allows the object to come into words.” On my reading, language can be a medium and a horizon of discursive articulation, if existential agency constantly oper-

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The linguistic medium constituted by the fusing horizons of intertwined dialogues (including the dialogues the Self carries out with herself in narrating the Self and maintaining biographic continuity) is not external to the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency. It is a medium that exists through its ongoing articulation by means of actualizing possibilities. The fusion of horizons situates and transcends interlocutors’ subjective resources for dialogizing. According to a counterpart of this claim, when intertwined dialogues articulate language as a medium by actualizing dialogical possibilities, the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency participates in this discursive articulation (Ginev, 2014c). In this regard, the fusion of horizons creates a hermeneutic medium of both co-understanding and discursive articulation. Growing co-understanding and discursive articulation are the main dimensions of the articulation of authentic cultural lifeforms. By implication, the Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency is always already within a medium of fusing horizons. Being in this medium, however, does not exclude the silence as part and parcel of the ongoing dialogues. (The theme of the forms of silence – a theme I will only touch upon – is the Kierkegaardian dimension of the Self’s dialogical being. The supporters of dialogical Self theory tend to ignore the role of silence within dialogicity. They do not do justice to the fact that only creatures who could reflexively keep silent are able to carry out dialogues.) Keeping silence is always an actualization of a possibility within the process of conversation. The dynamics of any dialogue taking place in the medium of fusing horizons includes the moments of listening to silence. Jean-Louis Chrétien (2004b, 39) is absolutely right when observing that “speech itself comes from silence and tends towards it, just as it never ceases to accompany it.” Speech, discursive articulation, and dialogue are born from silence that is filled with meaning. Silence is that absence of sound which characterizes the dialogical Self’s positioning within the medium of fusing horizons. As a rule, silence mediates between the dialogues among the Self’s I-positions and the Self’s dialogues with her significant others. Because of this mediation, one can metaphorically state that silence is the voice of existential agency. It is the medium of fusing horizons that gives the interloc-

ates within it. By implication, language is a medium that does not preexist the interactions, processes, and events taking place in it. Language in which existential agency operates is a horizon of possibilities for linguistic expressivity of those who (as locutors and interlocutors) are situated in it. It is the ongoing expressivity of those who choose and appropriate the possibilities that articulates the medium. Or better, language-as-medium is the ongoing fusion of horizons – a concretion of the effective-historical consciousness (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein) which is “more being than a form of consciousness”.

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utors silence to listen and hear, thereby enabling their constant (re)positioning in the dialogical process.⁴² The fusion of horizons is the trans-subjective medium in which interlocutors are engaged in a potentially unstoppable co-understanding by cultivating their capability of posing questions. Co-understanding is neither a fixed state, nor can it – pace Karl-Otto Apel – be defined by means of invariant transcendental conditions for achieving dialogical consensus.⁴³ Co-understanding is a continuous process of posing questions and answering them. This process cannot be represented as a sum of interactive inter-subjective relations consisting of particular acts of understanding. Characterized by its openness and its “logic of question and answer”, co-understanding is from the very outset a trans-subjective phenomenon. For Gadamer, posing questions implies openness, but also limitation. Each question reveals and conceals dialogical possibilities. Understanding in a dialogue is the understanding of the other’s position as an answer to a question the other is posing. In actualizing a dialogical possibility, each act of understanding shifts the horizon of dialogizing. Answering a question and actualizing a dialogical possibility poses a new question. The open whole of possibilities characterizing a particular dialogue is enabled and regulated by the fusion of horizons. Questioning the other’s position examines the questioner’s presuppositions in the course of co-understanding. What is no less important, the fusion of horizons taking place in conversing with the other also “fuses” any difference in kind between the dialogues with interlocutors and the dialogues among the Self’s positions (including the positions of inner-others). The rationale for positioning toward a significant other is often provided by questions posed via dialogues of Ipositions. Thus, there is a continuum without dividing lines between the Self’s dialogues with significant others and the dialogues among the Self’s I-positions. Both types of dialogue become enacted through the fusion of horizons. Accordingly, a dialogue among the I-positions of the Self is also an event within the me Regardless of the figure with which one would describe silence, the latter is always turned towards dialogical speech (Chrétien 2004b, 74). Silence is always projected upon possibilities of discursive-articulation-through-dialogue. In this regard, silence does not belong to – or is not generated by – the interlocutors, but stems from the facticity of discursive practices as they constitute the medium of fusing horizons.  However, the incapability of reaching a full co-understanding should not be regarded as a deficiency of the dialogical process. The impossibility of reaching a consensus is more often the case. Yet it does not damage the fusion of horizons. On the contrary, this impossibility – pace the theorists of discourse ethics who transform the intersubjective norms of communicative consensus into moral principles – sharpens the hermeneutic sensitivity to the Other. (See Ginev 2003a and 2003b.)

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dium of fusing horizons. It is the logic of question and answer that creates a unitary dialogical space in which conversing with the other is always already prepared by conversations inherent in narrating the Self, and vice versa. In Gadamer’s perspective, both types of dialogue are united by “the dialectic of the I-Thou relation” – the dialectic that underlies the constant struggle for mutual recognition in social life.⁴⁴ Here is the argument for this claim. The fusion of horizon assists the participants in a conversation to pose the correct questions by “activating” the proper presuppositions. The fusion of horizon is, as it were, limited to the dialogues between the Self and her real social partners, co-actors, and interlocutors (or, her real significant others). Regardless of how they can be fictionalized – by altering them – in the Self’s psychic life, they keep their status of real significant others for the Self without psychic disorders. But, as stated above, the Self’s dialogues with them can only be carried out though the dialogues among the Self’s positions corresponding to her cultural identities. The reason for this is not that there are “inborn attitudes of mind” that somehow promote the Self for initiating internal dialogical processes. Such an assumption would only lead to subjectivism and psychologism. The reason lies rather in the way in which positioning opens up a leeway for posing possible questions in the dialogical process. At the same time, the (re)positioning through which particular I-positions emerged takes place in the medium of fusing horizons. It is this medium in which existential agency enacts the ongoing positioning, repositioning, and counter-positioning of the Self towards whole contexts in which the other’s questions are posed, whereby the Self looks for answers that would be capable of provoking further questioning. The other is significant only insofar as she or he is a persisting source of posing questions.

 Gadamer (2004, 353) observes that the way “in which the Thou is experienced and understood is that the Thou is acknowledged as a person, but despite this acknowledgement the understanding of the Thou is still a form of self-relatedness.” But there is another aspect of the reciprocity of the I-Thou relationship that should be taken into account. To put it in Gadamer’s terms, the self-authentication of a particular I-position comes into being due to the ability of one’s self-consciousness to withdraw from the dialectic of the I-Thou reciprocity. Thus, the formation of an I-position within the integral dialogical space is always associated with a kind of “symmetry breaking”, and the emergence of asymmetries in the I-Though relationship. One forms a certain I-position when attaining such an attitude to particular others that allows him – in a disagreement with logic of reciprocity – to regard himself as being independent of them. The otherness of the other is more or less ignored when an attitude (in the form of I-position) toward the other takes place. Any firm attitude toward the other destroys the “moral bond” in the I-Thou dialogue. To a certain extent, forming such an attitude is at odds with the way of experiencing “the Thou truly as a Thou”.

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Index of Names Agamben, Giorgio 26, 29 – 32, 65, 69, 72 – 74 Albahari, Miri 231 Ankersmit, Franklin Rudolph 203 f. Antliff, Mark 166 f., 169, 178 Apel, Karl-Otto 260 Apollinaire, Guillaume 169, 173, 176, 181 – 183, 185 Archer, Margaret 88, 136 f., 191, 200 Arendt, Hannah 118 – 120 Axelos, Kostas 207 Ayer, Alfred 1 f. Babich, Babette 13, 35 Baker, G. P. 73, 102 – 104 Bakhtin, Mikhail 145, 246, 253 Barad, Karen 60 Bateson, Gregory 52 Beck, Ulrich 161 f. Berger, Peter L. 152 Bergson, Henri 175 Bernstein, Richard 119 Bersani, Leo 128 Bertau, Marie-Cécile 251 Böhme, Gernot 35 Bohn, Willard 174 Bohr, Niels 46 – 48 Bois, Yve-Alain 174 Bourdieu, Pierre 82, 88, 98 f., 136, 153, 182, 192, 246 Braque, George 166 – 168, 170, 174 – 176, 178 – 183, 187 f. Brentari, Carlo 43 Brooke, Peter 179 Bruner, Jerome 242 Bubner, Rüdiger 73 Buchanan, Brett 43, 57 Buchloh, Benjamin 174 Burkitt, Ian 192 Butler, Judith 127 f. Buytendijk, Frederik 38

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110605303-008

Campbell, Scott 75 Caputo, John 75 Carnap, Rudolf 34 Carr, David 237, 240 Carrera, Javier 21 Cassirer, Ernst 47, 69 Catania, Dario 255 Cézanne, Paul 167, 187 Charlesworth, Brian 24 Chomsky, Noam 93 Chrétien, Jean-Louis 232, 259 f. Christias, Dyonisis 165 Cottington, David 176, 179 Coulter, Jeff 104 Crease, Robert 35 Critchley, Simon 229, 231 Crowell, Steven 165, 225 Culler, Jonathan 145 Dahlstrom, Daniel 49 Daniels, Alejandro 175 Darwin, Charles 41 Davis, Bret 139 de Beauvoir, Simone 235 de la Fresnaye, Roger 187 de Saussure, Ferdinand 35, 114 f. de Vlaminck, Maurice 168 Delaunay, Robert 167, 176, 178, 183 Delbrück, Max 47 Deleuze, Gilles 197 Dennett, Daniel 240 Derrida, Jacques 16, 29 f., 59 f., 62 – 66, 70, 116 – 118, 125, 235 Descartes, René 245 Dilthey, Wilhelm 9 f., 13, 73, 117, 204, 240 Dimaggio, Giancarlo 255 Dreyfus, Hubert 89 – 93, 216 f., 220, 234, 247 Driesch, Hans 46 f. Dubuisson-Quellier, Sophie 87, 96 Dufy, Raoul 168 Durkheim, Emile 78, 140, 151

Index of Names

Eichmann, Adolf 118 Esposito, Roberto 29, 31 f., 120, 126 Ferrara, Alessandro 234 Feuerbach, Ludwig 207 Feyerabend, Paul 1 Flanagan, Owen 201 Flyvbjerg, Bent 92 f. Flynn, Bernard 75 Foster, Hall 174 Foucault, Michel 23, 92, 120, 125 – 127, 133 f., 246 Fox Keller, Evelyn 21 – 24 Freeman, Mark 243 French, Steven 5, 95, 187 Friedman, Michel 34 Fry, Edward 166 Fuchs, Stephan 206 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 1, 74, 79, 173, 188, 194, 258, 260 f. Gallagher, Shaun 210 Garfinkel, Harold 35, 72, 75 f., 78 – 81 Gehlen, Arnold 37 Gergen, Kenneth 257 Giddens, Anthony 82, 98, 104, 106, 192, 199, 248 f., 252 Glazebrook, Patricia 35 Gleizes, Albert 167, 169, 173 f., 176, 178 – 180, 182 Goffman, Erving 210 Golding, John 169, 183 Goodall, Jane 52 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 191 Griesemer, James 33 Gris, Juan 179, 181, 183, 187 Groethuysen, Bernhard 9, 12 – 14 Grondin, Jean 74 Guattari, Felix 197 Gurwitsch, Aron 210 Habermas, Jürgen 121, 123 f., 158 Hacker, P. M. S. 73, 102 – 104 Hanson, Norwood 1 Haraway, Dona 52, 59 f. Hatab, Lawrence 41 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 133

275

Heidegger, Martin 2 f., 12 f., 15 f., 25 – 59, 61 f., 64, 66 f., 69 f., 72 – 75, 80, 86, 89, 92, 134 f., 138 – 141, 144, 153, 166, 185, 213 – 216, 219, 224 f., 227, 231, 247, 252, 256 Held, Klaus 195 Heller, Agnes 201 Henderson, Lynda 180, 185 Heritage, John 77 f. Hermans, Hubert 249, 253, 255 Hermans-Konopka, Agnieszka 249 Hirsch, Donald E. 207 Hockett, Charles F. 93 Hoy, David 206 Hui, Allison 96, 99, 150 Husserl, Edmund 48, 166, 225 Jacob, François 23 Jacob, Max 174 Jacoby, Russell 194 Jaramillo, Alfonso 21 Jouffret, Esprit 180 Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry 176, 178, 180, 184 Kant, Immanuel 37, 42, 84, 211 Karmel, Pepe 178, 181, 184 f. Kessel, Thomas 35, 41, 55 Kishik, David 73 Kisiel, Theodore 74 f. Kockelmans, Joseph 35 Kojève, Alexandre 30 Korsgaard, Christine 224 f., 228, 235 Krauss, Rosalind 174 Krell, David Farrell 30 Kuhn, Thomas 1, 92 Kymlicka, Will 82 Lacan, Jacques 63 – 65 Ladyman, James 5 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 23 Latour, Bruno 11, 147, 189 – 191 Laude, Jean 174 Lawlor, Leonard 62 – 64, 66 Le Fauconnier, Henri 167, 176, 178 f., 182 Léger, Fernand 172, 176, 178 f., 181 – 183 Leighten, Patricia 166 f., 169, 178, 188

276

Index of Names

Levi, Giovanni 148 Levi-Strauss, Claude 97 Levinas, Emmanuel 208, 232 Lewis, David 103 Liebsch, Burkhard 72 Locke, John 245 London, Fritz 48 Luckmann, Thomas 123, 152 Luhmann, Niklas 158, 161 Luria, Alexander 253 Lynch, Michael 78 – 80, 104, 159

Picasso, Pablo 166 – 168, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178 – 185, 187 Plessner, Helmuth 12, 24, 37 f., 40, 66, 69 Plesz, Marie 87 Pöggeler, Otto 3 Polikarov, Azarya 1 Pollner, Melvin 79 Poovey, Mary 150 Popova, Lyubov 187 Popper, Karl 33, 93 Princet, Maurice 180

Maller, Cecily 87, 96 Martin, Richard 181 Marx, Karl 35, 207 Matisse, Henri 181 McDowell, John 101 McHoul, Alec 80 McNeill, William 27, 35 f., 54 f., 58 Mead, George Herbert 246, 249 Medawar, Peter 24 f. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 41, 75, 166, 186 f., 246 Metzinger, Jean 167, 169, 173 – 176, 178 – 180, 182, 187 Minkowski, Hermann 180 Misch, Georg 12, 37, 66, 68, 70, 240 Mondrian, Piet 183 Moore, Chris 211 Mouffe, Chantal 125

Quosh, C.

Nagel, Thomas 226 Nancy, Jean-Luc 124 Needham, Joseph 33 Nelson, Eric 73 f. Oakeshott, Michael 149 f. Okrent, Mark 62 f. Olafson, Frederick 216, 224 Oliver, Kelly 64 – 66 Olson, Eric 201 f. Pacherie, Elisabeth 209 Panofsky, Erwin 170 Pantzar, Mika 87 Picabia, Francis 183

257

Raggatt, Peter 256 Reckwitz, Andreas 86 f., 98 f. Reff, Theodore 181 Rich, Adrienne 127 Richardson, William 50 Ricoeur, Paul 83 – 85, 145, 205, 243 Riegl, Alois 170 Robbin, Tony 180 Rodrigo, Guillermo 21 Rogozinski, Jacob 75 Rorty, Richard 8 Rouault, George 168 Rouse, Joseph 8, 62 f., 82 f., 85 – 87, 205 Roux, Wilhelm 42 Salvatore, Giampaolo 255 Sartre, Jean-Paul 216, 224, 227, 236, 238 f., 256 Saunders, Simon 5 Sayer, Andrew 88 Schatzki, Theodore 86 f., 104 Schechtman, Marya 212 Scheler, Max 38, 41, 69, 225 Schnädelbach, Herbert 195 Schrödinger, Erwin 48 Schürmann, Reiner 234 Schutz, Alfred 121, 123 Sérusier, Paul 168 Shockey, R. Matthew 49 Shove, Elizabeth 87, 96 Spemann, Hans 51 Steinthal, Heymann 67 Stern, David 90

Index of Names

Strengers, Yolande Suarez, Maria 21

87

Taylor, Charles 8, 73, 82, 98, 104, 111, 233, 245 – 247, 249, 255 Thibault, Paul 114 Tuomela, Raimo 96 Turner, Stephen 87 f., 105 f. Valsiner, Jaan 253 van der Veer, René 253 van Meijl, Toon 244 Vauxcelles, Louis 180 Verstegen, Ian 180, 184 Vetter, Helmuth 74 Visker, Rudi 74 von Bertalanffy, Ludwig 57

von Uexküll, Jakob 41 f., 58, 67 – 69 Vygotsky, Lev 253 Waddington, Conrad 33 Wagner, Peter 252 Waldenfels, Berhard 208 Warner, Michael 127 f. Watson, Matt 87 Weber, Max 94, 206 White, Hayden 14 White, Melanie 150 Whitehead, Alfred North 60 Winch, Peter 73, 105 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 72 f., 80, 101 – 105 Woodger, Joseph Henry 33, 36 Worrall, John 5 Wrathall, Mark 89 f., 109 f., 217

277

Index of Subjects Accessibility of world 38, 40, 54 Actor-network theory 147, 190 f. Adaptation 21, 41, 48, 54 f. Agential behavior 11 f., 15 f., 18 f., 75, 85, 88 f., 91, 95 f., 100 f., 103, 106, 108 – 111, 113 f., 116, 120, 134 f., 138, 142, 146, 149 f., 152 f., 155 – 159, 161 – 164, 189 – 191, 197, 204, 207, 210, 220, 229, 248 Animality 15 f., 29 – 32, 38 f., 44 f., 51 – 57, 64, 66 f., 151 Animal life 15, 25, 27, 30, 35 – 41, 44, 49, 52 – 55, 57 f., 62, 65 Anomie 75 Apophantic as 12, 26 Apophantic logos 26, 35, 63, 67 – 69 Artificial life 21 – 23 Assemblages of practices 96 f., 101, 103, 110, 119, 133, 146, 152, 154 f., 157, 162, 197 f., 212, 220, 227, 237, 239, 241 Attunement 26 f., 55, 58 f., 110 f. Authentic everydayness 128, 131, 153 – 159, 198, 214, 228 Authenticity of the Self 207, 216 Authentic lifeforms 15, 17, 19, 121 – 124, 129, 135, 154, 159, 162, 194, 198, 203, 208, 214 f., 217, 222, 228, 239, 248 Authentic subjectivity 234 Autonomy and authenticity 157, 159, 208, 228, 234 Background practices 89 – 93, 98, 216, 246 f. Being and Time 3, 12, 26, 28, 30, 37, 39, 41, 44, 49, 52 f., 66, 74, 110, 138 f., 185, 213, 215 – 218, 226, 229 Being-in-practices 11, 14, 65 f., 71, 76 f., 80, 91, 196, 198 Being-in-the-world 4 – 6, 12, 24, 26, 30, 37, 40, 44, 65, 68 f., 91 f., 134, 137, 153, 188, 217, 219, 254 Biological forms of life 38, 52 Biological objects of inquiry 15, 25, 36, 49

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110605303-009

Biopolitics 31 f., 73, 120, 125 f. Boredom 26 f., 64 Captivation (Benommenheit) 31, 34 f., 40 – 42, 45, 48, 53 f., 59 Characteristic hermeneutic situation 3, 7, 15, 18, 20, 29, 46, 50 f., 100, 143, 152, 155, 157 – 161, 163, 165, 173, 177 – 179, 181, 186, 189, 192 f., 195 f., 198, 200 f., 205 f., 208, 213, 216, 223, 225, 229 f., 241, 243 Constructivism 6, 94, 235, 257 Contextualization 6, 8, 10 – 12, 35, 112 – 114, 140, 143 – 146, 148 f., 205, 215, 230, 238 Cubism 18, 165 – 169, 172 – 189 Cultural anthropology 164 Cultural history 9, 13 f., 23, 127, 140, 250 Darwinism 41 Dialogical Self 15, 19 f., 199, 201, 221 – 223, 244 – 246, 249, 252 – 254, 256, 259 Dialogical self theory 200, 245, 249 – 251, 253 – 255, 259 Dialogicity 19 f., 246, 249, 252 f., 259 Dichotomous ontological difference 2, 4, 12 f., 111 Dilthey-school 13 Domains of scientific inquiry 7, 44 – 46, 50, 150, 155 Double hermeneutic 9, 13, 74, 81, 98, 205 f., 236 Embodied Self 210 f., 246 – 249 Emptiness 26 f., 233 Ensembles of practices 95 f., 109, 121 f., 124, 129, 137, 155, 199, 222, 240 Entanglement 5, 18, 60, 89, 106, 113, 134 f., 147, 165, 192, 203, 208, 234, 241 – 243, 250 Epistemological behaviorism 8 Ethnomethodology 72, 75 – 81, 100, 104, 157, 191

Index of Subjects

Ethos 3, 72, 121, 129 – 131, 159, 165, 195 f., 208, 222, 228 f. Existential agency 17 – 19, 106, 159, 189, 191 – 194, 196 – 204, 207 f., 210 – 213, 215 f., 220 f., 224, 228 f., 233, 236, 239 – 241, 244 f., 250 – 253, 256, 258 f., 261 Existential choice 15, 19, 202, 213, 236 f., 239 – 243, 250 f., 257 Existential conception of science 15, 28, 44, 49 f. Existentialia (Existenzialien) 30, 74, 111, 135, 146, 214, 220 Existential ontology 2 f., 37 f., 51, 185 Existential possibilities 65, 199, 203, 221, 223 f., 235 f., 238 f., 242, 252 Existential spatiality 18, 41, 166, 172, 175 f., 184 – 189, 247, 253 Facticity 13, 15, 17, 19, 38, 65, 73 – 77, 79 – 82, 84, 88 f., 100, 104 f., 107 – 109, 117 f., 123, 129, 133 – 140, 142 – 144, 146, 148 f., 151 – 153, 155 – 159, 161 f., 164 f., 189 – 191, 196, 204, 210, 218, 220, 224, 229, 234, 237 f., 240 – 242, 250 – 252, 255 – 257, 260 Factuality 11, 15, 19, 34, 36 f., 39, 73 – 79, 81 f., 88 f., 98, 100, 102, 104 – 106, 108 f., 117 f., 136, 138 f., 142, 151 – 154, 157, 164, 196, 217, 220, 240, 256 Fallenness 38 Finitude 25, 73, 92, 137, 206, 231, 258 Formal indication 49 Fusion of horizons 19, 258 – 260 Geisteswissenschaften

9

Habits 87 f., 100, 126, 149 – 153, 156, 162 Habitual behavior 88, 109, 149 – 153, 156, 217 Habitus 72, 88 f., 98 f., 106, 136, 153, 191 Hermeneutic conceptualization 18, 116, 154, 162, 166, 198, 204, 207, 256 Hermeneutic logic 13, 66, 79, 258 Hermeneutic ontology 30, 50 Hermeneutic phenomenology 1 f., 6, 8, 39, 52, 70, 74 – 76, 149, 229 Hermeneutic realism 7, 20

279

Hermeneutics of facticity 28, 51, 74 f. Historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) 3, 14, 54 Human agency 17 f., 73, 75, 77, 82, 85, 88, 91, 95 f., 100, 105, 108 f., 111, 117, 125, 135, 137, 152, 158 f., 162, 164 f., 189, 196 – 198, 201, 207 f., 211 f., 220, 253 Inauthentic everydayness 122, 125 – 127, 133 – 135, 146 f., 158 f., 161, 194, 198, 207, 212, 214, 218, 220 f., 224, 229, 231 Inauthentic lifeforms 15, 129, 150, 152, 155, 238 Incommensurability thesis 1 Indexicality 76 f., 79, 81 Instinctual behavior 37, 40, 67 f., 150 Intentionalism (hermeneutic, interpretive) 206 f. Inter-contextuality 70, 143 – 148, 210 f., 247 Intermediate lifeforms 15, 63, 68, 70 f. Interplay of practices and possibilities 117 f., 136 f., 142 – 145, 148 f., 157, 163, 165, 177, 189, 192, 196, 199, 201, 203, 208, 212, 221, 224, 228 – 230, 234, 237 f., 240 – 243, 253 – 255, 257 Intersubjectivity 114, 122, 164, 197, 252 I-position 19 f., 199 – 201, 203, 221, 241, 243, 250 – 257, 259 – 261 Logical empiricism

1 f., 33

Marxism 147 Metaphysical separationism 30, 62, 65 Metaphysics of presence 2, 33 – 35, 39, 47, 51, 104, 107, 242 Methodological individualism 88, 94, 203, 206 Moment of vision 213, 215, 220, 244, 252 Narrating the Self 19, 223, 242 f., 249, 255, 257, 259, 261 Narrative identities 19, 242 f., 251, 257 Non-dichotomous ontological difference 15, 112 f., 116 – 118, 137, 196 Nonhuman lifeforms 15 Normativity 62 f., 72, 85 f., 89, 106, 123, 127, 129, 136, 163 – 165, 195, 216 f., 219 f., 225, 228 f., 234

280

Index of Subjects

Objectification 2 – 7, 20, 28 f., 35 f., 44, 51, 57, 108, 110, 146, 151, 164, 185 f., 209, 256 Objectifying conceptualization 18, 75 Objectifying inquiry 4 – 7 Ontic-ontological difference 2, 4, 12 f., 20, 28, 36 f., 52 f., 74, 83, 88, 118, 138, 198, 231 Organ 39, 42 f., 45, 56 f., 197 Organism 15, 21 – 24, 27, 29, 34, 39 – 43, 45 – 48, 54 – 58, 60, 63 f., 68, 71, 144, 202 Paradigm of discreteness 72, 93 – 102, 104 f., 107 – 109, 112, 135, 142, 144, 150, 200, 207, 250, 254, 256, 258 Personal authenticity 15, 19, 199, 201, 212 – 214, 216 f., 231, 234, 244 Phenomenological ontology 24 f., 28, 30, 52 Phenomenological sociology 99, 152 Philosophical anthropology 14, 37 f. Philosophical biology 27, 33, 37 f., 40, 66 Phronetic social science 92 f. Positioning 19, 168, 170, 199, 208, 216 f., 237 – 239, 242 f., 250 – 255, 257, 259 – 261 Post-Durkheimian sociology 150 Potentiality-for-being 10 – 12, 80, 82, 85, 92, 99, 105 f., 109, 111 f., 129, 138, 141, 171, 202 f., 213, 215, 231 Poverty in world 15, 29 f., 34, 39 f., 42, 49, 51 – 53, 55, 61, 66, 69 Practical understanding 79, 84, 92, 247 Practice theory 72, 75 f., 79 – 82, 86 – 88, 91, 94 – 101, 103 – 106, 108, 112, 115, 152 Pre-narrativity 83 – 85, 243 Pre-normativity 86, 149, 163 – 165, 194 – 196 Psychologism 9, 166, 170, 186, 261 Punctual self 231, 233, 240, 245

Re-contextualization 8, 113 f., 136, 142, 202, 250 Repositioning 238, 251, 254 f., 257, 261 Sartrean existentialism 235 f. Self-cooperating-with-existential-agency 20, 199 – 201, 208 – 212, 215 f., 221, 223 f., 226, 228 – 230, 233, 235 f., 238 – 242, 247 f., 250 – 252, 254 f., 257 – 259 Situated Transcendence 17, 81, 105, 132, 144, 192 f., 233, 237, 247 Subjectivity 15 – 17, 84, 101, 105 – 107, 111, 114 f., 120 – 122, 124, 129, 134, 138 f., 152, 170, 172, 177, 181, 191 f., 197 f., 200 – 202, 207 f., 211 – 213, 223, 230, 232 – 234, 236 f., 239 – 241, 250, 252, 255 f. Synthetic Biology 21 f., 24 Tactility 18, 166, 175, 184 – 187 Technoscience 60 Teleology 11, 16, 29, 39, 47 f., 62 f., 84 f., 96, 146, 169 Temporalizing of temporality 3, 44, 55, 66, 84, 115, 143 f., 146, 149, 192 f., 198, 205, 210, 213, 229 f., 237, 243 f., 249, 251 f. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics 15 f., 25, 32 – 34, 39, 49 Theory-ladenness thesis 2 Trans-subjective existentialism 19 f., 229, 236, 240, 250, 252 – 257 Trans-subjectivity 16 f., 101, 105 – 107, 111, 119, 124, 126, 139, 170, 177 f., 186, 198, 200, 207, 213, 215, 223, 236, 239 – 241, 250, 255 f. Umwelt

41 f., 63, 67 – 70

Vienna Circle

1, 9

World-forming 25 – 27, 53, 58 Worldlessness 15, 29, 39, 52, 55 Worldness 24, 144 – 146, 153