Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis (Contributions to Phenomenology, 109) 3030308650, 9783030308650

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Contributions to Phenomenology  109

Kwok-Ying Lau Thomas Nenon Editors

Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis

Contributions to Phenomenology In Cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology Volume 109 Series Editors Nicolas de Warren, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA Ted Toadvine, Department of Philosophy, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA Editorial Board Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium David Carr, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong James Dodd, New School University, New York, USA Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, Florida, USA Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy Burt Hopkins, University of Lille, Lille, France José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea (Republic of) Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany William R. McKenna, Miami University, Ohio, USA Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, Ohio, USA J. N. Mohanty, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, Memphis, USA Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany Gail Soffer, Roma Tre University, Rome, Italy Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA

Scope The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than 100 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship, the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach of phenomenological research. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance. The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811

Kwok-Ying Lau  •  Thomas Nenon Editors

Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis

Editors Kwok-Ying Lau Department of Philosophy The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shatin, Hong Kong

Thomas Nenon Department of Philosophy University of Memphis Memphis, TN, USA

ISSN 0923-9545     ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic) Contributions to Phenomenology ISBN 978-3-030-30865-0    ISBN 978-3-030-30866-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This collection of articles is the fruit of intercultural cooperation: they are originated from an international conference entitled “Logos and Aisthesis: Phenomenology and the Arts” organized by the Edwin Cheng Foundation Asian Centre for Phenomenology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in August 2012. More than two dozens of phenomenologists from Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Ireland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan and the United States took part and presented papers in this conference. Thirteen of them have contributed the revised version of their original presentation to this volume which is divided into three parts. The Introduction and Part I consist of exposition and critical discussions of classical phenomenologists’ approach to aesthetics and the work of art (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty). Part II consists of phenomenological investigations into the different domains of arts: poetry, painting, theatre, architecture, urban aesthetics and photography. Part III consists of essays which explore the logic of sensibility within (Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-­ Ponty) and without the phenomenological tradition (Aristotle and Schiller). Thus, this volume distinguishes itself from other volumes which fall on the domain of aesthetics and art in two ways: the intercultural composition of its team of authors and the great varieties of aesthetic and artistic experience thematized from the phenomenological approach. The editors thank all the contributors for their trust and the witness of their friendship throughout this long process of preparation. They are grateful to the general editors of the series “Contributions to Phenomenology” who have supported from the very beginning this publication project. They also thank the working editors of Springer who offered their help at each stage of preparation and publication. They are sorry for the considerable delay caused by unforeseen circumstances. Shatin, Hong Kong  Kwok-Ying Lau Memphis, TN, USA  Thomas Nenon

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Contents

1 Introduction: Phenomenological Aesthetics as Logos of the Sensible........................................................................................... 1 Kwok-Ying Lau and Thomas Nenon Part I Phenomenological Approach to Art and Aesthetics 2 Aesthetic Attitude and Phenomenological Attitude: From Zhu Guangqian to Husserl........................................................... 11 Kwok-Ying Lau 3 A Husserlian Account of the Power of the Imaginary.......................... 27 Thomas Nenon 4 Art and Experience: Reflections on Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Phenomenological Approaches to Art-Works........................................ 37 Dermot Moran Part II Varieties of Artistic Experience 5 Aisthesis and Logos – One or Two? Two Kindred Poems by Qianlong Di and Goethe..................................................................... 59 Elmar Holenstein 6 Seeing the Invisible: Kandinsky and the Multi-dimensionality of Colors.................................................................................................... 87 Junichi Murata 7 Theatre as a Scene of Otherness............................................................. 99 Bernhard Waldenfels 8 The Figuration of Time: Rhythm and Metaphor in Dramatic Language............................................................................. 111 Kwok Kui Wong

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9 Emptiness and the Spiritual in Architecture......................................... 127 Jung-Sun Han Heuer 10 Digital Technology, Urban Aesthetics, and Phenomenology................ 145 Jong Kwan Lee 11 Re-presenting Earthscape: Towards a Phenomenology of Aerial Photographic Art...................................................................... 161 Chan-Fai Cheung Part III Logic of Sensibility 12 How Much Logos Is There in Aisthesis? Aristotle’s Phenomenology of Perception................................................................. 175 Emmanuel Alloa 13 Seeing and Touching: The Optic and the Haptic in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought................................................................... 189 Pierre Rodrigo 14 Toward the Phenomenology of Aesthetic Instinct Developed Through a Dialogue with F. Schiller.................................... 203 Nam-In Lee Author Index.................................................................................................... 219 Subject Index.................................................................................................... 221

Chapter 1

Introduction: Phenomenological Aesthetics as Logos of the Sensible Kwok-Ying Lau and Thomas Nenon

Abstract  Phenomenology occupies a privileged position in aesthetics and the study of the arts in comparison to traditional intellectualist schools of Western ­philosophy. It represents an immense thinking effort to rehabilitate the various dimensions of sensibility and the sensible in the contemporary setting. After Husserl the founding father, classical and new generation phenomenologists such as Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Michel Henry have further developed very original phenomenological theories of the arts. Phenomenology occupies a privileged position in aesthetics and the study of the arts in comparison to traditional intellectualist schools of Western philosophy. It represents an immense thinking effort to rehabilitate the various dimensions of sensibility and the sensible in the contemporary setting. Since the Greeks, there is a long tradition of opposition between on the one hand the nous and the noêta—the intellect and the intelligible—and on the other between the aisthesis and the aisthêta—sensations and the sensible—in the history of Western philosophy. In the best case, sensations and the sensible are considered as belonging to the lower faculty in contrast to the intellect and the intelligible as members of the higher faculty. In the worst case, sensations and the sensible are simply denied of intelligibility and excluded from the domain of logos as they are considered unintelligible and thus irrational. Under this view, aisthesis is entirely external and foreign to logos. We have to wait for Alexander Baumgarten (1714–1762) to

K.-Y. Lau (*) Department of Philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] T. Nenon Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_1

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turn the clock otherwise. In his monumental two-volume treatise Aesthetica (1750–1758) written in Latin,1 Baumgarten has inaugurated the new discipline of the study of beauty and the arts with the term “aesthetics”. The very invention of this term recognizes that sensation and sensibility in general is a source of legitimate cognition: aesthetics is the discipline about sensible cognition (épistémê aisthetica). Thus the birth of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in its own right is the first act of thinking against the current—against the intellectualist tradition dominating the philosophical scene of Eighteenth Century Europe. Our sense of beauty arises not only from the perception of the unity of the thing or a thought, but also from the perception of the way the thing or the thought is put into order or structured, as well as from the expression of the thing perceived or sensed by means of signs or symbols. Thus Baumgarten has brought together logos and aisthesis: the sensible can be observed, described and expressed in an orderly way, and is thus intelligible. Not only aesthetics as sensible cognition provides a gateway to truth side by side logic, aesthetics itself is a kind of logic of sensation or logic of the sensible.2 After Baumgarten, there is a revival of the intellectualist tradition in Kant, be it in a sophisticated way. It is well known that in Critique of Pure Reason there is a whole doctrine of transcendental aesthetics in which what receives the transcendental status is not sensible intuition itself, but the pure forms of time and space as a priori conditions of possible operation of sensible intuition.3 In the entire architectonic of the first Critique, sensible intuition is not only assigned a secondary role in cognition, it is stigmatized as blind in itself and devoid of intelligence. Sensible intuition alone is below the threshold of possible human experience. For sure in Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant has paid attention to another species of intuition which receives an a priori status, namely the symbolic intuition.4 According to Kant, symbols, like schemata, “are ascribed to concepts a priori” which present a concept indirectly by means of analogy with it. This is operated by “the transportation of the reflection on one object of intuition to another, [which is a] quite different concept, to which perhaps no intuition can ever directly correspond.”5 Thus symbolic intuition is mid-way between reflection and intuition; it is a kind of

1  There is a partial French translation of Aesthetica: A.  G. Baumgarten, Esthétique, traduction, présentation et notes par Jean-Yves Pranchère (Paris: L’Herne, 1988). 2  The above lines are inspired by the rich and clearly written book of historical survey written by the French specialist of phenomenological aesthetics Éliane Escoubas, L’Esthétique (Paris: Ellipses Édition, 2004), Ch. II, “Baumgarten et l’acte de naissance de l’esthétique”, pp. 32–41. 3  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781/1787), in Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, Band III (Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1911), B75/A51; Critique of Pure Reason, Eng. trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W.  Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 193–194. 4  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilkraft (1790), in Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, Band V (Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin, 1908/1913), §59, pp. 351–354; Critique of the Power of Judgment, Eng. trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §59, pp. 225–228. 5  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilkraft, in Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, Band V, pp. 352–353; Critique of the Power of Judgment, op. cit, pp. 226–227.

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­ ixture, a hybrid existence and is neither a sensible intuition nor pure idea in the m full sense of the term. Yet the ontological status of symbols as a kind of hybrid existence between the sensible and the intelligible—expression of idea or meaning by means of signs or figures which are founded on some sensible presentation or representation—cannot be clarified within the framework of Kantian transcendental philosophy. This is because the Kantian transcendental framework is basically an intellectualist conception which refuses intelligibility to the sensible. A satisfactory clarification of the hybrid nature of symbols from the ontological perspective has to wait until the formulation of the ontology of the flesh, which is hybrid and bipolar in nature, by the late Merleau-Ponty. The Merleau-Pontian concept of flesh does not denote a thing but the sensible basis of the primordial order of things prior to the establishment of the conceptual dichotomy of idea and matter, subject and object, as well as activity and passivity. Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the hybrid or bipolar nature of flesh as the sensible in general is itself inspired by Husserl’s famous descriptions of the phenomenon of double sensation with respect to the sense of tactility—the touching and the being touched—in Ideas II: the being-touched renders possible the touching, and the two belong to one another.6 To Merleau-Ponty, through the phenomenological investigation into the peculiar nature of the Leib, “Husserl rediscovers sensible being as the universal form of brute being”.7 Brute being is the mode of being of the primordial order of existents prior to its absorption into the thought of the scientist and the intellectualist philosopher. Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, an ontology of the sensible as the primordial and universal order of being, is arguably a radical development, or even transformation of the later Husserl’s project of immersing into “the Logos of the aesthetic world”.8 In his explication of “the Logos of the aesthetic world”, Merleau-Ponty refers explicitly to the mature Husserl’s Formal and Transcendental Logic (1929). In the Conclusion of this phenomenological treatise of transcendental elucidation of the formation of logical judgment which paves the way to the investigation of the a priori of a “world-logic”, i.e. the investigation into “the Apriori of the eidos world”, namely the a priori eidetic structure of the world, Husserl explains that “one stratum of that Apriori is the aesthetic Apriori of spatio-temporality [which is] the logos of the aesthetic world.”9 Apparently this expression of Husserl has some resonance 6  Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, Husserliana IV, ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1952), §§36–37, pp. 144–151; Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book, Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, Eng. trans. by R.  Rojcewicz and A.  Schuwer (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), pp. 152–159. 7  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p.  217; Signs, Eng. Trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 172. 8  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes, pp. 132, 218; Signs, pp. 105, 173. 9  Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, Husserliana XVII, ed. Paul Janssen (The Hague: M.  Nijhoff, 1974), pp.  256–257; Formal and Transcendental Logic, Eng. trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1969), pp. 291–292.

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with Kant’s formulation of transcendental aesthetics in Critique of Pure Reason. Yet Husserl further specifies his genetico-phenomenological motivation by declaring that the “world-logic”, i.e., “the logos of Objective worldly being, and of science, in the ‘higher sense’”, is “founded on the logos of the aesthetic world.”10 Against the intellectualist conception of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, Husserl’s genetic phenomenology of the Logos of the aesthetic world recognizes the founding character of the sensible and the aesthetic world in general. Upon Husserl’s indication, Merleau-Ponty identifies the underlying strata of being of the aesthetic world as brute being, the sensible in general, which serves as the sensible basis for the consciousness of the objective scientist and the intellectualist philosopher to think and to theorize. The objective scientist and the intellectualist philosopher have no idea about the aesthetic world, the world of the sensible being in general. The later Husserl’s genetic phenomenology is a project to investigate into the logos of the aesthetic world in order to give a phenomenological and ontological clarification of the sensible basis upon which scientific ideality is born. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) contributes to this project by exhibiting the carnal basis of the perceptual subject and its activity of expression. The theoretical activities of the scientist and the philosopher can take place only on the basis of the carnal subject’s perceptual and expressive activities. As these latter activities have a non-negligible sensible dimension, so do the theoretical activities of the scientist and the philosopher. By developing a phenomenology of perception and a phenomenology of expression in his 1945 master work, Merleau-Ponty has already laid down the foundation of the two basic constitutive elements of a phenomenological aesthetics which correspond to Baumgarten’s two principles of the origin of our sense of beauty, namely a theory of perception and a theory of expression. The last Merleau-Ponty has further sketched out an ontology of the flesh by taking over Husserl’s project of “logos of the aesthetic world” into his own project of the logos of the sensible world. This ontology of the flesh has an aesthetic of the sensible and an ontology of art work built on an aesthetic of art as its integral part. Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh and his ontology of art work proceed differently from Heidegger’s ontology. The later Heidegger privileges meditative thinking against perception and develops an ontology of art work which serves primarily the function of the capturing the event of truth as alêtheia—unconcealment of beings and opening up of the world. According to Heidegger, what is at stake in this event of truth is “the contesting of the strife between world and earth”,11 which has nothing to do with aisthesis and the sensible. Heidegger even speaks of “overcoming of aesthetics” in his meditation on

 Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, Husserliana XVII, p.  257; Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 292. 11  Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”, in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1950, 6th edition 1980), p. 43; “The Origin of the Work of Art”, in Off the Beaten Track, Eng. trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 33. 10

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the origin of the work of art.12 In any case, Heidegger proposes a divorce between art and aesthetics. In contrast to the Heideggerian way, Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of art work is built entirely on the thematization of aisthesis, the sensible: the correlation between the world as sensible world and the artist, namely the painter, as a sensible carnal being. To Merleau-Ponty a painting as an art work is a work through which “the artist changes the world into painting.”13 The artist, namely the painter, achieves this by lending her body to the world. But the painter’s body is not the body as object in the sense of Cartesian extension or body as material object in the sense of objective science, but the operative body of flesh which exhibits the ontological character of “intertwining between vision and movement”.14 As flesh, the operative body does not function merely according to mechanistic determinism, but is capable of reversibility, that is reflexivity among the different senses of the body such that they form a system of exchanges. This system of exchanges is a kind of crossover “between the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand”.15 In short, it is the crossover between the sensing and the sensible. What distinguishes the eyes of a painter from those of a profane is that the latter see only the visible objects as real objects without seeing the conditions which render possible the very visibility of these real objects. These conditions include light, lightning, the play of shadows, reflections, line, form, volume and color, etc. These are all invisible elements in the perceptual field which, however, render visible the things and the spectacle of the world. Thus the role of the painter is to depict these invisible elements by circumscribing and projecting onto a canvas what fascinates her eyes and affects her body. These invisible elements are then transformed into some kind of being seen which enters into communion with the painter herself. Through her most appropriate actions—the gestures of tracing, drawing and painting which she alone can execute—a painter reveals to others what the latter otherwise are unable to see. Thus the vocation of a painter is to make good use of the reversibility of her flesh to realize the metamorphosis of the seeing and the seen. A painter pays attention to the “secret and feverish genesis of things in our body”,16 and tries to capture the unfolding of world scenes in its infinite diversity by producing them on the surface of a canvas. Expressed in the vocabulary of  Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: V.  Klostermann, 1989), p.  503; Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Eng. trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 354. 13  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 16; “Eye and Mind”, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, Illinois: North Western University Press, 1993), p. 123. 14  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, p.  16; “Eye and Mind”, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader, p. 124. 15  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, p.  21; “Eye and Mind”, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader, p. 125. 16  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, p.  30; “Eye and Mind”, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader, p. 128. 12

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p­ henomenology, a painter is a genetic phenomenologist engaging herself in the constitution of her life-world by means of brushes, colors and figures instead of language, words and concepts. To Merleau-Ponty, the entire history of Western painting since Lascaux, whether in the form of figurative painting or abstract painting, “celebrates no other enigma than that of visibility”.17 Since the flesh is characterized by reversibility and transitivity between its different senses through a system of exchanges, the celebration of visibility is at the same time the celebration of the aisthesis—sensations and the sensible in general. Thus, in addition to the principle of perception and the principle of expression already laid out in Phenomenology of Perception, what the late Merleau-Ponty’s ontology brings in is the principle of the flesh. In virtue of its character of reversibility and transitivity, the painter’s body as flesh and as the sensing-sensible chiasmic existence renders possible her vision and her creativity as an artist. Her flesh encounters the flesh of the world—things of the world which, as sensible, are sources of affectivity and fascination to the artist. The flesh thus provides the link between the aesthetic of the sensible and the aesthetic of art in Merleau-Ponty. Art work does not re-present but presents the sensible world by the sensitivity and creativity of the artist. This is because the artist is not hidden within her domain of immanence cut off from the world, but immersed in the midst of this very sensible world and assists in the manifestation of the world phenomenon by her art work. In distinction to a photograph, a painting does not reproduce reality as a copy of the outside world. A painting has its own self-organization and is auto-figurative in view of expressing the way in which the world scene unveils itself. The painter’s vision is not a view upon the outside… The world no longer stands before him through representation; rather, it is the painter who is born in the things by a sort of concentration or coming-to-itself of the visible. Ultimately the painting relates to nothing at all among experienced things unless it is first of all ‘autofigurative.’ It is a spectacle of something only by being a ‘spectacle of nothing,’ by breaking the ‘skin of things’ to show how the things become things, how the world becomes world.… Art is not construction, artifice, the meticulous relationship to a space and a world existing outside. It is truly the ‘inarticulate cry’… And once it is present it awakens powers dormant in ordinary vision, a secret of preexistence.18

The above discussion, though brief, shows that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh is itself an aesthetic of the sensible—the phenomenological exploration of the logos of the sensible world. It is articulated through an aesthetic of art, in particular an aesthetic of painting, which provides a concrete illustration of the presentative and creative power of the flesh of the painter. This aesthetic of painting is an ontology of art work which carries with itself the function of revelation or manifestation of the logos of the sensible world. For sure, there exist, side by side painting, other art forms such as drawing and sculpture. Their respective means of expression and 17  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, p.  26; “Eye and Mind”, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader, p. 127. 18  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, pp. 69–70; “Eye and Mind”, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader, pp. 141–142; translation modified.

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creative gestures are quite different from one another. Yet to Merleau-Ponty, the fact that great painters are often also good at drawing and sculpture is the proof that between painting, drawing and sculpture “there is a system of equivalences, a Logos of lines, of lighting, of colors, or reliefs, of masses—a nonconceptual presentation of Universal Being.”19 This system of equivalences in the presentation of the multiple sensible dimensions of Universal Being, characterized by reversibility and transitivity, is the basic element of the logos of the sensible world. Thus Merleau-­ Ponty’s ontology of the flesh coupled with an ontology of art work built on an aesthetics of the sensible is a project which brings us back to the logos of the sensible world: it is a rehabilitation of the sensible.

X X X

In fact, in the Sixth of the Logical Investigations, Husserl has already attempted a rehabilitation of the sensible. Husserl achieves this in two steps. First: by making the distinction between sensible intuition and categorial intuition. Second: by formulating a phenomenological descriptive theory of categorial perception as a categorial act founded upon the more basic act of sensible perception.20 Thus already in his early work which lays the foundation of the entire phenomenological movement, Husserl has once again brought about a reversal of the intellectualist tradition of philosophy inaugurated since Plato and carried on by the Kant of Critique of Pure Reason. To Husserl and his followers, intelligence is possible only on the basis of aisthesis, namely the sensible. Though himself neither a specialist of aesthetics nor a theorist of the arts as such, it is well known that Husserl has always made use of his experiences of art appreciation to illustrate the modes of givenness of perception and imagination and their differences. In addition, Husserl’s discovery of the phenomenological method of epoché which serves as the gateway advancing from the natural attitude to the phenomenological attitude was inspired by the aesthetic attitude shown through the literary works of art of his relative Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the famous Austrian novelist, poet, and playwright of early Twentieth Century (cf., infra, the article of Kwok-ying Lau). Though Husserl’s own lecture courses on phenomenology of imagination were published rather late among his Nachlass,21 the author of the Logical Investigations has greatly encouraged and inspired the abundantly diverse trends of study of aesthetics and art forms in the subsequent development of the phenomenological movement (cf. infra, the contributions of Thomas Nenon and

19  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit, p.  71; “Eye and Mind”, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader, p. 142. 20  Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Band II/II (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1980), VI, § 48, pp. 152–156; Logical Investigations, Vol. 2, Eng. Trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1970), pp. 792–795. 21  Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung 1895–1925, Husserliana XXIII, ed. E.  Marbach (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1980); Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), Eng. Trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005).

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Dermot Moran).22 After Husserl the founding father, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-­ Ponty and Michel Henry, to name just a few of the classical and the new generation phenomenologists, have further developed very original phenomenological theories of the arts (cf. infra, the contributions of Dermot Moran and Junichi Murata). Under the motto “back to the things themselves”, phenomenology shows its power by encouraging independent investigations on other art forms such as poetry, theatre, architecture, photography, and even urban aesthetics (cf. infra, the studies of Elmar Holenstein, Bernhard Waldenfels, Kwok-Kui Wong, Jung-Sun Han Heuer, Chan-Fai Cheung, and Jong-Kwan Lee). The originality of the phenomenological approach to aesthetics and philosophy of art consists in that it never adopts a unilaterally naive objectivist view on the works of art. Phenomenology always proceeds from a correlative approach. It always directs its reflective gaze back to the acts of seeing and touching of the subject of affectivity and creative desire in order to probe into the underlying logos of sensibility. The articles of Emmanuel Alloa, Pierre Rodrigo, and Nam-In Lee advance in this direction. As mentioned in the Preface, this volume of articles is the fruit of operation of an international team of specialists. We hope that it can contribute to the further flourishing of the phenomenological investigation of aesthetics and the arts with intercultural intent.

 Cf. Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree, “Introduction”, in Sepp, H. R. and Embree, E. (eds.), Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. xv–xxx.

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Part I

Phenomenological Approach to Art and Aesthetics

Chapter 2

Aesthetic Attitude and Phenomenological Attitude: From Zhu Guangqian to Husserl Kwok-Ying Lau

Abstract  The anti-naturalistic attitude of the phenomenological attitude is closed to the aesthetic attitude of the artist who shows no interest in the epistemologicalontological aspect as well as the pragmatic aspect of worldly objects. Husserl came to the awareness of the specific character of the phenomenological attitude he had adopted since a decade when he discovered the proximity of the attitude of an artist with his own philosophical attitude in 1907 through the encounter with the art work of his relative Hugo van Hofmannsthal, the famous Austrian playwright and poet. In order to shed light on Husserl’s important discovery, this essay will start by elucidating the basic essential characteristic of the aesthetic attitude provided by the famous contemporary Chinese aesthetic philosopher Zhu Guangqian. With Zhu’s elucidation of the aesthetic attitude in mind, we will try to show not only the proximity of the phenomenological attitude with the aesthetic attitude, but also the interwoven usage of imagination and perception in Husserl’s phenomenological method. This will also help us to understand why the study of art work occupies a privileged place in the phenomenological movement after Husserl.

2.1  Introduction The mature Husserl used to define his phenomenological attitude as an anti-­ naturalistic attitude. The anti-naturalistic attitude can be understood at least in the following two senses. Firstly, the phenomenological attitude is anti-naturalistic in the sense that it does not follow the reductionist mode of understanding of the sciences which reasons strictly along the lines of natural causality. Phenomenology as

K.-Y. Lau (*) Department of Philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_2

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the study of consciousness falls on a domain the intelligence of which goes beyond that of natural causality. The actions of a conscious subject can be understood only with reference to her motivation which presupposes freedom of the will and lies outside the domain of natural causation. The phenomenological attitude is anti-­ naturalistic in a second sense: it does not consider its object of enquiry as an object of natural existence. The phenomenological attitude abstains from any ontological judgment about the reality of the objects of the world in general. In other words, it abstains from adhering to the general hypothesis of the existence of all objects of the world as some sort of natural reality. Yet the adherence to the hypothesis of the existence of all worldly objects as natural reality is an attitude shared by the epistemological attitude of the natural scientist and the pragmatic attitude of the common man in his daily life. The anti-naturalistic attitude of the phenomenological attitude is rather closed to the aesthetic attitude of the artist who precisely shows no interest in the epistemological-ontological aspect as well as the pragmatic aspect of worldly objects. Husserl came to the awareness of the specific character of the phenomenological attitude he had adopted since a decade when he discovered the proximity of the attitude of an artist with his own philosophical attitude in 1907 through the encounter with the art work of his relative Hugo van Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), the famous Austrian playwright and poet. In order to shed light on Husserl’s important discovery, this essay will start by elucidating the basic essential characteristic of the aesthetic attitude provided by the famous contemporary Chinese aesthetic philosopher Zhu Guangqian (朱光潛, 1897–1986). With Zhu’s elucidation of the aesthetic attitude in mind, we will try to show not only the proximity of the phenomenological attitude with the aesthetic attitude, but also the interwoven usage of imagination and perception in Husserl’s phenomenological method. This will also help us to understand why the study of art work occupies a privileged place in the phenomenological movement after Husserl.

2.2  Z  hu Guangqian’s Elucidation of the Aesthetic Attitude: A Latent Phenomenologist? The phenomenological approach occupies a privileged position in understanding the aesthetic attitude. In this article, we would like to begin our presentation by introducing the elucidation of the aesthetic attitude provided by Zhu Guangqian, one of the founding fathers of aesthetic theory in modern China. We shall show that Zhu, who is well-known for being able to explain in simple terms different aspects of aesthetic experience to the general public, has provided some distinctions leading to an understanding of the basic features of the aesthetic attitude in a manner close to phenomenology, yet without employing any technical terminology used by Husserl or his German and French disciples. One of Zhu’s most famous articles, “Our Three Attitudes Towards an Old Pine Tree” (), collected in On Beauty (《談美》) 1932), will serve as our example. In this article, Zhu illustrates the essential charac-

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teristics of the aesthetic attitude of an artist by contrasting it with the pragmatic attitude of a timber merchant and the scientific attitude of a botanist. These three attitudes are among the most common attitudes human beings adopt with regard to an old pine tree. The pragmatic attitude is motivated by the fulfillment of the necessities of life; thus, every action aims essentially at “how to utilize the environment.”1 The scientific attitude is motivated by the search for truth; it is an attitude that disregards all emotions and becomes “purely objective and theoretical.”2 Zhu explains the attitudes of the timber merchant and the botanist, who hold the pragmatic and the scientific attitudes respectively, in the following terms: Their consciousness cannot remain fixed on the old pine itself. They only take the old pine as a spring board and jump from it to all sorts of things related to it. Thus in the pragmatic attitude and the scientific attitude, the thought about things is not independent, nor isolated; the attention of the perceiver is not focused on the thing perceived itself.3

In contrast to the above two attitudes, the aesthetic attitude shows an entirely different character: “The focusing of attention and the isolation of thought is the major characteristic of the aesthetic attitude.”4 The old pine is a singular thing encountered in daily life. But it appears as three different objects under three different attitudes of the subject: as a pragmatic object, as an object of scientific cognition and as an object of aesthetic appreciation, which correspond respectively to the pragmatic, the scientific and the aesthetic attitudes. Zhu attributes the different modes of manifestation of a singular thing to the different attitudes held by the perceiving subject. The appearing of the same thing as different objects is a direct consequence of the different modes of consciousness maintained by this same subject. Zhu’s approach shares the basic characteristic of the method of correlative analysis practiced by Husserl and his phenomenological followers. Yet Zhu never uses any technical terms specific to phenomenology in order to draw the distinction between the pragmatic, the scientific, and the aesthetic attitudes. Zhu further clarifies what he means by “the focusing of attention and the isolation of thought”. He says: The artist forgets that his wife is waiting for the wood she needs in order to cook meal; he forgets that in botanical textbook pine tree is called flowering plant… The old pine occupies his entire consciousness. While his eyes and ears are open, the world outside the old pine is neither visible nor audible to him.5

In other words, the aesthetic attitude positions the artist in such a way that the external world is completely out of his attention. He is no longer interested in the external world. He has his eyes fixed on the old pine tree as an object of pure con1  The Complete Works of Zhu Guangqian, Vol. 2 (Hefei: Education Press of Anhui) (《朱光潛全 集》, 第二卷(合肥:安徽教育出版社)), 1987, p. 9. 2  The Complete Works of Zhu Guangqian, Vol. 2 (《朱光潛全集》, 第二卷), 1987, p. 10. 3  The Complete Works of Zhu Guangqian, Vol. 2 (《朱光潛全集》, 第二卷), pp. 10–11. 4  The Complete Works of Zhu Guangqian, Vol. 2 (《朱光潛全集》, 第二卷), p. 11. 5  The Complete Works of Zhu Guangqian, Vol. 2 (《朱光潛全集》, 第二卷), p. 11.

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templation, unaffected by any scientific or mundane interest. Where comes this attitude of complete disinterestedness in the external world? In phenomenological terms, this arrives out of the epoché practiced on the world by the perceiving subject. By enacting the epoché, the meditating subject reduces his ontological interest in the world. Likewise, in his pure contemplation, the artist suspends his existential belief in the world by withholding any judgment as to whether the world exists or not: he shows neither any cognitive interest nor any pragmatic concerns about the world. The way Zhu chooses to explain the essential moment of the aesthetic attitude is surprisingly close to the phenomenological approach, though Zhu never employs any well-­known phenomenological vocabulary except the term “consciousness” (「意識」). One cannot help asking: is Zhu in some way a latent phenomenologist? Yet, phenomenology is guided by the maxim “To the things themselves,” and Husserl is well-known for emphasizing that philosophy should be a “rigorous science.”6 Will phenomenology be suspected of pursuing scientific research from a positivist attitude dominated overwhelmingly by the epistemological interest? How would such an approach to philosophy be favorable to the aesthetic attitude, an attitude which is at the basis of aesthetic experience of appreciation of art work? If phenomenology is a form of philosophy dominated by epistemological interests, will it consider, as Plato does in The Republic, that the search for truth has absolute priority over activities of aesthetic appreciation and thus will result in the depreciation of art in its defense of philosophy?

2.3  P  henomenological Attitude as the Epoché of the Natural Attitude To the uninitiated reader, the maxim “To the things themselves” might run the risk of being misunderstood as proposing an approach adjacent to positivism. In the epistemological dimension, positivism adopts an empiricist approach. But metaphysically speaking, positivism is basically a kind of naïve realism. It asserts essentially that the world is a realm of natural reality existing in-itself independently of any cognitive activities of the subject, and that such a world exhibits its properties and laws which are independent of human cognition. As a form of philosophy that has accepted the challenge of Kantian criticism, phenomenology has overcome the pre-reflective attitude of naïve realism inherent to positivism. Husserl calls this pre-­

 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft”, originally in Logos, Bd. I, 1910–11, pp. 289–340; later published as monograph bearing the same title, ed. Wilheim Szilasi (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1965); published also in Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), Husserliana XXV, ed. Thomas Nenon & Hans Rainer Sepp (Dordrecht: M.  Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 3–62. 6

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reflective attitude the natural attitude (die natürliche Einstellung).7 It is now well-­ known that Husserl has invented the famous method of phenomenological reduction. The exercise of the reduction enables the naïve actor of everyday activities to be transformed into a phenomenologically reflective philosopher. The key to this self-transformation of the naïvely acting subject to a radically reflective philosopher is the change of attitude brought about by the phenomenological reduction, which is initiated by the epoché with regard to the natural attitude. This consists of the suspension of the general thesis of the ever-existing world (die Generalthesis der immer daseiende Welt).8 Let us recall briefly Husserl’s famous explication of this change of attitude brought about by the enactment of the epoché in Ideen I. In the natural attitude of everyday life, we busy ourselves with all sorts of knowing, feeling, and willing activities. Through these different modes of activity we encounter perceptual objects of different kinds. These objects can be merely physical things, living beings, other fellow human beings, cultural objects, or goods. My encounter with these objects takes place within an indefinitely extending perceptual field intermingled with an equally indefinitely enduring temporal horizon. These objects are found in a definite orientation with respect to my body, either in front of me or behind me, on my left or on my right, above or below my eye level. I am aware of the existence of these objects not only when they fall under my present field of vision; I can still be aware of them even when they fall outside my present field of vision. They co-exist with me in the same surrounding world. I can call upon them by turning toward them when there is such a necessity, especially when I have to accomplish certain tasks. Thus, my relation to the perceptual objects around me is not limited to a cognitive relation. Such objects may help me to achieve some end; they play a role in my activities of finality. Thus my surrounding world is not merely a world of cognitive truths, it is also a world of values or evaluation (I have to make decisions according to my judgment of good and bad, desirable and undesirable), a world of goods (I have to face the necessities of life and undertake pragmatic activities), and a practical world (I have to set up ends and I gather my efforts to achieve these ends). Likewise, my relation with others in the surrounding world is not limited to the relation of cognition. The Other is not merely an object of knowledge. Others show themselves always at the same time as a relative or a stranger, a friend or an enemy, a partner or a competitor, a superior or a subordinate in a working relationship. In short, my surrounding world is also a network of interpersonal relations.9 7  Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einfürung in die reine Phänomenologie (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlage, 1980) (hereafter Ideen I), p.  48; Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. Trans. F.  Kersten (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1983) (hereafter Ideas I), p. 53. 8  Ideen I, § 30, p. 53, § 32, p. 56; Ideas I, p. 57, p. 61. 9  Ideen I, § 27, pp. 48–50; Ideas I, pp. 51–53.

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In fact, our everyday mode of living is never a pure mode guided by a unique interest. The three modes of activity—knowing, feeling, and willing—are always interwoven with one another. Yet we can always pass from one mode to another and concentrate on one mode at a time. For example, when we engage ourselves in an arithmetic exercise, we temporarily suspend other modes of activity and immerse ourselves in the cognitive attitude of formal theoretical science. Under this attitude, we are no longer interested in the empirical facts of the natural world; yet, we are still in the natural attitude, as we still assume that the objective world exists, though its existence is not the focus of my attention. Nor do we inquire about the relation between these two attitudes—the relation between the cognitive attitude of theoretical science and the natural attitude. Thus, the natural attitude exhibits the following state of mind: no matter what kind of activities I am undertaking, no matter what is the focus of my attention, I assume without question the factual existence of the natural world which exists in-itself and is present around me as the substructure of my existence and of the existence of objects around me. This natural world is not limited to the world constructed by natural scientific knowledge; it is also an intersubjective world I share with others. Only on the basis of this intersubjective world is any natural scientific knowledge communicated to me. I can perceive the changes that this natural world undergoes. I can even think that this world lacks this or that aspect that I judge to be desirable. But I never doubt the existence of the world itself; my belief in the factual existence of the world in general is beyond any doubt. Husserl summarizes the natural attitude as one which adheres pre-reflectively to the general thesis of the ever-existing world.10 The reflective attitude advocated by Husserl begins by the radical modification of the natural attitude held by us in our everyday life. We no longer take the existence of the natural world as a matter of evidence. We bracket the unquestioned thesis of the existence of the world as a natural reality in order to reserve the right to examine it. Husserl borrows the Greek term ὲποχή to name this act of suspension of judgment on the general thesis of the existence of the world. In Ideen I, Husserl declares that the epoché is inspired by Descartes’ method of universal doubt: never pronounce judgment of the existence of the world before we secure any evidence about it. The suspension of judgment about the existence of the world is neither the negation of its existence, nor the consideration of the world as a kind of virtual existence, for this consideration still affirms the existence of the world in some way. Epoché as a suspension of judgment is modification of the natural attitude by neutralization of the general thesis of the existence of the world. But neutralization of the general ontological thesis about the world does not mean that we give up the search for the truth of the world. On the contrary, we ask in a more radical manner what does it mean by this very thing termed “world”: we are enquiring about the meaning of world as world. Just as with Descartes’ methodic doubt, Husserl’s phenomenological epoché is the manifestation of the freedom of the subject: we refuse to accept any unexamined claim about the thesis of the world before proceeding with our own

10

 Ideen I, § 30, p. 53; Ideas I, p. 57.

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reflection on it.11 The exercise of this freedom enables me as reflective subject to be freed from any prejudice about the world and the things encountered in the world. The radicality of the epoché extends to the whole realm of established scientific knowledge: the validity of any scientific proposition will not be accepted before reflective examination. Thus the enactment of the epoché is the manifestation of the spirit of rigour proper to the phenomenological philosopher. It is in conformity with this spirit of rigour that Husserl claims that phenomenology is a philosophizing which aims at “freedom from presupposition” (Voraussetzungslosigkeit).12 The radical transformation of the attitude of the subject facing the world initiated by the epoché brings about a positive result: our gaze, which is directed entirely to things in world under the natural attitude, is now fixed on our direct experience, which Husserl calls lived-experience (Erlebnis). This is the realm of conscious experience from which we can never separate. The phenomenological epoché renders visible for the first time a domain of immanence that is hidden while we are busy leading our life of mundane interests. Only by suspending our mundane interests as well as our pre-reflective ontological presupposition about the existence of the world can this vast domain of immanence—pure consciousness—be open to us.13 In the natural attitude, our gaze is predominantly attracted to things in the world through perception, which asserts the reality of the objects seen until contradicted by another perception. The perceptual mode of consciousness always understands the objects seen in terms of reality. With the epoché our gaze is directed back to the realm of consciousness, and other modes of consciousness are accessible. Objects of cognition, of willing, and of feeling are not necessarily real; they can be irreal and present to our consciousness in the form of ideas. Thus other than real objects accessible to us through perception, there exist also objects of ideality, such as numbers, geometric figures, ideas, images, and musical melodies which are accessible to us through other modes of consciousness. Among modes of consciousness other than perception, imagination is the most prominent mode used during our contact with objects of ideality. They are accessible to us either by pure imagination or through a mixture of the perceptual and the imaginary modes of consciousness, which Husserl called ideation. Thus, by opening up the domain of pure consciousness, the phenomenological epoché opens up a hithertho undiscovered domain of philosophical research: the domain of objects of ideality. This is the novelty and advantage of phenomenology in contrast to other approaches to philosophy. It is also well-known that Husserl began the practice of the method of epoché around the years 1904–05. At the very beginning of the Lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time delivered during this period, Husserl was aware that “the suspension of objective time” of the physical

 Ideen I, § 31, pp. 54–55; Ideas I, pp. 57–58.  Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, Band II/1 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1980), § 7, pp. 19–22; Logical Investigations, Vol. 1, Eng. Trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1970), pp. 263–266. 13  Ideen I, § 33, pp. 58–59; Ideas I, pp. 65–66. 11 12

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world is the pre-condition of going back to the consciousness of internal time.14 Though in these lectures the term used by Husserl is “Ausschaltung,” and not yet the Greek term “ὲποχή”, “the suspension of objective time” has the effect of enacting what he later used to call the epoché with respect to objective time. Later in the summer lectures of 1907 from which the introductive part was published posthumously under the title The Idea of Phenomenology (Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Fünf Vorlesungen) Husserl used for the first time publicly the term “phenomenological reduction” (phänomenologische Reduktion).15 This term is used to denote the whole methodological process of performing the epoché of the general thesis of the ever-­existing world and directing the gaze back to the realm of consciousness. From then on, the epoché or the phenomenological reduction is considered by Husserl as the condicio sine qua non for passing through the gateway which leads to phenomenological reflection.

2.4  A  esthetic Attitude as the Prototype of Phenomenological Attitude? How has Husserl discovered the key role played by the epoché in his search for the gateway to phenomenological reflection? Since Husserl came to philosophy from mathematics and logic, and emphasized throughout his whole life that philosophy has to be guided by the idea of rigorous science, it is commonly believed that mathematics and the formal sciences constitute the paradigm of Husserl’s philosophical thinking. However, we find that serious consideration of the characteristics of the work of art constitutes a non-negligible moment in the formation of Husserl’s thought, in particular in Husserl’s awareness of the importance of the change of attitude brought about by the practice of epoché and reduction. In a letter written to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a famous Austrian novelist, poet, and playwright, in January 1907,16 i.e., some three months prior to the lectures mentioned above from which The Idea of Phenomenology was originated, Husserl made a stunning confes14  Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), Husserliana X (Den Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1966), p. 4; On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), Eng. Trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1991), p. 4. 15  Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Husserliana II (Den Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1950), p. 45; The Idea of Phenomenology, Eng. Trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1999), p. 34. 16  Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) was a member of the extended family of Malvine Husserl, wife of the phenomenological philosopher. He visited Göttingen in December 1906 and gave a lecture on “The Poet and our Time” (“Der Dichter und diese Zeit”) at the University of Göttingen in which Husserl was teaching at that time. Hofmannsthal probably had sent some of his works to Husserl after this visit, and Husserl sent him back a letter of thanks. C.f., “Une lettre de Husserl à Hofmannsthal”, note of the French translator Eliane Escoubas in La Part de l’Oeil, Dossier: Art et phénoménologie, réalizé par Eliane Escoubas, no. 7, 1991, p. 12.

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sion about the impact of Hofmannsthal’s work on the progress of his own philosophical thinking. Husserl wrote that after having received the former’s “marvelous gift”, which is believed to be some early literary works of Hofmannsthal, “syntheses of thought sought for during a long time are transmitted to me suddenly, like fallen from heaven.”17 Husserl went on to say that the theatrical works of Hofmannsthal present an immense significance to him as philosopher and phenomenologist. This is because through the literary works of Hofmannsthal, Husserl found that the attitude towards the surrounding world manifested by works of art is very close to the attitude of the phenomenological method. Husserl’s letter continues in the following manner: The ‘inner states’ which your art describes as pure aesthetic states … present to me an entirely specific interest with respect to its objectification. This means that this is valid for me not only as lover of art, but also as philosopher and ‘phenomenologist’. Efforts of long years aiming at the clarification of the meaning of basic philosophical problems and then at the method of their solution brought me the persistent acquisition of the ­‘phenomenological’ method. This method requires a position-taking which departs essentially from the ‘natural’ position-taking face to all objectivities. This position-taking is a close relative to the attitude and the position in which your art as a purely aesthetic art transports us in regard to its objects and the whole surrounding world.18

To Husserl, the position-taking of both the phenomenological method and of an art work as a purely aesthetic enterprise moves away from the “natural” positiontaking of everyday life. What does this mean? Husserl went on to explain as follows: Intuition of a purely aesthetic art work is enacted by the strict suspension of any existential position-taking (existenziale Stellungnahme) by the intellect and any position-taking by feelings and wills, which presupposes such an existential position-taking… Art work places us in the state of pure aesthetic intuition which excludes any such position-taking. More an art work is in resonance with the world of existence or draws life from it, more an art work requires an existential position-taking from itself (for example as sensible appearance of the naturalistic type: like the natural truth of photography), less is the work aesthetically pure… The natural attitude of the mind (die natürliche Geisteshaltung), which is the attitude of actual life, is thoroughly ‘existential’. Things positing before us in a sensible manner, things which actual and scientific discourse talks about, we position them as realities, and acts of feeling and willing are grounded upon these positioning of existence (Existenzsetzungen) … They are at the opposite pole of the attitude of the mind of pure aesthetic intuition and of the corresponding state of feeling. They are in no way less opposite to the pure phenomenological attitude of the mind, in which alone philosophical problems can be solved. This is because the phenomenological method also requires the strict suspension of all existential position-taking.19

To readers familiar with Husserl’s published works, it is not difficult to see that the terms “die natürliche Geisteshaltung” (translated by us as “the natural attitude 17  “Husserl an von Hofmannsthal, 12. I. 1907”, Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, Bd. VII, hrsg. Karl Schuhmann & Elisabeth Schuhmann (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1994), p. 133. 18  “Husserl an von Hofmannsthal, 12. I. 1907”, op. cit., p. 133; emphasis by Husserl. The English translation by the present author is benefited by the French translation of Eliane Escoubas. C.f., La Part de l’Oeil, p. 13. 19  “Husserl an von Hofmannsthal, 12. I. 1907”, op. cit., pp. 133–134. All emphases are by Husserl.

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of the mind”) and “existenziale Stellungnahme” (translated by us as “existential position-­taking”) used by Husserl in this letter amount to the forerunners, respectively, of the now well-known terms “die natürliche Einstellung” (“the natural attitude”) and “die Generalthesis der immer daseiende Welt” (“the general thesis of the ever existing world”) proposed six years later in the Ideas I (1913). Both the artist and the phenomenological philosopher need to observe the strict abstention from position-taking with regard to the surrounding world and the mundane things encountered in it in natural life. Though the celebrated term of ὲποχή specific to phenomenological philosophy in the later development of the phenomenological movement was not yet invented at this moment, through this contrast and comparison Husserl came to the understanding that the suspension of the position-taking in natural life is the common stand of the phenomenological reflective attitude and the pure aesthetic attitude of the artist. That is why Husserl concluded his letter to Hofmannsthal by saying this: “The phenomenological seeing is thus a close relative to the aesthetic seeing in ‘pure’ art.”20 Husserl has given some further explanation on the proximity of the phenomenological attitude and the aesthetic attitude. This consists in their common distinction from the attitude of the natural sciences and psychology: The artist ‘observes’ the world in order to acquire from it and for his end ‘knowledge’ of nature and of human being, and behaves in regard to the world like the phenomenologist behaves. Thus: not as observer in the way of natural scientific researcher and psychologist, not as practical observer of man, as if he aims at getting information about nature and about human being. To him the world in which he carries out his observation on it becomes phenomenon, its existence is indifferent to him, just as to the philosopher (in the critique of reason).21

Husserl found that to adopt a neutral position in regard to the general thesis of the existence of the world is the common stance of the phenomenological attitude and the pure aesthetic attitude. Under both attitudes the world becomes a mere phenomenon. We can venture to say that the pure aesthetic attitude is a quasi-­ phenomenological attitude. However, Husserl did not simply conclude that the task of philosophy and the task of art work are the same. On the contrary, he still pointed out the essential distinction between the two: Only that he [the artist] does not aim at fathoming the ‘meaning’ of the phenomenon of the world and grasping it in concepts in the way the latter [the philosopher] does; he only aims at appropriating the phenomenon of the world intuitively in order to collect a plenitude of forms and materials for the sake of creative aesthetic configurations.22

In other words, the tasks of the phenomenological philosopher and the artist are different despite the proximity of their respective attitudes: the former aims at understanding through concepts, the latter endeavors at creating aesthetic configurations. Yet, both begin with an epoché of the natural attitude. Did Husserl come to  “Husserl an von Hofmannsthal, 12. I. 1907”, op. cit., pp. 135.  “Husserl an von Hofmannsthal, 12. I. 1907”, op. cit., pp. 135. All emphases are by Husserl. 22  “Husserl an von Hofmannsthal, 12. I. 1907”, op. cit., pp. 135. 20 21

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this view as the result of reading Hofmannsthal’s literary work? In any case, we have ample reason to believe that Husserl strengthened his thought on the epoché as the method of phenomenological philosophy he was searching for through the understanding of the neutral position-taking of art work. Thus to Husserl the phenomenological attitude will not result in the depreciation of art work for the benefit of philosophy. On the contrary, to the founder of phenomenology, art work is in active complicity with phenomenological philosophy.

2.5  The Primacy of Imagination and the Privilege of Art Our discussions above, if correct, will bring about some significant theoretical consequences. If the key to the transformation from the natural attitude to the phenomenological attitude resides in the practice of the phenomenological epoché, and if epoché is the neutralization of the general thesis of the existence of the world, then seeing under the phenomenological attitude is closer to the seeing of the artist than the seeing of the natural scientist and the naturalistic psychologist. To the phenomenological philosopher not only is the immediate positive givenness of intuition essential to her seeing, but the exercise of imagination is of equal importance to the acquisition of a proper way of phenomenological seeing. This is because the act of imagination as a neutralization of the existential attitude that underlies the perceptual mode of consciousness is at the origin of the accomplishment of the epoché as the suspension of the natural attitude and the pass over onto the phenomenological attitude. One of the essential differences between phenomenological philosophical study and positivistic scientific research consists in that the latter is satisfied with factual knowledge of the natural world and the human world and never enquires about the essential structure of the world or the meaning of the world as world. In other words, the worldhood of the world is a central concern of the phenomenological philosopher, but not of the empirical scientist. The scientist understands the world in terms of physical space, physical time and physical matter, but never in terms of the worldhood of the world. In order to acquire a deeper level understanding of the world, phenomenological philosophy takes the structural invariants of the world as its object of inquiry. Husserl sometimes called these structural invariants “eidetic structures”, or sometimes simply “eidos” or “essences”, sometimes “idealities” or “ideal objects”. It is in this sense that Husserl defined phenomenological study as the study of essence guided by essential or eidetic intuition. If phenomenology is defined as an eidetic science, the world it understands is not only the world of natural reality. The world is also a cultural world, which is a world of spiritual existence or, simply, a spiritual world. To Husserl, all cultural objectivities are idealities and do not belong to the order of natural reality. Rather, they belong to the order of ideality which is an irreal order. Among the great varieties of cultural objectivities, the work of art is a prime example of ideality which belongs to the irreal order of existence. In §65 of Experience and Judgment, Husserl gives a

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concise explication of the distinction between the order of the real and the order of irreal objects. We call real in a specific sense all that which, in real things in the broader sense, is, according to its sense, essentially individualized by its spatiotemporal position; but we call irreal every determination which, indeed, is founded with regard to its spatiotemporal appearance in a specifically real thing but which can appear in different realities as identical—not merely as similar.23

This means that even though all cultural objectivities have to be embodied in things of the real order and individualized through a particular spatio-temporal existence, but this state of affairs does not diminish their status as irreal object of ideality. Husserl explains this with reference to literary work: Goethe’s Faust is found in any number of real books … which are termed exemplars of Faust. This spiritual meaning which determines the work of art, the spiritual structure as such, is certainly ‘embodied’ in the real world, but it is not individualized by this embodiment. Or again: the same geometrical proposition can be uttered as often as desired; every real utterance has this sense, and different ones have identically the same sense.24

A book of literature is of course a work of art capable of being reproduced through an embodied mode of existence, namely a printed copy of that very book; but the ideal meaning of this singular book is not affected by the number of copies of the book printed. How about works of art which cannot be mechanically reproduced, such as a painting or a sculpture, which allow only a specific spatio-temporal mode of embodiment? In what way does their ideal meaning manifest? A musical work can be repeatedly played, and every playing is a different spatio-temporal embodiment and brings about different effects. How is the ideal meaning of music to be understood? All these questions are not easy to answer. But Husserl has still provided an answer in principle: To be sure, an ideal object like Raphael’s Madonna can in fact have only one mundane state and in fact is not repeatable in an adequate identity (of the complete ideal content). But in principle this ideal is indeed repeatable, as is Goethe’s Faust.25

Likewise, taking Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata for Violin and Piano as an example, Husserl explains that although a musical work is composed of a combination of sounds, it is still a work of ideal unity. This is because the sounds of a musical work are not merely physical entities studied by the science of physics, nor merely sensuous signals perceived by our auditory system. Only one and the same sonata is reproduced among the multiple live or recorded performances of the work, under

 Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1999), p.  319; Experience and Judgment, Eng. Trans. James S.  Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), PP. 265–266. All emphases are by Husserl. 24  Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, p. 320; Experience and Judgment, p. 266; English translation slightly modified. 25  Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, p. 320; Experience and Judgment, p. 266; emphasis by Husserl. 23

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real conditions of reproduction.26 That is why a musical work is also an eidetic object of ideality. Since one of the main tasks of phenomenological philosophy is the explication of the ontological status of objects of ideality and defines itself as an eidetic science, imagination, in the Husserlian sense of phantasy (Phantasie), has an equal status compared to perception, because it is considered as a legitimate source of eidetic cognition: The Eidos, the pure essence, can be exemplified for intuition in experiential data—in data of perception, memory, and so forth; but it can equally well be exemplified in data of mere phantasy. Accordingly, to seize upon an essence itself, and to seize upon it originarily, we can start from corresponding experiencing intuitions, but equally well from intuitions which are non-experiencing, which do not seize upon factual existence but which are instead ‘merely imaginative’.27

To Husserl, in eidetic sciences, for example in geometry, free phantasy (freie Phantasie) even has some sort of primacy over perception when the object of cognition is pure essence and not sense data. As a mathematician before coming to philosophy, Husserl understands the secrets of geometric operation better than a philosopher without comparable training. In his investigative thinking, the geometer operates on the figure or model incomparably more in phantasy than in perception, and even more so does the ‘pure’ geometer, i.e., the one who dispenses with algebraic methods… in phantasy he has incomparably more freedom reshaping at will the figures feigned, and in running through continuously modified possible shapings, thus in generating innumerable new formations; a freedom opens up to him for the very first time an access to the expanses of essential possibilities with their infinite horizons of eidetic cognitions.28

As a science of eidos, phenomenology is in a situation similar to geometry with respect to its general operative characteristics. This is because what the phenomenologist looks for is the eidetic structures of the lived-experience and its intentional correlates that are accessible by the exercise of the phenomenological reduction. Since our experience can be deployed indefinitely, the eidetic structures to be studied by the phenomenologist can be varied indefinitely. Originary givenness provided by perception alone is not sufficient for the phenomenologist to apprehend all possible essential structures. Thus, in addition to perception, imagination is also called upon for help. To Husserl, art occupies a position of primacy over other domains in terms of the use of imagination. Extraordinary profit can be drawn from the offerings of history, in even more abundant measure from those of art, and especially from poetry, which are, to be sure, imaginary but which, in the originality of their invention of forms [Neugestaltungen], the abundance of their singular features and the unbrokenness of their motivation, tower high above the prod-

 Edmund Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik, Husserliana XVII (Den Haag: M. Nijhoff, 1974), p. 18; Formal and Transcendental Logic, Eng. Trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 21. 27  Ideen I, § 4, p. 12; Ideas I, p. 11. 28  Ideen I, § 70, p. 131; Ideas I, p. 159; Eng. Trans. slightly modified. 26

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Art not only operates abundantly with imagination, its objects are very often fictive. If phenomenology as eidetic science takes art as its prototype, it contains necessarily fictive components. No wonder Husserl says with a somewhat exaggerated tone that “‘feigning’ [Fiktion] makes up the vital elements of phenomenology as of every other eidetic science, that feigning is the source from which the cognition of ‘eternal truth’ is fed.”30 The esteem and the paradigmatic status given by Husserl to art and free imagination are astonishingly high.

2.6  Conclusion Our preceding discussions start from the elucidation of the basic character of the aesthetic attitude given by the modern Chinese theorist of aesthetics Zhu Guangqian. We hope to have shown that what opposes to the phenomenological attitude is not the aesthetic attitude but rather the naturalistic and positivistic attitude of the sciences and the pragmatic attitude of everyday life. Thus the phenomenological attitude does not devaluate the aesthetic attitude. On the contrary, they are on a par as both attitudes enact an epoché of the general thesis of the existence of the world posited by the natural attitude. Thus the phenomenological attitude and the aesthetic attitude are in a position of complicity face to natural life. Husserl not only never maintained a pejorative attitude towards art, but recognized that art occupies a position of supremacy in terms of its operative power of imagination in comparison to other domains of human intellectual activities. To accomplish the task of an eidetic science, phenomenology operates by the intertwinement of perception and imagination, and sometimes even proceeds with a fictional form of thinking. Yet after the epoché of the natural world thesis, the respective task of phenomenology and of art departs from one another. Whereas art aims at the creation of varieties of aesthetic configuration through forms and sensible materials, phenomenological philosophy practices “the reduction of the question of being to the question of the meaning of being.”31 In a word, the phenomenological philosopher goes on to understand the deep structure and meaning of the world as world through concepts. This is precisely not the task of an artist. We can go on to ask the following question about art: what does art aim to bring about through imagination and fiction? Does it create a new world or lead us toward

 Ideen I, § 70, p. 132; Ideas I, p. 160.  Ideen I, § 70, p. 132; Ideas I, p. 160; emphasis by Husserl. 31  Paul Ricoeur, Le conflit des interprétations. Essais d’hérméneutique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969), p.  12; Conflict of Interpretations. Esssays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Idhe (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 9. 29 30

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some new spiritual dimensions of the world such that we can live-through its existential meaning? In other words, is art an activity which leads us to some spiritual horizon invisible and inaccessible to the mundane eye and mind? If such is the case, the task of an art work is the opening up of the world in order to penetrate into its profound ontological structure and existential meaning. This consideration leads to the question of the truth function of art work. Husserl has not shown great interest in this question. In the phenomenological movement, this question has to wait for Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Henri Maldiney, and Michel Henry to be tackled thematically. Yet, Husserl had prior to them laid the ground for the phenomenology of art. Not only had the old master of Freiburg given some sort of primacy to the operative power of imagination and to art work as a privileged example for eidetic sciences, but he also recognized the deep complicity between the phenomenological attitude and the aesthetic attitude. To both the phenomenologist and the artist, the world and the things therein are mere phenomenon.

Bibliography Husserl, Edmund. 1950. Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Husserliana II. Den Haag: M. Nijhoff. The Idea of Phenomenology, Eng. Trans. Lee Hardy. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1999. ———. 1965. “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft”, originally in Logos, Bd. I, 1910–11, pp. 289–340; later published as monograph bearing the same title, ed. Wilheim Szilasi (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1965); published also in Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), Husserliana XXV, ed. Thomas Nenon & Hans Rainer Sepp (Dordrecht: M.  Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 3–62. ———. 1966. Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893–1917), Husserliana X. Den Haag: M.  Nijhoff. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), Eng. Trans. John Barnett Brough. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1991. ———. 1974. Formale und Transzendentale Logik, Husserliana XVII. Den Haag: M.  Nijhoff. Formal and Transcendental Logic, Eng. Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969. ———. 1980a. Logische Untersuchungen, I & II.  Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Logical Investigations, Eng. Trans. J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1970. ———. 1980b. Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einfürung in die reine Phänomenologie. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlage. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, Eng. Trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht/ Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1983. ———. 1994. Briefwechsel, Bd. VII, hrsg. Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher. ———. 1999. Erfahrung und Urteil. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Experience and Judgment, Eng. Trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Ricoeur, Paul. 1969. Le conflit des interprétations. Essais d’hérméneutique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Conflict of Interpretations. Esssays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Idhe (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). Zhu, Guangqian. 1987. The Complete Works of Zhu Guangqian, vol. 2. Hefei: Education Press of Anhui (《朱光潛全集》, 第二卷(合肥:安徽教育出版社)).

Chapter 3

A Husserlian Account of the Power of the Imaginary Thomas Nenon

Abstract  This essay will concentrate on two brief texts that provide some indications about how Husserl thinks about theatrical and literary works of art as specific instances of Phantasie, about what he means by their “aesthetic” properties, and how this extended sense of the aesthetic points to their ability to move and renew the human spirit in ways consistent with Husserl’s own phenomenological enterprise, but in another sense in ways that surpass what theoretical enterprises like philosophy can achieve on their own. The two texts are, first of all, excerpts from research manuscripts from around 1918 published as Text 18  in Husserliana XXIII, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung 1895–1925, and secondly an even briefer occasional essay written around the middle of the 20’s entitled “Shaw und die Lebenskraft des Abendlands,” published as Beilage XI to the Kaizo articles in Husserliana XXVII. This essay will concentrate on two brief texts that provide some indications about how Husserl thinks about theatrical and literary works of art as specific instances of Phantasie,1 about what he means by their “aesthetic” properties, and how this extended sense of the aesthetic points to their ability to move and renew the human spirit in ways consistent with Husserl’s own phenomenological enterprise, but in another sense in ways that surpass what theoretical enterprises like philosophy can achieve on their own. The two texts are, first of all, excerpts from research manuscripts from around 1918 published as Text 18 in Husserliana XXIII, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung 1895–1925,2 and secondly an even briefer occasional  In this essay, it will be translated simply as“imagination” in spite of some translation problems that would otherwise cause if we were contrasting Phantasie, as he sometimes does, with “Einbildungskraft.” The distinction is not relevant for this text. 2  Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung 1895–1925, Husserliana Volume XXIII, edited by E.  Marbach, (Dordrecht: Kluweer, 1980), pp.  498–545, esp. 514–524 and 540–543. 1

T. Nenon (*) Department of Philosophy, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_3

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essay written around the middle of the 20’s entitled “Shaw und die Lebenskraft des Abendlands,” published as Beilage XI to the Kaizo articles in Husserliana XXVII.3 Apart from questions about art works in general and literary and theatrical art in particular, readers of Husserl are already quite familiar with the power of the imaginary in a very different sense. Phenomenology itself, Husserl reiterates over and again, is a science not of the factual and actual, but of pure possibilities as such. The eidetic structures of experience and the objects constituted within experience are not just generalizations about the specific experiences of individuals or the things that they happen to have encountered in those experiences, but about the very nature of experience itself, the various kinds and dimensions of possible experience, how these experiences exhibit various different dependencies and essential interrelations without themselves all being able to be reduced to one kind of experience, just as the very different kinds or regions of things that present themselves to us in experience exhibit various kinds of essential interrelations and dependencies without being able all to be reduced to any one kind of simpler or most basic things. What makes phenomenology possible is the ability of human cognition to consider not just what is in the sense of what has actually happened to show itself to be the case (or seem to be the case) to an individual at a given moment, but rather to imagine other possibilities as such – and not just possibilities of one’s own experience but of other possible subjects of experience, and not just other humans but other possible cognizers in general. Phenomenological reflection involves systematically examining such possibilities as such and discovering through eidetic intuition the essential structures of such experiences and the objects constituted for experience as such that moves us beyond the confines of the merely actual, be it on the individual or the social/cultural level. It can thereby reveal to us a priori possibilities that may otherwise be overlooked or even covered up by specific tendencies of the actual to seem to be all there is or ever could be. It is against this backdrop that Husserl formulates his critiques first of psychologism, then later of naturalism and objectivism that attempt to constrain the possibilities of what there is and what we can know to the merely real and to reduce what is real to the observable and measurable properties of spatio-temporally located, causally determined individuals, “nature” as determined in the modern sense as the correlate of modern natural science. Husserl wrote about this widely and what he had to say about it is well-known. In particular, Husserl’s published works and those later published much later in numerous volumes of the Husserliana present sustained analyses of the nature of ideal entities such as numbers, meaning, and mathematical and logical relationships that cannot be reduced to the real; of the nature of mental states as such and the way they are different from physical states and not reducible to them; to a lesser extent, but still relatively extended descriptions of persons and personhood and even higher-order personalities such as societies and states; and of use-objects and other cultural artifacts. However, even though he men-

3  Edmund Husserl, Aufsätze und Vorträge 1912–1937, Husserliana XXVII, edited by H.-R. Sepp and T. Nenon, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), pp. 122–124.

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tions works of arts and religious objects as objects that would belong to additional distinct regions of beings, he does not typically say much about them except to note that they belong to the personalistic realm in which values and practical predicates that attend to these kinds of objects constitute them as the kinds of objects they are. Two places where he does say a bit more about them, and particularly about theatre and literary works are the texts I will discuss in this essay. I am not claiming that these are the only two or even the most significant places where Husserl discusses literary works of art. Of course, there are a few classic passages where he talks about other kinds of works of art, especially music, painting, and sculptures as higher-order objects. Musical melodies show up famously as primary examples of temporal objects in the early lectures on the constitution of internal time-­ consciousness; and the beauty of a violin tone as something that we experience every much as genuinely and immediately as the narrower perceptual features of that event is described in a passage from the Ideas II that I have often seen quoted as a good example of the way that higher-order objects and their aesthetic and practical predicates present themselves to us as part of our everyday experience much more powerfully and immediately than their “real” predicates conceived in the narrower sense, how the perception of them in the broadest sense can involve Wertnehmungen just as much as sensible perceptual properties. He notes that when one hears the pleasing tone of a violin, its beauty is “originarily given when the tone originally moves one’s spirit (Gemüt) and the beauty as such is originally given in the medium of this pleasure …” (IV, 186). In other contexts in the Ideas II, he also describes how and, at a yet higher level, we perceive the practical predicates of the objects that surround us in our daily lives. The perceived positive or negative values (Husserl’s examples here are all examples of positive values, though) serve as stimuli, and evoke desires that lead to actions: “The experienced objects as objects with this experiential sense stimulate my desires, or they fulfill needs in relation to certain circumstances that are constituted in consciousness, for example the often recurring need for nourishment. They then become apprehensible as consistent with the satisfaction of such needs or as suitable for that purpose” (IV, 187). In the Ideas II and in other places where he describes the aesthetic predicates of the experience of works of art such as music, the aesthetic predicates he describes are typically properties such the experience of them as beautiful (schön) or pleasing (gefällig), which spark an positive interest in them as such just as the pleasant feeling or taste of some other objects stimulates an inherent attraction to the object exhibiting this characteristic. There is also at least one passage where he describes the negative experience of value when the anticipated positive experience of what we can presume to be a work of art that we take to be beautiful turns out to be “in truth an awful Kitsch” (XXXVII, 120). The descriptions of paintings and sculptures more typically occur in passages where Husserl’s interest is less in their aesthetic qualities as works of art than in the differences between image-consciousness – be it of two-dimensional images such as pictures or three-dimensional images such as sculptures – and knowledge as part of his basic epistemological argument beginning in the Logical Investigations

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against the so-called representational or image-theory of consciousness. Experiences such as perceptual experience that purport to provide knowledge of the objects, to present the object as thus and such; they are not re-presentations, but rather presentations. Images, by contrast, when we perceive them are themselves presented, but with an awareness that they are presented precisely as re-presentations of something that is itself different from the image. If it presents an actually existing real thing, then what we have are not two representations, but rather the presentation of a representation and perhaps in some cases the presentation of the re-presented thing as well, perhaps at the same time but more often prior to or subsequent to presentation of the image that represents it. Husserl’s examples of such images even when they are works of art serve more typically to advance his epistemological analyses than an analysis of them as artworks per se. In the research manuscripts published in Husserliana XXIII, Husserl pursues a broader project, distinguishing not only image-consciousness from immediately presentive experiences such as perception, but also from various other kinds of presenting and representing experiences such as memory, dreaming, hallucination, and expectation. Even there, though, he says little about the specific aesthetic dimension of the modes in which art-works present. A good illustration of this can be found in Beilage IX4 to Text 1, where he discusses Tizian’s “Heavenly Love” and a bust and a photograph of Fechner without any discussion of what the “aesthetic apperception” he mentions there means, suggesting only that, as works of art, they are of interest not only in what they present, but in how they present it. This would be where the discussion of the specifically aesthetic dimension of art works would have to begin. Indeed, it is here that the conception of the “aesthetic” dimension of works of art is also introduced in the texts that discuss plays and other written “Fikta,” as Husserl calls them. The plays and other literary works that Husserl analyses in Text 18 belong to the general class of objects that, as products of the artist’s imagination (again in German “Phantasie”), are pure “fictions” and yet are forms of presentation – they present characters, events, and setting that may or may not exist or ever have existed in reality. They differ from many other forms of presenting precisely with regard to the fact that the actual existence of what it is they present is a matter of indifference, which is why they are “pure fantasy.” This does not mean that the character and events that they present might not be placed is a setting that actually does exist: Husserl mentions Schnitzler’s Vienna and Fontane’s Berlin as examples. In fact, much of Husserl’s analysis focuses again on just this very problem, how the play or the literary work “presents” without taking any position or even interest in the actual factual existence of what it presents. Husserl stresses that a work of fictional writing is not an illusion in the sense that it first fools the audience into thinking that what it presents is (has been, will be) actual, and that a subsequent negation in the audience’s consciousness has to suspend that illusion, but rather that it creates a quasi-world with quasi-realities that the audience recognizes from the outset as what is being presented and nothing more:

 Hua XXIII, 149–160.

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In a theatrical performance we live in a world of perceptive fantasy, we “images” (Bilder) of the interconnected unity of a picture, but not for that reason “copies” (Abbilder). When Wallenstein or Richard III are presented on stage, what we have is certainly not copied presentation, even though one question that can be considered is the extent to which the accuracy of the copy (Abbildlichkeit) itself has an aesthetic function. Primarily what the immediate imagination presents is certainly not a copy but a picturing in the sense of perceptive fantasy. (515)

That is why he says a little further on that when we watch a play, “We live in neutrality, we take no actual position about what we see, everything that happens there, whatever is said and done with regard to things and persons etc., all has the character of an as-if” (515–16). The same holds true, Husserl says, about narratives. The primary difference is that in the case of a play, the “reproductive phantasies,” as he calls them, that the author calls forth in the audience are induced by witnessed events on stage in the case of a play and by a “succession of spoken or written words” in the latter case (519). In both, however, the quasi-world sets up its own set of intersubjectively binding events and laws. The way the action unfolds in either case sets up the possibility of true and false statements being made about this quasi-world and its events. Things that the audience expects at one point do or do not happen in the further course of the play or narrative. A reader can be mistaken about some of the things that happen there. As opposed to the real world where all facts are determined or will be determined at some point, however, in the work of fiction some things are determined, others are left open and remain open, and even the determined ones are determined as what he calls “hypothetical” truths, i.e. relative to the world of the fictional work as presented there (520–23). All of these considerations, however, still remain more within the sphere of the phenomenological differentiation of different modes of presenting and representing. Where does the aesthetic moment come in? In Beilage LVIII, Husserl turns to the question of fictions as “values,” and his first description focuses on their mimetic function. He begins with a sculpture that is a copy of an original that appears in it: “The aesthetic pleasure (Freude) is directed to the presenting (Darstellende) as such in this copy, in the way that the original appears in it, and it is directed to what is presented only to the extent and only in regard to those moments (and according to the how of those moments) that are presented, and in the specific presenting of them” (538). Instead of following up with the question of what it is about the way of presenting that is the source of the aesthetic pleasure, he instead makes a more general point about modes of presentation for any objects at all, be the presentation an artistic presentation or simply a specific perspective from which even a real natural object – he uses the example of a mountain – presents itself to us. That mode of presentation, the specific perspective or image (Bild) in which the object, for example the mountain, shows itself to me can be a source of pleasure independently of the pleasure taken in the object itself, even independently of the accuracy of the way the object is presented or the very existence of the object itself. The point seems to be a general one, namely that the pleasure in the way an object is presented can be independent of the pleasure taken in

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the existence of the object, of other features of the object, or even the object’s own existence, which is why he includes images artificially produced by a “stereoscope” as examples of fictional images in which one can find some sort of value without regard to the existence of the object, i.e. even if it is a fiction. But what makes one presentation aesthetically valuable rather than the opposite? Are there any criteria for the aesthetic value of artistic fictions? Beilage LIX that begins with the list “artist, ‘poet,’ seer, prophet, leader, describer, bard” (540) does make a few distinctions that provide some hints in that direction. Husserl begins by recognizing some differences in the way that different artists portray their worlds. In some, the aim seems to be to portray a specific world, whereby world here clearly means not only the physical features but also the values and practices of that world, as faithfully as possible. Others create worlds very different from any that exist, some obeying even natural laws very different from those that hold in reality. Husserl notes that the audience’s attention is directed not to the artist’s state of mind, but to the world that the work presents when he says, “Not the writer (Dichter), but the writing or work (Dichtung) is what is understood (nachverstanden)” (540–41). In some cases, where the aim is the realistic portrayal of an existing or previously existing world, the ability to do so faithfully and skillfully using the means available to the artist, i.e. words, can be what is so “admirable” (bewunderungswürdig) when they succeed. The audience derives pleasure from the “intuition of what is concrete and is thereby illuminated in its motivation, the typical ways that it is represented, and pleasure in the art of making that transparent to us” (541). He calls this approach “artistic empiricism or positivism,” whereby it is strictly the mimetic moment that is the source of artistic accomplishment and value. He says that here, “There is no talk of beauty. But beauty can enter into it as a stimulation” (ibid.). What this kind of art describes are types of persons who represent various epochs of the world. Going beyond what Husserl says here, and to a certain extent undercutting the distinction he aims at here, it is important to note that the term “concrete” mentioned in the quote above as it appears in works like the Ideas II, connotes not just or even primarily the perceptible qualities of things but rather the fullness of experience and experienced objects with all of the significances they have for individual human beings and societies in the Umwelt in which they live. So even this form of “realism” involves much more than simply detailed description, it involves showing values and practical aims as such, and  – even though Husserl himself does not say so – helping us understand them in ways that we otherwise might not. He contrasts this kind of narrative art with idealistic writing that takes a look at “ideas and ideals” (541), evaluating them and presenting them as values. As opposed to the realist, the idealist is normatively oriented, “… he not only presents values and the struggle between good and evil, he wants to inflame the love of the good in our souls without moralizing or preaching. He enlightens through the medium of beauty” (542). In this sense, the work moves beyond showing what is characteristic as such and is instead oriented on “the beautiful,” which it seems must now mean what is “good.” So Husserl thereby introduces levels of aesthetics: “‘Aesthetic’ is all art, it is pleasure in what comes to be seen in concreto. But not all art is kallistic.

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And not all kallistic art is moreover idealistic, normative, depicts the Ideal and enlightens (verklärt) through beauty” (ibid.). And if such language did not already stretch the bounds of what most of us would now see as well beyond what we in a much soberer and perhaps disillusioned age would want to expect of art, he adds that, even higher than that, there is a kind of art that “can also be philosophical, metaphysical, elevates one to the Idea of the good, to godliness through beauty, to the most profound basis of the world, and bring one into unity with it” (542). What kind of works would he have in mind here and what would these aesthetics look like? Would they take the form of hymns to virtue in epic pentameter, secular homilies about the virtues and the holiness of all creation? Given Husserl’s own, to our ears often preachy pathos, would it be a play full of declamations, a novel filled with noble characters sacrificing themselves for the ideals of wisdom or the needs of their communities? Surprisingly enough, it turns out that at least some of the leading candidates for the lofty status of the highest spheres of art for Husserl are the comedies of George Bernard Shaw. Shaw himself, no friend of schoolmasters or schoolmasterly tones, might have been one of the first to provide a comic parody of the German philosopher’s high rhetoric here, but maybe we should at least try to see what Husserl could have had in mind with these descriptions of the highest mission of art, even if we for our part might need to find somewhat more sober language in which to couch it. Husserl opens his tribute to Shaw with a comparison between Spengler’s Decline of the West, a then popular lament about the inevitable fall of the West due to forces beyond any one individual’s or even group’s control, and Shaw’s comedies that “everywhere conquer hearts and inculcate the faith that underlies all authentic science and all authentic life, dispersing any skepticism” (Hua XXVII, 122). What is Shaw’s message? According to Husserl, it is that “we are the ones in whom the ‘West’ is alive, whether in abasement or in elevation – as we will” (ibid.). Just as Husserl sees his own work as counteracting various forms of naturalistic reductionism that in his view undermine the possibility of recognizing the power of ethical norms to shape human behavior, he sees Shaw’s work as an artistic work that calls one to personal self-responsibility in which the individual recognizes him- or herself as capable of self-determination that can lead to the betterment of one’s own life and the social life of the community as well  – one of the guiding themes of the Kaizo articles5 composed at around this time and of Husserl’s own lectures on ethics from 1920 and 1924.6 Just as Husserl sees his own philosophical work as serving to recreate an openness for the norms of practical reason inherent in human beings as geistige and hence free beings – hence the “we are the ones” here as the “we” of a community of persons recognizing themselves precisely as geistige, and hence as free and responsible for our own destinies and that of the communities in which we live and interact. This is what raises human beings above the merely natural level in

 Published in Husserliana XXVII (op.cit.), pp. 3–93.  Edmund Husserl, Einleitung in die Ethik, Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924, Hussserliana Vol. XXXVII, edited by H. Peucker, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004). 5 6

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Husserl’s view. In the Kaizo articles, Husserl had made claims about the possibility and necessity of individual and social ethical renewal based on this view; in the ethics lectures, he presents what he sees as fundamental phenomenological analyses that make this conviction more than just a personal assumption or a moral wish. He believes that the human possibilities of self-awareness and self-reflection have the possibility of grounding human actions in norms of reason that elevate them above the level of natural causation to the level of free and rational motivation. If there is a principle of reason in history, then it comes not from the outside but from the very nature of human practical agency itself. Hence Husserl’s claim that he has found in Shaw a fellow believer in the principle that “God’s power lives and exercises itself nowhere other than in us, in our radically authentic will (wurzelechten Willen). Where else does God’s work, the living God, than in our life, in our pure will, one that is sincere down to its final roots, that wants nothing else other than what it ­cannot stop doing without giving up our lives as senseless?” (122). Husserl acknowledges that Shaw is not the only allie in this movement, a movement based on insights into human agency and responsibility that he says can become “a revolutionary force in European civilization,” but, he says, “in terms of the extent and the power of the effect” Shaw and his work have, Shaw “has no equal” (123). In contrast to the many passages where Husserl seems to elevate himself to the lone voice of reason in the modern age and sees phenomenology as the prime mover in a new direction not just in philosophy but in Western civilization if there is to be one, here he acknowledges that he is not alone and that Shaw’s artistic work surpasses his own in its ability to reach and move others to join them in this enterprise. What gives Shaw’s work its power, he says, is Shaw’s “passionate reaction against skepticism” not just in its theoretical manifestation but also in the concomitant tendencies in other areas such as what he calls the “art of the aesthetes, the science of the specialists, the religion of the conventional churches etc.” (ibid.). In each of these spheres – art, science, and religion – what is needed is a return back to the original experiences, Husserl believes, that are their sources and that keeps them authentic. So art that is merely “pleasing,” an aesthetics without an ethics, is not as powerful as the kind of aesthetics that Husserl believes he has recognized in Shaw, which is what one might call an ethical aesthetics or an aesthetic ethics in the form of art works that call one to one’s ethical possibilities and responsibilities. And it is important to remember here that for Husserl ethics is not merely an intellectual exercise, but involves the cultivation of the proper sentiments and predispositions, because as he points out in the ethics lectures, reason in the practical sphere is not strictly an intellectual matter. It is the self’s directedness towards appropriate experiences and intuitions that can serve as confirmation for the genuinely beautiful and valuable in the aesthetic or the good in the ethical sphere. True art is art that aligns them. Practical reason involves having the appropriate feelings and dispositions for acting. In fact, Husserl believes that all actions are motivated by feelings: „Mere intellect is not practical. Only feelings can determine actions” (XXXVII, 170). Genuine art, the highest art is art that is guided by this insight and evokes these feelings. Shaw’s art is great, it fits the bill described earlier for the highest level of art because, “His art shatters the separation between the actual life

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of the audience member and his art’s figurative characters, in his hands art becomes a power of life itself and its social-ethical and religious renewal” (XXVII, 123). The job of the artist and hence the measure of his art is the ability to awaken insights in the audience and move each of them to take up his or her own life as a life of ethical responsibility. Finally, Husserl stresses one other dimension of Shaw’s work approvingly that reveals a further kinship that Husserl at least longs for. Shaw, he says, appeals to his audience not just as private persons, but “as members of a social Umwelt” (ibid.). Husserl sets out a list of alternatives – weakness or strength, an egoism that lacks a conscience or the power of true freedom – that reveals how Husserl himself sees both Shaw and by extension his own work as serving a true sense of community and responsibility to and for others that he also sees as combatting the corrupting influence of naturalistic reductionism, in this case a kind of utilitarian reductionism that sees practical responsibilities ultimately as responsibilities only to oneself and these responsibilities as the pursuit of one’s own material self-interest. This kind of self-­ serving intellectual degradation in modern moral theory is certainly part of what Husserl has in mind when he praises Shaw for “unmasking all of the hypocrisies and well-meaning inauthenticities, all of the intellectual and practical prejudices in all of their conceivable garbs” (ibid.). Shaw’s motto over against all of these prejudices, Husserl states is simply “I am” – this “I am” of course understood not as “I” of the individual outside of a community and outside of history, not the “I” simply as a particle set in motion and buffeted powerlessly by forces out of its own control, the “I” not simply as a nexus of natural desires, but the I as a rational and responsible agent in a community. This is of course the I that Husserl himself strives, perhaps even envisages himself to be. But whereas Husserl confesses that he himself often finds himself discouraged, convinced that he may be alone, despairing that his own work might not be effectively serving this noble cause he has identified, he says that he takes comfort in Shaw’s work as an inspiration that he is not alone, that he has others who share his cause and do so in their art in a way that inspires not only Husserl, but others to join them. He is acknowledging a role for art that can affect one’s feelings, renew the authenticity of one’s values, and lead to right action aimed at more humane, responsible lives and better communities. So the true aesthetics for Husserl would not be merely the feeling of the enjoyable or that which is pleasant, but rather that which awakens insights into genuine values and thereby inspires right feelings that lead to right actions. What I have tried to show here then is that what at first glance might seem to be a strange pair – Shaw the witty playwright, the biting social critic, the social revolutionary, the virulently anti-clerical secularist, on the one hand; and Husserl, often viewed as the abstract, solitary thinker sitting alone in his Schreibstube composing manuscript after manuscript of acribically recorded analyses on the nature of perception, the existence of ideal objects, and the nuances of phenomenological method, constantly on the lookout for followers who might somehow also become convinced that this is the way to save European humanity – is perhaps not such a strange pairing after all and that this image of Husserl is perhaps not the whole picture in the first place.

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Bibliography Husserl, Edmund. 1952. In Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, Husserliana, ed. Marly Biemel, vol. IV. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. 1980. In Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung 1895–1925, Husserliana, ed. E. Marbach, vol. XXIII. Dordrecht: Kluweer. ———. 1989. In Aufsätze und Vorträge 1912–1937, Husserliana, ed. H.-R. Sepp and T. Nenon, vol. XXVII. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Husserl, Edmund. 2004. In Einleitung in die Ethik, Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920 und 1924, Hussserliana, ed. H. Peucker, vol. XXXVII. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Chapter 4

Art and Experience: Reflections on Husserl’s and Heidegger’s Phenomenological Approaches to Art-Works Dermot Moran

Abstract  In this paper I compare and contrast Husserl’s and Heidegger’s thinking about art in relation to the overall phenomenological approach to aesthetic experience and art objects. I outline Husserl’s emerging analyses of the sui generis nature of aesthetic intuition as a kind of ‘presentification’ and contrast his analyses of the aesthetic attitude with Heidegger’s more explicitly ontological reflections on the essence of the art-object as such and the kind of ‘work’ that it performs. Husserl and Heidegger were both concerned to specify in phenomenological terms the relations of foundation (Fundierung) that exist between different kinds of apprehended objects, from perceptually-available things, to tools or equipment, to works of art. Both phenomenologists attend to the ‘how’ (Wie) of the ‘mode of givenness’ (die Gegebenheitsweise) or mode of presencing, of these objects. Husserl, however, generally follows the earlier European aesthetic tradition, deriving from Kant and Baumgarten, in being interested primarily in the aesthetic ‘position-taking’ (Stellungnahme), i.e. in the structure of the apprehension which yields up art objects as art objects, whereas Heidegger is more interested in the ontological question of how the art-work reveals, displays, and radiates ‘truth’. I shall argue that their positions are complementary and not in conflict. Keywords  Husserl · Heidegger · Phenomenology · Art · Representation · Imagination

D. Moran (*) Boston College & University College Dublin, Chestnut Hill, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_4

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4.1  Introduction In this contribution, I shall reflect on Edmund Husserl’s and Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological approaches to aesthetic experience and to the essential nature of the work of art. This paper is dedicated both to my Doktorvater Karsten Harries,1 Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, who awoke my interest in Heidegger’s writings on art, poetry, and architecture, and also to Professor Cheung Chan-Fai, Chinese University of Hong Kong, whose work on aesthetics and, especially, on the phenomenology of photography, has been most original and insightful for me.2 In thinking about Martin Heidegger’s reflections on art as found in his extraordinary 1935 essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’,3 I want to make some comparisons and contrasts with the scattered reflections of his mentor Edmund Husserl on art and on the aesthetic intuition. In this paper, then, I want to explore both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s reflections on the relations between art and experience.4 I shall argue that their views are complementary and not in conflict. Both Husserl and Heidegger were essentialists: there is an essence to art and to artistic creation; but Husserl is seeking the essence of the aesthetic act of intuiting (as ‘presentification’, Vergegenwärtigung), whereas Heidegger is seeking to define the essential, dynamic nature of the art-work (Kunstwerk) as somehow revelatory of truth. Art-works involve ‘the setting-itself-to-work of the truth of beings’ (das Sich-­ ins-­Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit des Seienden) as he puts it in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (Off the Beaten Track, p. 16; GA 5 21).

1  See Karsten Harries, Art Matters. A Critical Commentary on Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Contributions to Phenomenology 57 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009). 2  Cheung, Chan-Fai, ‘Phenomenology and Photography: On Seeing Photographs and Photographic Seeing’, in Cheung Chan-Fai & Yu Chung-chi, eds, Phenomenology 2005, vol.1, Selected Essays from Asia (Zeta Books, 2007) and see also idem, Kairos. Phenomenology and Photography (Hong Kong: Edwin Cheng Foundation Asia Centre for Phenomenology, 2009), esp. pp. 2–9. 3  Martin Heidegger, ‘Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (1935/1936)’, Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe 5 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), pp. 1–74, trans. as ‘The Origin of the Work of Art (1935/1936)’, in Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, eds, Off the Beaten Track (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Hereafter ‘Off the Beaten Track’ followed by page number of the English translation; and Gesamtausgabe (= ‘GA’) volume and page number. In fact, Heidegger delivered a number of versions of this talk in lectures in Zurich and Frankfurt and also developed a lecture course. See also the essays by Daniel O. Dahlstrom, ‘Heidegger’s Artworld’, and Otto Pöggeler, ‘Heidegger on Art’, both in Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamme, eds, Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1995). 4   An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference, Logos and Aesthesis: Phenomenology and the Arts, International Conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of Edwin Cheng Foundation Asian Centre for Phenomenology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 30 July–1 August 2012.

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4.2  The Critique of the Representational View of Art In their discussions of art-objects, Husserl and Heidegger were both concerned to specify in phenomenological terms the relations of foundation (Fundierung) that exist between different kinds of apprehended objects, from perceptually-available things found in the everyday, lived environment to the experiencing of tools or pieces of equipment, to the apprehension and appreciation of works of art. Both phenomenologists attend to the ‘how’ (Wie) of the ‘mode of givenness’ (die Gegebenheitsweise) or mode of presencing, of these objects – apperceived as everyday furniture of the world, tools, art-works, religious icons, and so on. What is their specific ‘phenomenality’? How do they manifest themselves in the human lived world? Husserl, however, generally follows the earlier European aesthetic tradition, deriving from Kant and Baumgarten, in being interested primarily in the aesthetic attitude or ‘position-taking’ (Stellungnahme), i.e. in the structure of the apprehension which yields up art objects as art objects, whereas Heidegger is more interested in the ontological question of how the art-work reveals, displays, and radiates ‘truth’ in some sense which Heidegger in particular seeks to determine in a way that makes this truth more basic than any form of ‘correctness’. Heidegger, on the other hand, is interested in the question of the ‘origin’ (Ursprung) of the art-work, understood as the source that gives it the kind of being it has. As Heidegger puts it, ‘We wish to hit upon the immediate and complete reality of the artwork, for only then will we discover the real art within it’ (Wir möchten die unmittelbare und volle Wirklichkeit des Kunstwerkes treffen; denn nur so finden wir in ihm auch die wirkliche Kunst, Off the Beaten Path, p. 3; Holzwege, GA 5, p. 4). He wants to know ‘what’ the art work is and ‘how’ it works as it does. He asks: ‘But what and how is a work of art?’ (Aber was und wie ist ein Werk der Kunst? Off the Beaten Path, p. 2; GA 5, p. 2). Heidegger, like Husserl, rejects the view that physical objects are grasped primarily in perception as bundles of sensations. Things are apprehended in the context of their uses—the sound is the sound of a door shutting not an ‘abstract’ sound. He writes: We never really first perceive a throng of sensations [Andrang von Empfindungen], e. g., tones and noises, in the appearance of things — as this thing-concept alleges; rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen [Adler-Wagen]. Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or even mere sounds. In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i. e., listen abstractly [abstrakt hören]. (Heidegger, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, Off the Beaten Track, p. 8; GA 5 10–11)

In this regard Husserl and Heidegger are saying exactly the same thing. Indeed, this is a standard phenomenological position, repeated later by Maurice MerleauPonty, for example, who himself is drawing both on Husserlian phenomenology and the Gestalt psychology that emphasised figure-ground. Perception, for phenomenology, is not a raw grasp of sensations but involves grasping objects against the

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b­ ackground of world. Thus, the phenomenological tradition already shifts the focus from the aesthetic feeling or sensation to the mode of givenness of the thing from out of its world. Husserl and Heidegger both appreciate the peculiarity of this concept of world and explore it in their own ways. Both Husserl and Heidegger were also concerned with a critique of art understood as mimesis, as straight-forward representation. Art is not primarily a representation or imitation of life. However, art is, for Husserl, a kind of pictorial or fantasy imaging. It is a form of Bildbewusstsein, to be distinguished from straight-­ forward thing-perception (Ding-Wahrnehmung).5 It has its own mode of fulfilment, fulfilment-in-fantasy. In his lectures and reflections on various kinds of ‘image-consciousness’ (Bildbewusstsein), Husserl –like Walter Benjamin—refers specifically to the relatively new art of photography. Husserl offers a very interesting analysis of how a photograph is perceived as representing something ‘depicted’ in the photograph. Already in 1898, he discusses the photo of a child and he often returns to this example.6 He distinguishes a number of layers in the perception and in the perceived object. In terms of the perceived object, there is at one level the material, physical thing that bears the image—for example, the actual sheet of photographic paper with ink on it. There is, secondly, the ‘projected image’ or ‘appearance’ (Erscheinung), or ‘image-object’, namely, let us say, an image of someone – a boy. But, on top of that, there is the referent of the image – what Husserl calls the picture’s ‘subject’ (Bildsujet), in this case, let us suppose it is a photograph of Husserl’s son. The fascinating point is that the flat, two-dimensional, black-and-white image of child does not have any of the physical qualities in common with original human child, yet we normally immediately recognise the photograph as a photograph of the specific child in question. We ‘see-in’, see the child in the photo. In another reflection,7 Husserl is interested in how it is that our perception of a physical object – a ‘thing’ (ein Ding) – undergoes a modification when it becomes the apperception of the object as a photograph of a child. Here he contrasts different apprehensions of spatiality – in a mirror image, in a photograph, and in the ­figurative

5  Husserl’s assistant Eugen Fink also discussed art in this light, see E. Fink, ‘Vergegenwärtigung und Bild. Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Unwirklichkeit. (1930)’, in Fink, Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939, Phaenomenologica XXI, 1–78 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966). See also Mikel Dufrenne, Phénoménologie de l’éxpérience Esthétique (Paris, 1953) and Roman Ingarden, ‘Aesthetic Experience and Aesthetic Object’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 21 no. 3 (1961), pp. 289–313. 6   See Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlaß (1898–1925), hrsg. Eduard Marbach, Husserliana XXIII (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1980), p.  109; trans. John Brough as Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (1895–1925). Husserl Collected Works vol. XI (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), p.  117. Hereafter ‘Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory’ and page number of English translation and Husserliana (= ‘Hua’) volume and page number. 7  See E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, Text no 17 (1912), pp. 581ff; Hua XXIII 486ff.

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bust of the head of a man (life-size – so there is an exact match with the kind of three-dimensional space and proportional relations of the original). We have to distinguish the physical image thing, the image object, and the image subject. The latter need not appear; and if it does appear, we have a phantasy or memory. When we have a perceptual image (not an image presentation in phantasy), the appearance of the physical image thing is the appearance of a physical thing, a perceptual appearance. And it is a filled perception: The thing is there as something present “in person.”8

Husserl sees this apprehension of an object that involves more than a straightforward perception, as involving a special form of Vergegenwärtigung, ‘re-­presentation’, or ‘presentification’, or ‘presentiation’, depending on the translation. Indeed, Husserl sees all art as involving a special Vergegenwärtigung. It is a kind of higher-­order apperceptive act build on an act of bare, ‘straightforward’ (schlicht) perceiving. Husserl, of course, regards this category of presentifications (Vergegenwärtigungen) as exceptionally broad – it includes all forms of remembering, imagining, dreaming, depicting, figuring, symbolizing, and even ‘empty intending’ (Leermeinen). He always contrasts Vergegenwärtigungen with the more bedrock acts of genuine perception (Wahrnehmung), which, for him, involves direct contact with the perceived object as given ‘there-in-the-flesh’ (leibhaftig da). As Husserl writes in his Thing and Space lectures: … the object stands in perception as there in the flesh, it stands, to speak still more precisely, as actually present, as self-given there in the current now. (Ding und Raum § 4, p. 12; Hua XVI 14)9

Husserl’s deeper analyses of external thing-perception reveal that it is always infected by inadequacy. Only one side of the material, spatial object is ever given with full presence, the other hidden sides or aspects are co-intended but not given in the flesh. They are meant in some kind of empty way, in a kind of Vergegenwärtigung. Thus he writes in the lectures of Passive Synthesis: No matter how completely we may perceive a thing, it is never given in perception with the characteristics that qualify it and make it up as a sensible thing from all sides at once. … Every aspect, every continuity of single adumbrations, regardless how far this continuity may extend, offers us only sides. And to our mind this is not just a mere statement of fact: It is inconceivable that external perception would exhaust the sensible-material content of its perceived object; it is inconceivable that a perceptual object could be given in the entirety of its sensibly intuited features, literally, from all sides at once in a self-contained perception. (Analyses Concerning Active and Passive Syntheses, pp. 39–40; Hua XI 3)10

 E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, p. 584; Hua XXIII 489.  E. Husserl, Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907, hrsg. U. Claesges, Hua XVI (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); Trans. R.  Rojcewicz, Thing and Space: Lectures of 1907. Husserl Collected Works VII (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997). 10  Edmund Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten (1918–1926), hrsg. M.  Fleischer, Husserliana XI (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988); Trans. Anthony J.  Steinbock, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures on Transcendental Logic, Husserl Collected Works Volume IX (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001). 8 9

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As Husserl’s thought progressed to became more and more fascinated by how these empty intentions operate, how they always accompany genuine perceptions. The perception of images and art-works moves in the realm of this presentification. Objects are somehow removed from the sphere of actuality and are apprehended in contexts other than the straightforward perceptual sense. Heidegger’s reflections on aesthetics begin from a different consideration. His phenomenological approach focuses not, like Husserl, on the aesthetic attitude or position-taking, but rather on the being of the art work itself. Heidegger is here deeply influenced by Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of art. Heidegger regards an over-emphasis on aesthetic experience (found in traditional aesthetics since Kant) as deeply misleading. Thus, in the ‘Afterword’ (Nachwort) to his ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ he writes: Almost as soon as specialized thinking about art and the artist began, such reflections were referred to as “aesthetic”. Aesthetics treated the artswork as an object, as indeed an object of aisthesis, of sensuous apprehension in a broad sense. These days such an apprehension is called an “experience”. The way in which man experiences art is supposed to inform us about its essential nature. Experience is the standard-giving source not only for the appreciation and enjoyment of art but also for its creation. Everything is experience. But perhaps experience is the element in which art dies. This dying proceeds so slowly that it takes several centuries.11

He is led to a reflection on the meaning of a thing, the nature of the ‘serviceability’ (Dienlichkeit) of use-objects and then the peculiar mode of being of the art work which somehow ‘works’ on us. Heidegger defines this serviceability as follows: Serviceability is the basic trait from out of which these kinds of beings look at us – that is, flash at us and thereby presence and so be the beings they are. (Dienlichkeit ist jener Grundzug, aus dem her dieses Seiende uns anblickt, d. h. anblitzt und damit anwest und so dieses Seiende ist, Off the Beaten Track, p. 10; GA 5 13)

The thingly character of the art-work – in the case of a stone sculpture, the block of marble or granite itself – is of course a kind of unsurpassable materiality that makes the work be. But the work also works – it has a kind of service it performs in the human world by having its own kind of presence (Anwesen) and ‘presencing’. But let us explore the phenomenological approach to art by reflecting a little further on Husserl’s conception of the constitution of aesthetic experiencing before returning to Heidegger’s concerns.

4.3  H  usserl’s Reflections on Art and the Aesthetic Imagination It is fair to say, that as a mathematician, Husserl is not primarily concerned in his early period from the Philosophy of Arithmetic to the Logical Investigations with the nature of aesthetic experience or art works, although he is very interested in how 11

 Heidegger, Afterword, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, Off the Beaten Track, p. 50; GA 5 67.

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symbols function, how one thing can somehow stand for something else. He does make reference, in the Fifth Logical Investigation, to the distinction between seeing a painting as aesthetically pleasing and actually being aesthetically moved by the painting. We can see something as aesthetically valuable and yet not personally value it ourselves. In this regard, Husserl sees aesthetic intention (die ästhetische Intention) as a peculiar sui generis mode of intention in general (see Fifth Logical Investigation § 10, LU II, p. 96; Hua XIX/1368).12 It is not just a matter of perceiving an object (a ‘mere presentation’, blosse Vorstellung) and then taking some kind of intellectual attitude or judgement (Urteil) towards it, as the Brentanian tradition had maintained. Aesthetic apprehension is a complex act, with a complex but unified higher-level apprehension founded on lower levels. Going further, Husserl sees the aesthetic act as a kind of non-positing ‘modification of an act in the Fifth Logical Investigation in contrast to acts that posit or affirm the existence (setzende Akte) of their intended object. Often enough we understand narrations without decision as to their truth or falsity. Even when we read novels, this is normally the case: we know we are dealing with aesthetic fictions (um eine ästhetische Fiktion), but this knowledge remains inoperative in the purely aesthetic effect…. Judgements are passed in a certain manner, but they lack the character of genuine judgements: we neither believe, deny or doubt what is told us – mere ‘imaginings’ replace genuine judgements. Such talk must not be taken to mean that imagined judgements here take the place of actual ones. We rather enact, instead or a judgement affirming a state or affairs, the qualitative modification, the neutral putting in suspense of the same state of affairs [die qualitative Modifikation, das neutral Dahingestellthaben desselben Sachverhalts], which cannot be identified with any picturing [mit einem Phantasieren] of it. (Fifth Logical Investigation § 40, LU II p. 165; Hua XIX/1490)

Husserl’s discussion of imaginative acts in the broadest sense as ‘non-positing’ and not ‘taking-for-true’ (fürwahrhaltend) is somewhat parallel to Alexius Meinong’s discussion of assumptions in his Über Annahme (On Assumptions, 1902),13 and reflects Husserl’s formation in and continued engagement with the thinking of the Brentanian school. The idea is that a certain kind of ‘suspension of disbelief’ or suspension of ontological commitment takes place when we enter the world of the work of fiction and imagination (Einbildung). We are not directly participating in explicitly thetic or positing acts, rather we inhabit a world of imagined judgements, decisions and stance-takings. For example, as another Brentanian,  Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Text der 1. und der 2. Auflage, hrsg. Elmar Holenstein, Husserliana XVIII (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975), and Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, in zwei Bänden, hrsg. Ursula Panzer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984); translated Logical Investigations, 2 Vols, trans. J.N. Findlay. Ed. with a New Introduction by Dermot Moran and New Preface by Michael Dummett (London & New York: Routledge, 2001). Hereafter ‘LU’ followed by the volume number of the English edition (in bold), page number of English translation and the Husserliana volume and page number. 13  Alexius Meinong, Ueber Annahmen, Ergänzungs-Band II, Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1902; 2nd ed., Leipzig: J. A. Barth. 1910); trans. with an Introduction by James Heanue, On Assumptions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983). 12

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Stephan Witasek, will discuss, our sympathy with the murderer in the detective novel is not any kind of enacting or express carrying out of an actual intention to murder. We savour the intentional act without, as it were, endorsing it or giving in to it. We remain with the world of a modification of the act, a fantasy modification.14 This is Husserl’s position. An important contribution to this understanding of fictional experience, within the followers of Brentano, came from Stephan Witasek (1870–1915), a member of the Graz school and a student of Alexius Meinong, who wrote on the nature of aesthetic experience in his ‘Zur psychologischen Analyse der ästhetischen Einfühlung’.15 Witasek regarded empathy (Einfühlung) as a ‘representation of the psychic’ (Vorstellung von Psychischem)16 of ‘psychic facts’ (psychische Thatsachen) especially emotional ones. Tragedy evokes in us fear and sympathy for the hero. What is presented on stage is understood through ‘reproduced representations’ (reproducierte Vorstellungen).17 I don’t feel precisely his pain (his fate is different from mine) but I feel ‘sympathy’ (Mitleid). Witasek speaks here of ‘hineinversetzung’, a placing oneself into the subjective experiences of the other. Witasek distinguishes between intuitive presentations (e.g. perceptions) and ‘unintuitive’ acts (e.g. imaginings). A blind person can have an unintuitive concept of colour but not an intuitive representation. Imaginative presentations are pretend presentations; fantasy feelings are modified feelings. Empathy-feelings are experiences of others experienced in a modified way. The aim of the feeling is another person. We grasp the feeling-­content but divorced from the consequences. We have experiences of sympathy and involvement (Anteilsgefühle). Empathy feelings are feelings in fantasy or specially modified feelings. When we connect with the anti-hero we feel their suffering and also feel for them, but even what we feel is modified from what they feel – as it does not have the same context and consequence for us. As Witasek writes, I hear music that makes me sad. But I am not sad about the music itself. My sadness has to have an object and a ground (Gegenstand und Grund).18 The music produces fantasy-­ presentations in me. Husserl was familiar with Witasek’s work and discussed it in his reflections on Einfühlung. In his lectures on Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (1898–1925), repeated and elaborated over many years, Husserl came to reflect seriously on the aesthetic attitude and on the nature of perception, memory, and imagination, in relation to cultural products generally and art-works in particular. There is much to be  For a discussion of the definition of the art work in twentieth-century thought, see Tiziana Andina, The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition: From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theories (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Meinong did not develop a theory of art objects but his student Stephan Witasek did. See also Robin D. Rollinger, ‘Husserl and Brentano on Imagination’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 75 (1993),pp. 195–210. 15  Stephan Witasek, ‘Zur psychologischen Analyse der ästhetischen Einfühlung’, Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, 25 (1901), pp. 1–49. 16  Witasek, ‘Zur psychologischen Analyse der ästhetischen Einfühlung’, p. 3. 17  Witasek, ‘Zur psychologischen Analyse der ästhetischen Einfühlung’, p. 15. 18  Witasek, ‘Zur psychologischen Analyse der ästhetischen Einfühlung’, p. 19. 14

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learned from these lectures, especially concerning the nature of the act of imagining and the work of John Brough in particular has been most illuminating in this regard.19 It is important to recognize that Husserl’s position changes substantially over the course of these reflections and lectures, but I cannot enter into these changes and developments here. Husserl generally continues to maintain that the aesthetic attitude operates through a ‘modification’ – a kind of ‘neutrality modification’, as he will later call it in Ideas I (1913), especially §§ 109–114.20 Phantasy is a specific form of ‘neutrality modification’ (Neutralitätsmodifikation, Ideas I, p.  215; Hua III/1, 225). Clearly, for Husserl, the depicting function of the physical object requires a correlated act by the subject – it is a kind of perceiving but more like ‘seeing in’, to use Richard Wollheim’s term.21 Indeed, Husserl himself uses the terms ‘hineinsehen’ (Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, p.  134; Hua XXIII 122), ‘hineinschauen’ (Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, p. 37; Hua XXIII 34) and ‘hineinblicken’ (Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, p. 164; Hua XXIII, 143).22 The presence of the perceiving subject is necessary for the presenting to take place. Husserl asks: ‘If I put a picture in a drawer, does the drawer represent something?’ (Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, p. 23; Hua XXIII 21). Phantasy is a kind of pictorialisation (Verbildlichung), (Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, p. 27; Hua XXIII 26). Husserl wants to make clear that the sensory contents which provide the material for the animating apprehension in perception are all used up in that act – so the act of seeing-in in pictorial apprehension is not based on new sensory material but rather on a shift in the apprehension itself. He writes: The image object and the physical image surely do not have separate and different apprehension contents; on the contrary, their contents are identically the same. The same visual sensations are interpreted as points and lines on paper and as appearing plastic form. The same sensations are interpreted as a physical thing made from plaster and as a white human form. And in spite of the identity of their sensory foundation, the two apprehensions certainly cannot exist at once: they cannot make two appearances stand out simultaneously. By turns, indeed, and therefore separately, but certainly not at once. (Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory, pp. 48–49; Hua XXIII, 44–45)

 See John Brough, ‘Depiction and Plastic Perception. A Critique of Husserl’s Theory of Picture Consciousness’, Continental Philosophy Review vol. 40 no. 2 (June 2007), pp. 171–85. 20  E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie 1, hrsg. K. Schuhmann, Husserliana III/1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014). Hereafter “Ideas I” followed by the page number of the English translation and the Husserliana (abbreviated to “Hua”) volume and page number. 21  See Richard Wollheim, ‘In Defense of Seeing-in’, in Heiko Hecht, Robert Schwartz & Margaret Atherton, eds, Looking into Pictures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), pp. 3–16. 22  See the excellent discussion in Regina-Nino Kurg, Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Image Consciousness, Aesthetic Consciousness, and Art, Thèse de Doctorat présentée devant la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Fribourg en Suisse, 2014. 19

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In seeing a photograph as the photograph of a child, we are not basing this new seeing on new contents, rather we pass by the ‘thingly’ character of the object to focus only on the ‘image-subject’. We can shift focus back – I can realise the photograph is printed on matt rather than glossy paper, that its size is 4 inches by 6 inches, and so on. But that shift in perspective disrupts the original seeing-in. The object seen in the picture, moreover, is not grasped as actual or extant or existent in the same sense as the physical object or bearer of the image exists. The neutrality consciousness means that we don’t assign an existence-value to the seen ‘picturesubject’ – although of course, in the case of the photograph of a living person, we know the person exists – but not ‘in’ the photo. Husserl remained fascinated by the switch or sudden change of perspective that takes place when I see a waxworks figure in a museum first as a living person and then as a lifeless wax figure. He returns again and again to an experience that he had in the Berlin Panoptikum Museum (actually there were two such waxworks museums – one the Passage-Panoptikum, in the Linden Passage and the other the Castans Panoptikum, both on Friedrichsstrasse in Berlin).23 The experience was deeply moving for Husserl and he returns to it again and again. In the Fifth Logical Investigation § 27, he speaks of seeing a woman and then we see a waxwork figure. Husserl sees this situation as different from that of seeing a statue representing a human figure. He writes: Such talk of ‘representing’ does not or course mean that the waxwork figure is modelled on a lady as in the same waxworks there are figure-models of Napoleon, of Bismarck etc. The percept of the waxwork figure as a thing does not therefore underlie our awareness of the same figure as representing the lady. The lady, rather, makes her appearance together with the wax-figure and in union with it. Two perceptual interpretations [zwei perzeptive Auffassungen], or two appearances of a thing [zwei Dingerscheinungen], interpenetrate, coinciding as it were in part in their perceptual content. And they interpenetrate in conflicting fashion [sie durchdringen sich in der Weise des Widerstreites], so that our observation wanders from one to another or the apparent objects each barring the other from existence. (Fifth Logical Investigation § 27 LU II, pp. 137–38; Hua XIX/1443)

Again the same sensuous contents found two distinct perceptual experiences – first seeing the woman and secondly seeing the waxwork figure and then an experience of conflict continues. Conflict, for Husserl, is a kind of synthesis. Two sets of intentions come into conflict because the underlying sensuous basis remains the same. In later writings, Husserl continued to refine his conception of image-­ consciousness, adding new complexities. He discusses actor’s performing of a role as a kind of ‘display’ or ‘representation’ (Darstellung) of a character – as a kind of non-intuitive presentation of that character.24

 See Katharina Gerstenberger, Writing the New Berlin. The German Capital in Post-Wall Literature (NY: Camden House, 2008), p. 56. 24  See, inter alia, Javier Enrique Carreño Cobos, ‘The Many Senses of Imagination and the Manifestation of Fiction: A View from Husserl’s Phenomenology of Phantasy’. Husserl Studies vol. 29 no. 2 (2013), pp. 143–62; Christian Ferencz-Flatz, ‘The Neutrality of Images and Husserlian Aesthetics’, Studia Phaenomenologica 9 (20098), pp.  477–493; and Christian Lotz, ‘Depiction and Plastic Perception. A Critique of Husserl’s Theory of Picture Consciousness’, Continental Philosophy Review 40 (July 2007), pp. 171–85.

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4.4  H  usserl and Hugo Von Hofmannsthal on Poetry and Phenomenology An important encounter for Husserl in terms of his thinking about art was his meeting with the renowned German literary figure Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929). On 6th December 1906, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was on a tour through Europe, reading his paper ‘The Poet and this Time’,25 paid a visit to Husserl in Göttingen.26 In fact Hofmannsthal was a distant relative of Husserl’s wife, Malvine Steinschneider. Some weeks after this meeting, on January 12, 1907, Husserl wrote a letter to Hofmannsthal thanking him for his gift, presumably a copy of Hofmannsthal’s book Kleine Dramen (Short Plays). In this famous letter,27 Husserl compares the aesthetic experience and the adoption of the phenomenological attitude. Husserl wrote to the poet: For me, the “inner states” [inneren Zuständlichkeiten] that are portrayed in your art as purely aesthetic, or not exactly portrayed, but elevated into the ideal sphere [die ideale Sphäre] of pure aesthetic beauty, these states hold, in this aesthetic objectification [dieser ästhetische Objectivirung], a particular interest—i.e. not only for the art lover [Kunstfreund] in me, but also for the philosopher and “phenomenologist.” (Husserl, Letter to Hugo von Hoffmansthal, Briefwechsel vol. VII, p. 133)28

This is one of the rare instances when Husserl reflects explicitly on his own nature as an aesthetic subject. His discussion at this time is focused on trying to find the correct attitude to adopt in relation to experiencing art – or indeed doing philosophy. Husserl is here articulating his view that aesthetic intuition involves a certain stance-­taking towards the object which imaginatively lifts it out of the real world and contemplates it in a different context (here he speaks of a kind of ideality attaching to the art work).  Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” reprinted in Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke: Prosa II (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1907), pp. 222–258; trans. ‘The Poet and Our Time’, in Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses 1906–1927, trans. David S. Luft (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2011). 26  See Rudolf Hirsch, “Edmund Husserl und Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Eine Begegnung und ein Brief,” in Sprache und Politik. Festgabe für Dolf Sternberger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag. Ed. Carl-Joachim Friedrich and Benno Reifenberg (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1968), pp. 108–115. 27   See Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel. Band VII: Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz, ed. Karl Schuhmann, Husserliana Dokumente III (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), vol. VII, pp. 133–136. And Edmund Husserl, « Une lettre de Husserl à Hofmannsthal », traduite par E. Escoubas, La Part de l’oeil, Dossier: Art et phénoménologie, n°7, 1991, pp. 12–15. An English translation by Sven-Olov Wallenstein is E.  Husserl, ‘Letter to Hofmannstahl (1907)’, SITE (2009), pp.  26–27. Husserl’s letter was originally published in Rudolf Hirsch, «Edmund Husserl und Hugo von Hofmannsthal — Eine Begegnung und ein Brief », in Sprache und Politik. Festgabe für Dolf Sternberger zum sechzigsten Geburgstag, hrsg. Carl-Joachim Friedrich und Benno Reifenberg, Heidelberg, Lambert Schneider, 1968, pp. 111–114. 28  See Husserl, Letter, Husserliana Dokumente, Briefwechsel, vol.VII, Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 133–36. I am using a modified version of the translation of SvenOlov Wallenstein, E. Husserl, ‘Letter to Hofmannsthal (1907)’, SITE (2009), pp. 26–27. 25

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Husserl’s discovery of the phenomenological epoché, the peculiar suspension of belief in the world that opens the entrance gate to phenomenological reflection on the essence of experience, more or less coincides with his discovery of the ‘natural attitude’ (die natürliche Einstellung). Indeed, both the natural attitude and its suspension through the epoché are first introduced in Ideas I (1913) §§ 27–31. Philosophy has to take a new attitude and phenomenology in particular involves a rigorous adopting of a transcendental, non-naturalistic approach that breaks with natural belief in the world and enters the realm of pure eidetic seeing. As Husserl writes in his letter to von Hoffmansthal: It [phenomenology] demands a position taking [Stellungnahme] towards all forms of objectivity that fundamentally departs from its “natural” counterpart, and which is closely related to the attitude and stance [Stellung und Haltung] in which your art, as something purely aesthetic, places us with respect to the presented objects and the whole of the surrounding world [Umwelt]. The intuition [Anschauung] of a purely aesthetic work of art is enacted under a strict suspension of all existential attitudes [existentiale Stellungnahme] of the intellect and of all attitudes relating to emotions and the will which presuppose such an existential attitude. (Husserl, Letter to Hofmannsthal, in Schuhmann, ed., Briefwechsel, vol. VII, p. 133)

In this regard, Husserl is following the fairly standard ‘disinterested’ view of art – commonplace at the end of the nineteenth century. We have the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement and the abandonment of the idea that art is a representation of life. Art is its own higher experience, it operates on its own level, it takes experiences, and, in a sense, disconnects them from everyday life, and presents them in a kind of ideal light. Moreover, this aesthetic attitude involves something like a suspension of belief in the extant world and indeed an uncoupling of our emotions and will in relation to real action and what he calls here ‘the existential attitude’. Similar views of art can be found in Oscar Wilde, for example. In this letter to Hoffmansthal, Husserl’s precision on the meaning of this aesthetic attitude is interesting; Or more precisely: the work of art places us in (almost forces us into) a state of pure aesthetic intuition that excludes these position-takings. The more of the existential world [von der Existentialen Welt] that resounds or is brought to attention, and the more the work of art demands an existential attitude of us out of itself (for instance a naturalistic sensuous appearance [Sinnenschein]: the natural truth of photography), the less aesthetically pure the work is. (To this also belong all kinds of “tendency” [Tendenz].) The natural stance of the mind, the stance of actual life, is “existential” through and through [Die natürliche Geisteshaltung, die des aktuellen Lebens, ist durchaus “existenzial”]. Things that stand before us in a sensuous way, the things of which actual scientific discourse speaks, are posited by us as realities [als Wirklichkeiten] … (Husserl, Letter to Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, vol. VII, p. 134)

Husserl is alluding to is the manner the aesthetic attitude takes hold of us and wrests us from our everyday attitude of immersion in the everyday world (for which Husserl’s favourite verbs are Dahinleben and Hineinleben), and literally transports us elsewhere. The natural stance of life is disrupted and everyday position-takings are ‘excluded’, and we are in a new realm – but Husserl does not want to talk about this realm as a simulacrum or as something which is simply to be contrasted with existential, factual reality. It is not a pale imitation of the real world (which is the

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Platonic critique of art) but a unique world of its own – with its own modified experiences, modified apprehensions, modified emotions, modified convictions and so on. Husserl continues: The artist, who “observes” [beobachtet] the world in order to gain “knowledge” of nature and man [Natur- un Menschen-kenntnis] for his own purposes, relates to it in a similar way as the phenomenologist. Thus: not as an observing natural scientist and psychologist, not as a practical observer of man [Menschenbeobachter], as if it were an issue of knowledge of man and nature. When he observes the world, it becomes a phenomenon for him, its existence is indifferent, just as it is to the philosopher (in the critique of reason). The difference is that the artist, unlike the philosopher, does not attempt to found the “sense” [Sinn] of the world-phenomenon [des Weltphänomens] and grasp it in concepts, but appropriates it intuitively, in order to gather, out if its plenitude, materials for the creation of aesthetic forms. (Husserl, Letter to Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, vol. VII, p. 135)

The extant world becomes a matter of indifference, we live within the aesthetic attitude in a world of aesthetic experiences and objects, a world with its own character of intention and fulfilment. Toward the end of the letter, however, Husserl outlines some differences between the purely aesthetic attitude and the stance of the phenomenologist. The phenomenological regard [Das phänomenologische Schauen] is, thus, closely related to the aesthetic look in “pure” art; but, of course, it is not a look in order to enjoy aesthetically, but to research, to discover, to constitute scientific affirmations of a new (philosophical) dimension. (Husserl, Letter to Hofmannsthal, Briefwechsel, vol. VII, p. 135)

For Husserl, philosophical reflection has a different focus, it aims not at art but at knowledge. Overall, in these lectures and in his letter to Hofmannsthal Husserl emphasises the idea of a ‘stance-taking’ (Stellungnahme) and the way different stance-takings take hold of us and operate with their own sense of space, time, causality, objecthood, and so on. The aesthetic realm is sui generis although Husserl does not dwell on its ontological character, rather he is in interested in how the natural stance is modified in the aesthetic attitude. Husserl must have been aware of Hofmannsthal’s views on art. Hofmannsthal had a view of everyday life as chaotic and scattered and gradually losing its meaning and “slipping away”. Art, on the other hand, for him, gathers and unifies. Poetry, moreover, is not about communicating information or emotions, but about discovering truth – and in this regard poets and philosophers are on the same path. However, according to Hofmannsthal, art has an advantage: only poets can reach the end of the path of truth.29 In an interesting discussion, Wolfgang Huemer has criticised Husserl’s letter for adopting an aestheticism that Hoffmansthal had already abandoned as is evident from his 1902 Letter to Lord Chandos. Here Hoffmansthal writes:

 See Wolfgang Huemer, ‘Phenomenological Redduction and Aesthetic Experience: Husserl meets Hofmannsthal’, in Writing the Austrian Traditions: Relations between Philosophy and Literature. Ed. Wolfgang Huemer and Marc-Oliver Schuster (Edmonton, Alberta: Wirth-Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, 2003), pp. 121–130.

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Others have seen that Husserl is following the Kantian line on art as a disinterested kind of play. Husserl’s earlier view sees art as having a certain ideality. There is undoubtedly something in this approach which can be found also in Hegel. It is a kind of Platonic appreciation of art as an escape from the fleeting world of appearances. Thus Hegel writes in his Lectures on Aesthetics: Art liberates the real import of appearances from this bad and fleeting world, and imparts to phenomenal semblances a higher reality, born of mind. The appearances of art therefore, far from being mere semblances, have the higher reality and the more genuine existence in comparison with the realities of common life. (Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics)31

But Husserl’s views continued to evolve as he came to contemplate more and more the nature of social life, culture and history.

4.5  The Later Husserl on Cultural Objects Husserl returns to talking about cultural productions in his late essays, especially ‘The Vienna Lecture’ and ‘The Origin of Geometry’ both collected by Walter Biemel in the Husserliana edition of The Crisis of European Sciences.32 Husserl’s focus is still on trying to specify the peculiar approach of philosophy. A crucial point of contact and difference between Husserl in this later period and Heidegger is the nature of the work of art and its role in expressing the nature of the culture or ‘spirit’ (Geist) of the age. Husserl has a critique of ‘objectivism’ in the Vienna lecture which sees spirit as originally tied to matter, always appearing layered onto physical being. Even in modernity the two Cartesian regions are connected by the one psychophysical causality. But this leaves out the pure ideality of cultural norms and values and the manner in which these motivate human beings, not to mention the avoidance of confronting the nature of subjectivity presupposed by this objectivity.

 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter, trans. Russell Stockman (Marlboro: The Marlboro Press, 1986), p. 21; cited in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), p. 221. 31  G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). See Karsten Harries, ‘Hegel on the Future of Art’, The Review of Metaphysics vol. 27 (1974), pp. 677–96. 32  E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, Husserlian VI (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1976), translated by David Carr, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Hereafter ‘Crisis’ followed by English page number and then Husserliana volume number and pagination of German original. 30

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In the Vienna Lecture, Husserl’s theme is the graded kinds of ideality that can be experienced. He regards art works as culturally bound in a way in which scientific products are not. For him, scientific products present themselves with an ideality which guarantees identity in all repeated acts of accessing them, e.g., the Pythagorean Theorem is the same for all. In the Prolegomena to the Investigations Husserl defends a realist view that the laws of nature hold true and are valid even if they have never been discovered or thought by the human mind. Consider the following passage from the Vienna Lecture: Let us illuminate first of all the remarkable, peculiar character of philosophy, unfolding in ever new special sciences. Let us contrast it with other cultural forms [Kulturformen] already present in prescientific mankind [in der vowissenschaftlichen Menschheit]: artefacts, agriculture, domestic arts, etc. All these signify classes of cultural products with their own methods for assuring successful production. Otherwise, they have a passing existence [ein vorübergehendes Dasein] in the surrounding world. Scientific acquisitions, on the other hand, after their method of assured successful production has been attained, have quite another manner of being [eine ganz andere Seinsart], quite another temporality. They are not used up; they are imperishable; repeated production creates not something similar, at best equally useful; it produces in any number of acts of production by one person or any number of persons something identically the same, identical in sense and validity [identisch nach Sinn und Geltung]. Persons bound together in direct mutual understanding cannot help experiencing what has been produced by their fellows in similar acts of production as being identically the same as what they themselves produce. In a word, what is acquired through scientific activity is not something real but something ideal. (Vienna Lecture, Crisis, p. 278; Hua VI 323)

Here Husserl is making an interesting contrast with cultural works  – useful domestic objects (e.g. pottery, clothing), art objects (jewellery), and agricultural objects (e.g. tools) – that are produced by pre-scientific cultures, and the kind of ideal objectivity produced by the exact sciences. In contrast to the usual traditional claim that art is perennial, Husserl is suggesting that cultural objects in general are temporally and culturally bound, and do not transcend their environments. As Husserl puts it: “they have a passing existence in the surrounding world” (Im übrigen haben sie ein vorübergehendes Dasein in der Umwelt, Hua VI 323), whereas the ‘products’ (Erzeugungen) of scientific endeavour are not real but ideal (was wissenschaftliches Tun erwirbt, ist nicht Reales sondern Ideales). In that sense, for the late Husserl, science lifts us above the life world and brings us into contact with the ideal, the identical, the self-same. Art can at best bring us into a cycle of repeated production of similar products. Art works are culturally bound – raising the spectre of relativism—and also (as Heidegger will develop) the idea that art is tied to a particular time, place and world. When that world withdraws, the art work no longer functions as such. Husserl still ties the art-work to ideality but he contrasts it with the context-­free ideality of scientific accomplishment. Notice how Husserl’s language in these writings from the 1930s is rather close to the description of the spheres of labour and work in Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition, written in 1950. However, where, for Arendt, it is action which lifts humans out of the cycle of nature whereby labourers are tied to their labour, and goes beyond the production of artefacts which take on an existence apart from the

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maker, the sphere of action is liberating. For Husserl, it is not political action that is liberating but the life of scientific communal inquiry in the carrying out of infinite tasks. Husserl has no particular view on the ‘material’ or ‘content’ of art. Traditionally, certain themes or topics were considered to be outside the scope of art, to belong to something else, kitch for example. Hegel had observed that modern art was freed from any restriction in regard to content – hence art could be made from anything or be found anywhere. Hegel writes: Today the artist is no longer bound to a specific content and a manner of representation appropriate only to this subject matter — art has thereby become a free instrument, which, his own subjective skill permitting, the artist can use equally well on any content, whatever it may be.

Husserl has nothing much to say on the content of art; he remained fascinated by how art comes to be recognized as such, the kind of stance-taking that reveals art.

4.6  Martin Heidegger on Art and the Working of Art Works In Being and Time (1927),33 Heidegger already recognized the importance of the artwork in challenging the categories of vorhanden and zuhanden, as the primary and most basic categories through which human existence as Dasein relating to things in the world, but it was not until the 1930s that Heidegger, wounded by the Rectoral debacle of 1933, turned towards his phenomenology of the artwork in powerful lectures delivered in 1935, when Heidegger was at the height of his powers. Heidegger focuses on the being of art works and their ‘reason for being’ – their ‘what-for’ (Wozu) character. Heidegger agrees with Husserl in beginning from the recognition that we do not experience art works in quite the same way as we experience physical things. Heidegger writes in his 1935 ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ (as published in Holzwege): If we consider the works in their untouched actuality and do not deceive ourselves, the result is that the works are as naturally present as are things [so natürlich vorhanden wie Dinge]. The picture hangs on the wall like a rifle or a hat. A painting, e. g., the one by Van Gogh that represents a pair of peasant shoes, travels from one exhibition to another. Works of art are shipped like coal from the Ruhr and logs from the Black Forest. During the First World war Hölderlin’s hymns were packed in soldier’s knapsacks together with cleaning gear. Beethoven’s quartets lie in the storerooms of the publishing house like potatoes in a cellar. (Heidegger, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, Off the Beaten Track, pp. 2–3; GA 5 3)

For Heidegger, art-works are, of course, physical ‘things’ (Dinge) – they have a vorhanden character of being merely present-at-hand in the world. However,  Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm v. Herrmann, Gesamtausgabe 2 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977); trans. John Macquarrie and E. Robinson Being and Time (New York/Oxford: Harper and Row/ Blackwell, 1962). Hereafter ‘BT’ followed by pagination of English translation of German edition.

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although the work of art is a physical object like any other, it also has some other significant essential features that take it beyond the merely vorhanden. Furthermore, when apprehended as an art-work, it is not primarily seen as a physical thing at all: The artwork, however, through its self-sufficient presence, resembles, rather, the mere thing which has taken shape by itself and is never forced into being. Nonetheless, we do not count such works as mere things. (Heidegger, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, Off the Beaten Track, p. 10; GA 5 14)

Furthermore, the art-work occupies a singular ontological position between tools or equipment, and ‘mere things’. The art work ‘works’ in a unique way and its ‘working’ is a form of phenomenality and disclosure that cannot be replaced by other kinds of entities. In Being and Time, Heidegger does have incidental remarks about the nature of society and about the nature of art and cultural works. He begins by thinking about human beings in their average everydayness. ‘Being-in-the-world’ has several structures that have particular important for art. There are the overwhelming processes of familiarisation, overcoming of distance, averaging down, ignoring significance, levelling off, which make up the phenomenon of being-in-the-world and account for the fact that it has remained unnoticed. But there are also indications of aspects of life that stand against these inevitable processes. Authentic life is simply a structural modification of the ‘they’, of the ‘one’ (Man-selbst, BT 168; 130). Famously, in Being and Time, Heidegger discusses the first encounters with things a, which he thinks the Greeks captured correctly as pragmata, as items of ‘handiness’ or ‘manipulability’ (Handlichkeit) within a context of concerns and projects. The Greeks, however, did not make the mode of being of things as tools transparent to themselves. Heidegger writes: The Greeks had an appropriate term for ‘Things’: pragmata – that is to say, that which one has to do with in one’s concernful dealings (praxis). But ontologically, the specifically ‘pragmatic’ character of the pragma is just what the Greeks left in obscurity; they thought of these ‘proximally’ as ‘mere Things’. We shall call those entities which we encounter in concern “equipment” [das Zeug]. (BT § 15, pp. 96–97; 68)

Equipment always exists in the context of other equipment in relation to networks of tasks and assignments. As Heidegger puts it, ‘The work bears with it that referential totality within which the equipment is encountered’ (Das Werk trägt die Verweisungsganzheit, innerhalb derer das Zeug begegnet, BT § 15, p.  99; GA 2 69–70). It is only against this background of usability and serviceability that something like ‘nature’ or indeed ‘art’ becomes apparent. There are different ways of understanding things: ‘the botanists plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow’ (BT § 15, p. 100; GA 2 70), the geographer’s river source is not the poet’s ‘springhead in the dale’. Heidegger is already aware that things emerge against the background of the kind of world to which they belong. Initially we encounter things in the ‘work-world’ (Werkwelt, BT § 15, p. 101; GA 2 71) but we really only notice them when they stand out from that world in not being serviceable, not functioning normally. These yield to the modes of ‘conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy’ (BT, p. 104; GA 74). In these instances: ‘the environment announces itself afresh’

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(Widerum meldet sich die Umwelt, BT p. 105; GA 2 75). Heidegger’s argument is that the world which is normally taken for granted only discloses itself in such ruptures. But that is not to say the world really consists of things for use, that they are the real ‘things in themselves’. The kinds of disclosure and non-disclosure are what really belong to the nature of world. This is where Heidegger’s analysis is quite novel. In his 1935 essay on art, Heidegger revisits his analysis of things and how they are ‘bearers’ of this context of usability and serviceability. Now, however, not just implements like work-boots are in focus but also art-works which ‘portray’ or ‘represent’ work-boots. Heidegger in his ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ essay rejects the Kantian-­ Husserlian starting point – which is the assumption that the key element is aesthetic experience understood as ‘pure’ or ‘disinterested’. He begins rather from the Hegelian position that art is a vehicle for truth, it is an agent of disclosure, a site of manifestation. The art-work works, it is actually a dynamic process, an actualization. It works by performing a kind of poeisis, a making. Thus we get Heidegger’s dense proclamation: It is due to art’s poetic nature that, in the midst of what is, art breaks open an open place [eine offene Stelle], in whose openness everything is other than usual. In virtue of the projected sketch set into the work of the unconcealedness [Unverborgentheit] of what is, which casts itself towards us, everything ordinary and hitherto existing becomes an unbeing [zum Unseienden]. This unbeing has lost the capacity to give and keep being as measure [als Mass]. The curious fact here is that the work in no way affects hitherto existing entities by causal connections. The working [Wirkung] of the work does not consist in the taking effect of a cause. It lies in a change, happening from out of the work, of the unconcealedness of what is, and this means of Being. (Heidegger ‘Origin of Work of Art’, Off the Beaten Track, pp. 44–45; GA 5 59–60)

As Heidegger puts it, art opens a clearing. What art does is to open a space – working in exactly the opposite way to the kind of loss of distance (Ent-fernung, SZ § 23  – using Heidegger’s peculiar interpretation of Entfernung as a de-distantiation—interpreting ‘ent’ as a privative instead of an intensive) experienced in mass society. Art is a de-stabilising power which allows the truth of being to manifest itself: ‘The essential nature of art would then be this: the setting-itself-to-work of the truth of beings’, (‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Off the Beaten Path, p. 16; GA 5 21). Clearly this is a complex and provocative claim that needs to be further developed, especially when Heidegger also quotes Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics to the effect that art is now a thing of the past. The age of the art-work as effective is essentially over, for Heidegger: In all these connections art is, and remains, with regard to its highest vocation, a thing of the past. (In allen diesen Beziehungen ist und bleibt die Kunst nach der Seite ihrer hochsten Bestimmung für uns ein Vergangenes, ‘Origin of the Work of Art’, Off the Beaten Track, p. 51; GA 5 68)

What Heidegger is returning to here – is interestingly exactly the issue which Husserl is contemporaneously in 1935 discussing in his ‘Vienna Lecture’, namely the kind of culture-bound ideality that belongs to cultural products (as opposed—at least in Husserl’s case—to scientific discoveries). Heidegger, on the other hand, is

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proclaiming the death of ‘art for art’s sake’, prefiguring the movements that would precisely champion this art-negating approach in the twentieth century. Heidegger does leave open however that some kind of poeisis can be the ‘other thinking’ which will replace the outworn forms of metaphysical thinking that have dominated the West for two millennia. In his 1935 essay, Heidegger explores how genuine art (and how art is genuine is another vexed matter) functions to open up a world and establish a tension or ‘strife’ (Streit) between world and earth. Heidegger writes that the art work sets up a fundamental tension between world and earth: ‘The setting-itself-to-work of the truth of beings are two essential traits belonging to the work-being of the work’. According to Heidegger, furthermore, art not just functions to set up a world but also to preserve that world. Art ‘set up’ a world and preserves it as world. We grasp the Greek world through its art-works. Heidegger writes: Standing there, the temple first gives to things their look [Gesicht], and to men their outlook [Aussicht] on themselves. This view remains open as long as the work is a work, as long as the god has not fled from it. … The work is not a portrait intended to make it easier to recognize what the god looks like. It is, rather, a work which allows the god himself to presence [das den Gott selbst anwesen lässt] and is, therefore, the god himself. (Off the Beaten Track, p. 21; GA 5 29)

Heidegger is ambiguous about whether the poeisis of art is itself the power that brings the gods into being. But this essential grasping of world can also fade away and disappear. The world of the Greeks can become inaccessible. As Heidegger puts it, ‘world-withdrawal and world-decay’ (Weltentzug und Weltzerfall, GA 5 26) cannot be undone. There is an evitable wearing down of the world of a work until that world is no longer available and art no longer functions as art. What Hegel actually said in his Lectures on Aesthetics was: … it certainly is the case that art is no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual wants, which earlier epochs and peoples have sought therein only; a satisfaction which, at all events on the religious side, was most intimately and profoundly connected with art. The beautiful days of Greek art, and the golden time of the later middle ages, are gone by. The reflective culture of our life of today, makes it a necessity for us, in respect to our will no less than of our judgment, to adhere to general points of view, and to regulate particular matters according to them, so that general forms, laws, duties, rights, maxims are what have validity as grounds of determination and are the chief regulative force.

Hegel concludes, as quoted by Heidegger: ‘In all these relationships, art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest vocation something past’ (In allen diesen Beziehungen ist und bleibt die Kunst nach der Seite ihrer höchsten Bestimmung für uns ein Vergangenes, GA 5 66). The reflective mood of modern life has made the immediate experience of art impossible and, since art, for Hegel, operates in the zone of sensuous immediacy, then art today is impossible as art. The Greeks lived, for Hegel, in the ‘religion of art’. Of course, a new kind of reflective appreciation could arise – and has arisen – but the kind of ‘art’ produced no longer bathes in sensuous immediacy. Art is now working at an intellectual, reflective level. Husserl does not consider this issue in his characterization of the peculiar kind of ideality

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that belongs to aesthetic intuition. It is of course possible that a kind of ideating, reflective regard could be aesthetic in a sense removed from the realm of sensuous immediacy but Husserl does not dwell explicitly on whether the aesthetic regard has an inbuilt historicity.

4.7  C  onclusion: The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Intuition and the Being of the Art-Work The relation between art, experience, and the working of art objects, then, in both Husserl and Heidegger, is very complex. Art is not primarily about generating a new kind of experience, certainly not something like aesthetic pleasure or sensuous satisfaction. Art has an ontological function, for Heidegger, in that it functions to set up and preserve ‘world’ and reveal the truth of that world. It also functions to maintain some kind of tension between earth and sky, immanence and transcendence, materiality as such as well as logos. Husserl also sees the deep connection between art-works and world. For both Husserl and Heidegger, art-works are primarily disclosive of world. Unlike use-objects or tools, where the tasks to be done are the primary focus of interest, in the art-work, the thing is released from its context of everydayness precisely so it can become disclosive of its world. Art reveals world. In Being and Time, theoretical inspection, mere viewing, curiosity, all strip the object from its Weltlichkeit. In art works on the other hand, world is foregrounded. Husserl’s careful analyses of the way in which the aesthetic intuition places its intentional object in a special zone, bracketed from the world of everyday concern and in a sense ‘idealised’, actually complements Heidegger’s account. Husserl wants to carefully separate out the objects of ordinary perception from the objects of aesthetic imagining. Both Husserl and Heidegger reject accounts of the aesthetic that make it purely a matter of sensory experiencing. But, in the end, Heidegger gives a dynamic account of art as an interplay of revelation and concealment, in the disclosure of truth, which goes beyond Husserl’s concerns with the life of aesthetic fantasy and fiction.

Part II

Varieties of Artistic Experience

Chapter 5

Aisthesis and Logos – One or Two? Two Kindred Poems by Qianlong Di and Goethe Elmar Holenstein

To Chan-Fai and Kwok-Ying (On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Asian Centre for Phenomenology, CUHK, of which they are the directors.) 是 二 是 一 shi er shi yi They are two and they are one.

Abstract  Cognition begins with sense perception (Hellenic: aisthēsis), prototypically with visual perception (German: Anschauung). This is commonplace in philosophy. Less commonly known is how Kant supplements this matter of course in the opening sentence of the “Transcendental Aesthetics” in his Critique of Pure Reason, namely with the claim that “worauf alles Denken als Mittel abzweckt, [ist] die Anschauung” (“at which all thought as a means is directed as its end, is perception”). Though the standard translation of Anschauung with “intuition” is linguistically correct, it is also slightly misleading. In the original sense of the word, “intuition” does indeed mean “visual awareness” or, like German Anschauung, “looking at,” but today it is predominantly used in the sense of “immediate mental insight” or even simply as a synonym for “hunch.” Sense perception is not only the basis of thought; it is its true goal as well. Keywords  Goethe · Identity · Jakobsonian poetics · Multiculturality · Qianlong Cognition begins with sense perception (Hellenic: aisthēsis), prototypically with visual perception (German: Anschauung). This is commonplace in philosophy. Less commonly known is how Kant supplements this matter of course in the opening E. Holenstein (*) ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_5

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sentence of the “Transcendental Aesthetics” in his Critique of Pure Reason,1 namely with the claim that “worauf alles Denken als Mittel abzweckt, [ist] die Anschauung” (“at which all thought as a means is directed as its end, is perception”).2 Though the standard translation of Anschauung with “intuition” is linguistically correct, it is also slightly misleading.3 In the original sense of the word, “intuition” does indeed mean “visual awareness” or, like German Anschauung, “looking at,” but today it is predominantly used in the sense of “immediate mental insight” or even simply as a synonym for “hunch.” Sense perception is not only the basis of thought; it is its true goal as well. The twofold relatedness to perception (aisthēsis) that Kant attributes to thought (logos), with which his “Transcendental Logic” is concerned, is of course already applicable to what logos primarily means: “speech.” This can be observed most clearly, playfully, and pleasingly in poetic speech. In poetry, the point is not only what is said, but also how something is said, that is, how its saying is perceived. Poetry aims to say what it says by how it says it and, if it is written, also by how it is written. In China, poetry and calligraphy belong together. They influence each other. In Europe, the arrangement of verses in lines (one verse – one line) and in stanzas, which are kept apart by greater spacing, plays a role. Furthermore, where a poem is recited or written and in what setting it is perceived can be co-constitutive for its meaning. This is most conspicuous when a poem is written as an accompanying text to a picture. I shall use two poems to illustrate how artfully logos and aisthēsis, the meaning of what is said and its phonetic as well as its grammatical expression, are harmonized with each other in poetry and are able to enhance each other: the inscription by the Chinese Emperor Qianlong Di 乾隆帝4 on his double portrait shi yi shi er 是 一 是 二 “One and/or Two” (Fig. 5.1)5 and Goethe’s poem Gin(k)go biloba. Anyone who knows both poems will be reminded of one by the other. Let me first present the poems, Qianlong’s in Chinese characters, with pinyin transcription and in my rendering, and Goethe’s poem in the original German, with an approximately literal rendering of each line (disregarding rhyme and, if necessary, rhythm). Then, the first part of the following essay will consist in remarks on the aesthetic structure of the two poems—on the Emperor’s multiple personality and on the Ginkgo tree and its names. The second and main part will subsequently  A 19/B 33.  Standard English translation: “...at which all thought as a means is directed as an end, is intuition.” Anschauung is for Kant, at least in this sentence, not “an”, but rather “the” end of all thought. 3  “Perception”, too, is of course an ambiguous term. Kant’s use of the corresponding German term Wahrnehmung is as “rationalistic” as his whole transcendental aesthetics. 4  Wade-Giles spelling: Ch’ien-lung Ti, “Heavenly Prosperity” or “Lasting Eminence,” Beijing 1711–1799. Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe, Frankfurt am Main 1749–Weimar 1832, was a contemporary of his, though four decades younger. 5  Colour reproduction can be found at http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:QianlongKunstsammlung1.jpg&filetimestamp=20101113192448 1 2

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Fig. 5.1  Double portrait of Qianlong “One or Two” (Mental Cultivation version), eighteenth century, Palace Museum, Beijing Colour reproduction in the Internet among many others at http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index. php?title=Datei:Qianlong-Kunstsammlung1.jpg&filetimestamp=20101113192448. Accessed November 25, 2015

provide a comparative-contrastive interpretation of the two poems entrusted to us, one from the East, the other from the West. Qianlong’s Inscription 是 一 是 二 shi yi shi er one and/or two not identic, not divided 不 即 不 離 bu ji bu li 儒 可 墨 可 ru ke mo ke Ruian perhaps, Moian perhaps why ponder, why reason 何 慮 何 思 he lü he si Gin(k)go biloba6 Dieses Baums Blatt, der von Osten This tree’s leaf, from Eastward Meinem Garten anvertraut, Entrusted to my garden, 6  The German version of the poem adheres to the Frankfurt edition of Goethe’s works, vol. 3, ed. by Hendrik Birus, 1994, pp.  78f., with minor adjustments to present-day spelling. My English rendering is based on various translations that are available online. A name, John Whaley, is ascribed to only one of them: http://www.wisdomportal.com/Poems2007/Goethe-Ginkgo.html. I have modified almost all of the lines used, some slightly, some radically. None of the translations does justice to the root meaning of erlesen (shortened for auserlesen) in the second stanza. Both erlesen and my choice for the translation “select” are etymologically derived from words with the meaning “to collect.” If the myth of the primal androgynous being is associated with Goethe’s poem as suggested below, then the mutual selection of the lovers is a re-collection.

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Gibt geheimen Sinn zu kosten, Wie’s den Wissenden erbaut.

Gives secret sense to savour, As it edifies him who knows.

Ist es Ein lebendig Wesen? Das sich in sich selbst getrennt, Sind es zwei? die sich erlesen, Dass man sie als Eines kennt.

Is it one living Being? Which as same itself divided. Are they two? that selected each other, So that people know them as one.

Solche Frage zu erwidern Fand ich wohl den rechten Sinn; Fühlst du nicht an meinen Liedern, Dass ich Eins und doppelt bin?

To reply to such a question I likely found the proper sense; Do you not feel in my songs, That I am one and double?

5.1  Part I: Structural and Historical Comments 5.1.1  On the Aesthetic Structure of Qianlong’s Poem7 Shi yī shi er has an architectural structure through and through. It is a compact composition of binary contrasts, symmetries, and symmetry breaks. It consists of four brief verses, each composed of four equally brief, monosyllabic words: two words 7  My text analyses of  Qianlong’s poem are primarily based on  those of  Patricia Berger, 2003, pp. 51–53, and Den-nin D. Lee, 2011, pp. 572–575. In the points in which I deviate from their reading and interpretation and go beyond them, I have been able to rely on advice from Kwan Tzewan (CU Hong Kong), JeeLoo Liu (CSU Fullerton, CA), Tsunekawa Takao (Meidai, Tokyo), Fabian Heubel (SA Taipei) and  Franz Martin Wimmer (U.  Vienna). In  the  structural analysis of the poem, I adhere to Roman Jakobson’s linguistic poetics, which will be obvious to any poetologist. It was only after the presentation of a first version of this essay at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in July 2012 that Kristina Kleutghen kindly provided me with a preprint of her essay “One or Two, Repictured” (2012). She is the only author of whom I am aware who explicitly refers to and explores the textual allusions and quotations in Qianlong’s poem. At the appropriate places I shall indicate what I am particularly indebted to her for. In the case of authors from whom I cite only one publication, I refrain from stating the year from the second mention on and only refer to the page numbers if indicted. For the analysis of the picture, which, like its inscription, has a complex composition, I refer to  the  descriptions of  Lachman (1996), Wu (1996, 231–236), Berger, Lee, and  Kleutghen. Kleutghen draws on the earlier descriptions with the exception of Lee’s, which was only published in 2011, and hers presents the most judicious analysis both of the inscription and of the picture. Let me, however, draw attention to at least four remarkable aspects of the picture:

(a) For Qianlong, who could look at the picture on a standing screen in his rooms in the Forbidden City, he was present threefold, as the beholder of the picture and as the person depicted twice in the picture. With his inscription and the added signature, he was present four times. In China, calligraphic writings are deemed to be more precious representations of a person than painted portraits. Similarly, Qianlong is given three- or four-fold for  all who know these historical givens.

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each in the focus of the individual verses designating what they are about (printed here in boldface and referred to as “main words”), and two supplementary words (referred to as “concomitant words”) in a constative or deliberative and interrogative relationship to what is designated by the main words. However, to begin with, a point that will be surprising for Europeans merits mention: the four verses do not coincide with the vertical lines on the extant versions8 of the double portrait. Symmetrical coincidence of verses and lines is not in keeping with Chinese tradition. On the most often exhibited and reproduced version,9 there are five characters in the first column, in the following two columns there are four, and in the fourth column, three. The two last columns are translatable as: “Added by the Emperor in the Hall of Mental Cultivation.”10 The structure of the poem can be visualized with a clear four-part diagram:

(b) Like the poem, the picture has a manifold binary structure. The pairs of correspondences that are most worthy of mention with reference to the poem are distributed on the left and right side of the picture. They flank the emperor sitting in the middle. One pair is constituted by the iconic portrait of the emperor on the hanging scroll above him on the left and its indexical representation by the inscription from his hand above him on the right (on this point see Lee, pp. 572f.), the  other by two especially prominent objects among the  many collector’s items belonging to the emperor that are also depicted (on this point see Kleutghen, pp. 29f.): A bronze vessel that an earlier emperor commissioned as the standard of measure to his right (from his point of view) identifies the Qianlong Emperor as the legitimate sovereign of measures. To his left, a porcelain jar with Buddhaitic invocations in Sanskrit syllables painted on it is emblematic of the emperor’s intimate relationship to Buddha’s teaching. (c) The fact that a picture is painted on a picture and that the same person is depicted on both is nothing special. For someone from the “West” it may be surprising and pleasing that in China a painted hanging scroll can be depicted on a real hanging scroll or, as in the case of Qianlong’s double portrait, on a standing screen. (d) It is, however, extraordinary that it is not the Qianlong depicted sitting on a wooden couch who looks up to his portrait, but the other way round. The Qianlong portrayed on the hanging scroll looks down to the one sitting at the table and indeed does so in axial symmetry, in the same angle as the latter looks at a mirror image in the opposite direction to the table at which a servant is pouring him a drink. In the literature accessible to me there is not much to be found on this. After the presentation of an earlier version of this paper in Kyoto, Norbert Mecklenburg expressed his dissatisfaction that I, too, failed to reflect further on this seemingly surrealistic inversion of the relationship between the “real” person sitting on a couch and his pictorial representation. Mecklenburg was  reminded of  Magritte’s and  Escher’s picture puzzles. Does the surprising inversion perhaps give a “secret sense to savour”? With its illusionism, the painting could insinuate that everything is just a phantasm: what we naively perceive as real just as well as what critical realists think they have to assume as the genuine reality behind treacherous visual appearances. Or does the inversion perhaps express the view that a person can transport herself into a picture of herself and “realize” what her image (in this case her mirror image) seems to be doing, namely, observing herself from a place where she imagines herself to be? This second possible interpretation is for me the one more worth thinking about with regard to Qianlong. I shall pick it up in the section “On Qianlong’s Multiple Personality.” 8  There are four known versions. See the reproductions and descriptions in Kleutghen, 2012. 9  The “Mental Cultivation version” in the Palace Museum, Beijing, reproduced here as Fig. 1. 10  Yang Xin Dian 养心殿 within Beijing’s “Forbidden City,” Kleutghen, pp.  34ff., provides the most detailed and convincing discussion of these additions, which serve to localize the painting.

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a+ N+ a- N - + a Q- a - Q + ~ - ~ S b Sb ? + ? + b Pb P

The two main words in each verse belong to the same word category.11 In the first verse these are numerals (N), in the second, qualifiers (Q), in the third, names of philosophical schools (S), and in the fourth, verbs for a philosophical activity (P). They are in a polar relationship to each other in the first three verses: one – two, identic[al] – divided, Ruian – Moian (indicated in the diagram by plus and minus signs: +N−N/+Q−Q/+S−S). In the concluding fourth verse, the second main word, almost synonymous with the first, reinforces what the first means (+P+P). By contrast, the concomitant words of each line are completely identical. However, in each case, Qianlong varies the second one by writing it not like the first one (and all other words) in regular script, but rather in semi-cursive script, playfully, but not arbitrarily. The result is a grammatical parallelism in each verse, with the second part of the parallelism systematically diverging from the first both in its written form and in its meaning. Breaking the systematic symmetry enhances the aesthetic effect of the parallel phrases.12 The two concomitant words of the first verse are in a polar relationship to the concomitant words of the second verse. This is a relationship of genuine opposition (indicated in the diagram with plus and minus signs: +a+a/−a−a). By means of their opposition to each other, the affirmative shi and the negative bu link the first two verses just as the positive and negative poles of magnets join two objects. The first verse cannot be adequately rendered in English without compromising its symmetry with the second verse (and similarly with the following ones). The result is a banal violation of symmetry that reduces the aesthetic appeal of the poem, not an artful violation, which would increase the appeal. Chinese sentences require no subject, neither a semantic one like a personal pronoun nor a grammatical one like the English “it,” and they require no connective words such as “and” or “or.” So, if we do not resort to ellipsis (“One and/or two”), there are several possible translations of the first verse, for example “It is one and/or two,” “He is one and/or two,” and “They are one and/or two.” Depending on the construal that we decide on, that is, the choice of the subject for the first two verses, shi has to be translated with “is” or “are.” If we choose emperor as the subject, we use “is,” and if we select his two depicted faces,13 or, as philosophers, “reality and appearance/imagination,” we use  Spontaneous word associations often occur within the same word category, especially between semantically related words. 12  Nota bene: The basic symmetry of the two parts of the verse, which is the prerequisite for (partial) symmetry breaking, is lost in all translations of which I am aware when the two occurrences of bu in the second verse, which are in such conspicuous contrast to the two occurrences of the affirmative shi in the first verse, are not rendered just as repetitively with “not … not …,” but rather prosaically with “neither … nor ….” 13  Wu Hung, 1996, p. 235, translates the first two verses as follows: “One or two? / – My two faces never come together yet are never separate.” 11

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“are.” According to context, the word shi can be rendered with “yes,” “indeed,” “affirm,” “true/right,” or something similar.14 Similarly, the two bu of the second verse, which I translate with “not,” can just as well be rendered with “no” or with a prefix of negation (“in-” or “un-”) depending on what it stands in relation to. Thus, the construals “Yes, one! Yes, two!” or “One, indeed!” “Two, indeed!” and “unidentic, undivided” are also conceivable. The affinity of the deliberative auxiliaries ke in the third verse and the interrogatives he in the fourth convey a certain bonding force to these two verses (in the diagram: ~b~b /?b?b). This affinity is given additional expression by the written characters. The addition of the “person radical”亻to the character 可 for ke (“perhaps”) in the third verse transforms in the fourth verse into the character 何 for the ­interrogative he (“why”).15 Note also that for grammatical reasons and in keeping with the deliberative cast of the verse, the two concomitant words in the third verse follow the main words instead of preceding them as in the other verses. The semantic relationship of the concomitant words of the first two and of the following two verses (and accordingly their character as corresponding pairs) is enhanced by their phonetic form. The semantic opposition of shi and bu (“yes” and “no”) corresponds to the opposition between the light i of the first word and the dark u of the second. The concomitant words ke and he are phonetically related. The deliberative character of ke corresponds to its dipping or falling-rising tone (ě), and the interrogative character of he corresponds to its rising tone (é). All of these are structural facts that, for sensitive readers, become factors with a primarily subliminal effect. They are predominantly of aesthetic relevance, but secondarily they also have a substantive import in a subtle way typical of poetry. The formal structuring of the verses indicates that they are related to each other in terms of their meaning. Their semantic variation, the alteration of the writing style of the two auxiliaries, the change in position of the main and concomitant words in the third verse, and the phonetic correspondences and variations are in a literal sense a “superficial” allusion to the relationship of sameness and difference or unity and duality, which is the “subject” of the double portrait of the emperor. Both poem and painting have a manifold binary structure. Some supplementary remarks of a structural and historical nature may be helpful in reading Qianlong’s poem. As just mentioned, it is not only for the first verse, but for all four verses that multiple interpretations and, thus, different translations are possible. The first three verses can be read either as simple constatations—and even as exclamations!—or as pondering questions, whereas the fourth verse can be read as a real or, more appropriately, a rhetorical question. In the second case, the response is implicitly given with the exclamation of the question.16 The negative wording of the second verse and even more so the dialectical conjunction of its two negative expressions are characteristic of South Asian philo Also with the demonstrative pronouns “this” and “that.” Cf. the different translations of shi in the passage quoted below from the second chapter of the book Zhuangzi (see note 76). 15  Berger, p. 52. Depending on context, other translations of he are also appropriate: “what, where, how” etc. 16  I omit punctuation marks. They would annul the plurality of possible readings. 14

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sophical texts. The prime “Asian” example of a negative wording is “non-duality” (for “unity” and “mutual implication”), which several commentators cite as the topic of Qianlong’s double portrait. Negative and dialectical phrasings have a certain aesthetic appeal. Together with Buddha’s teachings they have become common in religious and philosophical texts throughout East Asia. In the third verse, ru stands for rujia(o) 儒家/儒教, “House” (i.e., “School”) or “Teachings of the Learned”, i.e., of the followers of Kong Zi 孔子 (“Master Kong”, Confucius), and mo for mojia(o) 墨家/墨教, “House” or “Teachings” of Mo Zi 墨子 (“Master Mo”)17. As far as possible, I use designations ending in -ism, -ist, and -istic only for ideological movements and their adherents and doctrines. Hence, I write “Moian” instead of “Mohist” and for reasons of symmetry, “Ruian” or “Kongian” instead of “Confucian,” similarly “Buddait(ic)” instead of “Buddhist(ic),” and “Daoit(ic)” instead of “Daoist(ic).”18 In the context of a conference of phenomenologists on “Logos and Aisthesis,” the fourth verse could also be translated: “Why logos? Why ratiocination?” or “Why logoi? Why words?” (“Aisthesis is enough! Intuition is enough!”). An alternative paraphrase would be: “Why this thinking, considering, anxious musing, ruminating, phenomenologizing?” At any rate, the rhetorical character of the question is enhanced by doubling it. Shi yi shi er proves to be not only a condensed composition of brief words and sentences but, moreover, thanks to the underdetermined grammar of Chinese, a concentration of alternative readings wavering between questions and constatations. In line with the conciseness of its verbal composition, it is also a masterpiece of intertextualty19 and, as we shall see shortly, a concentration of quotations and textual associations matching each other. If there were interlingual prizes for poetic devices, the prizes for poetic terseness and intertextuality would very probably go to East Asia.

5.1.2  The Aesthetic Structure of Goethe’s Poem in Comparison Goethe’s Gin(k)go biloba, too, has a clear architectural structure. In fact, there are several surprising correspondences to Qianlong’s poem. As already mentioned, the emperor’s poem consists of four verses each with four monosyllabic words for a total of just sixteen words. These alternate with different meaning, weight, and stress. The result is a repetitive binary structure of each verse with “light,” unstressed (u) words and “heavy,” stressed (ś) words.

 470–391 BCE.  Compare “Abrahamitic” (not “Abrahamistic”) and “Jesuit” and “Jesuitic(al)” (instead of “Jesuist” and “Jesuistical”). 19  “Intertextuality” is a term that was introduced by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s for the literary technique of making various texts, together with their contexts, affect on each other by means of quotations. The idea is that in a manner similar to people who “intersubjectively” communicate, the texts interact with each other and thus transform each other. 17 18

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

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usus usus 



susu 

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usus



Goethe’s poem consists of three stanzas, each of them (like Qianlong’s poem as a whole) with four verses. Moreover, the verses are written in four-foot trochees, that is, a total of sixteen accentuations (“heavy,” stressed syllables). Cross rhymes link the verses to each other: One verse rhymes with every other verse, the first with the third, the second with the fourth, and so on:

ab ab / / cd cd / / ef ef

The cross rhymes end in alternation with an unstressed, “feminine” cadence or a stressed, “masculine” cadence. This results in a dichotomy of the four verses of each stanza with a division into two verse pairs: 

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sususus

susususu

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sususus



In the concatenation of the pairs and of the alternating verses closing with a “feminine” or a “masculine” cadence by means of cross rhyme, it is possible to see a symbolic expression of the “united twinature”20 of the lovers, which is what the poem is about. In both poems, how something is said reflects what is said. The tripartition of the poem in stanzas and their bipartition by means of their metrical structure is repeated on the grammatical and semantic level. The first stanza states the occasion (tree from Eastward) and the reason (secret sense of its leaf) for the poem, the second poses the double question insinuated by the shape of the leaf; the third answers it. The first two lines of the first stanza contain the subject of the four-line sentence together with its specification; the following two lines contain the predicate. The second stanza is divided by the breakdown of the question into two parts. The third stanza is divided by the introductory characterization of the response (using the pronoun “I”) and the rhetorical statement of the response (addressed to a “you”).

20

 Goethe, Faust, part 2, verse 11962: “geeinte Zwienatur”.

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In addition to the bipartition of Qianlong’s four verses, which are in many respects uniformly structured, and of Goethe’s stanzas, which are clearly uniform in structure at least regarding metre, the poems have another common feature: both close with a question that can be understood as a rhetorical question. However, whereas Qianlong puts his enigmas to rest with the rhetorical character of his question, deeming them to be ultimately irrelevant, Goethe uses this rhetorical character to express the obviousness of how his enigmatic question is to be answered. We shall return to this difference in the second part. Correspondingly, Qianlong’s poem has the air of a meditative monologue, whereas Goethe’s poem, with its somewhat throbbing trochaic metre and the “masculine” cadence of every second verse, has a sermonizing or even lecturing tone. The use of the two personal pronouns “I” and “you” in the final stanza further enhances the lecture character. In contrast to its soundly structured basis, however, Goethe’s poem stands out at the same time as an exultant love poem. It is in keeping with this that the classically educated German poet conveys content with an emblem, a symbolic image (the Ginkgo leaf), and otherwise simply with suggestions and allusions “for those who know,” and not with textual quotations as does the Chinese emperor, who is no less classically educated. “Exultant” is not a predicate that would occur to anyone in view of the compact structure of Qianlong’s poem.

5.1.3  On Qianlong’s Multiple Personality Qianlong was an emperor with a well-rounded education. He was trained in history, philosophy, and numerous aesthetic disciplines, above all calligraphy, poetry, and painting, which he practised himself, as well as in governance, warfare and, in the tradition of the Manchu nobility, as a horseman and hunter.21 He was not a polymath in the narrower sense of this term (remarkable activities in the natural sciences and mathematics are lacking), but he was a sort of “Renaissance Man.”22 In contrast to his calligraphy, which is generally admired, his pictures and the great majority of his 40,000 poems, however, are deemed to be mediocre.23

 On Qianlong as a person and on his government, cf. the biography by Elliott, 2009; on Qianlong as a poet, cf. Gimm, 1993. The report (1804) by a European contemporary, John Barrow, a member of the first British embassy to China 1792–94 who was intent on a judicious and balanced assessment, is also worth reading. 22  This is Elliott’s title of the 7th chapter of his biography. 23  According to Elliott, pp. 110ff., as well as many other authors, some of Qianlong’s poems were already known in Europe during his lifetime, but the judgements about them are totally contradictory. See the quotations in Gimm, pp. 50ff. For a long time, Voltaire was full of admiration. He wrote to Frederick the Great, “Sire, you and the king of China are at present the only monarchs who are philosophers and poets.” By contrast, Frederick was not much impressed by the poetry “de notre confrère le Chinois.” 21

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He was almost obsessively concerned with the duplicity or, indeed, multiplicity of his person. There are a number of depictions of him in various roles and costumes, among them more than one double portrait.24 Two such portraits show him as a youth encountering himself as an adult.25 This interpretation,26 however, is understandably controversial. Wu Hung27 calls it simply “fantastic.” According to him, they instead present encounters of the young prince Hongli (Qianlong’s name before his accession to the throne) with his father, the Yongzheng Emperor. That someone should encounter himself in another stage of life is indeed just as “fantastic” (or surrealistic28) as a person looking down from a hanging scroll at himself sitting on a couch. The fact that the Emperor had himself depicted in this way must at least be taken into consideration as an argument for the view that the two controversial pictures also display self-encounters. Transculturally, it is an indication of maturity when someone is capable of looking at himself from outside, from a standpoint in which one can imagine oneself, just as another person can see us from his standpoint. The distance from which one looks at oneself can be a spatial or a temporal distance. As a youth, one can prospectively imagine how one will be as an adult, and, conversely, as an adult one can retrospectively imagine how one was in young years and how in young years one imagined oneself as an adult. On the double portrait with the quoted inscription, Qianlong is depicted in the vestment of a scholar-official from the Han period. Since the picture is an imitation of an older double portrait29 in his collection of art works, the Emperor may well have seen himself not simply as a (proto)typical man of letters, but identified at the same time with a certain scholar-poet of the past.30 No one should think that it was only under European influence that Qianlong had the idea of self-reflection and portrayals in various roles and costumes. The Qianlong Emperor reigned over a multicultural empire. He prided himself that he could hold audiences in five languages without relying on an interpreter, in

 See the reproductions in Kahn, 1971, pp. 77–83 and 182–188, and the even more fantastic pluricultural “masquerades” of his father, Yongzheng Di (obviously under European influence, among others as a Persian warrior, Turkish prince [?] and European monarch with a wig and hunting tigers), reproduced in Wu, 1995, figs. 6a–k and 8. 25  Wu Hung, 1995, figs. 1 and 4. 26  Advocated by Kahn, p. 77. 27  1995, p. 25. Cf. on this controversy on interpretations Berger’s commentary, pp. 54f. 28  One famous modern representation of a person together with herself at a later stage in life is the Double Portrait of the Artist in Time (1935) by Helen Lundeberg, which is deemed to be “postSurrealist.” It displays the artist as a child in the foreground and as an adult in a portrait on the wall in the background (and not the other way round, i.e., the artist together with a photograph from her youth): http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id=15255. 29  Wu, 1995, fig. 14; 1996, fig. 165. According to recent estimates, the older portrait dates either from around 1200 (Nan Song dynasty) or from around 1500 (early Ming dynasty). Cf. Lachman, p. 740, and Kleutghen, pp. 30ff. 30  Lachman, pp. 740f. 24

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addition to Chinese and his native Manchu(rian), in Mongol(ian), Tibetan, and Uyghur(ian),31 thus expressing his idea of “conquering by kindness.”32 During his reign, a “Pentaglot Dictionary”33 was completed. Its Chinese title Yuzhi Wu Ti Qing Wen Jian 御製五體清文鑑 means “Imperial Mirror of the Qing Language in Five Incarnations.”34 It contains more than 18,000 lemmas listed in vertical columns, at the top in Manju gisun (Manchu language), then in Bod skad (Tibetan), Mongγol kele, and Uyghur tili, and, at the bottom, in Hanyu (Chinese) (Fig. 5.2). Tibetan was written three times, once in the Tibetan script and twice in Manchu transcription, the first one being a transliteration of the Tibetan abugida or alphasyllabic letters into the corresponding alphabetic Manchu letters, the second a phonetic transcription, rendering the contemporary pronunciation of the words. Uyghur was written twice, in the Arabic script used for this Turk language (Uyghur Ereb Yëziqi) and in the Manchu transcription: “the same word” repeated on various levels differently (in script, in pronunciation, and, invisibly, in the meaning‘s intension and extension) and yet is the same in its basic meaning. Shi yī shi wǔ 是一是 五. “Is it one? Is it five?“ Or, with the transcriptions, eight, or with the added synonyms in Tibetan and Mongol even more? The title already contains an identity conundrum: Besides the quoted title “Mirror of the Qing Language in Five Incarnations” one can find several others in the net. One replaces “Qing Language” with “Manchu Language“. Berger, however, paraphrases “Pentaglot mirror of Qing languages, that is, Manchu, Tibetan, Mongolian, Chinese, and Chagatay.” So, is there one Qing language or are there five? Is Manchu the Qing language (embodied in additional languages)? Or is the Qing language a kind of heavenly or so to speak “noumenal” language incarnated in five concrete spoken and written languages with Manchu in the first place? A fourth translation avoids the metaphor “bodies” and the more vivid “incarnations” by rendering them in plain speech: “Five-script mirror of Qing language.” The next one reads: “Five-­ Fold Mirror to the National Language.” Finally, an informal sixth variant also avoids the metaphor of the mirror: “Imperial vocabulary in five scripts.” Today most human  Berger, p. 38. How well did he speak these languages, one might ask. He had a total of 40 consorts and concubines from three of the major ethnic groups of his empire (Elliott, 2009: 39), from the Uyghurs, however, just one, and none from Tibet. After the untimely death of the Uyghurian consort Rong Fei in 1788 Qianlong had her interred in a stone coffin adorned with Quran verses in Arabic. Was it out of respect that as a devout Buddhait he did not have Tibetan consorts and concubines? Or because the political leaders of Tibet, as distinct from the other ethnic groups, were primarily monks? His spiritual counsellor, the Lama Rolpai Dorje, although of Mongolian descent, came from the Tibetan region Amdo (today a part of Qinghai province). Qianlong also studied Sanskrit, and at an old age, in 1780, he learned an additional language, Tangut, in order to be able to converse with the Panchen Lama on a familiar basis. 32  For him, cruel methods of persecution of ethnic separatists and Chinese opponents of the Qings’ foreign rule were compatible with this sublime maxim. 33  See: http://www.pentaglot.net/Project/Pentaglot.html. 34  Yuzhi: “made by Imperial order,” wu: “five,” ti: “bodies,” here translatable as “incarnations,” Qing wen: “language of the Qing (dynasty),” jian: “mirror,“ here in the sense of “dictionary.” 31

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Fig. 5.2  Imperial Pentaglot Dictionary, Beijing, eighteenth century Based on the example page in: Oliver Corff, 1998–2002, “Some Notes on the Pentaglot Dictionary”, http://www.pentaglot.net/Project/Pentaglot.html. Accessed November 25, 2015. See also: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentaglot_Dictionary

scientists would use the fashionable word “embodiments” instead of the iridescent expression “incarnations” (which, as such, is more appropriate for languages and scripts). The Qing Emperors did not only reign over a multilingual realm, but also over a territory with numerous religions. With respect to them, they adhered to the view common in traditional societies that all religions are but one. In Europe, Nicolaus Cusanus coined for this the formula una religio in rituum varietate: “One religion in a diversity of rites.”35 The following admonition by Qianlong’s father, the Yongzheng Emperor, addressed in 1727 to a countryman who had converted to Christianity, has been handed down: 35

 Cf. Holenstein, 1995: 65ff.

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In view of Qianlong’s multi-religiosity, -linguality, -culturality, and above all -ethnicity, it is possible to conceive alternative wordings in the third verse of his poem: instead of ru ke mo ke 儒可墨可 “Ruian/Kongian perhaps, Moian perhaps,” ru ke fo ke 儒 可 佛 可 “Kongian perhaps, Foian/Buddhait perhaps”, or more probably han ke man ke 漢可滿可 “Chinese perhaps, Manchu perhaps.” On the first alternative: For Qianlong, Rujiao and Fojiao were the two leading sets of convictions, Rujiao especially with respect to his office as Chinese emperor and Fojiao with respect to his belonging to the Manchu people, which by way of Mongolian contact had converted to Tibetan “Lamaism.” He practised Tibetan-Buddhaitic rites with fervour.38 He even identified himself as an emanation of the bodhisattva of wisdom Manjushri39 as his forebears had, and had himself depicted as such and venerated in temples.40 On the second alternative: Qianlong was just as proud of his ethnic origin as he was of his classical Chinese culture and naturally of his status as emperor of China. He was increasingly and seriously concerned about the ­observance of the “Manchu way” by his fellow Manchu, who lived scattered around China.41 Through his maternal line of descent, he also had Chinese ancestors.42 But these would be anachronistic ideas. For Qianlong it would most probably have been impolitic to speak in public of these two identities, the second being the most problematic and all the more so in Chinese. Moreover, his choice “Ruian perhaps, Moian perhaps” has the advantage that it weighs two classical philosophical schools in the balance, thus underpinning the genuinely philosophical character of his identity problem as illustrated with his double portrait.43 However, it must not be disregarded that Qianlong’s life-long preoccupation with his identity was hardly rooted in the tension between the poles of China’s great philosophical systems of belief (according to the standard view, the three dominant ones,

 The designation for God adopted by the Jesuit missionaries in China.  Elliott, 2001: 241 & 447 (note 37). For the Qing rulers, cultural identity was bound to ethnicity, and not at the free disposal of the individual. According to Yongzheng Di, each person had to adhere to the religious rites of his people: “I have never said that he [Urcen, a Manchu, who had converted to Christianity] could not honor Heaven but that everyone has his way of doing it. As a Manchu, Urcen should do it like us.” By contrast, John Barrow (1804, 29) admired the individual religious freedom of the Chinese, as had other proponents of the Enlightenment before him: “In China, every one was allowed to think as he pleased, and to choose his own religion.” As his father had thought with regard to religions, Qianlong thought of languages (and of ways of life in general). As the ruler over “all under heaven” (tianxia 天下), it was a matter of course for him to have a command of several languages and to be able to communicate with his subjects in their own language. Cf. Berger, pp. 34ff. 38  Some conjecture mono-causally that this was for strategic reasons. But people are complex enough to unite strategic ulterior motives with deeply felt religiosity. 39  Also insinuated by the phonetic association “Manchu [or Manju] – Manjushri.” 40  Cf. Berger, p. 55. 41  Cf. Elliott, 2001. 42  Moreover, he “used to boast of his descent from Gengis-khan” (Barrow, p. 185). 43  Lee, pp. 573f. 36 37

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Dao Jiao, Ru Jiao, and Fo Jiao, were deemed to be harmoniously compatible44), nor in the problem of the “non-duality” of all being, which was discussed at a high level by Buddhaitic and neo-Confucian thinkers, but rather in the tension between his ethnic origin and his Chinese culture and his office as Chinese emperor. In his case, this office involved the pronounced awareness that he was ruler over a multi-ethnic, -lingual, and -religious realm and, in conjunction with this, felt a sense of responsibility just as acutely. There are good reasons to assume that his most intimate identity problem did not refer to the relationship between himself as a physical person and his depictions and mental images of himself. That may well have been the ostensible problem, the only one to be explicitly considered, when he viewed portraits of himself. However, his real identity problem was probably the multiculturality, -linguality and -religiosity that he lived and that he deliberately practised as emperor. The relationship between the languages that he spoke (and that were visibly listed in the Pentaglot) is not a relationship between “reality and representation/appearance/illusion/maya,” but rather one of different “realizations,” “incarnations,” or “embodiments” of something that does not exist realiter detached from and independently of them. If there is anything that is purely ideal and unimaginable in any other way than as illusory (in other words, a theoretical construct, even though one of great psychological effect), then it is “the (heavenly, ideal, universal) language” of which philosophers believe comes to be expressed in particular human languages. Something similar applies to the particular rites of various peoples. These, too, are “manners of realization” of religion and not “mere forms of appearance.” Qianlong’s real problem of identity, one can assume, is less a “prototypically Indian” one, the relationship between “reality and appearance/illusion/maya” that is so impressively illustrated by his double portrait, than a “prototypically Chinese” one or even more so a “prototypically Manchurian” one, or, in more general terms, an “ethno-philosophical” problem of concurrently or alternately practised ways of life. The goal of this excursus on Qianlong’s multiple personality was to point this out.

5.1.4  Notes on the Ginkgo Tree and its Names45 A fair copy, in Goethe’s own hand, of his poem was found in 1965; it is famous mainly for the fact that two Ginkgo leaves are attached to the paper (Fig. 5.3).46 The title on it is spelled correctly according to Linné as Ginkgo biloba; in the printed

 San jiao he yi 三教合一“The three teachings are in accord with each other.”  The notes are based on a comparative consultation of pluri-lingual dictionaries of Chinese characters and  various online publications on  the  Ginkgo tree. I  found the  following instructive: Michel, 2005; Dharmananda and Fruehauf, 1997; the information provided by the Forest Botanical Garden of  the  University of  Göttingen; and  for  initial orientation, in  addition to  the  pertinent Wikipedia articles, Cor Kwant’s extensive “Ginkgo Pages.” 46  See fig. 15 in the Frankfurt edition of Goethe’s Divan, 1994. Colour copies can be found at several online sites, here, for example, together with translations into six languages: http://kwanten. home.xs4all.nl/goethe.htm. 44 45

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Fig. 5.3  Fair copy of Goethe’s poem “Ginkgo biloba” in his own hand, September 15, 1815 Figure 15 in the Frankfurt edition (1994) of Goethe’s Divan. Colour copies can be found at several online sites, here, for example, together with translations into six languages: http://kwanten.home. xs4all.nl/goethe.htm

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versions of Goethe’s Divan of 1819 and 1827, however, it is spelled Gingo biloba. The change might be explainable much the same way Goethe used the French spelling hegire47 to replace what to his ears sounded “barbaric,” the German Hedschre for Arabic hijra (the emigration of the Prophet Muhammad from Makka to Madina).48 Inasmuch as they avoid consonant clusters, hegire and Gingo are more euphonious and result in a more gracious appearance in writing and print. The spelling Ginkgo stems from the German physician, botanist, and ethnographer Engelbert Kaempfer, who worked for the Dutch East India Company in Nagasaki from 1790 to 1792. Probably due to momentary inattention, he transcribed the name of Chinese origin that was then customary in Japan, ginkyō, as Ginkgo.49 Ginkyō 銀杏 (pinyin transcription of the modern standard Chinese pronunciation of the characters used: yinxing) means “silver apricot.”50 In Kaempfer’s misspelling, together with the epithet biloba,51 Carl Linnaeus integrated it into his binomial nomenclature of plants.52 Around 1200 (or perhaps only two centuries later), Zen monks brought the tree from the region of Hangzhou,53 south of present-day Shanghai, to Japan as a temple tree. Starting from the botanical gardens of the University of Utrecht in the middle of the eighteenth century, the time of Goethe’s birth, it was propagated through Europe as an ornamental tree. Historians conjecture that it was first planted in Germany in Rödelheim near (today‘s) Frankfurt, the city in which Goethe was born. The tree has and has had several other names.54 The oldest documented designation that, like “Ginkgo biloba”, makes reference to the shape of the leaves,55 seems to be “duck-foot tree”, yajiao shu 鴨脚樹. This vividly imagined meaning does not do justice to the graceful tree and its leaves. Goethe would hardly have been inspired to write his love poem if he and his young lady friend had known the tree by this  Without an accent.  See Birus’ commentary in Goethe, 1819/1994: 883. 49  See Michel, 2005. 50  Or also “silver almond.” The nutshells and the slightly sweet fruit of the tree both gleam in silver. 51  “Two-lobed,” derived from Latin lobus. 52  1771, p. 313. 53  Hangzhou was the Imperial capital during a period of flourishing in China from 1123 to 1278. 54  Apart from yinxing 銀杏 (“silver apricot”) the most common present-day name for the tree in China is baiguo 白果 (“white fruit”). In Japan the typical names today are ichō for the tree and ginnan (also “silver apricot”) for its fruit. Both of them were already in common use in Kaempfer’s day. His entry in Amoenitates exoticae (“Exotic Pleasures”), 1712: 811, reads: “杏銀 [to be read from right to left] Ginkgo, vel Gin an, vulgo Itsjo. Arbor nucifera folio Adiantino.” The supplement means: “Nut-bearing tree with maidenhair-ferny leaf.” In today’s usage, the two words ichō and ginnan distinguish between the tree and the nut respectively and are normally written only in syllabary without use of Chinese characters. Nowadays, only philologists are aware of the etymological derivation of ichō from Chinese yajiao 鴨脚 (“duck foot”). 55  Ginkgo leaves occur in two forms. In addition to the well-known leaves with a cleavage in the middle, there are fan-shaped, non-bilobate leaves that can more readily be associated with duck’s feet. 47 48

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name. A name can block an aesthetic perception. Borrowing on Ludwig Klages’s book title and slogan, “The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul,” we could feel inclined to say, logos antidikos tēs psychēs aisthētikēs. A wide-spread name, but only in European languages, is “maidenhair tree.” It, too, can be traced back to Kaempfer, to his comparison of the tree’s leaf with those of the maidenhair fern,56 also called “Venus-hair fern.” This delightful name would perhaps have inspired Goethe to write a love poem, but certainly a different one than the present.

5.2  P  art II: Comparative-Contrastive Interpretation of the Poems 5.2.1  Identities Qianlong’s and Goethe’s poems deal with the enigma of identity in the awareness of their own doubling. However, the unity and duplicity about which the poems ask refer to patently different things. Goethe’s conundrum is how a pair in love feels itself “one and double,” while Qianlong’s is the doubling of an “individual” looking at pictures of himself. On more careful reading,57 one notices that Goethe, too, imagines an identity with an image, not with a portrait of himself, but with the Ginkgo leaf as a pictorial symbol of the biunity of two lovers. For Goethe, a symbol is more than a verbal metaphor. With the perception of the Ginkgo leaf as a symbol, a relatedness between the love pair and the Ginkgo leaf comes to light that one could be inclined to compare with totemic relationships. For Goethe as a philosopher of nature, the same universal energy and laws really generate both the morphological polarity of the two parts of the Ginkgo leaf and the togetherness of lovers. A botanic leaf is suited in a charming way to symbolize identity. A real Ginkgo leaf can regarded as a token of its type, as a visualisation of its own morphological structure, and be stuck to a sheet of paper as a symbol of the biunity of the lovers. Naturally, as documented by the fair copy of his poem, Goethe did not miss this point. Undecidedness in China, Certainty in Europe? The first verse in Qianlong’s quatrain can, as mentioned, be read in Chinese either as a question or as a statement. In English it has to be formulated unequivocally as a question or assertion if we do not wish to contract it to “one or two.” In Chinese, it remains in suspense how it is to be read, which is possible in English for the two following verses. For Qianlong, it remains undecided or even undecidable, and above all unimportant, how it ultimately is read. If the verse is read as a double 56 57

 Quoted in note 54.  To which Norbert Mecklenburg again guided me.

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question, then both answers can indeed be right, in analogy to Goethe’s double question. Goethe is, in contrast to Qianlong, simply certain of being one and two. He almost reproaches his lady friend: “Do you not feel that I am one and double?” When, on seeing a Ginkgo leaf by chance in 1815, he started to muse about its bilobate form, the only point that was questionable for him was whether it is one that divides itself in two, or two that unite to one.58 In the poem, he then formulates the question poetically: “Ist es Ein lebendig Wesen? Das sich in sich selbst getrennt, Sind es zwei? die sich erlesen, Dass man sie als Eines kennt.” The wording will remind classically educated Europeans of the fabulous explanation of love in Plato’s Symposium.59 There, Aristophanes recounts the myth of the original androgynous globular form of human beings who were split in two by Zeus (as punishment for their mischief). This, he claimed, explains why lovers strive to unite. An unnatural division is to be overcome. Goethe’s solution of the enigma is in keeping with his conciliatory mind, at once recognizing and uniting contraries, which makes him so attractive for East Asians.

5.2.2  M  ore Than a Question of Identity: A Question of Knowledge If it is read looking at the double portrait and/or if the reader is aware of the text associations that it arouses, Qianlong’s enigma more clearly has two dimensions than does Goethe’s, specifically in addition to the obvious ontological dimension, there is an epistemological one. Naturally, the epistemic dimension of Goethe’s experience of identity does not remain unspoken in his poem. The tree’s leaf “gives secret sense to savour” to “him who knows.” The loved one is asked if she does not sense what is the case. Although it is not explicitly pronounced, Goethe’s poem displays an epistemological dimension in an even stricter sense than Qianglong’s inscription, if “epistemology” is understood not merely as an alternative, learned word for the theory of knowledge, but rather as a technical term for the doctrine of the justification of knowledge. When in the middle stanza the question is raised as to whether the two lovers have selected each other “so that people know them as one,” in accordance with the tendency to terseness in Goethe’s style in later years, it may be that in the German verb kennen (“know”) there is an echo of erkennen (“recognize”) and anerkennen (“acknowledge”) and thus also the wishful imagination of the legitimation of the natural love relationship.60  See Hendrik Birus’s commentary in: Goethe, 1819/1994: 1194.  189c–193d. 60  It is once more Norbert Mecklenburg, a Goethe expert, to whom I am indebted for this potential interpretation of the second stanza. There is an anonymous translation that can be found at several websites in which the last verse of the second stanza is justly rendered with “To be recognized as one.” Sometimes something is gained in translation. 58 59

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With an exclusively European cultural background, one will read Qianlong’s quatrain simply as an enigma of identity. Are the two identical, or are they two separate beings? Someone with an East or South Asian erudition, by contrast, will think just as spontaneously of the epistemological status of what is being asked about.61 Are the unity and duality that we think we perceive real or illusions? Do imagination and reality belong together, or are they phenomena that must be kept strictly apart? Is what we automatically hold to be real merely imagined? Is what the Kongians claim right, or, as the Moians counter, false; and the other way round, is what the Moians purport to be right wrong, as the Kongians teach? Or is it, as so many Asian thinkers seem to proclaim, undecidable, indeed a question void of sense, which of the two schools is right? The first two verses of Qianlong’s inscription are familiar to every well-read Chinese person. Especially the question and/or assertion of the first verse, “One and/or two,” can be found in innumerable Buddhait texts and, under their influence, also in later neo-Confucian treatises, above all with reference to the relation of (concealed) essence and (manifest) appearance, inside and outside, reality and ­imagination, knowing and doing, a principle and its application.62 Qianlong quotes the first verse several times, even on other portraits of himself.63 The locus classicus for the saying in the second verse (“not identic[al], not divided”) is the “Sutra of the complete awakening.”64 Moreover, it coincides in sense, though not word for word, with two of the “eight negations” bā bu 八不 that the Indo-Buddhait philosopher Nagarjuna sets forth in his classical “Verses on the Middle Way,”65 indeed at the very beginning of it in the dedication to Buddha. In

 Cf. Lachman, p. 742.  In neo-Confucian literature, the question is for the most part posed with reference to ti and yong 體用 (literally “body” and “use/operate”). The standard translation is “substance and function,” in practical and moral contexts, “knowing and doing” and “principle and application.” With this pair of concepts, too, the contraries “latent and patent,” “interior and exterior,” and “real and illusionary” play an explicit or implicit role. The dominant teaching is that ti and yong (whatever is meant by them in the particular context) intrinsically belong together and that they need, complement, and promote each other. The one cannot exist without the other, at least not enduringly. The first is not temporally prior to the second, but it is also not reducible to the second, for example, a being to nothing other than “operating” or “acting.” What a moral principle means is only grasped completely when it is lived. “European thought” is sometimes accused by East Asians of declaring the two to be divisible, in contrast to “Asian thought.” Only exceptional thinkers, among whom Goethe is counted, are said to think in accordance with “Asian insight” (namely that everything is mutually dependent on each other). 63  Berger, p. 51. 64  Yuanjue jing 圓覺經, traditional European title: “Sutra of the Perfect Enlightenment,” chapter 3. I am indebted to Kwan Tze-wan for the reference to this passage and to the verse bu yī bu yì in the Chinese translation of Nagarjuna’s “Treatise of the Middle [Way],” of which it is reminiscent. Kleutghen, pp. 33f., quotes these two classical texts more extensively. 65  Mūla-madhyamaka-kārikā, probably written in the decades around the year 200 in the region around the lower course of the River Krishna in modern Andhra Pradesh in the northeast of South India. 61 62

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Kumarajiva’s ingenious Chinese verse translation66 they read bu yī bu yì 不一不異 “not identity, not difference” or “not identic[al], not different.”67 But there is more to come! It is not Qianlong’s second verse alone that is reminiscent of Nagarjuna, but also it together with the multiple readings of the first verse. A variant of Nagarjuna’s much discussed tetralemmas can be discerned in these verses if the first is read as two assertions and, additionally, as their conjunction and the second as their negative formulation:68 ,69

1st verse, 1st sentence: 1st verse, 2nd sentence: 1st verse, conjunction of the sentences: 2nd verse, negation of both sentences:

shi yi shi er shi yi shi er

x & y are 1 x & y are 2 x & y are 1 & 2

bu ji bu li

x & y are not 1 & not 2

(or fei yi fei er or bu yi bu er)

identic(al) divided identic(al) & divided not identic(al) & not divided69

Contrary to an opinion that has widspread acceptance, Nagarjuna does not affirm the sentences in the tetralemmas he quotes. Nor does he deny them. Rather, he advises against yielding to them. They are scholastic theses that in his view assert something inconceivable and are therefore senseless.70 The two names “Ru(ian)” and “Mo(ian)” in Qianlong’s third verse stand for philosophical schools that profess contrary doctrines.71 For thinkers intent on reconciliation and also in the opinion of Zhuang Zi 莊子72, of whose book experts in classical Chinese literature will be reminded by this and the following fourth verse, they are only false when they are absolutized and not regarded in perspective. A passage corresponding to the third verse can be found in the second “Inner Chapter” of the book Zhuangzi. It has a title that is also eloquently significant in our context, 66  “Treatise of the Middle” Zhong Lun 中論. Kumarajiva, born in Kuqa on the Silk Road in the Taklamakan desert in 344, died in Chang’an (today Xi’an) in 413. 67  In Sanskrit: anekārtham anānārtham. Various other translations are possible, e.g.: “not one, not many,” “no unity, no manifoldness.” 68  I have not found corroboration in the literature for this association. It may well be that it does not correspond to Qianlong’s “authorial intention,” but is rather a “reader’s intuition” of my own. However, I gather from Berger’s exposition on Qianlong (pp.  16f., 22, 51) that he had studied Nagarjuna’s doctrine of the Middle Way with his spiritual teacher, the Mongolo-Tibetan Lama Rolpai Dorje, and that in his inscriptions he at times shifted from “Are they 1 or 2?” to the double negation “not 1, not 2” fei yi fei er 非一非二. 69  The four sentences can be read with a simple or a double subject: “x is 1” or “x and y are 1,” etc. On the variations of the fourth sentence see the preceeding note 68. 70  Cf. Geldsetzer, 2010, p. 146. 71  In the “Golden Age” of Chinese philosophy from the fifth to the third century BCE, the Moians were deemed to be the main opponents of the Confucians. 72  I use the two-word spelling for the name of the person Zhuang Zi (“Master Zhuang”), and for the book, which was only in part written by him, the closed compound Zhuangzi.

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Qi Wu Lun 齊物論, which can be translated as “The sorting which evens things out”73 or “The adjustment of controversies.”74 The passage reads:75 “We have the ‘That’s it, that’s not’ of Confucians and Mohists, by which what is it for one of them for the other is not, what is not for one of them for the other is. If you wish to affirm what they deny and deny what they affirm, the best means is Illumination.” 故有儒墨之是非, 以是其所非, 而非其所是. 欲是其所非而非其所是, 則莫若以明.76

Interpreters of Qianlong’s poem who did not notice the allusions to the book Zhuangzi in the third and fourth verse wondered about the name 墨 mo in the third verse. In the eighteenth century, Mo Zi no longer had any followers, at least none of note, and Qianlong seems never to have referred to him elsewhere. The fact that the just quoted passage from the book Zhuangzi did not come to mind had the positive side-effect that another interpretation was sought and consideration was given to one that is appealing and worthy of mention, at least as a connotation. Good poetry is characterised by potential polysemy. The most common meaning of the character 墨 is “ink.” Lachman77 translated it exclusively in this sense, and Kleutghen,78 pointing out Qianlong’s enjoyment of word-plays and the primacy of ink in the portraits, accommodated both possible readings: “Perhaps Confucian, perhaps Mohist – perhaps a scholar, perhaps just ink.”

Although I cannot lay claim to a professional knowledge of history, it seems to me to be conceivable that as a “philo-Buddhist” and similarly as an ethnic Manchu, thus belonging to a people that in the eyes of many Chinese is “barbaric,” Qianlong might have found Mo Zi’s teaching appealing because of its principle of “universal love” jian ai 兼愛 and the requirement to care for all people equally. In his letter “To the King of Holland”79 he wrote: “I consider my own happy empire, and other kingdoms, as one and the same family; the princes and the people are, in my eye, the same men.”

 Graham’s translation.  Legge’s translation. 75  In Graham’s much-quoted translation of 1981. 76  In addition to the characters 儒 ru and 墨 mo, which stand for the schools of the “Ruians” or “Kongians” and the “Moians/Mohists” as they do for Qianlong, this short quotation includes the character 是 shi no fewer than five times, which Qianlong uses twice in his verse, and the character 非 fei, which he occasionally uses as an alternative to the character 不 bu in the second verse. Here, Graham translates shi with “is” and “affirm,” and fei with “not” and “deny.” 77  P. 741: “Is it a scholar, or is it just ink?” 78  P. 34. 79  1795, quoted by Barrow, p. 14. 73 74

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Qianlong’s fourth verse is a direct quotation from the 22nd chapter of the same book Zhuangzi80 and/or from the Appended Phrases81 to the Book of Changes Yi Jing 易經, traditionally attributed to Kong Zi. It merely exchanges the order of the almost synonymous verbs lü and si.82 In the 22nd chapter of Zhuangzi with a title that is both eloquent and significant in our context, Zhi Bei You 知北遊 “Knowledge Rambling in the North,” the person allegorically named “Knowledge” poses the question: “What should one resaon about, what should one ponder about in order to know the Way?”83 he si he lü ze zhi dao 何 思 何 慮 則 知 道

The final answer is given by the “Yellow Emperor” Huang Di 黃帝: “Without reasoning and without pondering one will come to know the Way.” wu si wu lü shi zhi dao 無思無慮始知道

There is controversy in the commentaries about whether the author or authors of Zhuangzi simply repudiate the contradictory doctrines84 or admit a relative, perspective-­related justification. As a ruler with a comprehensive education both in the traditions of his Chinese empire and in those of his Manchu dynasty, Qianlong can be expected to hold the view that in an analogy to the great philosophical teachings,85 all languages and religions are ultimately equivalent and harmoniously compatible with each other. They have the same goal and reach the same goal. With his tendency to conciliatoriness and syncretism, it is not the various teachings from which Qianlong as emperor would dissociate himself, but only the simple classificatory assignment of his person to one school.

 I am indebted to Fabian Heubel and JeeLoo Liu for the reference to the passage quoted.  The Great Appendix (III), Section II, Chapter V.31. I take the reference to this passage from Kleutghen, pp. 34f. 82  At least in comparison with the standard editions of the two books. 83  Translation based on Nina Correa’s: http://www.daoisopen.com/ZhuangziTranslation.html. 84  Wang Fuzhi 王夫之, a Confucian critic of tradition, elucidates the passage quoted from the second book in his “Commentary of Zhuangzi” 莊子解 in context, in a manner that should be taken into consideration for the interpretation of Qianlong’s third and fourth verses: 天之靜而不受人之 損益者, 儒聽其為儒, 墨聽其為墨, 朗然大明, 自生自死於其中, 而奚假辨焉 “The sound of Heaven is silence and it cannot be diminished or augmented by humans. The Confucians listen to it and claim it to be Confucian [truth]; the Mohists listen to it and take it to be Mohist [truth]. Seeing this, I am enlightened. I live and die by nature, and why is there any need to rely on discerning who has got the truth?” Kwan Tze-wan pointed this passage out to me, and the Wang Fuzhi expert JeeLoo Liu was so kind as to paraphrase and elucidate it. The text in quotation marks is hers. Wang Fuzhi, an obstinate opponent of the Qing dynasty, spent most of his life (1619–1692) in seclusion at the foot of the Chuan Shan, a part of the Daoitic Nan Heng Shan in Hengyang county, Hunan. It is not likely that Qianlong knew his commentary. His interpretation, however, was certainly not alien to him. It is not only that Heaven does not speak (also according to Mengzi 3A4), a dictum from the 22nd chapter of Zhuangzi, which was just quoted, applies to people: “One who knows doesn’t speak and one who speaks doesn’t know, a sage teaches without using words.” 85  As quoted in the excursus “On the multiple personality of Qianlong” (in note 44). 80 81

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The passage86 in the Appended Phrases to the Yi Jing is directly compatible with this: “The Master said: ‘In all (the processes taking place) under heaven, what is there to thinking? What is there to anxious scheming? They all come to the same end, though by different paths; there is one result, though there might be a hundred anxious schemes. What is there to thinking? What is there to anxious scheming?’”87 Zi yue: ›tian xia he si he lü!? tian xia tong gui er shu, yi zhi er bai lü. tian xia he si he lü!?‹ 子曰:「天下何思何慮!? 天下同歸而殊塗, 一致而百慮. 天下何思何慮!?」

For Kleutghen and, according to her, for Qianlong, both Buddhism and Confucianism are in agreement that any dualities and multiplicities perceived to be irreconcilable are only the result of the mind’s limitation (and we may well be justified to add that the Daoit Zhuang Zi would have concurred). Kong Zi and Zhuang Zi and with them Qianlong use rhetorical questions to dissociate themselves from a scholastic preoccupation with them. In the third and the fourth verses of his inscription, Qianlong reveals himself not only to be a follower of Kong Zi, which no one finds surprising, but also of Zhuang Zi and even of Huang Di, the “Yellow Emperor”. Since none of the interpreters points this fact out, let us recall that Qianlong, like his father Yongzheng before him, had himself depicted not only in Confucian and Buddhaitic dress, but also in Daoitic and with typical Daoitic symbols.88 Reasoning in China, Mythology and Imagery in Europa? or Logos versus Mythos The geographically and historically wide-ranging quotations and allusions enhance the content, import, and horizon of Qianlong’s identity enigma. They indicate the eminently philosophical character of his problem. After pondering on his identity with highly abstract, ontological reflections, Qianlong dissociates himself from them in the end with his quotations from Kong Zi and Zhuang Zi. It is conspicuous that in Goethe’s poem, as can be expected, there is also no lack of geographically and historically far-reaching allusions. I have already mentioned one of them, the myth of the androgynous primal human being. A second allusion is only accessible to those familiar with Hafez’s poems and people who read commentaries on Goethe’s poem. Its last line is reminiscent of verses by the Persian poet Hafez-e Shirazi, whom he held in great reverence: “And from my Spirit I breathed a breath of life to Adam This verse89 explains to me how I and he is only one.”90

 Quoted by Kleutghen, pp. 34ff.  Legge’s translation, slightly modified by Kleutghen. Here, the master (Confucius) even declaims the rhetorical question he si he lü? twice in succession! 88  See Wu Hung, 1995: figs. 6c, 10 & 11. 89  A quotation from the Quran. 90  Hafez, Shiraz ca. 1320–1390, “Ghazal Ta 77,” known to Goethe in the translation by Joseph von Hammer, 1812: 164. 86 87

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However, the dominant poetic resource that Goethe deploys in this poem to deepen and widen the significance is not textual associations but, rather, symbolic images. Already in the first stanza he points out that perceived things can have a hidden meaning. The myth of the androgynous primal human being, too, is more than just a literary association. It describes something that we can vividly imagine. Goethe evokes the image of the bilobate leaf that brought him to compose his poem by musing on it. Qianlong links his verses with the picture he is looking at by inscribing it with the reflections to which it prompted him. His double portrait and the poetic and calligraphic rendering of his reflections are visually co-present. His inscription thus “coproduces and amplifies the artwork’s theme.”91 At least on the sheet of paper with Goethe’s fair copy of his poem, it and the Ginkgo leaf to which it refers are also visible together. But for Goethe not only the two-lobed form of the leaf reveals a “secret sense.” The tree “from Eastward” also indicates one. Lovers are always also “knowers.” They intuitively sense what Goethe is alluding to. It is not by chance that people in love and newlywed couples like to travel to countries that from a distance are reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. This association, too, does not yet exhaust the poem’s potential for meaning. By including it in the “Book of Zuleika,” Goethe confirmed what it surely is, a love poem. Inclusion in the West-Eastern Divan makes it open to an additional meaning, one that is not at all cryptic. It can now also be read as a symbolization of the relationship between Orient and Occident. Orient and Occident were initially, and for long periods of their early history, one. Later it was not Zeus who divided them because of their mischief, but, to allude to Schiller’s famous words, it was “custom” that for no sufficient reason “strictly parted” them.

5.3  Conclusions It will not be particularly surprising that in the contrast between the manners of knowing and deliberating, the property of undecidedness can be attributed to the Chinese “poet-scholar,” the property of certainty to the German “poet and thinker.” But it will run contrary to many people’s cliché ideas that a Manchu on the Chinese imperial throne concerns himself with abstract ontological questions, whereas a West European intellectual illustrates his identity problem with an image of a plant’s leaf and an allusion to a myth. Especially in Germany, the course of the history of ideas from Asia to Europe was characterized in the past century as a path “from mythos to logos,” that is, from perceptual narrations to logical analyses and rational explanations. These roles are reversed in the two poems. Qianlong proves to be a self-critical thinker and Goethe a mystagogue appealing to feeling. Naturally, the objection is ready at hand that the poet Goethe is not a typical European thinker. But it is more important to dispense with the delusion that complex civilizations and 91

 Lee, pp. 574f.

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their most outstanding representatives can be adequately described with the exclusive attribution of only one concept from such popular pairs as mythos and logos, visual illustration and logical investigation, or even emotion and reason. After this first conclusion, let us return to the Kantian claim that the true end of all thought is visual perception. I suggested that the customary translation of Anschauung with “intuition,” though correct, is misleading because for Kant Anschauung in the cited passage stands for sensory awareness. Now we learn that Qianlong in the end regarded intuition in the common contemporary sense of “mental awareness” as decisively superior to thinking and that, for Goethe, intuition and indeed feeling is not only the end of thought but also an end of perception. The visual world “gives secret sense to savour,” or, as the Chorus mysticus proclaims in his Faust: “Everything transient is but a simile.”92 With such splendid words, too, it is—cross-culturally—better to keep one’s distance both from over-generalizations and over-differentiations between whole civilizations. For East Asian thinkers as for the poet Goethe, sense perception and its so-called “esoteric sense,” although “not identic,” are under ideal circumstances “not divided.” The Latin word intuitio and the Hellenic aisthēsis mean both sensory and intellectual experience. Combined with them, sensory pleasure and true happiness, hēdonē and eudaimōnia, too, might, with a little luck, be undivided.93

Bibliography Barrow, John. 1804. Travels in China. London: Cadell & Davies. Berger, Patricia. 2003. Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Dharmananda, Subhuti, and Heiner Fruehauf. 1997. Ginkgo. http://www.itmonline.org/arts/ ginkgo.htm. Elliott, Mark C. 2001. The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China. Stanford University Press. ———. 2009. Emperor Qianlong: Son of Heaven, Man of the World. New York: Longman. Forest Botanical Garden of the University of Göttingen, “Ginkgo”, http://www.uni-goettingen.de/ de/11030.html [2012]. Gimm, Martin. 1993. Kaiser Qianlong (1711–1799) als Poet. Stuttgart: Steiner. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1819. West-oestlicher Divan, Stuttgart: Cotta; enlarged edition 1827; Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurter Ausgabe), volume 3, ed. by Hendrik Birus. Frankfurt am Main: Bibliothek deutscher Klassiker 1994. Hafez-e Shirazi, 14th c./1812. Der Diwan von Mohammed Schemsed-din Hafis, translated by Joseph v. Hammer, Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta. Holenstein, Elmar. 1995. Human Equality and Intra- as well as Inter-Cultural Diversity. The Monist 78: 65–79. Kaempfer, Engelbert. 1712. Amoenitatum exoticarum politico-physico-medicarum fasciculi V. Lemgo: Meyer.

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 Part 2, verses 1204f.: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.”  Translation by Donald Goodwin.

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Kahn, Harold L. 1971. Monarchy in the Emperor’s Eyes: Image and Reality in the Ch’ien-lung Reign. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1781/1787. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Riga: Hartknoch. Kleutghen, Kristina. 2012. One or Two, Repictured. Archives of Asian Art 62: 25–46. Kwant, Cor. 2012. The Ginkgo Pages. http://kwanten.home.xs4all.nl/. Lachman, Charles. 1996. Blindness and Oversight: Some Comments on a Double Portrait of Qianlong and the New Sinology. Journal of the American Oriental Society 116 (4): 736–744. Lee, Den-nin Deanna. 2011. Chinese Painting: Image-Text-Object. In A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, ed. Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton, 563–579. Oxford: Blackwell. Linne, Carl a. 1771. Mantissa Plantarum Altera. Holm: Laurentius Salvius. Michel, Wolfgang. 2005. “On Engelbert Kaempfer’s Ginkgo” (Research Notes, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, revised version 2011), http://wolfgangmichel.web.fc2.com/serv/ek/amoenitates/ ginkgo/ginkgo.html. Nagarjuna, 2nd and/or 3d c. 2010. Die Lehre von der Mitte: (Mula-madhyamaka-karika) Zhong Lun, Chinesisch – Deutsch: translated and commented by Lutz Geldsetzer, Hamburg: Meiner. “The Pentaglott Dictionary” (Yuzhi Wu Ti Qing Wen Jian, Beijing, 18th c.) http://www.pentaglot. net/Project/Pentaglot-2.html. “The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment” (Yuanjue jing), 7th c. (?). Translated by Charles Muller, 2003, http://www.acmuller.net/bud-canon/sutra_of_perfect_enlightenment.html [2012]. Wu Hung. 1995. Emperor’s Masquerade: Costume Portraits of Yongzheng and Qianlong. Orientations 26 (7): 25–42. ———. 1996. The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting. University of Chicago: Press. Yijing: The Yî King. Translated by James Legge, Oxford: Clarendon, 1882; reprint: The I Ching: Book of changes, New York: Random House, 1996; I Ching: The Classic of Changes, translated by Edward L. Shaughnessy, New York: Ballantine Books, 1996. Zhuang Zi, -4th c. Edition of the book named after him, Zhuangzi, -4th to +2nd c.; weblinks to the original text and translations in the Wikipedia articles on Zhuangzi. Classical translations: The Sacred Books of China: Part 1: The Writings of Kwang Ze, Books I-XVII, & Part 2: Books XVII-­ XXXIII, translated by James Legge, Oxford University Press, 1891; The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book Chuang-tzǔ, translated by A(ngus) C(harles) Graham, London: Allen & Unwin, 1981.

Chapter 6

Seeing the Invisible: Kandinsky and the Multi-dimensionality of Colors Junichi Murata

Abstract  What is painting as a work of art? To address this fundamental question of the philosophy of art, I begin with the more qualified question: what is abstract painting? In this paper, I first take up Kandinsky’s view of abstract paintings, focusing especially on his views on colors. Second, to explicate the meaning of Kandinsky’s views, I refer to Michel Henry’s interpretation of Kandinsky. While Henry presented a very clear schematic interpretation of Kandinsky’s views, I think his interpretation is too metaphysical and anti-­phenomenological. To compensate for Henry’s one-dimensional interpretation and to develop a phenomenological interpretation of Kandinsky’s view of abstract painting, I focus on the multi-­ dimensionality of colors. Finally, to extract the philosophical or “metaphysical” implications of the multi-­dimensionality thesis, I take up Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of painting as developed in his Eye and Mind. The provisional answer to the question above that is obtained from these discussions is as follows: Painting as a work of art is an attempt to make visible the condition of visibility, and in this sense, painting can be regarded to be a kind of philosophical work about visibility. What is painting as a work of art? To address this fundamental question of the philosophy of art, I begin with the more qualified question: what is abstract painting? In the following, I first take up Kandinsky’s view of abstract paintings, focusing especially on his views on colors. Second, to explicate the meaning of Kandinsky’s views, I refer to Michel Henry’s interpretation of Kandinsky. While Henry presented a very clear schematic interpretation of Kandinsky’s views, I think his interpretation is too metaphysical and anti-phenomenological. To compensate for Henry’s one-dimensional interpretation and to develop a phenomenological interpretation of Kandinsky’s view of abstract painting, I focus on the multi-­dimensionality of colors. Finally, to

J. Murata (*) The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_6

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extract the philosophical or “metaphysical” implications of the multi-dimensionality thesis, I take up Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of painting as developed in his Eye and Mind. The provisional answer to the fundamental question above that will be obtained from these discussions is as follows: Painting as a work of art is an attempt to make visible the condition of visibility, and in this sense, painting can be regarded to be a kind of philosophical work about visibility.

6.1  Kandinsky 6.1.1  What Is Abstract Painting? What is abstract painting? What can and should we see in works of art that are called abstract paintings? When we visit modern art museums today, we can enjoy experiencing diverse interesting works of art, but we are also sometimes perplexed by various art products and wonder if and why they are considered works of art. Many works of art exhibited in contemporary museums seem to challenge us with the philosophical question: what on earth is art? A typical case in which we have such an experience, is when we encounter works of painters called abstract paintings. There are many kinds of abstract painting, but one typical and extreme case is an abstract painting in which almost a single color is painted on the canvas. Think, for example, of pieces by Kazimir Malevich, Sam Francis, Barnett Newman, or Brice Marden. In the masterpieces of these artists, we see almost only a single color, such as white, black, or red, on a very large canvas. What meaning does this kind of art have? What can and should we see in these colors? It is true that the masterpieces of these artists belong to different times and different contexts, and we cannot simply talk about them collectively. Art historians and critics have written many articles and books on them, and have given us various interpretations and explanations about their meaning. In this sense, abstract paintings seem to constitute a representative field in contemporary art and have established their status in the history of art. In spite of these circumstances, every time we encounter such a work of art, we continue to be perplexed by it and wonder what we can and should see in such paintings, and consequently question what art actually is. Of course, the interpretations of works of art provided by art historians and critics help us to understand and appreciate these works in some way or other. But, the question I pose above is much more naïve and primitive. When we see traditional paintings in which some concrete objects, such as flowers, persons, or houses, are depicted, we can immediately identify some objects. We are not perplexed by the question of what we can and should see in the paintings. Perhaps, faced with an interesting painting, we question why, when, and in what context the artist painted the object, and sometimes we need expert knowledge to decipher a symbolic or implicit meaning to infer and appreciate how the artist painted the object. But, these

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questions, inferences, and appreciations are possible only because we can understand what is painted in the painting. By contrast, in the case of abstract paintings, this most basic understanding seems to be lacking, even if we read the title of a work and explanations of the context in which it was made. Perhaps we need to reverse the direction of our thinking here. Perhaps it is better to think that it is rather this perplexity and questions that artists demand observers have. Perhaps the lack of understanding of the object of a painting can be understood not as a negative characteristic but rather as a positive characteristic that motivates us to think self-reflexively and find the most important meaning of a work of art.

6.1.2  The Internal and the External Indeed, it was this kind of perplexity that motivated Kandinsky, the pioneer of abstract paintings, to follow a path toward abstract paintings. In his Reminiscences, Kandinsky depicted the experience he had when he saw The Haystack by Claude Monet at an exhibition of French Impressionists in Moscow. And suddenly, for the first time, I saw a picture. That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I didn’t recognize it. I found this nonrecognition painful, and thought that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a dull feeling that the object was lacking in this picture. And I noticed with surprise and confusion that the picture not only gripped me, but impressed itself ineradicably upon my memory, always hovering quite unexpectedly before my eyes, down to the last detail. It was all unclear to me, and I was not able to draw simple conclusions from this experience. What was, however, quite clear to me was the unsuspected power of the palette, previously concealed from me, which exceeded all my dreams. Painting took on a fairy-tale power and splendor. (Kandinsky 1994, 363; the last two italicizations by J.M.)

Kandinsky characterized this experience as an event that stamped his whole life and shook him to the depths of his being. In spite of lacking a recognition of the object in the painting, or rather because of the lack of recognition, Kandinsky could, for the first time, find “the power of the palette,” that is, the power of colors, which gave a fairly-tale power and splendor to the painting, and consequently it gave the character of a picture to the painting. With the expression “fairy-tale power” of colors, Kandinsky meant his experience of a beautiful sunset in Moscow, which fascinated him on every sunny evening when he was a child. Kandinsky depicted this experience also in Reminiscences in the following way: “The sun dissolves the whole of Moscow into a single spot, which, like a wild tuba, sets all one’s soul vibrating. No, this red fusion is not the most beautiful hour! It’s only the final chord of the symphony, which brings every color vividly to life, which allows and forces the whole of Moscow resound like the fff of a giant orchestra. … To paint this hour, I thought, must be for an artist the most impossible, the greatest joy” (Kandinsky 1994, 360). According to Kandinsky, this is a typical case, in which everything appears for him to be alive and reveals to him its soul. This impressive character of appearances

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is made possible by the powers of colors and forms. Later in his theoretical writings, Kandinsky characterized this power of colors and forms as vibration of the soul, power of feelings and emotions, or intern elements involved in colors and forms. At the beginning of his second theoretical book, Point and Line to Plane, he formulated famous sentences indicating that every phenomenon has internal and external aspects; therefore, a work of art also has these two aspects. Every phenomenon can be experienced in two ways. These two ways are not random, but bound up with the phenomena—they are derived from the nature of the phenomena, from two characteristics of the same: External—Internal. The street may be observed through the window pane, causing its noises to become diminished, its movements ghostly, and the street itself, seen through the transparent but hard and firm pane, to appear as a separate organism, pulsating ‘out there.’ Or one can open the door: one can emerge from one’s isolation, immerse oneself in this organism, actively involve oneself in it and experience its pulsating life with all one’s senses. … The work of art is reflected on the surface of one’s consciousness. It lies beyond and, once the stimulus has gone, vanishes from the surface without trace. Here, too, is a kind of glass pane, transparent, but hard and firm, which precludes any direct, inner contact. And here, too, exists the possibility of entering into the work of art, involving oneself actively in it, and experiencing its pulsations with all one’s senses. (Kandinsky 1994, 532, italicized by J.M.)

“Entering into the work of art, involving oneself actively in it, and experiencing its pulsations with all one’s senses.” This experience, according to Kandinsky, is the essential characteristic of experiencing works of art, and it is made possible by internal elements of paintings, that is, vibration and emotion of colors and forms. If the purpose of paintings is to paint these internal elements and not external elements, which mainly play a role in expressing certain objects or stylized ornaments, every work of art must in the end become abstract. Among various internal elements in paintings, the most general ones are internal elements related to picture planes. Because almost every painting is painted on a square canvas, it cannot be indifferent to various characteristics Kandinsky indicated concerning picture planes. First, a picture plane is bounded by two horizontal lines and two vertical lines. A horizontal line is characterized by a cold repose, and a vertical line is characterized by a warm repose. These elements determine “the tranquil sound of the picture plane” (Kandinsky 1994, 637). In addition, various directions in a picture plane, such as above and below, left and right, have corresponding meanings. “‘Above’ conjures up an image of greater rarification, a feeling of lightness, of emancipation, and ultimately, of freedom. … ‘Below’ has entirely the opposite effect: density, weight, bondage” (Kandinsky 1994, 639f.). The directions left and right are also interpreted in a similar way. If these internal elements are included in every picture plane, even the monochromatic painting described above has such internal elements in addition to the powers of colors. In spite of the circumstance in which a canvas is painted only with a single color, or rather because of it, in the case of a monochro-

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matic painting, the possibility of clearly experiencing these internal elements related to picture planes becomes larger. In this way, we can have a first and representative answer to our naïve and primitive question. What can and should we see in abstract paintings? We can and should see the internal elements of the paintings. What are the internal elements of the paintings? They are powers, vibrations, tensions, souls, and emotions that are involved in colors and forms, and which we can experience when we “enter into the work of art.” What are abstract paintings? Abstract paintings are the paintings that succeed in painting the most important elements of all works of art, that is, internal elements expressed in colors and forms. Can we be satisfied with these answers? While these answers seem to involve various interesting implications and suggestions, it is not easy to clearly understand them. Through these answers, it seems we are led not to solutions but rather to another enigma concerning abstract paintings. What does it mean that colors and forms themselves have internal elements, which are characterized as vibrations and emotions, involved in colors and forms? What is the relationship between internal and external elements? What is it like to enter the work of art, rather than see it through a transparent glass pane? In which sense can traditional figurative paintings be characterized as works of art together with abstract paintings? In the following, searching for answers to these questions, I consider Michel Henry’s interpretation of Kandinsky, focusing especially on the role of colors.

6.2  Multi-dimensionality of Colors 6.2.1  The Visible and the Invisible One of the most popular explanations of abstract paintings is the following: works of art express the subjective and internal emotions of artists, who attempt to communicate their internal emotions through works of art to observers. According to this explanation, what we can and should experience when viewing abstract paintings are emotions that correspond to the original emotions of the artists. Since subjective emotions have no intrinsic figurative form, the works of art, in which these emotions are expressed, cannot express definite objects and inevitably become “abstract.”

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At first sight, Kandinsky seems to support this opinion. For example, in a short article entitled“Painting as pure art,” Kandinsky emphasized the role of emotion in a work of art and explained the process of making and appreciating a work of art in the following way: The work of art consists of two elements; the inner and the outer. The inner element, taken by itself, is the emotion in the soul of the artist. This emotion is capable of calling forth what is, essentially, a corresponding emotion in the soul of the observer. … Emotion (Emotion)—feeling (Gefühl)—the work of art—feeling—emotion. (Kandinsky 1994, 349).

While it seems that Kandinsky did not always stick to this view, Michel Henry, who reinterpreted Kandinsky’s view in his own metaphysical framework in Seeing the Invisible: on Kandinsky, seems to follow this schematic explanation. On one hand, Henry formulated a distinction between the inner and the outer in a metaphysical and absolute way, and emphasized the invisible character of internal elements. According to Henry, the content and the method of paintings are the affective and spiritual internal elements, which belong to the absolute subjectivity of life and remain invisible “forever in the Dark.” The word “abstract” in the sense of Kandinsky “refers to the life that is embraced in the night of its radical subjectivity, where there is no light or world” (Henry 2009, 10, 16). On the other hand, he considered that the purpose of works of art is to be found in the attempt to transmit this invisible affectivity and emotion to others. “Kandinsky just showed us the point of departure for painting---it is an emotion, a more intense mode of life. The content of art is this emotion. The aim of art is to transmit it to others” (Henry 2009, 18). Henry’s metaphysical interpretation of Kandinsky’s view emphasizes the exceptional and radical status of Kandinsky’s attempt and contrasts it with various other attempts that are usually considered to belong to the same stream of abstract painting. However, as long as Henry’s interpretation seems to follow the popular schematic explanation described above, it inevitably involves many problems. Above all, it contradicts Kandinsky’s description of his own experience. In Reminiscences, Kandinsky described the following episode, which motivated him to proceed to his abstract paintings in his Munich period. It was the hour when dusk draws in. I returned home with my painting box having finished a study, still dreamy and absorbed in the work I had completed, and suddenly saw an indescribably beautiful picture, pervaded by an inner glow. At first, I stopped short and then quickly approached this mysterious picture, on which I could discern only forms and colors and whose content was incomprehensible. At once, I discovered the key to the puzzle: it was a picture I had painted, standing on its side against the wall. … Now I could see clearly that objects harmed my pictures. (Kandinsky 1994, 369f.; italicized by J.M.)

In this case, “the inner glow,” which impressed and attracted Kandinsky so deeply, was not the expression of some emotion the artist had experienced previously. The artist himself could not understand why the work of art had such an impressive power of colors and attracted him, although he himself had painted it.

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The point of departure for painting was not the emotion of an artist. The reason that the inner glow of the painting emerged is that it stood accidentally on its side against the wall as dusk drew in. We could say the painting in this context begins to have the inner glow. This episode depicted by Kandinsky clearly indicates that the internal elements of paintings are not separable from the elements constituting how paintings appear to observers. The “fine bloom of dusk” was needed to make the inner glow emerge in the painting, just as the growing reds of the sun at sunset were needed to realize the fairy-tale power that “dissolves the whole of Moscow into a single spot.” If these elements, which constitute appearance, are to be considered to be “visible” elements, we should emphasize that the invisible (internal) and visible (external) elements are inseparable in the experience of impressive works of art. If we understand Kandinsky’s experience in this way, we should say that Michel Henry was too one-dimensional when he divided the invisible and visible elements so strictly in a metaphysical sense and found the essential content of abstract paintings of Kandinsky only in the invisible dimension. This one-dimensionality of Henry can also be identified in the way he characterized invisible color as sensation. According to him, rocks or flowers have in reality no colors, just as they have no pain. The colors we see on the surfaces of rocks or flowers are only a projection of the sensation we feel in our internal life. What is true about heat and pain is also true about color. The rock is no more red than it is hot or painful. … It is true that color seems to spread across the thing, blending with its surface and its extension. But the color perceived on the object, or likewise on the artwork—what Husserl calls the ‘noematic’ or objective color—is only the projection of a sensation of color onto the thing. (Henry 2009, 71).

Perhaps it is questionable if Henry seriously meant this anti-phenomenological statement based on Cartesian Dualism and the mythical concept of “projection.” If we follow the Husserlian thesis of the intentionality of perceptual experience, which is realized in an adumbration structure, we should say that colors, especially surface colors, are located where they are seen, that is, on the surfaces of objects and not in the minds of perceivers. Surely it is important to notice that, when we experience some color, we not only perceive it as a property of some object, but we experience and live it with a certain emotion and bodily movement. In his first theoretical writing, On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky indicated various characteristics of colors, which are essentially related to emotions and movements. He indicated, for example, the differentiation between warmth and coldness as well as brightness and darkness of colors. Yellow, for example, is a bright and warm color, expressing a horizontal movement toward a spectator and an eccentric movement. In contrast, blue is a dark and cold color, expressing a horizontal movement away from a spectator and a concentric movement (Kandinsky 1994, 177f.). In addition, Kandinsky mentioned various emotional and spiritual factors.

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J. Murata Yellow is the typical earthy color. Yellow cannot be pushed very far into the depths. When made colder with blue it takes on…a sickly hue. If one compares it to human states of mind, it could have the effect of representing madness—not melancholy or hypochondria, but mania, blind madness, or frenzy…. Blue is the typical heavenly color. Blue unfolds in its lowest depths the element of tranquility. As it deepens toward black, it assumes overtones of a superhuman sorrow. … (Kandinsky 1994, 181f.)

In this way, Kandinsky combined a color with various emotional, spiritual, and movement factors, but as these citations clearly indicate, if these factors are separated from a certain appearance of color, they lose their appropriate meaning. Just as the appearance of yellow cannot be separated from a certain movement as an eccentric movement, the eccentric movement of yellow would be incomprehensible if it were separated from the appearance of the color yellow. Perhaps even Michel Henry would not oppose this way of thinking, as he himself seems finally in a later part of his book to admit a connection between the invisible and the visible in the following way: “The theme of a work is indeed its pathos, but this pathos belongs to the colors and forms; it is their own pathos” (Henry 2009, 121). Regardless, following Kandinsky, we can confirm that the visible and invisible factors are inseparably connected. The essence of colors is located neither in the visible dimension alone nor in the invisible dimension, but in both dimensions. In this sense, the essence of colors is not one-dimensional but multi-dimensional.

6.2.2  Multi-dimensionality of Colors What is more important in this context is the multi-dimensionality of colors that David Katz discussed. According to Katz, a color, for example the color red, not only has the various invisible factors described above, but is only made possible in some definite spatial mode of appearance, for example the mode of surface color, film color, volume color, or luminous color. In our perceptual world, we encounter only colors that are achieved in some definite spatial mode, for example, the surface color of a red mailbox or the film color of a blue sky, and we never encounter a color as such. In particular, the difference between film color and surface color is very important in paintings because they have different internal meanings. Surface color is characterized by an appearance that is localized at a determinate distance for the viewer and offers a visual resistance. In contrast, film color is indefinite with regard to distance. It displays itself in an essentially parallel orientation, but one feels that one can penetrate it more or less (see Katz 1935, 8). In addition, based on Rubin’s findings, Katz documented that film color is experienced more in peripheral vision and surface color more centrally in the fovea (see Katz 1935, 15). Neither Kandinsky nor Michel Henry focused on this characteristic of the difference in the spatial mode of colors, but I think it plays an essential role, especially in abstract paintings.

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Think, for example, of the abstract paintings I introduced at the beginning of this paper. To understand the meaning of such a monochromatic painting, this difference plays a decisive role. According to the artist, Sanford Wurmfeld, “non-referential color, which is a color that appears to lack all information about the material and specific spatial location of an object, helps the appearance of the film mode” (Wurmfeld 1998, 186). Because of this characteristic, the monochromatic painting of Bruce Marden acquires some quality of film color for the attentive viewer. In addition, “because the viewer can also perceptually construct such a painting as a figure on the entire wall as a field, this returns the color in such a painting to a surface color” (Wurmfeld 1998, 186). In this case, when the viewer approaches the painting, the visual field is filled with a single color and the color tends to appear in a film mode. When the viewer moves away from the painting, the painting appears as a figure and the wall as a ground, and the color on the canvas tends to have a surface color. In this way, the viewer can experience a kind of gestalt change of color, even in the case of viewing a monochromatic color painting. To experience an internal element of this painting, the wall in the exhibition hall also plays a role, just as dusk played an essential role when Kandinsky was attracted by the inner glow of his own painting. “Entering into a work of art” means not only focusing on the paintings themselves, but also taking into consideration the context in which they are located. Having considered these multi-dimensionalities of colors, we have now a second answer to our first primitive question. What can and should we see in abstract paintings? We can and should see the multi-dimensionality of colors (and forms) as internal elements of the paintings. What are abstract paintings? Abstract paintings are paintings in which painters attempt to achieve a multi-­ dimensionality of colors (and forms). And, as long as the multi-dimensional character of colors constitutes the essence of paintings, the situation is not essentially different in the case of paintings in general.

6.3  F  rom the Philosophy of Paintings to the Painting as a Philosophy In the case of Henry’s interpretation, paintings, especially abstract paintings of Kandinsky, have a special philosophical meaning because they aim at and succeed in expressing the absolute subjectivity of an invisible life, which is regarded to be the most important basis of our existence. According to Henry, what the greatest

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artists have sought is “a metaphysical knowledge, capable of reaching beyond the external appearance of phenomena in order to lead us to their intimate essence” (Henry 2009, 3). As long as acquiring metaphysical knowledge is to be considered a work of philosophy, works of art, especially the works of art of Kandinsky, can be considered to be works of philosophy. In this way, Henry finds a philosophical or metaphysical meaning in the works of art. What about in the case of our view of multi-dimensionality of colors? Does our phenomenological view of paintings also implicate some definite philosophical or “metaphysical” meaning of paintings? Finally, I would like to take up Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of paintings, to search a little further for an ontological implication of the thesis of the multi-­ dimensionality of colors. In his latest work Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty also began his discussions by describing two different ways of approaching the world. One is a scientific and external approach, in which things are manipulated and living with things is given up. The other is the internal approach of artists, in which artists attempt to live with things; that means they change the world into paintings “by lending their bodies to the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 121, 123). According to Merleau-Ponty, only a body, and not a mind, can move within a world and use paints and canvas to transpose a world into paintings. In other words, “bodily” factors such as body, paints, and canvas play the role of a medium through which a world can be expressed. This role of a living body in the activities of painters corresponds to the role of the living body in the activities of vision. A perceiver also must lend his body to the world in order to see the world. Only a body can move and use various bodily factors, such as eye, illuminations, and colors to transpose a world into a perceived world. In this sense, the activities of painters can be understood as a simulation of the process of the emergence of vision, that is, the process by which “vision is caught or comes to being in things” (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 125). In this sense, the main task of painting, whatever painting it is, is to tackle the problem of how a visible world is possible. “In whatever civilization it is born, …from Lascaux to our time, pure or impure, figurative or not, painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility” (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 127). To clarify this enigma of visibility, Merleau-Ponty proposed the decisive thesis that to see is to have at a distance. “Painting awakens and carries to its highest pitch a delirium which is vision itself, for to see is to have at a distance; painting extends this strange possession to all aspects of Being, which must somehow become visible in order to enter into the work of art” (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 127). It is this strange possession with a distance that is the enigma of visibility. Because what makes possible this enigmatic distance can be regarded as a medium, which separates and combines perceiver and perceived object, I would like to call this kind of view of vision a medium model of vision (cf. Murata 2010). According to Merleau-Ponty, what painting teaches us is that visibility is possible only through some medium, which makes a distance between a perceiver and a perceived object,

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and paintings attempt to make visible this medium as a condition of visibility, which remains invisible in natural vision. Merleau-Ponty found this medium role in the play of “light, lighting, shadows, reflections, and color,” and calls it “the texture of Being” (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 127 f.). In his writing, Merleau-Ponty explicated the meaning of this texture of Being, using the concrete example of Rembrandt’s painting The Nightwatch, in which the painted shadow of the captain’s hand plays a decisive role in making the spatiality of the captain visible. What is important in this case is that the painted shadows appear in the mode of film color and not in surface color. Only because it appears in the mode of film color can it play the role of a medium. In this way, we can find the relationship between the medium as a texture of Being and various modes of appearances of colors. The color of light is achieved as a luminous color. As for the colors of reflections, they are achieved in the mode of luster (Katz 1935, 22). Shadows, as indicated above, achieve themselves in the mode of film color and are essentially related to the color of lighting or illumination. The color of lighting or illumination shows a peculiar character, which is in some sense visible, but in another sense is invisible. When illumination is made clearly visible, the object will not be made clearly visible and its color will become very vague. “To see the object, it was necessary not to see the play of shadows and light around it” (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 128). In this way, with the help of the multi-dimensionality of colors, paintings “give visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible,” that is, the texture of Being as a medium. Only in this way, can a vision as a peculiar possession with a distance be expressed in paintings. This voracious vision, reaching beyond the ‘visual givens’ opens upon a texture of Being of which the discrete sensorial messages are only the punctuations or the caesurae. The eye lives in this texture as a man in his house. (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 127; italicized by J.M.)

Merleau-Ponty contrasted this medium model with a contact model of vision, which is presupposed by Descartes and other scientific models of vision. According to this model, “it is best to think of light as an action by contact … not unlike the action of things upon the blind man’s cane. The blind, says Descartes, ‘see with their hands.’ The Cartesian model of vision is modeled after the sense of touch” (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 131; italicized by J.M.). What is problematical in this contact model is that distance and depth are eliminated, and there is no place where light plays the role of illumination as a medium of a vision. In this model, there is no place where the texture of Being is realized and in which the eye can live. In other words, there is no place where visibility is made possible. A mind can only receive some information from a brain, which receives some stimulation from light, and the mind can only think about some object as the starting point of a series of contacts or causal relations. In this model, the mind can never realize a vision with visibility, because mind can never live in the medium, just as a mind can never paint a painting. What Descartes and the scientific view teach us about a vision is the “vision” conceived by those who cannot see, that is, a vision without visibility.

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In contrast, what painters teach us is that a world becomes visible only through some medium, in which we live and which is constituted by internal elements, that is, colors (and forms) realized in various modes of appearance and filled with various emotions. Now perhaps we have a better sense of how much is contained in that little word ‘see.’ Seeing is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present from within at the fission of Being only at the end of which do I close up into myself. (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 145f.)

Perhaps it might be thought that Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of vision is too metaphysical. However, what I would like to emphasize following MerleauPonty here is the fact that the multi-dimensionality of colors makes possible the depth structure of our visual world, in which we are living. In this sense, painters’ attempt to achieve multi-dimensionality of colors in their paintings can be considered to be an attempt to make visible various depth structures of our being-in-the-world. If painters have always known this truth about vision and created “a silent science” through their own paintings, as Merleau-Ponty indicated, we can say that all paintings, not only the abstract paintings of Kandinsky, are expressions of their philosophy of vision. If this is the case, it is not at all curious that when encountering various works of art we are motivated to question what we can and should see in the paintings. Seeing a painting is nothing but experiencing the philosophical enigma of visibility through seeing and not through thinking. In this sense, works of art can be considered to be works of philosophy through vision.

References Henry, Michel. 2009. Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. Trans. Scott Davidson. London: Continuum. Kandinsky, Wassily. 1994. Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C.  Lindsay and Peter Vergo, New York: Da Capo Press. Katz, David. 1935. The World of Colour. Trans. R. B. MacLeod and C. W. Fox. London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1993. Eye and Mind. Trans Michael Smith, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetic Reader; Philosophy and Painting, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Murata, Junichi. 2010. The Phenomenology of illumination: The ontology of vision in Merleau-­ Ponty’s Eye and Mind. In Phenomenology 2010: Selected Essays from Asia and Pacific, ed. Yu Chung-Chi. Bucharest: Zeta Books. Wurmfeld, Sanford. 1998. Color in abstract painting. In Color for Science, Art and Technology, ed. Kurt Nassau. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Chapter 7

Theatre as a Scene of Otherness Bernhard Waldenfels

Abstract  Western theatre, whose origins go back to the ancient Greeks, presents itself as a scene, as an open place of showing and being shown, of exhibiting and being exhibited. In German we use the word Schauplatz. This common term is closely related to the Greek word theatron, which is derived from theoria, i.e. from contemplation as an intensive and persistent manner of viewing. Thus the theatre is certainly a scene, but a scene of otherness, of alienness, of strangeness, a Schauplatz des Fremden; but what does that mean? In this essay, I shall unfold step by step some phenomenological features of the theatre. In this context I refer to the presuppositions of what I call responsive phenomenology, especially stressing the aspects of corporeity and alienness. Theatre proves to be an aesthetic whole in which elements of sensuality, of mobility, of affectivity, of expression, of spatiality and of temporality are closely interwoven. The quality of otherness points to the fact that everything happening on the scene deviates greatly from our everyday life as if we were entering the world of dreams. The ways out of the normal are various, varying from one culture to the other and varying within one and the same culture. Let us here take the Western origins of the theatre as one paradigm among others, one that has now been considerably influenced by Eastern forms of theatre such as the Japanese Kabuki and Bunraku. The essay starts with general remarks on otherness on stage and then deals with various aspects of theatre that address specific phenomenological issues. Finally it touches upon the politics of theatre that exceed pure aesthetics. Western theatre, whose origins go back to the ancient Greeks, presents itself as a scene, as an open place of showing and being shown, of exhibiting and being exhibited. In German we use the word Schauplatz. This common term is closely related to the Greek word theatron, which is derived from theoria, i.e. from contemplation as an intensive and persistent manner of viewing. Thus the theatre is certainly a B. Waldenfels (*) University of Bochum, Bochum, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_7

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scene, but a scene of otherness, of alienness, of strangeness, a Schauplatz des Fremden; but what does that mean? In what follows I shall unfold step by step some phenomenological features of the theatre. In this context I refer to the presuppositions of what I call responsive phenomenology, especially stressing the aspects of corporeity and alienness. Theatre proves to be an aesthetic whole in which elements of sensuality, of mobility, of affectivity, of expression, of spatiality and of temporality are closely interwoven. The quality of otherness points to the fact that everything happening on the scene deviates greatly from our everyday life as if we were entering the world of dreams. The ways out of the normal are various, varying from one culture to the other and varying within one and the same culture. Let us here take the Western origins of the theatre as one paradigm among others, one that has now been considerably influenced by Eastern forms of theatre such as the Japanese Kabuki and Bunraku.1 My lecture will start with general remarks on otherness on the stage. After that I will deal with various aspects of the theatre which arouse special phenomenological issues. Finally I shall touch upon the politics of theatre which exceed pure aesthetics.

7.1  Otherness Let us begin with the efforts of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud, who was an attentive reader of Greek tragedy, helps us to bridge the gap between the scene and its otherness. In his book The Interpretation of Dreams, published in the same year as Husserl’s Logical Investigations, Freud refers to the psychophysics of Gustav Fechner, who claims that the Schauplatz der Träume, i.e. the scene of dreams, clearly differs from the scene of the wakeful state in our mental life. The place of the dream and, generally speaking, the place of the unconsciousness presents itself as another scene.2 That does not only mean that in the dark part of our life we are faced with strange things and strange persons as in fairy-tales, it rather means that the scene itself has its otherness, its strangeness. The unconscious appears as a place where we do not feel at home; it has something uncanny, literally something un-­ homy, unheimlich as Freud puts it, alluding to Romantic poetry.

1  The present text goes back to a conference given in the course of the Salzburger Festspiele 2007, opening the “Young Directors’ Project”. A German version has been published as chapter 9 of my book Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel (2010). I thank Donald Goodwin for his assistance with the English version. Certainly what I present here can and should be complemented by referring in detail to Eastern traditions. When I visited the Heritage Museum in Sha Tin I discovered plenty of interesting aspects concerning the Cantonese Opera; and when I came to Kaohsiung in 2010 I had the chance to attend the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan performing a piece entitled “Water Stains on the Wall” with music by Toshio Hosokawa. This performance was full of body movements, light effects and sounds. 2  Die Traumdeutung (GW vol. II/III), p. 541.

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As we are going to see the quality of otherness means either very much or very little.3 As long as we understand otherness as something we do not yet know and do not yet understand, taking theatre as a scene of otherness would not be very exciting. The spectator might leave the auditorium well instructed. The theatre would function as a special kind of school of higher learning, as an educational establishment, perhaps as a school of nations, but it would offer nothing more. Or we may be inclined to take otherness as something exotic. In this case we would feel as if we were being transported into another world from which we would return to our common world, just like people who at first feel delighted or relieved, and afterwards feel somewhat deceived. Nietzsche reserves the “spell of the exotic” for “sentimental loafers (empfindsame Eckensteher)”.4 In our days most people will behave less emotionally, but what remains is the temptation to take refuge in something like the totally other. However, what I have in mind is something different. I call it the radical other. Radical otherness means more than something unknown or something exotic, it literally touches the roots (radices) of the things and the core of ourselves. The radical other is neither susceptible to being learned like a foreign language or a special skill, nor is it good for satisfying our curiosity. It arises here and now, but as something distant in the midst of our proximity. It emerges whenever something goes wrong, when something deviates from the usual and when what is taken for granted moves. Otherness manifests itself by escaping our grasp. It affects us before we become aware of it. It turns up as a kind of pathos.5 We encounter it as something touching, moving, amazing, violating, frightening and thrilling.

7.2  Otherness on the Stage In the paradigmatic form of pity and fear, pathos or emotion is among the effects that have been attributed to tragedy from antiquity. Emotion literally means getting and being set in motion by our whole body. This does not at all mean that we have certain feelings at our disposal which we carry with us like private properties; on the contrary, we are exposed to im-pressions and im-pacts of all kinds which pierce the protective bulwark of our private sphere. There is no other remedy to otherness, to what touches us as foreign or alien than our responding. We respond to what surprises and disturbs us. Certainly, there are cases of relative and harmless otherness that we can cope with more or less easily, be it a problem to solve, a skill to be learned or the idiosyncrasies of others that we learn to respect. By contrast, the radical otherness which is at stake here goes much further. Ancient tragedies such as  More about the background of my conception of otherness is to be found in my books Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden (2006), English: Phenomenology of the Alien. Basic Concepts, (2011) and The Question of the Other (2007); the latter book has a certain Chinese context. 4  Nietzsche, Posthumus Fragments (KSA, vol. 13), p. 494. 5  I take up this Greek word which is fraught with meaning, referring at once to passivity, suffering, and passion. 3

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Antigone are full of striking examples. Radical otherness touches our own self like the question of the sphinx demanding an answer from Oedipus; it disrupts the public order, like the pest befalling Thebes; it tears human bonds like Creon’s prohibition of burial; it demands from Antigone a readiness to join in hatred, just as the laws command. Foreignness and enmity are close neighbours. Even the play of confusion, typical of classical comedies like Plautus’ Amphitryon, making Amphitryon and Alkmene exchange their roles, shows that each of us is an other and that every sort of recognition takes on features of ‘miscognition’, of méconnaissance in the sense of Jacques Lacan. Anything that has once been lost will never return precisely as it was left. All the well-known heroes and heroines, perpetrators and victims, being part of our collective imagination, can be revived again and again; they all illustrate how much otherness and strangeness is inscribed into the Western world of theatre, and this could be easily supplemented by intercultural variants. Theatre proves to be a scene of otherness, and not only because it represents strange and foreign things, but because it itself comes from elsewhere, aus der Fremde. What is happening on the stage revolves around something which escapes any direct presentation or representation. It is not enough to say that dreams take place elsewhere on “another scene”; the scene of theatre turns out to be itself a sort of double-scene. The myth or fable, which according to Aristotle constitutes the narrative background of the tragedy, belongs to the aura of logos; it penetrates the reign of speaking and thinking. Everything that we say is more or less due to what we have heard. To the extent that the logos functions as a response, as an Ant-wort, it comes from afar, starting from the other’s appeal or demand. Even Aristotle, who is so decided in taking the path of science, explicitly recalls Plato’s statement that philosophy originates with astonishment. At the beginning of the Metaphysics the philosopher, as the lover of wisdom, is called a philomyth, which is a lover of myths – so called on the grounds that the philosopher, too, deals with astonishing things. Wherever and whenever otherness rises, its consequence is that what is one’s own begins to oscillate and that reason becomes obscured. Freud tells us that we are not the master in our own house; this should also hold true for the playhouse. On the other hand, the trouble caused by otherness continuously rouses forces of protection. Like any other cultural institution the theatre is by no means immune to being normalised, which tends to deprive it of the sting of otherness. The process of normalisation can take on religious, moral, political or aesthetic traits. Such processes take place when the theatre merely serves as a holy place like Richard Wagner’s Bayreuth, as an institution of morality, as a political forum, as an aesthetic playground or as an entertainment program. Nothing against the interference of religious, political, legal or everyday elements. This belongs to the very history of theatre. Thus, Aeschylus was not afraid to celebrate, as he did in the Orestean Trilogy, the farewell to blood revenge, incarnated in the Erinnies, and to announce the establishment of the Areopagus, protected by the goddess Athena. Or let us take a modern example. In his drama Danton’s Death Ludwig Büchner places the French Revolution on the stage. He presents it as a great political tragedy, but without glorifying or denigrating it. Having been persecuted himself for political reasons, the

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author strives to keep a certain distance and to demythicize the publicly glorified event of revolution. History does not stop there. As long as the theatre remains faithful to its own laws, it will tolerate outer interventions only in an incidental way, refusing any sort of direct service and instrumentalisation. Theatre and art in general are political in the best way when they interrupt the course of political mechanisms and of violence, as the Red Boat group did by living aside from the common life of Guangzhou.

7.3  Performance What is strange or alien appears in its own otherness as soon as the curtain rises; but it is already present before the performance starts. It is there as something unexpected, as something coming  – or not coming, but rather anticipated only in its outlines. As to the curtain, it can be arranged visibly before our eyes. But it can just as well remain invisible, similar to a veil which is spread out over things and persons, and which rises only if somebody or something goes wrong. Wherever theatre is played, either on the stage or on the street, there is always something funny about it. At the moment when the performance starts not only the spectator, the actor, too, cross a threshold, as we do when we wake up or fall asleep. Wakening up always means somehow frightening up, since on the other side of the threshold things are always a little uncanny. Sleeping creeps into wakening, wakening into sleeping. Actions on the stage are in a way somnambulistic because the forces they are moved by can never be mastered completely. Anything we know and control ceases to move or to disconcert us. But how can we grasp what really moves us? Our view behind the scene resembles the look behind the looking-glass; this look does not solve the riddle of visibility, rather it reinforces it. Moreover, is it really true that the curtain, when it sets the view of the scene free, opens completely like the opening of our eyes, or must we admit that there is always a blink remaining? Staging, which sets and keeps the spectacle going, proves to be a peculiar sort of art of attention in making us look at and listen to things and in keeping our attention awake. But the chance of being surprised, i.e. being struck by something special, depends on the fact that becoming visible does not coincide with making visible, just as seeing does not coincide with what is seen. Otherwise we would see and hear nothing more than what we already know. We would never attend a première, but only revivals, and the spectacle, being a play, would be reduced to a mere piece of work. If we make a clear distinction between a planned staging and a singular performance, as the advocates of a performative theatre suggest, we must concede that each performance takes on certain features of a première.6

6  As to recent re-interpretation of the theatre see Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater (1999), and Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhetik des Performativen (2004).

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7.4  Stage Time and Stage Place Otherness or strangeness affects all components which determine the process of staging. Consequently, the stage where plays are performed is not simply one place among others, to be marked on a city map, and the temporal course of a theatrical performance is no more measured by a watch than a musical performance is.7 The Greeks called the scene skēnē, which literally means ‘shadow place’. Performances, bringing something on the stage, mark a certain time-space to be actualised in every new performance. As Jens Roselt shows in his Phenomenology of Theatre,8 every performance contains some “marked moments” at which something unforeseen occurs. Often such things take place on by-ways, by a slight shifting of sound, unspectacularly. One sees, hears and plays in a new way, even when something happens again. Generally, there is no change without repetition, no repetition without change. Theatre takes place whenever and wherever theatre is played. Without the productive forces which are set going by the play there would be nothing but sceneries or décors which resemble empty picture frames. Conversely, a street corner, a ­court-­room, or a lecture hall changes into a scene as soon as the mode of presentation overshadows the aims and rules of the corresponding actions. It is all too obvious that the police and especially police states do not like such actions getting out of control. So it may happen that a concept artist like Ai Weiwei, working with peaceful things like sunflower seeds or school bags in memory of concealed earthquake victims, is treated like a criminal. In a systematic way theatre works to make things become apparent just as painting works to make things become visible. Most of what happens in our everyday life more or less occasionally, half spontaneously, half on purpose, is integrated into an imaginary world of stage. Similar to Shakespeare, who evokes the “stuff” of dreams our lives are made of, we may refer to the stuff theatre plays are made of. Transformed into theatrical figures, humans do not only exist, they appear bodily, in military armour or in a clown’s dress, upsetting jugs or drawing daggers. Even sun and thunder change into theatre light and theatre noise, into Rampenlicht and Theaterdonner as we say in German. Everything is covered by a certain theatrical varnish. This allows the spectators to tackle what is not permitted and to trifle with perils, as if we were dreaming in an irresponsible way. What is happening on the stage is not circumscribed from the outside, it circumscribes itself. However, in contrast to the fixed borderlines of a temple district, the contours shaping certain stage events are flexible like silhouettes or Chinese shades. Modern theatre is especially careful to play with its own boundaries, eager to keep open the process of staging. Any theatre, exposing itself to the effects of the strange, could be called contrast theatre in opposition to illusion theatre. Such a theatre 7  Concerning the shifting of place and time which touches our whole experience see my Ortsverschiebungen, Zeitverschiebungen (2009). 8  Jens Roselt, Phänomenologie des Theaters (2008).

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refers to different forms of estrangement, of Verfremdung. Everything that appears on the stage appears at the same time here and elsewhere. On the stage there is no real-time (Echtzeit), which would presuppose a real-place (Echtort). What is happening on the stage is based on a sort of mimetic difference.9 In a similar way as signs are divided into the significant and the signified, the theatrical representative is divided into the representing and the represented. If we were to extinguish the mimetic difference separating the place of representation from the represented place and the time of representation from the represented time, theatre would be abolished as a whole. If everything were theatre, nothing would be theatre. The abolition of limits, absorbing art into life, would offer art as a sacrifice (sacrificium artis) which would be by no means better than the dubious sacrifice of the intellect (sacrificium intellectus).

7.5  Masque All actors, on moving onto the stage, enter a peculiar world which they co-create. No one sets foot on the boards of a stage without becoming another. “I is another – JE est un autre”. Comparable to the poetical ego in Rimbaud’s Voyant letter, the theatrical ego is another.10 Similar to the “brass awakening as a trumpet”, the bodily actor leaps on the stage, and similar to the world of dream or of fairy-tales, the world of the stage is a world of otherness. Since time immemorial the spectacle has had something of a masque, even when the faces do not disappear behind fabricated masks and even when they are not prepared by artificial make-up. This hide-and-­ seek is not as harmless as it may seem. Like every sort of play, the play with changing faces seems to conflict with the seriousness of life. Who is still speaking with his or her own voice? Who is still looking into the other’s eyes? Is everything nothing more than a play? But the other way round, there is the question what seriousness would mean without play. Plato already considers play as the brother of seriousness (Sixth Letter, 323 d), and in Nietzsche’s view the “maturity of man” comes to light in the ability to recover the seriousness of one’s child’s play (Beyond Good and Evil, KSA, vol. 5, p. 90). Deprived of any element of playfulness (des Spielerischen) our “sense of the possible” would waste away; what would be left would be nothing more than over-normal human beings (Normalmenschen), nourished by facts and clinging to the real as a salvation. But actors even go a step further, seeking a symbiosis between seriousness and play. They risk a special act of balance. If their 9  See my article “Mimetische Differenz und pathische Impulse”, in: Primavesi and Schmitt 2004, reprinted in Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel (2010)., ch. 10. Husserl touches the problem of a creative sort of mimesis when he characterises the theatrical performance by a “pictorial quality (Bildlichkeit)” resulting from “perceptual fantasy” in contrast to a mere “quality of copy (Abbildlichkeit)” resulting from “reproductive fantasy”. See Phantasie, Bildbewußtsein, Erinnerung (Hua XXIII), p. 515. 10  See Arthur Rimbaud, Letter of May 15, 1871.

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behaviour on stage were totally serious, they would die of jealousy or of fear evening by evening. But supposing on the contrary their behaviour were totally unserious, it would be nothing but a fuss that cannot touch anybody, leaving us cold. Actors incarnate and impersonate other figures without extinguishing their otherness. Theatrical estrangement presupposes playing with possibilities and impossibilities like playing with fire; anything else may be amusing, but it would be harmless.

7.6  Speech Theatre and Body Theatre Up to now educated people have always attempted to change the life of theatre into mere literature and to retire to a kind of speech and text theatre. We can already see this happening in Aristotle’s Poetics (ch. 6): staging tends to degrade to a mere sensuous accessory; it touches the eye of the spectator and the hand of the stage designer much more than it touches the spirit of poetry. After all, poetry can do without spectacles. One sees and hears what one could read just as well or even better. Certainly, on the opposite side people are inclined to degrade the poetry of theatrical texts to a mere verbal accompaniment of gestures, as if Shakespeare were only the author of some libretti, of certain booklets. But the first extreme cannot be remedied by turning to the second. Someone who exclusively favours speech theatre tends to neglect the corporeality of all our speaking and hearing. Yet corporeality becomes all the more important as our speech goes beyond the mere exchange of information. Without melody and rhythm, without the play of gestures, without the drapery and the colours of clothes, without the co-operation of things, without the provocation of others and without visible rituals the whole process of saying and hearing would be reduced to what is said and heard; it would be reduced to what “one brings home confidently (was man getrost nach Hause trägt)”, as we read in Goethe’s Faust. Nothing would be really at stake, nothing would really come into play – as if it were not true that each segodnja vecerom, each this evening, which Stanislavski made his disciples perform and not only recite, carries with it the seed for a full-­ length scene. In the same way as we are faced with an expressive surplus that cannot be exhausted by linguistic sense and rule, we encounter a bodily mobility which uses the free play of movement without sticking to fixed tracks. Each movement has some dance-like aspects, etwas Tänzerisches as we say in German. The common sort of speech and action theatre of today retains certain traces of the older dance theatre, even if the dance-like mobility is not transformed into explicit dance movements. It was Nietzsche who really rediscovered the dance within the sphere of philosophy. In his study on The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music he recovered many ideas which had been lost by the theatre of his time, which was merely educational.11  See more about that in Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel (2010)., ch. 8: on dancing as bodily moving.

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7.7  Stage Techniques The play of senses passes into corresponding stage techniques. These are as old as the famous Deus ex machina. This theological-technological hybrid owes its dubious fame to the fact that the artificial god was not only heaved onto the stage, but that he served to solve practical complications all too easily by intervening from outside. The general reservation against any technical accessory can be explained by an ideal of naturalness. The artificial is only admitted as a second nature or as an external remedy; therefore there is an inclination to restrict or to hide artificial interventions as far as possible. However, technical interventions are not added to natural life-forms as something secondary. They already start on the level of elementary body techniques, which are never completely natural. The same holds true for our body as such. By virtue of its materiality, gravity and vulnerability our own body contains something of a foreign body, which somehow belongs to us, but not completely. For a long time, a modern sort of stage technique has been developing. Let us take simple opera-glasses; they allow us to approach the actors (or the co-­spectators) like distant stars. This shifts the spectator’s point of view. Moreover, there are various types of scene. To start with an Eastern example, the scene of the Bunraku theatre may be called a divided scene (geteilte Bühne). The scene is divided into the movements of the puppets, manipulated by the hands of the puppet player and his assistants, the voice of the reciter, sitting sideward on a revolving stage, and the play of the shamisen player, accompanying the words and the gestures of the others: “Total spectacle, but divided – Spectacle total, mais divisé”, as Roland Barthes puts it.12 The Western tradition shows its own variations. Whereas the simultaneous stage (Simultanbühne) allows our view to wander from one scene to the other, the peep-­ show stage (Guckkastenbühne) generates a sequence of ranges assimilating our gaze to the camera view. The point of view is fixed. Furthermore, artificial illumination, which only open-air stages can dispense with, articulates the field of vision, setting particular luminous accents. Figures appear and disappear; but stage and auditorium remain strictly separated like home country and foreign country. This situation changes with the modern establishment of a space stage (Raumbühne). This no longer provides a ready-made housing, but itself becomes a stage in the course of staging. If the spectators enter the stage or wander through the playhouse, as was practised in a performance series staged recently by Wanda Golonka in Frankfurt under the title An-Antigone,13 the place of spectacle and the place of movement interpenetrate. Spectators discover within themselves that inner outside, that inneres Ausland, which according to Freud characterises the unconsciousness (G. W., vol. XIII, p. 62).

 L’empire des signes (1984), p. 71. See my comment in Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel, (2010), pp. 204–206. 13  Wanda Golonka learned from Pina Bausch’s dance theatre. 12

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The decision to abandon the frontal view produces specific effects of otherness or strangeness which resemble certain experiments to be found in modern painting. We are surrounded by what we see, and we immerse ourselves in the spectacle. The recent use of videos, tapes and screens reinforces such effects of estrangement. What is large becomes small, what is small becomes large; what is nearby moves away, what is remote comes near. Voices are superimposed, gazes cross. We see and hear with our own eyes and ears, but simultaneously we see and hear with the eyes and ears of others, as we know quite well from our technically impregnated everyday life. But this is not all; the technical estrangement takes place before our eyes and ears. So the phenomenology of dance is supplemented by a phenomenotechnique of dance which exceeds what is seen and heard by presenting specific modes of seeing and hearing. The same Plato who in his cave allegory anticipates the closed world of the cinema, in German called Lichtspielhaus, likes to mock people who, desirous of hearing, hire out their ears so as not to miss one of the many chorus performances (Rep. 475 d). Although Plato tries to remove the “things themselves” from the area of mere visibility, he has a better understanding of the strange ­stimulations and techniques of the senses than those who feel all too comfortable there. Plato’s critique struggles against the seductive forces of our senses; nevertheless it makes us clear-sighted and quick of hearing because the critic gets involved in what he criticises. This may be considered as a cunning of the senses which seems to be more sophisticated than the famous cunning of reason.

7.8  Action and Reception In using the term spectacle or Schauspiel we seem to suggest something happening before our eyes that we contemplate in divine calm and from a sublime distance. If we go further, drawing upon expressions like actor, the theatre seems to be divided into a primary room of activity and a secondary room of receptivity. It would seem that on the stage the actors are acting whereas in the audience one receives and applauds, and in the end theatre critics pronounce their final judgement. But by accepting such a simple division of roles, we miss the character of pathos which inheres in all our speaking and doing. Everything starts with something happening on the stage, which affects and involves us all together, but each of us in a peculiar way. The actual ‘we’, constituting the audience as a whole, does not originate from a consensus or a contract, but rather from a sort of co-affection. Being affected together allows for heterogeneous manners of response. Let us begin with the actors. In Greek the actor is called hypocritēs, which literally means respondent. Even the actors, in spite of all their sophistication and all their training, have to be internally touched by what is strange and comes from the outside, and they have to be surprised by their own play; otherwise they would never touch and thrill their spectators. But to the extent that this really happens the spectators turn into co-players, and are moved by what moves the actors. Between actors and spectators something takes place that cannot be split into what happens on the

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one side of the ramp or on the other. The between has to be regarded as a threshold which is more or less permeable and not as a sharp borderline. There is sufficient room for transitional positions and mediating functions which make it possible to pass from one side to the other. Take the antique chorus. The chorus functions as a scenic sort of third party by marking a distance in the middle of the stage and by assuming alternatively the role of a witness, of an accuser or of a commentator. Furthermore, in traditional theatre we meet transitional remarks which are made aside or apart and by which the actor quasi conspires with the audience. In the end, the theatre comes close to a theatre without stage-director and without author. This depends on the fact that the theatrical presentation touches something which cannot be represented and produced straightaway, but which can only be shown in an indirect way. If all that exceeds the means of representation and presentation were to be grasped directly, it would loose its frightening and astonishing force.

7.9  Experiments Between Shock and Routine Every kind of theatre that takes itself as a scene of otherness is strictly speaking a form of experimental theatre. Similar to Nietzsche’s experimental style of philosophy, such an experimental theatre would arouse the question: “How much truth does one’s spirit endure, how much does it dare?” (Ecce Homo, KSA, vol. 6, p. 259). Experiments, since they deal with truth, are more than a sort of aesthetic play with the possible and more than a pragmatic probing of chances. Experimental theatre, trying to challenge existing orders, cannot content itself with bearing classical garments, even if the audience likes it. It is committed to the appeal of otherness which demands that it be represented and requires creative responses. This holds true for everybody who participates in the process of staging, including the spectators in their role as co-players. Striking ideas are infectious, they spread like fermentation. But such an experimental process runs over a ridge which separates normal theatre from shock theatre, and it runs the risk of plunging down on this or on that side. In any case, scenic experiments challenge the routine of our well-tried and even time-­ honoured practise. In extreme cases experiments come near the shock. The shock violently tears us out of the ordinary and usual, it makes us blind, numb, mute and rigid because the assault of the unforeseen is no longer damped or filtered by any medium. When Plato in Republic VII describes the double scene change which leads us upwards from the “nightly day” of cave-life to the “veritable day” of invisible ideas and downwards again into the everyday cave, he describes it as a double form of blinding. First the eyes see too much, then they see too little; the light is too bright for the eye accustomed to the dark, the dark is too dark for the eye accustomed to the light. Enlightenment does not run on a one-way street. Even Descartes does not totally neglect the shadows of enlightenment. Among the passions of the soul he mentions the amazement or stupefaction (étonnement) which exceeds the Platonic astonishment by leaving our body “motionless like a statue” (Les passions de l’âme, Art.

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73). What comes close to the shock is the trauma which blocks any response and eliminates all defence forces. The final point that has to be added is the scandal. No history of theatre without shocks, violations and scandals. But shocks which touch the corporeal foundations of our experience wear out like an over-dosed drug when they become regular. Even experiments change into mere ‘events’ when the “rubbing against or friction with reality” gets lost. The “automatism of boldness”, with which Paul Valéry14 reproaches an avant-garde bent on innovations, becomes intoxicated with its own effects. Experiments have a sustained effect only as long as they are exposed to testing. They prove good only by repetition of the unrepeatable singular, by revision of the usual and by disengaging a surplus which is freed from economic, political and cultural utilization. Take the non-representable in the theatre, the invisible in the art of pictures, the unheard in the art of music, this all works as a secret attractor whose attractive forces generate new force fields. Experiments with otherness are by no means directed against learning and knowing, but they emphasize the unlearnable within learning, the impossible within the possible, and they fulfil the paradoxical task of presenting and representing the non-representable. Theatre degrades to nothing more than mere theatre if it does not work permanently against the grain. Such an obstinacy needs the spectator’s cooperation.

Literature Barthes, Roland. 1984. L’empire des signes. Genève/Paris: Skira/Flammarion. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2004. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Freud, Sigmund. 1940. Gesammelte Werke. London/Frankfurt/M: Imago. Husserl, Edmund, Husserliana (= Hua), Den Haag resp. Dordrecht 1950 ff. Lehman, Hans-Thies. 1999. Postdramatisches Theater. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1980. In Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA), ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari. Berlin: De Gruyter. Primavesi, Patrick, and Olaf A. Schmitt, eds. 2004. AufBrüche. Theaterarbeit zwischen Text und Situation. Frankfurt/M: Theater der Zeit. Roselt, Jens. 2008. Phänomenologie des Theaters. München: Fink. Valéry, Paul. 1960. Œuvres. Vol. II. Paris: Gallimard. Waldenfels, Bernhard. 2006. Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. English: Phenomenology of the Alien. Basic Concepts. Trans. T. Stähler, Evanston: Northwestern, 2011. ———. 2007. The Question of the Other. In The Tang Chun-I Lecture for 2004. Hong Kong/New York: The Chinese University Press/SUNY Press. Ortsverschiebungen, Zeitverschiebungen. 2009. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2009. ———. 2010. Sinne und Künste im Wechselspiel. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

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 Paul Valéry, Œuvres, vol. II, Paris: Gallimard, 1960, p. 1321.

Chapter 8

The Figuration of Time: Rhythm and Metaphor in Dramatic Language Kwok Kui Wong

Abstract  This study starts with the classical questions on the reality, extension and continuum of the flux of time, and then turns to the creative use of language as a possible solution. It will focus mainly on dramatic language as a spoken language, which has an essential relation with the flow of time. It will look at the different elements in dramatic language such as meter, rhythm, rhetorical devices, and metaphor, etc. to see how language may response to the relation of tension in the structure of time, i.e. how it may, on the one hand, flow with time while, on the other hand, create permanent unities in this flow such as meaning and concept. Keywords  Time · Dramatic speech · Pathos · Schopenhauer · Nietzsche · Ricoeur

8.1  Introduction In the history of western philosophy, the problem of how time as a Heraclitean flux can be grasped has raised many unresolved problems and paradoxes, which culminate in Augustine’s rejection of the reality of time. However, the root of this alleged problem is probably not in time itself but, rather, in that a passive, receptive, and epistemological approach may not be able to put philosophy in a good position to represent time as a flowing entity. For example, Augustine’s attempt to understand time as an enduring and extended being (esse) will necessarily enter into perplexity. For while time is essentially a flux, an attempt to describe the flowing time as present (praesens) with extension and permanence will inevitably “miss” it so that it always escapes from our understanding. I owe this wonderful formulation to Prof. Rudolf Bernet’s suggestion K. K. Wong (*) Hong Kong Baptist University, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_8

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On the other hand, the flux of time as a given fact of human experience cannot be denied, that humans are temporal beings and are always in time. An example is again Augustine, who famously says thus about time, “I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.”1 This alleged century old mystery perhaps is not a mystery at all, but only because philosophers have used the wrong approach to understand time: rather than flowing together with time, which is the essence of time itself, Augustine tries to express time in terms of being, something which has extended existence in the flux. On the other hand, philosophers on time from Kant and Schelling to Husserl have little to say about time as pure flux apart from saying something like “nothing abides,”2 or “absolute flux,” while Husserl even says “for all these, names are lacking.”3

8.2  The Role of Language From the anthropological perspective, human beings as temporal entities have always been in interaction with time through creative action. In particular, men have created cultural objects that can only have meaning if they flow together with time. From the history of writing, invention of words and concepts, use of language, creation of arts and music, etc., men as homo creans always have created objects that flow with time and yet strive to overcome the transience of time. Spoken language in particular has an interesting role to play here because it is essentially a flowing entity, while it also strives to disseminate meanings, which have certain permanence. Therefore, the more appropriate question is whether we may understand time better if we sketch a structure of time reflected in creative actions. In this structure, the interaction between the contrary elements of temporal experience—flux and permanence, change and non-change—may be more sufficiently represented, for speaking itself is a temporal activity and has therefore a closer ontological relation with time. Plato’s Cratylus is, therefore, the first important text to refer to. In this dialogue, the relation between flux and permanence in spoken language is dealt with against the background the war of the giants between the Heraclitean and Eleatic Schools. Plato, whose major concern is the possibility of knowledge and its linguistic expression, argues that if ideas like beauty are always changing, i.e., something is sometimes beautiful and sometimes not, then we cannot rightly speak of beauty. He juxtaposes speaking (rho) with permanent and consistent knowledge: “And can we rightly speak of a beauty which is always passing away, and is first this and then

 Saint Augustine, Confessions, book xi, 14.  Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason (A364, A382). 3  Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, tr. James S. Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), p.100. 1 2

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that? Must not the same thing be born and retire and vanish while the word is in our mouths?” (Cratylus 439d) “But if that which knows and that which is known exist ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process or flux, as we were just now supposing.” (Cratylus 440a)4 There seems to be then a fundamental contradiction in the ontology between the flux of speaking and knowledge as such; that is, meaning and knowledge always require a certain permanence through time or at least extension in the flow of time, so what is known and what is meant by the word do not change, at least within the brief period of time when we are speaking. Plato therefore ­emphasizes that in the flux of speaking, the speaker should not lose sight of these constant ideas.

8.3  Language Art and Time While Plato’s theory of ideas is more concerned with the possibility of knowledge and its linguistic expression, our concern is the reverse. If the world is a Heraclitean flux, our spoken language should be able to somehow reflect this. Though spoken language tries to express unchanging truth as Plato envisages, it should also do justice to time as a flowing entity. Therefore, we are not interested in the permanence of meaning and expression in each word or idea, but, on the contrary, whether the meanings of the words will become “fluid”, i.e., how the speech as a flowing entity may affect this alleged permanence of meaning. If we divide the different forms of art according to their relations with time, we may distinguish temporal and non-temporal art, the latter with examples like architecture, plastic arts, painting, sculpture, etc., while the former being music and film. As far as literature as language art in concerned, it should be in the middle, because different forms of language art have different relations with time. Dramatic language has been chosen for discussion for two reasons. First, though music has the closest relation with time, language has a musical but also semantics aspects. These two aspects and their interrelation can better reflect the contradiction between flux and permanence. Drama as performing art has a close relation with time, not only in terms of plot and narrative, but also in terms of the flow of real time during the performance and delivery of speech. The way in which a speech is delivered may affect our sense of time. For example, the rhythm and tempo of delivering lines constitute an important element in the interpretation of a play. Moreover, drama is essentially an art of language. Aristotle has argued that the power to prove or disprove, to arouse emotions, and to emphasize, used in tragedy

4  Plato, Cratylus, in: E. Hamilton & H. Cairns ed., tr. B. Jowett, Plato: The Collected Dialogues including the Letters. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 473.

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belong to the technique of poetics.5 He also says in Poetics that while tragedy is an art of language, a character uses the art of rhetoric to show his dianoia and to convince the audience about the moral issues involved in the dramatic action.6 Further, in the poetics of epic and drama, a special language style has been developed to combat the transience of time. Homeric epic, for example, was an invention in the period of oral culture in the eighth century B.C.. Epic has therefore developed a particular linguistic style as mnemotechnics and to make a strong impression to the audience in its performance by rhapsodists,7 or, in other words, to overcome the problem of “verba volant, scipta manent.” Similarly, dramatic performance has to impress the audience by sheer force of its speech and has therefore developed a particular linguistic style to achieve this purpose.

8.4  Pathos and Time In the discussion about the nature of time in western philosophy, the basic proposition is that time is a movement, and this can be either as a movement of physical objects represented by Aristotle or as a movement of the soul represented by Augustine. As far as the latter is concerned, it usually means time as “inner sense,” that our soul must be in constant movement so we may feel the passage of time as inner sensation even without perception of movement in the external world. Husserl’s phenomenological research thus focuses on how to construct a structure of time based on this movement, which should be as objective as possible, i.e., regular, constant, measurable, etc. However, if we rethink its nature, movement of the soul may also mean the inner driving force that makes human action possible, e.g., emotion or pathos.8 While the former is passive, regular, constant, and always moving, the latter is subjective, irregular, unstable, etc.—characteristics that make it a less reliable basis for the analysis of temporal experience. Movement of the soul as emotion, on the other hand, is a major source of artistic expression, while many art forms which express strong emotion are also intricately related with the flow of time. An example is the close relation between pathos and tragedy. Moreover, our pathos may also affect our sensation of time, e.g., when we are happy, time seems to pass faster, but when we are bored, time seems to pass more slowly. The issue is, different from Husserl’s, not to find an objective, regular  Aristotle’s Poetics, 1450b, 1456a-b.  Aristotle’s Poetics, 1450b. 7  Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), chp. 2, p.17–30. 8  Emotion has been described as movement of the soul in the antiquity. Cicero, for example, uses the term motus animi to refer to emotion. See Cicero, De Oratore, book 3, 215–216. However, in other instances, he uses the same term to refer to the Platonic self-moving soul. See De re publica, book vi, 26–28; Pro Sestio, 43, Cato Maior 78. It is an interesting question whether there is any relation between the two in Greek and Roman philosophy. 5 6

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flow of emotion in order to construct an objective time, but to see how artistic expression of pathos constitutes a pattern of temporal experience in the flux of speech.9

8.5  Rhythm This paper will focus on two elements in dramatic language, namely rhythm and semantics, and will analyse their respective relations with time. They are chosen for our analysis because they may reflect two extremes of time, i.e., flux and permanence. We will show that rhythm, which operates with the flow of time, may yet create a “semblance of eternity” in the flux. The semantic side of language, which is supposed to be the place for permanence, may yet create room for volatility in the meanings of words in the flux of speech through metaphor. Rhythmic language has been used in classical western theater from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare. The basic principle of iambic meter is the alternate use of long and short, stressed and unstressed syllables. Combined with the sound of individual words, the audience will follow the rhythm naturally. The audience of Shakespearian theatre has the interesting experience: while he enjoys listening to the lines, he seems to be able to better understand what the character is saying even without completely understanding the words. This interesting effect due to the rhythm is the object of our investigation. In the nineteenth century German aesthetics, there is the question of what is in the mind of the poet at the beginning of inspiration, i.e., whether it is an abstract idea, a word, a picture, or a melody. In the tradition since Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, it is argued that a musical mood is the true origin of poetic inspiration, and rhythm is part of this musical mood. The function of rhythm in poetry is, according to Schopenhauer, to connect the words in a sentence such that the abstract words can be better fused with each other so the audience can be more perceptive of their meanings. Schopenhauer has said something very interesting about the effect of rhythm, where he emphasizes the role of time in particular: Rhythm and rhyme are quite peculiar aids to poetry. I can give no other explanation of their incredibly powerful effect than that our faculties of perception have received from time, to which they are essentially bound, some quality on account of which we inwardly follow, and, as it were, consent to each regularly recurring sound.10

 I find Thomas Mann’s misquote of Cicero’s “motus continuus animi” in his novel Death in Venice interesting, where Aschenbach believes in the “the inner mechanism—the motus animi continuus in which, according to Cicero, eloquence resides.” Unfortunately, it is not from Cicero. While Cicero has quoted Plato’s autokineton in Phaedrus, he has not related it to rhetoric. See Scherer, Paul & Wysling, Hans. Quellenkritische Studien zum Werk Thomas Manns, in: Thomas Mann Studien, Bd. 1, (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1990), p.154. Only in one instance does Cicero talk about the relation between emotion (motus animi) and bodily movement during speaking. See Cicero, De Oratore, book 3, 215–216. 10  Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, book iii, tr. J. Norman, A. Welchman & C. Janaway, (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), §51, p. 270. 9

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We may try to explain what Schopenhauer means by “faculties of perception have received from time to which they are essentially bound” („an die Zeit wesentlich gebundenen Vorstellungskräfte“) by assuming these Vorstellungskräfte to be our ability to measure time in our heart, i.e., to divide time into smaller units and then measure the flow of time by repeating these units. If we are reminded of Aristotle’s definition of time as “number of change according to earlier and later,”11 then rhythmic meter in poetics can be understood as such units of measurement. Further, what Schopenhauer has shown is that the most effective way to grasp the unending flux of time is to divide it into units and then repeat them in an orderly and regular way, thus creating an impression of certain permanence or what we call a “semblance of eternity.” Once an unending flux of time has been arranged into units subject to comparison and memory, something repeatable appears from the irreversible time line and becomes somehow “atemporal”, i.e., the unit seems to stand above the flux of time.12 Paradoxically, this eternity can come to be only with the flow of time. Nietzsche’s early studies of Greek meter in the 1870s is therefore of great significance for our concern. In a series of lecture notes and manuscripts, Nietzsche investigates the writings of the Greek music theorist Aristoxenus (ca. 360–300 B.C.). I summarize the implications in the following: (i) Aristoxenus has rightly pointed out that time does not divide itself but has to be divided. Time is a continuum, and we measure it by dividing it into discrete units. (ii) Rhythm is concerned with the “division of times.”13 (iii) There is a distinction between rhythm (rhythmos) and rhythmisable medium (rhythmizomenon). While the former means the abstract principle of division (e.g., mathematical), the latter is ingrained in things that are natural to man, e.g., language, bodily movement. (iv) The latter thus involves an anthropology of rhythm because rhythm-making is a natural human activity. Aristoxenus further divides language (lexis) into letter, syllable, and word, while each of them has its different function in the linguistic formation of rhythm. (v) According to Günther, these studies by Nietzsche have great significance for his The Birth of Tragedy. By means of rhythm, the formless dionysiac Will analogous to the flux of time is “interrupted” by the Appollinian rhythm, which is spatial in nature. This paved the way for Nietzsche’s argument about the Apollo-Dionysus duality, namely how the formless Dionysiac spirit of music  Aristotle, Physics (219a30).  This is exactly the opposite of what Husserl calls “absolute Subjektivität” of the “Bewußtseinsfluß” when we have taken away all temporal objects in time. 13  There are different translations of the Greek plural word chronoi. While Nietzsche renders it simply as “Zeiten,” the English translator Lionel Pearson points out that it is a technical term in Greek meter and therefore uses the term “time-length.” See Aristoxenus Elementa Rhythmica: The Fragment of Book II and the Additional Evidence for Aristoxenean Rhythmic Theory, tr. L. Pearson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 5. 11 12

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is structured into forms and therefore results in the bodily and symbolic expression in theatre.14 Without going into detail about the complicated arguments concerning the anthropological meanings of Greek meter, the point I would like to make is that Nietzsche’s thesis can be a possible answer to Schopenhauer’s question: why do we seem to be more able to understand the meanings of the words by following the rhythm? (a) Rhythm divides time not only to measure it by repetition of rhythmic units, but also, in Günther’s word, by creating a certain unit of “space” in the formless flux of time. By this “space” it means that time becomes spatialized, i.e., time becomes a series of units of space in which things are more or less consistent or “only ideally present” (nur ideal gegenwärtig) despite the constant change and flux, so that we may imagine something as “more or less” the same within the unit of space in the flux.15 (b) While there is a certain relation between affect and rhythm in the sentence as a whole (for example, a quick tempo may express jollity, or a grave tempo may express gravity, etc.), a rhythmic flow of affect can help us express affects in each individual word and in syllables that are spaces, i.e., a certain stressed syllable may express certain affect. For each individual word, the emotion may also vary according to the way it is spoken, e.g., the tempo and stress in speaking a particular syllable of a word. (c) These double aspects answer the Schopenhauerian question in this way. We are led by the flux of affect while listening to the speech in two ways: the rhythm of the whole sentence and the stresses of individual words or syllables. These two aspects are essential elements in rhythm and may synthesize the otherwise discrete series of words as a whole into a continuous flow. While the whole sentence can be synthesized when it is delivered with certain pathos and stress, individual words, spoken in certain pathos, may also create a rhythmic pattern within the sentence. Just as Schiller argues that a poet first conceives of a musical mood before conceiving the words in the poem, an audience may in turn perceive this musical mood first before they try to understand the meanings of the words.16 The thesis is therefore: a dramatic speech is a “continuum of affects.” By “continuum” there can be two meanings: first, it means simply a continual flow of affect in a speech; second, with the intervention of rhythm, it means the arrangement of this flow so there can be a continuum within the units divided by the rhythm. Rhythm in 14  Günther, Friederike Felicitas. Rhythmus beim frühen Nietzsche, in: Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung, Bd. 55, (Berlin; New  York: De Gruyter, 2008), p.120. See also Cathrin Nielsen’s review of Günther’s book “Der Frühe Nietzsche über Erkenntnis, Sprache und Rhythmus” in: Nietzsche-Studien (Berlin; New York: De Gruyter), bd. 39, 2010, p. 613–616. 15  Günther (2008), p.14. 16  See Wong, Kwok-kui. “Rhythm and the Symbolic Process in The Birth of Tragedy”, p.141–142, in: New Nietzsche Studies, Vol. 10, Nos. 3 and 4 (Fall/Winter 2017), (New York: Fordham University), pp. 137–155.

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language is not merely a mechanical division of time into discrete units but a patterned arrangement of this continuum. The words, taken themselves as grammatical components, are discrete units, but when they are synthesized by a rhythmic pattern, the affect flows continually throughout the whole sentence and also within a single word or syllable. It therefore differs from the mechanical measurement of time in that in a rhythmically arranged sentence, a particular affect is not merely expressed by the continual flow of the affect accompanying the rhythm but also the rhythm ingrained in each of the words.

8.6  Semantics: The Use of Metaphor After having looked at rhythm, we will examine the issue from an opposite perspective, i.e., rather than to see how certain permanence can be created from the flux by rhythm, we will see how, in the permanence of the meanings words, certain semantic fluidity can become possible. One of the distinguishing characteristics of theatrical writing is the frequent use of metaphor. It is partly due to the particular need of theatre as a performing art: the experienced playwright should prefer to write speeches which are smooth and easy to be read and understood but at the same time able to express the complicated emotions of the character. Metaphor can achieve this curious effect of turning abstract speeches into a series of flowing pictures. Schopenhauer even argues that if the lines are written with good rhyme, the audience will follow while suspending their judgment. The question is how this interesting effect comes about. Schopenhauer offers this explanation: Ideas are essentially intuitive: if, therefore, only abstract concepts are directly communicated by means of words in poetry, it is nevertheless clear that the aim is still to allow the listener to intuit the Ideas of life in the representatives of these concepts, something that can take place only with the help of the listener’s own imagination. But in order to put this into effect given the goal, the abstract concepts (which are the immediate material of poetry just as they are of the driest prose) must be arranged in such a way that the pattern of intersection of their spheres ensures that no concept can persist in its abstract generality; instead an intuitive representative appears before the imagination and the poet’s words continually modify this in keeping with his intentions.17

What Schopenhauer means here is that ideas should have certain mobility in poetic representation. They cannot be represented merely as abstract and universal intellectual objects, but should be able to be intuited like visual images, lively and vivid. He uses the term “sphere” (Sphäre) to describe this, which we may understand as the peripheral area around the word with a certain ambiguity of meaning. A series of such spheres may create a situation in which each sphere may connect, overlap, and intertwine with each other so that a sentence in a speech is not a mere series of discrete words and concepts, but may enter into relation with each other, 17

 Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, book iii, §51, p. 269.

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making it a living work of art. Schopenhauer is implying that rhythm and rhyme have the effect of “dissolving” the words. The individual words in a sentence, taken in themselves, are isolated in their “strict abstractness” (starre Abstraktheit), and we have to understand them individually and then relate them in our mind as words in a sentence in terms of grammatical relation. However, with the help of rhythm and rhyme, the words seem to be alive, and thus help us understand their relation not by means of grammar but in terms of musical flow and mood. This brings out the interesting effect of metaphor in the history of rhetoric, and what interests us in particular is a certain “space” in these “spheres.” This space, different from the space in rhythm discussed above, means rather a free space for the imagination of the meanings of a word during the flux of speech. In the history of the strife between philosophy and rhetoric, the former has prided itself with scientific precision in its method of definition by genus prximum et differentia specifica, whereas the latter becomes marginalised because of its alleged unclarity of meaning due to its use of metaphor. The assumption of this genus and difference definition is the subsuming relation between class and genus, i.e., that words generate their meanings by subsuming themselves to other bigger classes. In our practical usage of words, however, Gadamer argues, we may not know the complete relations between a word and its other related classes the moment we use it.18 In reality, we use words to refer to a particular object by means of certain similarity between the signified and the signifier, or in Chrysippus’ (c.279 BC – c.206 BC) terms, between the semainon and the semainomenon.19 Only with extended usage of the same word to denote different objects does its meaning become extended and more clear. This incurs the idea of living metaphor. In contrast to dead metaphor, the meaning of which is lexigraphically defined, living metaphor acquires its meaning through constant usage and transferrance (Übertragung).20 It is similar to analogy, which uses the space (topos) between the analogized objects to acquire its meaning, or, in Chrysippus’ words, in the intermediate part between the mind and the object (meson tou te noematos kai tou pragmatos).21 A famous example is the similarity between the wings of a bird and the floss of the fish cited by Speusippus (408–338 BC). What is interesting about this space is that it seems in the first place to be volatile and indefinite, but it is by no means ambiguous and confusing. It does not change its meaning during the course of its usage, something Plato warns against in his Cratylus, but only “discovers” its meaning and makes it clearer. It cannot be rendered lexigraphically with a fixed definition, but its meaning is not equivocal at 18  Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, tr. J.  Weinsheimer and D.  G. Marshall, (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 431–432. 19  Johannes von Arnim. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1964), vol. ii, §166 §168, p.48. 20  See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: the Creation of Meaning in Language (French: La Métaphore vive), tr. R.  Czerny, K.  McLaughlin & J.  Costello, S.J. (London: Routledge, 2003), p.355. 21  Johannes von Arnim. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1964), vol. ii, §166 §168, p.48.

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all. Just like the image bearing the similarity between a wing and a floss, it is indefinite yet intuitively vivid.22 Having said all this, we may use an example to illustrate the effect of metaphor in theater and its relation with time. When a character is in very intense emotion like extreme horror and pain, a normal person will just scream and cry. However, a Shakespearian character may deliver long and rhetorically ornamented speeches to express his emotions, something that seems impossible for a normal human being in a real situation. An example is Titus Andronicus, act 2, when Titus has been tricked into having his hand cut off, and sees his daughter raped and her tongue and both of her hands cut off. A normal person in such situation would just scream wildly, but Titus says: TITUS ANDRONICUS O, here I lift this one hand up to heaven, And bow this feeble ruin to the earth: If any power pities wretched tears, To that I call! (To LAVINIA) What, wilt thou kneel with me? Do, then, dear heart; for heaven shall hear our prayers; Or with our sighs we’ll breathe the welkin dim, And stain the sun with fog, as sometime clouds When they do hug him in their melting bosoms. MARCUS ANDRONICUS brother, speak with possibilities, And do not break into these deep extremes. TITUS ANDRONICUS Is not my sorrow deep, having no bottom? Then be my passions bottomless with them. MARCUS ANDRONICUS But yet let reason govern thy lament. TITUS ANDRONICUS If there were reason for these miseries, Then into limits could I bind my woes: When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth o’erflow? If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad, Threatening the welkin with his big-swoln face? And wilt thou have a reason for this coil? I am the sea; hark, how her sighs do blow! She is the weeping welkin, I the earth: Then must my sea be moved with her sighs; Then must my earth with her continual tears Become a deluge, overflow’d and drown’d; For why my bowels cannot hide her woes, But like a drunkard must I vomit them. Then give me leave, for losers will have leave To ease their stomachs with their bitter tongues.23

22 23

 Aristotle, Physics, A 4, 211b.  William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, act iii, scene i.

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As John Barton has pointed out, the audience may have difficulty deciding whether to perceive the overwhelming emotion or to listen to the words.24 This difficulty is also a reflection of the impossible situation the character is in, i.e., how to express, channel, and even manage his emotion by richly ornamented, rhythmically, and even musically structured texts and images.25 When we look at the metaphor used here, e.g., the sun, fog, wind, sea, welkin, earth, etc., a series of flowing images will appear in the audience’s mind. These images are not like paintings appearing together at the same time, but moving images flowing from the speech, synthesized through rhythm, or, in Schopenhauer’s words, they are not abstract ideas but images that can constantly revise themselves. We may now analyse the effect of metaphor as follow. As Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, the process of acquisition of meaning by living metaphor is a process of discovery and creation at the same time. By creative and unusual use of words, we may discover another way of looking at the world, which is neither purely sensual perception, seeing the heaven as heaven, nor purely conceptual, using the word “pain” to express the feeling of pain; rather, it is something between these two. We find that there is an ambiguous but free area between our perception of pain and the conceptual judgment of it, and this area can be understood in Kantian terms as the mediation between sensibility and judgment. The use of metaphor allows our consciousness to freely move between sensibility and judgment so that we may, on the one hand, have different judgments about the same sensual perception, while on the other hand our sensual perception may be guided by different concepts. We may realise in the process that we have different approaches in perceiving the same object. Ricoeur remarks: “Its necessity proceeds instead from the very structure of the mind, which it is the task of transcendental philosophy to articulate.”26 Yet he does not explain what he means by this. Some commentators suggest that Ricoeur is talking about Kant’s schematism,27 while Ricoeur himself has mentioned productive imagination in this connection.28 Putting aside what Ricoeur means, we may try to understand the effect of metaphor by analysing Titus’ speech. When he says, “I am the sea,” what is meant is simple but not clear: we do not know what quality, element, or emotional state in himself he wants to refer to by using the “sea” metaphor. The signifying and signified are in unclear relation, or in Ricoeur’s words, the audience has to narrow down the range of possible meanings by constant judgment between the subject and the  See John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare, vol. 3. episode 7, Passion and Coolness (Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities, 1990). 25  Some critics regard Shakespeare as having inherited the idea of “rhetorical tragedy “from Roman Stoic tragedy like Seneca (c.1 BC – AD 65), which uses speech to manage one’s emotion. See Hill, R.F. “Shakespeare’s Early Tragic Mode” in: Shakespeare Quarterly 9 (1958), p. 455–469. 26  Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: the Creation of Meaning in Language, tr. R.  Czerny, K. McLaughlin & J. Costello, SJ (London: Routledge, 2003), p.355. 27  Cazeaux, Clive. Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: from Kant to Derrida (New York; London: Routledge, 2007), p.193. 28  The Rule of Metaphor, p.351. 24

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predicate. However, there is also another process of searching for meaning taking place at the same time; namely, the predicate will look for the subject it wants to refer to, i.e., what the sea signifies in Titus‘speech.29 Yet, these opposite movements may not necessarily meet in the middle, but will discover new possibilities of meanings for the subject and the predicate. The audience, therefore, when listening to the text, is in a state of uncertainty and volatility as they follow the rhythm and produce in themselves a series of moving images in their minds. The audience has no time to pass interpretive judgment to each of the words, but has to choose to follow the rhythm blindly and allow these images to generate their meanings. In this sense, interpretation is a form of creation. The audience realises that Titus is not only a Roman general, and the sea is not only a natural phenomenon. And when they try to imagine the relation between the two, a world comes to be where different images appear which cannot be conceived by ordinary perception appear: “I am the sea, the sea is in great pain, my pain is endless; the endless sea is roaring, etc.” To this adds the relation between Titus and his daughter Lavinia, the heaven, the sea: “hark, how her sighs do blow! She is the weeping welkin, I the earth…” In this process of imagination, the relation between these images becomes more concrete and substantial.

8.7  Metaphor and Time Therefore, metaphor in a dramatic speech may create a space for imagination so that the audience may constantly discover the meaning of words during the speech. Time plays a significant role in this process, which we may summarize as follow. From the epistemological perspective, whether Ricoeur is referring to schematism or productive imagination, the similarity between them is their close relation with time. For Kant, there is a free space for imagination between sensibility and understanding so that we may synthesize different impressions appearing in different times into one permanent object. In the analogy of experience, this synthesis takes place in the so-called permanence of substance through time. However, for Kant, this substance has no particular content so that on the one hand in the passage of time our imagination is free, but it must be moving around a certain permanent object on the other. Second, because of the above, a metaphor may instigate imaginings that are not a series of unrelated images disseminating aimlessly into different directions, but should be centring around the same object, moving back and forth, making its meaning clearer and richer. We may borrow Hegel’s understanding of speculative structure to illustrate this. Predicates are not arbitrary additions to a subject, but are  “One movement aims at determining more rigorously the conceptual traits of reality, while the other aims at making the referents appear (that is, the entities to which the appropriate predicative terms apply). This circularity between the abstractive phase and the concretizing phase makes this power of signifying an unending exercise, a ‘continuing Odyssey’.” p.352.

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expressions of the essence of the subject itself. Therefore, our thought may take these predicates as the substance in order to bring about even more predicates. Hegel remarks that this back and forth movement is not completely free, but is held together by the gravity of the material gained by this movement.30 Third, as far as language in drama is concerned, there is one significant difference from other linguistic arts, namely, no matter how many metaphors and images are expressed in a speech, they are all spoken by one single speaker, namely the character. The metaphors and images in a dramatic speech should not be merely descriptions of the objective world, but are expressions of the situation or emotion the character is in. Aristotle has also mentioned that a character should not speak aimlessly. “Character in a play is that which reveals the moral purpose of the agents, i.e. the sort of thing they seek or avoid, where that is not obvious—hence there is no room for character in a speech on a purely indifferent subject.”31 For example, with all the flourishing imageries, the speech by Titus should be understood as an expression of his pain. Even for long speeches like Titania’s about the jealousy between her and Oberon in the second act of Midsummer Night’s Dream, which relates the chaos of heaven, earth, and seasons, at the end of the speech she finally comes back to the reason for this natural chaos: “This same progeny of evils comes from our debate, from our dissension: We are their parents and original.”32 Exceptions are perhaps modernist dramas like the monologues in Beckett’s plays, which have to be dealt with differently. The point is that a character, being the subject of the speech, plays the role of substance in the flux of time, holding the different images together around one thing. This substance is, however, different from that described by Kant in that it is not merely something of uncertain content existing through time, but a moving subject from which a series of images are constantly generated, accompanied by rhythm and melody. Further, if language in theatre is a “continuum of affect,” this continuum, with the aid of metaphor, also has a certain “space.” However, different from that space in rhythm: it is not only a division of time by rhythmic units, but each word itself as a unit is also a continuum, i.e., each individual word, motivated by the affect of speaking, may discover its different meanings during the course of speaking. The same word, “sea” for example, spoken quickly or slowly, with swiftness or gravity, can have different meaning in acting. The two different interpretations by Patrick Stewart in John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare illustrate this: the first one is a violent outburst of emotions, while the second is calmer and more stoical. Or in Barton’s instruction: for the former, the actor should focus on the emotion and “let the words take care of themselves, while in the latter he should “try to use the words to cope with the emotions.”33 While in the first we have an image of a roaming sea, in the 30  Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J.B.  Baillie (London: Allen & Unwin, 1977), “Preface”, p.119. 31  Aristotle’s Poetics, 1450b, tr. I.  Bywater, in: J.  Barnes ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), vol. ii, p.2321. 32  William Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 2, scene i. 33  John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare (1990).

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second we have a seemingly calm sea with suppressed tumult underneath. These different imageries are the results of the different emotional dispositions the actor is in when delivering the same speech, which is the result of the different tempo of his delivery and thus the different interpretations of the same text.

8.8  Conclusion Coming back to the problem of time, the role played by language is that it not only creates the “semblance of eternity” by dividing time into temporal units of rhythm, but also turns time as pure flux into movement of our heart and soul. Making use of this movement, it then generates a patterned flux of affects accompanied by associated imageries. An actor should therefore pay attention to the inner movement of the soul, the rhythm of the speech, the possible imageries accompanying this rhythm, the emotional state the character is in, and the relation between all these.34 If it is well captured, time is no longer a transient flux, but a series of moving images instigated by these emotions concurring with the rhythm inside the actor. The pleasure of listening to the language in drama as a temporal art, or as the rho or running speeches, is here.

34

 I find Hamlet’s advice to his actors instructive:

“HAMLET: Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. … Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure… William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3. Scene 2.

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References Aristoxenus. 1990. Elementa Rhythmica: The Fragment of Book II and the Additional Evidence for Aristoxenean Rhythmic Theory. Trans. L. Pearson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barton, John. 1990. Playing Shakespeare , vol. 3. episode 7, Passion and Coolness. Princeton: Films for the Humanities. Cazeaux, Clive. 2007. Metaphor and Continental Philosophy: from Kant to Derrida. New York/ London: Routledge. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004. Truth and Method. Trans. J.  Weinsheimer and D.  G. Marshall. London: Continuum. Günther, Friederike Felicitas. 2008. Rhythmus beim frühen Nietzsche. In: Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung, Bd. 55. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J.B. Baillie. London: Allen & Unwin Husserl, Edmund. 1964. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Trans. James S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nielsen, Cathrin. 2010. Der Frühe Nietzsche über Erkenntnis, Sprache und Rhythmus. In Nietzsche-Studien, 613–616. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, bd. 39. Ricoeur, Paul. 2003. The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (French: La Métaphore vive). Trans. R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin, and J. Costello, S.J. London: Routledge. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 2010. The World as Will and Representation, book iii. Trans. J. Norman, A. Welchman, and C. Janaway. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. von Arnim, Johannes. 1964. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. Stuttgart: Teubner. Wong, Kwok-kui. 2017. Rhythm and the Symbolic Process in The Birth of Tragedy. New Nietzsche Studies 10 (3 and 4): 137–155. (New York: Fordham University).

Chapter 9

Emptiness and the Spiritual in Architecture Jung-Sun Han Heuer

Abstract  In current global architectural practices, especially in metropolises such as Seoul, architecture serves the blind logic of economic profit, dynamic consumer culture, and high technology. Architecture is increasingly losing its cultural and spiritual value while desolating cities, the beauty of the land and rivers, and human nature. In the face of this crisis, contemporary architecture needs to develop new spiritual strengths and sensibilities in order to open another horizon.

9.1  Introduction In current global architectural practices,1 especially in metropolises such as Seoul, architecture serves the blind logic of economic profit, dynamic consumer culture, and high technology. Architecture is increasingly losing its cultural and spiritual value while desolating cities, the beauty of the land and rivers, and human nature. In the face of this crisis, contemporary architecture needs to develop new spiritual strengths and sensibilities in order to open another horizon. The purpose of this paper is first to survey the concept of structuring emptiness and the value of the spiritual in architecture and to recognize the significance of the experiential quality of this spiritual encounter. In part two, I trace the idea of structuring emptiness in traditional Korean architecture. Emptiness is structured into such components as overlapping, multi-layered sequences, indeterminacy, flexibil-

1  Y.-S. Kim, “Architecture of New Regionalism Aesthetics”, in: H-S. Seung, K. Y. Cheong, S. Y. Cho et al., The Canon of Architect (Paju: Yoelhwadang, 2010), pp. 71–88.

The Korean version of this paper was published in Theology and World in December 2012. J.-S. Han Heuer (*) Department of Philosophy of Region, Methodist Theological University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_9

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ity, variability, transparency, overall spatial flow, and the unity of mutually interdependent inner and outer spaces. In part three, I address the contemporary Korean architect Seung in order to show that structuring emptiness is applicable to contemporary architectural practice. Seung structures emptiness in the form of “the live void.” His idea is inspired by the traditional Korean courtyard, called a madang. His structuring emptiness suggests that we can rethink the value of a healthy community. In part four, I account for the lived experience of the void and structured ­emptiness. The Finnish architect Pallasmaa’s concept of a multi-sensory experience is introduced, and I apply the concept of intertwining from Merleau-Ponty’s early work to explicate the lived experience. The sensorimotor, the existential, and the spiritual experiences are realized through the asymmetrical interplay between the affectivity of the architectural work and space, and the sensible embodied subject. Architectural work and space incorporate sensorimotor-existential-spiritual meaning. The architectural void and structured emptiness are integral parts of architectural work and space. In part five, I conclude that the spirituality of the mannature-universe community and the spiritual sensibilities of a variety of emptinesses will contribute to enriching the architecture of our time.

9.2  Emptiness in Traditional Korean Architecture 9.2.1  The Concept of Emptiness Emptiness is a major characteristic of traditional Korean architecture2 that is shared across Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. The interpretation of emptiness differs by school of thought. Within the Korean architectural tradition, emptiness is subdivided into several meanings, including the following3: (a1) emptiness (空) in itself as “a complete state,” “the natural true state of all beings,” and “the truth of nature and the cosmos”. (a2) non-being (無) and taking-no-action (無爲) as the ideal true states of being in Taoism; (b) emptiness (虛) and non-being (無) as a condition for the right filling in Taoism. The tranquility represented by Zen Buddhism corresponds to (a1), whereas the spiritual purity revealed by taking-no-action (無爲) is related to (a2). With respect to practical attitudes, emptiness in the sense of (b) is exposed by a right or wrong filling:

 S. J. Yim, The Traditional Space (Seoul: Ewha Women’s University Press, 2005), pp.13–23.  S. J. Yim, The Traditional Space, pp.13–23. Another variation of “Emptiness (空, sunyata)” in Buddhism and Zen Buddhism implies that all experienced phenomena (dharma) arise dependently and thus lack permanence and any permanently enduring substantial identity. This concept does not claim that all experienced things do not exist, only that they exist without a permanently existing transcendental reality behind the phenomenal world.

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Clay is molded to form a vessel, […]. Doors and windows are cut out to make a room, And it is because of its non-being [無] that it becomes useful. Therefore, being [有] is for benefit [利], And non-being [無] is for usefulness [用].4

Emptiness with its variations and related concepts has become a significant part of all practices of Korean spirituality and culture. With respect to architecture, “emptying” is synonymous with “structuring emptiness,” and emptying is presented in such architectural components as indeterminacy, overlapping, spatial sequence, spatial flow, and inner-outer unity.5 Furthermore, “emptying” means to purify one’s inner-­ self from greed and obsession in order to live in accordance with the tao of nature and the universe.6

9.2.2  S  tructuring Emptiness in Traditional Korean Architecture According to traditional understanding, architectural space can be best defined in terms of emptying. The best thing that architecture can create is not solid walls but the void. Traditional architecture is consciously concerned with structuring emptiness through overlapping and the creation of a multi-layered sequence. These structures then generate indeterminacy, flexibility, variability, transparency, overall spatial flow, and a unity of the mutually interdependent inner and outer spaces.7 The traditional residence complex termed a hanok is a good example of this concept. A hanok is composed of elementary buildings in the form of ┑, L, or □ and courtyards called madangs. Windows, doors, and structural frameworks overlap,8 thus creating a composition of sequential links between multi-layered spaces. Opening

4  Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (道德經), Chapter 11, trans. by K-N. Oh, in: K-N. Oh, Thinking with Lao Tzu (Seoul: Hyunamsa, 2010), p.  377. B.  D. Choi, On the Spiritual in Architecture (Seoul; Misulmunwha, 2001), p. 36. 5  S. J. Yim, The Traditional Space, p. 13. B. R. Kim, Stories on Korean Architecture 3, The Spirit Imprinted on This Land (Paju: Dolbaegae, 2010), p. 23; Kim, B. R., The Secret Spirit of Korean Architecture, English trans. by Y. Lee (London: Shaffron Books, 2007), pp. 70, 78. 6  For instance, Taoism’s “taking-no-action (無爲)” and “having-no-desire (無慾)” have influenced the self-cultivation of Confucian scholars. K-N. Oh, Thinking with Lao Tzu, pp. 380, 399, 404, 405. 7  B.  D. Choi, On the Spiritual in Architecture, pp.  22, 41, 175. B.  R, Kim, Stories on Korean Architecture 3, p. 23. S. J. Yim, The Traditional Space, pp. 13, 17, 23, 70, 97–116. These components produce a Cubistic multi-dimensional space. S.  J. Yim, Reading Traditional and Western Architecture (Seoul: Culturegraphy, 2011), pp.  381–382, 399. J.  H. Kim, “The Relationship between the Interests of Traditional Far East Asian Architecture in Europe and the US in the 17th– 20th Centuries and the Modern Movement”, in: Journal of the Architectural Institute of Korea, vol. 25, no. 2 (Seoul, 2009), p. 148. 8  S. J. Yim, The Traditional Space, p. 99. S. J. Yim, Reading Traditional and Western Architecture, pp. 381–382, 399.

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windows and doors reorganizes the adjacent windows, doors, and space and, consequently, the whole Gestalt of the multi-layered space sequence. To open a window or a door deprives a solid wall of its solidity, realizing its inherent potential for void. To refer to the exclusive dichotomy between the solid and the void is meaningless here; these concepts are inherently interdependent and relational. Each hanok housing type exhibits a variety of expressions of visual ­privacy and enclosure, overlapping views, and spatial experiences. In this way, traditional space becomes indeterminate, flexible, and variable. Furthermore, the opening of windows and doors generates an overall spatial flow within the complex. The overlapping of a hanok space expands outward to nature and the universe. In contrast, the overlapping of a Buddhist temple compound occurs in the form of concentric circles: from the Main Buddha Hall, atop the other buildings, across the surrounding layers of mountains, over the distant landscape, and, finally, toward nature and the universe. This concentric overlapping exemplifies the Buddhist thought of “the largest bodies and smallest particles having the same value.” Here, the architectural space symbolizes the condensed universe of Buddhist philosophy.9 The primary architectural space is understood as nature and the universe, a space that exists in endless time and without boundaries.10 Traditional architecture aims to enjoy the landscape, which is brought into view from the outside and vice versa.11 The architecture is thus placed in such a way as to best view the drama of the landscape over time. Traditional architecture aims to accommodate the conditions of nature and to permit the outer nature to come inward. It aims not only to be passively with and in nature but also to actively interpret nature into architectural components.12 To relate the inner and outer spaces is of the utmost importance. In this respect, an authentic architectural space emerges through the interplay between emptying and filling, on the one hand, and through the interplay among man, nature, and architecture, on the other. Architectural space is defined not by any particular physical measure but by the temporal-spatial relationships among individual spaces, buildings, and the inner and outer spaces. So-called “half-outer spaces”—such as various types of maru, pavilions, the small madang attached to a maru, the narrow space beneath an eave, and the sideway between a building and a wall—are good examples of creating interplay between inner space and the outer world.13 These half-outer spaces are open to the outer space on at least one side. In particular, a maru is an ambiguous space that possesses the characteristics of both inner and outer spaces; this roofed space is  S. J. Yim, The Traditional Space, p. 116. B. R, Kim, Stories on Korean Architecture 3, p. 185.  S. J. Yim, The Traditional Space, p. 73. 11  B. D. Choi, On the Spiritual in Architecture, p. 26. 12  B. R. Kim, Stories on Korean Architecture 3, pp. 19, 51; The Secret Spirit of Korean Architecture, pp.178, 184. 13  B. D. Choi, On the Spiritual in Architecture, pp. 7–8, 39. S. J. Yim, Windows and Doors (Seoul: Ewha Women’s University Press, 2005), p.  73. S.  J. Yim, Reading Traditional and Western Architecture, p. 392. 9

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half-outer, as it is open to nature, and half-inner, as one must remove one’s shoes to enter and household objects may be placed therein. The combination of the maru and the madang is an exemplary component of traditional space.14 Marus cause their dwellers to be directly and continuously touched by nature. A very small madang surrounded by rooms is an outer space without a roof that yet is experienced ambiguously as an extended inner space. Each edge of an individual building is mostly open and integrated into the spatial flow of the overall complex. Narrow passages between the buildings and walls are intended for the flow of wind and shadows, as well as the passage of people. This openness brings the sounds of nature and mankind inward and promotes communication between the dwellers and the outer world.15

9.2.3  T  he Void Open to Nature, the Universe, and Community Life Traditional architecture is intentionally concerned with creating a void16 that is open to outer spaces and community life.17 Madangs and marus are good examples. First, these spaces are open to nature and the universe and are thus able to extend nature into the inner space. Diverse openings make the building breathe with the wind.18 In an empty madang, a shadow stays for a while and vanishes, rain occurs, and seasons come and go. Nature and the universe live in this space over time. Second, madangs and marus are open to community life, episodes, and memories.19 A madang, as an indeterminate space, is used for ceremonies and feasts, for a workplace when women dry vegetables, and for a playground when children play. An open maru is also an indeterminate space that becomes a dining room when the lunch table is set, a bedroom when a nap is taken, and a place for meditation when remote mountains are viewed.

 S.-W.  Kim and J.-K.  Kim, “The Creation of the Solid and the Void through Surrounding in Korean Traditional Architecture”, in: Journal of the Architectural Institute of Korea, vol. 17, no. 2 (Seoul, 1997), p. 446. 15  S. J. Yim, Reading Traditional and Western Architecture, pp. 303, 307, 311. 16  In Yim’s view, “emptiness,” as the universal space with neither limits nor boundaries, is called “the Great and Broad”. Nature and the universe are equal to the Great and Broad. In contrast, “the void” is a man-made architectural space “existing between walls”. S.  J. Yim, The Traditional Space, pp. 69, 70, 81. S.-W. Kim and J.-K. Kim, “The Creation of the Solid and the Void through Surrounding in Korean Traditional Architecture”, p. 445. 17  B. D. Choi, On the Spiritual in Architecture, pp. 7, 11, 22, 34, 175. 18  B. D. Choi, On the Spiritual in Architecture, pp. 66, 86. 19  S.-W.  Kim and J.-K.  Kim, “The Creation of the Solid and the Void through Surrounding in Korean Traditional Architecture”, p. 448. 14

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9.3  S  tructuring Emptiness in Contemporary Korean Architecture Seung is an architect of structuring emptiness. His spatial concept of emptiness is inspired by the traditional courtyard madang and the Tao Te Ching concept that the great usefulness comes from the uselessness. The spatial concept of “emptiness” can be extended to the “urban void” when applied to the realm of a city.20 In his view, it is not the solid buildings but rather the void between the buildings that determines the quality of an urban landscape.21 In opposition to the “[…] totalitarian planning imbedded in functionalist modern architecture, the determinist idea that one can control human life by controlling space, and the positivist and reductive attitude in form and space making,”22 he regards “amorphousness, indeterminacy, openness, and versatility as the fundamentals of architectural space.”23 The spatial concept of emptiness is an alternative to that of “space as objet,” which pervades early twentieth century architecture. Seung believes that emptiness provides the most effective means to experience the amorphousness, indeterminacy, openness, and versatility of an architectural space and the versatility of living in it. The space that appears “useless” and “purposeless” actually deepens our emotions and lends diversity to a life freed from fixed rules. In Seung’s architecture, emptiness is practiced in the silent plan and forms that negate superfluous expression. Emptiness is practiced in the forms of pathways, roads, parks, plazas, sky gardens, spaces between buildings and regions, and so forth. Furthermore, Seung pulls down the unnecessary walls of segregation in order to open the remaining spaces and give them back to community life, the city, nature, and the cosmos.24 Exaggerated walls deform the space within and distort life. When structuring the void, architects should respect the “landscript”—a term coined by Seung that means “the inscription of nature and life on the land.” Architects should first read the script of the land, as engraved by nature, and only then add architecture—an inscription of life.25  H. Khang, “The Portrait of the Architect”, in: H-S. Min, H-S. Seung & H. Khang, Structuring Emptiness (Paju: Dongnyuk, 2009), p. 38. The spatial concept of “emptiness” can be understood in terms of “neutral space,” “specific indeterminate space,” “indefinite space,” “uncommitted or free space,” and “universal space.” F.  Bagel, H-S.  Min, H-S. Seung et  al., “Wisdom City for Communality”, in: H-S.  Min, Questioning Architecture of the Times (Paju: Dolbaegae, 2009), p. 78. 21  H-S. Seung, “Essay 20,040,514” (http://www.irojae.com.essay); “Essay 20,040,702”. 22  H. Khang, “The Portrait of the Architect”, p. 37. 23  H.  Khang, “The Portrait of the Architect”, p.  41. From 1998 to 1999  in London, Seung was impressed by the similarities between East Asian architectural concepts and Florian Beigel’s ideas of landscape, the planned void, and specific indeterminacy, which facilitate planned and unanticipated activity. H. M. Pai, Sensuous Plan. The Architecture of H-S. Seung (Paju: Dongnyuk, 2009), pp. 105–113. H-S. Seung, “Essay 20,010,117”. 24  H-S. Seung, “Beauty of Poverty”, in: H. M. Pai, Sensuous Plan, pp. 535, 541. 25  H-S. Seung, Landscript (Paju: Youlhwadang, 2009), p. 79. 20

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A residence named Subaekdang (守白堂, “Keeping the free spirit of scholar”, 1999)26 embodies the traditional concept of emptiness. Traditional Korean rooms are not defined by their fixed functions, such as “bedroom” or “living room.” Instead, rooms and spaces are used in a flexible way that corresponds to the dweller’s will and are thus named after their location: “inner-room,” “opposite-room,” “room-­ beside-­the-entrance,” and so forth. Subaekdang is a complex composed of inner spaces that are exposed to nature and 14 purposeless rooms, with the exception of the kitchen and the bathroom. Seven spaces are defined by walls but have no roofs. Dwellers may use the indeterminate spaces as they wish and enjoy the emptiness and nature. The simplicity and temperance of this spatial composition differs from minimalism in Western art, which seeks richness by way of aesthetic purity and simplicity. In his view, minimalism is captured by a fixed and unchangeable existence. “Binding the condensed spiritual world in the least of expression, this minimalism is trapped in a genre that unavoidably limits itself to its own mechanical sounds.”27 Instead of aesthetics, he surveys the practical ethics of emptiness. He intends to provide a basic architectural essence, cleansed of useless excess. What the tradition teaches is that architecture does not need to be an eternal object in itself; it exists and vanishes in time, leaving memories and traces behind. Architecture is an infrastructure that permits impermanence and life.28 Welcomm City (2000)—a communication company—provides an example of structuring the urban void.29 This building complex consists of four sub-spaces accompanied by void spaces. The void spaces function in the same way as a traditional madang. Because of their indeterminate function, these spaces are available for resting, as conference halls, or for any other use. These simple void spaces permit the outer landscape and nature to move inward. The building complex is a frame that provides empty spaces for communication between the complex itself, the surrounding houses, and the city. While building the Hyehwa Culture Center of Deajeon University,30 Seung constructed a madang-like open deck along the sloped hill of the land. In addition to its main function as a path leading to other facilities, this sloped space is intended for multiple purposes. It functions as an active space, an open theater, a park or plaza, or, from a certain viewpoint, a wide path directed to the sky. Like a traditional madang, this deck is an indeterminate space that is open to the versatility of living. Seung’s concept of the void differs from that of the Ryoan-ji Zen Garden31 in Japan, which Western architects tend to regard as an example of the void and indeterminate space. In his view, this type of void space is ironically “frozen as a  H-S. Seung, “Essay 20,040,325”.  H-S. Seung, “Beauty of Poverty”, pp. 527, 546–547. 28  H-S. Seung, “Essay 20,050,705”. 29  H-S. Seung, “Our times, The Value of the City”, in: H-S. Min, Questioning Architecture of the Times, 24. H-S. Seung, “Essay 20,050,705”. 30  H-S. Seung, “Hyehwa Culture Center”, in: H-S.  Min, H-S.  Seung & H.  Khang, Structuring Emptiness, pp. 65–71. 31  H-S. Seung, “Beauty of Poverty”, p. 528; H-S. Seung, “Essay 20,050,705”. 26 27

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d­ eterminate space” and is thus a dead space where no life can fill it. It indeed contains breathtaking beauty and tranquility; however, people are forced to merely watch the space as an object and can never enter it. Instead, Seung’s void space pursues the concept of madang, a live void, which can be filled with anything: feasts, ceremonies, work, rest, and memories. Still, when everything is removed, the space returns to a silent and empty state; it is a place to discover the positive meaning of sharing and living together. It is indeterminate, creative, and thoughtful as a live void. Seung conceives of the live void as the true meaning of “urban void.”32

9.4  Lived Experience of the Void and Structured Emptiness 9.4.1  S  ensorimotor Experience of the Void and Structured Emptiness Architectural space defined by emptiness should not be simply reduced to geometrical space. That space is rather lived space—space experienced by embodied subjects who possess sensorimotor, existential, and spiritual capacities. Lived space is an important aspect of architecture because it relates primarily to where we dwell. We may understand lived space in the light of the sensorimotor, the existential, and the spiritual experience; however, this viewpoint raises a question: How do we experience the void and structured emptiness? Answering this question requires us to survey our sensorimotor, existential, and spiritual experiences of the void and structured emptiness. The Finnish architect J. Pallasmaa, whose theory is indebted to Mearleau-Ponty’s theory of perception and “being in the world,” places emphasis on the role of the body and the multi-sensory lived experience.33 In his view, dynamic interactions between the body and architecture interweave into a full multi-sensory experience. “[T]he volumes, surfaces, textures and colors of the house, and even the smells of  H-S. Seung, “Beauty of Poverty”, p. 528; “Essay 20,050,705” “Essay 20,020,827”.  Pallasmaa refers to seven realms of senses: “eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle.” He claims that all of the senses are extensions of the tactile sense. The haptic sense and the sense of orientation are developed at an earlier stage in life than vision and other senses. J. Pallasmaa, “An Architecture of the Seven Senses”, in: S. Holl, J. Pallasmaa, and A. Pérez-Gόmez, Questions of Perception, Phenomenology of Architecture (Sanfrancisco: William Stout Publishers, 2006), p. 30. J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2011), p. 41. In my view, the experiential quality of the tactile sense and other senses are different and unique in themselves. To insist on a primal sense among senses is less important. It is because the question regarding which sense is the main player in perception depends, as Merleau-Ponty’s Gestalt theory asserts, upon the Gestalt situation of which sense takes over the function of the figure or ground. Furthermore, it is because all the senses are communicating to one another, as Merleau-Ponty’s theory of communication of senses shows. M.  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by C. Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2010), pp. 138, 261–273.

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the forest and the sounds of the river” are “not experienced as a collection of isolated visual pictures” but are experienced in their “fully embodied material and spiritual presence.”34 The value of multi-sensory experience lies in their enrichment of our sensory life and life in general. I agree with Pallasmaa that architectural work and space incorporate material and perceptual presence. They incorporate sensorimotor-emotional meaning through the perceptual interface35 between themselves and the embodied subject. Pallasmaa proposes that this interface implies the projection of the fragments of an embodied subject, a “projection” in Melanie Kline’s language. “[W]e project our emotions and feelings on to the work. […] whereas the work lends us its authority and aura.”36 In his Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty uses the terms “intertwining” and “synchronizing”37 instead of the psychoanalytic term “projection.” Applying these terms to the architectural experience, we can say that meaning is a product of “intertwining.” Intertwining is a co-product of the embodied subject and the architectural work and space. In the intertwining process, the architectural work and space provoke reactions from the embodied subject, while the embodied subject reacts to them with a particular sensorimotor behavior. “The things of the world […]. Each one of them symbolizes or recalls a particular way of behaving, provoking in us reactions […].”38 Things and the qualities of things, such as place, color, and sound, affect in us certain emotional meanings and provoke us to a certain emotional behavior: […] the place which gives it a certain emotional meaning […]. Indeed our experience contains numerous qualities that would be almost devoid of meaning if considered separately from the reactions they provoke in our bodies.39 So the quality of being honeyed […] can only be understood in the light of the dialogue between me as an embodied subject and the external object which bears this quality.40

Intertwining brings forth sensorimotor meaning and value, but there exists an asymmetry between the sensible subject and the affecting object. The sensible subject is a subject who is passively affected by the object and, at the same time, a subject who actively brings forth meaning and value. The intentionality of the embodied subject

 J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, pp. 44, 64. B. D. Choi, On the Spiritual in Architecture, p. 45. S. J. Yim, The Traditional Space, p. 98. 35  J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 66. 36  J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 66. Pallasmaa uses also the word “resonance”. J. Pallasmaa, “An Architecture of the Seven Senses”, p. 36. 37  M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 245, 248. 38  M.  Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, trans. by O.  Davis (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 48. 39  M. Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, p. 46. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. by A.  Fisher (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2008), p  152; Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 244, 249. 40  M. Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, p. 47. 34

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plays a significant role in the creation of a surplus of sensorimotor meaning and value. It must be noted that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intertwining is to be understood within his theory of the communication of senses and his Gestalt theory of perception and behavior. Senses communicate with one another: “One sees the weight of a block of cast iron which sinks in the sand, the fluidity of water and the viscosity of syrup.”41 This communication among the senses is brought about through the medium of the body, working as a self-organizing synergic system.42 The unity of perception occurs through bodily movement. Perception is thus a sensorimotor behavior of the embodied subject.43 In the intertwining process, the embodied subject experiences the affecting object in the form of sensorimotor Gestalt bearing meaning and value.44 The affecting object may appear in the form of an optical Gestalt, acoustic Gestalt, color Gestalt, tactile Gestalt (with qualities such as rough and soft), scent Gestalt, and time-motion Gestalt. However, it must be stressed that the sensorimotor Gestalt, as the sensorimotor structure of a figure on a background, is merely an example of the diverse types of Gestalten.45 The embodied subject itself behaves as a Gestalt as well: […] if my body can be a ‘form’ and if there can be […] important figures against indifferent backgrounds, this occurs in virtue of its being polarized by its tasks, of its existence towards them, of its collecting together of itself in its pursuit of its aims; the body schema is finally a way of stating that my body is in the world.46

Without our animated body acting as a Gestalt, we could not experience the architectural world of Gestalt. The meaning of sensorimotor behavior of Gestalt is intertwined with bodily intentionality.47 Owing to this intentionality, the sensorimotor

 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 267.  M.  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp.  270–272. J.-S.  Han Heuer, “On Synaesthetic Experience: Merleau-Ponty and Neuroscience”, p. 199. 43  M.  Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, ed. by J.  Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. xvi. 44  M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 274. J.-S. Han Heuer, “The Significance of Gestalt Psychology for Merleau-Ponty and Its Limits”, in: Theology and the World, vol. 69 (Seoul: Methodist Theological University Press, 2010), p. 453. “Gestalt” is a spontaneous structured organization of figure and background in which the whole is divided into sub-wholes, and the subwholes are dependent on the whole. Merleau-Ponty refers to (a) sensorimotor Gestalt, behavior Gestalt, thought Gestalt, and the like; (b) to numerous Gestalt corresponding to the biological, socio-cultural, and historical world; and (c) to body and body schema functioning as Gestalt. M.  Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, pp.  127, 132; Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 115, 138, 529. J.-S. Han Heuer, “Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Body Schema and Neuroscience,” in: Grenzgänge, ed. by J.-S.  Han Heuer and S.  Hong (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011), p. 93. 45  J.-S. Han Heuer, “The Significance of Gestalt Psychology for Merleau-Ponty and Its Limits,” p. 448. 46  M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 115. 47  M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 138; The World of Perception, pp. 46–47. 41 42

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experience of an architectural work and space goes beyond its physiological level and is already imbued with a certain emotional and socio-cultural meaning. The void that is open to nature is experienced as a sensorimotor space and is an essential medium through which we may be touched by nature. We perceive and feel nature: the shadow, the waning moon, the wind shaking the trees, and rainstorms sweeping through the forest. We also perceive and feel the living beings that are in nature. Our direct connection with nature opens us up to a lived world of abundant sensorimotor meaning and value, a world that is greater than the physical world of shape, sound, color, smell, and fragrance. The full sensorimotor experience of the world penetrates the embodied subject and enriches his sensorimotor-­ emotional life. Artificial and rational architecture containing high technology may fascinate us, but it does not provide us with the fragrance and aura of the natural world. Any extremely artificial environment that has little contact with nature impoverishes our sensorimotor experience and, ultimately, our existence as a whole.

9.4.2  E  xistential Experience of the Void and Structured Emptiness The architectural void and structured emptiness that are open to our lives are experienced essentially as sensorimotor spaces and, furthermore, as existential spaces. They carry stories, meanings, and memories of life. Pallasmaa refers to existential and metaphysical experiences mediated by the body.48 The body itself is “enriched both by memory and dream, past and future” and carries “body memories” and “sensory thoughts.” Architectural work and space incorporate existential structures. He claims that “[a]rchitecture strengthens the existential experience, one’s sense of being in the world, and this is essentially a strengthened experience of self.”49 Architecture widens the horizon of existential experience and enables us to understand the dialectics of permanence and change, to settle ourselves in the world, and to place ourselves in the continuum of culture and time. Because our body embodies the space, our domicile is experienced as an extended part of our body.50 In Merleau-Ponty’s context, we can say that architectural work and space come to incorporate existential presence and meaning through the existential experience of the embodied subject. Architectural work and space, then, tell meaningful stories of life.51 The embodied subject is essentially characterized as “being in the world (être-au-monde).” Even though in his Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty concentrates more on explaining the unconsciously working level of the body-­ subject as a being in the world, there exists the consciously working level of the  J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, pp. 41–46.  J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 41. 50  J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 72. 51  J. J. Kim, Resonance with Space (Paju: Hyohyung Publishing, 2011), p. 231. 48 49

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embodied subject and his existential experience that implies the rich existential meaning of life and its value. When Pallasmaa refers to the body being “enriched both by memory and dream” and carrying “body memories” and “sensory thoughts,” it must be clarified whether he refers to them (a) on the unconscious level of the body-subject, (b) on the conscious level of the embodied subject, or (c) on both of those levels. In my view, (a) and (b) are intertwined inseparably, and I explicate the intertwinement of (b) with (a) here. The existential experience is permeated with the sensorimotor experience, because the embodied subject is essentially a bodily being in and toward the world. The existential experience is thus the sensorimotor-­ existential experience. The existential experience requires a higher level of intertwining than the level of the sensorimotor intertwining. This “existential intertwining,” in my terms, can be a complicated interplay between the embodied subject and the experienced architectural object corresponding to the complexity involved in the meaning of life in question. The embodied subject senses and experiences the existential meaning of the architectural object, while the architectural object affects the embodied subject. The existential intertwining is and can be a richly interdependent interplay between the sensible subject and the affecting object or, in other words, between existential sensibility and affectivity. Here again, the interrelation between these two poles is asymmetrical, because the embodied subject experiences more than what the object affects. For instance, although summer may have left the maru in which we once sat with friends, memories re-evoke the talk and fragrance of the day. The recollected embodied stories, meanings, and memories make us aware of the value of mutual living. These stories, meanings, memories, and values of life are the intentional contents of the embodied subject who experiences more than the object affects. They are the surplus of existential meaning brought forth by the embodied subject’s intentionality. In this way, architectural work and space come to incorporate existential meaning. The architectural void and structured emptiness are experienced in the same way, because they themselves are integral parts of architectural work and space, as shown above (part 2 and 3). The existential experience is essentially imbued with a certain sensorimotor, emotional, and socio-cultural meaning and imagination.

9.4.3  S  piritual Experience of the Void and Structured Emptiness There is a spiritual experience of the architectural void and structured emptiness that constitutes an integral part of the spiritual experience of an architectural work and space, and it requires the embodied subject’s spiritual sensibilities regarding “void” and “emptiness.” I use the term “spiritual” in the sense of (a) “incorporating spiritual meaning” and (b) “transcending conceptual thinking and language.” I regard the spiritual experience as essentially mediated by and intertwined with the sensorimotor and existential experiences, though it goes beyond them.

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For instance, the continuous cycle of a silent morning rising over a wide river evokes some ineffable feeling in us, as if we are encountering a trace of eternity. This experience incorporates the characteristics of both (a) and (b). Likewise, the solitude of moonlight penetrates through an entire existence called “I,” and we feel that “we exist just like dust” here in the universe. A moment of life vanishes suddenly, provoking ineffable feelings of the vanity (虛無) and the impermanence (空, sunyata) of the phenomenal world. Sitting at a corner of the maru, we discover an abundant variety of living beings. All living beings are networked in the great community of life, giving, receiving, and sharing sources of life. Each living being has its own way of living and dying. We all are surely one such being. We feel as if we are encountering the tao of the great living community called nature. A wide empty sky over a rice field says something inexpressible in the depth of its silence. The void, which is open to our living community, nature, and the universe, evokes spiritual experiences to the embodied subject. Spiritual experience is essentially mediated by and intertwined with sensorimotor and existential experiences. In its most extreme depth, the spiritual experience tends to transcend conceptual thinking and language. This experience raises the question of how architectural work and space come to incorporate spiritual presence and meaning. Is this accomplished (i) through a certain spiritual meaning that an architect projected into his works by design or (ii) through the affectivity of the architectural works and spaces themselves where the architect did not intend to project any specific spiritual meaning? Buddhist and Confucian architectural works and spaces that are imbued with their spiritual ideas and ideologies belong to type (i).52 Neo-Confucian scholars designed buildings without excessive decoration and color but with temperance and plain elegance.53 They named the buildings in accordance with their own life philosophies. For instance, the Giochoen (寄傲軒)54 incorporates a scholar’s free spirit to cultivate himself only through reliance on the tao of nature. Like Buddhists and Taoists, Neo-­ Confucian scholars believed that one of the main teachings of nature is the purification of body and mind.55 It is thus easier for embodied subjects with the same kind of cultural-spiritual background to have an insight into the cultural-spiritual meaning of these objects. There are also architectural works and spaces of type (ii) that incorporate no specific spiritual ideas projected by architects but evoke certain spiritual feelings and experiences within the embodied subject. The wide void of Jongmyo Royal Shrine exemplifies, in Seung’s view, an architectural space that incorporates the presence of an immaterial beauty of emptiness.56 In my view, this experience of

 B. R. Kim, Stories on Korean Architecture 3, pp. 106, 128, 137, 170, 213, 227.  B. R. Kim, Stories on Korean Architecture 3, pp. 108, 111, 144. 54  H-S. Min, “Architecture: From Aesthetics to Ethics,” in: H-S. Seung, K. Y. Cheong, S. Y. Cho et al., The Canon of Architect (Paju: Yoelhwadang, 2010), p. 104. 55  See footnote 7. S. J. Yim, The Traditional Space, p. 122. 56  H-S. Seung, “Essay 20,030,803”. B. R. Kim, The Secret Spirit of Korean Architecture, pp. 16–29. 52 53

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emptiness is imbued with a certain inexplicable spiritual and essential absoluteness that is initiated by the affecting force of the architectural work and space. The wide void of the shrine affects the embodied subject as if encountering something ineffably and absolutely silent. The affecting force of the objects is a necessary condition for evoking the spiritual experiences of type (ii). However, here again the subject’s spiritual sensibility of being able to grasp a certain absoluteness from the affecting object plays a significant and active role. The affecting force of the object may have no influence on the subjects without the available spiritual sensibility. Because of the spiritual sensibility of the embodied subject, the presence of emptiness (空), tao (道), and many other spiritual values of types (a), (b), (i), and (ii) related to the interrelationships among man, nature, and the universe can be experienced. These spiritual values raise the question of whether a spiritual experience can be characterized as “intertwining” in Merleau-Ponty’s sense. I contend that the spiritual experience is also a form of intertwining, insofar as there is an immediate interdependent interplay between the sensible subject and the affecting object, between sensibility and affectivity. However, the meaning-creating and meaning-interpreting roles of the embodied subject are more actively and reflectively involved in the spiritual intertwining than in the existential or sensorimotor intertwining, as the creating and interpreting of spiritual meaning depend more upon the subject’s intentionality and spiritual capacity. The embodied subject can experience much more than what the architectural object can affect. In respect to the richness of spiritual experiences, a variety of individual differences and asymmetries between the sensible subject and the affecting object emerges. Some embodied subjects can, for instance, have poor spiritual experiences from outstanding architectural works and spaces, while the others may not. The spiritual experience of the architectural void and structured emptiness is an integral part of the spiritual experience of architectural work and space; it requires the embodied subject’s sensibilities for “void” and “emptiness.” These sensibilities are a product of the embodied subject’s higher-level reflective capacity on cultural and spiritual values and can thus be cultivated. In my view, the Korean religious-­ cultural-­spiritual tradition has promoted spiritual sensibilities for emptiness (空), tao (道), and many other spiritual values related to the interrelations among man, nature, and the universe.

9.5  C  oncluding Remarks: The Value of the Spiritual in Architecture The authenticity of architecture cannot be grounded solely in its functionality, material objectivity, or availability for superficial multi-sensory pleasure. I conceive that the authenticity of architecture must, phenomenologically speaking, be grounded in its sensorimotor, existential, and spiritual presence, as well as in its experiential quality. Based on his phenomenological survey of the multi-sensory architectural

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experience, Pallasmaa57 claims that architecture organizes, frames, and inspires our behavior and thoughts. He favors a multi-sensory architecture that fully recognizes the multitude of sensory experiences in the interaction between the flesh of the body and the flesh of the world. Moreover, he recognizes the significance of embodied existential and spiritual experiences: The timeless task of architecture is to create embodied and lived experiential metaphors that concretise and structure our being in the world. Architecture reflects, materialises and eternalises ideas and images of ideal life. Buildings and towns enables us to structure, understand and remember the shapeless flow of reality and, ultimately, to recognize and remember who we are. Architecture enables us [...] to settle ourselves in the world, and to place ourselves in the continuum of culture and time.58

I view Pallasmaa’s insight into the significance of existential experiences in architecture as notable. However, despite his notion of the spiritual and metaphysical experience,59 the roles of embodied spirit and spiritual sensibility are less worked out in his survey. I contend that the significance of embodied spiritual experiences and attitudes toward architecture should be stressed within the current global architectural practice.60 Especially in metropolises such as Seoul, spiritual values do not attract serious attention. Architecture serves the blind logic of economic profit, dynamic consumer culture, and high technology. Architecture is even defined in terms of real estate. Architecture is increasingly losing its cultural and spiritual value while desolating cities, the beauty of the land and rivers, and human nature. I agree with those Korean architects who see the absence of insight into culture and spirit as a cause of this crisis. These architects attempt to pursue another horizon of contemporary architecture by reinterpreting traditional sources in a new context.61 This, then, is the question to be asked: What spirits and spiritual sensibilities will contribute to enriching architecture in our time? Several spirits from the Korean tradition may be still applicable to the contemporary situation. First, there is the spirit that seeks to respect and to live with nature. This spirit understands architecture as a medium through which man is connected with the living community, the man-nature-universe community. On the maru of the Byungsan Neo-Confucian academy,62 which is open to the wide blue river and mountains, students may have incorporated the thought that no authentic learning is achieved without inquiring into the tao of nature. Second, there is the spirit that promotes mutual living. As the traditional madang demonstrates, this spirit calls for a sensibility for sharing life with one another. Third, there is the spirit that cultivates the embodied self. In the Neo-Confucian view, the person who cultivates himself is able to inquire into the

 J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, pp. 39, 45, 63, 70–71, 75.  J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 71. 59  J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, p. 41–46. 60  Y.-S. Kim, “Architecture of New Regionalism Aesthetics”, pp. 71–88. H-S. Seung, “Beauty of Poverty”, p. 511. 61  H. Khang, “The Portrait of the Architect”, p. 42. 62  B.-R. Kim, B. R. Kim, The Secret Spirit of Korean Architecture, p. 120. 57 58

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ultimate principles of the universe and all things. The person who cultivates his spirit is able to be free from greed for material wealth, power, and fame; he is then qualified to serve people and the world. Fourth, there are spiritual sensibilities for a variety of types of emptiness, such as emptiness as the natural true state of all beings (空), emptiness as a condition for a right filling (虛), and emptiness as non-being, the ideal true states of being (無). I conceive that the sensibilities for these invisible realities strengthen our highest reflective power, that of the man-nature-universe community. Traditional Korean architecture sought to embody spiritual meanings and values. The spirits of traditional Korean architecture merge into the spirituality of the living man-nature-universe community. This spirituality and these spiritual sensibilities with a variety of emptinesses will contribute to enriching architecture in our time.

References Bagel, F., H-S.  Min, H-S.  Seung, et  al. 2009. Wisdom City for Communality. In Questioning Architecture of the Times, ed. H-S. Min, 58–85. Paju: Dolbaegae.  Choi, B.D. 2001. On the Spiritual in Architecture. Seoul: Misulmunwha. Han Heuer, J.-S. 2006. On Synaesthetic Experience: Merleau-Ponty and Neuroscience. In Theology and the World, English version, vol. 3, September, 191–209. Seoul: Methodist Theologucal University Press. ———. 2010. The Significance of Gestalt Psychology for Merleau-Ponty and Its Limits. In Theology and the World, vol. 69, 438–468. Seoul: Methodist Theological University Press. ———. 2011. Merleau-Ponty’s Concept of Body Schema and Neuroscience, In Grenzgänge, ed. by J.-S. Han Heuer and S. Hong, 85–101.Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Holl, S., J. Pallasmaa, and A. Pérez-Gόmez. 2006. Questions of Perception. Phenomenology of Architecture. San Francisco: William Stout Publishers. Khang, H. 2009. The Portrait of the Architect. In Structuring Emptiness, ed. H-S. Min, H-S. Seung, and H. Khang, 25–61. Paju: Dongnyuk. Kim, B.R. 2007. The Secret Spirit of Korean Architecture, English Trans. Y. Lee. London: Shaffron Books. Kim, J.H. 2009. The Relationship Between the Interests of Traditional Ear East Asian Architecture in Europe and the US in the 17th–20th Centuries and the Modern Movement. Journal of the Architectural Institute of Korea 25 (2): 143–154. Kim, B.R. 2010. Stories on Korean Architecture 3. The Spirit Imprinted on This Land. Paju: Dolbaegae. Kim, Y.-S. 2010. Architecture of New Regionalism Aesthetics. In The Canon of Architect, ed. H-S. Seung, K.Y. Cheong, S.Y. Cho, et al., 71–88. Paju: Yoelhwadang. Kim, J.J. 2011. Resonance with Space. Paju: Hyohyung Publishing. Kim, S.-W., and J.-K. Kim. 1997. The Creation of the Solid and the Void Through Surrounding in Korean Traditional Architecture. Journal of the Architectural Institute of Korea 17 (2): 443–448. Lao Tzu. 2010. Tao Te Ching (道德經). Trans. K-N.  Oh, In Oh, K-N., Thinking with Lao Tzu, 371–418. Seoul: Hyunamsa. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, ed. by J. Edie Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2008. The Structure of Behavior. Trans. A. Fisher. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

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———. 2009. The World of Perception. Trans. O. Davis. London: Routledge. ———. 2010. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Min, H-S., H-S. Seung, and H. Khang. 2009. Structuring Emptiness. Paju: Dongnyuk. Pai, H.M. 2009. Sensuous Plan. The Architecture of H-S. Seung. Paju: Dongnyuk. Pallasmaa, J.  2006. An Architecture of the Seven Senses. In Questions of Perception. Phenomenology of Architecture, ed. S. Holl, J. Pallasmaa, and A. Pérez-Gόmez. San Francisco: William Stout Publishers. ———. 2011. The Eyes of the Skin. West Sussex: Wiley. Seung, H-S., Essay 20010117; Essay 20020827; Essay 20030803; Essay 20040325; Essay 20040514; Essay 20040702; Essay 20050705. http://www.irojae.com.essay. Seung, H-S. 2009a. Beauty of Poverty. In Sensuous Plan. The Architecture of H-S.  Seung, ed. H.M. Pai. Paju: Dongnyuk. ———. 2009b. Our times, The Value of the City. In Questioning Architecture of the Times, ed. H-S. Min, 12–28. Paju: Dolbaegae. ———. 2009c. Landscript. Paju: Youlhwadang. Seung, H-S., K.Y. Cheong, S.Y. Cho, et al. 2010. The Canon of Architect. Paju: Yoelhwadang. Yim, S.J. 2005a. The Traditional Space. Seoul: Ewha Women’s University Press. ———. 2005b. Windows and Doors. Seoul: Ewha Women’s University Press. ———. 2011. Reading Traditional and Western Architecture. Seoul: Culturegraphy.

Chapter 10

Digital Technology, Urban Aesthetics, and Phenomenology Jong Kwan Lee

Abstract  The process of total digitization of Being, generally referred to as digital convergence, has now entered a new phase, and this new aspect of digital convergence is being implemented through Ubiquitous Computing (UC). And such UC has emerged as a concrete life world that penetrates into cities and emerges new cities. The emerging urban reality, so-called Ubiquitous City, will have a tremendous influence in determining the future space of human beings. However, philosophical reflection is necessary to determine whether it is the right direction for the human to ride on this journey toward the future. For this reason, this paper philosophically traces the technological situation in which ubiquitous computing emerges as a third-generation HCI, and reveals its philosophical basis as Heidegger’s phenomenology. In this process, the article makes clear that the purpose of UC is to return the current direction of IT development especially back to the existential space of human beings. This develops into a discussion that crosses the discussion of UC with Heidegger’s spatial theory and Schulz’s phenomenology of architecture based on it.

10.1  Introduction: Digital Convergence and Ubiquitous City There has been a lot of talk recently about digital convergence. Unfortunately, however, confusion prevails concerning what digital convergence is. The meaning of the word fluctuates with various derivative effects of this fluctuation. Each sector affected by digital convergence has its own definition according to the most apparent phenomenon triggered by digital convergence in that sector. Thus, ironically, we

J. K. Lee (*) Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_10

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are now witnessing the divergence of meaning of digital convergence, for example, in the area of enterprise, where convergence is taking place between industries and services. In the area of media science, it refers primarily to convergence between different media. Going back to the origin of the word, it becomes clear what digital convergence basically is: “Everything is converging on digital”. The definition of the word is proclaimed in the exactly same way by a digital guru, Negroponte, who for the first time gave rise to the word. Philosophically reformulated, digital convergence means the total digitalization of Being. In fact we find ourselves in the age in which devices to digitalize everything, starting with sounds and images, and even our thoughts, are being developed aggressively and sold globally. Thus the life-­ world in which we now live would collapse without digital technology because digital technology has become ubiquitous. Reflecting this situation, technology literally named “Ubiquitous Computing” (UC) is emerging rapidly. As the word itself connotes, this technology is pervading every corner of the world and is becoming available anytime. This pervasiveness of UC is not just rhetoric, but is on the way in the full realization to build a city, in which concrete everyday human life is actually carried out. Using UC in South Korea, the new concept of the “Ubiquitous City” has emerged. In this Ubiquitous City, people are supposed to be able to enjoy the most convenient lifestyle thanks to computers installed in everything that people should deal with in their everyday lives in the city. Since everything in which the computer is embedded becomes a smart thing which communicates information to other computers as well as with humans seamlessly, the world of things responds to human desires as much as and as quickly as possible. For certain dangers which we might inevitably face each day, we would be informed in advance so that we have enough time to take preventive measures. UC is now on the way to becoming the life-world of human beings in the form of the ubiquitous city, in which each person finds his or her desires satisfied and is freed from dangers. In this techno-life-world, safety and the amenities of human life will be guaranteed. Scientists are impressed by this concept of UC, promising an optimistic future, and they endeavor to optimize the degree of efficiency and perfection of the technology. But it is not yet well known that the concept of UC involves an existential agony of the technologist regarding the digital space driven toward virtuality. Unfortunately, the original motive that brought it into being is in danger of being lost and forgotten. Let us trace back who and what brings UC into being.

10.2  PC, VR, UC and Ontology of Tool UC was first conceived by Mark Weiser, who had been a scientist at Xerox and later became a professor at Stanford University. It was intended to shift the paradigm of the established interactive relation between human and computers, or the human-­ computer interaction (HCI) in the late 80’s. UC represents the third generation of HCI following the PC which innovated on its side the first generation of HCI, namely the main frame computer. Weiser characterizes UC through terms like “per-

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vasive technology,” “calm technology,” or “invisible technology.” In order to realize this UC as pervasive Technology or calm technology, there must be systems like RFID and USN. What brings Weiser to initiate the conception of UC? Why does he call it “calm technology”? Two things should be noted. First, the motive for Weiser to develop UC was not to maximize the efficiency of computer system, but to bring the relation between computer and human on to the right path. Secondly, Weiser’s conception of UC shows important characteristics which depart from the meaning of ubiquity in the ordinary use of the word. A ubiquitous computer is normally thought to be one we carry everywhere and anytime with us, using it whenever and wherever we want. But the UC conceived by Weiser makes computers pervasive in the life-world and invisible. Weiser says: “The goal is to achieve the most effective kind of technology, that which is essentially invisible to the user… I call this future world “Ubiquitous Computing” (UC)” (Weiser 1993). Why does Weiser take liberty with the ordinary use of the word ubiquity? It is because in the normal sense of the ubiquity of the computer, it is not used as a tool, but is set before humans as a device that attracts the attention of human consciousness and so blocks the natural flow of a person’s actions. For instance, carrying computers everywhere and anytime with us, we always are forced to pay attention to the monitor of computer and to be engaged in manipulating the computer. Such manipulation of a computer was not easy at the time when Weiser coined the term UC. What deserves special emphasis is that the HCI which Weiser regards as the most contrary case to the HCI of his UC is the interaction between humans and computers in virtual reality. Let us turn to virtual reality for a moment. Virtual reality has been appreciated as the most fantastic achievement of information technology (IT) and expected to move us into a fantastic world. It had been impossible for this fantastic world to be experienced as close to our reality, but thanks to virtual reality technology (VRT), human beings equipped with HMD (Head Mounted Display), DG (Data Gloves), and motion capture operated by computer software and hardware, being acted on by computer mediated stimuli simulating natural stimuli from the real physical world, are able to be completely immersed in the fantastic situation which is not real, and to experience it as if it were real. However, in order to make the stimuli generated by devices composing a VR system as real as possible, and to maximize the effect of VRT which enables the user (human) to be immersed in the VR, VRT must exclude the life-world, into which the user is naturally thrown, from the user. For instance, the computer-mediated stimuli must be so strong that the natural stimuli from the world in which the user lives, are overwhelmed completely by them, exerting no impact on the user and being thus ignored by them. Furthermore, the computer power installed with software and hardware operating devices of VRT system must be so improved that its processing speed is instantaneous enough to respond to the user’s reaction as quickly as perceivable for the user not to be conscious of any delay of time in order to be stimulated in next phase of his or her action as expected. Seen from this mode of operation, the pivotal function of VR is interactivity, immersion, and information density. Interactivity is dependent on the computer’s power to generate stimuli instanta-

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neously corresponding to the speed of the changing positions of the user’s body and of the user’s changing perspective. Immersion and information density are dependent on the system which is able to isolate the user from the situation (or the place) in which the user is really thrown (or located) in order to make the user feel him- or herself in a different place. These three functions are so closely interrelated that malfunction in one leads to the collapse of VR as a whole. The technologies which materialize the optimal function of the interrelation are four: (1) display technology, which simulates the real optic, acoustic, and tactual stimuli; (2) graphic rendering technology, which processes the moving image at extremely high speeds; (3) tracking technology, which captures the movement of the user accurately; and (4) databases, which create and keep the model in VR. Contrary to VR, which pushes the human user away from the life-world in which he finds himself into the not real reality through the just mentioned technologies, the purpose of UC is to bring the user back to the life-world. In order to fulfill this purpose, Weiser urges that the relation of computers to human users should restore the original genuine relation of the tools to humans and so computers should recede into the background of the life-world of the human being. “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it” (Weiser 1991). The computer should not be set before the human user, for example, in the form of a desktop with monitor, pushing the human user away from his life-world through the monitor into VR, but it should pervade the world in which the users lives, and contribute to the enhancement of the world. What deserves attention is that while developing his conception of UC, Weiser is inspired partly by the Heideggerian existential phenomenology of tools in Being and Time and comes across the problem hidden in the then HCI. So let us turn to Heidegger’s discussion of tools in Being and Time in order to understand which moments in Heidegger’s existential phenomenology of tools contribute to the birth of the concept of UC in Weiser. According to Heidegger, the mode of being of the human is not just to be, not just to survive, but to exist. Here the term “existence” as the mode of being of humans is introduced to specify the unique mode of being of humans which is neither just located in an extended space like a physical body, nor just to survive in the natural environment like an animal. The mode of being of the human is distinguished in that, while letting the fact that someday each human will die intrude into the present moment of his life, a human is always doing something. But while doing something against the background of absolute nothingness, namely death, humans cannot dispense with tools in any moment (see Heidegger 2000a 168–169). Thus humans comes across everything other than themselves as tools first and foremost. What is important is that tools, being used in the existential situation of humans and being incorporated into humans acting in their existence, cannot be separated from the acts of humans in the moment of their actions. So the mode of being of tools is distinguished through the fact that tools cannot be noticeable to the user as long as the tools are in the mode of being as tools. Put in the reverse way, a tool is not a tool as long as its presence is noticeable, and so the tool which always attracts the notice of

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users distorts the existential action of the human. A true tool does not come into the foreground for the user, but recedes into the background at the moment when it is being used as tool, in other words, in the mode of being of a tool. When the tool comes to the foreground and demands the user’s attention, it stops being in the mode of being of a tool and turns into the mode of being of an obstacle disturbing or blocking user’s action. In this case the user becomes observer, whereas the tool becomes an object attracting attention and being observed. Another ontological characteristic, specific to the mode of a being of tool in Heidegger’s discussion, lies in the fact that a tool could not be a tool isolated from other tools. Heidegger never ceases to emphasize the fact that a tool alone is not a tool. He says: “Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the Being of any equipment, there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is” (Heidegger 1962, 97). A tool like a hammer is only a hammer in hammering a nail. A nail is only a nail in fastening two walls together, and a wall is a wall in supporting the structure of a house. A house is a house in enabling the existence of a human being. From this fact, we encounter two important characteristics of the mode of being of tools. First, every tool is only a tool when it is interrelated to another tool. Second, the interrelation of tools is finally converging on the situation of human existence. Here we already can presume how UC should be conceptualized to restore the computer as a tool for human existence. 1. Computers must be incorporated into the existential world of human beings and should not come to the foreground. They must recede into the background, be calm and unnoticeable as “that which informs but doesn’t demand our focus or attention” as Weiser says. He also writes: “A good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, I mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task, not the tool. Eyeglasses are a good tool – you look at the world, not the eyeglasses. The blind man tapping the cane feels the street, not the cane” (Weiser 1993, 7). “Just as a good, well-balanced hammer ‘disappears’ in the hands of a carpenter and allows him to concentrate on the big picture, we hope that computers can participate in a similar magic disappearing act” (Weiser 1999). 2. Every tool finds itself in the network of relations with other tools. In isolation, no tool can be in the mode of being of a tool. Therefore, a computer cannot be an isolated tool, but each computer must build networks with other computers. 3. As long as the relation in which every tool is referred to other tools finally converges on the situation of human existence, every computer networked to the others should be able to take the situation into account. In order for UC to realize these three qualifications required for computers to be genuine tools for human existence, it becomes clear that the following three technologies must be developed. 1. Embedding Technology: Weiser tries to develop technology that makes computers unnoticeable and pervasive in the everyday lives of humans. Computers should be technology “the presence of which no one notices,” or calm technol-

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ogy unnoticeably embedded in the place where we ordinarily live and act if it is to be a tool in a genuine sense. The technology to realize the computer as calm technology is embedding technology. This technology is necessary for computers not to detach humans from their life-worlds into VR 2. Interconnecting Technology: A tool is tool only when it finds itself in the system of relations, in which each is interconnected with the others in terms of function, and is committed to the others. So computers as unnoticeable tools embedded in the things with which the human deals need interconnecting technology in order to realize the mode of being of tools. 3. Context-aware technology: The system of the functional relation of tools converges on the situational context, in which the human finds him- or herself. So the computer in system of UC needs context-aware technology to identify who is in which situation. The current context-aware technology depends on two sorts of information. One is the information concerning the location of the computer. The other is information about the identity of the user. The first is enabled by USN, and the second by RFID. If we want to resume what we have discussed as the pivotal and essential characteristics of UC in one sentence, it would be expressed as it was in the first sentence of the epoch making paper by Weiser “The Computer for the 21st Century” in which the upcoming age of UC is predicted: “Specialized element of hardware and software, connected by wires, radio waves and infrared, will be so ubiquitous that no one will notice that presence” (Weiser 1999, 3).

10.3  UC, Home, and Landscape After tracing back the original motive of the emergence of UC, it becomes clear which direction the attempt to apply UC should take. Currently, projects like the Ubiquitous City are being driven toward applying the three technologies to all the things and infrastructures needed for urban life. The task is then to realize the three technologies in the things and buildings composing the urban space effectively and to make them function efficiently. The optimal architectural structure of buildings, as well as their design, should be figured out in order for the improved technologies to be seamlessly installed in the buildings in the city. For the time being, all attempts to realize the concept of a ubiquitous city are being driven in this direction. Now the question arises; is the significance of UC for humans exhausted when the task is successfully achieved? It is important to remember that UC is an attempt to reorient the interaction between the computer and humans toward the original relationship between the tool and humans as elucidated by Heidegger. Regrettably, Weiser overlooked a very important point while he adopted Heidegger’s existential ontology and applied it to computer science. It is the fact that Heidegger’s analysis of tool that acts a decisive role in Weiser’s ubiquitous computing is deeply related to the problem of human existence and that human existence cannot be discussed

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separately from the problem of the place for humans to live. Weiser also seems to have realized to some degree how tools, human life, and place are related to one another in his saying “The result of calm technology is to return us to the homes and familiar places.” (Weiser 1996, 4–5) While criticizing virtual reality and attempting a new conception of HCI, Weiser makes UC involve the turn toward the place and the space where the human being lives and dwells. However, although he insisted on the ultimate aim of ubiquitous computing, he did not address the problem of human existence and where an existential human lives. As a scientist engaged intensively in technological affairs, Weiser would be overburdened if he were asked to clarify what the home and the familiar space is into which UC puts us; rather it is the task of the philosopher who is freed from the business of technology to clarify the case. Fortunately, the path we should take in implementing the task is already indicated. As far as the conception of UC is achieved by following the Heideggerian reflection on the existential relation between humans and tools, the place and the space to which UC puts us as Weiser expressed, is the existential space that Heidegger revealed in conjunction with his phenomenology of tools. But we should not forget the fact that, as this phenomenology matured in his late thinking, the existential space in which the human being dwells is revealed as the place where fourfold – earth, sky, divinities, and mortals – are gathered (see Heidegger 2000a, b, 146ff).1 Christian Norberg Schulz, who takes this Heideggerian fourfold topology over into the practical field of architecture, sees the place from the perspective of the relation between natural landscape and village or city (see Christian Norberg-Schulz 1980, 6–10). According to him, the landscape is not the subjective product which is created through coloring subjective emotion on nature understood as the field of physical matter or the storage of resources. Rather it is the ontological aura implying existential meaning, being cleared prior to human being and then inviting humans to dwell in. On the other hand, humanity dwells in this aura by bringing this meaning to the fore through building houses, roads, villages and cities. The landscape is the ontological atmosphere calling the human being. While the human being dwells, he or she visualizes, symbolizes or complements the meaning impli1  Heidegger writes about the gathering of fourfold: “Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and framing, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal (Gertier). When we say earth, we are already thinking of the other three along with it, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four. But on the other:… mortals are… human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death. Only man dies (Nur der Mensch stirbt), and indeed continually, as long as he remains on earth, under the sky, before the divinities. The sky is the vaulting path of the sun, the course of the changing moon, the wandering glitter of the stars, the year”s seasons and their changes, the light and dusk of day, the gloom and glow of night, the clemency and inclemency of the weather, the drifting clouds and blue depth of the ether. When we say sky, we are already thinking of the other three along with it, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four. The divinities10 are the beckoning messengers of the godhead. Out of the sway of the godhead, the god appears in his presence or withdraws into his concealment. When we speak of the divinities, we are already thinking of the other three along with them, but we give no thought to the simple oneness of the four” (Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” in Poetry, Language, Thought, transl. by Albert Hofstadter (Harper & Row, New  York, 1971) p.147ff.

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cated in the natural landscape. “Visualization, complementation, symbolization are aspects of the general process of settling; and dwelling, in the existential sense of the word, depends on these function. … Before the meaning of the landscape was hidden, and the building (of the bridge) brings it out into the Open” (Christian Norberg-Schulz 1980, 18).

10.4  Liquid Space, Posthuman, and Irony Following this line of Heideggerian thinking, UC as inspired by Weiser’s drawing on Heidegger’s ontology of tools which matures into a fourfold ontology, provides chance to discover the deepest dimension of nature not as physical matter or resource, but as landscape, as poietic text from which the existential meaning originates and which so indicates the way of life of the human being. In this sense, UC trying to upgrade digital civilization into a new stage is an opportunity to arouse the understanding that it is humans’ dwelling to reveal the meaning. That is, humans’ existential place is not a nature understood as a reservoir of raw materials that must be processed for use value to satisfy human needs. Nature is the original poietic text, that is, landscape, in which the meaning to be revealed through human dwelling is concealed in herself. And humans who dwell in this landscape can make their site and get along only through building (poiesis) in the original sense that materializes the meaning of landscape into an abode, village and city. In light of the foregoing reflection on the place in which humans dwell, it is clear that the urgent task of the project of building a Ubiquitous City is to find out the way that the landscape as the original Heimat of human dwelling could be called into being a city. The direction of the attempt to advance technologies like the embedding technology, interconnecting technology, and context-aware technology, all of which together constitute the backbone of the system of UC, should be reoriented from this perspective on the task. In order to give more a clear direction to the reorientation, it is worth noting that the current urban space, which is spatialized and expanded in accordance with the functions of buildings in the city, could be shrinking because of UC. The spatiality of the modern city has been determined by the so-called functionalism according to which forms of buildings follow functions which buildings are supposed to take for practical and economic purposes. The modern urban space has been so strongly dominated by this functionalism, which has become the mainstream of architecture in modern times, that function comes to the foreground of the buildings, constituting the urban space. Seen in depth, functionalism is grounded in the premise that function, including aesthetical effect, can be optimized in geometrical space. The representative example for this functionalism is found in the works of Le Corbusier and Mies van de Roh, who committed themselves to giving rise to the modern city. But, urging that function should recede into background, UC, in its application to urban space, implies that the reference system to which the spatiality of the building is oriented must be discovered in new way. Following Heideggerian thinking which motivated Weiser to give birth to UC,

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as long as in the UC the return to the place of human existence is implied, this reference system has to be understood as a landscape in the sense of the ontological aura of human dwelling. Unfortunately, however, up to the end of twentieth century, this ontological aura has been treated as merely a subjective decorative phenomenon, which functionalism thought of as encumbering the optimal function of a building and therefore as something to be removed or destroyed. How about in contemporary twenty-first century architecture which has considers itself as having overcome modern functionalism? Is there a chance to return to the ontological aura which has been destroyed by the functional space preserved in contemporary twenty-first century architecture? Unfortunately, the chance is still in danger of being lost even now. Current architecture shows rather a trend to radicalize functionalism, neglecting the original motive which gives birth to UC.  This trend, which could be called hyper-functionalism, is rooted in the fact that UC has allowed us to perform multiple tasks in the same place and in the same building. For example, in the café equipped with UC, we can access a digitalized library and work on a specialized academic topic. In this case, the café performs the function of a library or a research room. We might even hold a conference there. The house is not only the place where we can rest and be separated from our workplace. The home can turn into an office in which we can work as if we were away from home. The home can also turn into a classroom for online education, or it can be turned into a movie theater in which we can enjoy films ordered by a Vod system. So, the building should take on a form that can perform these multiple functions. However, the spatiality of buildings constructed according to modern functionalism, based upon traditional geometry, is unable to fulfill such multiple functions. As already pointed out, modern functionalism divided the urban space according to function and constructed the infrastructure connecting the functionally divided parts of the space to one another most efficiently according to the measure of the geometrical space. It presupposed that the best way to maximize the efficiency of function is to make one building correspond to one function. But owing to UC, this presupposition loses its legitimacy. There is an emerging idea, which is to “liquidize” the space of a building and make it flexible, in order for the building to accept multiple functions. In this idea of liquid space, the division of the boundary of space, according to function, loses its meaning. The boundary of space in a building should be blurred, so the space of the building in the age of UC can be said to follow the demand to become liquid space. How can the demand to force the space of building to be liquid and flexible, justify itself, and with what technology can this liquid spatiality be realized? First, we need a theory of space with no boundary as well as no center. We also need a metaphysics supporting this theory of spatiality. Is it not a Deleuzean theory of smooth space and his metaphysics of fold which satisfies this need? Is it not the reason why in the current trend of architecture and urban design Deleuze’s philosophy is so preferred (see Greg Lynn 2004, 121ff)? Not only that, but in order to design this kind of building, the non-linear geometry that has been developed since Riemann is preferred, figures of which a human is not able to perceive or even imagine, but to visualize and to simulate only through digital computer graphics. Along

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with this geometry, we need a technology that allows the free transformation of space according to need, which was once attempted by a so called “star” architect Rem Kool Haas with his building named Transformer in Seoul in 2009. Finally nano-technology is desperately needed which can realize the non-linear geometrical figure by liquidizing matter and material. On the other hand, what if the age would come in which this technology, supported with the metaphysics of fold and with non- lineal geometry, is mature enough to embody the idea of liquid architecture which will constitute the space of future cities? A prospect for a future city shows that, “the computer system could recognize me working at the table, not moving to other areas, and starts a space transformation. The inhabited space would then be physically minimized to preserve energy. This decision could be supported by my online schedule that indicates that I am not expecting any visitors and therefore I do not need my working space in full representational size. In contrary, a threefold clapping of my hands or any other activity indicates that I disagree with the space minimization and the system has to come up with other responses to my desires. In fact, at this level of responsiveness, it is not just me who has a relation to the techno-environment but its technology also to me, caused by the design of it” (Tristan d’Estrée Sterk 2009). In fact, Topotransegrity as designed by Robert Neumayr shows how a responsive architecture can be introduced in public spaces challenging long-held assumptions about architecture as a passive arrangement. It investigates today’s networked ways that enable architecture itself to operate as an intelligent interface that connects spaces, users, and performance criteria in real time and the impact such spatial configurations have on urban space and urban public life. “Topotransegrity is a kinetic structure that constantly evaluates its surroundings and reconfigures according to these changing conditions, being capable of various transformations, which range from small-scale surface articulations to large surface deformations, which can generate temporary enclosures” (R. Neumayer 2006, 429). Ironically, however, a person dwelling in the liquid space of a future city responding to human desires immediately would become a permanent missing person, because the spatial relation of the liquid space in which the human dwells would vary with human desires. As Strek points out, in responsive architecture, the next architectural state of a building is determined by the idea of “treating” the needs and desires of users “as a set of ever changing conditions. As the architectural state is to be in flux, space transforms from a former static modular order into a topological field which responses to bodily activity” (Tristan d’Estrée Sterk 2009). But human desires as the ceaseless process in which desire desires itself are hard to satisfy and would become very complicated and amplified due to the complexity of social interaction between humans. The spatial relation of liquid space, instantaneously responding to human activity implementing various desires, could be so ceaselessly changing and complicated that the human with a natural faculty of perception and orientation of one’s body is incapable to find oneself in this continuously transforming spatial relation. Someone would not be able to know where he is even in his house, the spatiality of which would become liquid in response to his varying desires and wants. Since in this continuously transforming liquid space of

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responsive architecture humans would be incapable of orienting themselves, they would hardly be able to move. Therefore, in order to take action to exist in this space, the human body would need a special kind of navigator to receive spatial information at every moment when it takes motion. But this navigator should not only display spatial information, but also have the function to control the kinesthesia of the body, in order for the body to initiate motion in the direction led by the navigation. It is because in continuously transforming liquid space, the natural kinesthesia of the body finds itself in confusion as well. In order for the body to achieve spatial information through navigation, and to gain control through it in every moment of one’s motion and action, the navigator should be incorporated into the body. The most efficient way for such incorporation would be to implant the navigator into the body. What would then happen at this point? The first thing to be noted is that not just a minimized navigator is transplanted into the body. This navigator is a device which is able to function only within the whole system of UC which is producing information about things in the space, enabling the communication of the information between things, and integrating them. So the transplantation of the navigator into the body is in effect the transplantation of the whole system of UC into the body. So the computer which is embedded in everything in the world, becomes embedded into our body. Then we would confront the situation with the irony. The human body, controlled by UC, which is incorporated into the body, has a function like the plastic box of computer. Permeated into the human body, the whole system of the computer is turning the body into a material basis for computing, while replacing the natural kinesthesia and intelligence of the human. Then human would become posthuman (see N. Katherine Hayles 1999, 284 ff). Nanotech data storage memory system Metabrain Increased frequency range, parabolic hearing

Error correction deviceinstant data replay and feedback Network sonar sensors map data onto visual field

Solar protected skin with tone - texture changeability Turbocharged suspension flexibility

Cardio flow and function monitor In vivo fiberoptic communications backbone Smart Skin

Internal wholebody navigational grid

primo posthuman biosensors externally stimulate atmospheric tensions

Replacement organs

For the posthuman in the sense of the word conceptualized firstly by the transhumanism, the natural human body is merely an original prosthesis to be manipulated, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses is said to be unproblematic. The body of the posthuman is merely an accessory, which can be easily substituted at its own will. This might enable the posthuman to continue its life through different material bases, so that it would be immortal as the so called transhumanists like Kurzweil in his book “Singularity” predict.

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Currently, when our human hardware crashes, the software of our lives—our personal “mind file”—dies with it. However, this will not continue to be the case when we have the means to store and restore the thousands of trillions of bytes of information represented in the pattern that we call our brains (together with the rest of our nervous system, endocrine system, and other structures that our mind file comprises) At that point the longevity of one’s mind file will not depend on the continued viability of any particular hardware medium (for example, the survival of a biological body and brain). Ultimately software-­ based humans will be vastly extended beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse realms of virtual reality, holographically projected bodies, foglet-projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology. (R. Kurzweil 2006, 241)

But here a serious question arises. Does the attempt to apply UC to architecture and to cities with the purpose of assuring amenities and safety for humans actually deprive humans of their mode of being as mortal? Is it not the groundless mode of being of the human which requires him to ground his being? Does this requirement, which the human being could never avoid, not bring the human being to build a home from which his behavior to exist starts and to which it returns according to Heidegger whom the concept of UC owes its being? If such a scenario is the case, then does the posthuman, who is not mortal, need a home and a city? These questions indicate that the attempt to apply UC to a city would fall into an irony which deprives home and city of its existential-ontological significance.

10.5  High Line Park: The Way to Poietic Urban Design? It is always worth remembering that UC brings us back to home and to a familiar place, drawing on the Heideggerian reflection. If we follow Heideggerian thinking in depth, UC is clearing the way to understand space as the place for gathering the fourfold and building as poiesis of physis in a genuine original sense. This understanding makes clear the task of UC as follows. UC supported by embedding technology should be embedded into things not to augment the function of things, but to make room for the opening of the poietic value of things. Once the urban designers and architects have decided to work in this direction, we are encouraged to hope that there could open the space in which humans encounter the landscape poietically, while the extension of functional space devastating the landscape would shrink thanks to UC. In this respect, High Line Park which opened recently in New  York deserves great attention. High Line used to be an elevated railway to transport goods and commodities by circulating across New York. But from 1930 onwards, it gradually had been losing its function, and eventually became a totally abandoned railway. Since then, it was seen as an eyesore in New York, which led to the plan of postmodern redevelopment to get rid of Highline at the end of 1980’s. This plan was confronted with resistance from some New Yorkers. As time went by, the abandoned rusty railway had been gradually covered in wild grasses and flowers. A natural,

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somewhat wild landscape had emerged, which is impossible to be expected in a modern city like New York. The New Yorkers were so touched by the landscape as to feel that some significant event had taken place in the city; but they were at loss how to bring their amazing experience, when touched by the landscape, into words. They simply said that they like Alice in Wonderland. Resisting the redevelopment plan, they desperately needed architecture which could bring the significant experience into words. Architect and Landscape designer group Diller Scofido & Renfro responded to the need with concept of agri-tecture. Inspired by wild seeded landscape left after the railway had been abandoned, Diller Scofido & Renfro created a paving system that encourages natural growth which creates a pathless landscape…. The resulting “pathless” landscape encourages the public to meander in unscripted ways. The park accommodates the wild, the cultivated, the intimate, and the social. Access points are durational experiences designed to prolong the transition from the frenetic pace of city streets to the slow otherworldly landscape above” (Architecture Lab. Online Architecture Magazine, 10 June 2009).

Illuminated from the Heideggerian perspective of architecture as poiesis of physis, the epoch- making excellence of High Line Park will be revealed in a more clear way. High Line Park shows how the product of modern functionalism, the elevated railway, pervading the earth, is being transformed into an element of the landscape understood as gathering of heaven, earth, mortal and divine. The railway is, put in a Heideggerian way in his essay on technology, the infrastructure supporting the modern techno-economic space, in which every being comes into being only through being attached to the total enframing system, in which every being is ordered, produced into things other than itself, and consumed. In this techno-economic space everything is not a thing of its own, but a resource or “standing reserve” (Bestand) to be manufactured into another product. In the techno-economic space, nothing is allowed to be in its own place. Every being is homeless, ordered to be on the way to another place (see Heidegger 1993, 320). Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering. Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own standing. We shall call it the standing-reserve (Bestand) (Heidegger 1993, 332).

Thus, the techno-economic space comes true only through the transport system like a railway. A railway is not just an ontic way running through a city, but the most modern ontological way in which Being comes true. But if the railway loses its ontological meaning which is functional as a transport system, it is not allowed to be placed in the techno-economic space. It must be abandoned and thrown away from the space. Such a destiny was confronting High Line. It had been abandoned to become an ugly rusting useless iron structure. However, as time went by, a marvelous reversal had been taking place in the destiny confronting High Line. By being abandoned and thrown away from the techno-economic space, High Line escaped from the enframing system. This escape opened the chance for High Line to return to the poietic space in which fourfold was gathering. As New Yorkers wit-

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nessed, in the rusting railway with grey and gloomy concrete, wild grasses were growing and the flowers were blooming. The railway rusting into nothing is, as it were, transforming itself into a place of vegetation inviting grasses and flowers by being absorbed into a new the stratum of earth and transformed into a place for vegetation. Vegetation growing when the rain from the sky seeps into earth is the poietic event brought forth through the gathering of heaven and earth in the Heideggerian sense (see Christian Norberg-Schulz 1980, 25). So as long as architecture is understood in the fundamental sense clarified by Heidegger and Schultz, such vegetation should be well-kept and taken care of through architecture. Then, the meaning of the landscape that sprouted out of it should be gathered by architecture. A Civic group called Highline Friends remembered the ontological and existential essence of such architecture though they were not obviously aware. Also, the work on the Highline by architects in correspondence with the campaign of the civic group managed to work out such architecture whether it was intended or not. Designers of the Highline refused to explode and dismantle the elevated railroad like postmodernists would do, regarding it as an ugly object of the modern times that obstructs postmodern decorative beauty. They rather recovered the Highline to elements of landscape and gave birth to the meaning conceived in it through architecture. Above all, the Highline was born with a monumental act of architecture that deserves great appreciation in the phenomenology of landscape. According to Yoon Hee-yeon, who participated in this architecture, they even replanted weeds grown thickly there after the railway had been abandoned through the process of harvesting their seeds since they had a high estimation of their own aesthetic value. This is not just another kind of ecological architecture prevailing these days. Such acts make the Highline shine with profound meanings of a phenomenology of the landscape. It is because an infrastructure in a modern city that used to be hostile and destructive to the earth was absorbed into a layer of the earth to enrich the history of the earth. It is also because it opened a place that can grow new vegetation from the earth so enriched. Furthermore, the Highline did not leave it back alone in the wild but embraced it through architecture so that the meaning of the event might be open to people. This is concretized by the method of agritecture, which is a compound word of agriculture and architecture and a design method that can upgrade the Highline to an epoch-making work in the history of human dwelling. It aims to “form an organic relationship between nature represented by plant materials and art represented by concrete gradually mingling together without restraint” (Architecture Lab. Online Architecture Magazine, 10 June 2009). “Combining organic and building materials into a blend of changing proportions that accommodates the wild, the cultivated, the intimate, and the hyper-social” and recovering the rusting and perishing railway into being, High Line was given birth as poiesis of physis” (ibid). In this way, the Highline revolved the process of oxidizing railroad, which was being eroded into nothing, into the process of awaiting poiesis of physis which has been presented to people living there. At the same time, it recovered the meaning of dwelling to landscape by allowing them to dwell there. Now, New  Yorkers are dwelling in the landscape opened by poiesis of physis taking place in High Line

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which used to be simply ugly and rusted infrastructure destroying the cityscape of New York.

10.6  Concluding Remark: Hope for Oikonimia As already mentioned, there is no direct relationship between the Highline and UC. Actually, when the Highline was redeveloped into a park, UC technology was not considered or introduced. Moreover, even UC that is expected to open a new space after receding of the function dominating the whole space of modern society has yet to notice the future path suggested in the Highline. Contrary to the pure technological understanding of UC, it implies the potentiality to reduce the extension of functional space by enabling the function to recede into the background. Then, there might be increasing space available that is functionally useless and abandoned. Taking the cue from Highline Park, which transforms a modern ­functional space into poietic landscape, the current city planner and architect have, being mediated through the technology of UC, the good fortune to let the space provided through the receding of the functional space take place as a poiesis of physis. If UC is in charge of the technology to return man to a home for human existence by recovering the relationship between existential humans and tools following its original meaning, the home humans have to return to is the poietic landscape for the fourfold to take place in which things come into being as the focus of poietic gathering. If the functional infrastructure spatializing the space of modern cities can be freed from functionalization due to UC, the Highline is an excellent example to suggest a path for them to be transformed into poietic landscape even without a direct relationship to UC. Furthermore, it shows a way how the modern techno-­economic space can be transformed into a poietic landscape, in which the vegetation of nature and the building activity of humanity pervade each other. Illuminating High Line Park and the technology of UC together in this way points to a glimmer of hope for new beginning for poietic dwelling, which will reorganize the techno-economic constellation between human, heaven, earth, and divinities. This tiny glimmer would then have a significant effect on the current arrangement of the economy facing a crisis. It would point the way toward a new oikonomia (οίκονομία) to emerge, oikonomia understood as prudent handling of matter in the original sense of the word. The oikonomia would be formed with a focus on architecture, not on financial industry. This architecture should be differentiated from the mega- building like the luxurious magnificent skyscrapers in Dubai. The mega-building has drawn an astronomical scale of hyper-capital investment. But this is no more than another mode of financial speculation boosted by the financial industry and no more than a huge display of luxurious signs. As we are now witnessing, this kind of mega-construction finds itself in the same crisis as the financial industry. The architecture responsible for the future oikonomia should be the architecture of poiesis through which heaven and earth come into being not as storage of resource, but as ontological aura for humanity.

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It is the urgent task of this age to implement the transfer from economy to Oikonomia by means of poietic architecture using UC technology. The task requires close collaboration coordinated by phenomenology between economics, IT, and the phenomenology of architecture. This is the monumental task arising to for phenomenology in the age of Ubiquitous Computing and economic crisis.

References Hayles, N. Katherline. 1999. How We Become Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, Martin 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1993. The Question Concerning Technology. In Basic Writings, ed. D. Farrell-Krell. San Francisco: Harper Collins. ———. 2000a. Vortraege and Aufsaetze (Gesamt-Ausgabe 7), ed. Friedlich-Wilhelm von Hermann. ———. 2000b. Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. Yale University Press. Kurzweil, Ray. 2006. The Singularity is Near. When Humans Transcend Biology. New  York: Penguin Books. Lynn, Greg. 2004. Folds, Bodies and Blobs. Princeton Architectural Press. Neumayer, Robert. 2006. Topotransegrity: Non-linear Responsive Environments. In Game Set and Match II. On Computer Games, Advanced Geometries, and Digital Technologies (No. 2), ed. Kas Oosterhuis and Lukas Feireiss. Rotterdam: Episode Publishers. Schulz, Christian Norberg. 1980. Genius Loci: Toward a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli. Sterk, Tristan d´Estrée. 2009. Building Upon Negroponte: A Hybridized Model of Control for Responsive Architecture. http://www.orambra.com/negroponte/sterkECAADE_03.pdf, 01. 2009 Weiser. 1991, September. Communications, Computers and Networks: How to Work, Play and Thrive in Cyberspace. Scientific American 265 (3): 94 –105. Weiser, Mark. 1993. Some Computer Science Issues in Ubiquitous Computing. http://nano.xerox. com/hypertext/weiser/ubiCACM.html. ———. 1996. Designing Calm Technology. http://nano.xerox.com/weiser/calmtech/calmtech. html. ———. 1999. The Computer for the 21st Century. Mobile Computer and Communication Review 3 (3): 3–11.

Chapter 11

Re-presenting Earthscape: Towards a Phenomenology of Aerial Photographic Art Chan-Fai Cheung

ἀεὶ ὁ θεὸς γεωμετρεῖ (God always geometrizes) Plato “Our earth is art, the photograph is only a witness” Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Abstract  Landscape is one of the most important genres in painting in both Chinese and Western traditions. The Chinese considers landscape painting, or shanshui (山水) painting, the dominating genre in the whole history of Chinese art. Since the late-Tang dynasty of tenth century (923–936 CE), Chinese artists painted nature that they encountered with a philosophical attitude: that culture and nature should be intertwined into each other. Such nature of course is not the nature in the geological sense; rather, it conveys the philosophy of Daoism and/or Buddhism. Chinese landscape painting is not the pure description of the visible world but a means to express the inner “landscape” of the artist’s heart and mind. Human beings in most Chinese landscape paintings appear to be small in size and sometimes insignificant, because human beings are only parts of the immense nature. Guo Xi (郭熙 1020–1090) Early Spring (早春1072) (Fig.  11.2) exemplifies the relationship between human being and nature. The mountains, trees and rivers in the brushwork are not realistically drawn, but abstractly represented.

11.1  From Landscape to Earthscape Landscape is one of the most important genres in painting in both Chinese and Western traditions. The Chinese considers landscape painting, or shanshui (山水) painting, the dominating genre in the whole history of Chinese art. Since the late-­ C.-F. Cheung (*) The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_11

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Fig. 11.1  Photo by Chan-Fai Cheung

Tang dynasty of 11th century (923–936 CE), Chinese artists painted nature that they encountered with a philosophical attitude: that culture and nature should be intertwined into each other. Such nature of course is not the nature in the geological sense; rather, it conveys the philosophy of Daoism and/or Buddhism. Chinese landscape painting is not the pure description of the visible world but a means to express the inner “landscape” of the artist’s heart and mind. Human beings in most Chinese landscape paintings appear to be small in size and sometimes insignificant, because human beings are only parts of the immense nature. Guo Xi (郭熙1020–1090) Early Spring (早春1072) (Fig. 11.2) exemplifies the relationship between human being and nature. The mountains, trees and rivers in the brushwork are not realistically drawn, but abstractly represented. On the other hand, Western landscape painting, according to Kenneth Clark, does not have as long a history as the Chinese. “It is only in the seventeenth century that great artists take up painting for its own sake, and try to systematize the rules. Only in the nineteenth century does it become the dominant art, and create a new aesthetic of its own.”1 Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog in 1818 (Fig. 11.3) is a complete contrast to the Chinese landscape painting. The centrality of the human being in the composition is dominant. It reflects one significant Western view over nature in the period of romanticism, that nature can be known, studied and subsequently changed by human knowledge. 1  Kenneth Clark, quoted in Edward Casey, Representing Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 5.

11  Re-presenting Earthscape: Towards a Phenomenology of Aerial Photographic Art Fig. 11.2  Guo Xi Early Spring (11th Century) (in Public domain)

Fig. 11.3  Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818 [in public domain]

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In spite of all the differences between Western and Chinese landscape paintings, the idea of landscape seems to be the same: “The landscape, in short, is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view on our surroundings. And it is within the context of this attentive imagination gets to work in fashioning ideas about it. For the landscape, to borrow a phrase from Merleau-Ponty, is not so much the object as the ‘homeland of our thought.’”2 Indeed the world cum nature in which we encounter everyday is through a creative imagination re-presented as landscape, an attentive perspective to be in the world. So is the case when the world cum nature is re-presented in landscape photography. Though photography is commonly considered as a record of capturing reality by the camera, it is indeed a naïve assumption to believe reality so experienced in a particular moment is simply recorded. The photographer, whether consciously or unconsciously, applies a particular perspective in taking the picture. Landscape photography, like its counterpart in painting, has become a significant genre in photography. In Landscape as Photograph, Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth LindquistCock says in the introduction: “Landscape is a construct. Like nature, what we call landscape is defined by our vision and interpreted by our minds…that landscape construed as the phenomenological world does not exist: landscape can only be symbolic.”3 Since the invention of photography, the criticism that photography is not an art has been argued and debated. It is assumed that taking a photo in a split second can never be compared with the time consumed in painting. Obviously, the products, i.e., a painting and a photo, are in the end ontologically the same as the image-thing. Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock further elaborates the similarities rather than the differences between painting and photography in landscape: “Our argument is that the aesthetic may enter into image-making where it is at least expected. What surprised us during the research and writing of the text were the similarities in conceptualization shared by painting and photography, and the metaphysical ideologies which inform both media. Both painting and photography produced what were called ‘views,’ and for us the term “landscape” is a convenient rubric which s­ ubsumes the term “views”. It seems almost self-evident that a view can be aesthetic as a landscape, and that a landscape must be considered in the widest possible context.”4 Ansel Adams’ masterpiece Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico5 aptly illustrates the aesthetics in landscape photography. Surely the world would never appear in black and white, but the photo elicits a poetic serenity and beauty, which re-presents the feeling and idea of Adams in his encounter with this scenery in 1941. Jussim  Tim Inglod, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 207. 3  Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, Landscape as Photograph (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. xiv. 4  Ibid., p. xv. 5  For the photo please see:Ansel Adams, Moonrise, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moonrise,_ Hernandez,_New_Mexico.jpg 2

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concludes her chapter “Landscape as Artistic Genre” as follows: “The landscape photograph, like poetry, seeks to convey not only feeling but idea; regardless of whether it has as its content things not human, the human interpretation will always govern its meanings.”6 Here the difference between painting and photography does not lie in the image-­ thing or image-object, but rather the ontological status of the image-subject.7 The artist can create any image out of sheer imagination onto the canvas. The mystical figures in Dali’s surrealistic paintings do not exist. The mountain in Paul Cezanne’s landscape painting does not necessarily correspond to the “real” mountain in Provence. However, photography is different. It must begin with the absolute given. The Moonrise was taken by Adam himself as he encountered and experienced the “real” scenery in Mexico in a definite moment in 1941. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes asserts the absolute given as the ontological ground of photography, in contradistinction to painting where the given world is not necessarily a condition of the image-subject. Barthes says: “I called ‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it. Discourse combines signs which have references, of course, but these referents can be and are most often ‘chimeras’. Contrary to these imitations, in Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there. There is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past. And since this constraint exists only for photography, we must consider it, by reduction, as the very essence, the noema of Photography…The name of Photography’s noema will therefore be: ‘That-has-been’ or again: the Intractable.”8 It is exactly because of this noema that photography is more akin to phenomenology than other arts. Both phenomenology and photography begin with the “thing-­ itself,” the absolute givenness of experience. While the task of phenomenology is to describe the structures of conscious lived-experiences, photography is to re-present the perceived world in the experience at a given moment as the image. The creativity of the photography lies in the “how” to re-present according to the form, lines, contrast and composition aesthetically.  Ibid., p. 18.  On the meaning of image-thing, image-object and image-subject, I am indebted to Professor Rudolf Bernet’s lecture “Phenomenological Approach to Painting” given in Symposia Phaenmenologica Asistica 2012, a master class in phenomenology for young Asian scholars organized by the Edwin Cheng Foundation Asian Centre for Phenomenology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 8  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 77. In a similar vein, Susan Sontag says, “Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)—a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.” Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p 154. 6 7

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So much for a general discussion on landscape painting and photography in relation to phenomenology. Now we have to come to “aerial photographic art” and “earthscape”.

11.2  Aerial Photographic Art Aerial photographic art did not really exist before the advent of modern flight and photography in the twentieth century. This genre refers to photography that represents the landscape from above, first from hot air balloon and later from jet planes. Of course, aerial photography is first of all important to geography, cartography and meteorology that relate to know the changing of the earth surface and its surrounding atmosphere. Such perception of the earth from above has important applications in climatic, economic and military activities and environmental concern. However, the world as seen from above—not just from the so-called bird-eye-view, but from 10,000 feet and more, a height at which no bird can fly—fascinates many artists. The Russian painter, Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935), one of the chief exponents of Suprematism, is reported to have described aerial landscape as “a genuinely new and radicalizing paradigm in the art of the twentieth century. In his view, air travel, and more specifically, aerial photography, had created this broad change in consciousness.”9 In his Suprematist Painting: Aeroplane Flying (Fig. 11.4), Malevich reduces the landscape seen below into abstract geometric forms of colors. The difference between traditional landscape painting and aerial landscape art lies apparently in the vertical views of the artist. Instead of looking upwards to mountains and the sky, the artist looks downwards from the sky. Hence there is neither infinite regression of perspective nor any view of horizon or sky, because it is a view from the sky. Other aerial landscape artists, such as Jane Frank,10 Yvonne Jacquette,11 Richard Diebenkorn12 or Georgia O’Kefee13 re-present aerial landscape in an abstract manner.14

 “Aerial Photographic Art”, in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_landscape_art   Cf. Jane Frank, Ledge of Light, 1974, http://www.wikipaintings.org/en/jane-frank/ ledge-of-light-1974 11  Cf. Yvonne Jacquette, Lake Triptych, 2003, http://www.dcmooregallery.com/artists/ yvonne-jacquette#13 12  Cf. Richard Diebenkorn: ‘Ocean Park No.129’, 1984, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_ Diebenkorn%27s_painting_%27Ocean_Park_No.129%27.jpg 13  CF. Georgia O’Keefee, It was Blue and Green, 1960, http://amica.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/ detail/AMICO~1~1~125281~66228:It-Was-Blue-and-Green?sort=INITIALSORT_CRN%2COC S%2CAMICOID&qvq=q:AMICOID%3DWMAA.77.1.37%2B;sort:INITIALSORT_CRN%2CO CS%2CAMICOID;lc:AMICO~1~1&mi=0&trs=1 14  Cf. Margret Dreikausen, Aerial Perception: The Earth as Seen from Aircraft and Spacecraft and Its Influence on Contemporary Art (Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, 1985), pp. 22–27. 9

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Fig. 11.4 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Painting: Aeroplane Flying, 1915 [should be in public domain]

Fig. 11.5  Earthrise, December 24, 1968 [in public domain]

The world as it appears in aerial photography has indeed changed the way that we look at our earth. The very first photos of the earth seen from space taken by the American astronauts, the Earthrise (1968, Fig. 11.5) and later The Blue Marble (1972, Fig. 11.6) represent a “Copernican revolution” in which “humans for the first

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Fig. 11.6  The Blue Marble, December 7, 1972 [in public domain]

time saw themselves as ‘Riders on the Earth,’ forced to recognized the spatial and environmental limitations imposed by their ‘home planet’.”. (Figs. 11.5 and 11.6)15 The earth, on which we have firmly stood since time immemorial, has suddenly become an object of appreciation. We are above the sky, in deep space and the earth looks like the moon that is moving around us in the sky. However, Adam’s Moonrise was taken on the plain of Mexico where the moon shines on the small village; whereas in the Earthrise, the earth is seen arising on the arid dessert of the cold moon, devoid of culture and human activities. Though most of us as earthlings have never encountered the earth as the American astronauts did, we are still fascinated by the color and the form of our earth. Yet this earth seems to be too far away. We can never see such views of the earth because space travel is not available to us up till now. However, air travel has been very common in our life today. Recently, aerial photographic art, taken from a helicopter or jet-plane, has become a genre of art. In particular, the works of Emmet Gowin,16 Yann Arthus-Bertrand,17 Klaus D. Francke,18 and Bernhard Edmaier19 have illustrated the beauty of the earth. But they all have a kind of moral message relating to environmental concern embedded in the photographs. According to Arthus-Bertrand, “the indissociable collection of

 Denis Cosgrove and William L. Fox, Photography and Flight (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), p. 86. 16  See Emmet Gowin, Changing the Earth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 17  See Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Earth from Above (Paris: Altitude, 2001). 18  See Klaus D. Francke, The Earth as Art (München: Bucher Verlag, 2007). 19  See Bernhard Edmaier, Earthsong (London: Paidon Press, 2004). 15

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photographs and texts that accompany and complete them, invite each of us to think about the changes in the planet and the future of its inhabitants…. This work [Earth from Above] underlines the fact that, more than ever, our present levels and styles of consumption, production and exploitation of resources are not viable over the long term.”20 Hence, apart from appreciating this photograph Arthus-Bertrand comments: “Village close to the island of Panducan, Philippines…. The deposits of sediment, left by the withdrawal of fixing vegetation, are also devastating. Close to 70% of all coral reefs to Philippines have been damaged.”21 For Arthus-Bertand, the aerial ­photographs, in spite of the aesthetic appeal, serve only mainly as tools to awaken the sense of preserving the earth from pollution and exploitation. But to Emmet Gowin, the landscape photography has a deeper meaning than an environmental moral message. His black and white aerial photography delivers a sense of awesome feeling in us that is partly destitute and lonely. Though in essence, the drastic ways that humans did to the earth are still concern for Gowin, he definitely has a more reflective awareness towards aerial landscape photography. He said, “In a landscape photograph, both the mind and heart need to find their proper place. Before the landscape we look for an invitation to stand without premeditation. It is always, in some sense, our home. At times, we may also look for an architecture of light and a poetry of atmosphere which welcomes the eye into a landscape of natural process. It may also be the map—the evidence of the thing itself; may it also, always be a vision of the double world—the world of appearances and the invisible world all at once. Even when the landscape is greatly disfigured or brutalized, it is always deeply animated from within. When one really sees an awesome, vast, and terrible place, we tremble at the feelings we experience as our sense of wholeness is reorganized by what we see. The heart seems to withdraw and the body seems always to diminish. At such a moment, our feelings reach for an understanding. This is the gift of a landscape photograph, that the heart finds a place to stand.”22 As noted by Denis Cosgrove, Gowin seeks beauty in cultural and natural patterns, especially in large-scale human destruction of nature, e.g., the atomic bomb craters in Nevada dessert. He creates “uncommonly beautiful prints of sublimely ugly environmental depredations.”23 Aerial photographic art, compared with other genres in photography such as photojournalism or portrait photography, is apparently still considered a subsidiary branch of landscape photography. Here I propose that the distinction of aerial photographic art lies in the differentiation of the idea of “earthscape” from “landscape.” A phenomenological description is appropriate to clarify these two concepts.

 Arthus-Bertrand, Earth from Above, p. 6.  Ibid., p. 164. 22  Gowin, Changing the Earth, p(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p.4. 23  Cosgrove and Fox, Photography and Flight, p. 111. 20 21

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11.3  The Idea of Earthscape In “Mapping the Earth in Works of Art,” Edward Casey defines “-scapes” as “a bounded view of a scene of some sort. It is place or region seen from somewhere by a looking body, a somebody who is acting on his or her epistemophiliac interest, a curiosity about and a wish to know better the surrounding world.”24 Accordingly, “Earthscape is the earth construed under a certain aspect, its detotalized totality as viewed from somewhere in particular, or else in a representation that depicts it in terms of a region or set of place.”25 Casey is of course not particularly interested in aerial photographic art but in the relationship between “earth” and “world” as in artistic and mapping representation. Nevertheless, Casey’s idea of “earthscape” can be a good starting point for my phenomenological discussion. Earthscape in my context is a photographic image of the earth taken from above at the window seat of a commercial airplane, which normally travels at the base of the stratosphere with an altitude of over 35,000 feet. In landscape painting or photography, we stand on our feet to appreciate the landscape in front of us. The earth does not move, it is the Original-Ark of our perception. Even though we can climb up to the highest mountain (Peak XV of Mount Everest at 29,002 ft.) to look at the surrounding landscape, we still plant our feet firmly on the ground. We move on the ground, whether on foot or by other means. We perceive the world through my bodily presence by touching the ground. The trees and rivers in front of us are not objects just to be seen and heard but also to be touched by our body. The landscape and my body are present in the same space and time at the moment of my appreciation. However, when I sit on the window seat in the airplane, the relationship between the space inside the airplane and the vast and open space outside is completely different from that on the ground. I am floating in the high air and the experience of the open earth down below through the window is limited only to a visual one. The inside space is confined and constrained but safe, whereas the outside is vast and unlimited. The outside earth cannot be touched. In fact, at this high level, all things on the ground have lost their individual identities. Trees become patches of green; rivers are thick and thin lines; mountains are folded shapes of irregular contours; fields are rectangular or square forms; buildings, if recognized, are only dots on earth. Certainly we are aware of the Google-map, which shows the earth in its geological form from the satellite with exact presentation. But the function of Google-map is to show location geographically. The earth seen from the window has no national boundary drawn, no name given to rivers and to mountain ranges. Though the airplane is flying at a normal velocity of over 550 miles per hour, we do not feel the speed inside while the outside earth seems to recede slowly in the opposite direction of the plane. The vast and open earth looks familiar because we know there are mountains and rivers, but at the same time it is  Edward Casey, “Mapping the Earth in Works of Art”, in Bruce V. Foltz & Robert Frodeman, eds. Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), p. 264. 25  Ibid., p. 265. 24

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strange and distant because we do not know exactly where we are.26 If we are not kept inside the airplane, none of us can survive for a moment at such a height with minus 50 degree Celsius. Hence the earth is in principle not directly given in body as totality except perceived visually through sight. We are separated by the inside and outside space confined in the airplane. Furthermore, my seeing of the earth depends on various conditions: the direction of sunlight, the time of the day, cloud conditions, and humidity. A clear view of the earth does not necessarily and often come by; and it is sometimes pure chance that we can experience a clear sight. I am not looking at the Google-map like earth, but experiencing the ever changing but slowly moving earth from above.

11.4  Re-presenting Earthscape Casey further elaborates the idea of earthscape as follows: Characterizing every earthscape is its sheer stability, the sense that it will remain after any experience or representation of it; the bearing up of the earth under our living and looking bodies, its always being under foot; the earth-arc: not the horizon but the receding of earth as it recedes toward the horizon from the place where we are viewing it; a factor of closure, whereby it always reaches a more or less determinate end, whether effected by the horizon or by the limit of a region; and its sheer materiality, as this presents itself in the form of mega-things such as mountains or miniscule items such as bushes.27

Photographing the earth from above is re-presenting earthscape. However, such re-­ presentation does not intend simply to take a snapshot of the scenery down below, but to present a conscientious ‘framing’ of the earth through the camera to form an image. The aim is not to re-produce a geological image of the earth. It is to re-­ present the earth into an aesthetic work of earthscape. The earth in the earthscape will lose all the geographical reality. Photographic seeing is a kind of phenomenological seeing in the sense that the image-subject is framed according to the intentional meanings bestowed onto the perceived world.28 It is, as Casey mentioned above, a process of “detotalized totality”. Photographic framing is the act of delimiting the vast open earth through the viewfinder of the camera into a limited space. In fact, it is a freezing of time and space at that particular visual experience, the “decisive moment” of Cartier-Bresson. Hence photographic framing, borrowing the terminology of phenomenology, is a reduction, which is immediately coupled with construction. Photographic construction is to construe and compose the image-­ subject according to the aesthetic motives, i.e., geometric forms, lines, contrast.  Of course the exact location can be informed by the pilot or the flight map in front of our seat, but our concern here is not so much precision in geographical location. 27  Casey, “Mapping the Earth in Works of Art”, p. 265. 28  For a fuller discussion on photographic and phenomenological seeing, please refer to the chapter “Phenomenology and Photography: On Seeing Photographs and Photographic Seeing”, in Chanfai Cheung, Kairos: Phenomenology and Photography (Hong Kong: Edwin Cheng Foundation Asian Centre for Phenomenology, 2009), pp. 2–9. 26

Part III

Logic of Sensibility

Chapter 12

How Much Logos Is There in Aisthesis? Aristotle’s Phenomenology of Perception Emmanuel Alloa

Abstract  Over the course of the history of philosophy, very different answers have been given to the question regarding the relationship between ‘logos’ and ‘aisthesis’. If ‘logos’ is taken to be tantamount to conceptual propositionality, sensible experience (‘aisthesis’) is both been declared totally non-propositional and sometimes wholly consistent with propositionality. In a first step, the paper aims at clarifying the position of Husserl’s phenomenology on this point, explicating the sense of this project of an analysis of the “logos of the aesthetic world”. In a second step, the paper argues that striking similarities can be found between Husserl’s own project and Aristotle’s inquiry into the structure of ‘aisthesis’. In a third and slightly provocative move, the paper explains why there are good reasons to consider that Aristotle should be read as a proto-phenomenologist, and that his work ‘De anima’ (On the Soul) is, for the most part, a phenomenology of perception. The main claim will be that the where Aristotle and phenomenology converge is on the fact that the structure of predication is inconmensurable to the structure of phenomenality.

12.1  Husserl and the “Logos of the Aesthetic World” At a time when many of his contemporaries were stressing that philosophical problems were essentially linguistic problems (from Gottlob Frege to the members of the Vienna Circle) , Edmund Husserl sought on the contrary—and seemingly against all odds—to redeem phenomenal intuition. Anschaulichkeit or “intuitiveness,” anyhow, became the basic principle of phenomenological investigation. In the lecture series The Idea of Phenomenology, held in the summer of 1907, Husserl pushes this conception so far as to consider that self-given intuition has to be kept free, as far as

E. Alloa (*) University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_12

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possible, from discursive framings, which would inevitably alter its nature. In a striking comparison, he underpins the proximity of the phenomenological eye with the artistic, and even the mystic, gaze: as little understanding as possible, as much pure intuition as possible (intuitio sine comprehensione). Indeed, we are here reminded of the speech of the mystics when they describe the intellectual act of seeing that contains no discursive knowledge.1

Husserl hence goes on, and gives out an advice that was to become famous: “The whole trick here is to let the seeing eye have its say.”2 But, if we look at the original phrasing, rather than in a “trick,” phenomenology consists in an “art” (Kunst): “Die ganze Kunst besteht darin, rein dem schauenden Auge das Wort zu lassen.” A more faithful, yet undoubtedly less elegant, translation would thus read: “The whole art consists in letting only the seeing eye have its say”. Nonetheless—and this is probably the significant point about this famous claim—Husserl is not sanctioning a precinct of pure opticality devoid of any linguistic contamination. The “seeing eye” (das schauende Auge) does not merely register a sensuous data-stream; it is as such always already expressive. Hence Husserl’s curious formula: dem schauenden Auge das Wort lassen, “having the seeing eye having its say” or, more literally even, “giving the floor to the eye.” Interestingly, a similar, yet inversed characterization, is to be found in Merleau-Ponty, who says that the task of phenomenology is to “show by words” (faire voir par les mots).3 In a sense, what Husserl is stressing could be rephrased as follows: rather than a faire voir par les mots (“showing by words”) the aim is faire parler par les yeux (“speaking through the eye”). That is why it would be rather meaningless to oppose a philosophy of intuition to a philosophy of language; phenomenology is not a phenomenalism—as Heidegger has diligently insisted upon—but has the question of logos in its core.4 But what kind of logos is the phenomenological one? Which then is the logos corresponding to the phainomenon? According to Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, in his later work, became more and more aware of the crucial importance of the logos of the phenomenon and the interwovenness of the two dimensions. In 1951, Merleau-Ponty writes: When the recognition of the life-world, and thus too of language as we live it, becomes characteristic of phenomenology, as it does in [Husserl’s] last writings, this is only a more resolute way of saying that philosophy does not possess the truth about language and the world from the start, but is rather the recuperation and first formulation of a Logos scattered out in our world and our life and bound to their concrete structures–that “Logos of the aesthetic world” already spoken of in the Formal and Transcendental Logic5

1  Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Hua II, ed. W.  Biemel, 2nd ed, Den Haag: Nijhoff 1976, p. 62 (trans. The Idea of Phenomenology, Lee Hardy, Springer 1990, p. 45–47). 2  Ibid., p. 62 (modified translation, P. 47). 3  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, p. 319 (trans. The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern 1968, p. 266.) 4  Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1993, § 7 (Being and Time, trans. John McQuarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell 1962). 5  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes, Paris, Gallimard, 1960, p. (trans. The Philosopher and Sociology, in: Signs, Evanston: Northwestern 1964, p. 105).

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Yet, the meaning of this “Logos of the aesthetic world,” so often quoted by Merleau-­ Ponty and by many after him, is far from being transparent. Merleau-Ponty himself has given an interpretation of his own, also qualifying this logos as “tacit” or “mute,” a kind of “conceptless presentation of Being.”6 Rather than following this post-Husserlian line with Merleau-Ponty and asking how a phenomenology of perception led to a more general and ontological investigation of the immanent logos of the sensible, which I’ve done elsewhere,7 I would like—in the framework of this conference on Logos and Aisthesis—to move backwards, in the sense of what Husserl called the Rückfrage, the “rearward questioning.” Husserl himself occasionally stressed the propinquity between phenomenology and aesthetics, and in particular in the letter he wrote to Hugo von Hofmannsthal.8 Yet many readers looking for an ambitious confrontation with poetry of art were often left with a sense of frustration, and it has to be said that his thinking hardly offers much substance for any consistent aesthetics, let alone a philosophy of art. Husserl’s understanding of aesthetics was not so much an artistic one, as for Merleau-Ponty, but rather moved in the wake of Alexander Baumgarten’s and Kant’s aesthetics, referring back to the first meaning of the word aesthetics as the domain of aesthesis or sensation. This linkage becomes particularly evident when, in the conclusion to the Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl evokes the “logos of the aesthetic world” as being the true object of a thoroughly renewed “transcendental aesthetics.”9 Unlike Kant, the object of Husserl’s transcendental aesthetics is not to investigate the a priori structure of intuition preceding experience, but to investigate the form of a “possible world as a world given in ‘pure experience’,” preceding the formal objectivations of science.10 Accordingly, there seem to be two kinds of logoi, as it were: one is the logos which Husserl also calls the logos “in the ‘higher’ sense” and the other is that which corresponds to science. Traditionally associated with objectivity, its rules can be formulated in terms of assertive judgments (e.g., every time q is the case, r will be true, etc.). These assertive judgments are valid independently of the context of their sensible (phonatory, corporeal, scriptural) utterance, and they must

6  Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’esprit, Paris: Gallimard, 1964, p. 71 (“Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie, Evanston: Northwestern UP 1964, p. 182). 7  See my Resistance of the Sensible World, New York: Fordham 2017, chapter IV as well as, more specifically on the relationship of logos and aisthesis in Merleau-Ponty: “La parole oblique. Merleau-Ponty et les enjeux d’une éthique de l’indirect,” in Phainomenon. Revista de Fenomenologia 18 (2011), p. 157–174. 8  Edmund Husserl, “Brief an von Hofmannsthal, 12. I.1907,” in: Husserliana Dokumente vol. III: Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz, eds Karl and Elisabeth Schuhmann, Dordrecht u.a.: Springer 1994, p.  133–136. See also Edmund Husserl, “Ein Husserlmanuskript uber Ästhetik” (1906), ed. G. Scaramuzza and K. Schuhmann, in: Husserl Studies 7/3 (1990), p. 165–177. 9  Edmund Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (1929), ed. Paul Janssen, Hua XVII, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974, p. 256–258 (Formal and transcendental logic, trans. Dorion Cairns, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978, p. 291–293). 10  Ibid., p. 256 (trans. p. 292).

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be, as their validity only stems from their context-independent repeatability. As it will be quite obvious, the Torricelli law of outpouring fluids didn’t wait for Evangelista Torricelli’s formulation of it in the year 1643 to produce tangible results in the empirical world, nor did apples wait for Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravitational laws to fall from their tree. This is why scientific discoveries are literally dis-­ coveries: they consist in bringing to light something that was there all along. In a sense, the logic of scientific discoveries isn’t merely a thrust towards the future, but rather consists in the paradox of discovering something that has “always already been the case”: natural laws display a structure tantamount to what Heidegger appropriately termed as the “apriori present perfect” (apriorisches Perfekt). However, says Husserl, these laws do not exhaust the limits of the logos. In the Preparatory Considerations to the Formal and Transcendental Logic, one reads that if we wanted to have the word logos to coincide with “thinking,” then we had to enlarge the scope of thinking beyond assertive propositions: The sense of the world logos leads us predominantly to assertive thinking – judging, in the usual sense of the word – and, correlatively, to judgments as thoughts. But judgment does not embrace all ‘thinking’ […]11

Addressing thinking in the “broadest” possible term means to posit a logos beneath the logos, a somehow pre-logic ordering which will receive the name of “logos of the aesthetic world.” The higher-level logos—that of scientific objectivity—is “founded on the logos of the aesthetic world,” and from this deeper logos the other one “rises.”12 What Husserl does not seem to be aware of, though, is that his conception of transcendental aesthetics as genetic emergence of ideality is not radically new, but rather restates, if in other terms, a certain thinking of sensible emergence in Greek conceptions of the soul. Such a thinking of continuous emergence, needless to say, is quite at odds with a Kantian framework of the a priori and has many similarities with the thinking of the sensible faculties Aristotle outlines in his treaty On the Soul (De anima). Husserl himself seems to have been totally unaware of this fact, and rather claimed his affiliation to Plato: “My life and that of Plato’s are one. I continue his life’s work, the unity of his efforts is an element of my own efforts; his striving, his will, his designs perpetuate themselves within my own”.13 What Husserl failed to see himself, Martin Heidegger understood with all the more lucidity, and that is the fact that a deep affinity runs between the Aristotelian thinking of aisthesis and Husserl’s phenomenology of the sensible world.14 However, Husserl himself later

 Ibid., p. 17(trans. p. 19).  Ibid., p. 257 (trans. p. 292). 13  Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928, Hua XIV, ed. Iso Kern, Den Haag, Nijhoff, 1973, p. 198. 14  Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Marburg Lecture Winter Semester 1923/24, GA 17, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994 (Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005). 11 12

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underscored in a conversation with Dorion Cairns that he had the sense that Heidegger’s own interpretation of Aristotle was but an attempt to “reading back into Aristotle of an answer to a question which first arose in Husserl’s philosophy”.15 In recent scholarship, various attempts have been made to identify the affinities between Husserl and Aristotle, especially in terms of his first philosophy, and his science of logics.16 In what follows, I shall try to argue that Aristotle is not only the thinker who consolidated in his Organon and his Rhetorics the rules of the objective logos, but that his thinking of the faculties of soul seems to anticipate in a peculiar way the phenomenological idea of a “logos of the aesthetic world.”17

12.2  Apophantic Logic and Phenomenal Logic In which ways thus can Aristotle’s philosophy be said to be phenomenological, i.e., in which ways is its logos one that makes phenomena appear for themselves? In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl had posited his own analysis of judgment in a continuity with Aristotle’s analysis of “apophantic” speech, i.e., “predicative assertive statements” or simply “judgments.”18 In a strictly etymological sense, however, the apophansis in “apophantic” speech manifests a close connection to phenomena. Heidegger has stressed this aspect by recalling that Aristotle’s first determination of the logos is that of apophansis: of “making manifest in the sense of letting something be seen by pointing it out” (im Sinne des aufweisenden Sehenlassens).19 As a matter of fact, phainomenon and apophansis both stem from the root ∗pha which gave words such as phos, “light,” and phaino, “shine forth” or “appear.” Even the verb “to speak,” phêmi, still bears witness to this dimension of phenomenal manifestation.

 Dorion Cairns, Conversations with Husserl and Fink, Den Haag: Nijhoff, 1976, p. 5.  Among others, see Pierre Rodrigo, Aristote, l’eidétique et la phénoménologie, Grenoble: J. Millon, 1995; Richard Cobb-Stevens, “Aristotelian Nous in Husserl’s Philosophy,” The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy, ed. Ricardo Pozzo, Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2004, pp. 231–247; Robert Sokolowski, “How Aristotle and Husserl Differ on First Philosophy,” in Life, Subjectivity & Art, eds. R.  Breeur and U.  Melle, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2012, 1–28; James Dodd, “Aristotle and Phenomenology,” Phenomenology in a New Key - Between Analysis and History, eds. J. Bloechl and N. de Warren, Dordrecht: Springer, 2015, 181–207;; Pavlos Kontos, ‘Aristotle in Phenomenology’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. D. Zahavi, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, p. 5–25. 17  What follows is just a brief sketch, with references reduced to the minimum, of some aspects of my attempt of a reconstruction of Aristotle’s thinking of the sensible in Das durchscheinende Bild. Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie, Berlin/Zurich: diaphanes, 2011 (2018 revised edition), Part II (English translation forthcoming). 18  Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik, p. 53. (Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 48). 19  Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1993, p. 33 (Being and Time, trans. John McQuarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell 1962, p. 56). 15 16

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But in spite of all the insistence on manifestation, in Aristotle logics, the logos apophantikos is not merely “letting something be seen.” Rather, it is rigorously defined as “letting something be seen as something,” thus allowing for its ­identification. Rather than its visualizing, sensible moment, the apophantic discourse is characterized by its assertive as-structure: saying something is saying something about something (ti kata tinos legein) as something. By attributing an identity or a quality to something, a statement is made that, as such, contains a claim of truth. If man is the only animal capable of logos, as Aristotle affirms (Politics 1253a8), he is thus the only animal capable of speaking the truth. But the possibility of speaking the truth goes hand in hand with the possibility of error: by affirming that the sun is setting, we may affirm something wrong with respect to the object as object (On interpretation 16b33-17a33). A word alone does not have a truth value of its own; saying “centaur” is not yet an assertion. If we say “the centaur is,” it “exists,” then only by the conjunction with a predicate does an assertive value come about (16a16–18). Apophantic discourse with its two modalities, apophasis and its counterpart kataphasis, i.e., attributing a quality to an object or denying that object a quality, affirmation, and negation, thus inaugurates the space of distinction, operation through dissociation and conjunction, dihairesis and synthesis (16a12). But as we shall see in a short while, dissociation and conjunction are not restricted to apophantic discourse. Or, put differently, distinguishing is not solely a prerogative of judgment. In order to approach this non-propositional mode of distinction, we will proceed coming from two ways: on the one hand (a) it shall be demonstrated why, for Aristotle, logos has a semantic extension much broader than judgment, and on the other hand (b) it shall be argued why Aristotle considers that a characteristic frequently attributed to logos—that of abstraction—is already inherent to the sensible. (a) Why logos exceeds judgment Aristotle begins his analysis of logos in On Interpretation (De interpretatione) by dissecting the mechanisms of apophantic logos, but he quickly admits that not every logos has an apophantic—that is: a veritative—structure. The sentence “I wish I were king” belongs to speech without any doubt, yet it does not claim anything about how things are out there in the world. The prayer “is a logos, but neither true nor false” (17a4), and the same goes for many other non-indicative modes of the logos, which proceed in modes expressing an interrogation, a request, a preference, or a hypothesis. Yet, if these logoi are not claims about a state of things—about pragmata—they do, however, have a logical consistency of their own: when someone expresses an inclination or a wish, this preference or wish has an internal coherence, which as such remains unaffected by my approval or dissent. Whether I like it or not, I cannot seriously contest a preference; I must take it as it is. Expressing a desire is thus to manifest something that, at first, escapes judgment: it is made manifest without being immediately transposable into meaning or interpretation. It is not always possible to justify a preference or an inclination (that which the Greeks call enklisis), and yet it has a cogency or, if we prefer, a “logics” of its own. This is why the Latin rendering of the logos as ratio (“reason”) inevitably misses the breadth of the term. As it is well known, although it progressively consolidated itself in phi-

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losophy as standing for the process of giving a reasonable account (logon didonai), the logos also stands for a more general legein: “gathering” and “laying out,” be it in musical, geometrical, or choreographic compositions, rhythmical orderings that display their own structure. Even before being a philosophical term, logos is central in music, dance, and mathematics.20 It is noteworthy that both Plato and Aristotle describe logos in terms of “manifestation,” as dêlômata (Sophistes 261e5) or as epi to dêloun (Politics 1253b14). Interestingly enough, though, this “delotic” dimension of manifestation transgresses the boundaries of human speech, given that, according to Aristotle, even animals are capable of manifesting meaning, albeit in a non-conceptual way. This also somehow displaces the traditional equation between man, language, and reason. For although Aristotle had stated that man is the animal that possesses logos, the most explicit formulation of the anthropological exception is not related to logos, but to a certain kind of aisthesis, that of moral feelings: Only one thing is specific to men as opposed to the other animals: the fact that they alone have the perception [aisthêsin echein] of good, bad, right, wrong and the rest (Politics 1253a15–17).

Morals are not just a matter of rational judgment, but also of moral sentiments, which allow for distinctions; on the other hand, animals have, although defined as alogon, the capacity for dêlôsis, for “manifestation,” says Aristotle in On interpretation (16a28) while in his studies of animal life, he seems to consider that birds are capable of communicating among themselves (History of animals 618b16). Not only speech can signify (semainein) and certainly not only propositional speech. If twentieth century philosophy—and phenomenology in particular—has rediscovered the non-judgmental forms of experience, such a reappraisal is thus only anti-­ Aristotelian in part. If it is the case that human logos and the possibilities of judgment about good and bad that it entails go hand in hand with a certain feeling—aisthesis—of right and wrong, then, at the least, it is the long-standing opposition of the sensible and the intelligible, of the aisthêta and the noêta—the divide which runs from Parmenides to Scholasticism, from Neoplatonism to Kant—that finds itself undermined from the start, and the notion of logos that appears enlarged far beyond the scope of linguistic concepts.21 As Aristotle shall state in his treatise On the Soul, the senses, too, are a kind of logos (426b4). If, in other words, for Aristotle logos reaches out towards sensible manifestation, then inversely a process of abstraction is inherent to sensible life as such. This is what shall now be outline in a kind of bottom-up procedure, starting from the lowest faculties of the soul and progressively climbing all the way up to thinking.

20  See Johannes Lohmann, Musiké und Logos: Aufsätze zur griechischen Philosophie und Musiktheorie, Stuttgart: Musikwissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft 1970. 21  It is significant that the alleged inventor of modern aesthetics, A. G. Baumgarten, rather fortified than invalidated the divide between the aisthêta and the noêta. “The noêta are the object of Logic while the aisthêta are the object of the epistemê aisthêtikê, in other words: of Aesthetics” (Meditationes philosophicae de nonnulis ad poema pertinentibus (1735), CXVI).

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(b) Why aisthesis is abstraction In order to grasp why abstraction sets in way before discursive thinking, one must return one more time to the apophantic logos. As mentioned before, the notion is usually rendered as a discourse “stating something about something.” But the preposition apo- in apophansis does not only mean “about”, it also means “(away) from.” An interesting double and somewhat contradictory movement is thus operative at the core of apophantic logos. Heidegger reads this “twofold” apo- as corresponding respectively to affirmation (kataphasis) and denial (apophasis): to affirm is to predicate something about something, and to deny is to take a predicate away from something.22 But there is yet another possible reading, which sets in on an earlier level, preceding the alternative of affirmative and negative discourse. In order to say something about something, that about which we talk must be already identifiable so receive further qualifications can be received; in other words, S must be singled out as S in order to predicated p. In order to talk about a thing, it must appear as a thing and thus determine itself (chôrizein) on the prospect of an undifferentiated (aoriston) ground. A key idea of Aristotle’s conception of the sensible is that of medial spacing: in situation of direct contiguity of the sentient organ and the sensed object, this dimensional differentiation does not take place. Distance is not a hindrance, but a condition of aisthesis: if a colored object were placed right on the eye, we would not see it at all (On the Soul 419a12–13). Without depth of the sensory field, nothing will appear in it.23 In a similar fashion, we might imagine the double movement implied in the apophansis, towards and away: that which is talked about recedes and becomes thus identifiable as an object. Hence, apophansis is indeed a demonstrative discourse, as it is a literal de-monstratio, that is, it supposes that the discursive instance moves away from what it refers back to. Accordingly, the abstractive moment of apophantic discourse cannot be opposed to sensory perception; it may well be that the earlier becomes intelligible on the backdrop of the latter. What does that mean? It has usually been claimed that what makes for the truth value of apophantic discourse is the possibility of its decontextualization. Its significance is “abstracted” from the momentary situation, allowing for its repeatability. This not only applies to mathematical truths such as “2 + 2 = 4,” but also assertions like “it rains,” which can stated by a multitude of speakers. Aisthesis, on the contrary, supposes a certain unrepeatability. Because of its extension (megethos), the place a body fills will never be occupied by another, hence the absolute singularity of its sensorial intuition. What the senses provide the soul with is only always “particular” (hekaston) and cannot be generalized. Are we authorized to infer from this fact that aisthesis defies any abstraction?

 Heidegger, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, p. 23 (trans. p. 17).  For a more detailed account of these implications, as well as further textual references, see Alloa, “Metaxy: Aristotle on Mediacy,” Media and Classics, ed. Pantelis Michelakis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, (forthcoming). 22 23

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To answer this question, we first have to come to Aristotle’s notion of abstraction. The word he uses is aphairesis, a compound of apo and hairesis. To abstract is literally to “cut out” something from something else in order to flesh it out, to ­withdraw (abstrahere) in order to draw (trahere) a better picture (again, we witness the double movement, away and towards). Aristotle’s conception of aphairesis notably diverges from Plato’s: the mathematician needs to move away from the given particular sensible, indeed, but without this starting point, no abstraction would be possible. Aristotle ironically mocks the Platonist geometer: can he geometrize the inside of a snub nose by disregarding completely what a snub nose looks like? What would a snub nose “without any flesh” look like (On the Soul 431b14–15)? The mathematician, says Aristotle in Physics II 2, starts with sensory experience, related to place (topos), and then proceeds to take something specific out of his sensory experience in order to generalize it. He thus overlooks the contingencies of the situation; he separates (chôrizein) from the specifically delimitated place (chôra). And yet, even overlooking is still a kind of looking. As a matter of fact, the form has no place as such, like Plato claimed, but not because it is situated in some kind of heaven of ideas, rather, because the form emerges as the result of a process of abstraction. While standard perception is able to distinguish the limits between bodies, taking in a particular constellation, the mathematician, says Aristotle, does not consider the limit of a body (peras) as belonging to this or that other particular physical body (physikou sômatos), but the limit as the limit of a plane as such. The limit is out of place (ouk en topô), because it was taken out of its place. In contrast to the mathematician, the geometer will only radicalize this moment of abstraction, as he will not only “extract” from a given topos or space, but actively “posit” (thesis) a space in phantasia in order to move towards the timeless (aidios) principles of the intellect. Yet, even pure thinking cannot do without images, as Aristotle famously stated (On the Soul 431a16–17). The singling out of the form is not entrusted to mathematics or geometry alone, however, and it begins already on the level of aisthesis, it is even perception’s very definition to “take in the form without matter” (424a17). This entails a specific understanding of “assimilation” as discrimination, which stands in contrast to assimilation as absorption. As a matter of fact, the process of aisthetic distinction can be considered to be the reverse of what it means to have an ailment in the process of nutrition. In the case of the living organism feeding itself, the living being “preserves” itself by taking in food and thus by assimilating matter, undoing it of its form (416b14). In the case of perceptive assimilation, quite the opposite happens: the sensory part of the embodied soul assimilates only the form of the object throughout the distance, without incorporating its matter. As a result, the aesthetic soul (aisthêtikon) proves to be, very literally, a kritikon (432a15–18), not because it would pronounce perceptual judgments, but by virtue of the distinctions it proceeds to within the sensible, as prerequisites to any judgment. As a determining instance, it is itself only loosely determined: like a “wax tablet,” which can receive the imprint of an infinite number of seal rings (see the famous metaphor given which itself

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refers back to Plato),24 the soul can be infinitely rewritten upon, as if permanently becoming a blank slate again, a tabula rasa. By actualizing its capacity of taking up a form, the soul does not lose the capacity to take up any other further form.

12.3  Operating with Gaps: A Logic of Intensification With reason, it has been claimed that Aristotle’s philosophy of matter and form cannot be reduced to a Cartesian opposition between res extensa and res cogitans, between external physical thingness and internal mental content, and that from the onset on, Aristotle’s thinking of aisthesis ruins the categorical opposition of sensible and intelligible. The argumentation for that claim, however, has often been often somewhat problematic, as the rehabilitation of the aisthesis was almost always carried out from the perspective of conceptual apprehension in a kind of top-down procedure to rescue the lower faculties by showing that they, too, already feature conceptual contents. In his treatise, On the Soul, Aristotle seems indeed to identify perception to logos—hê d’aisthêsis ho logos, 426b7—a passage which has invoked some contemporary interpreters to suggest that aisthesis already has the same propositional structure as the concept. Perception would no longer be alogon, as in Plato, but would be a form of the logos among others.25 After centuries of denigration of the senses, the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, and one may wonder whether to qualify the aisthetic as form of conceptuality among others is really doing it a favor. When Aristotle says that sensation (aisthesis) is a kind of legein and even of noein (thinking), this should not mean that aisthesis should be interpreted on the backdrop of the higher faculties, as some critical voices had rightly pointed out.26 It is not that aesthesis is proto-logic, that (to speak with Husserl’s terms) the “logos of the aesthetic world” already has the rudimentary structure of the scientific logos, quite the opposite: the aphairesis of thinking only intensifies the abstraction already at work in aisthesis, as we shall see.

 Aristotle, On the soul 430a and On memory 450b. Plato, Theaetetus, 191c–195b.  Charles Kahn, “The Role of Nous in the Cognition of First Principles in Posterior Analytics II 19,” in Enrico Berti (ed.), Aristotle on Science. The Posterior Analytics, Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium Aristotelicum, Padova: Antenore 1981, p. 385–414. Michel Narcy, “Κρίσις et αἴσθεσις (De anima III, 2)”, in Corps et Ame. Sur le De Anima d’Aristote, ed. G. Romeyer-Dherbey, Paris: Vrin, 1996, p. 239–256. Barbara Cassin, “Enquête sur le logos dans le De anima” in: Corps et âme, ibid., p. 257–293. Jeffrey Barnouw, Propositional Perception. Phantasia, Predication, and Sign in Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, Lanham: University Press of America 2002. 26  Stanford Cashdollar, “Aristotle’s Account of Incidental Perception,” Phronesis 18 (1973), 156– 171. Andrew Barker, “Aristotle on Perception and Ratios,ˮ Phronesis 26 (1981), 248–266. Wolfgang Welsch, Aisthesis. Grundzüge und Perspektiven der Aristotelischen Sinneslehre, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta 1987. Pierre Rodrigo, “Comment dire la sensation? Logos et aisthesis en De Anima, III, 2,ˮ Études phénoménologiques 16 (1992), p. 47–78. Franco Volpi, “Le problème de l’aisthesis chez Aristote,” Études Phénoménologiques 17 (1993), p. 27–49. 24 25

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One of the main arguments for stating that perception is a judgment about a state of affairs is based on Aristotle’s account of practical deliberation. When the animal perceives something either pleasant or painful, it either pursues it or shuns it (431a9–10, 413b21–24). The “pursuit or avoidance in the region of sense corresponds to a logical judgment of affirmation or denial,” Hicks affirmed in 1907, and after him many others, referring to a passage of the Nicomachean Ethics where the animal’s orientation in a sensible world of pleasant and unpleasant things is indeed, in an analogy, compared to the apophasis and the kataphasis of the judging intellect (1139a21).27 But again, it is nothing more than an analogy, as the animal is said to have no intellect (dianoia). In what consists an aesthetic distinction—the krinein—if it shall not amount to a mere prefiguration of the judgmental intellection? Martin Heidegger has given a succinct answer to this question. In the passages of his 1923/24 lecture, which are devoted to Aristotle, he notes that aisthesis “is such a process of offsetting [Abheben] something from something else (distinguishing). In selecting something, what is selected is as such offset from something else (pros allon). Something can be perceived in such a way that, while existing together with others, it is set off from them. The krinein [judging, discriminating] is not formal; rather, in this process of setting something off from others, what is offset becomes accessible and can be grasped as here. This krinein is constitutive not only for aisthesis, but also for noesis.”28 Heidegger hence not only affirms that the specifically aesthetic krinein is not a subclass of judgment, but that, quite the opposite, the judgmental krinein is but one among the possible modes of setting something off from something else. While perception is like logos (hê d’aisthesis ho logos, 426b7) and thinking is eventually described, in the ethical context, as a kind of aisthesis (Nicomachean Ethics VI 5, 1143b5), it would be perfectly misleading to try to reduce one faculty to the other. If one wants to understand Aristotle’s doctrine of faculties, one has to accept the apparent paradox from a modern, post-Kantian point of view that they are both irreducible to one another and interrelated among them. The higher faculties always presuppose the lower ones: while not all animals have the sense of sight or hearing, they all have a sense of touch, which will have its importance in the higher forms of apprehension too; while plants are not capable of locomotion, but have only a nutritive power, all animals capable of locomotion also inevitably have a nutritive power. Higher faculties do not stem from another “source” or “root,” they emergence from the lower sensorial faculties: There is no thinking without images or, more precisely, without phantasmata and the faculty producing those phantasmata—the faculty of phantasia in turn presupposes perception.29 The intelligible forms, too, 27  Robert Drew Hicks, De anima, with translation, introduction and notes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1907, p. 528. 28  Heidegger, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, p.  26 (Introduction to Phenomenological Research, p. 19). 29  On the specifics of imagination in the context of Aristotle’s psychology, see Emmanuel Alloa, “Phantasia. Aristoteles’ Theorie der Sichtbarmachung,ˮ in: Imagination. Suchen und Finden, eds. G. Boehm, E. Alloa, O. Budelacci, G. Wildgruber, Munich: Fink, 2013, p. 91–112.

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“are in the perceptible forms” (en tois aisthetois, 432a3–5) and need to be abstracted from it in a kind of seeing-in, just as the geometer is capable of seeing the pure rectangle in a roughly drawn square. But if all the faculties of the soul are a way of differentiating—including through movement, which is a way of creating depth and thus foregrounding things and having others recede—then aisthesis too is an aphairesis, a capacity of abstraction. That is, aisthesis is not simply registering sense-data, but is already a differential process which, by fleshing out the form, creates holes and gaps in the fabric of the sensible, which the imagination and thinking will only yet deepen. Foregrounding something is thus both a procedure of abstraction and of individuation: the soul makes out what it refers to by setting it off from a background field. Something becomes explicit, comes to the fore, or is thematized, yet the theme does not need to have a conceptual content as perception shows: “The theme is the color itself, grasped with a distinctive emphasis, and set off as such. The critical ‘than’ or ‘as’ [kritische ‘als’] springs forth in the field of perceptibility: blue other than red, blue as not red.”30 The critical—or one could even say, diacritical—nature of perception explains why for Aristotle, aisthesis, when directed to its specific sensible object, is never mistaken: I might be wrong that the blue ball I perceive is a ball, yet I cannot be mistaken that it is blue I perceive. What is at stake here—Heidegger justly underscores it—is the range of the “as-structure” (AlsStruktur) of perception. Aristotle upholds that every perception has an as-structure, that seeing is seeing something. But this “critical as-structure” does not imply a judgmental or “apophantic” as. To see something is to see something as (an individuated) something in contrast to its environment; that is sensibly different, though, than to see something-as-x. No one will contest that I see something blue, only that the blue object that I see is a ball. According to Aristotle, error (pseudos) only comes in with judgmental attribution. Subsequently, one would thus need to distinguish between the contrastive as and the judgmental as, or, as Heidegger puts it, between a critical as and a demonstrative as. “Pseudos is the ostensive presenting of something as something. Hence, it is more than merely concealing something without presenting it as something other than it is.”31 The apophantic logos has an intuitive quality insofar as it manifests something by presenting it as something; it shows what shows itself. The higher faculties thus intensify a capacity of differentiation already present at the level of aisthesis, or even below. The faculty of locomotion, the kinesis poreutikê (432b4) stands for a movement towards something specific (hou heneka), and, as such, the kinein (movement) is a kind of krinein (distinction). To imagine–and even more so, to think–means abstracting from the given and to decontextualize what is singled out in the process (with all the possibilities of deception that this entails).

 Heidegger, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, p.  31 (Introduction to Phenomenological Research, p. 23). 31  Heidegger, Introduction to Phenomenological Research, p. 32 (Introduction to Phenomenological Research, p. 23). 30

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Friedrich Nietzsche–and with this I will come to an end–imagined a similar genealogy for abstraction: thinking is nothing but a “foregrounding” (ein Herausheben), and insofar as every representation is as such an emphasized perception, thinking is but a “selection of representations” (ein Herauswählen von Vorstellungen).32 We get a glimpse of what Nietzsche mean when we visualize things in the accidental of stains on a wall. Significantly, it is this very example which Aristotle already commented upon. Caught in fever, Aristotle explains, the ill person suddenly sees animal shapes appear on the walls, but “if they are not too ill,” they can play with these hallucinations (On Dreams III, 460b). “Fever patients proceed this way,” Nietzsche acknowledges too. And he immediately adds: “it‘s just that the healthy ones project the wallpaper too.”33

Bibliography Alloa, Emmanuel. 2011. La parole oblique. Merleau-Ponty et les enjeux d’une éthique de l’indirect. Phainomenon: Revista de Fenomenologia 18: 157–174. ———. 2013. Phantasia. Aristoteles’ Theorie der Sichtbarmachung. In Imagination. Suchen und Finden, ed. G. Boehm, E. Alloa, O. Budelacci, and G. Wildgruber, 91–112. Munich: Fink. ———. 2017. Resistance of the Sensible World. New York: Fordham. ———. forthcoming. Metaxy: Aristotle on Mediacy. In Media and Classics, ed. Pantelis Michelakis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barker, Andrew. 1981. Aristotle on Perception and Ratios. Phronesis 26: 248–266. Barnouw, Jeffrey. 2002. Propositional Perception. Phantasia, Predication, and Sign in Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. Lanham: University Press of America. Baumgarten, A.G. 1954. Meditationes philosophicae de nonnulis ad poema pertinentibus, Halle 1735 (Trans. Reflections on Poetry. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s ‘Meditationes philosophicae de nonnulis ad poema pertinentibus,’ ed. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B.  Holther, Berkeley: University of California Press). Cairns, Dorion. 1976. Conversations with Husserl and Fink. Den Haag: Nijhoff. Cashdollar, Stanford. 1973. Aristotle’s Account of Incidental Perception. Phronesis 18: 156–171. Cassin, Barbara. 1996. Enquête sur le logos dans le De anima. In Corps et Ame. Sur le De Anima d’Aristote, ed. G. Romeyer-Dherbey, 257–293. Paris: Vrin. Cobb-Stevens, Richard. 2004. Aristotelian Nous in Husserl’s Philosophy. In The Impact of Aristotelianism on Modern Philosophy, ed. Ricardo Pozzo, 231–247. Washington: Catholic University of America Press. Dodd, James. 2015. Aristotle and Phenomenology. In Phenomenology in a New Key – Between Analysis and History, ed. J. Bloechl and N. de Warren, 181–207. Dordrecht: Springer. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Sein und Zeit, Tübingen: Niemeyer 1993 (Being and Time, Trans. John McQuarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Blackwell). ———. 1994. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. In Marburg Lecture Winter Semester 1923/24, GA 17, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. Frankfurt: Klostermann. (Introduction to Phenomenological Research. Trans. Daniel O.  Dahlstrom, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

32  Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1869–1874, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 7, Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 1988, p. 445. 33  Ibid.

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Hicks, Robert Drew. 1907. Aristotle De anima, with translation, introduction and notes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1929. Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (1929), ed. Paul Janssen, Hua XVII, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974 (Formal and transcendental logic, Trans. Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1978). ———. 1973. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928, Hua XIV, ed. Iso Kern, Den Haag, Nijhoff, 1973. ———. 1990a. Ein Husserlmanuskript uber Ästhetik (1906), In: Husserl Studies 7/3 (1990a), ed. G. Scaramuzza and K. Schuhmann, 165–177. ———. 1990b. Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Hua II, ed. W. Biemel, 2nd ed, Den Haag: Nijhoff 1976 (Trans. The Idea of Phenomenology, Lee Hardy, Springer). ———. 1994. Brief an von Hofmannsthal, 12.1.1907. In Husserliana Dokumente vol. III: Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz, ed. Karl Schuhmann and Elisabeth Schuhmann, 133–136. Dordrecht u.a: Springer. Kahn, Charles. 1981. The Role of Nous in the Cognition of First Principles in Posterior Analytics II 19. In Aristotle on Science. The Posterior Analytics, Proceedings of the Eighth Symposium Aristotelicum, ed. Enrico Berti, 385–414. Padova: Antenore. Kontos, Pavlos. 2018. Aristotle in Phenomenology. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. D. Zahavi, 5–25. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lohmann, Johannes. 1970. Musiké und Logos: Aufsätze zur griechischen Philosophie und Musiktheorie. Stuttgart: Musikwissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1960. Signes. Paris: Gallimard. (Trans. The Philosopher and Sociology, in: Signs, Evanston: Northwestern 1964. ———. 1964. L’Œil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard. (“Eye and Mind,” Trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie, Evanston: Northwestern UP 1964. ———. 1968. Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard. (trans. The Visible and the Invisible, Alphonso Lingis, Evanston: Northwestern 1968). Narcy, Michel. 1996. Κρίσις et αἴσθεσις (De anima III, 2). In Corps et Ame. Sur le De Anima d’Aristote, ed. G. Romeyer-Dherbey, 239–256. Paris: Vrin. Rodrigo, Pierre. 1992. Comment dire la sensation? Logos et aisthesis en De Anima, III, 2. Études phénoménologiques 16: 47–78. ———. 1995. Aristote, l’eidétique et la phénoménologie. Grenoble: J. Millon. Sokolowski, Robert. 2012. How Aristotle and Husserl Differ on First Philosophy. In Life, Subjectivity & Art, ed. R. Breeur and U. Melle, 1–28. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. Volpi, Franco. 1993. Le problème de l’aisthesis chez Aristote. Études Phénoménologiques 17: 27–49. Welsch, Wolfgang. 1987. Aisthesis. Grundzüge und Perspektiven der Aristotelischen Sinneslehre. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.

Chapter 13

Seeing and Touching: The Optic and the Haptic in Merleau-Ponty’s Thought Pierre Rodrigo

Abstract  It is well known that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy developed remarkably between the Structure of Behaviour, which appeared in 1942, and the later working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, written in 1960–1961. More precisely, through a self-criticism that started immediately after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-­Ponty’s philosophy progressed from a meditation on embodied consciousness – which was still anchored to the ontological dualism that it tried to overcome – to a radically different reflection on the status of flesh as the “element” of Being, and on Being itself as “true negative,” or as “Being of deflection” and as Wesen, in the verbal sense of this term inherited from Heidegger’s philosophy. Thus, Merleau-Ponty considered Being no longer as a determined Being  – namely, as the essence of what is – but rather as an irradiation of interior or exterior horizons from which subjects and objects arise as “rays of the world.” This comprehensive movement manifests a clear rejection of substantial dualism for the benefit of “brute Being” or “wild Being” monism.

13.1  T  he Eye which Sees and Touches: a Synaesthetic Conception of Perception It is well known that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy developed remarkably between the Structure of Behaviour, which appeared in 1942, and the later working notes of The Visible and the Invisible, written in 1960–1961. More precisely, through a self-­ criticism that started immediately after the publication of the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy progressed from a meditation on embodied consciousness – which was still anchored to the ontological dualism that it tried to overcome – to a radically different reflection on the status of flesh as the “eleP. Rodrigo (*) Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_13

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ment” of Being, and on Being itself as “true negative,” or as “Being of deflection” and as Wesen, in the verbal sense of this term inherited from Heidegger’s philosophy. Thus, Merleau-Ponty considered Being no longer as a determined Being  – namely, as the essence of what is – but rather as an irradiation of interior or exterior horizons from which subjects and objects arise as “rays of the world.” This comprehensive movement manifests a clear rejection of substantial dualism for the benefit of “brute Being” or “wild Being” monism. Still, in the bosom of such a movement, a clear constancy can be traced out. Such constancy is that which, from Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the Invisible as well as Eye and Mind, has made Merleau-Ponty admit that seeing is eventually the touch of gaze. Then, from one side to the other of the evolution of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, the privilege that he seemed to grant to the visible and to vision with respect to the other dimensions of sensible experience – including that of touch – is somehow doubled by a conception of vision that is in fact haptic rather than optic. I shall justify in a moment my present reference to the categories of “haptic” and “optic,” elaborated by the German art historian Aloïs Riegl. Meanwhile, it will be enough to remember that ascribing a “haptic” characterization to vision is considering that the seeing-eye somehow touches what it sees, and that vision is therefore first of all a movement rather than a passive contemplation – as a more classically “optical” conception of the experience of the visible suggests. Such an interpretation of the relationship between the seeing-eye and the visible thing, in terms of palpation through the gaze, is explicit in the chapter opening the second part of Phenomenology of Perception that is focused on “feeling.” In order to better contextualize this chapter from the 1945 writing, I shall remind you that its aim is to refuse both intellectualism and objectivism by rehabilitating perceptive experience and by showing that the logic of such an experience is not the juxtaposition of our five senses (which is the common assumption of the objectivist and intellectualist thesis), but rather that “synaesthetic perception is the rule,” so that “One sees the weight of a block of cast iron which sinks in the sand, the fluidity of water and the viscosity of syrup” (PhP,1 p. 265/230). Moreover, Merleau-Ponty remarks that a subject’s reactions to colors shows that the motor significance of these colors implies the existence of a certain comprehensive atmosphere or, as he writes, of a “general setting” harmonizing the seeing subject with the whole world, instead of simply putting it in relation with some optical values of things: The motor significance of colours is comprehensible only if they cease to be states closed onto themselves [objectivist hypothesis] or indescribable qualities presented to the judgment of a thinking subject, [opposite intellectualist hypothesis] and if they impinge within me upon a certain general setting (un montage général) through which I am adapted to the world; if, moreover, they suggest to me a new manner of evaluating, and yet if motility ceases to be the mere consciousness of my present and future movements from place to place, and becomes the function constantly laying down my standards of size and the vary-

 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), English translation: Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1962).

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ing scope of my being in the world. Blue is that which prompts me (sollicite de moi) to look in a certain way, that which lets itself be palpated by a movement that is defined by my own gaze. (PhP, p. 243/210, my emphasis. [Translation modified.])

It is then possible to understand Merleau-Ponty’s use – in this very chapter of Phenomenology of Perception – of the Claudelian term of reciprocal “co-naissance” of the bodily subject perceiving the world and of the world perceived by this bodily subject. In fact, this theme disqualifies on principle and deprives of all epistemological pertinence the arguments developed by the philosophical tradition about problems such as that of Molineux’s man born blind, in order to know if the tactile field is  – or is not  – broader than the visual one. Eventually, the theme of “co-­ naissance” leads Merleau-Ponty to state that “sensation is literally a form of communion” (PhP, p.  246/212), or a “coexistence” (PhP, p.  247/213), and that it is wrong to dismember it in juxtaposed partial domains, each one heterogeneous with respect to the other. The palpation through the gaze – that is, in Riegl’s terms, the “haptic” function of vision – is therefore evoked here in order to better circumscribe our comprehensive bodily opening to the world, in so far as such an opening is manifested through synaesthetical attitudes and movements rather than through a synthetic reflection worked by consciousness.2 By referring now to the arguments developed later on in the Visible and the Invisible, and particularly in the last chapter of this text, entitled “The Intertwining – The Chiasm,” not only do we find again the theme of palpation through the gaze, but, furthermore, we may find it as if it were amplified. It is in fact on the ontological level that this theme now intervenes, for it supports an argument that, to quote Merleau-Ponty himself, means to “recommence everything” and to “reject the instruments reflection and intuition had provided themselves, and install itself in a locus where they have not yet been distinguished, in experiences that have not yet been ‘worked over’, that offer us all at once, pell-mell, both ‘subject’ and ‘object’, both existence and essence” (VI,3 p.  172/130). In this new ontological context, which is clearly that of a radical refounding of phenomenology and, more generally, of philosophy as a whole, such is the first result: What there is then are not things first identical with themselves, which would then offer themselves to the seer, nor is there a seer who is first empty and who, afterward, would open himself to them – but something to which we could not be closer than by palpating it with our look, things we could not dream of seeing “all naked” because the gaze itself envelops them, clothes them with its own flesh. (VI, p. 173/131, my emphasis)

Here, not only does Merleau-Ponty reaffirm that seeing is the palpating of gaze, or – as he writes a few pages after the passage I just quoted – that “vision is a palpa2  See PhP., p. 160–161/137–139: “Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’” (with footnote reference to Husserl); and “Consciousness is being towards the thing through the intermediary of the body”. See on these issues the deep analysis of J. Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p.  165–169, English translation: On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 146–150. 3  M.  Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), English translation: The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968).

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tion with the look” (VI, p. 177/134), but this thesis also constitutes the jewel in the crown. In fact, on the one hand, it highlights Merleau-Ponty’s criticism towards the substantialist ontology and, on the other hand, it flags the promotion of that “endo-­ ontology” which is its way out. Indeed, such lines introduce us to an ontology which is neither that of the seeing subject nor that of the seen things, but rather, as the quoted passage clearly says, that of a certain “something,” namely “something to which we could not be closer than by palpating it with our look.” The crucial point is that this “something,” this etwas is not the thing “all naked,” the blosse Sache. It is not a visible that would enter into a relation with a seer. Rather, it is the opening of a certain concretion of visibility, namely, of a certain dimension of the world in which the seer himself participates, from the moment that we stop considering it as a pure and simple kosmotheôros. We shall recall the phenomenological description supporting such a new ontology in this chapter of the Visible and the Invisible: that is to say, the description of the vision of a red dress meant as etwas perceived in its expressive thickness and in its concretion of sense in depth. I will only quote the end of it, which is opposed to the traditional interpretation of colour as a thing’s value: A certain red is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. If we took these participations into account, we would recognize that a naked colour, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, invisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of strait between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever grasping open. […] Between the alleged colours and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency and a flesh of things. (VI, p. 175/132–133)

Thus, the “something” that our gaze palpates is in no way the objective support of a sensible value. In these conditions, talking about “palpation” through the gaze is not suggesting that some “tactile value” would mysteriously add itself to the optical values of things, as it is in the case, on the contrary, of the aesthetical theory of Bernard Berenson – who insisted, for his part, on the “tactile values” which would be characteristic of the Italian Renaissance painting.4 To get back to a suggestive formulation by Merleau-Ponty, when one talks about palpation through the gaze, when one passes from vision to touch, indeed, one does not proceed to any “occult trading of metaphor” (VI, p. 167/125); rather, one collects the testimony of a way of being in the world that is more original than the one presupposing the theoretical division of the five senses. This is why talking about “palpation” indicates a sort of connivance between the subject and the world, rather than conferring a paradigmatic value to one of our senses (that of touching). Such a connivance is highlighted by Merleau-Ponty when he writes: “the look […] envelopes, palpates, espouses the visible things. As though it were in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them” (VI, p. 175/133). This chapter of The Visible and the Invisible means to apply to the whole of the fleshy structure of our

4  See B. Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, II: The Florentine Painters (London: Puntam’s Sons, 1896; second edition, revised, 1902), p. 40–41. See also Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms in Eye and Mind and in the Cours du Collège de France.

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relation with the world precisely this model of profound connivance, of ‘con-sent’ between what palpates and what is palpated, as this passage eloquently witnesses: What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes, this inspired exegesis? We would perhaps find the answer in the tactile palpation where the questioner and the questioned are closer, and of which, after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant (VI, p. 175/133, my emphasis).

No doubt this passage is a non-Husserlian one, and even with a certain pertness in the use of the expression “after all”, which seems to consider as nearly negligible the insistence with which Husserl had, for his part, established the difference between seeing and touching, in section 37 of his Ideen II. Indeed, for Husserl, the crucial situation experienced in the first person – namely that of my hand touched by my other hand, which I feel straight away as being in its turn a touching hand and, consequently, as a hand belonging to my Leibkörper, that is, to my “fleshy body”  – in other words, such a situation of “double-sensations (Doppelempfindungen)” – is precisely denied to vision: In the case of an Object constituted purely visually we have nothing comparable. To be sure, sometimes it is said that the eye is in touch with the Object by casting its glance over it. But we immediately sense the difference. An eye does not appear to one’s own vision […], I do not see myself, my Body, the way I touch myself. What I call the seen Body is something touching which is touched.5

And, in a note, Husserl specifies furthermore: Obviously, it cannot be said that I see my eye in the mirror, for my eye, that which sees qua seeing, I do not perceive. I see something, of which I judge indirectly, by way of “empathy” (Einfühlung), that it is identical with my eye as a thing […] in the same way I see the eye of an other.6

The opposition between Husserl and Merleau-Ponty is therefore evident on this point. However, this shall not dispens us from reflecting furthermore on what is precisely non-Husserlian in the position adopted by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible. The main point is not that Merleau-Ponty claims that I can indeed see myself as a seer, while Husserl absolutely denies this  – and apparently with good phenomenological reasons, since it seems clear that what I can see in the mirror is not in fact my seeing-eye, but no more than an “eye as a thing.” However, this is not the essential point. In fact, the reason for the distance taken by Merleau-Ponty with respect to Husserl is that he does not share any longer the Husserlian ontological scheme, for he does not assume as the principle of his argument the separation of the five human senses. On the contrary, he starts from what he considers to be, as we saw, the real “rule” of the analysis of the embodied subject and of its situation of being in the world: namely, the rule of “synaesthesia”. As a consequence, it is precisely because Merleau-Ponty starts from synaesthesia that he considers vision itself as one of the modes of the flesh’s reflexivity witnessed, in Husserl, by the  E.  Husserl, Ideen II (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), § 37, English translation: Ideas, II (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), § 37, p. 155. 6  Ibid. 5

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experience of my touching-touched hand. Merleau-Ponty characterizes that properly visual mode – or this modulation of the flesh’s reflexivity in the invisible depth of the visible – by the astonishing expression “fundamental narcissism”, consisting in seeing one’s self as seer in any vision of a “something,” or of an etwas. Thus, the question now is: what is the meaning of this “fundamental narcissism” of vision? Is it assured that I indeed see myself as seer when I see something? Of course, I can easily conceive such reflexivity in the case of touching, for my hand actually touches itself touching, in its contact with an object or with my other hand. But this is far from being evident in the case of vision… Still, this is precisely what is implied by the formulation of The Visible and the Invisible, according to which the palpation of the eye is, “after all, […] a remarkable variant” of that of the hand – a formulation which is perfectly mutual if we understand it from the standpoint of the “rule” of synaesthesia, and which, despite the appearances, does not establish any primacy of touch with respect to sight, as it is clearly shown by the continuation of the text: Every experience of the visible has always been given to me within the context of the movements of the look, the visible spectacle belongs to the touch neither more or less than do the “tactile qualities.” We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out in the tangible, every tactile being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is an encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as, conversely, the tangible itself is not a nothingness of visibility, is not without visual existence. (VI, p. 177/134)

I shall get back to the remarkable appearance, at the end of this quotation, of the adjective “visual” and of the expression “visual existence”. In any case, two points seem certain: –– First, that in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty does not appear to be much concerned – or may even not be concerned at all – about the question of the respective importance of the domains of the visible and the tactile in the heterogeneous whole of the “sensible values” given in our experience. –– And second, that, in The Visible and the Invisible, he no longer takes interest, as he did in the Phenomenology of Perception, only in the haptic function of the eye that is traceable in the synaesthetical functioning of our senses. What may then motivate his analyses of seeing and touching here? According to the above quoted passage, it is precisely their “interlacing” (entrecroisement) or their “infringement” (enjambement) in conformity with a topological figure, that of the “chiasm”, in which no branch has a privilege over another. Both being constituted in an overhanging (en “porte à faux”) with respect to themselves, the visible and the tangible are not, if we mean by Being a substantial entity; but at the same time, they are not nothing either. What they are has to be called etwas: “something” that does not subsist in the identity itself, “something” that, actually, is – to get back to the fine formulation through which Paul Ricoeur qualified the “flesh” in Husserl –

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a “paradigm of otherness.”7 Hence, in a word, the reflexive fleshy dimension of touch is also that of vision, and, generalizing, that of hearing, taste, and smell too. The same happens, in the chiasm, as for the visible, the touchable, the sonorous and so on. Such is the ontological sense of the “encroachment” (empiètement) and the “infringement” (enjambement): a sort of hollow in Being that is not a lack of Being, but rather sets the in-principle possibility of an interlacing (entrecroisement), of the dimensions of what is. In this sense, what appears as a visible is in fact always an interweaving of multiple invisibles. The “de jure invisible” that, in our experiences, gives visible phenomena their “thickness” (épaisseur), results from what the above quoted text named precisely “visual existence”: the visual existence, or the visuality of what is not a pure and simple visible value (in this sense, there is a visuality, namely a “visual existence”, of what we usually call the tactile or the audible), or of what is not simply an actually visible value. Consequently, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty does not just restore a parallelism between touch and vision that Husserl had rejected. Rather, he states, on the ontological level, that “vision, like touching, happens in the midst of the world and within being.”8 That is: within Being conceived as verbal Wesen, i.e. as thickness of flesh of whatever is a “something,” an etwas. From an ontological point of view, this new conception of Being as verbal Wesen constitutes an important advancement. By taking into account the fleshy dimension of experience, such a conception confers it a new depth. To stick to the example of the experience of seeing and of the visible which guides us here, the fleshy dimension is precisely what characterizes, if we get back to Merleau-Ponty’s formulation, “visual existence.”

13.2  E  ncroachment and Mutual Infringement of the Tangible and the Visible: the Flesh as Wild Being Whatever may be the interest of this advancement towards the visual as such  – which takes us beyond any usual division between seeing and touching, or between the optic and the haptic –, still, the ontological significance of such a visuality seems to have been thought by Merleau-Ponty from the standpoint of touching. Still, then, to formulate it otherwise, the heuristic model of the fleshy depth of invisibility, 7  P. Ricoeur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990) p. 375, English translation: Oneself as Another (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 324. 8  F. Dastur, “Monde, chair, vision”, in Chair et langage. Essais sur Merleau-Ponty (La Versanne: Encre Marine, 2001), English translation: “World, Flesh, Vision”, in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000) p. 41. F. Dastur adds: “there is not only a ‘vague comparison’ between seeing and touching, but also a literal, essential identity between flesh and visibility: the look ‘envelopes, palpates, espouses the visible things.’”

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which doubles the experience of the visible, seems to have been offered by the inaugural experience of the reversibility of touching. We should recall that, after putting forward the surprising formulation according to which “the look […] envelopes, palpates, espouses the visible things. As though it were in a relation of preestablished harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them,” Merleau-­ Ponty adds: What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes, this inspired exegesis? We would perhaps find the answer in the tactile palpation where the questioner and the questioned are closer, and of which, after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant. (VI, p. 175/133)

It thus seems quite evident that, even if this approaching of sight and touch is non-Husserlian, it nevertheless turns to Husserl’s idea of the exemplarity of touching, for it makes the “palpation” through the gaze become “a remarkable variant” of that of touch. We may then say – with Jacques Derrida, in the pages he devoted to Merleau-Ponty in his work entitled On Touching – that an ambiguity does not cease to reign, until The Visible and the Invisible, between a need of “coincidence” – of which the touching always provides the paradigm in Husserl as well as in Merleau-­ Ponty – and an opposite need of “noncoincidence,” which is imposed by Merleau-­ Ponty’s approaching towards the ontology of wild Wesen and towards the Being as depth. Actually, with reference to a text as The Visible and the Invisible, where such a “mutation of a thought” at work is traceable from one side to the other, Jacques Derrida wonders: Shall we give [Merleau-Ponty] credit for this, as I am often tempted to do, or, on the contrary, regret that he was unable to carry out a more powerful reformalisation of his discourse in order to thematize and think the law under which he was thus placing himself – always, in fact, and all things considered, preferring “coincidence” (of coincidence with noncoincidence) to “noncoincidence” (of coincidence with noncoincidence)?9

In spite of the advancements of certain pages “so strong, so alive, which have contributed so much to open a pathway for the thinking of its time, and our time,”10 the ultimate question posed by Derrida is to know if in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty is still debtor to the “haptico-intuitionism,” namely the classical conception of intuitive vision of essences that finds its achievement in an intellectual touching of those essences, assuring the perfect coincidence with them: From Plato to Henri Bergson, from Berkeley to Maine de Biran to Husserl, and beyond them, the same ongoing formal constraint is carried out: certainly there is the well-known hegemony of eidetics, as figure of aspect, and therefore as visible form exposed to a disembodied, incorporeal look. But this supremacy itself does not obey the eye except to the extent that a haptical intuitionism comes to fulfil it, fill it, and still the intentional movement of desire, as a desire for presence.11

 J. Derrida, On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy, op. cit., p. 239/211.  Ibid., p. 242/214. 11  Ibid., p. 139/121. 9

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Evidently, everything Merleau-Ponty could write on “the Being as depth,” of the “rays of the world” and of the “fleshy dimension” of experience in the bosom of the world, seems to block that suspicion of belonging to the metaphysics of Presence and to its “haptico-intuitionism,” Nevertheless, the texts we commented on so far do not weaken a priori the hypothesis of a retention of that very metaphysics in Merleau-Ponty. To persuade one’s self, one only needs to remember the most symptomatic quote: “the tactile palpation […] of which, after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant” (VI, p. 175/133). The stake, then, is big enough, for it consists in evaluating Merleau-Ponty’s debt to the metaphysics of Presence, or – in his own words – to the comprehension of Being as a Being which – on the model of the Being of the object – is either pure parousia of the essence, namely full presence, or bare nothingness. The question we have to debate is not knowing if Merleau-Ponty willed to abandon that ontology, for that is certain. Rather, the question is knowing whether he succeeded. Of course, the answer will not be perfectly defined. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s texts from the late Fifties and the early Sixties remain in progress, or even pending. The philosophy of flesh, meant in the whole wideness of its ontological sense, is hardly formulated. This is certain, and it has often been discussed. However, I think that a reflection on the use of the category of “visual” may contribute to the clarification of the later Merleau-Ponty’s thinking situation in view of the metaphysical haptico-intuitionist tradition. From this perspective, it is extremely significant to point out that, in The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty actually uses the adjective “visual” only when he deciphers the perceptive experience in the light of his new ontology of wild Wesen, that is to say when he conceives it as an opening to a world in the background of which only “something,” or etwas, appears as a form. In the use of the term “visual” one has therefore to understand the Merleau-Pontian rejection of the partition (which is current in philosophy) of perception and visual, tactile, auditory sensations, all atomized one with respect to the other and referred to objects that are in their turn well-differentiated and given partes extra partes. Actually, we have seen that if Merleau-Ponty evokes a “visual existence” of the tangible, it is precisely in the context of the last completed chapter of The Visible and the Invisible where he mainly stresses the “encroachment” (empiètement) and the “infringement” (enjambement), namely the alleged “tactile” or “optical” values.12 there is an encroachment, infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as, conversely, the tangible itself is not a nothingness of visibility, is not without visual existence […] There is

12  See, on the same issue, the criticism towards the American aesthetician Bernard Berenson in OE: “when, apropos of Italian painting, the young Berenson spoke of an evocation of tactile values, he could hardly have been more mistaken; painting evokes nothing, least of all the tactile. [...] It gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible” [M.  Merleau-Ponty, L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard 1964), p. 27, English translation: Eye and Mind, in G. Johnson (editor), “The Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics Reader” (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), p.127)].

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double and crossed situating of the visible in the tangible and of the tangible in the visible; the two maps are complete and yet they do not merge into one. The two parts are total parts and yet are not superposable. (VI, p.177/134, my emphasis)

The “visual existence” formula is thus related to a strange topology. If, in this new ontology, one still wants to talk about “visible” and “tangible,” then such a topology makes it necessary to remarkably complicate their way of being, so as to take into account their correlation a priori by mutual infringement. Indeed, none of the two, neither the tangible nor the visible, subsists by itself and in itself any longer, none of them is a thing’s quality any longer. This is already quite remarkable. What is all the more remarkable is that, in an important working note dated May 1960 (VI, p.  307–310/254–257), the “visual” is recalled, when Merleau-Ponty determinates the flesh as a “mirror phenomenon” between the subject and the world. This note is precious for it proposes a kind of synthesis of the new ontology. Even if it does not dispel all the ambiguities connected to the notion of flesh in its ontological sense, even if it does therefore not totally answer the question, “What is then the ‘flesh of the world’?” it confronts enough delicate points to make me consider it essential. What is in question here is indeed the “visual” in the circumstance of an interpretation of the experience of vision within a mirror: The flesh is a mirror phenomenon and the mirror is an extension of my relation with my body. Mirror = realization of a Bild of the thing, and I-my shadow relation = realization of a (verbal) Wesen. […] To touch oneself, to see oneself, is to obtain such a specular extract of oneself. I.e. fission of appearance and Being – a fission that already takes place in the touch (duality of the touching and the touched) and which, with the mirror (Narcissus) is only a more profound adhesion to Self. The visual projection of the world in me [is] to be understood not as intra-objective things-my body relation. But as a shadow-body relation, a community of verbal Wesen […]. The vision-touch divergence (not superposable, one of the universes overhangs the other) [is] to be understood as the most striking case of the overhanging (porte à faux) that exists within each sense and makes of it “eine Art der Reflexion.” (VI, p. 309/255–256)

How to disentangle such a skein? A first step is to avoid any misunderstanding concerning the sense of the “mirror phenomenon” in question. This is an essential point.13 Indeed, if Merleau-Ponty meant to say that the mirror gives me a specular image of my own body and provides me with the images of things at once, nothing would differentiate his ontology from the ontology of object! That is why, as the French scholar Marc Richir rightly remarks, “Bild cannot precisely be translated as ‘image,’ but shall be translated as ‘figure,’ that in which ‘something’ undetermined and still inchoative becomes a thing – that in which the etwas becomes Sache or Thing.”14 What is it that addresses us towards such a translation of Bild? Nothing but the explication, provided by Merleau-Ponty himself in that very note, of the formu-

 See M. Richir, « Le sensible dans le rêve », in R. Barbaras (editor), Merleau-Ponty. Notes de cours surL’origine de la géométrie de Husserl (Paris: P.U.F., « Épiméthée », 1998) p. 239–254. See also the analysis of P. Leconte in his work Proximité. Lectures du phénomène éthique (Argenteuil: Le Cercle Herméneutique, 2011), p. 84–90. 14  M. Richir, « Le sensible dans le rêve », op. cit., p. 244. [our translation]. 13

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lation “visual projection of the world in me.” This does not mean, as Merleau-Ponty points out with no ambiguity, the “intra-objective things-my body relation.” It is therefore not, with the Bild, a question of image, namely of reduplication in image of what is visible (the things or my body). It is, on the contrary, a question of the “community of verbal Wesen” between my body and its “shadow” in the mirror. In a very similar context, Eye and Mind will name “phantom” that shadow in the mirror in which I recognize the trace of my fleshy opening to the world – and definitely not, as Husserl still believed, a simple objectivation of my Leib. Indeed, in the second chapter of Eye and Mind, in referring to the “round eye of the mirror” in paintings, Merleau-Ponty writes, by extrapolating the analysis of the “body-schema” and its “phantoms” that he found in Paul Schilder115: The mirror’s phantom draws my flesh into the outer world, and at the same time the invisible of my body can invest its psychic energy in the other bodies I see. [...] Artists have often mused upon mirrors because beneath this “mechanical trick,” they recognized, as they did in the case of the “trick” of perspective, the metamorphosis of seeing and seen that defines both our flesh and the painter’s vocation. (OE, p. 33–34/129–130).

Thus, either phantom or shadow, the Bild of my body is not an objectivated body that would be visible over there, on the surface of the mirror. It is actually a “visual projection” insofar as “something” not positive, something unpresentable, presents itself on that surface; “something” – or etwas – that the same working note specifies as “a true negative, i.e. an Urpräsentation of the Nichturpräsentierbar, in other words, an original of the elsewhere, a Selbst that is an Other, a Hollow” (VI, p. 308/254). This very etwas is properly the visual meant as the expressive depth of a “ray of the world” experienced in its dimension of visibility overhangingly (en “porte à faux”) intertwined with the other dimensions of Being, or rather with the other ways of “staying” (ester).16 Thus understood, the visual indeed constitutes the “hollow” of the visible, the game of invisible dimensions that constitute it from within as the visible that it is, in its whole depth of sense. As Georges Didi-Huberman will emphasize in his 1990 essay Confronting Images, the visual shows that “There is a work of the negative in the image, a ‘dark’ efficacy that, so to speak, eats away at the visible.”17 It is therefore what opens the visible to its own phantoms, that is to say, to its distances and, simultaneously, to its proximity. Consequently, the “visual” is nothing but – in the terms of Walter Benjamin – the “aura” of the visible. But – this time following the pages of Eye and Mind in which Merleau-Ponty refers to the

 P. Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the human Body (New York: International Universities Press, 1935). 16  As Lefort points out in a note to the Visible and the Invisible working notes, “Ester, as a French translation of Wesen, is a term borrowed from Gilbert Kahn. Cf. M. Heidegger, Introduction à la métaphysique, French translation (Paris: P.U.F., 1958), p. 239 (Glossary of German terms)” (VI, p. 256 / 203). [T.N.] 17  G. Didi-Huberman, Devant l’image (Paris: Minuit, 1990), English translation: Confronting images (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. 142–143; See also ibid., p. 143: “In this optic, we are using the visual and not the invisible as the element of this constraint of negativity within which images are caught, catch us.” 15

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lexicon of painter Robert Delaunay and of the articles on art by Guillaume Apollinaire – we can also conclude that: We must take literally what vision teaches us: namely, that through it we touch the sun and the stars, that we are everywhere at once, and that even our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere – “I am in Petersburg in my bed, in Paris, my eyes see the sun” – or freely to envision real beings, wherever they are, borrows from vision and employs means we owe to it. Vision alone teaches us that beings that are different, “exterior,” foreign to one another, are yet absolutely together, are “simultaneity.” (OE, p. 83-84/146)18

The ultimate result of these remarks is that the “dehiscence” and the “fission of Being” thus redefined, both in the visible and in the tactile  – for each one now appears as “overhanging” (en “porte à faux”) with respect to itself and to its own other –, militate in favor of a monism of the “wild Being” in the bosom of which the supposed sensible “values” will evidently no longer have that autonomy we usually ascribe them. The alternative between vision and touch will not have any more ­reason to be, then. No more, in any case, than the alternative – still, so dear to certain aesthetitians such as Berenson, Riegl, Worringer or Hildebrand – between the tactile and visual values of the works of art, the first being picked up by the “close vision (Nahsehen)” and the latter by the “distant vision (Fernsehen).”19 Thinking that the close vision might be compared to a “palpation” through the gaze and to an effective seizing of the plastic forms, while the distant vision would be related only to the visibility of flat surfaces, is precisely what is no longer anyhow founded from the strict standpoint of phenomena, if it is true  – as Robert Delaunay writes and as Merleau-Ponty reaffirms in the texts sporting the sign of his final ontology – that “Depth is the new inspiration. All we see is seen in depth. We live in depth. We travel in depth. I am there. The senses are there. And the spirit.”20

Bibliography Berenson, B. 1896. The Italian painters of the renaissance, II: The Florentine painters. London: Puntam’s Sons (Second edition, revised, 1902).

18  Here Merleau-Ponty quotes R. Delaunay. In a note he refers to Du cubisme à l’art abstrait (Paris, S.E.V.P.E.N., 1957) p. 110 and 115. For the Apollinaire texts, we shall refer, in the same work, to p. 144–166. Apropos of the main Delaunay thesis on the “simultanéité” and the “métier simultané,” see mostly p. 106–115. 19  A. Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strassburg: Heitz, 1893), English translation: The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture (New York: Stechert, 1907); A. Riegl, Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste [1897–1898] (Graz: Böhlau, 1966), English translation: Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (New York: Zone, 2004); W. Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfuhlung (Munich: Piper, 1908), English translation: Abstraction and Empathy (London: Routledge, 1953); B. Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, op. cit. 20  R.  Delaunay, op. cit., p.  109; to be put in relation with M.  Merleau-Ponty, OE, p. 64–71/140–142.

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Dastur, F. 2001. Monde, chair, vision. In Chair et langage. Essais sur Merleau-Ponty. La Versanne: Encre Marine. English translation: 2000. World, Flesh, Vision. In Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor. Albany: State University of New York Press. Delaunay, R. 1957. Du cubisme à l’art abstrait (Paris, S.E.V.P.E.N.). Derrida, J.  2000. Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy. Paris: Galilée. English translation: 2005. On Touching, Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Didi-Huberman, G. 1990. Devant l’image. Paris: Minuit. English translation: 2005. Confronting images. The Pennsylvania State University Press. Hildebrand, A. 1893. Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst. Strassburg: Heitz. English translation: 1907. The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture. New York: Stechert). Husserl, E. 1952. Ideen II. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. English translation: 1989. Ideas, II. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Leconte, P. 2011. Proximité. Lectures du phénomène éthique. Argenteuil: Le Cercle Herméneutique. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception Paris: Gallimard. English translation: 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. ———. 1964a. Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard. English translation: 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1964b. L’oeil et l’esprit. Paris: Gallimard. English translation: 1993. Eye and Mind. In The Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics Reader, ed. G. Johnson. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Richir, M. 1998. Le sensible dans le rêve. In Merleau-Ponty. Notes de cours sur L’origine de la géométrie de Husserl, ed. R. Barbaras. Paris: P.U.F., « Épiméthée ». Ricoeur, P. 1990. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil. English translation: 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Riegl, A. 1966. Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste [1897–1898]. Graz: Böhlau. English translation: 2004. Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts. New York: Zone. Schilder, P. 1935. The Image and Appearance of the Human Body. New  York: International Universities Press. Worringer, W. 1908. Abstraktion und Einfuhlung. Munich: Piper. English translation: 1953. Abstraction and Empathy. London: Routledge.

Chapter 14

Toward the Phenomenology of Aesthetic Instinct Developed Through a Dialogue with F. Schiller Nam-In Lee

Abstract  It is the aim of this paper to clarify the phenomenological concept of the aesthetic instinct and to sketch the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct that has its basis in concrete aesthetic experience. In Sect. 14.1, I will delineate Schiller’s concept of the aesthetic instinct. In Sect. 14.2, I will assess Schiller’s concept of the aesthetic instinct, and in Sect. 14.3, I will give a brief sketch of the phenomenological concept of the aesthetic instinct. In On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters,1 Schiller (1759–1805) introduces the concept of “the play-drive” (der Spieltrieb) as a central concept of his aesthetics. The concept of the play-drive is the very foundation of the whole system of aesthetics developed in that work. In this paper, I will call Schiller’s play-drive the aesthetic instinct.2 In my view, Schiller’s concept of the aesthetic instinct in the Aesthetic Education has two features. On the one hand, it could be developed into a fundamental concept of aesthetics that could shed a new light on various important

 F. Schiller, On the Aesthtetic Education of Man in a Series of Letter, English and German Facing, trans. by E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. In this paper, this work will be referred to with the abbreviation: Aesthetic Education. 2  I will translate “Trieb” as “instinct.” 1

An earlier version of this paper was published in Inmunnonchong 68 (2012), the journal of the Institute of Humanities of Seoul National University. It was presented on October 25, 2012 at the Colloquium of the Department of Aesthetics of Seoul National University. I thank Professor Oh, Chong-Hwan and Professor Shin, Hye-Kyoung for their kind invitation to the Colloquium. It was also presented on December 28, 2012 at the Colloquium of Philosophy Department of Fudan University, China. I thank Professor Sun Xiangchen for his kind invitation to the Colloquinum. This work was supported by the Korea Research Foundation Grant funded by the Korean Government(MEST) (NRF-2007-361-AL0016). N.-I. Lee (*) Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7_14

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topics in aesthetics. On the other hand, it has its own difficulties that should be overcome before it can become a truly fundamental concept of aesthetics. It is the aim of this paper to clarify the phenomenological concept of the aesthetic instinct and to sketch the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct that has its basis on concrete aesthetic experience. In Sect. 14.1, I will delineate Schiller’s concept of the aesthetic instinct introduced in the Aesthetic Education. In Sect. 14.2, I will assess Schiller’s concept of the aesthetic instinct, and in Sect. 14.3, I will give a brief sketch of the phenomenological concept of the aesthetic instinct.

14.1  Schiller’s Concept of the Aesthetic Instinct Schiller considers the aesthetic instinct to be the origin of art. Art is the result of the working of the aesthetic instinct, an instinct that is able to cope with the total crisis of mankind as a whole experienced at that time. In order to clarify the structure of the aesthetic instinct, Schiller makes a distinction between “Beauty as Idea” and “Beauty in experience” (Aesthetic Education, 111) and considers “Beauty as Idea” to be the only legitimate concept of beauty. In this case, “Beauty as Idea” is the “pure rational concept of Beauty” (Aesthetic Education, 69) by means of which “we are to decide whether that which in experience we call beautiful is justly entitled to the name” (Aesthetic Education, 69). How can we discover “Beauty as Idea” or the “pure rational concept of Beauty”? What is the method for discovering this concept? It cannot be ascertained from observation of experience, since it is “a concept of beauty derived from a source other than experience” (Aesthetic Education, 69). According to Schiller, it has “to be discovered by a process of abstraction, and deduced from the sheer potentialities of our sensuo-rational nature” (Aesthetic Education, 69). The method of abstraction is simply the method of discovering the “pure rational concept of Beauty.” Employing the method of abstraction, “we must lift our thoughts to the pure concept of human nature; and since experience never shows us human nature as such, but only individual human beings in individual situations, we must endeavor to discover from all these individual and changing manifestations that which is absolute and unchanging, and, by the rejection of all contingent limitations, apprehend the necessary conditions of their existence” (Aesthetic Education, 71). Schiller designates the method of abstraction “the transcendental way” (Aesthetic Education, 71) that “will lead us out of the familiar circle of phenomenal existence, away from the living presence of things, and cause us to tarry for while upon the barren and naked land of abstractions.” (Aesthetic Education, 71). If we carry out this abstraction to the highest level with respect to the human being, we arrive at “two ultimate concepts” (Aesthetic Education, 73) as the essential components of man. One of the “two ultimate concepts” in man is “something that endures” and the other of them is “something that constantly changes” (Aesthetic Education, 73). “That which endures” in man is “his Person” (Person) and “that which changes” is “his condition” (Zustand) (Aesthetic Education, 73). The Person

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and the Condition are two principles that constitute human being. At this point, it is important to pay attention to the fact that they are two principles that conflict with each other endlessly. “The Person, which manifests itself in the eternally persisting ‘I’, and only in this, cannot become, cannot have a beginning in time” (Aesthetic Education, 75), whereas “every Condition, […] every determinate existence, has its origins in time” (Aesthetic Education, 75). In the Eleventh Letter, Schiller calls the Condition in man “the material,” “the matter,” “the formless content,” “the sensuous,” “the world,” or “reality,” whereas he calls the Person in man “the law (das Gesetz), ” “the disposition to the divine (die Anlage zu der Gottheit),” or “the form.” Since man is composed of two different principles in his real life, man is confronted with two contrary tasks. On the one hand, man is faced with the task of being faithful to his Condition. This task “insists upon absolute reality: he is to turn everything which is mere form into world, and make all his potentialities fully manifest” (Aesthetic Education, 77). On the other hand, man is faced with the task of being faithful to his Person. This task “insists upon absolute formality: he is to destroy everything in himself which is mere world, and bring harmony into all his changes” (Aesthetic Education, 77). Man is unable to fulfill these two tasks, if man does not have “two opposing forces which, since they drive us to the realization of their object, may aptly be termed instincts” (Aesthetic Education, 79). One of the two instincts that Schiller introduces as one of the central concepts of his aesthetics is the sensuous instinct that “proceeds from the physical existence of man, or his sensuous nature” (Aesthetic Education, 79). “Its business is to set him within the limits of time, and to turn him into matter” and “by matter in this context we understand nothing more than change, or reality which occupies time” (Aesthetic Education, 79). The other instinct is “the formal instinct” that “proceeds from the absolute existence of man, or from his rational nature, and is intent on giving him the freedom to bring harmony into the diversity of his manifestations, and to affirm his Person among all his changes of Condition” (Aesthetic Education, 81). Schiller considers the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct to be the two fundamental instincts of man. It is “these two instincts which […] exhaust our concept of humanity” and there is not “a third fundamental instinct which might possibly reconcile the two” (Aesthetic Education, 85). The non-existence of “a third fundamental instinct,” however, does not imply that there is no other instinct in man than these two. If there is no other instinct in man except them, “the unity of human nature” would be utterly destroyed by the “primary and radical opposition” (Aesthetic Education, 85) of these two fundamental instincts. Thus, there must be a third instinct that is supposed to restore “the unity of human nature” and it is none other than “the play-drive” or “the play-instinct” (Spieltrieb), the central concept of the Aesthetic Education. The play-instinct is the genetic product of the “reciprocal action” (Aesthetic Education, 95) between the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct. Originally, these two instincts do not act reciprocally, since by their own natures, they are not in need of contact. “The sensuous instinct does indeed demand change; but it does not demand the extension of this to the Person and its domain, does not demand a change of principles. The

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formal instinct insists on unity and persistence – but it does not require the Condition to be stabilized as well as the Person does not require identity of sensation. The two are, therefore, not by nature opposed […]” (Aesthetic Education, 85). But if we take a look at their operation in concrete situations, we cannot deny “that their tendencies do indeed conflict with each other” (Aesthetic Education, 85). What is then the reason that they conflict with each other? It is “through a wanton transgression of Nature, through mistaking their nature and function, and confusing their spheres of operation” (Aesthetic Education, 85) that they conflict with each other. “A wanton transgression of Nature” implies that each of the fundamental instincts attempts to extend their power beyond its own sphere and thereby transgresses the sphere of the other fundamental instinct. What happens, then, if there is a transgression of this kind? According to Schiller, there arises “a new instinct which, precisely because the other two instincts co-operate within it, would be opposed to each of them considered separately and could justifiably count as a new instinct” (Aesthetic Education, 97). As indicated earlier, Schiller calls this new instinct “the play-­ instinct” and seeks to clarify its identity and its relationship to the other instincts as follows: The sense instinct demands that there shall be change and that time shall have a content; the form-instinct demands that time shall be annulled and that there shall be no change. That instinct, therefore, in which both the others work in concert […], the play-instinct would be directed towards annulling time within time, reconciling becoming with absolute being and change with identity. (Aesthetic Education, 97)

Every kind of instinct has its own object to which it is directed. What is then the object of the play-instinct? Since the play-instinct is the result of the reciprocal action of the sensuous instinct and the form instinct, we could clarify its object by comparing it with the object of the sensuous instinct and that of the form instinct. “The object of sense-instinct, expressed in a general concept, we call life, in the widest sense of this term: a concept designating all material being and all that is immediately present to the senses. The object of the form-instinct, expressed in a general concept, we call form, both in the figurative and in the literal sense of this word: a concept which includes all the formal qualities of things and all the relations of these to our thinking faculties. The object of the play-instinct, represented in a general schema, may therefore be called living form (lebende Gestalt): a concept serving to designate all the aesthetic qualities of phenomena and, in a word, what in the widest sense of the term we call beauty” (Aesthetic Education, 101). With respect to the object of the play-instinct, Schiller claims that beauty is “the object common to both instincts, that is to say, the object of the play-instinct” (Aesthetic Education, 103). Thus, the object of the play-instinct is beauty defined by Schiller as “living form (lebende Gestalt).” Since the object of the play-instinct is this beauty, it could properly be called the aesthetic instinct. In fact, in the Twenty Seventh Letter, Schiller determines the play-instinct as “the aesthetic play-instinct (der ästhetische Spieltrieb)” (Aesthetic Education, 211) or “the aesthetic instinct to form (der ästhetische Bildungstrieb)” (Aesthetic Education, 215).

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Thus, for Schiller, the play-instinct is just another name for the aesthetic instinct. The aesthetic instinct is called the play-instinct for the following three reasons. First, it is called play-instinct because it is the result of the reciprocal action between the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct as a play between them, as discussed above. Second, it is called play-instinct because it is simply the impulse or the force that drives man to play with beauty through the pronouncement that “with beauty man shall only play, and it is with beauty only that he shall play” (Aesthetic Education, 107). Third, it is called play-instinct because it is directed to beauty or living form as the result of the play of life and form. The play-instinct as the aesthetic instinct is the basic concept from which the other important concepts of Schiller’s aesthetics such as beauty, aesthetic freedom, the aesthetic mood, aesthetic feeling, play, appearance (der Schein), the aesthetic state etc. could be deduced. Let us take a look at the connection between the play-­ instinct and some of the other concepts of Schiller’s aesthetics. As discussed above, beauty as the object of the play-instinct is defined as living form, since it is the product of the reciprocal action of the sensuous instinct that has life as its object and the formal instinct that has the form as its object. After defining the concept of beauty, Schiller introduces two distinctions between two concepts of beauty. The first one is the distinction mentioned above between “Beauty as Idea and beauty in experience” (Aesthetic Education, 111). In this respect, it should be noted that the play-instinct as the result of the reciprocal action between the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct could have different modes of operation. In an ideal case, it could operate in such a way that the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct as its two components could act with perfect balance and harmony. Besides this ideal case, there are endlessly many cases in which the two instincts do act reciprocally in an unbalanced and unharmonious manner. For instance, the sensuous instinct sometimes could take precedence over the formal instinct, and vice-versa. Furthermore, in an ideal case, the play-instinct has “Beauty as Idea” as its object, whereas in the other cases, it has “the beauty in experience” as its object. In contrast to this, in normal cases, when the play-instinct does work, we do not experience “Beauty as Idea,” but only “the beauty in experience.” The second one is the distinction between “melting beauty (die auflösende Schönheit)” and the “energizing beauty (die energische Schönheit)” (Aesthetic Education, 119). In this respect, it should be noted “that we must expect from beauty at once a releasing and a tensing effect: a releasing effect in order to keep both the sense-instinct and the form-instinct within proper bounds; a tensing effect, in order to keep both at full strength” (Aesthetic Education, 111). The releasing effect is the work of melting beauty, whereas the tensing effect is the work of energizing beauty. Melting beauty and tensing beauty are not two unrelated things. Rather, they are two sides of the same coin that is called beauty. They always go hand in hand, as Schiller describes them in the following way: “Ideally speaking, however, these two effects must be reducible to a single effect. Beauty is to release by tensing both natures uniformly, and to tense by releasing both natures uniformly. This already follows

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from the concept of a reciprocal action, by virtue of which both factors necessarily condition each other and are at the same time conditioned by each other, and the purest product of which is beauty”(Aesthetic Education, 111). In this way, the play-instinct is the origin of freedom because freedom is concretely understood as freedom from “compulsion (Zwang)” (Aesthetic Education, 119) as the state of being tense. We could call a man tense “when he is under the compulsion of thought, no less than when he is under the compulsion of feeling. Exclusive domination by either of his two basic instincts is for him a state of constraint and violence […]” (Aesthetic Education, 119). It is only the play-instinct that could make man free from “the compulsion of thought” as well as from “the compulsion of feeling”. From this standpoint, it is clear that “freedom lies only in the co-operation of both his natures. The man one-sidedly dominated by feeling, or the sensuously tensed man, will be released and set free by means of form; the man one-sidedly dominated by law, or the spiritually tensed man, will be released and set free by means of matter” (Aesthetic Education, 119). It should be noted that this freedom that has its origin in the play-instinct is produced by melting beauty that makes man free from feeling as well as from law. “In order to be adequate to this twofold task, melting beauty will therefore reveal herself under two different guises. First, as tranquil form, she will assuage the violence of life, and pave the way which leads from sensation to thought. Secondly, as living image, she will arm abstract form with sensuous power, lead concept back to intuition, and law back to feeling” (Aesthetic Education, 119–121). Since this freedom is produced by the melting beauty, it is called “aesthetic freedom” (Aesthetic Education, 143). Needless to say, what Schiller means by aesthetic freedom is different from the moral freedom in the Kantian sense. Viewed from the aesthetic point of view, moral freedom in the Kantian sense is not freedom, but a compulsion that has its origin in the formal instinct. Man should be also free from moral freedom through aesthetic instinct. The state in which “aesthetic freedom” prevails is called “the aesthetic State” (Aesthetic Education, 215). It is distinguished from “the dynamic State” as the State of the savages as well as from “the ethical State of duties” as the State of the barbarians. In “the dynamic State,” “it is as force that one man encounters another, and imposes limits upon his activities” and, in “the ethical State of duties,” “man sets himself over against man with all the majesty of the law, and puts a curb upon his desires” (Aesthetic Education, 215). In the aesthetic State, “none may appear to the other except as form, or confront him except as an object of free play. To bestow freedom by means of freedom is the fundamental law of this kingdom” (Aesthetic Education, 215). The aesthetic State is the final stage in the development of mankind. There is no harmony, but only conflict among the individuals in the dynamic State as well as in the ethical State. In contrast to these states, in the aesthetic State, there is no conflict, but harmony among the individuals. In this context, the following three points should be noted: first, that “taste alone brings harmony into society, because it fosters harmony in the individual” (Aesthetic Education, 215); second, that “only the aesthetic mode of perception makes of him [man] a whole, because both his natures must be in harmony, if he is to achieve it” (Aesthetic Education, 215); and, third,

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that “only the aesthetic mode of communication unites society, because it relates to that which is common to all” (Aesthetic Education, 215). It is a State of equality in which “no privilege, no autocracy of any kind, is tolerated” (Aesthetic Education, 217). “Here, therefore, in the realm of Aesthetic Semblance, we find that ideal of equality fulfilled […]” (Aesthetic Education, 219). Thus, the aesthetic State as a State in which harmony, unification and equality prevail is a State in which man as an individual as well as a genus is happy. “Beauty alone makes the whole happy, and each and every being forgets its limitations while under its spell” (Aesthetic Education, 217).

14.2  S  chiller’s Theory of the Aesthetic Instinct as a Mixture of Dogmatic Metaphysics and the Phenomenology of Aesthetic Instinct I will now assess Schiller’s theory of the aesthetic instinct summarized in Sect. 14.1. In my view, on the one hand, it contains some difficulties that preclude it from being characterized as the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct, but, on the other hand, it is of great significance for the development of the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct since it is full of phenomenological insights. As will be discussed later, Schiller’s theory of the aesthetic instinct that includes these two aspects could be considered to be a mixture of dogmatic metaphysics and the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct. Let me first point out some of its difficulties. Schiller’s theory of aesthetic instinct has the following methodological difficulty. The method that Schiller employs to clarify the existence and the structure of aesthetic instinct is the method of abstraction that he calls “the transcendental way.” He claims that the method of abstraction enables us to grasp Person and Condition as the “two ultimate concepts” in man. These “two ultimate concepts” are the foundation for the existence of the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct as “two fundamental instincts” in man. The method of abstraction is problematic, since abstraction could be carried out in different ways according to different research interests. In this context, one may ask why the abstraction employed by Schiller leads to two ultimate concepts, not to three or four ultimate concepts. Rather than intuition of the phenomenon itself, I claim, it is prejudices built into the tradition that motivate Schiller to conceive of Person and Condition as the two ultimate concepts in man. For example, Kant’s distinction between the epistemological subject and the moral subject, the Cartesian distinction between res congitans and res extensa, the Aristotelian or the scholastic distinction between form and matter, and finally Plato’s distinction between Idea and Chora are, in some respects, similar to Schiller’s distinction between Person and Condition. As will be discussed in Sect. 14.3, to develop the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct properly, we have to employ various kinds of the phenomenological method.

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The methodological difficulty in Schiller is closely related to another difficulty in his concept of the aesthetic instinct. As mentioned above, according to him, the aesthetic instinct is not a fundamental concept, but a derivative one, since it is the product of the reciprocal action between the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct. The definition of aesthetic instinct as a derivative one is the result of the thesis that Person and Condition are considered to be two ultimate concepts. However, if we do not accept Person and Condition as the two ultimate concepts in man and recognize three ultimate concepts such as Person, Condition and the Aesthetic Play, the fundamental instincts could turn out to be three and one of them is the aesthetic instinct. In this context, it should be noted that J. G. Fichte does not consider the aesthetic instinct to be derived from the other kinds of instinct. He classifies the basic instincts of man into “the knowledge instinct (der Erkenntnistrieb),” “the practical instinct (der praktische Trieb),” and “the aesthetic instinct (der ästhetische Trieb).”3 These three instincts are not reducible to one another and, in this sense, they could be called fundamental rather than derivative. In my view, Schiller was a little bit hesitant about the issue of whether the aesthetic instinct could be considered to be derivative. In Aesthetic Education, there are some passages that seem to support the interpretation of the aesthetic instinct as a fundamental, not derivative one. For example, the following passage from Nineteenth Letter lends support to this interpretation. Each of these two primary instincts, from the time it is developed, strives inevitably, and according to its nature, towards satisfaction; but just because both are necessary, and yet strive towards opposite ends, these two compulsions cancel each other out, and the will maintains perfect freedom between them. It is, then, the will which acts as power (power being the ground of all reality) vis-à-vis both instincts; but neither of these can of itself act as power against the other. (Aesthetic Education, 135)

Here we have to pay attention to what “the will” in this passage means. In this passage, the will is described as a power that “maintains perfect freedom” between the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct as “two primary instincts.” It is nothing other than the aesthetic instinct as the play-instinct between the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct. What is important in this context is the fact that “the will” as the aesthetic instinct “acts as power (power being the ground of all reality) vis-à-­ vis both instincts” and that “neither of these [the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct] can of itself act as power against the other.” Thus, “the will” as the aesthetic instinct turns out to be the power that acts on or through the other two instincts and thereby makes the reciprocal action between them possible. This implies that the aesthetic instinct is not a derivative instinct, but rather it is one of the fundamental instincts that constitute man. Even though Schiller’s theory of the aesthetic instinct has some difficulties, it is full of important phenomenological insights. Let me give some examples.

3  J. G. Fichte, “Über Geist und Buchstab in der Philosophie (1794)”, in: Vermischte Schriften und Aufsätze, Fichtes Werke Bd VIII, ed. by I. H. Fichte, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971, 276 ff.

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The first step in developing the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct is to identify the existence of the aesthetic instinct. It should be noted that the concept of the aesthetic instinct may sound somewhat metaphysical and arouse some skepticism with respect to its existence. In this situation, Schiller’s theory of the aesthetic instinct could serve as evidence for the existence of the aesthetic instinct, since it could be interpreted as a theory that is based on the concrete experience of the aesthetic instinct that Schiller himself possessed as an artist. Moreover, even though Schiller’s theory of aesthetic instinct is abstract due to the method of abstraction it employs, it is, nevertheless, full of concrete phenomenological analyses of the aesthetic instinct. One of them is the analysis of the noesis-noema structure of the aesthetic instinct. As is well known, phenomenology considers the noesis-noema correlation to be essential to every kind of consciousness, and the aesthetic instinct is no exception. One of the basic characteristics of the aesthetic instinct is that it has the noesis-­ noema structure. In fact, in the Aesthetic Education, one can ascertain various kinds of the analysis of the noesis-noema structure of the aesthetic instinct. One of them is the analysis of the object of the aesthetic instinct. As discussed above, Schiller maintains that the aesthetic instinct has its own object just as the other kinds of instinct have their own objects. According to him, the aesthetic instinct has Beauty or the living form as its object and, in this respect, it is different not only from the sensuous instinct that has life as its object, but also different from the formal instinct that has form as its object. Another example of the phenomenological analyses of the aesthetic instinct is the analysis of the mode of the satisfaction of the aesthetic instinct. The original state of instinct is that of starvation as dissatisfaction, and instinct strives necessarily towards satisfaction, as Schiller describes with respect to the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct in the Nineteenth Letter: “Each of these two primary instincts, from the time it is developed, strives inevitably, and according to its nature, towards satisfaction […]” (Aesthetic Education, 135). In this respect, the aesthetic instinct is no exception. It also strives towards satisfaction. The process of play as a process of aesthetic experience is nothing other than the process in which the aesthetic instinct strives for satisfaction. In fact, Schiller describes the way to discover Beauty as Idea as a process of satisfying the aesthetic instinct, as a passage from the Fifteenth Letter shows: “The beauty we find in actual existence is precisely what the play-­ instinct we find in actual existence deserves; but with the ideal of Beauty that is set up by Reason, an ideal of the play-instinct, too, is enjoined upon man, which he must keep before his eyes in all his forms of play. We shall not go far wrong when trying to discover man’s ideal of beauty if we inquire how he satisfies his play-­ instinct” (Aesthetic Education, 107). A third example of the phenomenological analyses of the aesthetic instinct is the analysis of the aesthetic world. Every kind of instinct is the origin of the constitution of a specific world. For example, the sensuous instinct is the origin of the constitution of the sensuous world, and the formal instinct is the origin of the constitution of the moral world. In this sense, the aesthetic instinct is no exception, and it is the origin of the constitution of a specific world, namely the aesthetic world. In fact, in

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the Twenty-Seventh Letter, employing the concepts of the aesthetic instinct, play and semblance (Schein), Schiller touches on the issue of the constitution of the aesthetic world as “a third joyous kingdom of play and of semblance” as follows: “In the midst of the fearful kingdom of forces, and in the midst of the sacred kingdom of laws, the aesthetic instinct to form is at work, unnoticed, on the building of a third joyous kingdom of play and of semblance, in which man is relieved from all that might be called constraint, alike in the physical and in the moral sphere” (Aesthetic Education, 215). We have observed that Schiller’s theory of the aesthetic instinct has difficulties as well as insights for the development of the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct. In my view, Schiller’s theory of aesthetic instinct has difficulties for the development of the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct, since it is partly based on dogmatic metaphysics that has its origin in the method of abstraction. In my view, dogmatic metaphysics is one of the aspects of Schiller’s theory of the aesthetic instinct. But the same theory has another aspect, namely, that of phenomenological theory, since, as discussed above, it is full of phenomenological insights. If we take into account this aspect, Schiller’s theory of the aesthetic instinct could be considered to be a forerunner of the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct. Considering these two aspects of Schiller’s theory of the aesthetic instinct, we can define it as a mixture of dogmatic metaphysics and the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct.

14.3  A  Brief Sketch of the Phenomenology of Aesthetic Instinct Through criticizing the dogmatic metaphysical aspects of Schiller’s theory of aesthetic instinct, appropriating its phenomenological aspects and examining the various aspects of the aesthetic instinct that are not dealt with by Schiller, I will clarify the aesthetic instinct and thereby briefly sketch the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct. 1. In order to develop the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct properly, we first have to clarify its method. As discussed above, Schiller used the method of abstraction to develop his theory of the aesthetic instinct, and this method leads his theory to a dogmatic metaphysics that is basically arbitrary. The method of abstraction cannot be employed to develop the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct. Rather we have to employ various kinds of phenomenological reductions to develop the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct properly. Concerning this point, it should be noted that the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct could take various forms such as eidetic ontology, phenomenological psychology, transcendental phenomenology, etc. In order to develop the various forms of the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct, we need different forms of the phenomenological reduction. For example, we need the eidetic reduction to develop the phenome-

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nology of aesthetic instinct as ontology, and we need the phenomenological psychological reduction to develop the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct as phenomenological psychology. Finally, we need the transcendental phenomenological reduction to develop the phenomenology of instinct as ­transcendental phenomenology. Moreover, in order to develop the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct systematically, we need the methods of dismantling and constructing (der Ab- und Aufbau). In this context, it should be noted that there are various layers of genetic constitution of aesthetic experience that could be clarified only layer by layer. In order to clarify the various layers of the genetic constitution of the aesthetic experience systematically, employing the method of dismantling, we have to dismantle them step by step, and, after going back to the most fundamental layer of genetic constitution of aesthetic experience by employing the method of the constructing, we have to try to understand how the other layers of genetic constitution of aesthetic experience are developed from that layer. Needless to say, under the circumstances, we have to use the method of the phenomenological interpretation to clarify the various kinds of aesthetic experience that could not be grasped through direct phenomenological reflection carried out from the first-person perspective. 2. The concept of the aesthetic instinct is not a metaphysical notion or a mere theoretical construct that does not have any corresponding matter. It is a concept that is founded on the experience of the aesthetic instinct. Here it should be noted that the aesthetic instinct really does exist. There are many evidences that indicate the existence of the aesthetic instinct, and I will enumerate two of them. The first is reflective experience that each of us could have of it. If we reflect on our aesthetic experiences, we feel some motivating force working in us that drives us to have and pursue them. The second is the reports of the artists about their own aesthetic instinct that take various forms such as their diary, letters, autobiography, literature, or philosophical works. Schiller’s theory of the aesthetic instinct developed in the Aesthetic Education is his report about his experience of the aesthetic instinct in the form of a philosophical work. 3. As discussed above, according to Schiller, the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct are two fundamental instincts, whereas the aesthetic instinct as the play-­ instinct is a derivative one. Assessing Schiller’s concept of the aesthetic instinct, I have shown that, contrary to what Schiller explicitly claims, even in his aesthetics, it is possible to interpret the aesthetic instinct as a fundamental instinct. The aesthetic instinct should be considered to be a fundamental instinct that is not to be reduced to the other fundamental instinct(s). In my view, it is not the method of abstraction employed by Schiller as “the transcendental way,” but the phenomenological method that could show that the aesthetic instinct is a fundamental one. What matters here is the method of phenomenological interpretation that can be employed for the empirical scientific research such as archaeology, history of art, or developmental psychology. Regarding this point, it should be noted that the genetic origin of aesthetic experience is an important topic for archaeology, history of art, and developmental psychology. If we interpret phenomenologically

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the various results of the researches in these areas that have relevance for the origin of aesthetic experience, we could show that the aesthetic instinct is one of man’s fundamental instincts. Furthermore I also reject any aesthetic theories that consider the aesthetic experience to be something reducible to the other instincts. Freud’s theory of the art as the result of the sublimation of the sexual instinct is a typical example.4 He considers the enormously strong knowledge-instinct of Leonardo Da Vinci to be a sublimation of “the sexual instinct (der Sexualtrieb)”5 (104). For him, the sexual instinct is the fundamental instinct and the other instincts are derived ones that have their origin in the sexual instinct. In this respect, the aesthetic instinct is no exception. Of course, I admit that there might be some aesthetic experiences that might be interpreted as the result of sublimating the sexual instinct. However, it is not the case that every kind of the aesthetic experience can be considered to be the result of sublimating the sexual instinct. There are some researches in the developmental psychology that show that the aesthetic instinct could work long before the sexual instinct begins to function.6 4. The aesthetic instinct is the beginning of any aesthetic experience such as the aesthetic creation or the aesthetic appreciation. It is the beginning of any aesthetic creation in the sense that an artist who begins creating an artistic work is driven by the aesthetic instinct. It is also the beginning of any aesthetic appreciation in the sense that a person who begins to appreciate a work of art is driven by the aesthetic instinct. In this context, it should be noted that the encounter with a work of art is surely a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition for the beginning of the act of appreciating an artwork. The working of the aesthetic instinct is needed for beginning the act of appreciating a work of art on the part of the spectator. In order to understand this fact, one might compare the following two cases with each other. In one case, a person encounters a work of art, but he does not appreciate it as a work of art, but only as an ordinary object of everyday life. In another case, another person encounters the same artwork, but he does appreciate it as a work of art. What is the difference between these two cases? In my view, in the first case, the aesthetic instinct is not yet awakened in the person who encounters the work of art, whereas, in the second case, it is. Many aestheticians consider play (Spiel) to be the essence of the aesthetic experience. Schiller is a typical example for them, and he considers the play of the sensuous instinct and the formal instinct to be the essence of aesthetic experience. As is well known, before Schiller, Kant considered the play between the imagination and the understanding to be the essence of aesthetic experience.7 I claim that the whole process of the aesthetic experience as a process of playing 4  S. Freud, “Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo Da Vinci (1910),” in: Bildende Kunst und Literatur, Studienausgabe Bd. X, Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 1969, 87–159. 5  S. Freud, “Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo Da Vinci (1910),” 104. 6  For example, J. Hargreaves, The Developmental Psychology of Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 62 ff. 7  I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1974, 55 ff.

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is the work of aesthetic instinct. So long as the aesthetic instinct continues to work, the aesthetic experience as a process of aesthetic playing continues and at the moment when the aesthetic instinct stops, the aesthetic also stops. 5. Aesthetic instinct is the origin of aesthetic feeling. The aesthetic feeling is an important topic for aesthetics after the subjective turn in the aesthetics in the seventeenth century. For example, in Kritik der Urteilskraft, Kant deals with the issue of the pleasant feeling that is related to art work.8 According to him, one gets a pleasant feeling, when one encounters a work of art and thereby experiences the play between the imagination and the understanding. Kant describes the pleasant feeling as if it were the last fact that could not be explained anymore. In my view, however, Kant should have traced the origin of the aesthetic feeling and should have identified the aesthetic instinct as the origin of that feeling. In order to understand the connection between the aesthetic instincts and the aesthetic feeling, we have to pay attention to the fact that the aesthetic instinct like all the other kinds of instinct strives towards the satisfaction and that the satisfaction of the aesthetic instinct results in the aesthetic feeling. Like Kant, Schiller considers the aesthetic feeling to be the central concept in his aesthetics. In fact, “the purely aesthetic feeling (das rein ästhetische Gefuhl)” (Aesthetic Education, 198) or “the aesthetic mood or attunement (die ästhetische Stimmung)” (Aesthetic Education, 147) is an important topic in Letters 20–26.9 Contrary to Kant, however, Schiller does not consider the aesthetic feeling to be the final fact that could not be traced back further. Rather, he deals with the issue of aesthetic feeling in close connection with the issue of the aesthetic instinct. He considers the aesthetic instinct to be the ultimate origin of aesthetic feeling. In this context, it is important to see that aesthetic feeling is closely related to the aesthetic freedom that has its origin in the aesthetic instinct.10 6. The aesthetic instinct sheds a new light on the issue of whether aesthetic experience is disinterested. One of the traditional positions concerning this issue is that aesthetic experience is not interested.11 According to this position, aesthetic experience is not interested in matters of everyday life such as those related to class, sex, race, society, politics, economics, etc. But this does not imply that the aesthetic experience has nothing to do with interest at all, since it has a peculiar interest that might be called the aesthetic interest. The aesthetic interest is different from the various kinds of interest of everyday life. If only the interest of

 I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 44.  E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby translate “das reine ästhetische Gefuhl” as “the purely aesthetic sense” (Aesthetic Education, 199), but I translate it as “the purely aesthetic feeing.” They translate “Stimmung” mainly as “mode,” but I translate it as “mood or attunement.” Sometimes they also translate “Stimmung” as “mood” (Aesthetic Education, 153). 10  With respect to the close connection between the aesthetic feeling and the aesthetic freedom, Schiller writes as follows: “This lofty equanimity and freedom of the spirit, combined with power and vigour, is the mood in which a genuine work of art should release us, and there is no more certain touchstone of true aesthetic excellence” (Aesthetic Education, 153). 11  A typical example for this position is I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 40 ff. 8 9

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everyday life deserves to be called interest, then one can say that the aesthetic experience does not have any interests. In my view, the claim that the aesthetic experience has nothing to do with interest is based on the assumption that only the interests of everyday life deserves to be called interests. However, this assumption is problematic, and we should admit that the aesthetic interest is a kind of interest. It should be noted that the genetic origin of the aesthetic interest is the aesthetic instinct. As long as the aesthetic instinct is awakened, the aesthetic interest is alive. The stronger the aesthetic instinct works, the stronger the aesthetic interest is. 7. In many cases, the aesthetic instinct does not work by itself, but it works together with other instincts. For example, an artist could begin a work of art which is to serve a religious purpose. In this case, not only the aesthetic instinct, but also the religious instinct is the driving force that motivates him to produce the work of art. Or the same person could produce a work of art to earn a living. In this case, not only the aesthetic instinct but also what Schiller calls the sensuous instinct is the driving force that motivates the person to produce a work of art. It is also possible for the same person to produce a work of art to serve a religious purpose and, at the same time, to earn a living. In this case, the aesthetic instinct, the religious instinct, and the sensuous instinct are the driving forces that motivate the person to produce the work of art. Thus, the aesthetic instinct could work together with the other instincts. What happens to the aesthetic experience that is motivated by the aesthetic instinct when the aesthetic instinct works together with the other instincts? There could be cases in which the other instinct(s) could oppress the working of the aesthetic instinct, and they could have a detrimental effect on the aesthetic experience. In an extreme case, the aesthetic experience could be turned into a non-aesthetic experience, and the art could change into a mere technique. However, there are also cases in which the other instinct(s) could intensify the working of the aesthetic instinct, and they could function for the aesthetic instinct in a positive way. There are endlessly many cases in which the religious zeal of an artist is the motivating force for the creation of a masterpiece. 8. The aesthetic instinct could shed a new light on the structure of the aesthetic attitude. The aesthetic attitude is an important topic for the contemporary aesthetics. In the phenomenological tradition, we have a general agreement that there is an aesthetic attitude.12 In the analytic philosophy, however, it has been a hot issue if there is an aesthetic attitude.13 With respect to this issue, there are conflicting positions: On the one hand, some scholars claim that there is really an  Husserl talks about the aesthetic attitude, for example, in Erste Philosophie II (Husserliana VIII), p.  101. M. Dufrenne attempts a detailed analysis of the aesthetic attitude in M.  Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. by E.  S. Casey, Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 426–439. 13  D. E. W. Fenner gives an overview of the history of the discussion about the issue of the aesthetic attitude in D. E. W. Fenner, The Aesthetic Attitude, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996. 12

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aesthetic attitude14 and, on the other hand, some scholars claim that there is no aesthetic attitude, as the title of the article “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude”15 indicates. In my view, there really is an aesthetic attitude, as we have the term “the aesthetic attitude” in ordinary language. Of course, it would be unfair to claim that those scholars who deny that there is aesthetic attitude have not contributed anything. In my view, their contribution lies in having shown that the traditional theory of the aesthetic attitude is unsatisfactory. In this respect, I would like to note that, even in the phenomenological tradition, no satisfactory theory of the aesthetic attitude has been developed. This is due to the fact that the traditional phenomenological aesthetics has not attempted to clarify the genetic development of the aesthetic attitude thoroughly. In my view, the aesthetic instinct is the final genetic foundation of the aesthetic attitude. And the best way to prove that the aesthetic attitude is not a myth is to show how the aesthetic attitude is formed on the basis of the aesthetic instinct, which is, at the same time, the best way to clarify the structure of the aesthetic attitude. In this respect, I would like to point out that, like all the other instincts, the aesthetic instinct does not disappear from the field of consciousness after its first appearance, but it appears again and again and, in this way, makes it possible that the aesthetic habit is formed on the part of the person as the bearer of the aesthetic instinct. The aesthetic habit formed through the repeated function of the aesthetic instinct is an important component of the aesthetic attitude. 9. The aesthetic instinct could also shed a new light on the structure of the aesthetic world. As discussed above, Schiller touches upon the issue of the aesthetic world. In this context, in the Twenty-Sixth Letter, dealing with the problem of the aesthetic semblance, he talks about “the world of semblance” (Aesthetic Education, 197) that could be called the aesthetic world. This concept of the aesthetic world is an important topic for contemporary aesthetics in general, for example, for aesthetics of the phenomenological school,16 for aesthetics of the analytic school,17 and perhaps for the other schools of aesthetics as well.18 Unfortunately, there is no agreement about the concept of the aesthetic world between these  For example, J. Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969; J.  Stolniz, “Some Questions Concerning Aesthetic Perception,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 22 (1961); V. Tomas, “Aesthetic Vision”, The Philosophical Review 68 (1959); F. Sibley, “Aesthetics and the Looks of Things,” Journal of Philosophy 56 (1959). 15  G. Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” American Philosophical Quarterly I/1 (1964); G.  Dickie, “Attitude and Object: Aldrich on the Aesthetic,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 25/1 (1966). 16  M. Dufrenne attempts a detailed analysis of the aesthetic world in chapter 5 of The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. by E. S. Casey, Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 147-198. Chapter 5 has the title: “Aesthetic Object and World.” 17  A.  Danto, “The Artworld,“The Journal of Philosophy 61/9 (1964); H.  S. Becker, Art Worlds, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; G. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974; G. Dickie, The Art Circle, New York: Haven,1984. 18  P. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. by S. Emanuel, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. 14

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schools. The concept of the aesthetic world is used ambiguously. Sometimes it refers to the world of artwork that is incorporated in the artwork,19 and s­ ometimes it is identified with social institutions.20 The different concepts of the aesthetic world have to be separated from one another and clarified in detail. In my view, however, the concepts of the aesthetic world could not be clarified thoroughly if we do not take the aesthetic instinct into account. The reason for this is that the aesthetic instinct is the very origin of the constitution of all the aesthetic and, in this respect, the aesthetic world is no exception.

14.4  Concluding Remarks Taking Schiller’s theory of the aesthetic instinct in the Aesthetic Education as the guiding point, I have tried to provide a brief sketch of the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct. I will close the discussion of the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct by making two remarks.

1. It is my task in the future to clarify in more detail the various issues of the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct sketched in Sect. 14.3 and thereby to develop the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct systematically. I hope that a phenomenology of aesthetic instinct will be able to elucidate the various issues of aesthetics and consequently open a new horizon for contemporary aesthetics. 2. There are still many issues concerning the phenomenology of aesthetic instinct that were not addressed in Sect. 14.3 at all. For example, there is a close relationship between the aesthetic instinct and aesthetic rationality, and the aesthetic instinct could shed new light on the issue of aesthetic rationality. It will be my future task to deal with all the other important issues concerning the aesthetic instinct that were not mentioned in Sect. 14.3.

 M. Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. by E. S. Casey, Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 147–198. 20  G. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1974. 19

Author Index

A Adams, Ansel (1902–1984), 164 Apollinaire, Guillaume (1880–1918), 200 Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), 102, 106, 113, 114, 116, 120, 123, 175 Arthus-Bertrand, Yann (1946–), 161–171 B Barbaras, Renaud (1955–), 198 Barthes, Roland (1915–1980), 107, 165 Benjamin, Walter (1892–1940), 40, 199 Berenson, Bernard (1865–1959), 192, 197, 200 Berger, Patricia (1946–), 62, 65, 69, 70, 72, 78 C Casey, Edward (1939–), 162, 170, 171, 216, 218 Cézanne, Paul (1839–1906), 165 Clark, Kenneth (1904–1983), 162 Cusanus, Nicholas (1401–1464), 71 D Dastur, Françoise (1942–), 195 Delaunay, Robert (1885–1941), 200 Deleuze, Gilles (1925–1995), 153 Derrida, Jacques (1930–2004), 121, 191, 196 Descartes, René (1596–1650), 16, 97, 109 Dickie, George (1926–), 217 Didi-Huberman, Georges (1953–), 199 Dufrenne, Mikel (1910–1995), 40, 216, 217

F Fichte, Johann Gottlieb (1762–1814), 210 Fontane, Theodor (1819–1898), 30 Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939), 100, 102, 107, 214 Friedrich, Caspar David (1774–1840), 46, 47, 162, 163, 178 G Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832), 22, 59–84 Gowin, Emmet (1941–), 168, 169 Guo, Xi (郭熙) (1020–1090), 162, 163 H Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976), 4, 5, 8, 25, 38–56, 148–152, 156–158, 176, 178, 179, 182, 185, 186, 190, 199 Henry, Michel (1922–2002), 8, 25, 87, 91–95 Hildebrand, Adolf von (1847–1921), 200 Hofmannsthal, Hugo van (1874–1929), 7, 12, 18–21, 47–50, 177 Husserl, Edmund (1859–1938), 3, 11, 27, 38, 93, 100, 112, 175, 191, 216 J Jussim, Estelle (1927–2004), 164 K Kandinsky, Wassily (1866–1944), 87–98

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7

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220 Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804), 2, 4, 7, 39, 42, 59, 60, 84, 112, 121–123, 177, 181, 209, 214, 215 Katz, David, 94, 97 Kleutghen, Kristina, 62, 63, 69, 78, 80–82 Kong Zi (孔子) (551–471 B.C.), 66, 81, 82 Kurzweil, Ray (1948–), 155, 156 Kwan, Tze-wan (1951–), 145–160 L Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 103 Liu, JeeLoo (1958–), 62, 81 Lohmann, Johannes, 181 M Malevich, Kazimir (1878–1935), 88, 166, 167 Mecklenburg, Norbert (1943–), 63, 76, 77 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1908–1961), 3–8, 25, 39, 88, 96–98, 128, 134–137, 140, 164, 176, 177, 189–200 Mo Zi (墨子) (470–391 b.c.), 66, 80 N Nagarjuna (150–250), 78, 79 Nancy, Jean-Luc (1940–), 191, 196 Negroponte, Nicholas (1943–), 146 Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900), 101, 105, 106, 109, 187 Norberg-Schulz, Christian (1926–2000), 151, 152, 158 P Pallasmaa, Juhani (1936–), 128, 134, 135, 137, 138, 141 Plato (428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC), 7, 14, 77, 102, 105, 108, 109, 112, 113, 115, 119, 178, 181, 183, 184, 196

Q Qianlong (乾隆) (1711–1799), 59–84 R Richir, Marc (1943–2015), 198 Ricoeur, Paul (1913–2005), 24, 194, 195 Riegl, Alois (1858–1905), 190, 191, 200 Roselt, Jens, 104 S Schilder, Paul (1886–1940), 199 Schiller, Friedrich (1759–1805), 83, 115, 117, 203–218 Schnitzler, Arthur (1862–1931), 30 Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860), 115–119, 121 Seung, Hyo-Sang (1952–), 127, 128, 132–134, 139, 141 Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), 28, 33–35 T Tizian, 30, 44 W Waldenfels, Bernhard (1934–), 8, 99–110 Wang, Fuzhi (王夫之) (1619–1692), 81, 165 Weiser, Mark (1952–1999), 146–152 Worringer, Wilhelm (1881–1965), 200 Z Zhu, Guangqian (朱光潛) (1897–1986), 11–25 Zhuang Zi (莊子) (369–286 B.C.), 65, 79, 81, 82

Subject Index

A Abstract painting, 6, 87–89, 91–95, 98 Abstraction, 180–184, 186, 187, 204, 209, 211–213 Actor as hypocritēs, 108 Aerial photographic art, 161–171 Aesthetic, 12, 27, 38, 60, 100, 133, 158, 162, 176, 203 Aesthetic attitude, 11–25, 39, 42, 44, 48, 49, 216, 217 Aesthetic experience, 12, 14, 38, 40, 42, 44, 47, 49, 54, 136, 204, 211, 213–217 Aesthetic feeling, 40, 207, 215 Aesthetic instinct, 203–218 Aesthetic world, 3, 4, 176–179, 184, 211, 217, 218 Affective object, 135, 138, 140 Aisthesis, 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 42, 59–84 Apophantic, 179–184, 186 Architecture, 8, 38, 113, 127–142, 151–160, 169 Art, 1, 11, 27, 38, 69, 87, 102, 112, 133, 158, 161, 176, 189, 204 Art, works of art literary, 7, 19, 21, 27, 29, 30, 47, 217 theatrical, 19, 27, 105, 118 B Beauty, 2, 4, 12, 29, 32, 33, 47, 112, 127, 132–134, 139, 141, 158, 164, 168, 169, 204, 206–209, 211 Being in the world, 53, 98, 134, 137, 141, 191–193 Bodily intentionality, 136

Body-subject, 137 Buddhist philosophy, 130 Bunraku, kabuki, 100 C Colors, 5–7, 87–98, 135–137, 139, 166, 168, 186, 190 Communities, 33, 35, 128, 131, 132, 139, 141, 142, 198, 199 Confucian (Ru) philosophy, 79, 139 Confucianism, 82, 128 D Dehiscence, 200 Depths, 89, 94, 97, 98, 139, 151, 152, 156, 182, 186, 192, 194–197, 199, 200 Digital convergence, 145, 146 Dream as another scene, 100, 102 Drives, 205, 207, 213 E Earthscape, 163 Eidetic science, 21, 23–25 Embodied subject, 128, 134, 135, 137–140, 193 Endo-ontology, 192 Epoché, 7, 14–18, 20, 21, 24, 48 Ethics, 33, 34, 133, 139 Etwas, 106, 192, 194, 197–199 Existential experience, 137–139, 141 Existential position-taking (existenziale Stellungnahme), 19, 20

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 K.-Y. Lau, T. Nenon (eds.), Phenomenology and the Arts: Logos and Aisthesis, Contributions to Phenomenology 109, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30866-7

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Subject Index

222 F Film color, 94, 95, 97 Flesh, 3–7, 41, 141, 183, 189, 191–195, 197–199 Fourfold, 151, 152, 156, 157, 159 Functionalism, 152, 153, 157 G Gestalt theory, 134, 136 Ginkgo (Variants: Gingo, Gin(k)go), 60, 61, 68, 73–77, 83 God, 34, 55, 72, 107, 151 H Half-outer spaces, 130 Haptic, 134, 189–200 Human Computer Interaction (HCI), 146–148, 151 I Identities, 22, 45, 51, 70, 72, 73, 76–83, 128, 150, 170, 180, 194, 195, 206 Imagination, 7, 12, 17, 21–24, 27, 30, 31, 42–44, 46, 64, 77, 78, 102, 118, 119, 121, 122, 138, 164, 165, 185, 186, 214, 215 Impermanence (空), 133, 139 Instinct formal, 205, 207–211, 213, 214 sensuous, 205–207, 209–211, 213, 214, 216 Interest, 12, 14, 16, 17, 19, 25, 29, 30, 38, 47, 56, 119, 129, 170, 194, 195, 209, 215 Interpretation, 24, 46, 54, 61–63, 65, 69, 76–83, 87, 88, 91, 92, 95, 113, 122, 123, 128, 165, 177, 179–181, 190, 192, 198, 210, 213 Intertextuality, 66 Intertwining, 5, 128, 135, 136, 138, 140, 191 J Jongmyo Royal Shrine, 139 Judgment, 2, 3, 12, 14–16, 21, 22, 55, 118, 121, 122, 177, 179–181, 183, 185, 190 L Landscape, 130, 132, 133, 150–153, 156–159, 161, 162, 164–166, 169, 170 Landscript, 132

Liquid space, 152–156 Logos, 1–8, 14, 56, 59–84, 102 M Manchu, 68, 70, 72, 80, 81, 83 Maru and madang, 130, 131, 141 Masque, 105–106 Medium, 29, 32, 96–98, 109, 116, 136, 137, 141, 156 Minimalism, 133 Mohist philosophy, 66, 80 Multi-dimensionality, 87–98 Multiple personality, 60, 63, 68–70, 72, 73, 81 Multi-sensory experience, 128, 134 Music, 22, 29, 44, 100, 110, 112, 113, 116, 181, 214 N Nahsehen/Fernsehen, 200 Natural attitude, 7, 14–18, 20, 21, 24, 48 Natural attitude of the mind (die natürliche Geisteshaltung), 19 Noema, 165 Non-duality, 66, 73 O Occident, 83 Oikonomia, 159, 160 Optic, 148, 189–200 Orient, 83 Otherness, 99–110, 195 P Painting, 22, 29, 43, 63, 87, 104, 113, 161 Palpation, 190–194, 196, 197, 200 Pathos, 33, 94, 101, 108, 114, 115, 117 Pentaglot, 70, 71, 73 Perception, 2, 4, 6, 7, 12, 17, 23, 24, 29, 30, 35, 39–42, 44, 45, 56, 59, 60, 76, 84, 114, 116, 121, 122, 134–137, 154, 164, 166, 170, 189–191, 194, 197, 208, 217 Performance, 22, 31, 100, 103–105, 107, 108, 113, 114, 154 Phantasy, 7, 23, 24, 40, 41, 44–46 Phenomenology, 1–8, 11–25, 28, 34, 38–56, 100, 101, 104, 108, 112, 123, 134–137, 145–160, 163, 189–191, 194, 203–218 Phenomenon, 6, 20, 25, 49, 53, 90, 122, 145, 153, 176, 198, 209 Photography, 8, 19, 38, 40, 48, 164–171

Subject Index Physis, 156–159 Plays (theatrical), 19, 31, 104–106, 109, 118 Poiesis, 152, 156–159 Polysemy, 80 Posthuman, 152–156 Pragmatic attitude, 12, 13, 24 Properties, 14, 27–29, 83, 93, 101 Q Qing dynasty, 70, 81 emperors, 71 R Reduction, phenomenological, 15, 18, 23, 49, 212 Reflection, 2, 5, 17, 18, 28, 38–56, 82, 83, 97, 121, 151, 152, 156, 189, 191, 197, 213 Representation of the non-representable, 110 Response to the other, 154 S Scientific attitude, 13 Seeing, 5, 8, 20, 21, 38, 43, 45, 46, 48, 77, 81, 87–98, 103, 108, 121, 171, 176, 186, 189–200 Sensible subject, 135, 138, 140 Shanshui, 161 Spectator as co-player, 108, 109 Spiritual sensibilities, 128, 138, 140–142 Stage as place/time, 104–105 Structuring emptiness, 127, 129, 130, 132, 133 Suprematism, 166 Surface colors, 93–95, 97 Surprises, 89, 101

223 Symmetry, 62–64, 66 Symmetry breaks, 62, 64 T Taoism, 128, 129 Texture of Being, 97 Time, dramatic speech, 117, 122, 123 Topotransegrity, 154 Touching, 3, 5, 8, 101, 170, 189–200 Traditional Korean architecture, 127–131, 142 Transhumanism, 155 U Ubiquitous city, 145, 146, 150, 152 Ubiquitous computing (UC), 146–153, 155, 156, 159, 160 Urban void, 132–134 V Values optical, 190, 192, 197 tactile, 192, 197 Vanity, 139 Virtual reality technology (VRT), 147 Visual existence, 194, 195, 197, 198 W Wesen, 62, 77, 190, 195–199 Wild Being, 190, 200 Z Zen Buddhism, 128