The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, Volume 21, 2023: Aesthetics, Art, Heidegger, French Philosophy [21] 9781032562810, 9781032562834, 9781003434801

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The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XXI Special Issue, 2023 Part 1: Phenomenological Perspectives on Aesthetics and Art Part 2: Heidegger and Contemporary French Philosophy Aim and Scope: The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl’s groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Reinach, Scheler, Stein, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer. Contributors: Liliana Albertazzi, Dimitris Apostolopoulos, Gabriele Baratelli, AnnaEirini Baka, Irene Breuer, John Brough, Peer Bundgaard, Justin Clemens, Richard Colledge, Bryan Cooke, Françoise Dastur, Ivo De Gennaro, Natalie Depraz, Helena De Preester, Daniele De Santis, Madalina Diaconu, Arto Haapala, Robyn Horner, Erik Kuravsky, Donald Landes, Elisa Magri, Michelle Maiese, Regina-Nino Mion, Brian O’Connor, Costas Pagondiotis, Knox Peden, Constantinos Picolas, Hans Reiner Sepp, Jack Reynolds, Jon Roffe, Claude Romano, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Michela Summa, Panos Theodorou, Fotini Vassiliou, and Sanem Yazicioglu. Submissions: Manuscripts, prepared for blind review, should be submitted to the Editors ([email protected] and [email protected]) electronically via email attachments. Burt C. Hopkins is an associate member of Université de Lille, UMR-CNRS 8163 STL, France, and a visiting researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences (2019–2020). Daniele De Santis is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies (ÚFaR) of Charles University, CZ.

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy General Editors Burt C. Hopkins, University of Lille, France Daniele De Santis, Charles University, Czech Republic Founding Co-editor Steven Crowell, Rice University, United States Book Review Editors Emanuela Carta, KU Leuven, Husserl Archive, Belgium Margaret Stark, The Catholic University of America, United States Contributing Editors Marcus Brainard, London, United Kingdom Ronald Bruzina, University of Kentucky, United States† John Drummond, Fordham University, United States Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, United States Thomas Seebohm, Bonn, Germany† Thomas Sheehan, Stanford University, United States Consulting Editors Patrick Burke (Gonzaga University, Italy), Ivo de Gennaro (University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy), Nicholas de Warren (Pennsylvania State University, United States), James Dodd (The New School, United States), R. O. Elveton (Carleton College, United States), Parvis Emad (DePaul University (Emeritus), United States), James G. Hart (Indiana University, United States), George Heffernan (Merrimack College, United States), Nam-In Lee (Seoul National University, Republic of Korea), Claudio Majolino (University of Lille, France), Dermot Moran (Boston College, United States), James Risser (Seattle University, United States), Michael Shim (California State University, Los Angeles, United States), Andrea Staiti (University of Parma, Italy), Panos Theodorou (University of Crete, Greece), Emiliano Trizio (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice), Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann, Emeritus (University of Freiburg, Germany), Dan Zahavi (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy is currently covered by the following indexing, abstracting, and full-text services: Philosophy Research Index, International Philosophical Bibliography, The Philosopher’s Index. The views and opinions expressed in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial board except where otherwise stated. The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy is published annually by Routledge. More volumes in the series can be found on: http://www. routledge.com/New-Yearbook-for-Phenomenology-and-Phenomenological-Philosophy/ book-series/NYPPP

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XXI

Special Issue, 2023 Part 1: Phenomenological Perspectives on Aesthetics and Art Part 2: Heidegger and Contemporary French Philosophy Edited by Burt C. Hopkins and Daniele De Santis

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter Burt C. Hopkins and Daniele De Santis; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Burt C. Hopkins and Daniele De Santis to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-56281-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-56283-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-43480-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801 Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Notes on contributors

ix

PART I

Phenomenological perspectives on aesthetics and art (ed. Fotini Vassiliou)1   1 Editor’s introduction

3

FOTINI VASSILIOU

  2 Aesthetic normativity and deviation: A reading of Hume’s Of the Standard of Taste

16

MICHELA SUMMA

  3 Habit and creativity: Foundations for a phenomenology of artistic style in Ravaisson, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze

34

DONALD A. LANDES

  4 On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics

54

LILIANA ALBERTAZZI

  5 “Und Dennoch” – “And Yet.” The role of examples in phenomenological aesthetics

78

ARTO HAAPALA

  6 Surprise in art: The art of release

90

NATALIE DEPRAZ

  7 Atmospheres of boredom in Martin Heidegger and David Foster Wallace

108

ELISA MAGRÌ

  8 Engaging with physical atmospheres: The aesthetics of weather

125

MADALINA DIACONU

  9 Visual art and the reconstruction of the artist’s gesture: Phenomenological arguments for an alternative mirror theory HELENA DE PREESTER

139

vi Contents 10 Schizophrenia, music therapy, and getting into “Groove”

154

MICHELLE MAIESE

11 Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance – on Husserl’s theory of depiction

170

PEER F. BUNDGAARD

12 Seeing-in and seeing-out: Husserl’s theory of depiction revisited

192

REGINA-NINO MION

13 Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)

206

IVO DE GENNARO

14 Time and the photograph

232

JOHN BROUGH

15 Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance

256

MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

16 What is moving in the movie

279

HANS RAINER SEPP

17 Topographies of memory: Husserl’s “Ever-New Present” and recollection in urban art

292

SANEM YAZICIOĞLU

PART II

Heidegger and contemporary French philosophy (eds. Richard J. Colledge, Claude Romano)305 18 Editor’s introduction

307

RICHARD J. COLLEDGE AND CLAUDE ROMANO

19 Phenomenology and difference

316

FRANÇOISE DASTUR

20 Heidegger and Ricœur on ipseity

328

CLAUDE ROMANO

21 Badiou contra Lacan contra Heidegger: Truth, being, subject, polemos

340

JUSTIN CLEMENS

22 From Mitsein to Volk: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Geschichtlichkeit question in Heidegger RICHARD J. COLLEDGE

357

Contents  vii 23 Another night of the world: Affect and eternity, being and time in Heidegger and Henry

376

BRYAN COOKE

24 Is anxiety fundamental? Lacoste’s reading of Heidegger

394

ROBYN HORNER

25 Starting from Heidegger, arriving at Augustine: Selfhood and Christianity in Michel Foucault’s late work

409

KNOX PEDEN

26 Captivated by life: The life sciences in the heretical tradition of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ruyer

425

JACK REYNOLDS AND JON ROFFE

PART III

Celebrating Husserl’s Jahrbuch one-hundred years later447 27 Three Caesars: Jean Hering and Edith Stein on the core of the essence, individuality, and the a priori (and early phenomenology) (with a coda on Ernst Kantorowicz)

449

DANIELE DE SANTIS

28 Continuity and infinity: Koyré’s “Bemerkungen zu den Zenonischen Paradoxen” against the background of Aristotle’s critical reflections – Koyré’s contribution to a phenomenological hermeneutics

472

IRENE BREUER

PART IV

Varia517 29 Desiderativity and temporality: Contribution to the naturalization of intentionality

519

PANOS THEODOROU, COSTAS PAGONDIOTIS, ANNA IRENE BAKA, AND CONSTANTINOS PICOLAS

30 Thinking and the danger of insanity: Two ways of reaching into the abyss

543

ERIK KURAVSKY

31 Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude DIMITRIS APOSTOLOPOULOS

565

viii Contents PART V

In review591 32 Review of J. Kates, A New Philosophy of Discourse: Language Unbound (Bloomsbury Academic 2021)

593

BRIAN O’CONNOR

33 Review of M. Hartimo, Husserl and Mathematics (Cambridge University Press 2021)

599

GABRIELE BARATELLI

Index605

Contributors

Liliana Albertazzi, Ph.D., is currently a retired professor from the University of Trento. As a Principal Investigator at CiMEC (Center for Mind and Brain), she worked at the Department of Cognitive Science and the Department of Humanities. She was head of the Laboratory for Experimental Phenomenology which is part the Department of Humanities of the University of Trento. She published five books, edited about 20 collected volumes and a Wiley Handbook on Experimental Phenomenology, and published about 200 papers in scientific journals. Her research focuses on perception from an experimental phenomenological viewpoint, cross-modality, and experimental aesthetics. Her main topics of interest are color, sound, and shape. She serves as Assistant Editor of the APA Journal Psychology of Consciousness. Theory, Research, and Practice Dimitris Apostolopoulos is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame in 2017. Among other topics, his research has explored issues at the intersection of phenomenology and German Idealism, phenomenological philosophy of language, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history. Anna Irene Baka is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University. A recipient of the Hellenic National Scholarship, she received her Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Law from the University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, in 2016 with a doctoral thesis entitled “The Dialectic of the Cave: Self-Determination, Constitution and the Phenomenology of Deprivation”. She is a Greek jurist and has worked for several years as legal advisor and human rights lawyer at the National Human Rights’ Institution of Greece. She is the Principal Investigator of the three-year Global Marie Skłodowska-Curie project “RIGHT” carried out at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University and the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, focusing on the intersections between Aristotelian philosophy and Neo-Confucianism in the area of human rights. Irene Breuer studied Architecture (1988) and Philosophy (2003) at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina (UBA). He earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy (2012) from the Bergische Universität Wuppertal (BUW), Germany. She worked as an architect and also as a professor for design and critical theory of architecture at the UBA and Universidad de Belgrano, Buenos Aires. From 2012 to 2017, she lectured on Theoretical Philosophy and Phenomenology in the Department of Philosophy of Bergische

x Contributors Universität Wuppertal. She has published on ancient philosophy, phenomenology, aesthetics and Argentine literature. Among her publications, there is the monograph Ort, Raum, Unendlichkeit. Aristoteles und Husserl auf dem Weg zu einer lebensweltlichen Raumerfahrung (Würzburg/Königshausen & Neumann 2020). John Brough is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1970. He has written essays on the consciousness of time, art and aesthetics, representation, depiction, phenomenology and photography, the phenomenology of film, and art and the artworld. He has translated Husserliana Volume X, which includes Husserl’s early writings on time-consciousness, and Husserliana Volume XXIII, which collects Husserl’s texts on memory, phantasy, and image-consciousness. He is the co-editor of The Many Faces of Time. Peer F. Bundgaard received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Semiotics in 1996. He is an associate professor at the Department for Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Aarhus University. His research interests are cognitive linguistics and phenomenology as well as the cognitive semiotics of art and aesthetic experience. He has published articles in Synthese, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Cognitive Semiotics, and Semiotica. He and Frederik Stjernfelt have edited Investigations into the Phenomenology and the Ontology of the Work of Art (Springer, open access). He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Semiotics. Justin Clemens is an associate professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He has edited many books on thinkers and writers such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jacques Lacan, Georges Perec, and Jacqueline Rose. His most recent book, cowritten with Thomas H. Ford, examines the work of Barron Field, a nineteenth-century colonial judge who published the first book of poetry in Australia in 1819. Richard J. Colledge is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy at Australian Catholic University, based on its Brisbane campus. He has written widely in publications such as Review of Metaphysics, International Philosophical Quarterly, and American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly on phenomenology and hermeneutics, the philosophy of religion, and the history of metaphysics. Brian O’Connor earned his Ph.D. in English from Indiana University and is currently a senior lecturer in the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth College. His main interests include post-45 American literature, theories of fictionality, and the philosophy of language. Bryan Cooke is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne and a Leading Tutor in Humanities at Ormond College, Melbourne. For many years, he has been the Convenor of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. His doctorate re-examines attempts to show how different currents in the French reception of Husserl culminate in rival attempts to think life and thought as subtracted from the domain of technologically mediated representation. Françoise Dastur taught at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne) and the University of Paris XII (Créteil), and is Professor Emeritus of the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis. She has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Mannheim, Rio de Janeiro, Caracas,

Contributors  xi Warwick, Essex, De Paul (Chicago) Boston College, and North Western University (Evanston). She was, as honorary Professor of Philosophy, attached to the Husserl Archives of Paris (ENS Ulm), and was a founding member and president (until 2003) of the École Française de Daseinsanalyse. She is the author of numerous books and articles on French and German phenomenology, including Heidegger et la question du temps (PUF, 1990), La phénoménologie en questions: Langage, altérité, temporalité, finitude (Vrin, 2004), and La Mort. Essai sur la finitude (PUF, 2007). Ivo De Gennaro is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Free University of BozenBolzano. His research is in fundamental ethics, to which he brings a perspective informed by hermeneutic phenomenology. His recent books are Principles of Philosophy. A Phenomenological Approach (Freiburg/München 2019) and Vincoli etici. Tra metafisica, scienza e arte (Como-Pavia, 2022). Currently, he is working on a study on Nietzsche’s economy of time, and (with M. Borghi and G. Zaccaria) on a phenomenological diagnosis of contemporary science. Natalie Depraz is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rouen Normandie (France) and a member of the Husserl-Archives (CNRS-ENS, Paris, France). Among her latest publications were Attention et vigilance. A la croisée de la phénoménologie et des sciences cognitives (PUF, 2014, am. trans. in preparation with Northwestern US) and La surprise du sujet. Un sujet cardial (Zeta Books, 2018, Spanish trans. in preparation with SB Edicion, Argentina). She is currently working on a book titled La surprise. Mise en crise de la pensée (to be published in 2023). Helena De Preester studied Philosophy at Ghent University and Université Libre de Bruxelles (BE) and received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Ghent University (2004). She also holds a Master of Science in Psychology (Clinical Psychology). Her research topics focus on philosophy of technology (body, mind, and society), the human mind (self and subjectivity, and the role of embodiment), and the relationships with art. She is currently Professor of Philosophy and a researcher at the School of Arts, University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She is also a visiting research professor at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Science, Ghent University (BE). For more information, visit https://helenadepreester.com Daniele De Santis is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Charles University, Prague. He has recently published Husserl and the A Priori. Phenomenology and Rationality (Springer 2021), and co-edited (with D. Manca) the collective volume Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology. Encounters, Intersections, Oppositions (Ohio University Press 2023). He is the co-editor in chief of The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (Routledge). Madalina Diaconu received a Ph.D. from the University of Bucharest (1996) and another one from the University of Vienna (1998), where she also obtained her venia legendi in Philosophy. Since 2006 she has been Dozentin for philosophy at the University of Vienna. She is the former editor-in-chief of polylog. Zeitschrift für interkulturelles Philosophieren and a member of the editorial boards of Studia Phaenomenologica and Contemporary Aesthetics. She authored and (co)edited several books on the phenomenology of perception, the aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste, the design of urban sensescapes, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard, such as Phänomenologie der Sinne (2013), Sinnesraum Stadt. Eine multisensorische Anthropologie (2012), Tasten, Riechen,

xii Contributors Schmecken. Eine Ästhetik der anästhesierten Sinne (2005), and Relation und Andersheit. Mit Martin Heidegger zu einer relationalen Ästhetik (2000). For more information, visit https://homepage.univie.ac.at/madalina.diaconu/ and contact her at [email protected] Arto Haapala received his Ph.D. in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and his M.A. in Aesthetics at the University of Helsinki. He has been Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Helsinki since 1995. He has been a visiting professor at Temple University, Philadelphia; Lancaster University, UK; Universities of Murcia and Málaga, Spain; and University of Palermo, Italy. He is also a visiting researcher at Universities of Freiburg and Bochum, Germany. He has conducted research on different problems in aesthetics, particularly ontology and interpretation as well as environmental aesthetics, and Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. His most recent interests are in the aesthetics of everyday environments and urban aesthetics. His publications include What Is a Work of Literature? (1988), The End of Art and Beyond (ed. with Jerrold Levinson and Veikko Rantala, 1997), City as a Cultural Metaphor: Studies in Urban Aesthetics (ed. 1998), Interpretation and Its Boundaries (ed. with Ossi Naukkarinen, 1999), Aesthetic Experience and the Ethical Dimension: Essays on Moral Problems in Aesthetics (ed. with Oiva Kuisma, 2003), Paradokseja paratiiseissa: näkökulmia urbaanin luonnon kysymyksiin (Paradoxes in Paradises: Issues in Urban Nature, ed. with Mia Kunnaskari, 2008), and Ympäristö, estetiikka ja hyvinvointi (Environment, Aesthetics, and Well-Being, ed. with Kalle Puolakka and Tarja Rannisto, 2015). His publications also include numerous articles on different problems in aesthetics. In 2010 he founded a journal entitled Aesthetic Pathways together with Gerald Cipriani, and the journal was relaunched in 2014 under the title Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology (Routledge: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfap20). Robyn Horner is a member of the School of Theology and the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne campus. She received her Ph.D. from Monash University (Australia) in 1998. She is the author of The Experience of God: The Event of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Jean-Luc Marion: A Theo-Logical Introduction (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2005); and Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). She is also the author of numerous journal articles, book chapters, and compositions. Erik Kuravsky has a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Tel Aviv, and a Bachelor in Cognitive Sciences and Psychology from the Open University of Israel. Currently he is a Minerva Stiftung post-doc fellow at the faculty of Catholic Theology in the University of Erfurt. Dr. Kuravsky’s expertise lies in phenomenology, especially in the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Merab Mamardashvili. He has published both on early and late Heidegger and has taught courses on Kant’s transcendental philosophy, metaphysics, and mystical experiences. Donald A. Landes is an associate professor in the Faculté de philosophie at Université Laval (Québec). After receiving his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Stony Brook University (2010), he was a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at McGill University (2010–2012). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on topics in contemporary continental philosophy. He is the author of Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression (Bloomsbury, 2013) and The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary

Contributors  xiii (2013). He has also translated two major works of twentieth-century French philosophy: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge, 2012) and Bergson’s Creative Evolution (Routledge, 2022). Elisa Magrí is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Her work primarily revolves on Hegel’s philosophy and contemporary phenomenology. She is the author of Hegel e la genesi del concetto. Autoriferimento, memoria, incarnazione [Hegel and the Genesis of the Concept. Self-reference, memory, and embodiment] (2017), and is a co-author of Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction (2022). Michelle Maiese received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2005 and is now Professor of Philosophy at Emmanuel College in Boston, MA. She has authored or co-authored five books: Embodied Minds in Action (co-authored with R. Hanna, OUP, 2009), Embodiment, Emotion, and Cognition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Embodied Selves and Divided Minds, OUP, 2015), The Mind-Body Politic (co-authored with R. Hanna, OUP, 2019), and Autonomy, Enactivism, and Mental Disorder (Routledge, 2022). Regina-Nino Mion (b. 1979) received her Ph.D. from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) in 2014. She is a senior researcher at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She has published widely on Husserl’s theory of image consciousness, aesthetic consciousness, and art. She is an executive committee member of the European Society for Aesthetics and a board member of the Central and East European Society for Phenomenology. Costas Pagondiotis received his Ph.D. from the National Technical University of Athens (Greece) in 2002. He is an assistant professor in Philosophy of Mind at the University of Patras, Greece. His publications and research are mainly in the areas of philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, and contemporary epistemology. He is currently writing a book on the object, the content, the subject, and the mechanisms of perception. Knox Peden is a Visiting Fellow in the School of Philosophy and Honorary Research Associate of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the Australian National University. He is the author of Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford, 2014) and, with Stephen Gaukroger, French Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2020). With Peter Hallward he edited a twovolume work devoted to the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966–1969) that was published by Verso in 2010. In 2021, a new English edition of Jean Cavaillès’s On Logic and the Theory of Science that he co-translated with Robin Mackay appeared with Urbanomic Press. His articles have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, where he is on the editorial board, and in History & Theory, Journal of the Philosophy of History, and many others. Constantinos Picolas, Dr., is currently practicing neurosurgery in Nicosia, Cyprus. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at University of Patras, Greece. He received his M.D. from Patras University in 2004. He then had graduate studies in philosophy in tandem to his neurosurgery post-graduate training. He received his M.A. in Philosophy in 2014. His main research interests revolve around the areas of time perception in enactivist approaches and self-awareness in Minimally Conscious-State patients. He publishes articles in both medical and philosophy journals.

xiv Contributors Jack Reynolds is Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University, Australia, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has published several books, most recently Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science: A Hybrid and Heretical Proposal (Routledge 2018), and several papers on the connections between phenomenology and biology in Synthese and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, among other places. Jon Roffe teaches philosophy at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. He is the author of multiple books, including The Works of Gilles Deleuze 1, 1953–1969 (Re Press 2020), Gilles Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Abstract Market Theory (Palgrave, 2015), and Badiou’s Deleuze (Acumen 2012). He is the co-author of Lacan Deleuze Badiou (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and has co-translated Ruyer’s The Genesis of Living Forms (Rowman and Littlefield 2019). Claude Romano is currently Maître de Conférences at Sorbonne University and Professor at the Australian Catholic University. He was also recently Gadamer chair at Boston College (2019–2020) and Perelman chair at the Free University of Bruxelles (2021–2022). He is the author of numerous books in phenomenology and history of philosophy, among which are At the Heart of Reason (Northwestern University Press) and Être soi-même. Une autre histoire de la philosophie (Gallimard, 2019). In 2020, he was awarded the Grand Prix of the French Academy in recognition of his entire body of philosophical work. Hans Rainer Sepp is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities of the Charles University, Prague/Czech Republic, and is, together with Karel Novotný, Director of the Central European Institute of Philosophy (Charles University and Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic). His specialties are theories of knowing in overlapping areas of philosophy, science, religion, and art; genealogies of knowing in intercultural respects; and European and Asian philosophies. He is currently dealing with a renewed phenomenology of corporeity as the basis of an interdisciplinary and intercultural oikological philosophy. His most recent book publications include Philosophie der imaginären Dinge (2017) and In. Grundrisse der Oikologie (2023). Together with Lester Embree, he is the editor of the Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics (2010). Maxine Sheets-Johnstone received her Ph.D. in Philosophy and Dance from the University of Wisconsin in 1963. She has an incomplete Ph.D. (all course work completed, but no dissertation) in evolutionary biology in 1979. Her publications include the following books: The Phenomenology of Dance (1966, University of Wisconsin Press; 2nd edition: 1979, Dance Books Ltd., 1980, Arno Press; 2015, 50th anniversary edition, Temple University Press); Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Explorations (1985, Bucknell University Press); “Roots” trilogy: The Roots of Thinking (1990, Temple University Press); The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies (1994, Open Court Press); The Roots of Morality (2008, Pennsylvania State University Press); Giving the Body Its Due (1992, State University of New York Press); The Primacy of Movement (1999, John Benjamins Publishing, expanded 2nd ed. 2011, John Benjamins Publishing); The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader (2009, Imprint Academic); Putting Movement into Your Life: A Beyond Fitness Primer (2010, Kindle Book); Insides and Outsides: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Animate Nature (2016, Imprint Academic): The Importance of Evolution to Understandings of Human

Contributors  xv Nature (2023, Brill). She has given guest lectures and keynote addresses in North and South America and in Europe over the course of her academic career. Michela Summa is Junior Professor for Theoretical Philosophy at Würzburg University. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pavia and KU-Leuven in 2010 with a dissertation on Husserl’s phenomenology of temporal and spatial constitution, published as Spatio-temporal Intertwining. Husserl’s Transcendental Aesthetic (Springer 2014). Before the appointment as Junior Professor at Würzburg University, she was a post-doc at the Clinic for General Psychiatry in Heidelberg (2009–2015) and at the Institute for Philosophy in Würzburg (2015–2018), as well as a guest professor for phenomenology and hermeneutics at the Institute for Philosophy in Kassel (2018). Her research focuses on the philosophy and phenomenology of perception, imagination, fiction, aesthetic experience, and sociality, as well as phenomenological psychopathology. Panos Theodorou is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Crete (Greece). He is the author of the following books: Perception and Theory as Practices (Kritiki, 2006, in Greek); Husserl and Heidegger on Reduction, Primordiality, and the Categorial (Springer, 2015); Introduction to the Philosophy of Values (Kallipos 2016, in Greek); Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time: Phenomenological Reading of the Preliminary Existential Analytic (Kallipos 2016, in Greek). He is the co-author, with F. Vassiliou, of Introduction to Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology: Genesis and Meaning of the Logical Investigations (Nissos 2019, in Greek). He has translated in Greek and commented Husserl’s and Heidegger’s texts for the “Britannica Artikel” project (Kritiki, 2005), and Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (Parts I and II) (Nissos, 2012). His articles on phenomenology, philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology, and philosophy of emotions, values, and desires appear in international journals and volumes. Fotini Vassiliou is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her research interests include phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and phenomenological aesthetics. Sanem Yazıcıoğlu received her Ph.D. from Istanbul University (Türkiye) in 2000. Her research is on contemporary philosophy, particularly on the theoretical background of phenomenology and hermeneutics and their application in aesthetics and political philosophy. She previously worked at Tilburg University (the Netherlands), and she was a visiting professor at Boston College (the USA) and a research affiliate in several institutions in Europe. She is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Researcher Award and conducted her research at the Husserl Archive Freiburg. She is the author of Time Memory Perception in Husserl’s Phenomenology (in Turkish, 2022) and has several edited volumes and articles; some of the edited volumes are Heidegger and Arendt: Metaphysics and Politics (co-editor, 2002), Hannah Arendt on Her Birth Centenary (2009), and Das Zwischen/In-Between (2013).

Part I

Phenomenological perspectives on aesthetics and art (ed. Fotini Vassiliou)

1 Editor’s introduction Fotini Vassiliou

How has phenomenological tradition approached the issues of aesthetics and art? Are there, maybe, some common theoretical axes vertebrating the thought of this movement’s delegates in respect to these topics? Can we, potentially, speak of a united and coherent phenomenological aesthetic theory? It is a fact that the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, did not exhaustively examine the problems related to aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, his broader analyses on the stratification and the multifarious dimensions of intentional experience have determined all the ensuing attempts to phenomenologically read the aesthetic phenomenon. Following Immanuel Kant, Husserl maintains that the aesthetic stance is distinguished by indifference in respect to existence or non-existence of its objects and is not connected to theoretical or practical pursues. Husserl parallels pure, disinterested aesthetic experience with his own phenomenological method. He considers that in both cases an attitude of suspension of natural-naïve attitude’s beliefs (those of common sense and scientific thought) is attained for a reduction to be accomplished in a field where phenomena reveal themselves precisely in their pertinent way of givenness to phenomenological and aesthetic consciousness, respectively. Husserl’s analyses, in fact, permit us to distinguish a primordial field of aesthetic experience, in the framework of which we intuitionally correlate to aesthetically significant objectivities, prior to the mediation of higher-order acts. In such a correlation, the interest is precisely aesthetic. For Husserl this means that we, momentarily, leave out of interest the main object of our perception and turn to the how of its appearance. Subtle analyses of image-consciousness acts assist us in shedding light to this important facet. Many of Husserl’s immediate or mediate students, from the circles of Göttingen and Munich, adopted the Husserlian descriptions of correlations between conscious acts (noeses) and intentional objects (noemata), applying them specifically in the case of aesthetic consciousness and its objects. Roman Ingarden, faithful to the realistic interpretation concerning universals in Logical Investigations (1900–1901), and considering that phenomenology can surpass objectivistic and subjectivistic conceptions about art, proceeded to a detailed description of the acts’, entangled in aesthetic experience, structure, and dimensions, on the one hand, and to the ontological stratification of the work of art, on the other. The latter, to the extent that it is a product of conscious acts, is nothing more than an intentional object dependent on these acts and on its realistically existing material substrate. A work of art is an artist’s schematic creation and is discerned by multifarious points of indeterminacy and the possession of traits in a potential form. Upon reception of a work of art, its indeterminacies are fulfilled and its potential traits are being materialized. This way, the work of art is concretized as aesthetic object. Its concretization can vary between recipients, though it moves within a field of freedom, dictated by the work’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-2

4  Fotini Vassiliou proper dynamic. Drawing upon Husserl’s mereological theory, Ingarden would insist on mapping the relations within the corpus of artistic and aesthetic properties and on how, on the basis of these relations, artistic, aesthetic, and, ultimately, metaphysical values of works of art emerge. Husserl’s most important student, Martin Heidegger, approached the topic of art under a new perspective. He criticized traditional aesthetic theories, which, according to him, adhere to a Cartesian, dualistic view and adopt the distinction between aestheticsensing subject and aesthetic object. Heidegger supports the view that the problem of art should not be dealt with in terms of aesthetics, namely, in the bottom line, in terms of human (psycho)physiology. On the basis of his Fundamental Ontology, he transposes the center of his interest to what determines the work of art as such and lets it appear in its being. Upon authentic relation to a work of art other interests are excluded, interests aiming to its cognitive analysis, its use, its treatment, etc. The work is left so as to reveal the presented beings in what they truly are. Truth is here not conceived as correlation between statements and facts in the world. Truth is conceived in its primordial meaning as an exit from oblivion, as revelation. The way Heidegger phenomenologically describes a pair of shoes painted by Van Gogh is paradigmatic. The painting does not represent, does not emulate, nor does it function as a sign referring to something else other than itself. The painting opens upon the world to which the shoes belong, revealing the special character of their instrumentality. Each revelation performed by authentic art is being materialized in the horizon and the background of multiple elements that remain concealed. To these concealed and elusive elements refers Heidegger when he speaks of the Earth as the ground from which the artwork’s world springs forth. To the earthly elements belongs the material of the work of art, which is, exactly, presented in its materiality. French phenomenologists emphatically concentrated on the realm of the aesthetic. To elaborate, Jean-Paul Sartre considered artistic creation as a form of expression of the subject’s unfettered choices and unlimited freedom. The role of imagination is here catalytic. Imagination, denying the directly perceived material substrate of the work of art, turns toward the imaginative, non-real aesthetic object. Literature holds an emblematic position in Sartre’s phenomenological aesthetics. It is that form of art that activates language in its authentic, namely, according to Sartre, its significative operation. In opposition to other kinds of art that incorporate various aesthetic meanings, even in opposition to poetry that reifies words, literature’s language, operating significatively, points to and reveals the things and states of affairs in the world. Without being constrained by limitations posed by the medium, the author uses language to offer as a gift his/her creation to his/her reader who is freely called to choose to react not only aesthetically but also morally and politically. Sartre’s contemporary and interlocutor, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is the thinker of contemporary French thought to faithfully abide to Husserlian phenomenology’s guidelines and treat more than anyone else the topic of the primacy of perception. Merleau-Ponty critically incorporates basic elements of Husserlian philosophy, emphasizing on the part left unexploited by Husserl: on a phenomenological aesthetic theory. In an attempt to definitively surpass the problem of dualism, later Merleau-Ponty shall quest for a deeper ontological structure. In his incomplete work The Visible and the Invisible and in his research notes, we encounter the elements of an Ontology, declaring the ontological continuity between man and nature. This is the continuity of the wild or brute Being

Editor’s introduction  5 which as an ontological tissue weaves in its thread man and things; man and things share, without breach, the same ontological flesh. The weaving, now, of the world’s ontological web is the one to be expressed in perception, language, philosophical discourse, and art. Art, especially, and painting, in particular, acquire in later Merleau-Ponty’s thought significant ontological weight. As an authentic language, it rediscovers the world and expresses with the assistance of colors its corporeal, primordial texture. The artist, and Cézanne is for Merleau-Ponty an exemplary case, has the ability to reduce him/herself to the level of primordial experience and understand him/herself as an organic part of the world’s corporeal fabric. Within the ontological continuity of the wild Being, he/she conceives of him/herself in things and things in him/herself. From the zero point of his/ her corporeal spatiality, the painter realizes in a material-corporeal manner with his/her brush, considered not as a means but as a bodily organ, the space of the painting’s world. For Merleau-Ponty, the artist exerts upon reality a “secret science,” up to the degree that he/she understands and “handles” the intuitive logos of lines, shadows, light, colors, and volumes – the logos, hence, that regulates, without concept mediation, the weaving of wild Being. Mikel Dufrenne is the philosopher to have worked toward the most systematic and extensive development of a phenomenological aesthetics. He extracts elements from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology, and in his works he converses with tenets of Ingarden, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Dufrenne adopts Ingarden’s distinction between the work of art and the aesthetic object without, however, making the same ontological admissions with respect to the objects of perception and aesthetic experience. Moreover, Dufrenne objects to the accentuated emphasis put by Sartre on the act of imagination and its opposing relation to perception. Following more faithfully Merleau-Ponty’s steps, Dufrenne will claim that the aesthetic object is not completely severed from the act of perception. Its aesthetic meaning never fully transcends the realm of the sensuous. As a conveyor of aesthetic meanings, the aesthetic object is nothing more than the sensuous in the fullness of its glory. Actually, once the aesthetic object is capable of expressing aesthetic meanings, it is interpreted by Dufrenne as a quasi-subject, to whom we relate in an intersubjective and empathetic manner. Undeniably, the work of classical phenomenologists has provided valuable theoretical tools for advanced analyses and thorough descriptions regarding all forms and levels of conscious experience, including aesthetic experience. During the last decades, phenomenological ideas have systematically fertilized views that place emphasis on intentionality and its bodily, (inter)active, affective, and worldly dimensions. Phenomenological aesthetics is today also a lively area of philosophical inquiry, with many ongoing debates and discussions among creative scholars. The present collection of chapters aims to contribute to this growing field of research by focusing specifically on the realm of the aesthetic and the problem of our intentional relation with aesthetically and artistically significant objects. The chapters of Part I of the collection dedicated to phenomenological aesthetics have methodological and historico-philosophical scope. In “Aesthetic Normativity and Deviation. A Reading of Hume’s Standard of Taste,” Michela Summa first of all discusses how the early phenomenologist Moritz Geiger criticizes subjectivist solutions to the problem of normativity in relation to aesthetic evaluation. According to Geiger, theories that put emphasis on an inward concentration on our own feelings consider artworks simply as mediums for sentimental arousal and overlook the value of the object itself. Such

6  Fotini Vassiliou approaches result in unwanted sentimentalism and subjectivism. What Geiger proposes instead is that our feelings and emotions elicited when encountering a work of art aren’t but ways of grasping its intrinsic values. And it is these realistically construed values that impose the norm for aesthetic evaluation. This approach isn’t without problems, though. The frequency of aesthetic disagreement shows this well. Summa turns then to David Hume’s theory of the standard of taste and his well-known resort to the figure of the critic. The critic’s subjective experience is supposed to be in syntony with the dispositional qualities of the object, which makes him/her the exemplary case of how to adequately perceive the object’s aesthetic properties. In this sense, the critic also becomes the example to follow if one is to have a proper aesthetic experience. At the heart of her argumentation, Summa unfolds a three-step tactic. She first argues that one of the main qualities the critic needs to possess, namely delicacy, is a particular kind of norm-­ aberration. She next claims that imagination can play the role of a “corrective” for such an aberration and turn it into a norm-instituting quality. Norm-institution, Summa finally argues, is not individually but intersubjectively and socially achieved. What is thus shown is that, while Humean theory underlines the subjective nature of aesthetic experience, it is not sentimentalistic or inwardly centered, as it takes into consideration both the objectual referent and the social embeddedness of aesthetic judgments. Summa offers her careful reappraisal of Hume’s aesthetic theory in order to, so to say, graft phenomenological analyses with her conclusions regarding aesthetic normativity; a subject matter that is definitely understudied within phenomenological aesthetics. The next chapter of the collection is also permeated by a historico-philosophical spirit. In “Habit and Creativity: Foundations for a Phenomenology of Artistic Style in Ravaisson, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze,” Donald Landes examines the development of the notion of subjectivity within the context of French thought (in Félix Ravaisson, Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze), seeking more particularly for a positive ontological and existential interpretation of habit. To begin his analysis, Landes examines Ravaisson’s work Of Habit and asserts that habit should be viewed not as a mechanism but as an ontological principle linked with creativity. He then critiques Bergson’s understanding of Ravaisson’s ideas, pointing out that Bergson’s concept of habit does not align with his implicit view of subjectivity as a trajectory. Following this, Landes delves into Merleau-Ponty’s viewpoint on habit and creativity and suggests that the paradoxical logic of expression within subjectivity can be used to reunite these concepts. Finally, Landes examines Deleuze’s theory of habit in Difference and Repetition, contending that it can be used to construct a non-classical conception of identity. By tracing the trajectory from Ravaisson to Deleuze through Merleau-Ponty, Landes challenges the widely accepted assumption in modern philosophy that habit is fundamentally opposed to creativity. He instead argues that habit is an evolving trajectory of expression that exists between pure repetition and pure creation and is the foundation for both creative being-in-the-world and artistic style. Ultimately, Landes presents a new perspective on habit and creativity that incorporates the paradoxical logic of expression and challenges conventional understandings of the relationship between these concepts. Liliana Albertazzi also shares the concern for the disorienting exclusive focus on the side of our subjective experience, in terms of an analysis of subjective taste. With her chapter “On the Scientific Value of Experimental Aesthetics,” she draws our attention to the phenomenological quest for universal laws, fundamentally the organization of color and form invariants, as the explanatory basis of our aesthetic experience. Her overall interest targets the field of Empirical Aesthetics. Empirical Aesthetics is a branch of

Editor’s introduction  7 psychological research that investigates, in terms also of physiology, all the dimensions that are involved in aesthetic experience. It has its roots in British empiricism of seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and we find its first explicit formulation in the work of Edmund Burke. After its Kantian exclusion, we find the initial sensualist approach in the works of H. R. Marshall and Grant Allen. Gustav Fechner attempted to systematize the general principles of an Empirical Aesthetics by carefully studying the relations between stimuli and aesthetic preferences. More recently, Daniel Berlyne took over a contemporary reformulation of Fechner’s attempt, rendering explicit at the same time the need for its biological grounding. Over the following years, research within the field of Empirical Aesthetics has met considerable growth and today includes concerted investigations coming from different sub-regions of psychology (cognitive, perceptual, clinical, physiological, social). Toward the end of the twentieth century, empirical research in aesthetics takes another turn. As neuroimaging methods and techniques have triggered an abrupt progress in Brain Studies, the first steps in search of the neuro-biological basis of aesthetic experience were taken. Neuroscientists, who had mostly visual perception as their principal research theme, started looking for the neural bases of our experience of the beautiful, establishing in this way the newborn scientific discipline of Neuroaesthetics. Albertazzi, after presenting the genesis and the general theoretical context of Experimental Aesthetics, focuses on the experimental phenomenological methods of investigation and underlines their merits. Her basic claim is that experimental phenomenology, contrary to psychophysics and neurophysiology, deals with the meaning imbued in perceptual configurations that appear within the field of phenomena. The investigation of aesthetic meaning in the case of pictorial perception, in which Albertazzi is interested, is not but an investigation of the color, light, textural and expressive properties, and structural dynamics of the elements of the visual field. Arto Haapala, with his chapter “‘Und Dennoch’ – ‘And Yet’: The Role of Examples in Phenomenological Aesthetics,” investigates the function and the role of the use, within the context of philosophical aesthetics, of certain examples from the world of art. Haapala brings several characteristic examples of philosophical argumentation that deviate from austere logical reasoning. At the point where philosophy meets literature, Haapala claims that another important rhetorical and argumentative function is at work. With the aid of literary means, philosophers attempt to draw the readers by their side; they try to draw them into the world the description opens up, to entice them to participate in it and witness the set of beliefs that constitute its structure, change their point of view, and possibly change their own beliefs. Not all such attempts are successful though. According to Haapala, part of the persuasive force of the examples in question is based on the plausibility that comes from strong connection to reality. Their persuasive force also depends on the beliefs and prejudices that determine the reader’s lifeworld. Incommensurability or excessive unfamiliarity of content impedes the credibility of the argumentation. In any case, our experience when reading such descriptions in philosophical texts is that of being involved the way we become engaged when reading literature. Haapala argues that some kind of empathy toward the case the author creates is at work and various emotions are elicited. We create imaginatively an experiential space as we enter into the real or fictional situation the description articulates. And the deeper the emotional involvement, the better the chances that we get convinced by the philosophical argumentation. The second part of the collection centers on the elucidation of various aspects of aesthetic experience. In “Surprise in Art: The Art of Release,” Natalie Depraz articulates a phenomenological analysis of the role the experience of surprise plays in the constitution

8  Fotini Vassiliou of aesthetic experience as a whole. The model Depraz proposes for the experience of surprise in her, so to say, cardioward phenomenology, is that of a tripartite dynamic process, what she calls “the art of release.” The primary structural moment of the process of release is that of attention-expectation developed as implicit anticipation. The lived experience of attention as open expectancy renders possible a subsequent intense and bodily felt shock which in turn gives way to the affective resonance of an aftershock. Depraz argues that this dynamic process with its micro-structure is at the heart of what artists, but also receivers of art, experience at that specific moment of extreme intensity when they are transported outside of themselves toward the generativity of novelty. In the discussion that follows, Depraz focuses her analyses on the case of three intense and, in a sense, extreme experiences we can call oxymoronic: the terror of the beautiful, painful joy, and sober drunkenness. These aesthetic and spiritual experiences are presented as tropes of the art of release. In an extreme experience of beauty, the subject is captivated by the dynamism of beauty but also experiences the rupture of a transcending movement, an extreme departure from oneself. In the case of antinomic painful joy, the subject experiences an interior “explosion” of the heart, while in the case of sober drunkenness and the antinomy of calmness and exaltation the subject experiences an opening, an επέκτασις of the heart. Depraz keeps distance from interpretations that read beauty and terror, pain and joy, soberness and drunkenness as antithetical, paradoxical, or even contradictory pairs. Her micro-dynamic model gives us the tools to approach the constituents of these antinomies as mutually dependent and complementary moments in the temporal unfolding of the experience as a whole. She even argues that the complementary moments of imminence and fulguration, as she calls them, almost come to coincide when seen under the prism of the dynamic of surprise as an opening onto something not given ahead of time but in a sense already present. The possibility of an attentive opening onto another’s existential horizon is what occupies Elisa Magri, in “Atmospheres of Boredom in Martin Heidegger and David Foster Wallace.” More particularly, Magri examines comparatively the way Heidegger and David Foster Wallace approach the issue of boredom, and, using fiction as a scaffold, she argues for the recognition of the intersubjective character of moods, an element she believes is absent in the relevant Heideggerian analysis. The case of boredom is examined as to its character of attunement (Befindlichkeit) and its sensitivity to another’s affective state. Magri admits that Heidegger’s account of boredom is not solipsistic since it generally recognizes moods as ways of exposing us to the world. However, Heidegger considers attunement to others only in a negative way, to the degree that it makes manifest the lack of authentic communication and interaction, without answering to boredom’s intersubjective dynamics. Receptivity and sensitivity to another’s experiences are not constitutive of the Heideggerian notion of attunement. David Foster Wallace’s fiction story The Soul Is not a Smithy gives, then, Magri the opportunity to unpack a different account of boredom that takes into consideration the self-other relationality of moods. The careful examination of the story’s first-person fictional narration reveals profound boredom as an existential mood in which self-absorption and loneliness coexist with increased sensitivity to the other’s affective space and yearning for human communication. Being in a certain mood is not inhabiting a closed territory of absolute privacy and impossible communication. And what renders possible the arduous task of communication is, as Wallace’s work shows, the stance of authentic concern and care for others, a stance someone takes the responsibility to cultivate in order to be attentive and attuned to the affective quality of another’s existence.

Editor’s introduction  9 In the next chapter of the collection, titled “Engaging with Physical Atmospheres: The Aesthetics of Weather,” Madalina Diaconu points out the need for the expansion of our conception of aesthetic experience and turns more specifically her interest toward the surveying of the determinants of the aesthetics of weather. Diaconu’s starting point is the diagnosis that whereas phenomenology puts emphasis on our primordial experience, it pays little or no attention to our inescapable engagement with weather phenomena, events, and processes. The main reason for this, she claims, is phenomenology’s antinaturalistic and subject-oriented stance. To construe natural phenomena and natural objects as correlates of meaning-giving subjective acts prevents us from recognizing the formers’ intrinsic or objective value. With the question in mind of how the outlining of a meteorological aesthetics and the cultivation of an engaged ecological stance can be achieved, Diaconu turns her attention to the examination of two relevant strands of investigation: eco-phenomenology and the phenomenological poetics of nature. Eco-phenomenology stretches the phenomenological method to the limit and considers nature as alterity that originally appears to us as a mystery that resists apprehension. The poetics of nature puts emphasis on humans’ kinship with nature, starting from the essential fact that the embodied subject is not but a fold of the sensible and in constant communication with it. Diaconu argues that both these strands abstractly deal with the aesthetic attitude toward nature as being an independent and autonomous dimension of our whole experience. It is in this sense that they cannot give a sufficient account of the richness of the experience of weather and cannot provide an aesthetic theory that would at the same time support environmental ethics. What Diaconu proposes is the articulation of a phenomenology of the atmosphere that would be fertilized by crucial aspects of the aesthetics of engagement, namely by cognitive, social-communitarian, and ethical-critical elements. She makes explicit that the concept of engagement should be taken in an extended sense; that the aesthetics of weather should include descriptions from realms beyond everyday experience and art; that cognition in general and scientific cognition in particular should be taken into consideration; and that the subject of the aesthetic experience should be intersubjectively, socially, historically contextualized. Only then, Diaconu argues, the aesthetics of the weather can help toward cultivating ecological responsibility. In “Visual Art and the Reconstruction of the Artist’s Gesture: Phenomenological Arguments for an Alternative Mirror Theory,” Helena De Preester examines the way contemporary neuroscientists interpret experimental findings regarding the firing of brain neurons in the case of subjects who encounter works of visual art and puts at the center of her discussion the mirror-neurons theory, according to which the same neuron activity takes place in the brain of the subject in the case of the observation of an, even represented, action and in the case of the performance of that very action. De Preester questions the basic assumption of this theory, namely that subjects encountering drawings or paintings feel bodily engaged and respond mirror-neuronally to the artist’s gestures by actually responding to the goal-directed movements that produced the observed artistic traces. She claims that the assumption of goal-directedness does not adequately explicate the artist’s productive gestures. In her critique of the strong intentionalist neuroscientific approach, De Preester is careful to distinguish, on the one hand, the level of our overall empathetic understanding of intentions: we understand that the artwork is the result of purposeful artistic practice. On the other hand, she points to those pre-reflective and non-intentional gestures that comprise the artist’s authentic expressivity. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of authentic speech and expression, De Preester shows that the specific temporality of authentic expressivity differentiates artistic practice from

10  Fotini Vassiliou daily movements and gestures, i.e., from raising a cup or opening a door. Artistic traces are not the realization of a preformed intention or of a precedent fully schematized representation in the artist’s mind. They are nothing but the coming into being of a meaningful intention through certain embodied processes. This helps us understand that in the face of a painting and when observing its creative traces, we don’t witness the result of some purposeful movement but become co-creators of the genesis of expressive meaning. De Preester’s phenomenological reading sheds light on how the understanding of the kinetic intentionality of creators can contribute to the aesthetic experience of the recipients. Such an interpretation is pivotal for explaining the thorny difficulty mirror-neurons theory has in giving an account for the specific aesthetic dimension of our relatedness with artworks. De Preester finally points toward the articulation of an alternative mirror account centered on the internal motor simulation of the way static traces result through dynamical embodied processes. In the next chapter, “Schizophrenia, Music Therapy, and Getting into ‘Groove,’” Michelle Maiese explores the way music (either in playing an organ or listening to it) can play a therapeutic role in cases of subjects with schizophrenic symptoms. From a phenomenological point of view, the phenomenon of schizophrenia is not exclusively reduced to the activation of particular brain mechanisms and its deep understanding requires a thorough examination of the first-person lived experience of its symptoms. Maiese follows a certain theoretical tradition that construes schizophrenic symptoms, both negative and positive, as reflections of aberrations in self-experience and disruptions in the sense of self. Maiese’s claim is that the primary disorder of schizophrenia is an altered sense of selfhood that can be largely attributed to the disturbance of selective attention. The inability to attend selectively to what is contextually significant while all irrelevant information is inhibited makes individuals with schizophrenia face difficulties in having coherent experiences at the levels of bodily sensation, perception, linguistic communication, and interpersonal interaction. Their perceptual, cognitive, and practical life becomes ruptured, and they experience a serious lack of self-coherence. Given this account, Maiese claims that current mainstream treatment approaches to schizophrenia are not sufficient. To target pharmacologically brain chemistry may leave unaddressed the subjective meaning of the patient’s lived experiences. On the other hand, talk therapies may not be effective in patients with severely impaired cognitive processes. What Maiese proposes is that “bottom-up” therapeutic approaches that target pre-reflective affective, experiential, and behavioral dimensions can work supplementarily and sooth schizophrenic symptoms by restoring selective attention and helping patients develop a more coherent pre-reflective sense of self. Music can paradigmatically constitute such a nonverbal therapeutic method. Through the discussion of the case of a particular patient under musical therapy, Maiese shows that music’s structural characteristics, together with the bodily entrainment involved in both listening and playing music, acquire a regulatory role and help subjects’ cognitive and perceptual processes become better organized and well integrated. In “Aesthetic Perception as Vision for Appearance – On Husserl’s Theory of Depiction and Its Actuality,” Peer Bundgaard visits the Husserlian theory of image consciousness, focusing more particularly on the issue of its threefold structure. As is well known, Husserl distinguishes three different sub-intentions in the act of image consciousness, which have as correlates (a) the physical thing, e.g., the canvas, or the piece of marble; (b) the image-object, or else the depicting object; and (c) the image-subject, i.e., the depicted object. Bundgaard examines the conflicting relationship between, on the one hand, the

Editor’s introduction  11 image-object and the image-thing and, on the other, the image-object and the depicted object. In contradistinction to the image-thing, the image-object is given, in its esoteric differentiation, in one adumbration without standing in any functional relation with its surroundings. Also, contrary to the image-subject, the image-object has, as a moment of its depictive character, a scope: it depicts the things it depicts in a certain way out of innumerable other presentational ways of diversified configurations and scales. The qualitative organization of the depicting surface is what triggers the experience of seeingin the depicted subject or motif. Bundgaard argues that this experience exceeds the mere referential, to one degree or another, recognition of the theme (of the restricted imagesubject in a restricted sense) and is rather a kind of quasi-perceptual simulation of the immediately and meaningfully given depicted subject or motif (of the “extended image subject,” as Bundgaard calls it), which is encoded in the design of the depicting surface. Now, according to Husserl, in an aesthetic experience, the mind leaves the intentional object of ordinary image-perception and contemplates the image-object in its appearance. Bundgaard explores the role played by certain essential properties that belong to the pictorial, and not the physical, surface for the ignition of such movement. It is here where a “transparency reduction” takes place, Bundgaard claims, and the image appears in its pure pictoriality and not in its representing function. Some essential dimensions of what he calls “multiply depicting design” play an important role. With the help of concrete examples, Bundgaard discusses more extensively how brushwork and shape (as properties of the depicting surface) are intended as quasi-autonomous organizations of lines, colors, and forms and can thus inform and enhance the aesthetic appreciation of the painting. With the previous Husserlian distinctions at hand, Bundgaard can finally turn to Richard Wollheim’s twofold model of image-perception and pinpoint its inherent conceptual confusion. The fact that Wollheim considers both the image-thing and the image-object at one and the same level, the configurational as he calls it, doesn’t allow him to realize how different seeing-in is in the case of natural objects (e.g., see a face in a cloud) and in that of depicting artifacts (e.g., paintings). In the first case the experience of seeing-in is informed by the natural thing while in the second it is informed by the image-object. By also adopting a Husserlian perspective, Regina-Nino Mion, in her essay “Seeing-in and Seeing-out: Husserl’s Theory of Depiction Revisited,” examines the difference between image and sign and seeks the conditions under which an image is able to function symbolically. According to a certain semiotics-inspired interpretation, Husserl couldn’t see that pictures always involve a symbolic function and that, therefore, the images that are not signs, about which he speaks, are not actually depictions. This is exactly the view Mion undertakes to refute. Her claim is that, according to Husserl, there can be pictorial representations that are not signs but are still depictions. Mion argues that even though other scholars have tried to defend an asemiotic reading of the Husserlian theory of the image, they haven’t provided satisfactory results because they haven’t exploited in a clear way the important distinction between (a) internal depiction and the experience of seeing-in elicited by a picture, and (b) external depiction and the experience of (here Mion adopts John Brough’s terminology) seeing-out, of our intention moving beyond the picture and toward its referent. Both internal and external depictions represent their subjects through analogy or resemblance. In internal depiction, that is, during a seeing-in experience, we intuit the image-subject in the image-object, more particularly in those moments of the image-object that are analogous to or resemble the image-subject. Some minimum resemblance is required, at least with respect to the plastic form. When this requirement is fulfilled and with the help of attention directed toward the resembling

12  Fotini Vassiliou plastic form, seeing-in is rendered possible even with imperfect or impure representations of the depicted theme, which we can hardly recognize. Crucially, in the case of internal depiction, no other separate act intervenes. Contrary to the semiotic reading, seeing-in is a pictorial intuitional act that doesn’t involve any symbolic dimension. In external depiction, however, we move outside of the image, we have a seeing-out experience. The subject is not given intuitively in the image-object; it is rather independently constituted, in a more perfect or more complete way, by a separate act informed by memory or phantasy. According to Husserl, this separate act is symbolic in character; the image functions here as a sign and not as depiction. This is why Mion remarks that the use of the adjective “depictive” Husserl uses to characterize the external function of the image might be unfortunate. Mion’s contribution shows that, under the light of Husserl’s analyses, the semiotics approach cannot keep apart seeing-in, where image functions as depiction with no signifying characteristics, and seeing-out, where it functions as sign but then it is not a depiction. The authors who contribute to the third part of the collection aim at elucidating issues that have to do with the constitution of the works of art, their “internal” life, as well as the relation between the creator and the artistic product. Ivo De Gennaro’s contribution is an original effort to creatively elaborate on some intriguing phenomenological intuitions of the Romanian director Sergiu Celibidache. More specifically, Celibedache developed a conception of musical tempo that goes beyond the received view that approaches it in terms of speed or pace of a musical piece. An approach to tempo like the latter, says he, is still under the spell of what objectively measured time is – the time that physico-mechanical devices register as a sequence of equal quantities of temporal intervals. Understanding tempo in such terms would render it totally irrelevant to the phenomenon and experience of music. What is peculiar to music as distinct from some musical performance is that, whereas the latter is something that develops in time and has duration that is indeed objectively measurable by our clocks, music itself loses its meaning as soon as we attempt to experience it as embedded in such a temporal framework. Music has no duration. What Celibedache, thus, asks is that we understand music as an artwork weaved by tones and melodies on a background of a more primordial, “original” temporality. It is in the context of such a temporality that he coined his notions of a vertical and a horizontal simultaneity, the identification of which brings about their unification into what is Same. Now, Celibedache’s phenomenological insight is that tempo is precisely what, in our consciousness, makes possible this identification of the interweaved horizontal and vertical simultaneity. De Gennaro, thus, suggests that, understood in this way, tempo is what hermeneutic phenomenology has in mind as ἦθος (ēthos), a term indicating the dwelling of man in the world and, together with it, man’s being and comporting as indweller in this world. In this sense, ἦθος is the way in which man’s world and things are entwined and at the same time kept distinct in what they are. For De Gennaro, then, this means that, at this juncture, Celibedache’s musical phenomenology can be seen as acquiring an unexpected ethical relevance. As can now be said, tempo is intimately connected with this understanding of ἦθος and, more specifically, forms its primordial temporal web. Further, as De Gennaro maintains, in our epoch, which is characterized by will to power, an ἦθος understood in terms of the Celibedachean musical tempo can have important ethical implications for our understanding of our condition. Let us now pass to photography. Let us consider the following questions that are fundamental to the phenomenological understanding of photography but also, more generally, of the visual arts. What is the relation between the world of perception and the

Editor’s introduction  13 world that manifests itself in the photographic image? What is the relation of the photographer and the recipient to both the real and the photographic worlds? What is the difference of the photograph as a work of art and as a documentary piece providing epistemic information about the world? In “Time and the Photograph,” John Brough argues that these questions are related and that what inhabits them all is the issue of time. Undeniably, time is involved in everything we experience; it is certainly involved in the arts, but in photography its involvement is particularly perplexed. Brough’s following argumentation offers a phenomenological analysis of the peculiar temporal character of the photograph and the role this character plays for the adaptation of an aesthetic stance. Brough’s starting point is the discussion of Husserl’s tripartite theory of the image (image-thing, image-object, and image-subject) applied here to the specific case of photographic image. What is then convincingly pinpointed is that, again in Husserlian terms but also in accord with Roland Barthes’ relevant remarks, photography offers a radically new mode of time consciousness. It shows and preserves real time; it shows and preserves the past. As Brough puts it, the photograph arrests the flow of time and preserves the flow’s moments in images. But there are several ways time enters into photographs and Brough elaborates on them by reference to concrete examples. In the final part of his chapter, Brough sheds light on the aesthetic appeal a photograph can have. Besides pinpointing to the, again Husserlian, view that if it is to be art, the photograph must excel as an image, Brough examines certain features that have to do with time and can contribute to the aesthetic significance of a photograph, namely the depiction of simultaneity, the depiction of expectation, the depiction of waiting, and the depiction of age. But hasn’t Husserl told us, something that many phenomenologists accept, that the aesthetic stance is disinterested; that aesthetic experience excludes any interest in real existence and therefore in real time? How can this dictum be reconciled with the view that a photograph that presents (past) time can have aesthetic appeal? In his concluding discussion, Brough tackles this difficulty and shows how for Husserl the aesthetically significant manner of appearance also can include the consciousness of actual existence in time. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s chapter “Exploring the Aesthetic Uniqueness of the Art of Dance” offers a phenomenological analysis of the aesthetic unity of dancer and dance. This unity, she argues, is what makes dance, as a form of art, unique. Dance is not an art form that can be separated from the dancer the way the play can be separated from the actor or the piece of music from the music player. The aesthetic unity of dancer and dance, which for Sheets-Johnstone is nothing but the unfolding of purely kinetic dynamic realities of movement, can be abruptly disturbed by audiences of dance when technical virtuosity, and not pure aesthetic form, becomes the focus of attention. In such cases, dancer and dance become separate entities and the technicality of movement takes the place of dance. In order to shed light on the internal logic of the peculiar character of dance in its aesthetic unity with the dancer, Sheets-Johnstone discusses writings by Susan Sontag, by the dancers and choreographers Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown, and Pina Bausch. The center of her discussion occupies the issue of the temporal dimension of dance and the fact that its fleeting nowness and its existential impermanence render its preservation difficult. The fleeting character of dance may also explain the difficulty we have to phenomenologically grasp it and unpack it. Sheets-Johnstone claims that both classical phenomenologists, like Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, and contemporary scholars, like Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, neglect or misunderstand the core condition of dance, namely the sensory modality of kinesthesia. On the contrary, it is dancers, choreographers, and theater directors (Sheets-Johnstone discusses the cases of

14  Fotini Vassiliou Doris Humphrey, Jacques Le Coq, and Stanton Garner) who attest to and underscore the centrality of movement and kinesthesia to dance. In “What Is Moving in the Movie?” Hans Reiner Sepp poses the core question of what the moving moment of the form of the cinematographic image is. His interest focuses on the immanent structure that underlies a movie irrespective of its narrative content or the external psychological and pragmatological pre-conditions that determine it. Sepp’s point of departure is the examination of the emergence of cinematography out of the development of nineteenth-century photography. What mainly interests him is how reality is manifested in the photograph and the way film radicalizes this manifestation. Sepp argues that the experience of something real occurs through the experience of resistance in our tactual interaction with it. In the case of the photograph, it is also touchability that puts us in contact with the photographic real thing and the photographic real space and time. A touchability that, according to Sepp, in an immediate way encounters the inevitable factuality of what presents itself. The photograph, Sepp says, is saturated with reality. And by this he means that a real situation is manifested in the photographic image and in the how of the corporeal position of the camera, the resulting perspective, and the chosen picture frame. In the case of the film, we, in addition, see movement: the movement of what is presented in the film as also the movement of the filming subject whose body is instrumentally extended to include the camera itself. It is the movement of the camera body that renders possible and determines the perspectival manifestation and framing of the filmic content and the movements it presents. Sepp argues that movement in films is the interplay between continuity and discontinuity in space and time. He suggests that the creation of narrative continuity in films is the result of a discontinuous cut into our actual experience of the world, but this continuity can also become trapped in itself without a new discontinuous step in the cinematic medium itself. Sepp’s analysis ultimately reveals the philosophical potential of film, as it mirrors the basic movement of human existence through the subjective perspective of the camera and the imaginative world it constructs. In parallel to the phenomenological approach, film’s unique movement is able to represent human existence through its own means. The chapter that completes the New Yearbook’s collection dedicated to phenomenological aesthetics is “Topographies of Memory. Husserl’s ‘Ever-New Present’ and Recollection in Urban Art.” In it, Sanem Yazicioğlu draws on Husserl’s analyses of time and memory and investigates how the surrounding world affects artistic production. Her case study is the urban art of the Turkish-American artist Burhan Doğançay. In Doğançay’s work, more particularly in his paintings and collages on urban walls, Yazicioğlu reads an exemplary realization of what Husserl calls the “ever-new.” In order to make her case, Yazicioğlu compares concrete walls to glass surfaces that we so frequently meet in contemporary cities. She claims that glass surfaces may invite our vision’s visit. However, since they are not objectivities with which we interact in our personal, social, and political activities, which means that they are not recorders of our individual and communal life’s traces and do not participate in the hodological constitution of our history, our vision’s return to them is not but a repetitive act that, even if it is filled with new content, cannot participate in the structuring of what Yazicioğlu calls “topographies of memory.” “Topographies of memory” indicate the building-up of the topos of recollection whose temporal and spatial fillings unfold not indeterminately and indifferently, but in terms of significantly ordered befores and afters, foregrounds and backgrounds, attachments to and detachments from the surroundings, namely in a way anchored in our personal,

Editor’s introduction  15 social, and political praxis. Urban concrete walls are such fields where signs are inscribed with reference to temporal and spatial becomings. In our encounters with them, our retention of their physical topographies ignites our return to already constituted topographies of secondary memory (recollection). But this is an enriching return that produces new topographies. Yazicioğlu’s claim is that the dynamics of how the adumbrations and variations of the retentional dimension of our presenting acts enrich the topoi of memory can also inspire artistic production. Doğançay’s urban art manifests such inspiration and at the same time it realizes artistically the ever-new retrieval of our topographies of (collective) memory.

2 Aesthetic normativity and deviation A reading of Hume’s Of the Standard of Taste1 Michela Summa

Abstract  Questions about the normativity of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgments are central to the discussion in philosophical aesthetics and have their roots in early modern debates. In phenomenology, a discussion of aesthetic normativity can be found in the work of Moritz Geiger, whose main concern is to emphasize the primacy of the object’s real value and to warn against the generalizations of subjective and self-referential enjoyment. This chapter aims to provide an answer to Geiger’s worry based on David Hume’s discussion of taste. While arguing for the subjective character of aesthetic appreciation, Hume does not reduce aesthetic ­experience to a form of self-referential inner concentration devoid of normative implications. This chapter shows in what sense a reassessment of Hume’s approach to aesthetic normativity can be fruitful for phenomenological aesthetics and help reassessing epistemic questions about the validity of judgments for which we may not have verificational criteria. Keywords  Aesthetic Normativity; Imagination; Taste; David Hume; Moritz Geiger 1 Introduction Philosophical aesthetics has often dwelled on the problem of normativity in aesthetic judgments. Frequently discussed questions include: how can the subjectivity of aesthetic experience be combined with the claim that aesthetic evaluation is intersubjectively valid? Should we distinguish standards of aesthetic evaluation from prescriptions? Should we assume that those standards are grounded in some real properties of objects? How are we to account for the plurality of human tastes and preferences? In phenomenological aesthetics, these questions tend to be addressed only incidentally. Phenomenological research in aesthetics focuses mainly on questions about the specific ways in which artworks are perceived and the structures of aesthetic responsiveness, on the forms of aesthetic production and expression, on the ontology of artworks, on their expressiveness (also considered in relation to the expressiveness of nature), etc. While remarks on aesthetic evaluation certainly permeate these studies, phenomenological 1 I presented preliminary versions of this chapter at the colloquium of the Institute for Educational Science of Bern University and at the workshop “The Problem of Normativity—a Phenomenological Approach” in the Department of Philosophy of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. I am grateful to the organizers and to all participants for their feedback. I am also grateful to Alessandro Salice and Ian Drummond for their critical comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-3

Aesthetic normativity and deviation  17 inquiries seem to be more cautious when it comes to the normativity of aesthetic judgments. There are various reasons for this, which mostly have to do with the descriptive priorities of phenomenological aesthetics. However, questions about normativity are of crucial importance also for phenomenological aesthetics. In aesthetic experience, we seek standards of appropriateness that apparently are neither given nor ultimately determinable. Accordingly, considering the normativity of aesthetic evaluation can be significant for a reassessment of further forms of cognition for which we lack verificational criteria. In order to clarify the implications of inquiries into aesthetic normativity, we need to reassess the question about the reality of aesthetic values and, relatedly, the question about the subjectivity or objectivity of aesthetic evaluation. In the work of some early phenomenologists, we find some remarks on these questions, mostly expressed within the framework of a realist approach to values. Specifically, normative questions are often raised by these authors as a corollary of ontological and descriptive questions.2 In this framework, Moritz Geiger stands out as an author who explicitly addresses normative issues related to aesthetic evaluation. In the second section, I discuss his approach to aesthetic normativity, notably the implications of his view on dilettantism in aesthetic appreciation and his critique of subjectivism. I focus, in particular, on what I consider to be the problems in realist accounts of aesthetic values. I then turn to David Hume’s view on aesthetic normativity and discuss his account of three constitutive aspects of aesthetic experience and appreciation: the subjective nature of aesthetic experience and how it is influenced by contingent factors (such as age, education, and cultural background); the relational and responsive character of aesthetic experience; and the social embeddedness of aesthetic judgments. In the third section, I show how Hume’s relational and responsive approach accommodates both the plurality of aesthetic appreciation and the quest for normativity. In the fourth section, I argue that we should understand the figure of the critic or true judge as exemplary and as suggesting that aesthetic normativity is instituted and shared on the basis of a particular kind of deviation from emotional norms or standards, which get productively reintegrated in a social context. 2 The problem of the subjectivity and objectivity of aesthetic value: subjectivity as inner concentration? In his Contributions to the Phenomenology of Aesthetic Enjoyment (Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses) from 1913, Geiger declares that he will devote his inquiry to descriptive problems,3 in particular the problem of how to characterize aesthetic enjoyment as distinguished from other kinds of joy and enjoyment on the basis of its intentional and motivational structure. In other writings, notably his 1928 article entitled “On Dilettantism in the Experience of Art” (Vom Dilettantismus im künstlerischen Erleben), Geiger focuses more closely on normative questions. The inquiry into aesthetic normativity developed in this essay relies on the distinction between inner 2 This is the case, for instance, in Roman Ingarden’s work on the ontology and cognition of literary works of art. See Roman Ingarden, Das literarische Kunstwerk (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1972); Roman Ingarden, Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerkes (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968). 3 Moritz Geiger, “Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses,” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Phänomenologische Forschung 1, no. 2 (1913): 572.

18  Michela Summa and outer concentration, which Geiger takes up from Otto Schulze4 and further develops in relation to the results of his works on emotional experience.5 The distinction between inner and outer concentration depends on a certain understanding of the awareness of our own emotions. Geiger distinguishes between living through an emotional experience and being attentive to it. He admits that, in a primal sense, we simply live through our emotional experiences as affective experiences. Something affects us and elicits an emotional response like joy or sorrow, and we immediately live through these emotional states. Such an immediate and straightforward affective experience is primarily one of sensible feelings, which are not intentional in the strict sense but nonetheless are related to what elicits them, for instance, something attractive or repulsive.6 More complex emotional acts build on this primal affective awareness. This means that in affective and emotional experience we are directed at the object, event, or state of affairs eliciting our emotion, but we are also implicitly aware of the emotional tonality of our experience; in other words, even without turning our attention to our feeling of pleasure, we are aware of this feeling and we experience the object that elicits it as pleasurable.7 Besides this form of pre-thematic awareness of feelings, Geiger discusses the different ways in which we can be attentively aware of our emotional experiences. In all cases of attentive awareness, we have two simultaneous intentions: one of the emotion itself and an attentional one directed at the emotion. Attentional awareness can assume different forms, which we do not need to discuss here.8 What is important to emphasize is that such attentional attitude can either be reflective or prereflective: while the former is a turn to the emotion after the fact, the latter is a way of subjectively responding to an affective state while we are having it. This point is important for understanding how Geiger conceives of aesthetic normativity on the basis of the distinction between inner and outer concentration. In his essay “Dilettantism in the Experience of Art,” Geiger connects the attentional stance he describes in earlier texts with the capacity to “take a stance” (Stellungnahme) with regard to one’s own emotion. This “taking a stance” refers to the emotional responsiveness to the feeling or affect itself, which does not presuppose any reflective act but rather accompanies the emotional experience. Thus, for instance, one can abandon oneself to one’s grief or intimately revolt against it; one can lose and forget oneself in enjoyment or live the enjoyment in a more superficial or detached way.9 Such taking a stance occurs as an “intimate attitude” (innere Haltung) while one is experiencing the emotion. One aspect of such attentiveness as taking a stance is that the emotion can occur in either inner or

4 Moritz Geiger, “Das Bewusstsein von Gefühlen,” in Münchener Philosophische Abhandlungen. Theodor Lipps zu seinem sechzigsten Geburtstag gewidmet von früheren Schülern, ed. Alexander Pfänder (Leipzig: Barth, 1911), 151–152. 5 See Mariano Crespo, “Moritz Geiger on the Consciousness of Feelings,” Studia Phaenomenologica 15 (2015): 375–393; Alessandro Salice, “Moritz Geiger,” in The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotions, ed. Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer (London: Routledge), 87–95. 6 Geiger, “Das Bewusstsein von Gefühlen,” 141. 7 The question of whether emotional experience is grounded in an affectively neutral representation of the object or, conversely, whether all acts, including all representations, have an affective component is extensively debated in both early and contemporary phenomenology. Geiger seems to defend the former view, suggesting here that not all cognitive acts have emotional coloring. 8 See Salice, “Moritz Geiger.” 9 Moritz Geiger, “Vom Dilettantismus im künstlerischen Erleben,” in Zugänge zur Ästhetik (Leipzig: Der Neue Geist Verlag, 1928), 12.

Aesthetic normativity and deviation  19 outer concentration. Inner concentration is characteristic of experiences in which the object, event, or state of affairs eliciting the emotion is experienced as the occasion for the emotions or feelings. Accordingly, if we experience a beautiful landscape in inner concentration, what we enjoy are our feelings, not the landscape itself: The landscape is only there in order to produce emotions, to stir up emotions. It does not have mental force; only the emotions have this—one lives in the inner concentration on the emotion.10 Outer concentration, conversly, occurs when we take a stance that is oriented to the object eliciting the emotion: The direction of concentration goes in this case towards the landscape. One looks at it with alert eyes, observes it in detail, grasps the fields, the houses, the lots of wood. The landscape is not outside the attitude—it is at the center of one’s interest—one opens oneself for its irradiations. These arouse the emotion, without changing the attitude directed to the outside: one lives in outer concentration.11 This distinction between inner and outer concentration underlies Geiger’s remarks on aesthetic normativity, notably his critique of dilettantism in aesthetic experience. Discussing both fine arts and the aesthetic experience of nature, Geiger argues that there are two main characteristics of aesthetic dilettantism: first, the emotions one experiences are inadequate to the value of the artwork, which for him amounts to saying that they do not originate from such values; and second, these inadequate emotions are taken to be adequate.12 Besides cases in which one confuses the form and matter of artworks and cases in which one enjoys identification with characters or other personal associations, Geiger considers the dilettantism of inner concentration to be the most pernicious kind of dilettantism. Inner concentration is an inadequate attitude because it neglects what is primary in aesthetic experience: the value of the object itself. In inner concentration, the object functions only as a medium or instrument to elicit emotions and feelings: what one enjoys is the inner effect of the experience, not the object itself, and this is similar to what happens with a drug (Rauschmittel). The implications of such an attitude are sentimentalism, a concealed self-referentiality, and subjectivism in aesthetic evaluation: when we say in inner concentration that an object is beautiful, we actually mean that this object elicits in us pleasurable feelings. This means that the value of the work is taken to be grounded in our subjective and sentimental experience. This is the view Geiger attributes to aesthetic evaluation based on the effect or impact (Wirkung) of the work of art: An artwork is a means to elicit certain emotional experiences, and it is exhaustively described as a means to this aim. The value of an artwork is nothing more than its suitability to this aim; its value is value for something, value for the emotional experience of the spectator. In itself, the artwork does not possess any value.13

10 Geiger, “Vom Dilettantismus im künstlerischen Erleben,” 14. 11 Geiger, “Vom Dilettantismus im künstlerischen Erleben,” 15. 12 Geiger, “Vom Dilettantismus im künstlerischen Erleben,” 4. 13 Geiger, “Vom Dilettantismus im künstlerischen Erleben,” 31.

20  Michela Summa According to Geiger, this amounts to reducing artworks to objects of use. Thus, the subjectivism of inner concentration undermines the autonomy and disinterestedness of aesthetic experience. Remarkably, Geiger mentions Kant as a defender of such a subjectivist view, without however engaging in a closer discussion of how Kant precisely combines the subjectivity, autonomy, and disinterestedness of aesthetic judgments. Criticizing the aesthetics of effectiveness, Geiger contends that the only way to elaborate on the appropriateness of aesthetic judgments is to dismiss the dilettantism of inner concentration and take only outer concentration as a suitable attitude in aesthetic experience. Unfortunately, his discussion of outer concentration and of the related aesthetics of value is much less elaborated than the criticism toward the dilettantism of inner concentration and the related subjectivism. Geiger repeatedly emphasizes that the norm for aesthetic evaluation must be found in the value of the object itself and that the only appropriate attitude is the “feeling grasping of artistic values” (das fühlende Erfassen künstlerischer Werte).14 But what do aesthetic values consist in? Clearly, the whole discussion presupposes a kind of realism about aesthetic values. In the case of aesthetic experience, however, we would need to account for the problem that traditionally affects approaches to aesthetic normativity. In what sense can we say that the value really pertains to the object, given the variety of judgments of taste? How, for instance, can we account for intergenerational and intercultural differences in aesthetic appreciation? Where does the norm for establishing which judgments are appropriate and which not stem from? Can we impose a norm of appreciation on someone who does not share our aesthetic evaluations? Turning to Hume and analyzing the significance of his quest for a standard of taste will allow us to reassess these problems by showing that subjectivism of aesthetic appreciation does not necessarily lead to relativism, inner concentration, and dilettantism. 3  Hume: relationality and responsiveness in aesthetic experience Geiger’s remarks on aesthetic normativity rely mainly on an individualistic understanding of aesthetic experience. His discussion of inner and outer concentration, of the adequateness of appreciation, and of values does not fully consider the fact that we may disagree with others and argue about aesthetic evaluation, and that we are interested in the aesthetic appreciation of others. Quarreling about taste means not only that one is convinced of the rightness of one’s own appreciation but also that one cares about others’ appreciation and about the possibility of remodulating one’s own experience by sharing it with others. This is not so much a form of pro-social behavior as a search for agreement that is constitutive of the experienced object as valuable. These problems, related to the plurality of aesthetic judgments, are dwelled upon by several modern philosophers. In this and the following sections, I address the position of David Hume on the problem of aesthetic normativity as a possible response to Geiger’s view, which can be fruitfully integrated into a phenomenology of aesthetic experience. Though Hume argues that aesthetic values are “subjective,” he is not to be criticized for the kind of subjectivism Geiger refers to. Rather, Hume proposes a relational and responsive account of aesthetic evaluation, to the extent that it does claim that aesthetic properties are subjectdependent, but he denies that they are merely projected onto objects. They are actualized in and through the affective responsivity of the experiencing subject. Thus, expressing our aesthetic evaluation about something connects our emotional experience to qualities we 14 Geiger, “Vom Dilettantismus im künstlerischen Erleben,” 36.

Aesthetic normativity and deviation  21 attribute to the object itself. Hume’s responsive and relational account is based on an inquiry into the sharing of the experience of taste and conceives of the education of taste on the basis of the particular productivity of deviation from norms. Hume’s essay Of the Standard of Taste (1757) is devoted to the question of whether and how we can assume that there is a normative standard for evaluating the appropriateness of aesthetic judgments, assuming that such judgments are grounded on feelings and emotions and that emotional experiences differ among individuals. Hume introduces the problem by discussing a paradox deriving from two common-sense assumptions, which are apparently equally valid.16 The first assumption can be summarized with the dictum “De gustibus non est disputandum”: one does not argue about taste. The claim behind this assumption is that beauty and ugliness are not objective properties like size and shape. Aesthetic properties are properties we attribute to objects on the basis of our emotional response, or, more precisely, on the basis of the “conformity or relation between the object and the organs or faculties of the mind.”17 Hume’s account in this respect seems to be very distant from Geiger’s aesthetic realism: 15

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. To seek the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter. According to the disposition of the organs, the same object may be both sweet and bitter; and the proverb has justly determined it to be fruitless to dispute concerning tastes. It is very natural, and even quite necessary, to extend this axiom to mental, as well as bodily taste; and thus common sense, which is so often at variance with philosophy, especially with the sceptical kind, is found, in one instance at least, to agree in pronouncing the same decision.18 Confronted with the debate in eighteenth-century aesthetics,19 Hume understands beauty and deformity not as real properties of the things themselves but rather as relying on human sentiment. This amounts to saying that beauty is dependent on the relation between experiencing subjects and objects being experienced. This does not mean, however, that 15 Several studies discuss the consistence of Hume’s approach and the question of whether the proposed theory should not be considered as a causal after all. See, e.g., Carolyn W. Korsmeyer, “Hume and the Foundations of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35 (1976): 201–215; Roger A. Shiner, “Hume and the Causal Theory of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54 (1996): 237–249; Mary Mothersill, “In Defense of Hume and the Causal Theory of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (1997): 312–317. 16 This paradox can be read as an antinomy in Kant’s sense, which Hume thinks can ultimately be resolved. See Timothy M. Costelloe, Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume (London: Routledge, 2007), 37–52. 17 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 133–154. 18 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 136–137. See also David Hume, “The Sceptic,” in Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 100; David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), App 1.14, 291–292. 19 Hume’s aesthetics is inspired by, notably, John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Joseph Addison, and Francis Hutcheson. See Laurent Jaffro, La couleur du goût: Psychologie et esthétique au siècle de Hume (Paris: Vrin, 2019); Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense: Francis Hutcheson and 18th-Century British Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003).

22  Michela Summa we simply project our inner experiences onto objects: as Hume observes in the second book of the Treatise, “beauty is such an order and construction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul.”20 This seems to suggest that beauty may be taken to be a dispositional quality of the object, the actualization of which requires a corresponding emotional and judgmental response on the part of the subject. However, the analogy with dispositional properties should be taken carefully.21 On Hume’s account, saying that a painting is beautiful is not the same as saying that glass is fragile, since adequate subjective responsiveness is needed not only to actualize a property but also to bring this property into existence, even as a disposition. Hume acknowledges this first common-sense view as a matter of fact, but he contrasts it with the second common-sense assumption, which is not only factual but also introduces a normative claim. Despite the variety of tastes, there is a large (and potentially extendable) agreement about some beautiful works, which are appreciated throughout different epochs and cultures, thus passing the so-called “test of time.”22 Also, there is agreement in the preference of some works when compared with others: But though this axiom, by passing into a proverb, seems to have attained the sanction of common sense; there is certainly a species of common sense which opposes it, at least serves to modify and restrain it. Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-hill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean. Though there may be found persons, who give the preference to the former authors; no one pays attention to such a taste; and we pronounce without scruple the sentiment of these pretended critics to be absurd and ridiculous. The principle of the natural equality of tastes is then totally forgot, and while we admit it on some occasions, where the objects seem near an equality, it appears an extravagant paradox, or rather a palpable absurdity, where objects so disproportioned are compared together.23 While Hume recognizes that both common-sense assumptions are legitimate, his effort is devoted to finding reasons for the second one, that is, to clarify on what basis—­assuming that taste is subjective—we are entitled to appeal to some kind of normativity in aesthetic experience and evaluation. Should we consider this approach as based on the subjectivism and sentimentalism Geiger is criticizing? I believe not. While contending that aesthetic values derive from the affective and emotional resonance that artworks or nature have on the subject, Hume does not endorse a kind of sentimentalism of inner concentration; rather, he seeks a way to maintain both the subjectivity of taste and the normativity

20 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2.1.8.2, 195. 21 See Theodore Gracyk, “Hume’s Aesthetics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (2121) (accessed on April 8, 2022). 22 Hume is thinking mainly of literary works. See David Hume, “My Own Life,” in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. G.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. On this topic, see Jerrold Levinson, Contemplating Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 366–387. 23 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 137.

Aesthetic normativity and deviation  23 that underlies the distinction between adequate and inadequate evaluations.24 Thus, it is for Hume natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least a decision afforded confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.25 Since Hume accepts both assumptions, the standard of taste underlying the normativity of aesthetic evaluation is not to be defined on the basis of some real property of the object. It is significant that even Geiger, who defends a realistic view, does not mention the real properties that would render an object undoubtedly beautiful or ugly. This suggests that there are at least some difficulties in finding unambiguous criteria or drawing up a list of the properties that make something aesthetically valuable in itself. For Hume, to speak correctly about aesthetic evaluation means considering that such evaluation corresponds only to the relation between subjects and objects of experience, or to the capacities we have to respond to what we experience and are affected by. Moreover, Hume emphasizes that, at least prima facie, the different emotional reactions in aesthetic experience seem to be justified or at least to have their motives; this implies that aesthetic standards cannot be simply imposed but rather need to be acknowledged by the experiencing subject. But how are we to search for such standards? In order to answer this question, Hume exemplarily refers to the figure of the critic. Such a figure is exemplary in two senses: on the one hand, the critic exemplifies the adequate perception of aesthetic value, because his/her subjective experience best resonates with the object; on the other hand, the critic also assumes the function of an example for others to follow in order to properly appreciate aesthetic values. How should we understand this on the basis of Hume’s previous remarks? Taking up the idea of an exemplary presentation, Hume mentions ex negativo the characteristics that cannot be missing in a good critic: When the critic has no delicacy, he judges without any distinction, and is only affected by the grosser and more palpable qualities of the object: The finer touches pass unnoticed and disregarded. Where he is not aided by practice, his verdict is attended with confusion and hesitation. Where no comparison has been employed, the most frivolous beauties, such as rather merit the name of defects, are the object of his admiration. Where he lies under the influence of prejudice, all his natural sentiments are perverted. Where good sense is wanting, he is not qualified to discern the beauties of design and reasoning, which are the highest and most excellent.26 The critic thus needs to have five qualities: delicacy, practice, the capacity to draw comparisons, the capacity not to be influenced by prejudice, and good sense. Before discussing these five characteristics, I wish to turn to two aspects that allow us to better qualify Hume’s sentimentalist and subjectivist approach to aesthetic value. First, Hume’s position does not express a kind of naïve sentimentalism, nor does it fall prey to Geiger’s critique of inner concentration. The references to sentiment and the 24 See Peter Jones, “Hume’s Literary and Aesthetic Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Fate Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 255–280; Gracyk, “Hume’s Aesthetics.” 25 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 136. 26 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 147.

24  Michela Summa passions are importantly qualified by the search for a standard, which also represents a way to educate our sentiments. Important in this respect is the distinction Hume makes throughout the essay between questions of fact and questions of sentiment:27 while the former concern only what factually occurs, the latter have to do with the structure and appropriateness of emotional responses. It is simply a matter of fact that everyone has different tastes and that everyone’s taste is conditioned by environment, culture, era, etc. However, this does not mean that one cannot judge emotional responses to be more or less appropriate and inappropriate. Clarifying when appreciation is appropriate or inappropriate is a matter of sentiment and justification. Accordingly, the search for a standard of taste counteracts naive sentimentalism and relativism without neglecting the fact that the aesthetic is grounded in subjective feelings and emotions. This search needs to account not only for the fittingness of sentiment and the objectual presentation but also for the shareability of one’s own emotional experience. The possibility of sharing experiences underlies the quest for a standard and allows us to understand the meaning of particular disputes concerning taste as well as the positive and negative sanctioning of aesthetic judgments.28 What Hume is appealing to is the quest for a standard of taste, that is, a standard that is not simply given but needs to be envisaged and negotiated with others.29 In this respect, it is significant that Hume introduces the exemplary figure of the critic as an answer to a kind of deviation from norms: the deviation of someone who would in the end prefer Ogilby over Milton. Against this, Hume responds: It appears then, that, amidst all the variety and caprice of taste, there are certain general principles of approbation or blame, whose influence a careful eye may trace in all operations of the mind. Some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and others to displease; and if they fail of their effect in any particular instance, it is from some apparent defect or imperfection in the organ.30 Second, however, this passage is controversial, in particular because it brings to the fore the circularity in Hume’s argument, which was implicit already in the previous remarks on aesthetic values. What does it mean to say that there are forms and qualities “calculated to please”? Hume’s answer seems to be that there are exemplary figures, the critic or true judge, who emotionally resonate with objects in the appropriate way. But the appropriateness of the emotional response is precisely defined by the capacity to grasp what is beautiful or ugly. Moreover, Hume seems here to rely on a naturalistic analogy between the sense of taste (and more generally secondary qualities) and aesthetic appreciation. This seems to presuppose a concept of normality in organic functioning, which Hume does not properly thematize. The circularity of Hume’s argument has been extensively discussed in the literature. Departing from positions that see the circularity as simply a flaw in Hume’s argument, Peter Kivy contends that this reading presupposes a narrow understanding of Hume’s 27 See Costelloe, Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume, 3–22; Jaffro, La couleur du goût, 87–108; Jones, “Hume’s Literary and Aesthetic Theory.” 28 This reference to communicability, the capacity to consider the restrictedness of one’s own perspective and take up someone else’s perspective, also represents a bridge between Hume’s aesthetic and moral philosophy. See Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 3.3.1.15, 372. 29 See Dabney Towsend, Hume’s Aesthetic Theory: Taste and Sentiment (London: Routledge, 2001), 180–216. 30 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 140.

Aesthetic normativity and deviation  25 essay. He argues that the circularity concerns only two of the qualities of the critic— namely, practice and use of comparison, since both are defined in the text by referring to the concept of the beautiful—but not the others. The qualities of the critic should not be considered apart from each other and from the figure of the critic that embodies all the above-mentioned features. More importantly, in my view, focusing on the circularity does not do justice to the exemplary nature of the argument. Arguments based on exemplarity, in fact, do not merely refer to examples as illustrations for an already given and recognized generality. Instead, they take particulars as guiding threads to seek out the generality. In this sense, all arguments based on exemplarity implicitly anticipate the generality that a concrete particular exemplifies.32 Since the argument is neither a definition nor a demonstration, the circle is not vicious and cannot be considered to be a flaw. With the exemplary figure of the critic, Hume is elaborating on a kind of experiential normativity that cannot be expressed by means of standard argumentation and for which criteria have not previously been given. This also implies that aesthetics sets some limits to what can be claimed on the basis of logical argumentation,33 and should allow descriptive and exhibiting components. In our case, such components have to do with the way human beings experience aesthetic phenomena (though this discourse is not limited to aesthetics) as part of their communal life. 31

4  Delicacy and imagination: an aberration from which to learn? Hume elaborates on his theory of taste by confronting the challenges of a particular aberration of sentiment—namely, a kind of emotional responsiveness that falls outside certain factual standards but is nonetheless able to set new normative standards. Considering how this aberration becomes part of the search for a new standard allows us to better define in what sense Hume is neither endorsing naïve sentimentalism nor proposing a relativist turn to inner experience; rather he is developing a social and responsive account of the shaping of aesthetic normativity. I argue for the following three claims: (a) delicacy, which for Hume is one of the crucial characteristics of the critic, is a particular kind of aberration or deviation from norms; (b) imagination, insofar as it is involved in aesthetic experience, modifies this aberration, and turns it into a standard-setting quality; (c) such institution of new standards is constitutively social. 4.1  Why is delicacy a kind of aberration?

In Of the Standard of Taste, Hume introduces what we may call a naturalistic understanding of delicacy by discussing an episode in Cervantes’s Don Quixote. In this episode, Sancho wants to bring a proof of the delicacy of his own taste and tells a story about two of his relatives, from whom he supposedly has inherited this quality. Both are asked to taste some wine, which is supposed to be excellent, old, and of a good vintage. 31 Peter Kivy, “Hume’s Standard of Taste: Breaking the Circle,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 7, no. 1 (1967): 57–66. See also Peter Kivy, De Gustibus: Arguing about Taste and Why We Do It (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 32 See Michela Summa and Karl Mertens, “Introduction: Exemplarity; A Pattern of Thought for Aesthetic Cognition,” Discipline Filosofiche XXXI, no. 1 (2021): 5–20; Michela Summa and Karl Mertens, “Einleitung,” in Das Exemplarische – Orientierung für menschliches Wissen und Handeln, ed. Michela Summa and Karl Mertens (Paderborn: Mentis, 2022,): vii–xxxv. 33 See Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 68–90.

26  Michela Summa Both declare that the wine is good, yet each with a different comment: according to one, the wine has an aftertaste of leather, according to the other, of iron. Here is how Hume reports the end of the story: You cannot imagine how much they were both ridiculed for their judgment. But who laughed in the end? On emptying the hogshead, there was found at the bottom an old key with a leathern thong tied to it.34 Sancho’s relatives have delicate taste—and here Hume considers aesthetic taste in analogy with sensory taste. Also, such delicacy of taste is something that may initially stand out as extraordinary and, depending on how such extraordinariness is socially evaluated, as an aberration or deviation from the norm. This is testified by the sanctioning reaction of others: the remarks on aftertaste are initially ridiculed. The fact that the correctness of the remarks made by Sancho’s relatives is then verified on the basis of objective proof should not mislead us. Hume, in fact, emphasizes that the same distinction between delicate and non-delicate taste would hold even if no key with leather tong was found. This means that something can have an aesthetic effect on us even if we do not know what elicits our aesthetic response; it is also consistent with Hume’s responsive approach to taste. Certainly, we appreciate qualities of objects, but this does not mean that aesthetic values themselves are real qualities. Aesthetic experience requires the response to the affection produced by the object with its qualities. Something is delightful or beautiful only in relation to an at least possible experience of delight and beauty—that is, only in relation to an emotional response. Against this background, we can also understand Hume’s account of delicacy: Where the organs are so fine as to allow nothing to escape them, and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition, this we call delicacy of taste, whether we employ these terms in the literal or metaphorical sense.35 Although these remarks already hint at the extraordinary character of delicacy, the importance of this quality and its productive implications are more closely emphasized in “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” (1741). In this essay, Hume first clarifies that delicacy is a modification not only of taste but potentially of the passions in general. Second, he compares delicacy of the passions with delicacy of taste, in order to show how the quality of delicacy can undergo a productive transformation. The essay begins with an observation about how individuals with a particular delicacy of the passions are “extremely sensible to all the accidents of life”; this “gives them a lively joy upon every prosperous event, as well as a piercing grief when they meet with misfortunes and adversity.”36 Such sensibility implies a kind of excess in the emotional response, be that positive or negative: joy and sorrow are not experienced in the balanced way that “men of cool and sedate tempers”37 do, but as overwhelming passions. Even if

34 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 141. 35 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 141. 36 David Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” in Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10. 37 Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” 10.

Aesthetic normativity and deviation  27 someone may be esteemed as endowed with a particularly fine sensibility, delicacy is in this sense of no benefit for the experiencing subject: [W]hen a person that has this sensibility of temper meets with any misfortune, his sorrow or resentment takes entire possession of him, and deprives him of all relish in the common occurrence of life, the right enjoyment of which forms the chief part of our happiness. […] Not to mention, that men of such lively passions are apt to be transported beyond all bounds of prudence and discretion, and to take false steps in the conduct of life, which are often irretrievable.38 Precisely for this reason, delicacy should be considered a particular kind of aberration, which also has social implications. Hypersensitivity makes human beings suffer and become unfree. Also, someone who suffers or is a slave to their passions will not be open to or even capable of sharing them with others or of entering into a serene and balanced relation with themselves. This extreme sensibility and the delicacy of existentially meaningful emotions may eventually become the source of melancholy, unhappiness, and isolation. 4.2 Why can imagination be a corrective for the excess of sensibility due to the delicacy of the passions?

Hume also thematizes another and connected form of delicacy, one which turns out to be a productive transformation of the delicacy of the passions. Since the hypersensibility of delicate passions also characterizes how one emotionally responds to artworks (or to the beauty of nature), individuals with delicate taste are able to grasp all aspects of a beautiful work and their fitting relations. They are in the best position to make an aesthetic evaluation and are able to fully appreciate the work (literary works in particular): In short, delicacy of taste has the same effect as delicacy of passion. It enlarges the sphere both of our happiness and misery, and makes us sensible to pains as well as pleasures which escape the rest of mankind.39 Hume’s observations about the relation between these two forms of delicacy are rather parsimonious. He sometimes gives the impression that they are two dimensions of the same phenomenon: hypersensitivity to emotions, which in one case should be contained or controlled, since it is potentially dangerous for the emotional equilibrium of the person (delicacy of the passions), and in the other case should instead be fostered and cultivated (delicacy of taste). A plausible interpretation is that in both cases, delicacy qualifies the emotional responses, but in the case of taste it qualifies emotions that are operative within an imaginative sphere.40 The delicacy of imagination that is operative in aesthetic

38 Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” 10. 39 Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” 11. 40 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 140.

28  Michela Summa experience has a healing potential with respect to the disadvantages and the possible harm generated by delicacy and hypersensitivity of the passions: Whatever connection there may be originally between these two species of delicacy, I am persuaded that nothing is so proper to cure us of this delicacy of passion, as the cultivating of that higher and more refined taste, which enables us to judge of the characters of men, of the compositions of genius, and of the productions of the nobler arts.41 Delicacy of taste does not affect emotions that are immediately existentially relevant. From these emotions—say, grief for the loss of a beloved one, despair at being betrayed by someone we trusted, or joy at an unexpected encounter—we notoriously have no distance. They generally overwhelm us, and if we are particularly sensible they can have a shattering impact on our existence. Emotions arising from imagination or fictional emotions—for example the emotions we have while reading a novel or watching a play, including sympathy for the characters—imply instead a certain suspension and existential distance from the lived situation, and though genuine, they do not immediately touch one’s own existential concerns.42 Such distancing can educate or contribute to give shape to our real emotions. Moreover, the imaginative suspension of direct concerns is a condition for delicacy to assume a norm-instituting function, that is, to become a key feature defining the aesthetic normativity of a standard of taste. In this sense, the imagination that is operative in aesthetic experience liberates the subject from the enslaving aspects of hypersensitivity to some egocentric and existentially relevant passions.43 Furthermore, if delicacy—or the aberration of hypersensitivity—undergoes such an imaginative turn, it can be turned into something that educates the human being. 4.3  Why is the norm-instituting function of delicacy constitutively social?

The reshaping of delicacy of the passions through imagination not only has an individually healing function; it is also socially relevant and has a potential educational value. The delicacy of taste presupposes social bonds and contributes to their reshaping. This becomes clear if we consider how Hume, in Of the Standard of Taste, connects delicacy with the other four features that characterize the critic. The critic needs practice to gain competence in aesthetic experience.44 If we allow even unexperienced individuals to acquire experience or a certain know-how in aesthetic contemplation, feelings can be refined. In particular, these people will be able to appreciate the various parts and aspects of the work and to evaluate how they fit together in the unity of 41 Hume, “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” 11. 42 See Michela Summa, “Are Fictional Emotions Genuine and Rational? Phenomenological Reflections on a Controversial Question,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XVII (2019): 246–267. 43 This does not mean that one should look for a shelter in imaginative emotions and forget about real emotions; in fact, it would be wrong to say that all imaginative retreat can be a way of healing the passions, and examples of imaginative projections and isolation are easy to find. What Hume is saying is rather that our emotions can be educated only if we are not fully immersed in them, and that the aesthetic imagination precisely enables this form of distancing that is able to shed new light on our own existential-emotional experience and to condition how we undergo experience. 44 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 143.

Aesthetic normativity and deviation  29 the whole. Accordingly, practice is essential not only for the production of artworks but also for their reception, for “the same address and dexterity which practice gives to the execution of any work, is also acquired by the same means in the judging of it.”45 Hume reaffirms that the subjectivity of taste does not entail a turn to inner experience. Instead, grasping an object as beautiful or deformed means emotionally resonating with it, thereby seeing how the parts fit together into a whole and having the emotional responses that an object and its parts are “naturally fitted to produce.”46 The apparent naturalism implied in these remarks needs to be qualified too. Hume is not saying that one either has the capacity to properly resonate with objects or not. For this capacity can and should be trained, refined, and educated. Delicacy may well be something like a natural talent, but this is not an elitist claim: every human being can develop, in suitable conditions and through education, an adequate emotional disposition, and practice is needed even for those who have already developed a delicate taste. Finally, Hume understands the capacity to judge about aesthetic values—analogous to the capacity to produce valuable artistic works—as a kind of knowing how, for which practice is needed in order to develop the adequate “address and dexterity.” This also underlies Hume’s discussion of the next quality of a good critic, the capacity to draw comparisons: It is impossible to continue in the practice of contemplating any order of beauty, without being frequently obliged to form comparisons between the several species and degrees of excellence, and estimating their proportion to each other. A man who has had no opportunity of comparing the different kinds of beauty is indeed totally unqualified to pronounce an opinion with regard to any object presented to him. By comparison alone we fix the epithets of praise or blame, and learn how to assign the due degree of each.47 This remark on the capacity to draw comparisons between artworks brings to the fore the connection between (i) the particular kind of cognition that is realized in and through aesthetic experience and (ii) the intersubjective and social dimensions in the education of taste. (i) Aesthetic experience is not only emotional experience but can also be characterized as a particular form of cognition through which we grasp some morphological properties pertaining to an object or shared by different objects. We speak, for example, of a style of painting or poetry, of a musical trend, etc., by which we mean typologies that are grasped, even in a cognitive sense, through the experience of taste. The kind of cognition realized in and through aesthetic experience is not obtained through argumentative or logical demonstration; instead, it is taught by the exemplary showing of specific features of a particular work. In this sense, Hume’s remarks come close to Merleau-Ponty’s observations about style48 or to Wittgenstein’s remarks on showing 45 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 144. 46 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 143. 47 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 144. 48 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2005), 381–389; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159–191.

30  Michela Summa family resemblances.49 We cannot describe or isolate the features that characterize the style of an author or a painter, nor can we find a univocally defined common denominator of the features defining it; we can only point at them, multiply the examples that express them, and show their uniqueness or distinctiveness by comparing this style with the style of another author or painter. Even if it is not possible to define what a style is or to list what properties make the specificity of a style, what we obtain by comparing different styles is a specific kind of cognition, which can also be shared with others, mostly by means of ostensive communication. This remark also shows how Hume’s approach can be fruitful for intercultural debates on aesthetic experience and evaluation: aesthetic cognition and appreciation are refined, thanks to the acknowledgment of differences and plurality. Appreciating the plurality of artistic expression may mean entering into a discussion about how the aesthetic value of artistic productions is embedded in cultural history and how it can also appeal to human experience as such. Commenting on the appreciation of works of art throughout history (his example is Homer), Hume is keen to recognize both the particular historical and cultural embeddedness of artistic production and reception, and its enduring and transcultural significance.50 All this shows that the kind of cognition to be realized through aesthetic experience is a morphologically inexact kind of cognition, which is not reducible to exact cognition. (ii) Comparisons are not made only for oneself: they are ostensively shown to others, which implies that “showing” should be primarily understood as a practical attitude.51 In such a way, making and discussing comparisons opens up the possibility of disputes about taste, as well as of correcting or refining one’s own judgment. All these are forms of aesthetic education. Referring to Sancho in Don Quixote, Hume observes how difficult it is to convince bad critics about the inappropriateness of their aesthetic reactions, since everyone has immediate confidence in their own feelings. And certainly, Hume observes, it would be vain to try to use argument to convince someone to revise their aesthetic judgments. However, if we show what we mean by means of concrete comparisons, if we ostensively illustrate how an aesthetic judgment should be revised by presenting and discussing examples rather than by appealing to abstract principles, then “[h]e must conclude, upon the whole, that the fault lies in himself, and that he wants the delicacy which is requisite to make him sensible of every beauty and every blemish in any composition or discourse.”52 Moreover, if one relies on ostensive presentation, the revision of an aesthetic judgment is not a mental act of agreement or only a kind of pro-social behavior or conformity; the education of taste succeeds only if the revision and refinement correlate with comprehension and a new evaluation based on a genuine and autonomous emotional reaction.

49 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), § 66–79. 50 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 139. 51 See Hilge Landweer, “Zeigen, Sich-zeigen und Sehen-lassen. Evolutionstheoretische Untersuchungen zu geteilter Intentionalität in phänomenologischer Sicht,” in Politik des Zeigens, ed. Karen van den Berg and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Munich: Fink, 2010), 29–58; Lambert Wiesing, Sehen lassen: Die Praxis des Zeigens (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2013). 52 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 142.

Aesthetic normativity and deviation  31 Thus, despite all differences, Hume emphasizes, like Kant, the importance for aesthetic normativity of communicability and the sharing of aesthetic experience.53 The possibility of sharing aesthetic experiences cannot depend on pre-given principles; it can only depend on the singularity of concrete aesthetic experiences, which assume an exemplary role for searching a general principle. The reflecting moment, which is for Kant implied in the search for such a principle and depends on a sensus communis,54 is for Hume absorbed in the showing by examples and the related attempt to make one’s own experience sharable by others. In order to share experiences of taste, the last two qualities of the critic are required: the quest for an attitude that is vigilant with respect to prejudice, and good sense. We cannot of course expect someone to be aware of all the prejudices that may condition their evaluation, especially since prejudices mostly operate behind our back and we remain unconscious of them. However, we can appeal to a genuinely critical awareness that there are prejudices that we need to try to identify and face before we can claim any general validity of our own aesthetic appreciation.55 One way to do so is to shift one’s perspective and examine from another perspective what one takes to be true and certain. This is entailed in Hume’s quest in the Treatise for a “steady and general point of view.”56 This optimal point of view, which ideally underlies appropriate aesthetic judgments, can be reached only thanks to the exchangeability in principle of our perspectives, and through the critical bracketing of idiosyncratic prejudices and preferences.57 Finally, “good sense” is crucial if the critic is to play a social and educational role. Good sense entails all the traits that make delicacy intersubjectively sharable and communicable. One can have delicate taste and be able to exercise it through comparison, but this needs to be done in a way that can be communicated to and shared with others; otherwise, we would not have a good critic but an isolated genius. Good sense is what makes delicacy communicable, what allows us to recognize prejudices and prevent them from having an impact on our judgment,58 and what makes it possible for us not just to have an adequate experience but to formulate adequate judgments about aesthetic experience. This is the moment in which reason, communicating with the passions, comes to play a role in aesthetic judgment.59 53 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. 96–104, 121–127, 162–176. See Silvana Borutti, “We-Perspective on Aesthetic Grounds: Gemeinsinn and Übereinstimmung in Kant and Wittgenstein,” in Imagination and Social Perspectives: Approaches from Phenomenology and Psychopathology, ed. Michela Summa, Thomas Fuchs, and Luca Vanzago (London/ New York: Routledge, 2018), 287–303; Serena Feloj, Il dovere estetico: Normatività e giudizi di gusto (Milano: Mimesis, 2018); Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 68–90; Hanna Ginsborg, The Normativity of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 54 Kant, “Critique of the Power of Judgment,” 173–176. 55 Regarding this, see Hume’s discussion of prejudice in A Treatise of Human Nature, T 1.3.13.7–20, 99–104. 56 Hume, “A Treatise of Human Nature,” 3.3.1.15, 372. 57 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 146–147. 58 The good sense of critics is connected with their capacity to direct the influence of so-called general rules. These are rules of induction and generalization, for which imagination is mostly responsible. To the extent that they depend only on the power of imagination, they can be either justified or unjustified generalizations; in the latter case they yield prejudices (T 1.3.13.7–20, 99–104). However, Hume claims that it is possible to correct the influence of general rules. Connecting the quest for a standard of taste with Hume’s account of general rules allows us to better understand the educational function of the critic or true judge as an ideal figure. See Costelloe, Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume, 3–22; Bennett Helm, “Why We Believe in Induction: Standards of Taste and Hume’s Two Definitions of Causation,” Hume Studies 19, no. 1 (1993): 117–140; Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 37–74. 59 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” 146–147.

32  Michela Summa 5  Concluding remarks In this chapter, I have considered those insights in Hume’s analyses of taste and aesthetic normativity that make a significant contribution to a phenomenological account of aesthetic experience. In conclusion, I wish to recapitulate what these insights are. I began by discussing Geiger as one of the few authors who explicitly deal with aesthetic normativity in phenomenology. Defending a realist view and condemning subjectivism as a turn to interiority, but neglecting the importance of elaborating on what it means for aesthetic judgments to be subjective, Geiger aims to avoid projective views of aesthetic evaluation inspired by Romanticism. In this way, however, he seems to have a narrower view than Hume on what “subjectivity of taste” means and seems to maintain that subjectivism eo ipso implies relativism. In particular, Geiger proposes a rather individualistic approach, thereby failing to consider the implications of social discourse, of education, of plurality, and even of disagreement about aesthetic evaluation. Most significantly, though he defends a realist view of aesthetic value, Geiger does not provide any clue as to where and how we should find unambiguous and universal criteria of evaluation. As I have argued with reference to Hume, however, this should not be considered a lack of aesthetic theory. The problem with Geiger is not that he does not provide any prescriptions for aesthetic production and evaluation, but rather that he suggests that it is possible to make such prescriptions because the value is real. Thus, one could argue that, according to Geiger, once we have grasped the value, we will be able to elaborate on the prescriptions. Hume’s contributions regarding aesthetic normativity can be traced back to three points. First, he develops his view not in a deductive or demonstrative way, but by relying methodologically on concrete exemplary descriptions and their possible variation. Second, he relies on the correlational structure of experience, and elaborates on a theory of taste that is grounded on the structures of social experience. And third, the implications of his work on the judgment of taste go beyond the narrowly considered field of aesthetics and show how aesthetic experience plays a constitutive role in human cognition. Hume does not proceed from assumptions concerning the reality of values but rather from observations about two conflicting modes in which we speak about aesthetic evaluation and the search for agreement despite all disagreement. Crucially, his view on normativity is related to the search for a standard of aesthetic evaluation. Such a standard is not pregiven or determinable a priori; it can be developed only on the basis of experience. The critic or true judge is introduced as an ideal exemplary figure that embodies those attitudes that can lead us to find such a standard.60 Importantly, the standard is not reducible to a set of abstract principles that, once established, can be applied in every particular case. Rather, taste is always related to individual cases to be compared and can be educated and refined through ostensive communication. Particular aesthetic judgments can then be the exemplary source for further analogical reasoning. Though he maintains that experiences and judgments of taste are subjective, Hume does not reduce subjectivity to inner experience or inner concentration, nor does he defend a kind of value relativism. Instead, he elaborates on the exemplary figure of the critic in order to show guiding threads for aesthetic evaluation. The first characteristic of the critic, namely, delicacy of taste, corresponds to a particular transformation of a 60 Noël Carroll contends that the reference to the critic is ultimately redundant, since the theory would only require some general rules for the appropriate attitudes. However, I take Hume to be saying that these attitudes cannot be just defined abstractly in such a way that abstract prescriptions that everyone should follow could be found; introducing the exemplary figure of the critic is therefore in no way redundant. See Noël Carroll, “Hume’s Standard of Taste,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1984): 181–194.

Aesthetic normativity and deviation  33 deviation from norms, namely, the deviation of hypersensitivity of the passions. Such a transformation is made possible by the interplay of imagination, which allows us to turn hypersensitivity from the existential concerns of our lives to the aesthetic domain, and good sense, which allows us to reflect on our immediate sentiments. Hume’s account of the normativity of taste is related to shareability and social experience. This finds expression in his notorious quest for “some steady and general points of view,”61 which Hume introduces when discussing the analogy between aesthetic taste and moral taste. Seeking this point of view should prevent illegitimate generalization of one’s own individual taste. A steady and general point of view entails an appeal to judgments we can understand and agree upon, notwithstanding the differences of our particular—personal, historical, and cultural—backgrounds. The search for such a point of view does not require us to give up those differences but rather appeals to an open attitude with regard to the plurality of experience. The relevance of Hume’s approach to the standard of taste extends beyond aesthetics and has some more general implications about how we can understand specific kinds of cognition, as well as moral experience.62 What Hume says about the standard of taste sheds light on the distinction between different kinds of rules of probable reasoning and moral reasoning, and especially between natural relations and general rules, and philosophical ones; the former are relations we establish on the basis of what de facto happens, affects us, and the connections we form by means of imagination and customs, whereas the latter are relations and general rules we ought to form. Already in the first book of the Treatise, Hume argues that probable reasoning and cognition is a matter of taste: ’Tis not solely in poetry and music, we must follow our taste and sentiment, but likewise in philosophy. When I am convinc’d of any principle, ’tis only an idea, which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.63 This should not be misunderstood as signifying that knowledge is just a matter of naive sentimental intuition or that every philosophical position is equally good since everyone has their own taste: as we have seen, this is not Hume’s view on the normativity of taste. Certainly, such an approach does not arrive at universally valid prescriptions on how to produce and enjoy art and nature, but, as Stanley Cavell observes,64 one of the philosophical merits of Hume’s aesthetic work is that he noticed what this implies. More precisely, Hume’s merit consists in the choice to elaborate on the search for an agreement based on acknowledgment rather than on the criteria or the norms themselves—that is, on the social processes and negotiations behind that search. Acknowledgment Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) Project-ID 446126658 61 Hume, “A Treatise of Human Nature,” 3.3.1.15, 372. 62 See Helm, “Why We Believe in Induction”; Costelloe, Aesthetics and Morals in the Philosophy of David Hume. 63 Hume, “A Treatise of Human Nature,” 1.3.8.12, 72. 64 Cavell, “Must We Mean What We Say?” 68–90.

3 Habit and creativity Foundations for a phenomenology of artistic style in Ravaisson, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze Donald A. Landes Abstract  Bergson draws an analogy between personality as the continuous creation of ourselves and the concept of artistic style, and yet his somewhat classical conception of habit undermines this rich understanding of subjectivity as open and evolving trajectory. This chapter aims to reconsider Bergson’s account of subjectivity from within a larger trajectory of French thought that runs from Ravaisson to Deleuze, via Merleau-Ponty. By developing an account of subjectivity as trajectory, these thinkers provide a positive ontological and existential interpretation of habit that demonstrates how it serves as the foundation for, and not the negation of, creative being-in-theworld and artistic style. Keywords  Habit; Style; Trajectory; Personality; Ravaisson; Bergson; Merleau-Ponty; Deleuze 1 Introduction And just as the talent of the painter is formed or deformed—in any case, is modified―under the very influence of the works he produces, […] we are continually creating ourselves.1 In this passage from Creative Evolution, Bergson proposes a fascinating analogy between the evolution of an artist’s creative style and the forging of that complex unity we experience as our identity or personality across a lifetime. Bergson is presenting personality as an image for the movement of life, and he takes for granted a perhaps idiosyncratic interpretation of artistic style that resonates with his theory of duration and memory. Personality is an ongoing creation that is felt more than known: the past either lingers in an unconscious virtual until it again becomes useful and is invited through the halfopen door to action; or it sediments into an unreflective actual of “motor contrivances” that wait to be triggered like any other mechanism. As such, Bergson’s understanding of personality implies a category of entities whose ontological status outstrips classical

1 Henri Bergson, L’évolution créatrice (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016 [1907]), 7; English translation: Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Miller (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 7. Henceforth cited as EC, followed by French then English pages. DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-4

Habit and creativity  35 categories: trajectories. Our personality, like all trajectories, is neither fully what it is nor where it is (since it is mostly virtual), and is best characterized as an ongoing process of expression. Experienced from within, we “have no distinct idea of it, we feel vaguely that our past remains present to us”3 and it is “felt in the form of tendency.”4 According to Bergson, this continuous creation of ourselves also characterizes how an artist develops his or her style as their way of taking up their past into each new situation. Every part of their being shapes and colors each new act in subtle and unpredictable ways, and yet each new act also reshapes their being in return. Trajectories are thus strange ontological objects, somehow self-identical through their ongoing selfdifferentiation or becoming, “ever new and always the same.”5 Our personality or our style “shoots, grows and ripens without ceasing,” 6 and it has a sense or an orientation, if not a predetermined telos. Artists create something motivated but unpredictable and thereby reshape themselves in oriented but not predeterminable ways. To paraphrase what is perhaps Bergson’s most existential thought: we do what we do because of what we are, but we create what we are by what we do.7 Bergson’s notion of personality or style as ongoing self-creation enacts a certain “paradoxical logic of expression”8 and thereby illustrates a particularly important (though often implicit) conceptual structure in phenomenology and continental philosophy more generally. It requires acknowledging the role of the virtual in the theory of sense and giving an account of action as necessarily between pure repetition (habit) and pure spontaneity (creativity). And yet in Creative Evolution, habit plays a minor role, and Bergson even implies that habit is the absence of freedom and creativity, thereby adopting a negative interpretation of habit more in line with modern philosophy than with contemporary continental thinking.9 As such, it is impossible to accept Bergson’s later account of personality or style without first revisiting habit and its relation to creativity, and particularly the distinction between habit and memory that he had proposed in Matter and Memory.10 In short, if creativity were fully dead in the motor contrivances of habit into which it sediments, then we would lose sight of the open continuity of personality as trajectory otherwise so important to Bergson. 2

2 For more on this notion of trajectories, see the Introduction to my Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), henceforth cited as MPPEx, and Section 3 of my chapter “Merleau-Ponty from 1945 to 1952: The Ontological Weight of Perception and the Transcendental Force of Description,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 3 EC, 5/5. 4 Ibid., 5/5. 5 This is a phrase Merleau-Ponty uses to characterize Bergson’s notion of duration. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 315; English translation: The Visible and the Invisible, trans. A. Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 267. Henceforth cited as VI, followed by French then English pages. 6 EC, 7/7. 7 This “existential” thought is expressed at EC, 7/7. 8 See the Introduction to my MPPEx. 9 EC, 128/127. Bergson writes: “Our freedom […] creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to renew itself by a constant effort: it is dogged by automatism.” For more on the negative “modern” interpretation of habit, see § 2. 10 Bergson, Matière et mémoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2012 [1896]; English Translation: Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Henceforth cited as MM, followed by French then English pages.

36  Donald A. Landes Given the role of habit and style in artistic creation, it is particularly instructive to reconsider Bergson’s account of personality as trajectory and his mechanistic version of habit from within a more complex story, a trajectory of thought that runs through French thought, from Ravaisson through Merleau-Ponty to Deleuze. By reconstructing the relationship between habit as creative repetition and subjectivity as trajectory we can provide the phenomenological foundations for Bergson’s intuition regarding artistic style. In this chapter, I first explore Ravaisson’s Of Habit to show what it would mean to take habit not as a mechanism but as an ontological principle deeply intertwined with creativity and self-creation. In the second section, I evaluate Bergson’s reading of Ravaisson and suggest how Bergson’s own concept of habit fails to reconnect with his implicit notion of subjectivity as trajectory. Third, I turn to Merleau-Ponty to reconnect habit and creativity within subjectivity via the paradoxical logic of expression. Finally, I conclude by considering Deleuze’s discussion of habit in Difference and Repetition so as to open up this theory of style and personality to a non-classical account of identity. This trajectory of thought provides, I argue, important phenomenological foundations for a concept of artistic style as trajectory, an ongoing expression forever between pure creation and pure repetition. 2  Ravaisson: habit as ontology This passage is movement, the movement that I accomplish whilst being immobile at the heart of my identity.11 In her excellent preface to the bilingual edition of Ravaisson’s Of Habit, Catherine Malabou makes an important observation: there are two major and radically opposed philosophical styles of conceiving of habit.12 There is a positive one that resonates in a variety of traditions, from the Greeks to phenomenology to post-phenomenological continental thought, and a rather negative one that shapes much of modern philosophy. On the first interpretation, which focuses on beings that exist as embodied and have temporal trajectories of becoming, habit is almost a synonym for being-in-the-world by changing-acrosstime. From Aristotle onward, it is thereby related to the strange ontological structure of a disposition, virtual structures of potentiality that are cultivated by living bodies as they take up the past toward the future by grappling with the incessant modulations of their unfolding lives and situations. Such entities cultivate virtual structures that provide the foundations for increasingly free and virtuous action. The second and currently dominant interpretation takes habitual action to be something like pure or mechanical repetition. On this account, habit is the loss of freedom, the victory of inauthenticity, and at best an “imitation of virtue.”13 Given this interpretation, Kant (for instance) reorients philosophical reflection toward pure creation, completely free acts unaffected by pre-­existing causes or influences. Others accept the interpretation but reject that such a freedom obtains in the world, and conclude that we must explain existence via pure repetition, a universe free of ambiguity and fully knowable by some superhuman intellect. The first

11 Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit [De l’habitude], trans. Claire Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008 [1838]), 41. Henceforth cited as OH. Since this is a bilingual edition, I am only citing the English page numbers. 12 Catherine Malabou, “Addiction and Grace: Preface to Félix Ravaisson’s Of Habit,” vii–xx, in OH. 13 The allusion is to Kant. See Malabou, “Addiction and Grace,” vii.

Habit and creativity  37 group is intent on grappling with the ambiguous reality of action as always between pure repetition and pure creation, the other bent on distinguishing once and for all pure repetition from pure creation so as to secure either a purified foundation for consciousness or a demonstration that such freedom is impossible. Empiricism and intellectualism are predicated upon the negative interpretation, whereas the positive interpretation requires that we move beyond modern philosophy. In the context of such radically divergent interpretations, rethinking the dialectic of habit and creativity promises to provide an important window into the very nature of subjectivity and its analogue in artistic style. But Bergson is a strange case: he seems to epitomize the view of trajectories required to belong to the first group, but adopts the negative view of habit characteristic of the second. By beginning our discussion here with Ravaisson’s positive interpretation of habit and his notion of identity (which figures in the epigraph to this section), we can begin to repair the breakdown in Bergson’s analogy and open the way to a phenomenological and post-phenomenological thinking of habit, creativity, and subjectivity. Ravaisson begins his treatise with a general definition of habit: “Habit, in the widest sense, is a general and permanent way of being, the state of an existence considered either as the unity of its elements or as the succession of its different phases.”14 In other words, habit is a change that persists, either spatially or in time, and is acquired in the sense that it is the result of a change. But Ravaisson quickly turns to a “special” sense of habit where change is not merely acquired, but contracted. In short, change happens in the actual, whereas habit is change sedimenting into the virtual. As Ravaisson writes: “Habit is not, therefore, merely a state, but a disposition, a virtue.”15 A state is actual and must follow the laws of the mechanical universe; a disposition is virtual and follows a logic of expression. Habit, then, is the emergence of a “disposition relative to change, which is engendered in a being by the continuity or the repetition of this very same change.”16 The being in question is but the locus or place of a passing trajectory because the special sense of contracting habits amounts to cultivating dispositions. To make this point, Ravaisson offers a variant of an example given by Aristotle: “A body changes place; but if we throw a body 100 times in the same direction, with the same speed, it still does not contract a habit.”17 In this example, the identity of the body is its acquired habit, remaining what it is throughout the experiment, whereas the special sense of habit requires “a change in the disposition, in the potential, in the internal value of that in which the change occurs, which itself does not change.”18 As such, a contracted habit is a reshaping of the virtual. Dispositions cannot, however, be reduced to inertia. Inertia exists within the realm of physical, chemical, and mechanical unions where, in the absence of a virtual influence on the real, “beyond actuality no potentiality remains that is distinguished from it and that outlives it.”19 That is, a physical mechanism is fully what it is and its repeated use does not alter it existentially. Here no change lingers in the virtual, “no durable change that can give birth to a habit.”20 Thus, genuine identity is not to be found in the mechanical universe. There is, declares Ravaisson, “being” in the homogeneous universe, but “there 14 OH, 25. 15 Ibid., 25. 16 Ibid., 25. 17 Ibid., 25. See also Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a15–25. 18 OH, 25. 19 Ibid., 27. 20 Ibid., 27.

38  Donald A. Landes is not a being.”21 Individuals and the virtual appear together via habit, and as such the individual is like “a determinate substance that develops, in diverse forms and within different temporal periods, its internal potentiality.”22 With habit, a new “substance” is born in the form of embodied and temporal identity. In the inorganic world, bodies are “completely external existences, subject to the general laws of a common necessity,” a sort of “empire of Destiny,” whereas life and habit institute internal values and a virtual within the actual.23 This brings us to Ravaisson’s general law of habit. On the one hand, the more some external change repeats, the less the living being is altered by that change; on the other, the more the living being actively enacts a change, the more it becomes incorporated into the organism’s virtual. Through repetition “receptivity diminishes and spontaneity increases.”24 As such, habit is far from being a simple threat to spontaneity. Life is the forging of a relation between time and matter in which we see the progression of habit as the “progressive exaltation of spontaneity.”25 Moreover, between pure repetition and pure creation, we find a sort of center or locus of an open and evolving trajectory: […] it seems that a centre is required to serve as a common limit: a centre at which reactions arrive and from which actions depart … What would such a measure be, if not a judge that knows, that values, that foresees and decides? What is this judge, if not the principle that is called the soul?26 Despite the spiritualist overtones, the “soul” here “emerge[s] in the realm of Nature”27 as a new structure or system able to cultivate time into temporality and bodies into embodiment. So rather than offering a dogmatic picture of the soul, Ravaisson makes what amounts to a phenomenological turn. He admits that up until here, we have been observing nature as if from the outside. But by their very nature, dispositions are not observable from the outside: our only direct access to the virtual is from within: “it is only in consciousness that we can aspire […] to learn its how and its why, to illuminate its generation and, finally, to understand its cause.”28 So against the constant flux of passing presents, there must be something that resists change so as to be the measure of change; there must be a “substance,” which Ravaisson defines as identity. As the trajectory of a life, my identity is the name for the movement from the past to the future, the constant accumulation of more time as a resource for future action, a “movement that I accomplish whilst being immobile at the heart of my identity.”29 I am not a “thing” that is immobile; I am an identity that remains the same

21 Ibid., 29; emphasis added. 22 Ibid., 29. 23 Ibid., 29. 24 Ibid., 31. Merleau-Ponty seems to repeat this double law. For the side of passivity, see Maurice MerleauPonty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 2005 [1945]), 103; English translation: Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), 77. Henceforth cited as PhP, followed by French then English pages. For active habit formation, see PhP, 178/144. 25 OH, 35. That an increase in habit is a progression of spontaneity would be contradictory on the modern, negative interpretation. 26 Ibid., 37. The soul here plays a role remarkably similar to the brain in MM. 27 Ibid., 37. 28 Ibid., 39. 29 Ibid., 41.

Habit and creativity  39 through a constant process of differentiation, a trajectory whose “substance” is nothing but its activity as a constant becoming and self-differentiation. Personality (or artistic style) expresses the fluctuating limit between action and passion, and is experienced internally as effort, the felt awareness of the tension between the outside that solicits us and the powers that we enjoy. Effort is our feeling for being-inthe-world as an ongoing self-creation. Moreover, trajectories are oriented but not predetermined; they have a sense or direction, but not a telos. That is, habit institutes a sort of lived protention. Though no thought intervenes, a lived consciousness nevertheless anticipates the not-quite-yet-present impression that will bring about a sensation. The living system hence develops a need for the impression that will make that anticipated activity into a present reality. Or again, when the repetition of an action has become more and more internalized into the capacities of the body’s dispositions, the living system might manifest the action without any corresponding solicitation in the form of ticks. “In this way,” writes Ravaisson, “continuity or repetition brings about a sort of obscure activity that increasingly anticipates both the impression of external objects in sensibility, and the will in activity.”30 A striking example of this “obscure activity” is sleep. Following the law of habit, a repeating sensation can seem more and more dull over time, essentially inducing sleep. But even though the sensation dulls, it institutes a sort of need, since when the sound ceases the person awakens. The sensory organs had established an obscure, decentralized activity, like an independent consciousness syncing with the rhythm of the sound. To do so, they establish need (a yearning for an as-yet virtual), and when that anticipation is no longer fulfilled, it triggers worry and wakefulness. These obscure activities are not merely mechanical; even if they are not themselves directly governed by consciousness, they are oriented or motivated by their location within the larger trajectory of subjectivity. On the side of spontaneity, where actions become less and less reflective, they too establish a sort of an “unreflective spontaneity […] beneath the region of will, personality and consciousness.”31 These relatively independent consciousnesses within subjectivity cannot be explained through a governing thetic consciousness. In short, habit falls along a continuum between pure activity and pure passivity, and renders impossible the extremes of mechanical fatality and pure reflective freedom.32 But can we be sure that habit, as a movement toward embodied intelligence, is not just a falling back into mechanism as Bergson seems to imply? For Ravaisson, although habit appears to diminish the need for the active participation of thetic consciousness, it does not leave the sphere of intelligence.33 Rather, habit is an “immediate intelligence,” a fusion between being and thought, the crystallization of intentionality into a body. Thus, habit does not cede our identity to some foreign blind power; it remains an expression of the overall trajectory of the subjectivity itself. The same “force” animates both will and habit, and accumulates through its own self-development, much like Bergson’s élan creates life’s various tendencies or the rich layers of personality. As Ravaisson writes: It is the same force that, without losing anything of its higher unity in personality, proliferates without being divided; that descends without going under; that 30 Ibid., 51; emphasis added. 31 Ibid., 53. 32 Ibid., 55. 33 Ibid., 55.

40  Donald A. Landes dissolves itself, in different ways, into its inclinations, acts and ideas; that is transformed in time, and that is disseminated in space.34 Habit may well be the creation of something like a necessity, but as creation it is also the expression of freedom. Habit is a law of the limbs, for Ravaisson, but one that emerges from spirit and remains within this overall trajectory through ongoing cultivation. It is the creative movement of the identity or force that ensures that habit is never merely pure repetition. 3  Bergson on Ravaisson and on habit There are many reasons to draw a direct intellectual lineage between Ravaisson and Bergson. They both belong to the spiritualist tradition in France, and Bergson famously presented a homage to Ravaisson in 1904, publishing it unchanged in 1934.35 Yet even here some intriguing fissures begin to appear in this lineage. For instance, Bergson recognizes that he had somewhat “Bergsonized” Ravaisson, ultimately incorporating the latter into his own philosophical trajectory.36 But particularly noteworthy is that, despite the obvious resonances to be expected between Bergson and Ravaisson on the question of habit, Bergson only very quickly mentions Of Habit in his homage, devoting much more time to how more minor works reveal Ravaisson’s philosophical personality and style. Even the brief discussion he does provide of the essay on habit includes a somewhat glaring misreading. This makes Bergson’s homage to Ravaisson a particularly fascinating text for our current purposes, since it illustrates Bergson’s concept of personality as trajectory and reveals a certain blind spot for the theory of habit needed to ground that concept. 3.1  Ravaisson’s philosophical style

In the homage, Bergson weaves together his predecessor’s personal and intellectual history into a story of both activity and passivity, the ongoing expression and cultivation of a character at grips with external influences. For instance, early traces of a certain eclecticism in his character shaped Ravaisson’s relationship with Victor Cousin. Or again, Bergson sees Ravaisson’s style emerging in his early work on Aristotle. Ravaisson won first prize in a contest directed by Cousin on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and he went on to add a second volume to this treatise. In the first volume, he demonstrates an ability to draw together sprawling conceptual analyses into a unified system, creatively repeating Aristotle. The second volume is even more ambitious, claiming that Aristotle’s philosophy fuses together Ancient materialism and Platonism. As much as this reading might be questioned by historians of philosophy, Bergson finds here something of Ravaisson himself: The idea that he locates as the foundation of Aristotelianism is the very one that inspired the majority of his own meditations. Throughout his entire work, a certain

34 Ibid., 57. 35 Bergson, “La vie et l’œuvre de Ravaisson,” in La pensée et le mouvant (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008 [1932]), 253–291; English translation: “The Life and Work of Ravaisson,” in The Creative Mind, trans. Maybelle L. Andison (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 187–216. Henceforth cited as VOR, followed by French then English pages. 36 VOR, 253n1/223n34.

Habit and creativity  41 affirmation resounds: rather than diluting one’s thinking in the general, the philosopher must concentrate it on the individual.37 Bergson presents this philosophical style through the image of a color spectrum. First, one might analyze the spectrum: purple, blue, green, etc. Despite the intention to achieve an exhaustive understanding of this spectrum, such a procedure has the opposite outcome. By relying on abstract similarities, the vibrant differences of individuals slip away. To reach the unique identity of the object, Ravaisson proposes a sort of convergence or concentrating vision. Rather than artificially separating them, the thousand nuances of each color are concentrated into a single point. Whereas analysis extinguishes the light of individuality by imposing the blackness of conceptual juxtaposition, Ravaisson concentrates the living vibrancy of the individual into a pure white light, each nuance contributing to the qualitative intensity of the whole. This concentrating vision is what is required of metaphysics: begin from individual existences and follow them back to the sources of their force in which they continue to participate or from which they emanate. Bergson’s analysis of Ravaisson’s philosophical style takes into account that a style or a personality has innumerable sources and develops through time. Consider the duration that separates the two volumes of his study of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, between 1835 and 1846. The evolution is dramatic enough for Bergson to suggest one might think they are dealing with two different authors, but the two volumes nonetheless belong to the same trajectory of a life. Ravaisson paradoxically finds his own voice through his ongoing practice of reperforming Aristotle. If Aristotle began as an object of study imposed through external forces (Cousin’s contest), he evolves into the voice of a “beloved genius” who motivates but does not predetermine or cause the trajectory of the disciple.38 Like any artist, Ravaisson creates himself in unpredictable yet motivated ways by taking up and taking forward. Aristotle’s voice is like a magnet, a force weighing upon Ravaisson’s evolving personality and calling him to participate in the development of a sense in the making. Bergson writes: [I]n this way, at the call of a beloved genius, the virtualities laying dormant here and there in the soul awaken, come together, work together towards a common action. Now, a personality is constituted through this concentration of all the powers of the spirit and of the heart into a unique point.39 Ravaisson, from the time of the first essay to the time of the completed book, continued reperforming Aristotle in the new context of his own evolving trajectory, thus forging his own philosophical style. Moreover, the sources of one’s personality cannot be artificially separated, and another important influence on Ravaisson’s character was art in general and painting in particular. Bergson reports that Ravaisson was exposed to the art-world from a young age and he even exhibited works in the Paris Salons. Passionate about drawing, Ravaisson was captivated by Leonardo da Vinci’s notion of the serpentine line. According to Leonardo, “the living being is characterized by the undulous or serpentine line, that each

37 Ibid., 259/191; translation modified. 38 I will return to the important distinction between motivation and causality in Merleau-Ponty below. 39 VOR., 263/195; translation modified.

42  Donald A. Landes being has its own way of undulating, and that the goal of art is to render this undulating individual.”40 In other words, each living being has a style that outstrips its mechanical present, and the goal of art is to take up and express anew this style. Here Bergson focuses on two short essays by Ravaisson in the Dictionnaire pédagogique, where he writes: “The secret of the art of drawing is to discover, for each object, […] a certain flexuous line that is like its generating axis.”41 Like the virtual that the object expresses, such a line is somehow everywhere and nowhere. To paint, the artist needs to grasp the individuality (the soul) of the trajectory of sense; this comes not through an intellectual analysis but through an immediate intuition by which the artist catches on to the “generative effort of nature”42 and attempts to reperform that sense. As such, painting is not the mechanical repetition of the real. Rather: True art aims at rendering the individuality of the model, and to do so it must go looking behind the lines that we see for the movement that the eye does not see, […] the original intention, the fundamental aspiration of the person.43 This movement that the eye does not see is the same movement that I accomplish while immobile at the heart of my identity, namely that of a trajectory.44 3.2  Bergson, reader of Of Habit

Here in the homage Bergson finally turns to Of Habit, arguably the most complete expression of Ravaisson’s philosophical style. And yet Bergson dedicates hardly more than a page to this great work. Bergson recognizes that Ravaisson resists all analysis of habit, and seeks the explanation “in a very concrete intuition, the intuition we have of our own manner of being when we contract a habit.”45 But rather than patiently exploring the argument, he quickly attributes to Ravaisson the idea that a habit, once acquired, is a simple mechanism or “motor contrivance” established in our body as the part of us subject to the laws of the material world. We have seen that this is not the case for Ravaisson. Habit is not just a mechanism, but always both matter and idea; and it never fully leaves the trajectory of sense that is subjectivity or consciousness. So for Bergson to see in habit merely “the fossilized residue of an activity of spirit,” a mere “automatism,” is indeed to Bergsonize Ravaisson.46 After all, he explicitly equates Ravaisson’s notion of an “obscure consciousness” in habit with the “sleeping will” of nature, which is unconsciousness for Bergson. This hasty reading of Ravaisson is more likely a veiled presentation of Bergson’s own account of habit from Matter and Memory.

40 Ibid., 264/195; translation modified. 41 Ravaisson, cited by Bergson, VOR, 264/196; translation modified. See Ravaisson, “Art” and “Dessin,” in Dictionnaire pédagogique et d’instruction primaire, vol. 1, dir. F. Buisson (Paris: Hachette, 1882–1893), 122–124 and 671–684. Henceforth cited as Dictionnaire; translations are my own. 42 VOR, 265/196. 43 Ibid., 265/196; translation modified. 44 OH, 41. 45 VOR, 267/197. 46 Ibid., 267/198.

Habit and creativity  43 3.3  Style (as trajectory)

After this notably brief glance toward Of Habit, Bergson turns his attention to Ravaisson’s move into the public service and his later Rapport sur la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle (1867). By insisting that philosophy resists the positivistic tendency toward pure mechanism, Ravaisson’s report not only cemented French spiritualism but arguably provided the groundwork for Bergsonism and the French reception of phenomenology. Bergson again focuses on the sources from which this expression crystallized, and he traces it back to Leonardo’s serpentine line. So, for a second time in the homage, Bergson devotes a disproportionate number of pages to Ravaisson’s two short articles in the Dictionnaire pédagogique.47 If habit didn’t capture Bergson’s imagination, clearly the organic unity of artistic style, as trajectory engaging with trajectories, did. A brief glance at these two entries reveals in Ravaisson a certain nascent understanding of the link between habit and expressive trajectory. In the first article, “Art,” Ravaisson criticizes modern education for focusing merely on techniques and thus on “material utility,” 48 what we might call pure repetition. Favoring an Ancient model of education, he suggests that “[t]rue education is rather the one that habituates each student to take an interest in and to become enamored with something better than themselves.”49 For Ravaisson, art and drawing contribute to the cultivation of “the good judgement of the eye,” that is, they help us to develop a capacity (the habit) for seeing properly, quickly, and well.50 Authentic drawing develops an open and evolving style of engaging with the world as a knot of trajectories, of sense that goes beyond actual mechanical relationships. Indeed, in “Drawing,” Ravaisson insists that the harmony or spirit of the living form must be grasped in a glance that takes up the object’s unique way of vibrating—its style. As a result, the form the artist must capture is not reducible to the parts; it somehow “floats above, like a higher light,” expressed through a movement that embodies an idea.51 The continuity with Of Habit is striking, since habit is precisely this fusion of matter and idea. Catching onto this way of seeing involves cultivating habits for gearing into habits, much in the way that one only learns virtues by taking up the sense of the virtuous gesture and thereby forging one’s unique style of gearing into the world of ever different situations and solicitations. Despite his interest in these articles, Bergson seems to have missed this essential connection between personality, style, and habit. For Ravaisson, the artist forges their style as a trajectory, and this notion of habitual being stands opposed to the Kantian negative interpretation of habit as merely an imitation of virtue. 3.4  Bergson on habit in Matter and Memory

Although habit figures prominently in Matter and Memory, Bergson does not even reference Ravaisson’s Of Habit in his book. So, where does habit fit into Bergson’s thinking and how might we characterize his interpretation of it? Consider Chapter 1 of Matter and Memory, on the role of the body in the selection of images in perception, where

47 See Dictionnaire. 48 Ibid., 122. 49 Ibid., 123; emphasis added. 50 Ibid., 123. 51 Ibid., 672.

44  Donald A. Landes Bergson seemingly alludes to Ravaisson’s law of habit insofar as the strength of perception is “diminished whenever a stable habit has been formed.”52 But this is quickly followed by comments that equate habit with mechanism. Bergson presents habit as fully detached from consciousness, absent from the zone of indetermination and equated with immediate blind reflex.53 Positing the radical distinction between the material universe and the spiritual realm (the virtual, consciousness, etc.), habit seems to fall wholly to the side of the physical as self-evidently mechanism. This is confirmed in Chapter 2, where Bergson describes the body as a sort of exchange between the energy coming in (passions) and the influences moving outward (action). Although this resonates with Ravaisson, Bergson again equates habits with reflexes, suggesting that the past is stored up by the body in “motor contrivances.”54 For Bergson, there is a difference in kind to be acknowledged: the past can be played into the future in two ways, either in “motor mechanisms” (habit) or in “independent recollections” (memory).55 Bergson’s approach here allows for the extreme forms of pure repetition and pure creation noted above. Of course, given the role of duration, the body is both the past contracted into present mechanisms and the locus of the indefinite virtual preservation of the past in itself. Although this is extremely useful for the idea of subjectivity and artistic style as open trajectory, Bergson nonetheless thinks of habit as a blind mechanism capable of being triggered by identical stimulations. Bergson thereby reduces habit to what Ravaisson viewed as an extreme form of habit: the pure repetition he names ticks. Thus for Bergson, artistic style cannot be creative and evolving unless it is entirely other than habit, but given the unquestionable role of habit cultivation and evolving habitual ways of seeing the world in the forging of artistic style, such an account has to be mistaken. For instance, he writes that the body is the “sum of sensori-motor systems organized by habit,”56 and thus the performance of an instantaneous memory in action. And rather than seeing character in the terms he will later give it in Creative Evolution (as the evolving trajectory of creative self-differentiation), here character is the balance between pure repetition (the “man of impulse”) and pure creation (the “dreamer”). Whereas the man of impulse is “swayed by habit” and thus merely repeats, the latter is lost in universals and the spontaneity of pure creation. Yet as we have seen, Ravaisson finds habit to be not one of the two extremes, but precisely the bridge between repetition and creation. Bergson tendency to see habit as motor contrivance prevents him from adequately explaining his implicit notion of character as trajectory. A new thinking of habit is needed to appreciate the account of style and personality as trajectories in the open and evolving process of self-creation. 4  Merleau-Ponty on habit and trajectory In Merleau-Ponty, habit as creative repetition and subjectivity as trajectory come together. For instance, he follows Ravaisson in refusing to reduce habit to mere repetition, but also develops aspects of Bergson’s account of character as evolving self-creation. 52 MM, 43/45. The only reference to Ravaisson in MM is to his later Rapport, mentioned above, see MM, 198n1/257n10. 53 See also MM, 66–68/64–65. 54 Ibid., 81/77. 55 Ibid., 82–83/78. 56 Ibid., 169/152; emphasis added.

Habit and creativity  45 Moreover, in some ways his account of subjectivity de-substantializes the subject. As I have argued elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that all human action must be located on a continuum between pure repetition and pure creation, without ever reaching either extreme. As such, a certain paradoxical logic of expression structures what I have been calling trajectories. Returning to the relation between habit and subjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception reveals Merleau-Ponty’s significant place within the emerging positive interpretation of habit. 4.1 Motivation

Near the beginning of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty establishes a concept of motivation that resonates with Ravaisson’s thinking. Attempting to bridge empiricism and intellectualism, he suggests that these schools presuppose an external perspective and a mechanistic account of causality. Phenomenology, he argues, demonstrates that lived experience is motivated, not caused. The size of the moon on the horizon, for instance, is neither reducible to causes in the visual field nor the result of a judgment by a pure understanding; its size is motivated by these and many forces, but only insofar as they are taken up by a lived and evolving subject. The sense experienced in perception crystallizes in the unpredictable intertwining of a trajectory passing through a milieu of trajectories. As he writes: “there is a perceived signification that has no equivalent in the universe of the understanding, a perceptual milieu that is not yet the objective world, and a perceptual being that is not yet determinate being.”57 Thus, the phenomenal field at once debunks idealism, materialism, and the idea of a substantial subject. Perception is an open and evolving negotiation between myself as a trajectory and the tensions that steal across the visual field, like “lines of force” that “animate it with a silent and magical life.”58 To account for this, he suggests the need to establish a “new cogito,” a new theory of subjectivity. 4.2  Habit and sedimentation

Merleau-Ponty first addresses the role of habit through the notions of sedimentation and ambiguity. As we saw above, lived experience cannot be accounted for on the categories of the objective world or pure consciousness. Our own body is ambiguously present to us, as confirmed in breakdown experiences. In other words, our lived body is not the actual body, nor the body as conceived of in the mind that animates it; it is a certain “indivisible power” that vaguely gathers together the parts as implicated in its capacities and overall dynamically evolving potentialities.59 The phantom limb is present because my life still moves out through a general potentiality in which it remains implicated, thanks to its having been involved in my existence across a lifetime of relevant projects. Thus, our habitual body expresses itself through innumerable layers of tasks, situations, horizons, and anticipations; its powers are at once virtual and as fragile as the actual body that they adhere to. Nothing guarantees that the habitual body and the actual body stay in

57 PhP, 73/48. 58 Ibid., 75/50. 59 Ibid., 110/83. This discussion resonates with Ravaisson’s idea of the body as an acquired change (actual body) and the body as contracted change (habitual body).

46  Donald A. Landes synchronization, and this shows how certain bodies are phases in unfolding trajectories. Here we discover a dynamic and “primordial field of presence” that is essentially what Ravaisson called identity: that which remains the same through constant change.60 This brings us to a significant contrast with Bergson, because Merleau-Ponty does not even believe that reflexes, let alone habits, can be equated to “motor contrivances.” For him, living systems are the institution of spatial and temporal horizons that reach back even to “the organic stereotypes” at the origin “of our volitional being.”61 This implies that “even reflexes have a sense, and the style of each individual is still visible in them just as the beating of the heart is felt even at the periphery of the body.”62 When analyzed, a reflex may seem to be nothing but a motor contrivance, but when seen through a concentrating vision, it is an expression of the very style of existence of the being in question and a crystallization within an unfolding trajectory. Since no two situations are identical, a reflex must express my orientation and attitude toward the new situation. So even “triggered” reflexes are creative repetitions and in turn contribute to my open and evolving style within my milieu.63 In short, habit is not mere motor contrivance but rather “expresses the power we have of dilating our being in the world, or of altering our existence through incorporating new instruments.”64 Habit is our power for existing as an open trajectory of sedimentations. So, although habits are learned through repetition, this repetition is never pure and has an existential effect, in that it motivates our integration into a new world of significations and solicitations. Habits are cultivated without explicit thetic knowledge or foresight, but this is not to say that it proceeds through blind reflex. Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, “habit resides neither in thought nor in the objective body, but rather in the body as the mediator of a world.”65 A habit is a sort of contraction or synthesis of time that remains open to development and or creative transfer, and all of this is possible because “the body is eminently an expressive space,” the locus of a trajectory of embodied temporality.66 4.3  Habit, memory, and sense

This picture of habit formation and its existential significance implies a critique of Bergson’s difference in kind between habit and memory. Merleau-Ponty’s argument to this effect figures in his analysis of speech and expression as between pure repetition and pure creation.67 For Merleau-Ponty, thought does not first have an independent existence before being translated into spoken or written signs. Rather, speech accomplishes thought, the thought is in the words. Phenomenological reflection on the act of speaking reveals that the speaker does not pre-think his speech and the auditor understands the sense “without a single thought.”68 Sense is not an idea or a representation held in the private space of the mind; during the speech, “it was present everywhere, but nowhere

60 Ibid., 121/94. 61 Ibid., 114/87. 62 Ibid., 114/87; emphasis added. 63 Ibid., 116/89. 64 Ibid., 179/145. 65 Ibid., 180/146. 66 Ibid., 181/147. 67 For more on the “paradoxical logic of expression” in PhP, see chapter 3 of MPPEx. 68 PhP, 220/185.

Habit and creativity  47 was it posited for itself.” This amounts to an entire rethinking of meaning as sense, as a trajectory of reperformances that at once take up acquired meanings and inevitably alter them. “Knowing a word” is neither possessing a pure idea nor establishing a blind motor contrivance; to learn the sense of a word is to acquire the habit for it, to be able to take it up according to the directions and orientations contained therein in the face of new and evolving situations. The word is ambiguously present, everywhere and nowhere, and this provides Merleau-Ponty with the opportunity to critique Bergson on habit and memory: 69

The Bergsonian alternative between habit-memory and pure memory does not account for the near presence of the words that I know. They are behind me, like the objects behind my back or like the horizon of the village surrounding my house; I reckon with them or I count upon them, but I have no ‘verbal image’ of them.70 The word does not remain in my trajectory as pure memory, nor as motor contrivance. Rather, “[w]hat remains for me of the word I have learned is its sonorous and articulatory style.”71 I catch on to its trajectory, and what is repeated is the sense of the past but as taken up into a new moment that expresses and reshapes the sense itself. The virtual is neither actual nor elsewhere than the actual, it is ambiguously ingredient in the lived present. As Merleau-Ponty continues: The word has a certain place in my linguistic world, it is part of my equipment. The only means I have of representing it to myself is by pronouncing it, just as the only means the artist has of representing to himself the work he is pursuing is by producing it.72 Here we see Merleau-Ponty too drawn to the image of art and artistic style to account for open and evolving trajectories. Although he concludes that Bergson’s distinction between habit and pure memory could not explain how our “body is a natural power of expression,” 73 continuously recrystallizing an open and ongoing trajectory between pure repetition and pure creation, his image of subjectivity forged in the manner that an artist develops their work and style nonetheless deeply resonates with the theory of personality in Creative Evolution. 4.4  Subjectivity as the ongoing crystallization of a tacit cogito

Phenomenology of Perception culminates in an account of subjectivity via the notions of a tacit cogito, an embodied temporality, and a situated freedom. Although this return to a cogito is to some readers evidence that phenomenology tends to fall back into a philosophy of consciousness,74 I would argue that Merleau-Ponty’s tacit cogito offers a new way of understanding subjectivity, not as substantial but as a mostly virtual trajectory of expression, similar to the idea of identity we saw above in Ravaisson. 69 Ibid., 220/185–186. 70 Ibid., 220/186. 71 Ibid., 220/186. 72 Ibid., 220/186. 73 Ibid., 220/187. 74 Indeed, Merleau-Ponty himself seems to have thought as much: VI, 183/200.

48  Donald A. Landes Merleau-Ponty begins this section by performing the alternative cogito that he is going to propose: “I am thinking of the Cartesian Cogito, wanting to finish this work, sensing the coolness of the paper under my hand, and perceiving the trees of the boulevard through the window.”75 The self as a trajectory is remarkably complex; as much as we might throw ourselves into a project, we are also always simultaneously motivated or weighed upon by larger goals or circumstances and grounded by the various sensings and feelings that assure our lived integration into our milieu. As Bergson saw above while discussing Ravaisson’s style, each trajectory is a multiplicity of open and evolving trajectories. In fact, even the meaningful objects around me are trajectories. Taking Descartes’ Cogito as an example, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that it is, simultaneously, an idea once held in his mind, the sense of his texts, and perhaps even some “eternal truth”—but above all it is “a cultural being that my thought tends toward rather than encompasses, just as my body orients itself and makes its way among objects in a familiar setting without my needing to represent them to myself explicitly.”76 My thoughts never fully possess an idea; ideas are trajectories of evolving meaning that I join with for a time and that are reshaped through their various performances. What is expressed always remains beyond its various expressions. Whether we are talking about an idea or my very existence, expression is never complete because each expression is a phase in an open trajectory of crystallizations. The expressed is the sense or virtual that unifies the trajectory of its own evolving reperformances: The Cartesian Cogito […] is always beyond what I currently represent to myself. It has an horizon of sense made up of so many thoughts that occurred to me while reading Descartes, but that are not currently present, and of other thoughts that I vaguely sense in advance, thoughts I could have but that I have never developed. But if it is enough that these three syllables are uttered in my presence for me to be immediately oriented toward a certain order of ideas, this is because in some sense all possible developments are at once present to me.77 The virtual is this rich dimension of sense and memories, present to the living bodies that can take it up and play it forward, but never wholly present in the manner of a pure memory or idea. Consciousness or subjectivity is a trajectory that collects together other trajectories, bends them to itself for a while, is reoriented by their influence, and then lets them go into the vestiges of expression (the cultural beings) that mark its passing by. Thus, to exist as a living trajectory is to forge an identity by expressing the past in the present as oriented toward an open future, since “what we have lived exists and remains for us, perpetually.”78 So, behind any spoken or explicit cogito, there must be something like a “tacit cogito,” the lived presence to ourselves of a virtual trajectory in the making that transcends its individual phases and that is nonetheless reshaped and reoriented by each new expression. In other words, the tacit cogito is a perhaps clumsy name for the existence of subjectivity as trajectory. The tacit cogito is the virtual or sense of each trajectory—its soul, as

75 PhP, 427/387. 76 Ibid., 427/387. 77 Ibid., 429/389. 78 Ibid., 454/413–414.

Habit and creativity  49 Ravaisson said—that ensures each new moment, though unpredictable, is a moment in the continuous development of its personality or style. For Merleau-Ponty, as was true for Ravaisson, this is possible because style or identity is a movement that I accomplish while being immobile, an identity forged in a constant movement of creative repetition and passive synthesis. Of course, there is no thetic act here; rather, temporalization flows through me in all of the things I do. “And yet,” insists Merleau-Ponty, “this springing forth of time is not a mere fact that I undergo.”79 As he writes: What we call passivity is not our reception of an external reality or of the causal action of the outside upon us: it is being encompassed, a situated being – prior to which we do not exist – that we perpetually start over and that is constitutive of us.80 4.5  Sedimentation and artistic style

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of sedimentation provides us with a bridge to artistic style and its relation to habit. Consider our experience of fatigue or pain. Such feelings are not the result of real causes nor simply the outcome of thetic judgments; rather, they express my attitude toward the situation in all of its physical and temporal layers. The same situation that is painful or exasperating for one person is not for the next, or even for the same person at a different moment. In other words, attitudes are the existential expressions of my style, which contracts the entire trajectory of my life into this gesture in this new situation. My style is a set of dispositions forged in repetitions across a lifetime, and indeed repetition establishes privileged (or habitual) possibilities from the panorama of actual possibilities available to my body. And yet, this habitual being-in-the-world remains always open to revision and evolution, it remains “fragile at each moment.”81 The virtual, the past that has repeatedly sedimented into my very existence, has a “specific weight,” not as a “sum of events over there, far away from me, but rather in the atmosphere of my present.”82 New external influences or new internally motivated practices at once invite us to repeat what we are and change us in return, rendering us “ever new and always the same.”83 This account of the subject as a trajectory provides the phenomenological and existential foundation for the notion of artistic style implicit in Bergson’s original analogy. Style is just this, the ongoing sedimentation through creative repetition of the past toward the future, becoming more and more solidified though never fully closed. Indeed, one of the main reasons Merleau-Ponty returns again and again to Cézanne is to discover how style and expression are motivated, not caused, by the past and thus are the possibility for a situated freedom and creativity. All of Cézanne’s paintings and gestures emerge from the same organic trajectory. They share and play forward the same virtual, such that each vestige bears the mark of his unique trajectory but also reshapes it. It is this identity in continuous self-differentiation or creative repetition that makes up a style or a self and incorporates an innumerable number of trajectories of sense. Cézanne’s style cannot be

79 Ibid., 490/451. 80 Ibid., 490/451, emphasis added. 81 Ibid., 505/466. 82 Ibid., 506/467. 83 VI, 315/267.

50  Donald A. Landes reduced to some collection of facts; his style is forged in how these facts are taken up in the trajectory of a life. As Merleau-Ponty writes: [I]t is therefore impossible to name a single gesture which is merely hereditary or innate, a single gesture which is not spontaneous—but also impossible to name a single gesture which is not absolutely new in regard to that way of being in the world which, from the very beginning, is myself.84 5  Decentering subjectivity: Deleuze Habit draws from repetition something new: difference.85 Given that Deleuze presents his philosophy as both Bergsonian and anti-phenomenological, it might seem strange now to turn to his work to conclude a chapter that attempts to problematize Bergson and champion a certain French phenomenological style of thinking habit as creative repetition. And yet, Difference and Repetition provides valuable resources for decentering the above theory of subjectivity. With Deleuze, habit is no longer mistakenly associated with pure repetition, but neither is creativity reserved for subjects. Rather, habit names an open and unfolding and decentralized trajectory of difference through creative repetition. Deleuze adopts Hume’s empiricist starting point by which physical events are considered radically independent of each other. Just as Ravaisson latched onto Aristotle’s example in which the object never learns to move upward, Deleuze follows Hume in thinking that if something changes, then it has to be not in the actual bodies, but in the subject that contemplates the change, in the virtual space of dispositions and habits. In the material universe, there is, properly speaking, no repetition. But repetition produces “a difference, something new in the mind”86 and produces the mind as the place for difference. But for Deleuze, we need to rethink just what we mean here by the mind or the subject that contemplates. In many ways, Deleuze stays close to Hume and Bergson. He suggests that the imagination is a contractile power that transforms quantitative events into qualitative expectations, leading us to anticipate B whenever A appears. This is not an active synthesis; rather, this contraction or contemplation is a “passive synthesis of time.”87 In the living system, the past is retained or contracted and the future is anticipated; as such, “the past and the future do not designate instants distinct from a supposed present instant, but rather the dimensions of the present itself.”88 This synthesis, being passive, “is not carried out by the mind, but occurs in the mind which contemplates,”89 and indeed the

84 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le doute de Cézanne,” in Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948), 15–44, here 36; English translation: “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 9–25, here 21. 85 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 101; English translation: Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1997), 94. Henceforth cited as DR, followed by French then English pages. 86 Ibid., 96/90. 87 Ibid., 97/91. 88 Ibid., 97/91. 89 Ibid., 97/91.

Habit and creativity  51 “active syntheses” presuppose a primordial passive synthesis of time in/as imagination. This amounts to decentering subjectivity: not only does it imply a non-thetic activity in consciousness, it also provides a definition of consciousness that can be applied to any such synthetic activity, any embodied temporality. A second decentering gesture emerges when Deleuze argues that perceptual synthesis constitutively relies upon an entire network of organic syntheses by which the senses and their sensibility become habits of parts of our body, each expressing thereby “a primary sensibility that we are.”90 As he writes: Every organism […] is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations. At the level of this primary vital sensibility, the lived present constitutes a past and a future in time. Need is the manner in which the future appears, as the organic form of expectation. The retained past appears in the form of cellular heredity.91 Deleuze does not cite Ravaisson, but echoing Malabou’s distinction he remarks: “we feel ourselves in effect so close to the mystery of habit, yet recognize nothing of what is ‘habitually’ called habit.”92 In other words, our contingent and evolving existence as a multiplicity of trajectories is accomplished via habit, but not in the habitual (modern) sense of pure repetition. Thus far I’ve suggested that this positive account of habit ultimately eluded Bergson, and Deleuze’s reading of Bergson in some way addresses this concern. He claims that overemphasizing action and contemplation might make habit seem to fall away into pure mechanism, but to understand Bergson, we must rethink the self not as something that contemplates but as something that is a contemplation. In any case, habit for Deleuze does not mean a static motor contrivance but rather an activity, “to draw something from.”93 As he writes: When we say that habit is a contraction we are speaking not of an instantaneous action which combines with another to form an element of repetition, but rather of the fusion of that repetition in the contemplating mind. A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract a habit.94 This radical decentering of the self resonates with my account of trajectories above. Citing Samuel Beckett, Deleuze observes that “there is no continuity [i.e., no ‘identity’] apart from that of habit, and that we have no other continuities apart from those of our thousands of component habits.”95 In short, we are an open trajectory of innumerable contemplative selves (trajectories) coming together in the unique and complex gesture we call our existence. At all levels, we are contemplations: from the cells of our bodies to the most elusive of our dreams, where there is passive synthesis there is contemplation, and hence a sort of “soul” or identity. The “soul” names not a “substance,” but an activity.

90 Ibid., 99/93. 91 Ibid., 99–100/93; emphasis added, since need recalls the discussion of Ravaisson above. 92 Ibid., 100/94. 93 Ibid., 101/94. 94 Ibid., 101/95. 95 Ibid., 102/95.

52  Donald A. Landes So, although Deleuze acknowledges the dominant negative interpretation of habit, he argues that free action is only possible thanks to this vast network of repetitions that we are. He writes: Underneath the self which acts there are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of our “self” only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us.96 Since contemplation is something, rather than something we do, repetition must be the core of creativity: “All our rhythms, our reserves, our reaction times, the thousand intertwinings, the presents and fatigues of which we are composed, are defined on the basis of our contemplations.”97 So, the self is not a substance, but rather a forged and fragile trajectory of trajectories, that is, a “larval” self: This self, therefore, is by no means simple: it is not enough to relativise or pluralise the self, all the while retaining for it a simple attenuated form. Selves are larval subjects; the world of passive syntheses constitutes the system of the self… but it is the system of a dissolved self. There is a self wherever a furtive contemplation has been established, whenever a contracting machine capable of drawing a difference from repetition functions somewhere.98 In other words, there is a self whenever there is an open and ongoing trajectory, which is the forging of creative repetition, of difference and repetition in the establishment of a virtual within the real, in short, a style. 6 Conclusion In this chapter, I have followed a certain trajectory of thought from Ravaisson to Deleuze as calling into question the negative interpretation of habit that structures modern philosophy and that feeds the suspicion that habit is necessarily the negation of creativity. With Ravaisson’s Leonardo, or Merleau-Ponty’s Cézanne, style was revealed to be an evolving trajectory of expression, always between pure repetition and pure creation. This insight, captured beautifully by Bergson’s image of personality, also serves to undermine his own rigid distinction between pure memory and motor contrivances. It is essential to provide a viable phenomenological foundation for this notion of style, and I argued above that my reading of Merleau-Ponty’s account of subjectivity as trajectory and Deleuze’s decentering contributions to this understanding provide the foundations for an account of a non-substantial subject, a trajectory of trajectories. Now, this existential insight also implies a complex notion of responsibility for what we are, insofar as we continually take up and reorient all that has created us and yet do not have the kind of pure spontaneity upon which classical ethics is mostly predicated. Our existence is an open and evolving expression illustrated by the rich notion of artistic style as a trajectory of trajectories.

96 Ibid., 103/96. 97 Ibid., 106/98. 98 Ibid., 107/100.

Habit and creativity  53 Moreover, this is illustrated above by the very “heritage of ideas” that I have followed from Ravaisson through Deleuze. As Merleau-Ponty writes: A [person] cannot receive a heritage of ideas without transforming it by the very fact that he [or she] comes to know it, without injecting his [or her] own and always different way of being into it.99 Our existence, as illustrated by identity or artistic style above, requires a rethinking of the very notion of responsibility from within an open trajectory of creative repetition.

99 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “L’homme et l’adversité,” in Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 365–396, here 365; English translation: “Man and Adversity,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 224–243, here 224.

4 On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics Liliana Albertazzi

Abstract  Aesthetics, as an experimental research field, is now gaining momentum within the newborn cognitive neurosciences comprising psychophysical analyses and aesthetic judgments of simple and complex stimuli. Such developments, unpredictable until only a few years ago, enhance awareness of the importance of collaboration between artists and scientists, which has long languished on the fringe of scientific research. My study divides into two parts: after a historical survey of the roots of experimental aesthetics, it outlines the general framework, compares the different approaches, and focuses on experimental phenomenological methods, requirements, and findings. Keywords  Experimental Aesthetics; Experimental Phenomenology; Harmony; Methods I have decided not to push the inquiry into the meaning that was further from the point to which direct evidence would have led me, accessible to my eyes. Arnheim, 1962

PART I

1  A dicephalus concept Still today the term “aesthetics” comprises a twofold dimension, although they are not always explicitly expressed or even acknowledged: the original meaning of a comprehensive science of perception (epistêmê aisthetikê) based on empirical laws, and the acquired meaning of “sensible cognition” and/or science of beauty. To be noted is that the original notion of aesthetics was rooted in an Aristotelian conception of physics, similar to that of nature in natural philosophy, and that the acquired notion, after Baumgartner,1 comprised both what is sensed and what is imagined. As regards the meaning that aesthetics acquired after the eighteenth century, it was initially assumed that a science of beauty could clarify formal, objective rules, laws, or principles of natural or artistic beauty.2 However, when discussing the new proposal of a “critique of taste” centered on the affective faculty, Kant concluded that aesthetic judgments are subjective (in the sense that

1 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartner, Aesthetica, 2 vols, ed. Dagmar Mirbach (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2007 [1750]). 2 Ibid. DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-5

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  55 they yield no information about the properties of external objects).3 They essentially relate to the internal feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Although simplified, the crucial point concerns the descriptive, empirical, and explanatory values in aesthetic judgments. In fact, what was progressively overshadowed, in favor of the subjective feeling of pleasantness, is the explanatory role of aesthetics as a comprehensive science of perceptual experience. A historical inquiry locates the origins of empirical and experimental aesthetics at the boundary between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, contemporaneously with the birth of modern psychophysics and the establishment of psychology as a science. It does so by relying on specific observables, concepts, definitions, and methodologies. The methods used to measure psychophysical phenomena were also applied to aesthetics, with two purposes: to determine the laws of beauty and to identify individual degrees of aesthetic appreciation and pleasure.4 Analyzed in experimental contexts was the weight of aesthetically significant perceptual dimensions such as complexity, harmony, and order in the evaluation of shapes considered responsible for psychological pleasantness. In experimental studies, particular importance was given to the golden ratio as a formal principle of beauty. The golden ratio corresponds to a number found by the division of a line into two parts (a longer and a smaller one) so that the longer part divided by the smaller one is equal to the whole length divided by the longer part. Over the centuries, this number, which is also to be found in natural shapes, has been used in arts (from painting, to architecture and music) to achieve the balance and beauty of forms. To evaluate empirically the beauty of shapes such as rectangles, Fechner tested the ratio of the golden section on the assumption that the preferred shape would closely match that of the so-called “golden rectangle.” He presented the subjects with a series of different rectangles and asked whether they found one of them more harmonious, pleasing, and elegant than the others by virtue of its aspect. As he reports, for example, the reason for a woman’s preference for one rectangle (whose ratio was 2:1) among the others was that it was perceived as beautifully slim.5 Fechner’s results showed a small preference for rectangles of certain proportions (21 × 34 cm), but also wide interindividual differences. Essentially, Fechnerian aesthetics are based on the numerically controlled proportions of the metric stimuli and the subjective evaluation of pleasantness by the subjects as expressed by connotative categories of natural language. Problematic aspects such as the proper object of aesthetics (beauty or pleasantness), the categorial description of the perceived stimuli (elegant, slim, etc.), the dimensions responsible for the criteria of evaluation (complexity, harmony, order), the individual preferences, and interindividual differences were already manifest in the first experimental approach of empirical aesthetics. Contemporary psychophysical aesthetics do not stray far from these principles.6 The phenomenological (empirical and experimental) approach to aesthetics, instead, provides

3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 4 Gustav T. Fechner, Vorschule der Ästhetik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1876). 5 Ibid. 6 See Ian C. McManus, “The aesthetics of simple figures,” British Journal of Psychology 71 (1980): 505–524; Ian C. McManus, et al., “Beyond the golden section and normative aesthetics: Why do individuals differ so much in their aesthetic preferences for rectangles?” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 4/2 (2010): 113–126; Flip Phillips, et al., “Fechner’s aesthetics revisited,” Seeing and Perceiving 23/3 (2010): 263–271; and below.

56  Liliana Albertazzi a very different explanation for the subjective evaluations of shapes: that they are independent of metric proportions and are not limited to pleasantness.7 2  Empirical aesthetics of space After Fechner, empirical aesthetics received a further boost from the analysis of perceived space triggered by the nascent rich debate on so-called optical illusions.8 The observed discrepancies between physical stimuli and perceptions cast doubt on the objectivity of perception and the isotropy of visual space. These analyses also raised the issue of an appropriate geometry of visual experiences. Such a geometry should have been able to represent “elements” like visual points, lines, and surfaces, which did not conform to Euclidean parameters and definitions, and their embedded expressive and physiognomic characteristics, conveying meaning and value to perceptual shapes―for example, their being perceived as harmonious, pleasing, elegant, or slim. In this respect, Theodor Lipps’ Aesthetics of Space was fundamental from both a systematic and an empirical viewpoint.9 It anticipated much of the subsequent experimental research in visual perception and empirical and experimental aesthetics. Lipps analyzed several dimensions of visual space in order to identify its intrinsic anisotropy and characteristics. Among the others are the visual distortion of angles: given two lines forming an angle and two dots placed at the extremities of both but at different spatial distances (one nearer, the other more distant), the two identical sides of the angle appear to be of unequal length, as a function of the distance between sides and relative dots; the bisection illusion, occurring when straight vertical lines separating small black vertical squares appear slightly tilted in a clockwise direction; and a line divided on its center appearing shorter than an undivided line of the same length. A similar case concerned a variation of the Müller-Lyer illusion10 (if one puts two points within the segments, the line segment between the dots, identical to the one on the left, appears longer), and Lipps was also one of the first to recognize the size illusion with circles, usually known as the Ebbinghaus illusion,11 consisting in the overestimation of the central circle surrounded by a ring of smaller concentric circles and the underestimation of a central circle surrounded by a ring of larger contextual circles. 2.1  Art and perception

The widespread, regular, and consistent presence of these illusory effects, besides raising the issue of the nature of space, highlighted the similarity between perceptual and pictorial spaces. Over the centuries, in fact, art history had shown the awareness and the use of optical illusions by artists as aesthetic and perceptual devices. Consider the èntasis of the Doric columns;12 the trompe-l’oeil dome perspective in Andrea Pozzo’s painted ceiling in

7 See Rudolf Arnheim, “Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchungen zum Ausdrucksproblem,” Psychologische Forschung 11 (1928): 1–132; and below. 8 Nicholas J. Wade, “Early history of illusions,” in The Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions, ed. Arthur G. Shapiro and Dejan Todorović (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 3–37. 9 Theodor Lipps, Raumäesthetik und geometrisch-optische Täuschungen (Leipzig: Barth, 1897). 10 Franz C. Müller-Lyer, “Zur Lehre von den optischen Täuschungen. Über Kontrast und Konfluxion,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 9 (1886): 1–16. 11 Hermann Ebbinghaus, Grundzüge der Psychologie (Leipzig: Veit & Co, 1902). 12 https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/14779435914/

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  57 the Church of St. Ignatius in Rome, and in Roman mosaics;13 the Bridal Chamber at the Ducal Palace in Mantua; the anamorphic paintings (Holbein, The Ambassadors), and recent Edgar Mueller’s more anamorphic (άναμόρϕωσις) street paintings;14 Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs (essentially, stereokinetic phenomena);15 and the San Lorenzo lunette at the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, a pictorial effect due to the Poggendorf illusion.16 Other illusory visual effects, like Brentano’s variations of the Müller-Lyer17 are still applied in fashion design.18 The same occurs in sculpture: the analysis of the third dimension as a product of the mind of the observer that idiosyncratically expands or contracts it19 shows how the perfection of sculptures also depends on their rendering at a distance of three-dimensional volumetric qualities with a two-dimensional surface effect.20 To sum up, the study of illusory effects showed that the space “in which we see” is intrinsically mental, observer-dependent, embedded with competing visual forces, and definitely “illusory” if compared with physical stimuli. Between the two basic characteristics of visual space (convexity, the space outside; and concavity, the space inside), there appeared to be an entire phenomenology of spatial variations and behaviors. From this perspective, the aesthetically pleasantness of shapes was due not to the metric features of shapes, because in visual space these undergo regular distortions, but to a balance among the contrasting forces and visual vectors embedded in that space and responsible for the distortions. This balance would also explain the tendency toward the simplest, purest, and clearest structure (Pregnänz) of shapes, as the Gestaltists would subsequently demonstrate.21 3  Empirical aesthetics and phenomenology The debate on visual illusions involved researchers belonging both to the nascent scientific psychology and the humanities. At that time, in fact, psychology, philosophy, and art were kindred disciplines. Brentano, the philosopher at the origin of the phenomenological movement, corresponded with Lipps and drew variations of the Müller-Lyer illusion intended to describe and demonstrate the visual effect.22 He did so by replacing the arrowheads of the original scheme with small wings so that salience was reduced at the line ends, or by eliminating the lines to leave only the end angles, showing that the distance

13 Nicholas J. Wade, “Artistic precursors of Gestalt principles,” Gestalt Theory 34 (2012): 329–348. 14 http://www.metanamorph.com/index.php?site=project&cat_dir=3D-Pavement-Art&proj=Waterfall 15 See Liliana Albertazzi, “Stereokinetic shapes and their shadows,” Perception 33 (2004): 1437–1452. 16 Olga Daneyko, et al., “San Lorenzo and the Poggendorf illusion in Ravenna,” Perception 20/4 (2011): 1261–1269. See also Rudolf Arnheim, The Power of the Center (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 17 Franz Brentano, Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie, eds. Roderick M. Chisholm and Reinhard Fabian (Hamburg: Meiner, 1979), 106; and § 3. 18 Kiyoshi Morikawa, “An application of the Müller-Lyer illusion,” Perception 32/1 (2003): 121–123. 19 Dhanraj Vishwanath and Paul B. Hibbard, “Explaining stereopsis in the absence of binocular disparities,” Journal of Vision 12/9 (2012): 446. 20 Adolf von Hildebrand, “Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst,” in Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunst, Bd. 39, ed. Henning Bock (Köln & Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1969 [1893]). 21 Max Wertheimer, “Laws of organization in perceptual forms,” in A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology, ed. Willis D. Ellis (London: Routledge, 2001, 3rd ed.), 71–88; Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception. The Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954); Rudolf Arnheim, The Power of the Center (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and § 5. 22 Brentano, Untersuchungen zur Sinnespsychologie, 106–108.

58  Liliana Albertazzi between the acute angles appears to be shorter than that between the obtuse ones. He also found that by replacing the end angles with square brackets turned inward or outward, the illusion still occurred although with less intensity. The debate continued after the criticisms brought by Lipps, so that Brentano devised a series of further variations of the Müller-Lyer illusion on the basis of a model originally developed by Helmholtz.23 Independently of the conclusions concerning the functional dependencies responsible for the visual effects (for Lipps, the perceptual role of the parts of visual space from both sides of the lines, for Brentano, the subjective under- and over-estimations of angles), both Brentano’s and Lipps’ analyses demonstrated that visual perceiving comprises subjective forms of completion and subjective judgments, ranging from sensory to mental integrations, as subsequently analyzed by experimental phenomenologists. Brentano’s and Lipps’ studies on optical illusions were among the first to account for the methods of description and empirical demonstration subsequently developed by Gestalt psychology (see 8). Similar studies were included in design textbooks of those years.24 3.1  Lipps’ legacy

The strict relationship between empirical aesthetics and phenomenology was further tested by the regular weekly meetings held by Alexander Pfänder, Johannes Daubert, Theodor Conrad, Moritz Geiger, and Adolf Reinach at the Academic Circle for Psychology (Akademisches Verein für Psychologie) founded by Lipps. All of them were exponents of the phenomenological Munich Circle. In this respect, worth mentioning is the relationship between the phenomenological analysis of the perceptual object as given in subjective experience25 and the visual dimensions analyzed by Impressionism, as was observed by Daubert, probably the most creative among Husserl’s pupils.26 The core concept embedded in the phenomenological stance is that of appearances, the qualitative “matter” of the things given in awareness, characterized by value and meaning.27 Phenomenological analyses show that the elements of shapes appearing in the visual field are qualitative, contextual, and relational entities rather than physical stimuli:28 a variety of examples have been given by the already mentioned spatial distor-

23 Ibid., 114ff. 24 Denman W. Ross, A Theory of Pure Design: Harmony, Balance, Rhythm (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1907). 25 Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. Linda McAlister (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1995). 26 Karl Schumann, “Philosophy and art in Munich,” in In Itinere: European Cities and the Birth of Modern Scientific Philosophy, ed. Roberto Poli (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 35–52. 27 Liliana Albertazzi, “Experimental phenomenology: An introduction,” in The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Experimental Phenomenology. Visual Perception of Shape, Space and Appearance, ed. Liliana Albertazzi (New York: Blackwell–Wiley, 2013), 1–36; Liliana Albertazzi, “Appearances from a radical viewpoint,” in The Wiley Blackwell Handbook…, ed. L. Albertazzi, 267–290; Baingio Pinna and Liliana Albertazzi, “From grouping to visual meanings: A new theory of perceptual organization,” in Perception beyond Inference: The Information Content of Perceptual Processes, ed. Liliana Albertazzi et al. (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010), 287–344. 28 Liliana Albertazzi, “A science of qualities,” Biological Theory 10/3 (2015): 188–199.

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  59 tions, the behavior of color on different backgrounds and contexts,29 acoustic grouping phenomena (double trill, acciaccatura, triads), and temporal displacements.30 Thus, as maintained by Lipps, from the phenomenological viewpoint, it is not the material stuff of the roof of a building that perceptually bears “downward” but its triangular or trapezoidal surface; it is not the marble but the human form of Myron’s Discobolus that perceptually bends and stretches his arm, and turns his head. Similarly, the perceived elevation of the Doric column, or more simply that of a table or a chair leg, pertains not to the material mass of the objects but to the form of the vertical straight line.31 The same holds for drawings and paintings. Consider the sandblasted glass by Josef Albers, Hochbauten (Skyscrapers, ca. 1929).32 Triangular and other geometric shapes, and vertical straight lines, as demonstrated by Lipps, have a specific behavior in vision, which does not necessarily coincide with metric features. One may conclude that, from the outset, the phenomenological approach to perception showed intrinsic similarities to aesthetics in terms of analysis of subjective space and time structures, qualitative dimensions, perceptual invariants, laws of organization of shapes, and capacity to “deceive” the viewer.33 Consequently, the boundary between the experienced environment and the experienced works of art became subtle: both subjective experiences appeared to be irreducible to physical parameters. The nature and relationships between the perceptual contents (colors, light, sounds, lines, surfaces, tridimensional things, etc.) of visual scenes, as objective correlates of seeing, were also debated and experimentally verified by the Graz school of Meinong.34 The similarity and differences between Lipps’ approach and the Graz School’s theory of production35 was discussed by Lipps in a letter to Meinong,36 and the contrasting viewpoints were inherited by the experimental psychologists of the Berlin and Graz schools.37 3.2  Philosophers and psychologists

Generally speaking, in this debate, philosophers mostly worked on the nature, the components, and the invariants of the things perceived in awareness from a categorial viewpoint. Artists, instead, paid close attention to identification of the basic elements of perceived forms to be represented in paintings and drawings: for example, illustrating the shape similarity of points and seeds; lines and wires or threads; surfaces and leaves; volumes and shells; directions and movements, etc., as in Klee’s theory of pictorial form.38

29 David Katz, The World of Colour (London: Kegan Paul, 1935). 30 Giovanni B. Vicario, “On experimental phenomenology,” in Foundations of Perceptual Theory, ed. Sergio Cesare Masin (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1993), 197–219. 31 See also Arnheim, The Power of the Center; and § 5. 32 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (1976.6.9). 33 Wolfgang Metzger, Laws of Seeing, trans. Lothar Spillmann (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2006), Ch. 6, § 5. 34 Stephan Witasek, Grundzüge der allgemeinen Ästhetik (Leipzig: Barth, 1904). 35 Rudolf Ameseder, “Über Vorstellungsproduktion,” in Untersuchungen zur Gegenstandstheorie und Psychologie, ed. Alexius Meinong (Leipzig: Barth, 1904), 303–448. 36 Lipps’ letter to Meinong of 30.3.1905, no. 3839 in the Graz Archive. 37 Liliana Albertazzi, “Philosophical background: Phenomenology,” in Oxford Handbook of Perceptual Organization, ed. Johan Wagemans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 21–40. 38 Paul Klee, “Creative Credo,” in Paul Klee, Notebooks, Vol. 1: The Thinking Eye, trans. Ralph Manheim, et al. (London: Lund Humphries, 1961), 76–80; Liliana Albertazzi, et al., “Chromatic dimensions. Earthy, watery, airy, and fiery,” Perception 44/10 (2015): 1153–1178.

60  Liliana Albertazzi Art proved to be an excellent “laboratory” in which to describe, demonstrate, and manipulate the internal structure of visual phenomena, as well as to identify the conditions responsible for the appearance of forms in a strictly phenomenological sense. Indeed, artistic movements such as Impressionism and Expressionism were representing in painting the perceptual, connotative, and expressive dimensions conveyed by form and color. Consider, as paradigmatic cases, Kandinsky’s and Klee’s paintings and writings.39 One may say that the foundation of phenomenological aesthetics consists in a series of analyses characterized by a complementarity between the description of visual stimuli and their expressive value, the systematic fulcrum of which is Munich aesthetics. In those years, both philosophers and painters believed that drawings are a study of perceptual structures.40 As regards Gestalt psychology, it has always been very close to art. Arnheim, for example, observed that reference to the arts pervades the writings of the major Gestaltists, who shared with artists the idea that a perceptual configuration, however simple, cannot be analyzed piece by piece.41 Particularly striking is the case of Paul Klee, who worked all his life on a basic visual element, the line, its deployment, and its dynamic behavior: for example, in the spiral conceived as the best graphic element because it visually embeds and makes visible the forces, directions, movements, and the continuity of forms in the perceptual field. Klee’s work, which he declared to have developed “through a long glance into the inner world,” did not aim to explain art through emotions or reduce it to a sort of philosophical psychologism. In purely phenomenological terms, he wrote that art does not display the visible but makes it visible.42 Similarly, the pencil and paper drawings of the first studies in Gestalt43 were manipulations of (visual) phenomena conducted to identify and demonstrate the laws and the grammar of seeing.44 4  Expressive qualities A concept that played a role for the future development of the experimental phenomenological aesthetics was empathy (Einfühlung).45 Empathy is today generally conceived as the capacity to understand others’ feelings, thoughts, and emotions, endorsing their point of view. But the roots of empathic behavior were originally analyzed and empirically verified by the structural components of perceived shapes. Lipps, in particular, ascribed the expressivity of shapes to perceived states of stillness or motion, these conveying

39 Wassily Kandinsky, “Point and line to plane,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. and trans. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994); and § 9 below; Klee, Notebooks… 40 Liliana Albertazzi, “Introduction to the special issue on morphologies in nature and art,” Art & Perception 3/3 (2015): 213–219. 41 Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, ch. 2; Wade, “Artistic precursors…” 42 Klee, “Creative Credo.” 43 Edgar Rubin, Visuell Wahrgenommene Figuren (København: Gyldendalske Boghandel, 1921); Wertheimer, “Laws of organization …” 44 Gaetano Kanizsa, Grammatica del vedere (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980); Metzger, Laws of Seeing. 45 Theodor Lipps, “Ästhetische Einfülung,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 22 (1899): 415–450.

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  61 connotative, positive, and negative feelings.46 This is equivalent to saying that in perceiving, content, meaning, and expression are non-detachable from each other.47 Lipps and his followers, such as Geiger and Witmer, agreed that the modes of apprehension of perceptual and aesthetic objects determine their expression (Ausdruck) and/ or expressive characteristics. The character of perceptual expressivity and its intrinsic dynamism also played a major role in Rausch’s analysis and classification of qualities that ascribed them a phenomenal and genetic primacy in form perceiving.48 In particular, Rausch expanded the classic distinction of qualities (primary and secondary) by including expressive/physiognomic and affordance properties in the categorization. Rausch also distinguished different kinds of attributes of appearances, grouping them according to order and construction (e.g., symmetrical, closed), textural properties (e.g., soft, rough, transparent), and expression properties (e.g., proud, peaceful, threatening). This grouping is very similar to the one already proposed by Lipps.49 Also to be noted is that Michotte’s experimental work subsequently confirmed and gave a scientific explanation of Lipps’ analysis, demonstrating that specific kinetic structures are responsible for meaning (e.g., causality) and expression (e.g., aggressiveness) based on functional relationships among appearances.50 Similar confirmation was provided by Kanizsa’s and Vicario’ work on the intentional reaction, based on kinetic structures of perceived movements.51 These analyses flowed into Arnheim’s work, in which expressivity was considered to be the principal content of perception.52 Interestingly, the criticism brought by Arnheim against experimental psychologists of his time, who generally limited the study of expressivity to facial expressions detached from the context, may still be largely applicable to contemporary psychophysics and experimental aesthetics. 5  Expressive qualities According to Brentano, in seeing an object, the act of seeing (Vorstellung) and the object are simultaneously given in consciousness as indivisible parts of the intentional

46 Lipps, “Ästhetische Einfülung;” see also Felix Krueger, “The essence of feeling,” in Zur Philosophie und Psychologie des Ganzheit: Schriften aus den Jahren 1918–1940, ed. Martin L. Reymert (Berlin: Springer, 1953), 195–221. 47 Kanizsa, Grammatica del vedere, ch. 5; Wolfgang Köhler, The Place of Value in a World of Facts (New York: Liveright, 1938), 51. 48 Edwin Rausch, “Das Eigenschaftproblem,” in Handbook der Psychologie, Bd 1, ed. Kurt Gottschaldt, et al. (Göttingen: Hogrefe), 866–953. 49 Lipps, Raumästhetik… 50 Albert Michotte, “The emotions regarded as functional connections,” in Feelings and Emotions, ed. Martin L. Reymert (New York: McGraw Hill, 1950), 128–144; see also Gianfranco F. Minguzzi, “Caratteristiche espressive dei movimenti: La ‘percezione dell’attesa’,” Rivista di Psicologia 3 (1961): 157–173; Boulanger Rimé, et al., “The perception of interpersonal emotions originated by patterns of movement,” Motivation and Emotion 9 (1985): 241–260. 51 Gaetano Kanizsa and Giovanni B. Vicario, “La percezione della reazione intenzionale,” in Ricerche sperimentali sulla percezione, ed. Gaetano Kanizsa and Giovanni B. Vicario (Trieste: Università degli Studi di Trieste, 1968), 69–126. 52 Rudolf Arnheim, Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); and § 5.

62  Liliana Albertazzi relationship.53 The evidence of the object, being directly and immanently given in consciousness, does not require any explanation in terms of a representation of external physical stimuli. Nevertheless, evidence has been one of the most controversial concepts of phenomenology. One recalls the criticism raised by Schlick,54 who was also a proponent of aesthetics from an evolutionary viewpoint.55 Indeed, assuming a classical NewtonianGalileian viewpoint in science, no explanation can be given of phenomena pertaining to consciousness except in reductionistic terms.56 If classical physics is considered to lie at the basis of knowledge, no objective explanation in a third-person account can be given of subjective experience, which thus can be addressed only in terms of emotion, language, and culture. Also, no qualitative characteristics of percepts can be explained, including the secondary (blue, bitter, high, soft, etc.) and the tertiary qualities (pleasant, elegant, miserable, repulsive, etc.) because they are explicitly excluded by science.57 To provide a science of qualitative phenomena, one has to adopt an experimental phenomenological stance consisting in their accurate description, demonstration, and experimental verification.58 The same holds for aesthetic experiences which are deeply rooted in perception. The above-mentioned analyses were developed after the rise of Fechnerian psychophysics, specifically by Lipps and successively by the Gestalt psychologists. They played a role in the work of Rudolf Arnheim, who constructed an aesthetic theory on those principles. He described and empirically demonstrated the nature of the visual field as a dynamic opposition and balance of forces, following the principles of order, equilibrium, and simplicity.59 Visual forces behave like vectors generated by the inner structure of the shapes, and they are characterized by magnitude, direction, and location in the perceptual space.60 Arnheim developed a formal theory of composition of spatial structures based on the interaction of two systems: the “centric” system, in which all the forces of the composition orient themselves toward a common inner center, and the “linear” or “lattice” system composed of vectors oriented toward external centers.61 These systems underlie

53 Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, 155–164. 54 Moritz Schlick, “On the value of knowledge,” in Moritz Schlick, Philosophical Papers, vol 1: (1909–1922), ed. Henk L. Mulder and Barbara F. B. van der Velde (Dordrecht/Boston/London: D. Reidel, 1979), 288–294. 55 Moritz Schlick, “The fundamental problems of aesthetics seen in an evolutionary light,” in Moritz Schlick, Philosophical Papers, vol 1: (1909–1922), ed. Henk L. Mulder and Barbara F. B. van der Velde (Dordrecht/ Boston/London: D. Reidel, 1979), 1–24. 56 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 57 Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Doubleday & Co, 1957), 237–238; Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology (New York: Liveright, 1929). 58 Liliana Albertazzi, “Naturalising phenomenology. A must have?” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018), article 1933; Liliana Albertazzi, “Experimental phenomenology. What it is and what is not,” Synthese 198/3 (2019): 2191–2212. 59 Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art. An Essay on Disorder and Order (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Ian McManus, et al., “Arnheim’s theory of visual balance: Examining the compositional structure of art photographs and abstract images,” i-Perception 2 (2011): 615–647; Eline van Geert and Johan Wagemans, “Order, complexity, and aesthetic appreciation,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 14/2 (2020): 135–154. 60 Arnheim, The Power of the Center, 4–8; Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception… 61 Arnheim, The Power of the Center.

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  63 the structure of visual shapes in bi- and three-dimensional space: any visual object, be it a simple dot or a cluster of shapes, is considered a “center” (source or target) of dynamic behavior.62 Vectors are also responsible for the expressivity of shapes. In this respect, consider, for example, Malevich’s Black Circle, expressing a characteristic of non-­equilibrium and “restlessness,” due to interactive forces between the circle and its distance from the borders and the upper-right corner of the square of the framework. Moreover, visual forces may also act to oppose the natural tendency of shapes toward simplicity (Prägnanz). For example, the good shape of a perceptual singularity like a square can be distorted into a parallelogram by the vectorial forces active in a part of the visual field. The same holds for a circle, which can undergo an elliptical distortion, and so on. (One has to admit, however, that concepts like forces and energy in the phenomenological sense are still awaiting a scientific explanation.) A specific concept due to Arnheim’s work is that of the “structural skeleton,” which he analyzed both in simple geometric shapes and in more complex scenes such as paintings. For example, the singularity of a triangle would be due to its specific structural skeleton, consisting in the schema of the axis and in the characteristic correspondences created by the axes.63 Interestingly, Malevich showed by drawings how a visual square can be visually deformed into black cruciform surfaces by a series of spatial dislocations or, rotating around its own geometrical center, become a circle. 5.1  Arnheim’s analyses of paintings

The demonstration of the presence of forces and characteristics of the visual field, besides its systematic discussion, is provided by Arnheim in his analyses of artistic drawings and paintings. Like Klee, in fact, Arnheim considered drawings as a laboratory for the analysis of the perceptual structures and the conditions for the visibility of shapes. In discussing a series of works of art analytically, he highlighted in them the presence and dominance of Gestalt principles, and the role of dimensions and the behavior of the force visual field in the structural skeleton of shapes. In particular, he focused on the strong role performed by visual direction in Ingres’ Source; by symmetry in El Greco’s The Virgin with Saint Ines and Saint Tecla; by expressivity in Picasso’s Guernica;64 by space dynamics between concave and convex in Hui Tsung’s The silk batting women, and the plurivocity of space in Borromini’s Francesco at the four fountains; while the role of color in creating perceptual weight, linkage, and separation between figure and ground was considered in Matisse’s Le Luxe. The presence of a structural scheme and the composition of spatial structures are discussed in the analysis of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. According to Arnheim, every work of art discloses, besides a skeleton of forces, the weight, the lightness, and the properties of perceptual texture. Analysis of characteristics such as pointedness, softness, excitation, viscosity, mechanical hardness, and organic flexibility of texture was conducted by Arnheim in regard to Pollock’s paintings. The power of abstraction was also analyzed in non-figurative painting, like Henry Moore’s

62 Arnheim, Entropy and Art…, ch. 2 and 3. 63 Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception… 64 Rudolf Arnheim, Picasso’s Guernica. The Genesis of a Painting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962).

64  Liliana Albertazzi Two forms, showing the sameness of perceptual patterns in figurative and abstract art. Arnheim, in fact, did not consider abstract art as a merely formal, cognitive endeavor. He saw abstraction as the ability to grasp the structural elements of a type of object from its perceived patterns. This explains, for example, the ability to see a house in a configuration of toothpicks, a face on a wall, or a roof in a triangle.65 Arnheim termed this process “sensible abstraction.”66 Structural patterns are qualitative and expressive properties of phenomena, not metric cues. For Arnheim and for Gestalt psychologists, “concrete” does not denote physical objects, and “abstract” does not denote symbolic entities.67 Kandinsky, Mondrian, Delaunay, and Klee, the main figures in the shift toward abstractionism in modern art, in fact, defined their works as concrete art as well. The concrete/abstract couplet in these artists referred to the analysis of the subjective, structural, and emotional experience of shape and color in their rich appearances and expressivity in the visual field, devoid of any trait of physical objectivity. PART II

6  New trends in experimental aesthetics Aesthetics, as an experimental research field, is now gaining momentum within cognitive neurosciences from psychophysical and neurophysiological analyses,68 and processing models.69 This development is supported by advances in neuro-imaging70 and computer technology, interactive electronic products, physiological measurement of posture, recording of eye movements,71 and so on. In recent years, a sector Journal has been created (2011), Art & Perception, and an increasing amount of papers and special issues raised the interest of researchers of different backgrounds in empirical and experimental aesthetics. The rapid development of experimental aesthetics, unpredictable until only a few years ago, has contributed to renewing awareness of the importance of collaboration between artists and scientists, which long languished on the fringe of scientific research. Consider,

65 Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, ch. 2; Kurt Goldstein, and Martin Scheerer, “Abstract and concrete behavior: An experimental study with special tests,” Psychological Monographs 53/22 (1941): i–151. 66 Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley/Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1969), 174. 67 Gretien van Campen, “Early abstract art and experimental Gestalt psychology,” Leonardo 30/2 (1997): 133–136. 68 Daniel E. Berlyne, Studies in the New Experimental Aesthetics (New York: Taylor & Francis, 1974); Anjan Chatterjee and Oshin Vartanian, “Neuroaesthetics,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18/7 (2014): 370–375; Jon O. Lauring (ed.), Introduction to Neuroaesthetics: The Neuroscientific Approach to Aesthetic Experience, Artistic Creativity, and Art Appreciation (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2014); Margaret Livingstone, Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002); Paul J. Locher, “A measure of information content of visual art stimuli in experimental aesthetics,” in the Special Issue: Current Trends in the Psychology of Art. Papers from the XIII Congress of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics (1995): 183–191; Paul J. Locher, “Contemporary experimental aesthetics: State of the art technology,” i-Perception 2 (2011): 697–707; Robert L. Solso, The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003). 69 Helmut Leder, et al., “A model of aesthetic appreciation and aesthetic judgment,” British Journal of Psychology 95 (2004): 489–508. 70 Martin Skov and Oshin Vartanian (eds.), Neuroaesthetics (Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Co., 2008); Semir Zeki, Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 71 Zoi Kapoula, et al., “Effect of title on eye-movement exploration of cubist paintings by Fernand Léger,” Perception 38 (2009): 479–491.

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  65 for example, the Parallelepipeda project,72 the Mapping Museum Experience project,73 and the relevant increase of studies in experimental aesthetics currently available. Thus, over the years, the boundary between general science of perception and experimental aesthetics has become less distinct, as also shown by the above- mentioned new mixed methodologies used in experimental design: think of participants visiting Museums wearing electronic gloves, whose locomotion, skin conductance, and heart rate were continuously monitored during their exploration of a number of works of modern and contemporary art in seven galleries; not to speak of the increasing number of cross-references in the publications of the two disciplines. Although the literature in the field may divide on definitions,74 the principal evaluation categories in aesthetic analyses are still those of appraisal75 and individual and cultural preference,76 while the generally accepted explanation is the emotion mediation hypothesis.77 The emotional mediation hypothesis assumes that percepts in different sensory modalities (for example, color and sound) are associated because they share emotional content. To be noted is that the association is not considered to be direct (i.e., objective) but mediated (by emotions), and the mediation is due to higher-order processes influenced by past experience and/or cultural differences. 6.1  Fechner’s legacy

Notwithstanding the refinement of the classic methodological tools and the availability of new ones, contemporary research in aesthetics does not stray far from the original Fechnerian design. The general approach is to develop experimental aesthetics from below, that is, analyze bottom-up processes, seeking to explain the nature of complex qualitative, subjective experience on the basis of lower-order phenomena (behavioral response to physical stimuli, and neural correlates). Examples are the explanation of Calder’s sculpture in terms of conscious receptive field properties of neurons sensitive to motion;78 Mona Lisa’s smile in terms of functional disparities between foveal and periph-

72 Johan Wagemans, “Towards a new kind of experimental psycho-aesthetics? Reflections on the Parallelepipeda project,” i-Perception 2 (2011): 648–678. 73 See http://www.mapping-museum-experience.com; Locher, “Contemporary experimental aesthetics …”; Wolfgang Tschacher, et al., “Physiological correlates of aesthetic perception of artworks in a museum,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 6/1 (2011): 96–103. 74 Dorothee M. Augustin, et al., “Artful terms: A study on aesthetic word usage for visual art versus film and music,” i-Perception 3 (2012): 319–337; Slobodan Marković, “Components of aesthetic experience: Aesthetic fascination, aesthetic appraisal and aesthetic emotion,” i-Perception 3 (2012): 1–17. 75 Claus-Christian Carbon, “Cognitive mechanisms for explaining dynamics of aesthetic appreciation,” iPerception 2 (2011): 708–719. 76 Hans E. Eysenck, “Factors determining aesthetic preferences for geometric designs and devices,” British Journal of Aesthetics 11/2 (1971): 154–166; Mieke Leyssen, et al., “Aesthetic preference for spatial composition in multiobject pictures,” i-Perception 3 (2012): 25–49. 77 Per Magnus Lindborg and Anders K. Friberg, “Colour association with music is mediated by emotion: Evidence from an experiment using a CIE Lab interface and interviews,” PLoS ONE 10/12 (2015): e0144013; Stephen E. Palmer and Karen B. Schloss, “An ecological valence theory of human color preferences,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 107/19 (2010): 8877–8882; Kelly L. Witheford, et al., “Color, music, and emotion. Back to the blues,” i-Perception 9/6 (2018): 2041669518808535; see also below. 78 Zeki, Inner Vision…

66  Liliana Albertazzi eral vision;79 and inquiry into artistic style on the basis of a psychophysical paradigm.80 In particular, as said, Fechner’s study on the aesthetics of the features constitutive of visual objects and their pleasurable effects on the perceiver has received a new appraisal in order to explain aesthetic associations and appreciation according to the above-mentioned emotional mediation hypothesis. Attempts to revise Fechnerian psychophysical methods and measurement of aesthetic judgments date back to the first decades of the last century.81 They focused on the main categories of order and complexity, although recent studies did not show a relevant role of the golden section in motivating the aesthetic preferences.82 Compared with contemporary studies, however, Fechner’s original purpose appears to be more general: it was to define the stimulus-dependent nature of beauty, and to construct a system of aesthetics and the laws thereof. Current experimental literature generally focuses on specific issues, such as recognition of facial types in painting,83 multiple viewpoints for a perfect portrait,84 or laws of simultaneous contrast in natural and pictorial spaces.85 Very rarely addressed are the beautiful86 and the sublime as such, and they are conceptually and experimentally conducted within the mainstream cognitive science epistemological framework.87 6.2  Methods and explanation

There may be some differences among researchers, but generally the current approaches to experimental aesthetics share a common framework. Cognitive neuroscience endorses the conception of the brain as an internal mechanism that has evolved for the elaboration, transformation, and representation of physical stimuli (metric cues), and whose behavior follows inferential-probabilistic principles.88 Thus, the mainstream idea is that aesthetic stimuli are biologically significant although difficult to explain in qualitative terms (the so-called qualia). The fact is that this biological relevance does not derive from certain brain’s characteristics, but from the observation that perception favors adaptation of the organism to the environment. It is obviously true that the brain is also responsible for adaptation, but we know it only by observing the characteristics of perception. In cognitive neuroscience, experiments are generally carried out using psychophysical and neuroscientific methodologies (EEG, eye movements, TMR, fMRI, etc.); and explanations of the results are developed by devising computational probabilistic models. Studies

79 Livingstone, Vision and Art… 80 Holly E. Gerhard and Matthias Bethge, “Towards rigorous study of artistic style: A new psychophysical paradigm,” Art & Perception 2/1–2 (2014): 23–44. 81 Eysenck, “Factors determining aesthetic preferences …” 82 Frans Boselie, “The golden section has no special aesthetic attractivity!” Empirical Studies of the Arts 10 (1992): 1–18; McManus, “The aesthetics of simple figures.” 83 Astrid Schenk and Jeroen Stumpel, “Facial types in painting and recognition skills: Laymen as connoisseurs,” Art & Perception 5/2 (2017): 143–167. 84 Pietro Perona, “Multiple viewpoints for the perfect portrait,” Art & Perception 1 (2013): 105–120. 85 Vebjørn Ekroll and Franz Faul, “Basic characteristics of simultaneous color contrast revisited,” Philosophical Science 23/10 (2012): 1246–1255. 86 Jennifer A. McMahon, “Towards a unified theory of beauty,” Literature & Aesthetics 9 (2000): 7–27. 87 Stefan A. Ortlieb, et al., “Männerphantasien―der Ursprung unserer Ideen vom Erhabenen und Schönen?” in Geschlecht und Verhalten aus evolutionärer Perspektive, ed. Clemens Schwender, et al. (Lengerich: Pabst, 2016), 273–292. 88 Joseph P. Huston, et al. (eds.), Art, Aesthetics and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  67 of this kind generally confine the qualitative properties of aesthetic experience to phenomena of subjective emotional appreciation (pleasantness),89 individual preferences,90 and self-reward.91 Thus, researchers attempt either (i) to explain the nature of qualitative aesthetic complex experiences in terms of phenomena of a lower order of complexity (for example, behavioral response to physical stimuli or neural correlates), or (ii) to explain aesthetic meaning in terms of phenomena pertaining to a higher order of complexity (such as social, linguistic, cultural influences or intersubjective distributed fruition).92 Both bottomup components, such as stimuli and neuronal correlates, and top-down components, such as cognitive schemas motivating the elaboration of pictorial and architectural styles, are certainly elements that come into play at different levels of aesthetic complexity:93 however, the latter not necessarily must be reduced onto the first. Notwithstanding the achievements that such approaches may obtain in terms of knowledge of the neural activity of the brain during aesthetic appreciation, they neither directly concern nor explain the issue of meaning imbued in perceptual configurations, be they arrangements of patterns in decoration or more complex configurational wholes such as paintings and drawings. The issue of meaning remains largely unexplained (in perception science and experimental aesthetics as well). Some might argue that complex stimuli could be also considered in psychophysics and neurophysiology by classic methodologies (EEG, IAT, and so on). However, phenomenology, psychophysics, and neurophysiology differ in several respects: the aim, the way in which the stimuli are presented, the methodologies used (speeded reaction times, IAT, etc.), the behavioral judgments in a third-person account, and the interpretation of the results. Shortly, the difference between a mainstream approach and a phenomenological one to experimental aesthetics concerns the design of the experiment and the methodologies used.94 7  Aesthetics from an experimental-phenomenological approach The closeness of art and science in the analysis of visual space and appearances is particularly valuable in the phenomenological-experimental approach to the behavior of form in both natural and pictorial spaces. Addressed in this framework is the experience of aesthetic phenomena in a first-person account, searching for regularities and/or explanations within the phenomenon itself, and relying on specific experimental methods and measurements. Basically, although this approach runs parallel to the mainstream, it is

89 Vilayanur Ramachandran and William Hirstein, “The science of art: A neurological theory of aesthetic experience,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6/6–7 (1999): 15–51. 90 Jonas Abeln, et al., “Preference for well-balanced saliency in details cropped from photographs,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9 (2016):704. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00704; Lars Kuchinke, et al., “Pupillary responses in art appreciation: Effects of aesthetic emotions,” Psychology of Aesthetics Creativity and the Arts 3/3 (2009): 156–163; Helmuth Leder, et al., “Aesthetic appreciation: Convergence from experimental aesthetics and physiology,” in Art, Aesthetics and the Brain, ed Joseph P. Huston et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 57–78. 91 Leder, et al., “A model of aesthetic appreciation…” 92 Robert Francès, “Interaction of biological and social factors in experimental aesthetics,” Bulletin de Psychologie 30/14–16 (1976–77): 622–626. 93 George D. Birkhoff, Aesthetic Measure (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 94 See § 8.

68  Liliana Albertazzi grounded on a diverse epistemological paradigm based on internal subjective parameters rather than a mapping on external stimuli. As an experimental analysis of space, time, and cross-modal forms, experimental phenomenology sees aesthetics as being as exact as physics or biology science. Indeed, taking up the original meaning of the term (epistêmê aisthetikê), aesthetics is viewed as a comprehensive theory of perception that may be experimentally verified because it shares many principles of perceptual organization. Aesthetic stimuli considered by experimental phenomenology can be simple geometric visual shapes such as triangles, circles, and squares, or angles of different widths as in Malevich’s or Kandinsky’s works;95 but they may also be very complex, like pieces of classical music and paintings,96 classical music and poetic texts,97 or the effect of veiled statuary in sculpture.98 As said, awareness of the similarity between perception and aesthetics pervades the Gestalt approach to perception. Artworks also highlight the connotative nature of colors, which in natural and pictorial configurations are perceived as warm or cold,99 bright or dull, wet or dry, soft or hard.100 In their compositions, artists also rely on the enlarging/ shrinking effect of color, according to which yellow surfaces are perceived as advancing, larger, warm, and joyful, while blue surfaces are perceived as retreating, smaller, cold, and melancholic.101 Moreover, the techniques developed by artists for the articulation of pictorial relief102 show the presence of many visual features in addition to the privileged ones (cues) of computational vision science. 8  New trends in experimental aesthetics As mentioned, phenomenological experiments in aesthetics differ from the current mainstream in several respects: in the assumptions (their stimuli are Gestalten, not physical stimuli), in the methodology, and in the interpretation of the results. Phenomenological

95 Liliana Albertazzi, et al., “The hue of shapes,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 39/1 (2012): 3–47; Liliana Albertazzi, et al., “The hue of angles. Was Kandinsky right?” Art & Perception 3/1 (2014): 81–92; § 9 below. 96 Liliana Albertazzi, et al., “Cross-modal associations between materic painting and classical Spanish music,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 424. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00424; Liliana Albertazzi, et al., “Calligraphy and abstract art. A case of categorial ambiguity,” Art & Perception 3 (2015): 1–25. 97 Liliana Albertazzi, et al., “Naturally biased associations between music and poetry,” Perception 46/2 (2016): 139–160. 98 Sergio Roncato and Fabio Roncato, “The veiled statuary: A lesson form sculpture to vision psychology,” Art & Perception 7/2–3 (2019): 1–35. 99 Osvaldo Da Pos and Viviana Valenti, “Warm and cold colours,” Proceedings of the AIC 2007 Midterm Meeting Color Science for Industry, Hangzhou (2007): 41–44. 100 Albertazzi et al., “Chromatic dimensions …” 101 Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1975); Carol Gundlach and Constance Macoubrey, “The effect of color on apparent size,” The American Journal of Psychology 43/1 (1931):109–111; Wassily Kandinsky, “On the spiritual in art,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 121–220; Katz, The World of Colour; Klee, The Thinking Eye; Johannes Itten, The Elements of Color (London: John Wiley & Sons, 1970); William H. Tedford, et al., “The size-color illusion,” Journal of General Psychology 97/1 (1977): 145–149. 102 Jan J. Koenderink, et al., “Hue contrast and the sense of space,” i-Perception 6/2 (2015): 67–85.

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  69 methods are description, empirical demonstration,104 and specific experimental testing. They are not psychophysical methodologies, although the relationship between psychophysics and experimental phenomenology is not an either-or opposition but rather a difference. Psychophysics experimentally verifies and measures the relationship between physical stimuli and the behavioral response of the organism to these stimuli, while experimental phenomenology concerns validation procedures for hypotheses explanatory of the phenomenal world.105 The use of measures in psychophysics applies to relations between stimuli; the use of phenomenological measures applies to relations between phenomena. Thus, although experimental phenomenology uses psychometric measurements to highlight relationships of dependence between phenomena, the manipulation of physical stimuli (as triggers of the phenomena) is largely irrelevant because the description, manipulation, and demonstration are performed at the level of appearances only. Demonstration can be performed by or may require the manipulation of the conditions in a laboratory-controlled environment. In this case, attention is paid to the instrumental (and/or computational) setting for the phenomena to be observed. In color perception, for example, a viewing booth, when feasible, is a better choice than a computer screen. A specific phenomenological method is the Osgood semantic differential,106 used also in other types of research when qualitative attributes are to be verified. Osgood’s semantic differential uses the associations made by the observer between the perceived object under study and qualities expressed in linguistic form, normally adjectival. The participants are asked whether or not a certain adjective is appropriate on a discrete scale of categorial evaluation (often converted into a pseudo-continuous scale for the purposes of statistical processing). Recently, this method has proved to be particularly suited to crossmodality research.107 In particular, it has been used to verify Kandinsky’s experience of the pervasive presence of contraries in visual appearances. Kandinsky, in fact, speaks of “fights among tones,” “contraries of the contradictions” (Widersprüche), such as light/ dark, and their cross-modal associations (light and sweet; cold and bitter) as founding the color harmony.108 Finally, among the methodological choices, attention should be paid to explaining the task to participants, recommending that they avoid being influenced by past experience as far as possible.109 103

9 Explanation In experimental phenomenology the phenomena being described, manipulated, and verified are appearances (colors, tones, lines, dots, squares, more complex forms, and scenes), whose independent and dependent variables pertain to the same dimension, and are simultaneously observable.110 As clearly stated by leading experimentalists of this tradition,111 explanations cannot be given in psychophysical and/or neurophysiological

103 Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1935), ch. 3. 104 Metzger, Laws of Seeing, 197. 105 Vicario, “On experimental phenomenology.” 106 Charles E. Osgood, et al. The Measurement of Meaning (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957). 107 See 10. 108 Kandinsky, “On the spiritual in art;” and 11. 109 Gaetano Kanizsa, Vedere e pensare (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991). 110 William Epstein, “Percept-percept couplings,” Perception 11/1 (1982): 75–83. 111 Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology; Metzger, Laws of Seeing.

70  Liliana Albertazzi terms. Consider the case of colors. In color perception an order is retrievable. It naturally groups them on the basis of their similarities and dissimilarities, based on subjective visual inspection alone, which evinces well-structured perceptual categories. This permits an explanation (based on the uniqueness and opponency of colors),112 on which to construct a model (Natural Color System – NCS).113 Moreover, strictly speaking, only within a phenomenological framework, is it possible to explain the connotative properties of color such as rowdy, pompous, pensive, dreamy, absorbed, serious, and mischievous,114 without referring to the influence of language or culture.115 These properties, so relevant in aesthetic perceiving, are intrinsic and not-detachable attributes of phenomena, often cross-modally experienced. Studies in cross-modality are a good example of aesthetic complexity, and often explained in terms of the above-mentioned emotional mediation hypothesis. Experimental phenomenology, instead, considers cross-modal associations due to a direct mapping between common structural and connotative attributes of the phenomena observed (for example, color and sound, but also in more complex configurations). As said, in the Gestalt tradition, connotative and expressive attributes are considered genetically primary characteristics of experience: examples are the color black perceived as gloomy, or the color red perceived as energetic.116 There is no need to refer to higher level extrinsic components to explain the associations: subjective experience is directly, cross-modally, and expressively meaningful. The emotional mediation hypothesis, in fact, relies on a distinction between “perceptual” and “emotion-related” features.117 From a phenomenological point of view, instead, all the attributes are perceptual, connotative and expressive properties included. The choice of attributes for the semantic differential in experimental phenomenology concerns their structural properties (e.g., symmetrical/asymmetrical, closed/ open), textural properties (e.g., soft/rough, transparent/opaque), and expressive properties (e.g., proud/demure, peaceful/bellicose).118 Needless to say, neither the attribute “symmetric” nor the attribute “closed” can be understood in a strict mathematical sense: a metric square can be perceived as a rectangle,119 whereas a circle presenting a small interruption of its perimeter is viewed as complete, because of the tendency of the area with convex margins to become figure.120 Similarities and dissimilarities between percepts are accounted for by the structure of phenomena themselves. Subjective judgments on

112 Ewald E. Hering, Outlines of a Theory of the Light Sense, trans. L. M. Hurvich and D. Jameson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). 113 Anders Hård and Lars Sivik, “NCS-Natural Color system: A Swedish standard for color notation,” Color Research & Application 6 (1981): 129–138; see 11. 114 Kandinsky, “On the spiritual in art.” 115 Da Pos and Liliana Albertazzi, “It is in the nature of the colours,” Seeing and Perceiving 23/1 (2010): 39–73. 116 Metzger, Laws of Seeing, 84–86. 117 Kelly L. Witheford, et al. “Color, music, and emotion. Back to the blues,” i-Perception 9/6 (2018): 2041669518808535. 118 Rausch, “Das Eigenschaftproblem.” 119 Liliana Albertazzi, “At the roots of consciousness. Intentional presentation,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 14/1–2 (2007): 94–114. 120 Kanizsa, Vedere e pensare, 58.

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  71 the pleasantness of stimuli correlated to emotions can be verified by a phenomenological approach,121 but they are not considered exhaustive of aesthetic research as a whole. 10  Paradigmatic examples In recent years a certain number of studies have been conducted on Kandinsky’s artistic findings: that is, a triangle is associated with yellow, a circle with blue, and a square with red. To be noted is that Kandinsky’s results were the output of a written questionnaire administered to his students at Bauhaus.122 Albertazzi et al., “The hue of shapes,” instead experimentally tested the existence of such “naturally biased associations” between color and shape,123 increasing the number of shapes (16) and hues (40). The choice of colors was based on Hering’s unique color hues (red, yellow, blue, and green). Figures were presented in the center of the screen, surrounded by the Hue Circle, in different sizes (large shapes with the same perimeter, small shapes with the same area) and at different orientations, while the Hue Circle orientation was varied randomly. Participants had to choose the color which “naturally matched” the shape, and not the color/s that they preferred or felt to be more pleasant. They could change their choice until they were satisfied, with no time restrictions, although they were asked to avoid making associations with past experiences, but limiting themselves to observing the stimuli. The results of the experiments confirmed the existence of a significant association between the variable color and shape, although Kandinsky’s findings were partially confirmed: a triangle is yellow and a square is red. Vice versa, a circle was not blue, but conveyed a specific nuance of red. Those results are not surprising considering that Kandinsky’s associations are most likely due to his synaesthesia and therefore idiosyncratic; further studies showed a consistency of associations in the general population, in particular the association between triangle and yellow and square and red.124 Moreover, in Albertazzi et al.’s “The hue of shapes,” color shape associations do not appear to be influenced by metric shape characteristics such as size and area/perimeter. Correspondence analysis suggested also an association between shape and light and dark colors, and between shape and warm and cold colors: for example, the triangle turned out to be warm, the circle warm, the rhombus cool, and the square dark. Certain shapes were more frequently related to cool colors, such as greens and blues, while others were related to warm colors like reds and yellows. Some shapes were light, some others were dark (a cool shape is a parallelogram, a warm shape a circle). Furthermore, shapes that appeared to be very close in “warmth,” such as the circle and triangle, showed a differentiation when examined according to dimension “lightness.” The research proceeded by verifying the associations between color and the parts of a shape (angles).125 In this case, Kandinsky’s hypothesis that acute angles are associated with warm colors and obtuse angles with cool colors was confirmed.

121 Osvaldo Da Pos and Paul Green-Armytage, “Facial expressions, colour and basic emotions,” Colour: Design and Creativity, 1/1 (2007 ): 1–20. 122 Wassily Kandinsky, “Colour Questionnaire,” in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, ed. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 850. 123 Ferinne Spector and Daphne Maurer, “The color of Os: Naturally biased associations between shape and color,” Perception 37 (2008): 841–847. 124 Noemi Dreksler and Charles Spence, “A critical analysis of colour-shape correspondences: Examining the replicability of colour shape associations,” i-Perception 10/2 (2019): 1–34. 125 Albertazzi, et al., “The hue of angles.”

72  Liliana Albertazzi Soon afterward another experiment was conducted on Kandinsky’s hypothesis of associations between shape and color, however, using the three primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) and three shapes (circle, square, and triangle)126 and in terms of RGB color value (rgb: red, green, and blue). The experiment was conducted with the Implicit Association Test (IAT), and it showed no cross-modal associations between the stimuli. Later on, in successive experiments, classical psychophysical methodologies (IAT, and speeded detection) were used to test Kandinsky’s associations,127 task of classification and discrimination, and so on.128 10.1  Psychophysics and experimental phenomenology

Besides the difference tested by judgments in third-person accounts or subjective judgments in first-person accounts, with or without reaction times, and the adopted methodologies, the diversity in the above-mentioned experiments also consists in the choice of the representation color space: usually RGB for psychophysical tests, since it is convenient for colorimetric analyses, and NCS for phenomenological tests.129 The results obtained by experimental-phenomenological methods, which confirmed Kandinsky’s hypothesis at least partially,130 may be contrasted by opposite results obtained by different methodologies (such as priming and IAT), claiming that such associations do not exist.131 As said, however, attention should be paid to the overall design of the experiments, the task given to participants (natural matching between shape and color, or individual preference), and what these experiments are testing.132 Discrepancies between the results obtained by psychophysical or by experimental phenomenological procedures are consistently explicable in terms of the different assumptions guiding the research, the design and the choice of the stimuli, the different tools (paper, computer screen, brain scanning, eye tracker, EEG, etc.), the number of stimuli (and often also the number of participants), and so on. In case that similar partial results obtained with different methodologies were similar, the question still remains of the level of analysis, their correlation, and their explication as well. The fact that, for example, neurophysiological analyses may yield results similar to those obtained by phenomenological analyses does not mean that they can be considered equally comparable or even more exchangeable. They are correlated data. Besides Kandinsky’s associations, the IAT has been used to answer various questions in empirical aesthetics.133 These experiments were specifically designed to probe associa-

126 Alexis D. J. Makin and Sophie M. Wuerger, “The IAT shows no evidence for Kandinsky’s color-shape associations,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2013): 616. 127 Na Chen, et al., “Associations between color and shape in Japanese observers,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 9/1 (2015): 101–110. 128 Lawrence E. Marks, “Cross-modal interactions in speeded classification,” in The Handbook of Multisensory Processes, eds. Gemma Calvert, Charles Spence, and Barry E. Stein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 85–105. 129 See § 11 below. 130 Albertazzi, et al., “The hue of shapes”; Albertazzi, et al., “The hue of angles”; Chen, et al., “Associations between color and shape …” 131 Makin and Wuerger, “The IAT shows no evidence …” 132 See, for example, Na Chen, et al., “Cross preferences for colors and shapes,” Color Research & Application 41/2 (2015): 188195. 133 Marco Bertamini, et al., “Testing whether and when abstract symmetric patterns produce affective response,” Plos ONE 8/7 (2013): e68403.

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  73 tions between what are called “stimulus” pairs, and they have been subjected to extensive methodological scrutiny. To be noted is that the IAT procedure requires participants to classify all “stimuli.”134 Other studies on cross-modality between color and shape, conducted on natural organic forms,135 showed the association between rounded figures and non-holed figures with red, elongated figures with hues between blue and green, and holed figures with hues between green and yellow. The type of shape and texture also exhibited a relationship with the warmth of the color. 11  Harmony and balance The relationship between structural dimensions such as harmony and balance, which over the centuries has characterized aesthetic analyses, finds a paradigmatic example in color harmony. Burchett lists eight basic components of color harmony: order, tone, configuration, interaction, similarity, association, attitude, and area.136 For the most part however, as Itten observed, the layman only defines as harmonic the combinations of colors with similar characters or identical tonal value, without strong contrasts.137 Color harmony is usually conceived to concern the properties that make certain colors (and their dimensions such as hue, lightness, area, saturation) or combinations of colors pleasant, and motivate the preference for them. The studies on the components responsible for the pleasantness of colors range from the relevance given to their summativity138 or, vice versa, to their Gestalt quality, 139 or to both.140 A mathematical study that explains color harmony on the basis of the similarity of colors has been conducted by Moon and Spencer:141 two colors are perceived as harmonious if they are identical, similar, or very different shades; if the differences are intermediate, and therefore the degree of difference between the two colors is ambiguous, the combination would not be perceived as harmonic. In order for the areas occupied by two colors to give a pleasant sense of balance (i.e., a harmonic sense), they must have equal scalar moments with respect to the point of adaptation (i.e., the larger the areas, the closer the colors to the neutral gray). Other experimental psychological studies on color harmony, conducted on large-scale tests and according to the rules of color space based

134 Anthony G. Greenwald, et al., “Understanding and using the implicit association test: I. An improved scoring algorithm,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85/2 (2003): 197–216. 135 James Dadam, et al., “Morphological patterns and their colours,” Perceptual & Motor Skills 114/2 (2012): 363–377; Albertazzi, et al., “The semantics of biological forms,” Perception 43/12 (2014): 1365–1376. 136 Kenneth Burchett, “Color harmony attributes,” Color Research & Application 16/4 (1991): 275–278. 137 Itten, The Elements of Color, ch. 3. 138 Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King, 1877); G. W. Granger, “An experimental study of colour preferences,” The Journal of General Psychology 52/1 (1955): 3–20; Joy P. Guilford and Patricia C. Smith, “A system of color-preferences,” The American Journal of Psychology 72/4 (1959): 487–502. 139 Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception …; Osvaldo Da Pos, et al., “Pleasantness as a frequency of some bicolour combination: An Italian/Indian cross-cultural study,” in Gi-Chul Kim, Color 2000 (Seul: Korean Society of Colour Studies, 2001), 18–23. 140 John T. Metcalf, “The pleasantness of brightness combinations,” The American Journal of Psychology 38/4 (1927): 607–623. 141 Parry Moon and Domina Eberle Spencer, “Geometric formulation of classical color harmony,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 34/1 (1944): 46–59.

74  Liliana Albertazzi on the Coloroid harmony threshold,142 showed that it is influenced by how the observers relate to colors, by color preferences, gender, and age. Making harmony coincide with pleasantness, however, induces the conclusion that no universal formal laws of harmony of colors can be found.143 This relativistic conclusion has some intrinsic weaknesses. For example, people prefer colors that bind together but also those characterized by dissonant contrasting hues; one may prefer the color blue and its nuances toward green, but evaluate as pleasant also the color yellow and its nuances toward red; the same holds for the structural nature of aesthetic experiences in general.144 Needless to say, also in this research field, the assumptions on the nature of colors, the methodologies, and the research tools shape the different explanations of the phenomenon. For example, color wheels, a basic tool of color harmony, can differ widely in number and in their grounding dimensions (additive and subtractive mixtures in primary colors, or Hering’s unique color, etc.), and they are also differently represented in science (CIELAB) and in art (MUNSELL color system).145 The choices of painters and the choices of scientists may also diverge or converge; for example, to rely on three primary colors (red, blue, yellow) or four unique colors (red, yellow, green, blue). 11.1  Harmony from a phenomenological viewpoint

In the overall framework, phenomenology aims to discover formal laws of harmony, independently of pleasantness or preference. Arnheim provided both a descriptive and an empirical analysis of the phenomenon, showing the role played by the Gestalt principles (see § 5) also in the field of color.146 According to Arnheim, harmony is an essential aesthetic dimension in the sense that, for example, all the colors of a composition must adapt to each other in order to form a whole (Gestalt), according to the mereological laws of non-independence of the parts.147 Even in the world of colors, corresponding (beautiful) combinations and partially inverted (ugly) combinations can create a pleasant whole: the result depends on how they are combined. The additivity explanation, endorsed by various researchers, is against the principle that the whole is different from the sum of the parts, although this being a well verified fact in perception. One may conclude that harmony concerns the whole (say, the dress worn by a woman in a certain context), while pleasantness concerns that aspect or dimension of particular combination evaluated directly by the observer. A good example of the fact that harmony in perceptual fields does not necessarily coincide with pleasantness is provided by Schönberg’s rules of composition, where the sounds do not necessarily all match in an easy consonance, but present varying degrees of dissonance.148 Much has been written about harmony as musical balance, and particularly about the relationship between consonance and dissonance. Here granularity exists in a vertical sense since the dissonant

142 Antal Nemcsics, “Experimental determination of the laws of color harmony. Part 4: Color preference and the color harmony content,” Color Research & Application 34/3 (2009): 210–224. 143 Rolf G. Kuehni, Color: An Introduction to Practice and Principles (Wiley Online Library, 2004). 144 Li-Chen Ou, et al., “A study of colour emotion and colour preference. Part I: Colour emotions for single colours,” Color Research and Application 29 (2004): 232–240. 145 Albert Munsell, “A pigment color and notation,” The American Journal of Psychology 23/2: 236–244. 146 Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception…, ch. 7. 147 See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 vols., trans. John Niemeyer Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 3rd Logical Investigation. 148 Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception…

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  75 value of the intervals within a chord can change depending on the whole, but above all, horizontally, as far as the development of harmonic sequences is concerned. However, one can verify the same phenomenon on a melodic level, where the opposing forces might be identified by the competitive completion of the fragments in the continuity of musical deployment. As regards granularity, an example is provided by the analysis of the different levels in the melodic grouping of Allemande in Bach’s Partita in D minor for violin solo (BWV 1004).149 These examples show how two opposing forces like conjunctions and disjunctions, the dynamic competition among different groupings, and the instability of the elements within both painting and music compositions turn out to be basic components of harmony. As to color field, harmony can be realized in different ways: for example, by contiguous unbalanced mixtures of two colors, or inserting large areas of dissonance (as to hue, saturation, and lightness) in painting (consider Kandinsky’s Black spot, 1912). The history of the composition of a painting records the different solutions attempted by the artist to achieve a balanced whole by acting on harmonic dimensions (tone, distribution of areas, similarity, contrasts, and so on). Arnheim’s work, however, is descriptive, empirically demonstrative, but not experimental. 11.2  Color harmony

From an experimental viewpoint, phenomenological studies endorse Hering’s theory of opponency of colors and rely on the Natural Color System (NCS) for experimental testing. Hering’s work, and specifically the first chapter of A Theory of Light Sense (1964), is an example of a formal-aesthetic analysis of color combination that strictly avoids introducing physical or physiological explanations of the phenomenon. NCS was conceived to designate a model for color combination based only on a descriptive phenomenological analysis.150 The task was to organize individual color percepts in relation to each other, identifying characteristic similarities and relationships, and assign them descriptive notations corresponding to their characteristically qualitative color attributes. In the notation, color material and light attributes were excluded; the information retrievable in non-figurative arts was instead taken into account. The assumption underlying NCS was that a formal theory of color combination should concern neither aesthetic evaluation of color in different cultures or periods of time nor the perceivers’ emotional and evaluative reactions to the combinations. NCS is based on some universal basic characteristics of color appearance. They are Color Gestalt (the phenomenon taking place in a confined area; it can also be a single color); Color Element (defined by the particular form that the color fills); Texture Element (varying in granularity to the extent that it may be difficult to visually decide either form or color); Contour Line Network (the structure formed by the borderlines that seem to demarcate the different color elements from each other); Form Character (the pattern emerging from the fusion of color elements in one direction and demarcated in another); Color Character (the particular color content that characterizes the whole color gestalt due to how colors interact and how large part of the visual field they fill); Tuning (the ordering or balancing of the color elements regarding size, formal color resemblance,

149 Iacopo Hachen and Liliana Albertazzi, “Anticipation on the boundaries of musical and pictorial continua,” in Handbook of Anticipation, ed. Roberto Poli (Cambridge: Springer, 2018), https://doi.org/10.1007/9783-319–31737-3_9-1 1–24. 150 Hård and Sivik, “NCS-natural color system…”

76  Liliana Albertazzi and spatial distance between elements); Visual Environment (two identical color gestalts can be differently perceived and evaluated depending on the visual context in which they appear). To be noted is that in this formal-phenomenological description of color appearance and behavior, the Color Element Tuning corresponds to harmony, and explicitly does not include the perceivers’ emotional and evaluative reactions to the combinations. From this point of view, therefore, the emotion mediation hypothesis is an explanation neither of aesthetic phenomena in general nor of color harmony in particular. In the NCS perspective, the color field shows the presence of those dimensions considered by Lipps in the analysis of perceived space: for example, direction (distinctness of borders), opposition (between unique hues), and connotative characteristics (warm/ cold, enlarging/shrinking). As to the relationship between harmony and balance, an interesting experimental result is the following. Usually, a dynamic value is attributed to the intermediate hues of the Hue Circle (in the yellow-red, red-blue, blue-green, and green-yellow quadrants) because of their hybrid (“unstable”) nature (Arnheim, 1954). However, four intermediate hues, and precisely orange, violet (bluish purple), turquoise, and lime, have been shown to be “balanced,”151 confirming an observation resulting from artistic practice.152 Experimental phenomenology has been able to verify certain aspects of the descriptive, phenomenological theory of color: for example, as mentioned, the warm and cold dimension, and the role that hue, lightness, and expressive dimensions play in color-shape associations and in perceived light.153 Color combination has been also verified in design, for example in Roberto Capucci’s fashion garments.154 On the basis of the experimental design, methodology, and procedure, these studies demonstrate that the results are due to structural (formal) dimensions of color perception, not merely to individual or social preference or to their pleasantness. Needless to say, and this generally holds for any experiment, the effect is verified on a restricted number of participants. Although the number of participants is generally much higher than in psychophysical experiments, experimental phenomenology avoids the more recent online testing: this procedure makes it possible to increase the numbers largely, but it is very problematic from the viewpoint of the control of ambient conditions and the comprehension of the task by participants. What would be desirable is a thorough study on the single elements of color harmony from an experimental phenomenological viewpoint. 12 Conclusions Initially, experimental aesthetics aimed at identifying the formal rules governing the subject’s experience of beauty in scientific terms that would guarantee its objectivity. Most of the studies, however, focused on the individual appreciation and pleasantness of aesthetic experiences. Beauty remained a sort of residual concept, difficult to address. The major

151 Liliana Albertazzi and Osvaldo Da Pos, “Color names, stimulus color and their subjective links,” Color Research & Application 42 (2026): 89–101. 152 Augusto Garau, Color Harmonies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 153 Liliana Albertazzi, et al., “Sensual light? Subjective dimensions of ambient illumination,” Perception 47/9 (2018): 909–926. 154 Osvaldo Da Pos, “The pleasantness of bi-colour combinations of the four unique hues,” in Aspects of Colour, ed. Harald Arnkil and Esa Hamalaien (Helsinki: UIAH University of Art and Design, 1995), 164–174.

On the scientific value of experimental aesthetics  77 part of contemporary studies shows that the research field does not distance itself from the Fechnerian proposal, which is even gaining greater support from more advanced tools and neurophysiological findings. Notwithstanding the recent renewed interaction between artists and scientists, in fact, the experimental analysis of aesthetic experience follows the mainstream of cognitive neuroscience in terms of bottom-up (sensory) and/or top-down (cultural) processes. The experimental-phenomenological approach to aesthetics, instead, verifies the structures of aesthetic perception by using the same parameters of the structures of general perception of the environment.155 Phenomena of individual and cultural preference or the influence of factors like previous experience, social context, implicit memory, etc. in the appraisal are not denied. However, what experimental phenomenology maintains is that aesthetics is not merely an analysis of how likes or dislikes arise and their causes, 156 or to use more authoritative terms, an analysis of subjective “taste.” The source of aesthetic experience is based on and explained by the universal laws of organization of color and form invariants; for example, in the analysis of works of art where the figurative elements of shapes are abstracted in their structural components.157 In arts, in fact, sensible forms are shaped, and they are able to retain and convey the informational, skeletal, imaginative, expressive, and ecological value that they possess as experienced in nature. Phenomenology evaluates the compositional properties of artistic works as structural properties of perception, their order and balance being due to the center of gravity, orientation, size, weight, and disposition of the elements. Color, light, textural, and expressive properties, also in their cross-modal interactions, form the content matter of both perceptual and pictorial spaces. The overall legacy of phenomenological analyses, and its challenge for the contemporary science of perception, consists in considering aesthetics to be a quality of things, grounded in the structural dynamics of the visual field. From this viewpoint, a pictorial theory of composition is a methodological demonstration of the laws of form perception. Acknowledgments I thank Osvaldo da Pos and Iacopo Hachen for their valuable comments.

155 Kanizsa, Vedere e pensare, ch. 3. 156 As in Na Chen, et al., “Cross preferences for colors and shapes …”; Leyssen, et al., “Aesthetic preference for spatial composition …”; Ou, et al., “ A study of colour emotion and colour preference”; Karen B. Schloss and Stephen E. Palmer, “Aesthetic response to color combination: Preferences, harmony, and similarity,” Perception & Psychophysics 73 (2011): 551–571. 157 Albertazzi, et al., “The hue of angles”; Albertazzi, et al., “The tactile dimensions of abstract paintings: A cross-modal study,” Perception 45/7 (2016): 805–822; Doris I. Braun and Katja Doerschner, “Kandinsky or me? How free is the eye of the beholder in abstract art?” i-Perception 10/5 (2019): 1–29.

5 “Und Dennoch” – “And Yet.” The role of examples in phenomenological aesthetics Arto Haapala

Abstract  In this chapter, my aim is to look at certain kinds of examples philosophers have used as rhetorical means and as arguments. These are cases in which the writer tries to entice a particular experience from the reader, or to generate his/ her own experience within the reader. By doing this, the writer, presumably, wants to win the reader to their side, and this is where the argumentative power supposedly lies. I will argue that emotional involvement often plays a role in this experience. In particular, some kind of empathy toward the case that the author creates is crucial. Keywords  Philosophical Example; Heidegger, Involvement; Empathy; Argument 1 Introduction There are numerous ways of doing philosophy, and different strategies for being persuasive and convincing. In the Anglo-American tradition, clarity, argumentation and logical thinking have been prime virtues. In the continental tradition, other kinds of rhetorical devices have had a role to play, although, especially in the early phases, philosophers were not shy of logic nor logical thinking. Edmund Husserl is an example of this, as is early Heidegger, who, despite the language that often bothered many early readers, especially in the English-speaking world, is extremely precise and consistent. In philosophical aesthetics, one of these rhetorical devices employed has been the use of examples, e.g., works of art or experiences generated by works of art or other aesthetic matters. This is something that many philosophers with different aspirations and conceptions of philosophy have done. In aesthetics, one is always, in one way or another, tied to the aesthetic reality, be it works of art and the experiences they inspire, or nature, or even the varieties of urbanity. Aesthetic experiences have been a rich source of examples for many philosophers writing about aesthetic issues. In this chapter, my aim is to look at certain kinds of examples that philosophers have used as rhetorical means and as arguments. These are cases in which the writer tries to entice a particular experience from the reader, or to generate his/her own experience within the reader. By doing this, the writer, presumably, wants to win the reader to their side, and this is where the argumentative power supposedly lies. I will argue that emotional involvement often plays a role in this experience. In particular, some kind of empathy toward the case that the author creates is crucial.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-6

Role of examples in phenomenological aesthetics  79 2  Philosophy as literature The relation between philosophy and literature is a complex one. When it is not a matter of pure logic, philosophy is bound to use different kinds of literary devices, similes, metaphors, and even fictional narratives. When it comes to philosophers such as Plato and Nietzsche, philosophy and literary fiction are happily married, and they cannot be separated.1 They write both philosophy and fiction, intriguingly tied together. I will not dwell at any lengths on issues of the philosophy of literature. There are certain recurring themes, like the problem of fiction and the cognitive relevance of literature, that have gained a surplus of attention, considering their relative larger insignificance. Belles lettres do play a role in human life, and not only in the sense of being a way to spend one’s free time and get excited and amused, but also in the sense of creating a communal ethos, or at least spelling out an ethos of a community or a culture. The best works of philosophy and literature can move us and make us think. Arthur C. Danto writes as follows about philosophy as literature. This quote can be understood almost as a manifesto of kind, and it deserves to be quoted in length: The form in which the truth as they (Plato in dialogues and Descartes in meditations) understood it must be grasped just might require a form of reading, hence a kind of relationship to those texts, altogether different from that appropriate to a paper, or to what we sometimes refer to as a ‘contribution.’ And this because something is intended to happen to the reader other than or in addition to being informed. It is after all not simply that the texts may lose something when flattened into papers: life may have lost something when philosophy is flattened out to the production and transmission of papers, noble as the correlative vision is. So addressing philosophy as literature is not meant to stultify the aspiration to philosophical truth as much as to propose a caveat against a reduced concept of reading, just because we realize that more is involved even in contemporary, analytic philosophy than merely stating the truth: to get at that kind of truth involves some kind of transformation of the audience, and the acquiescence in a certain form of initiation and life.2 Danto himself was a writer whose philosophical aspirations went well beyond the mere “production and transmission of papers.” Working as an art critic brought an extra layer to his style, and the richness of examples he used is admirable, and distinguished him from many of his contemporaries in the Anglo-American scene. It would be a mistake, as Danto points out, to claim that analytic philosophy is, by definition, devoid of literary features, but it is fair to say, I think, that in the continental tradition different kinds of stylistic means are being used much more broadly. What I find particularly illuminating 1 For an illuminating account on Plato’s use of images, see Katerina Bantinaki, Fotini Vassiliou, Anna Antaloudaki, and Alexandra Athanasiadou, “Plato’s Images: Addressing the Clash between Method and Critique,” Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics 11 (2019): 77–104. The authors formulate the rhetoric power of Plato’s imagery very elegantly: “Admittedly, although there is much in the rational argumentation of the Platonic dialogues that may escape the reader’s attention and memory, Plato’s artful images are definitely bound to capture the reader’s imagination but also to haunt the reader’s thought, long after the rigorous discourse that surrounds them fades-out in his or her memory” (p. 88). 2 Arthur C. Danto, “Philosophy as/and/of Literature,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchiment of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 140–141.

80  Arto Haapala in the above “manifesto” by Danto is his point about the effect of a piece of writing on the reader. Danto is not talking about emotions or feelings but rather a much deeper influence having to do with one’s Lebensform. This requires, he claims, “a form of reading” that is not merely that of reading a standard argumentative philosophical contribution, nor, if I may add, a comment on somebody else’s “contribution.” This is an important observation, and I shall follow Danto’s lead here and argue that one way of using philosophical argumentation is to draw the reader into a “world,” a set of beliefs, to see certain matters from another point of view, and possibly to modify one’s own beliefs. As I see the matter, empathy and, together with it, emotions and emotional involvement play a role in this. 3  Seeing the world of a work Consider the following description of a Siegfried Neuenhausen sculpture – entitled Die Bürger von B. (1976) – by Walter Biemel: There are simply nine figures in a fairly closed space. Die Bürger von B. is to be seen as a counterpart to Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, and was probably consciously designed as such by Neuenhausen. … How is it with Burger von B.? In Rodin’s work each burgher is a specific individual from which one could tell what individuality is, but in Neuenhausen’s piece we do not see any individuals. What we see are random repetitions of the mediocre citizen, repetitions in the sense of etcetera, or, to use Heidegger’s language, forms of the They (das Man), and the They is defined exactly by the fact that everybody is like everybody else, not different, not noticeable, not wanting to stand out. This work is perhaps the clearest representation of the They. Everybody dresses as they do, everybody thinks as they think, everybody reads what they read, everybody gets irritated over matters that irritate them. Everybody chooses matters that they are supposed to choose. At the same time, everybody is also curious as they are curious, in a way in which curiosity presents itself as a desire for knowledge, as being together with others, as educating oneself, in order to be of some help. – ­Everybody is concerned about everybody – which means, about nobody. Everybody regards oneself as a brave individual, and feels sorry for those who cannot be brave because of their problems. Everybody is noble and judges the other nobles.3 By using some terms and ideas Heidegger introduced in Being and Time, Biemel gives a very vivid account which aims to arouse a particular kind of vision and experience in the reader. Biemel uses standard rhetoric devices, like repetition, for this purpose. This is not only saying, it is also showing. This is not logical argumentation but rhetoric persuasion for us, the readers, to see the piece in a certain way and to understand it accordingly. This is where philosophy meets literature, and to understand literary philosophy one should understand literature. Biemel invites his readers to see Neuenhausen’s piece in a definite way; we are drawn into the world of this work as interpreted by Biemel. This also works the other way

3 Walter Biemel, “Kunst und Situation: Bemerkungen zu einem Aspekt der aktuellen Kunst,” in Gesammelte Schriften Bd 2: Schriften Zur Kunst (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Frommann–Holzboog 1996), 117–144, here 136–137, my translation.

Role of examples in phenomenological aesthetics  81 round: by using Heideggerian concepts in his interpretation, Biemel shows the very relevance and usefulness of these concepts, not only in understanding this particular work of art but human life more generally. I will come to the latter point in a moment. Before that, I want to explicate more closely the rhetoric power of the kinds of examples Biemel gives by using another analogy. 4  Creating a community and sharing the communal ethos Ted Cohen writes about the function and power of jokes as follows: “A point of telling a joke is the attainment of a community. There is a special intimacy in shared laughter, and a mastering aim of joke-telling is the purveyance of this intimacy.”4 The glue of every community is an intimacy of some kind based on an ethos. If there is no attachment nor connections between the individuals of a group, there is no community either. In the case of jokes, this is easy to understand, especially with regard to jokes Cohen calls “hermetic.”5 In order to get into the community of a hermetic joke – in order to get the point of the joke and be amused – one has to have particular information, or background knowledge, and the recognition of this information constitutes the intimacy and the according community. Cohen’s examples are jokes which require knowledge of, for example, catholic or Jewish religious practices. There is a shared set of beliefs and knowledge, or to put the matter in phenomenological terms: understanding hermetic jokes – and in fact, any jokes, I would say – presupposes a shared Lebenswelt.6 In this respect, jokes can be regarded as miniscule art works. Works of art create a community, and their understanding requires a fair amount of background information and shared beliefs. One of the most obvious obstacles of not being involved in the world of a film or novel and, accordingly, not understanding the piece is the impenetrability of the Lebenswelt of the work. If I simply cannot connect with anything that the work puts forward, say its political ideology is entirely different from what I believe in, then I cannot join the community of the work. To give another personal example, I have never been a fan of science fiction stories of any kind; I simply cannot connect myself to those kinds of futuristic stories, even though I might realize their considerable artistic merits. The life worlds do not match. Here is another well-known example from a classic novel. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina famously begins with a sentence which is either blatantly false or trivially true: “All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”7 Depending how one defines “happiness” and “unhappiness” one gets the truth-value one wants. However, despite the obvious vagueness and problematic nature of the sentence, it raises our interest by giving a clue to the themes and issues that follow – it is about family, about human relations, about love and hate, about our ways of being in the world. These are typical “perennial themes” to which humans have a universal interest. In one way or another, they concern us all, or as Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen put

4 Ted Cohen, “Jokes,” in Eva Schaper (ed.), Pleasure, Preference and Value: Studies in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 120–136, here 124. 5 Ibid., 125. 6 See Arto Haapala, “Metaphors for Living – Living Metaphors,” Danish Yearbook of Philosophy 31 (1996): 97–106. 7 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Edited and with a Revised Translation by George Gibrian (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 1.

82  Arto Haapala it: “They are permanent focuses of interest in a culture because they are unavoidable. The concepts which define these mortal questions are the fingerprints of the culture.”8 I can easily connect myself with the themes that Anna Karenina is about, but I can certainly also think of readers for whom Tolstoy’s novel is a no go – the life world is an aristocratic, old-fashioned, and, by some interpretations, chauvinist one. Anna Karenina is an undisputed classic, not only in the Russian literary scene but in the whole of the Western literary canon, broadly understood. However, there does not exist a story for which its life world would be approachable by all humans – novels and other narratives are cultural creations and represent the values of their respective cultures. Besides, there are numerous alternative cultures and sub-cultures with their own values which differ from the values of the main stream. 5  Philosophical examples Let us return to artistic examples in philosophy. Their function is to bring to the readers a point which resonates with them and which they, for this reason, find compelling. Biemel both analyzes Neuenhausen’s piece in an appealing way and shows the relevance of Heidegger’s concepts in understanding human existence. Humans exist in the mode of das Man, humans are often strange to each other even though physically close. The notion of alienation is relevant in understanding the current Western world. Let me point out that I am using the term “artistic example” in a broad sense. As we saw from the Neuenhausen case, an example does not have to be a narrative one. It is enough that the writer uses devices typical of literary works, e.g., similes, metaphors, and repetition, in order to make us see and accept the point he is making. An artistic example can be fictional, as “thought experiments” most often are. The following case is interesting in the sense that it is far from being clear whether the author intended it to be a piece of fiction. Martin Heidegger’s well-known and widely discussed analysis on a painting by Vincent van Gogh is worth looking at in more detail. It is an illuminating case both in the positive and in the negative. Even though Heidegger is skillful in using examples, his “description” – in the Origin of Art essay – of van Gogh’s painting remains controversial, despite carefully and quite persuasively preparing his readers for his art case. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, in the description, Heidegger’s own Lebenswelt takes over, and the account he gives is, at best, a reflection of the philosopher’s own surroundings. This entails, in my view, that persuasive power is rather limited, at least to a contemporary reader. However, the very fact that, despite the obvious problems of the case, it has gained significant attention and it is – I must admit – powerful in its own way justifies a closer look. So, let us revisit the famous paragraphs once more. We choose as example a common sort of equipment – a pair of peasant shoes. … We shall choose a well-known painting by van Gogh, who painted such shoes several times. … … The peasant woman wears her shoes in the field. Only here they are what they are. … It is in the process of the use of equipment that we must actually encounter the character of equipment. 8 Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1994), 406.

Role of examples in phenomenological aesthetics  83 As long as we only imagine a pair of shoes in general, or simply look at the empty, unused shoes as they merely stand in the picture, we shall never discover what the equipmental being of the equipment in truth is. From van Gogh’s painting we cannot even tell where these shoes stand. … A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet – From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and everuniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.9 The function and purpose of Heidegger’s van Gogh account is argumentative in the sense that I have described. It is a literary account by any standards, and it aims to draw the reader into the world of the “peasant woman,” or at least to see and experience her world from a very close distance. By using this example, Heidegger argues that great works of art have a kind of revelatory power; a painting was able to show in a very concrete way the world of a particular human, and by doing this, the case also revealed some of the fundamentals of everyone’s existence, e.g., “the earth” and “the world.” I am not denying that this is a great example of this type of argumentation in the sense that it appeals to our imagination – one can imagine and “see” the woman walking in the field, and empathize with her joys and sorrows. My point is that in order to be truly persuasive, the case, in this case, cannot be an imaginary one. It must have a strong connection to reality. The represented shoes have to be a pair of a peasant’s shoes, worn by a peasant woman; otherwise, the painting would not reveal anything. If the represented shoes are those of the artist himself, Vincent van Gogh, as Meyer Shapiro has argued,10 then one can question the argumentative power of Heidegger’s description. What is intriguing and interesting, however, is the fact that despite the imminent problems of Heidegger’s case, its rhetorical force seems to be so strong that many philosophers have either disregarded the problems or made great efforts to explain them away. Why is Heidegger’s case different from Biemel’s? In Biemel’s case, one might argue, it is also questionable whether Neuenhausen’s piece represents alienated humans in their average everydayness, das Man. It is only an interpretation – one possible way of seeing the piece among many others. Why could we not say that Heidegger is giving one

9 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. & ed. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 15–87, here 32–34. 10 Meyer Shapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein, ed. M. Simmel (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1968), 203–209.

84  Arto Haapala interpretation of van Gogh’s painting? His interpretation might not be compelling to me, but it has been credible to many readers. This has been Joseph Kockelman’s argument – there does not have to be any connection to a real person who might have worn the shoes for van Gogh’s painting to have the kind of revelatory power Heidegger ascribes to it. In Kockelman’s view, one should not be concerned about the actual owner of the shoes represented, but rather pay attention to the more general point Heidegger is making, “the equipment-being of equipment”: in the entire discussion about the painting by van Gogh the stress is not on the shoes insofar as they belong to the wife of the farmer, but rather on equipment, or perhaps more adequately, on the shoes as pieces of equipment.11 Contrary to Kockelmans, I think that it is crucial for Heidegger’s case that the depicted shoes are those of a particular person. If this were not the case, with a suitable description, this painting could reveal a world of just about anybody―a man in the city, a poor man in a slum, a Finnish schoolgirl from the early twentieth century, the world of my dead grandfather who was a miner, etc. To talk about the painting revealing a world would become trivial. This particular painting would be nothing but an inspiration for all kinds of fictional narratives. It would not make any sense to talk about interpretations either, because there are no ways to limit acceptable or creditable interpretations. In short, Biemel’s interpretation gives us conceptual tools to see and experience Neuenhausen’s piece in an acceptable and persuasive way, and by doing this, the description can draw us into the world of the picture, whereas Heidegger’s account of van Gogh’s painting remains a subjective projection, albeit a vivid one, of the environment of a romanticizing philosopher. Und dennoch: Heidegger’s choice of an example might have been an unfortunate one, but the sheer fact that so many sensible thinkers have been persuaded by it shows the effectiveness of this argumentative strategy. In all fairness to Heidegger, one has to admit that his other main example in the Origin essay, the Greek temple, is an excellent one, demonstrating beautifully how the temple supposedly served as a focal point for the Greek people. But rather than dwelling on Heidegger’s cases for any longer, let me take an example from a different cultural sphere, that of Paris in the middle of the twentieth century, after World War II. 6  Being engaged in an event and in a painting Consider this: Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a 11 Joseph J. Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and Art Works (Dordrecht: Martinus Nifhoff, 1980), 130. See also Arto Haapala, “Interpreting Heidegger across Philosophical Traditions,” Metaphilosophy 28/4 (1997): 433–448.

Role of examples in phenomenological aesthetics  85 little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automation while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting in it a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually reestablishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us. The game is a kind of marking out and investigation.12 This is not a description of a work of art; rather, it could be a part of a work of art, a novel, or a short story. Indeed, it is written by a novelist who certainly knew the power of figurative language. This is Jean-Paul Sartre’s well-known analysis of “bad faith.” Here I do not need to go any deeper into the issues of bad faith, nor do I need to take a stance as to how useful a concept it is in understanding human existence. However, one thing is certain: Sartre’s somewhat ironic description gives us a vivid picture of a Parisian waiter in his work. One does not even have to have first-hand experience of waiters in order to get the picture. Because of the vividness and plausibility of Sartre’s description, it is quite easy for the reader to enter the world Sartre paints, enter the community who sees waiters in this way. It is particularly easy for those who have first-hand experience of Parisian cafés, or who have previously encountered similar kinds of descriptions, for example, in novels or films. Sharing a certain amount of background knowledge and experiences gives the reader an easy access to the waiter’s world. We might feel empathy toward him, as well as toward the customer Sartre, watching the waiter in his work. For Sartre, this is an effective way of making the point. This is how bad faith is constituted, and how it shows itself: the waiter is presenting himself to be something that he is not. In Sartre’s words: But bad faith is not restricted to denying the qualities which I possess, to not seeing the being which I am. It attempts also to constitute myself as being what I am not. It apprehends me positively as courageous when I am not. And this is possible, once again, only if I am what I am not; that is, if non-being in me does not have being even as non-being.13 I think it is fair to say that we do recognize the phenomenon when reading Sartre’s account, although a different matter is whether Sartre is able to sell his ontological considerations by the same token. There are clearly many other theories than the one that Sartre offers that could fit his description. But again, just like in Heidegger’s example, the persuasive power of the example is remarkable. 12 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1984), 101–102. 13 Ibid., 111.

86  Arto Haapala Let me give one more example from the visual arts. Here is a description by early Sartre of paintings by Francesco de Guardi, a Venetian painter known for his cityscapes from Venice. Sarte writes: Guardi is concerned only with plastic problems, with light and substance, with colors and light, with unity amid diversity through rigorous imprecision. Result: Venice is present in each canvas as it was for him, as it is for us, as it has been experienced by everyone and seen by no one.14 This account gives us a hint of the atmosphere of Guardi’s paintings, and Sartre gives it as a part of his analysis of emotions. In this quote Sartre is not trying to draw us into the world of the picture, but he states clearly what is important – the experience of Venice as delivered by Guardi through his paintings. A contemporary aesthetician, Arnold Berleant, goes further than Sartre in using the persuasive strategy to substantiate his claim that works of art have a captive power to make spectators, in the case of paintings, engage with the work. He writes: The Piazza san Marco seems to depict an ordinary afternoon in that famous square. No noble, tragic, or dramatic scene, … Yet as one gradually approaches the painting, the orthogonals become less pronounced and the space, instead of dissolving or flattening out, … opens up to embrace the viewer. One is a mere spectator no longer; we step into the square and join its activities. We approach a yellow-coated courtier, we notice a pair of gentlemen engaged in conversation on our left, we observe a street urchin receiving alms from a man on our right. This is no documentary held before us; it is a real space of eighteenth-century Venetian life into which we have entered and can move.15 Again, even though Berleant’s description is less vivid than Sartre’s account of the waiter, Heidegger’s of van Gogh’s painting, or Biemel’s of Neuenhausen’s piece, Berleant gives enough clues to the reader to have a similar kind of experience as he himself has had. In Berleant’s case, it is fair to say, I think, that one really cannot understand the notion of engagement unless one has experienced it or at least imaginatively lived through the experience. The force of his argument lies, if anywhere, exactly here: in the experiential force. 7  Being involved Finally, I want to explain in a bit more detail the role and nature of the experience of being involved. Experiencing the kinds of descriptions in philosophical texts that I have outlined above does not differ in any fundamental way from experiencing fictional and other artistic descriptions. There is always an involvement, an engagement, or an immersion involved. In the case of literary descriptions, the involvement is imaginative. We are not engaged in a physical environment, as is the case when enjoying, for example, the

14 Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet (London & New York: Routledge, 1962), 37. 15 Arnold Berleant, Art and Engagement (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 66.

Role of examples in phenomenological aesthetics  87 livelihood of a great city. Nor are we engaged with our sight, as is the case with paintings. We are engaged by using our imaginative capabilities. We create an experiential space by the way of imagination. The deeper we are involved, the better the chances that we are convinced by the argument behind the description. If we are completely detached and cannot connect in any way to the world a philosopher is painting with his/her description, the chances of our being convinced are slim. By “imagination” I do not mean that we would form some kind of mental images in our minds. This would be what Sartre called the “illusion of immanence.”16 Consider Heidegger’s account of van Gogh’s painting or that by Sartre of the waiter – maybe some of us are capable of forming a clear mental image, but for me at least, in imagining these cases, mental images play only a minor role, if any. Imagination is rather our emphatic capacity to enter into situations, whether real or non-real. Putting aside the concerns I pointed out in Heidegger’s description of van Gogh’s painting, I can imaginatively feel the harshness of the peasant woman’s life; in the waiter’s case, I adopt the spectator’s point of view in the café, and I am imaginatively amused by his behavior. Being imaginatively involved is a form of entertaining oneself. It is playing with thoughts, possibilities, scenes, etc. Here I am following Edward S. Casey’s account. Casey defines imagination as “a special form of self-entertainment in which the imaginer amuses himself with what he conjures and contemplates by and for himself alone.”17 The notion of entertainment should be understood broadly. As Casey points out, it does not have to be amusing in the sense of something laughable. Rather, “it is to enter into a musing state of mind.”18 Most often, when entering this state of mind – triggered by the kinds of cases I have given above – there are different kinds of emotions involved, too; to use another expression, there is an atmosphere that affects us emotionally. In Sartre’s case, it is a comic one, in Heidegger’s, perhaps, a noble, a heroic one. We can enter into the mood of description and, again, feel it imaginatively. This kind of involvement is analogous to our empathic reactions to fictitious events and characters – we are not truly concerned about the fate of Anna Karenina, not in the same way we are about fellow-humans, but the emotions involved can be very strong and in some sense genuine. We experience real emotions, but the way we relate to these emotions is not the same as with emotions generated by events in the real world. A distinction made by Ray K. Elliot, in reference to Edith Stein, is useful here. Elliot writes: In the Lysis, Plato distinguishes between the ignorance which is both present in and predicable of a man and that which though it is present in him is not predicable of him. Emotion is subject to a similar distinction: the emotion that I feel in experiencing a work of art from within … may be present in me without being predicable of me. It is present in me because I do not merely recognize that the poet is expressing, for example, sadness, but actually feel this sadness; yet the emotion I feel is not predicable of me, i.e., it would be false to say that I am sad or even, unqualifiedly,

16 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary – A Phenomenological Psychology of Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), 6 and passim. 17 Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 118. 18 Ibid., 118.

88  Arto Haapala that I feel sad. Edith Stein describes emotion felt in this way (in our experience of other persons) as “primordial” for the other subject, “non-primordial” for me: it is “there for me in him.19 To use Stein’s expressions, we feel the emotions that descriptions such as Heidegger’s and Sartre’s raise, “non-primordially.” That is, I feel the hardness and anguish of the peasant woman’s life, but I am not in agony myself.20 This is persuasion by empathy, not by reason. I can identify myself with the situation; the description “rings a bell.” It is plausible at least to some extent. The fact that even Heidegger’s description has gained so much attention and salvaging attempts – despite its immanent problems – shows, I think, that the case has a lot of persuasive power exactly by giving the reader the possibility to empathize with the situation of the peasant woman. The emotional element is perhaps less obvious Biemel’s and Berleant’s cases, but their descriptions create an atmosphere – that of the insignificance of the mediocre life of the They, and that of a busy afternoon at the Piazza san Marco in Venice. By entering imaginatively these atmospheres, we experience their emotional qualities non-primordially. When reading Biemel’s description, and eventually watching Neuenhausen’s piece, I am not in the state of anguish in the sense that I would be depressed. However, I still feel the anguish. This applies to Guardi’s painting and Berleant’s description of it: I feel the atmosphere without being affected by it. 8 Conclusion What should one think of these kinds of arguments? We may admit that they can be powerful, but are they in some sense false or fake? If they are appealing to emotions rather than reason, shouldn’t we be skeptical about them? Plato wanted to dispel poets from the ideal state exactly because the purpose of poetry is to raise emotions. If philosophers still are lovers of wisdom, we should, by that same logic, disapprove arguments based on non-rational persuasion. However, I see the “logic” of these arguments differently. The primary aim is not to raise particular emotions but to see the point and understand it with the help of some emotive force. By drawing the reader into the world of a peasant woman or that of a customer in a café, the philosopher aims to make a particular point for us to see, to understand, and finally to accept. This works also in Biemel’s and Berleant’s examples. We can see, feel, and understand the existence of the They when reading Biemel’s interpretation and looking at a picture of Neuenhausen’s piece. And Berleant’s point of being engaged with a particular painting, or, as I would put it, being imaginatively involved in the world depicted in it, stands or falls, depending on whether the reader is lured to take part in the picture. As an argumentative strategy, this is not only acceptable and valid, but, in many cases, the best possible one and much more effective than arguments appealing to logical 19 Ray K. Elliott, “Aesthetic Theory and the Experience of Art,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 67/1 (1967): 111–126, here 113. 20 Stein draws from Edmund Husserl’s considerations. For an illuminating account of the problem of fiction and emotions in which Husserl’s analysis is taken into account too see, Michaela Summa, “Are Fictional Emotions Genuine and Rational? Phenomenological Reflections on a Controversial Question,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy XVII (2019): 246–267.

Role of examples in phenomenological aesthetics  89 thinking. However, it can also fail. If the premises are false, as in Heidegger’s case, the example and its luring force are not sufficient to convince the critical reader. These kinds of arguments often give us the possibility to see the world from another point of view. Whether we find this other point of view credible depends to a large extend on our own life world and the beliefs and prejudices defining it. An author creates possibilities for encounters and companionship; there must be elements in a literary work with which readers can connect themselves. There has to be a world which can be shared at least to a certain degree by the reader and the author. Otherwise, this kind of argumentation would not work. What is going on in successful cases is a Gadamerian dialogue. To come back to the quote from Danto: in philosophy, “more is involved … than merely stating the truth: to get at that kind of truth involves some kind of transformation of the audience, and the acquiescence in a certain form of initiation and life.” This is a grand aim that can be achieved both in art and in philosophy, or at least it should be.

6 Surprise in art The art of release Natalie Depraz

Abstract  The work of art offers a snapshot that unites beauty and novelty, and which evokes in us—in the artist as much as in the lover of music—the feeling of losing all control in a fraction of a second. I shall call this the art of release [déprise], and I would like in this contribution to retrace some of the phases along its unique dynamic, an interplay between attention, emotion, and surprise. In this dynamic, there prevails something akin to a crystallization that results almost in the osmosis of the three lived experiences [vécus]. What is at play in the art of surprise is a moment of extreme intensity that transports the artist outside of herself in the very moment in which, before their very eyes and almost without their intention, a new form is brought to life. Such an instantaneous crystallization of artistic form manifests, in terms of lived experience, in the modality of extremeness, and the strongest forms of this modality are first of all emotional. It is for this reason that I will discuss those paroxysmic emotive spaces that manifest fully the unique lived experience, in art, of release. After the description of this unique process of annulling inversion of emotional polarity at the point of the acme of emotion in art, I will examine the role that surprise plays in these states and these extreme emotional processes. Keywords  Art; Surprise; Emotions; Release; Extreme(ness); Attention 1 Introduction In 1792, Joseph Haydn writes his Symphony n. 94 in which the second movement, entitled “mit einem Paukenschlag,” surprises the audience with a fortissimo timpani strike. This symphony, nicknamed for this reason “The Surprise” (Die Überraschung), offers an excellent artistic example of fulguration against the background of imminence. In general, the work of art offers a snapshot that unites beauty and novelty, and which evokes in us—in the artist as much as in the lover of music—the feeling of losing all control in a fraction of a second. I shall call this the art of release [déprise], and I would like in this contribution to retrace some of the phases along its unique dynamic, an interplay between attention, emotion, and surprise. In this dynamic, there prevails something akin to a crystallization that results almost in the osmosis of the three lived experiences [vécus]. What is at play in the art of surprise is a moment of extreme intensity that transports the artist outside of herself in the very moment in which, before their very eyes and almost without their intention, a new form is brought to life.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-7

Surprise in art  91 Such an instantaneous crystallization of artistic form manifests, in terms of lived experience, in the modality of extremeness, and the strongest forms of this modality are first of all emotional. It is for this reason that I will discuss those paroxysmic emotive spaces that manifest fully the unique lived experience, in art, of release. It is, for example, an instance of fear, a feeling of sublimity, astonishment [sidération], dazzlement [éblouissement], vertigo, or even terror [effroi]. In taking up the unique polarization of these emotional lived experiences, be they negative or positive in their “valence,” as one says in psychology, I am in fact describing a dynamic of inversion, i.e., of annulment, which corresponds to the achievement of the apex of their intensity. After the description of this unique process of annulling inversion of emotional polarity at the point of the acme of emotion in art, I will examine the role that surprise plays in these states and these extreme emotional processes. At this paroxysmic point, will we discover that surprise itself also has an extreme quality that can then be compared, all else being equal, to a limit experience in Husserl’s sense, an event as Heidegger intends it, or a limit situation in Karl Jaspers’ sense? 2  Emotional extremeness I am petrified at the sight of a tiger that suddenly opens its maw only a few centimeters away from our car window in the Thoiry zoo. I am astonished as I listen to a friend tell me, trembling, of the incestuous abuse she suffered as a child. I have uncontrollable vertigo as I stare down the wall of ice several hundred meters below the slope I am skiing on. Horror assails me as I watch the end of the last season of Game of Thrones, where the Hand of the King, Ned Stark, is savagely beheaded at the orders of Kind Joffrey. As I open an album that contains a photo of him, I feel again the scandalous terror of desperation that I felt when I heard that a close friend was brutally killed in an accident in the mountains. Each of these unique situations, which each of us has had the chance to live in the first person, involves extreme, negative emotions in which the emphases are bodily (a feeling of vertigo in the mountains), relational (astonishment at the narrative of abuse), and memorial-traumatic (the memory of scandalous terror upon hearing about my friend’s death). And yet, my emotions will be equally extreme when they are “positive,” and they will also take bodily, relational, or memorial form. I was dazzled last week by the elegance of my daughter as she walked toward me on the street. I was in wonder at the rainbow cast against the twilight sky, which suddenly struck me as I rode the train back to Paris from Rouen two weeks ago. My son’s exultation as he recounts his last tournament is communicative and I feel an unexpected euphoria. Last Friday, a colleague relates what she felt as she listened to Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute: “it’s sublime!” she exclaimed. I feel an enthusiasm grow in me the moment I (though it is quite a rare occurrence) write a particularly well-conveyed page for my newest novel, Déni ma Survie! I am aware that emotions of this kind often appear in contexts of crisis, acute pathology, or artistic contemplation. Although emotions such as terror, vertigo, horror, astonishment, fear, or desperation are not necessarily part of a psychiatric condition nor are diagnosed as psychoses—nor as neuroses, in point of fact—they have a rare degree of intensity and are quite spontaneously qualified as “traumatic” or “traumatizing,” be it as a trauma-event source (my petrification at the zoo, the vertigo in the mountains) or as post-traumatic (PTSD) arising from a trauma source (the narrated abuse, the terror upon remembering the death of a friend). And although the emotions of dazzlement, wonder,

92  Natalie Depraz jubilation, enthusiasm, or sublimity can take place independently of all artistic reference (poetry, painting, music, sculpture) and be felt before the spectacle of nature (rainbow, aurora borealis), they make manifest the hypersensitivity of a lived experience that is part of aisthesis in a broad sense. These are, one can say, traumatic emotions on one hand and emotions of aesthetic enjoyment on the other, depending on their positive or negative polarity. Furthermore, they have in common a strong relationality and refer to different forms of empathy—of the kind that intends to echo the “pathos” of a radical passivity—tied to experiences ripe with shared lived experiences of affective contagion or emotive resonance. From here one can trace one side of the genealogy back to Sigmund Freud, as well as clinical cases connected to traumas and post-traumatic syndromes with Sandow Ferenczi. On the other side, one is led to Theodor Lipps, a contemporary of Freud and Husserl, to the nascent phenomenological philosophy that developed an aesthetics where empathy and pleasure play a central role, and to Moritz Geiger, another contemporary of Husserl and Lipps who also wrote on pleasure and artistic and aesthetic empathy. 3  Surprise and extreme emotional dynamics Such extreme experiences can reveal new, more complex, and better differentiated dimensions of emotional experience. In particular, the distinction “pleasure/displeasure,” or also the dual valence +/−, admits in these cases of a tension, that is, we find it transferred, transformed, annulled, overcome, to the point that it opens onto a dynamic of a different form. Thus, in some intense emotions, pleasure and displeasure appear to oscillate one into the other, to reinforce one another, to neutralize one another, or even to become so blurred that they no longer oppose one another. As far as language is concerned (that of metaphysics, but also our ordinary language), it loves clear distinctions: joy is positive, sadness is negative, love is positive, hatred is negative, admiration and desire are positive, and so on. One recognizes here the celebrated “primitive passions” from Descartes’ 1649 treatise Passions of the Soul. Fear, disgust, and rage are negative, something that psychology, at its most exemplary in Paul Ekman, has called “primary emotions” since the 1970s. For language, therefore, it is difficult to express properly those moments of experience in which oppositions are exacerbated to the point that they become porous. Our language consequently retreats into the silence of what we call the “ineffable”: “For all these matters, words fail us,” Husserl essentially says in his Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness about the enigma of time, in which the lived experience of the present moment is always already past once one attempts to speak of it. However, our language can become creative and make recourse, for instance, to expressions usually deemed “oxymoronic.” Some examples of this are the “terror of the beautiful” that contemporary philosopher Jean-Louis Chrétien thematizes through the Platonic dialogue Symposium, the “painful joy” that the Hesychast monks evoke, or the “sober drunkenness” at the heart of the mystical theology of Gregory of Nyssa in his Life of Moses. These are oxymoronic figures often considered incredibly suggestive, but also enigmatic and perhaps even unintelligible. These oxymoronic emotions are distinct from complex emotions such as joy, happiness, or melancholy, which are rather “emotion states.” Their extreme intensity goes along with a temporality of the order of a long duration. Oxymoronic emotions are also distinct from guilt, pride, and trust, which are moral emotions and, as such, eminently relational. At this point, I would like to sketch out the extreme antinomic emotions that

Surprise in art  93 I already mentioned in the context of a model of surprise that is founded on emotion and attention and whose dynamics can be defined in three micro-phases: 1 an attention that takes the temporal form of expectation 2 the bodily, physical intensity of shock 3 the affective resonance of an aftershock [après-coup] This model operates on three complementary levels: 1 Its temporal and dynamic structure, articulated through a ternary rhythm in three phases, is its continuous bass: (a) an open expectation-preparation, manifested as vigilance; (b) an instant-interruption that inheres in the surprise intended as a start on the bodily side and awareness on the internal side; (c) an aftershock that develops as an affective resonance in the form of multiple emotional cascades, an immediate effect tied to the phenomenon of shock, a longer and lasting repercussion [contrecoup] situated in the more extended temporality of astonishment, perseverance, effacement, or even the return of shock in the passive latency of the sedimentation of an event, as in the logic of trauma. 2 A cognitive process equally constituted in three parallel phases. It consists in an attention-condition of bracing oneself [étayage] and of support-intensification: (a) of a break and difference that allows the process to stand out; (b) of a regulating repercussion with reappropriation or an ignition of intelligibility, perplexity, or self-questioning. 3 A polarized affective dynamic articulates (a) relaxation-tranquility or anxiety-­ apprehension; (b) the emotional whiteout of shock; and (c) immediate association with fear, joy, disgust, or rage, and then a lasting resonance of astonishment, malaise, or appeasement. The model of surprise, anchored in the attentional and emotional structures, the multimodal dynamics of which I just mentioned, puts forth attention-expectation, developed as implicit anticipation, as the primary structure of surprise. Its emotional valence, developed as resonant aftershock, is its secondary structure. Consequently, surprise is itself traversed by an emotional valence (unlike joy and sadness, for instance, which are univalent) and is structured a priori by attention as its experiential condition: how could we be surprised except against the background of an open tension? How could we be surprised except by starting from its associated effect, its generativity in emotional cascades? Yet surprise is a phenomenon with a great breadth of sense and degree that are indefinite and manifold: it is an ordinary, daily experience, a micro-experience that barely comes to consciousness and, if usually pre-conscious, is very often only felt in the immediate aftershock of its manifestation. For this reason, language speaks of an “effect” or a “reaction” of surprise, or even, following John Dewey in his pragmatic philosophy, it can be considered as a non-experience, a non-lived-experience [non-vécu]: whenever I identify it, whenever I speak of it, it has already taken place…just like time. Surprises, therefore, are—for good or for ill—ubiquitous in our lives; they are quotidian, like a sort of startle (sursaut), a micro-experience, a barely perceptible interruption, or also as exceptions to the rule that take us out of the order of things, out of our routine, our habits, our boredom. We have all known those expanses of time [étale] during our vacations, a time where nothing happens, no plans are coming up, and everything is open so that we can finally do nothing! And then—this always happens eventually—life returns

94  Natalie Depraz and takes the upper hand, we gather with others, something always happens in the end, something unforeseen that makes us react: I had not been planning to go see the fireworks tonight, but they called me to ask me to go and I do not refuse, or perhaps it bothers me and I decide instead to stay home quietly and watch a good movie. In all cases, one always has a choice in front of a small miracle: to adhere to it or to reject it… The recovery of someone sick, a train accident, a war – these are different because they crash upon us and we are forced to undergo their effects, their affects, the way we somatize them, we think about them, we interrogate ourselves about them, the way they traumatize us, and so forth. All this certainly has to do with the intensity of surprise, be it a good or bad one. Although its degree is extreme, the margin left to receive it in the very moment it takes place, to deliberate about it, and to understand how to accept, welcome, or reject it is much smaller, if not entirely nonexistent. I hear on the radio that 200 people died in an airplane crash over the ocean! The intensity and objectivity of this news astonishes me for only a fraction of a second, before the process of attempting to comprehend and rationalize begins: the management of shock. Again, I am overcome by admiration in front of a painting I had never seen and this experience of internal, subjective speechlessness will take its course and could lead me to express my surprise, the relation to the consciousness that arises: “Wow, look at this painting by De Chirico, it is so strange! I have never seen heads so similar to rugby balls! Isn’t it bizarre?”1 Is then the difference between micro- and macro-surprise only a matter of bodily, emotional, imaginative, cognitive, or linguistic intensity? Is it simply a matter of transposing the model of surprise based on emotion-attention from an ordinary to an extraordinary register, from the quotidian to the most extreme limit, or would this modify the very relation that surprise has with its own structures, with attention and emotion, or even their very natures, their dynamics?2 4  Univalence, ambivalence, antinomy This is what I would like to present here. Most particularly, what is this possible mutation in the change of polarization from plus to minus or in the passage to emotional extremeness? And what is the particularity of aesthetic experience when this extremeness is reached? We identified above two kinds of emotional valence. Those involve either “univalent” emotions, be they simple, physiological, or psychological (negative: sadness, disgust, rage; positive: joy) or complex, social, and moral (negative: guilt, shame, pride; positive: hope, compassion, wonder). Or we have to do with “ambivalent” emotions, that is to say, emotions traversed by a polarizing valence: curiosity, concupiscence of the eyes (for Augustine), or creation of novelty (for Walter Benjamin); desire: appetite for knowledge (for Aristotle), or the infinite power of lack (for Freud), or the stupefaction that turns into wonder (for Heidegger or Condillac), or vigilance. Here the emotional dynamics that interest me are not, in the end, intrinsically polarized (more or less), i.e., univalent, nor are they transversal to this polarization, i.e., ambivalent. They are rather characterized by a structural antinomy that language often expressed through recourse to an oxymoron. It will be necessary to attempt to pinpoint

1 For more details, see the introduction to my book: Natalie Depraz, Le Sujet de la Surprise, Un Sujet Cardial (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2018). 2 Regarding this transposition and its metamorphoses, see Depraz, Le Sujet de la Surprise…, especially the models presented in it that represent artistic-aesthetic and pathological surprise.

Surprise in art  95 the differences in the emotional dynamics at play, for instance, between the ambivalence of curiosity and the antinomy of the terror of the beautiful, between the ambivalence of desire and the antinomy of a painful joy, or between the ambivalence of stupefaction and the antinomy of a sober drunkenness. It is thus also necessary to try to respond to the question of the relation between these antinomic emotional dynamics and surprise, starting from the model that I presented above. Are such antinomic emotional dynamics inscribed in the model of surprise articulated according to the double structure attention-emotion, which shows that surprise is neither univalent nor ambivalent? Is there such a thing as an “antinomy of surprise”? If so, what kind? If not, what effect do these extreme emotional dynamics have on surprise? And in what way is artistic release, which marks the experience of surprise in art, specified therein? I will analyze here, by way of example, three antinomic emotional dynamics: the terror of the beautiful, painful joy, and sober drunkenness. These provide the first cartography that will allow a new dimensionality of emotional experience to emerge. Within this cartography it will be possible to take up the experience of surprise which, as was shown elsewhere,3 does not quite fit into the standard frameworks of, on one hand, the Cartesian primitive passions nor, on the other, the Ekmanian primary emotions. It would be better, rather, to recontextualize the experience of surprise within its own antinomic structure. However, in order to begin, we should first do justice to a complex relational emotional mechanism, one which is closely related to empathy, but which divests it of its univocal positive sense and which thereby makes manifest the ambivalent ambiguity of the human being. It is in detailing the manifold aspects of this often pathological mechanism that, by contrast with it, we will gain a better understanding of the virtue of the antinomic emotional dynamics just mentioned. 5 From the ambiguity of the sensory and emotional process “Pleasure-Displeasure” to the ambivalence of the relational mechanism “Mitleid-Mitfreude” As is well known, the philosopher Immanuel Kant distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime in the third critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment. In the context of the experience of judgments of taste, which are characterized by their “purposiveness without a concept,”4 the two experiences quickly diverge: the first into the sphere of harmony, form, limit, regularity, and quality; the second into the sphere of dis-measure, of the unlimitedness of forces, of the unformed, of the monstrous, of quantity. In this way, Kant goes as far as to describe, within the very experience of the sublime, this tension of the spirit, at once attracted and repulsed by the object, that gives rise to what he calls “negative pleasure” (negative Lust).5 This German expression and its French translation [“plaisir négatif”] are intriguing because they both differ from a displeasure [déplaisir] (Unlust) that would be the simple negative of pleasure (Lust). Why might this be?

3 Natalie Depraz, “Surprise and Valence: On Cardio-Phenomenology,” in Surprise: An Emotion?, ed. Natalie Depraz and Anthony J. Steinbock (Heidelberg: Springer, 2019), 23–53. Online video link here: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=UOKT3D810Lw, 09/25/2013, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Phenomenology Research Center. 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 125. 5 Ibid., §23.

96  Natalie Depraz In the phenomenology of emotions that forms the Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins (1896–1925),6 Edmund Husserl regularly writes about Unlust and routinely distinguishes it from Lust. One would think that this is a simple separation of the univocal planes of pleasure and displeasure, and this is indeed the case in many examples. However, Husserl himself, and even more so his contemporary Max Scheler, who was well known for his phenomenology of affectivity [affectivité], describe complex emotional mechanisms that are traversed by an affective ambivalence: pleasure and displeasure are no longer, and are very far from being, situated in totally impermeable affective spheres. What is of great interest in the manuscripts on emotion that are part of the Studien is that they propose an analysis of emotions that are founded on distinctions usually motivated by examples whose initial experiential situation is that of Husserl himself. Even if these are not certainly specific lived experiences identified by the author as part of unique, deictically situated contexts, as is the case with an interview of microphenomenological explication,7 they are nevertheless concrete moments which the reader can easily relate, on her part, to a effectively lived situation. In any case, Husserl describes and analyzes a dynamic experiential process wherein, in a single and same affective experience, positivity and negativity coexist in the case of pleasure (Lust) and displeasure (Unlust), or of liking (Gefallen) and disliking (Misfallen): In the moment, I like […gefällt mir] a sweet baked treat, but then the liking turns into disliking. And this happens simply as I eat, without my turning toward the sensation [Empfindung]. Does not the sensory pleasure [Empfindungslust] remain the same, despite the change of liking into disliking? It “tastes good,” and yet I have no liking for “sweet stuff” [süßen Zeug]. But surely an analysis is required, and the question is that of a more precise explication. Are moments of strong sensory pleasure mixed with moments of displeasure, or is the whole, the sensory feeling [Empfindungsgefühl], according to its unitary character [Gesamtcharakter], sensory displeasure, although there is sensory pleasure in particular? Or must we not rather say: Indeed, the sensory feeling has its formal quality [Gestaltqualität], but this first founds the liking or disliking. The offensiveness of the sweet stuff that I feel subsequently is not given as something in and with the sensation. But aroused, motivated [erregter] disgust?8

6 Edmund Husserl, Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, Teilband II: Gefühl und Wert, ed. Ullrich Melle and Thomas Vongehr (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2020). 7 Pierre Vermersch, L’entretien d’explicitation (Paris: EDF, 1994, 2011); Claire Petitmengin (scientific director), https://www.microphenomenology.com/home (2018); Natalie Depraz et al., “A First-Person Analysis Using Third Person-Data as a Generative Method. A Case Study of Surprise in Depression,” in Constructivist Foundations 12/2, Neurophenomenology, ed. A. Riegler and C. Valenzuela (2017): 192–218. 8 “Ein süßes Backwerk gefällt mir im ersten Moment, aber es wandelt sich dann das Gefallen in Missfallen. Und zwar rein im Essen und Hinwendung auf die Empfindung. Bleibt da nicht trotz der Umwendung von Gefallen in Missfallen die Empfindungslust dieselbe. Es ‘schmeckt,’ und doch, ich habe kein Gefallen an dem ‘süßen Zeug.’ Aber freilich, das bedarf der Analyse und die Frage ist die der genaueren Deutung. Sind Momente starker Empfindungslust mit Momenten der Unlust gemengt oder ist das Ganze, das Empfindungsgefühl, seinem Gesamtcharakter nach sinnliche Unlust, obschon im Einzelnen sinnliche Lust da ist? Oder muss man nicht vielmehr sagen: Jawohl, das Empfindungsgefühl hat seine Gestaltqualität, aber diese fundiert erst das Gefallen oder Missfallen. Das Widerwärtige der Süßigkeit, das ich nachher fühle, gibt sich nicht als eins in und mit der Empfindung. Aber erregter Ekel?” Husserl, Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, II, 62, footnote 2, my translation.

Surprise in art  97 Another situation, this time less related to taste, manifests a feeling of aesthetic joy that borders on happiness: I see a work of art and I value it as a work of art, that is, I “grasp it in its beauty,” not as a representation [vorstellend], but rather it is the beauty that strikes me in the valuation [Wertung], in the aesthetic “recognition” [Anerkennung]. I now fall into a blissful state, I enjoy the work, I rejoice in it. I am traversed by the thrill [durchschauern] of aesthetic pleasure.9 It is significant that the extreme intensity of aesthetic joy morphs into happiness, characterized by the passive states of the subject who, in evoking surprise (beauty strikes me, I fall into a blissful state, I am traversed by the thrill…), arouses, in fine, an organic, proprioceptive, negative sensation of “thrill.” In these two cases, there is a change from the positive to the negative, as well as an enduring form of positivity at the heart of the negative: a thrill in contact with happiness, dislike, or even disgust coexisting with enjoyment. These are not ambivalent emotions in the strict sense, because they do not contain within themselves, intrinsically, positivity and negativity as is the case with curiosity, desire, or wonder. These are dynamic emotions that mutate, that at a certain point superimpose the negativity of dislike-disgust onto the sweet and pleasant taste, which could come to dominate again the next moment, or not…. Now, what is described here starting from sensory emotions, be they tasterelated or aesthetic-organic, can also be evinced from examples that put into play moral, existential, or strongly relational emotions: […] must every […] heart-situation [Gemützustand] have its motive [Motiv]? Can it not be that everything saddens me without reason, that all things are tinged in black? But that would mean that I, entirely without reason, would be subject to react with negative emotions [Affekte] only to what is unpleasant [Unschöne] and to the negative value-sides of things [negative Wertseiten], but not to positive values with positive emotions. Further, it would mean that, where there is nothing unpleasant that brings about a reaction of dislike, a mood is left behind from the constant negative reactions that then has its motive in the constant experience [Erfahrung] of “unhappiness” [Unglück]. Perhaps I am happy about something in particular [im Einzelnen], I am not totally unable to see the good and enjoy it, but I cannot give myself to joy. There remains a bit of vibrant [lebhafte] joy; I react much more strongly and severely with unhappiness [Unfreude] to negative things, and so only this has a lasting effect on my mood.10

9 “Ich sehe ein Kunstwerk und werte es als Kunstwerk, nämlich ich ‘erfasse seine Schönheit,’ aber nicht ‘vorstellend,’ sondern die Schönheit geht mir in der Wertung auf, in der ästhetischen ‘Anerkennung.’ Ich gerate nun in einen seligen Zustand, ich genieße das Werk, ich freue mich daran. Mich durchschauert die ästhetische Lust.” Husserl, Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, II, 170, my translation. 10 “Aber fordert jeder solche Gemütszustand sein Motiv? Kann nicht grundlos alles mich betrüben, alles in schwarzer Farbe dastehen? Aber das hieße, dass ich der Tendenz unterläge, grundlos überall nur auf das Unschöne und die negativen Wertseiten durch negative Affekte zu reagieren, aber nicht auf positiv Wertes durch positive, und dass, wo nichts Unschönes gerade da ist, das eine aktuelle Reaktion des Missfallens erregt, von den beständigen negativen Reaktionen eine Stimmung zurückbleibt, die dann eben ihr Motiv hat in der beständigen Erfahrung von ‘Unglück.’ Vielleicht freue ich mich im Einzelnen; ich bin nicht ganz unfähig, das Schöne zu sehen und mich zu freuen, aber ich kann mich nicht der Freude hingeben. Es bleibt eine wenig lebhafte Freude; viel stärker und heftiger reagiere ich gegen Negatives durch Unfreude und so wirkt nur diese auf die Stimmung nachhaltig ein.” Husserl, Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, II, 104, my translation.

98  Natalie Depraz We see here how an ingrained mood, here melancholy or the tendency toward sadness, enacts a continuous bass in the background without impeding the occasional emergence of joy, here aesthetic joy. But this joy cannot become an engrained disposition, and so is quickly submerged by the lingering sadness. In the same way, Husserl describes the possibility of a positive interior openness within a negative engrained mood: “When one simply endures something, one does it reluctantly, but such an enduring nevertheless contains an acceptance of the heart that is not there when one bristles uninterruptedly.”11 These different examples describe emotional processes where pleasure and displeasure (in relation with specific emotions, sensory or existential) alternate, pass one into the other, interfere with one another, or even coexist by situating themselves on different but parallel planes (foreground, background) or according to distinct temporal rhythms (the lasting or the instantaneous). In the case of intrinsically relational emotional processes that place the relation to the other at the center, the intertwining of pleasure and displeasure takes an even more complex form, one that is less parallel or successive but rather connected or even mixed, obfuscated, confused. Regarding these empathetic processes, it is fascinating that Husserl, Lipps, and Scheler offer a constellation of profoundly convergent reflections: in Lipps’ case, in the first years of the twentieth century; in Husserl’s, in the 1920s and 1930s; in Scheler’s, in the first two decades of the same century. Centering around the experience of Einfühlung, the three take up examples of a strongly relational nature while underlining certain points of torsion. These are well known: I rejoice in the joy of my friend, who was just hired at a great firm; I share in his pain at the moment of the passing of someone dear to him. This is the most frequent process, called “positive empathy.” Where Lipps distinguishes between positive and negative empathy by referring them to univalent emotions such as joy and grief,12 Husserl describes in the 1920s a more ambivalent process that highlights more clearly the ambiguity of the human being: “I behave in the mode of concordance with the shared behavior, the opposite mode of which is found in the fact that, if someone steps back with disgust before a garter snake that I find endearing, interiorly I do not share their action, but I nevertheless reluctantly follow them.”13 In this example, contrary sentiments coexist within me: the pleasure in seeing the garter snake (“I find it endearing”) and the sharing of the disgust felt by the others (“I nevertheless reluctantly follow them”). Nevertheless, Husserl does not go so far as to describe the partially pathological emotion of feeling a certain pleasure in seeing another insulted or, worse, beaten, or even the more frequent experience of taking pleasure in another’s unlucky circumstances or in wishing pain upon him. These are examples of a sadistic form of joy or even a kind of perversion, phenomena well described by Scheler in his Nature of Sympathy: Nothing shows the fundamental diversity of the two functions more plainly, than the fact that the first of them can not only begiven without the second, but is also

11 Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928, Husserlian vol. XIV, ed. Iso Kern, (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1973), 273. 12 Theodor Lipps, “Erkenntnsisquellen. Einfühlung,” in Leitfaden der Psychologie (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelman, 1909). See also Natalie Depraz, “Theodor Lipps. À la croiseé de la psychologie, de l’esthétique e de la philosophie,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, ed. N. Depraz and M. Galland (2018), https://hal. archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01613805. 13 Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Dritter Teil: 1929–1935, Husserliana Gesammelte Werke vol. XV, ed. Iso Kern (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1973), 513.

Surprise in art  99 present as a basis for the very opposite of an (associated) act of fellow-feeling. This happens, for instance, where there is specific pleasure in cruelty, and to a lesser extent in brutality. The cruel man owes his awareness of the pain or sorrow he causes entirely to a capacity for visualizing feeling! His joy lies in ‘torturing’ and in the agony of his victim. As he feels, vicariously, the increasing pain or suffering of his victim, so his own primary pleasure and enjoyment at the other’s pain also increases.14 In a less explicit but equally ambiguous way, Scheler describes, in the ninth chapter of the same work, two opposite mechanisms, both of which he names “sympathy” (Sympathie). They consist in the capacity to understand and share in the emotional states of others, but without thereby rejoicing in their joy, suffering in their pain, nor even becoming happy or sad oneself. Nevertheless, sharing in the suffering of others—which is what Lipps means by negative empathy and which corresponds, depending on its degree, to Mitleid as pity or, in more extreme cases, to commiseration—is not at all symmetrical to the fact of rejoicing in the joy of another (Mitfreude) which can be translated as “sympathy in the joy [of another].” Why? Scheler explains this clearly himself: It is very characteristic, and has often· been remarked, that pity and rejoicing are unusually different in the extent of their incidence. Mitleid (pity) is a genuine word, native to the language. Mitfreude (rejoicing-with) is a feeble product of analogy. Most languages possess a number of words for different kinds of pity, but not for different kinds of rejoicing. This is an indication, at least, that pity is wider in scope than rejoicing. In ethics, too, pity is always mentioned far more frequently than rejoicing, and often more highly thought of. [...] It is also said that pity for suffering is the greater for being often accompanied by the consoling thought: “It is a good thing I’m not in that state,” while rejoicing, on the other hand, is checked by the envy which is easily roused by good fortune.15 In feeling an implicit displeasure (jealousy) at the pleasure of others (happiness), in being pleased indirectly (consolation) by the suffering of others, or even in feeling an explicit pleasure at their suffering (perversion), one understands that this Unlust has nothing to do with mere sensory displeasure (disgust) brought about by rotten food or the smell of vomit. Here I make a different choice in translation, one that is possible in French with “displeasure” [déplaisir] in cases having to do with a sensorial modality, and “negative pleasure” [plaisir négatif] when concerned with complex relational mechanisms where the ambivalence between the positivity of enjoyment for me and the negativity of the ­suffering of another, and where this opposition becomes a conflagration in which the ­suffering (or joy) of another serves as a support or even a means to my enjoyment (or suffering). But if one understands the sense of this “negative pleasure,” which is situated on a relational plane that translates a moral perversion, then in what way can the “sublime,” on its aesthetic plane, refer to a “negative pleasure”?

14 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, Revised edition (Piscataway: Routledge, 2008), 14. 15 Ibid., 135–136.

100  Natalie Depraz 6 The beautiful, the sublime, and the terror of the beautiful: emotional ambivalence and surprise as outside-oneself [hors de soi] The separation of the beautiful and the sublime charts, for Kant, different aesthetic experiences that are well known among his repertoire of examples: the spectator who is warm and well sheltered at home and contemplates with delight a storm that rages outside but could endanger her friends who lingered on the lake shore will have a feeling of sublimity. By contrast, the spectator who contemplates the lake shore in the peace of twilight will experience its profound beauty: The mind feels itself moved in the representation of the sublime in nature, while in the aesthetic judgment on the beautiful in nature it is in calm contemplation. This movement [...] may be compared to a vibration, i.e., to a rapidly alternating repulsion from and attraction to one and the same object. What is excessive for the imagination (to which it is driven in the apprehension of the intuition) is as it were an abyss, in which it fears to lose itself [...]; hence it is precisely as attractive as it was repulsive for mere sensibility. [...] For just as imagination and understanding produce subjective purposiveness of the powers of the mind in the judging of the beautiful through their unison, so do imagination and reason produce subjective purposiveness through their conflict.16 One must conclude that if one begins with a separation of the objects of experience, the beautiful could never be terrifying. And if this were the case, it would not be the beautiful, but rather the sublime. Yet does the Kantian analysis really do justice to our experience of the beautiful? Does it not reduce it considerably? If one begins with the Kantian disjunctive analysis, the “terror of the beautiful” would in effect be a paradoxical, if not contradictory, experience. In what follows, I will show that an extreme experience of the beautiful, even if it can become terrifying, need not necessarily be identified with the sublime as a category impermeable with respect to the beautiful, but can rather witness to the gradual dynamism of beauty in a continuous intensification. Let us take up again some of the examples mentioned at the beginning of this contribution: I was in wonder at the rainbow in the evening sky, which I discovered on the train back to Paris from Rouen two weeks ago; a colleague relays what she felt while listening to Mozart’s The Magic Flute: “it was sublime!” she exclaims. What makes it so that in the first case I am in wonder while in the second my colleague finds Mozart’s opera sublime? Is this just a difference in language, a difference in expressing the experience of an extreme beauty, of the spectacle of the rainbow or of the quality of the music? In fact, in both examples, the extreme emotion is highly positive. The question is, at what experiential point does or can beauty, with its intensification, become negative, which is to say, terrifying? The “terror of the beautiful.” If one begins with a certain logic in mind, there would surely be a contradiction, just as there is an opposition between the positive and the negative, between good and evil. In the Phaedrus, Plato describes early on an experience of beauty that cannot be confused with a serene and placid pleasure such as the one experienced in the harmony of the lines in a landscape or a face. At the same time, it does justice to the experience of the one

16 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, §27, 141–142.

Surprise in art  101 who contemplates such a beauty. For Plato, this experience is first of all and eminently bodily, and it is felt by way of shivers and heat: A recent initiate, however, one who has seen much in heaven—when he sees a godlike face or bodily form that has captured Beauty well, first he shudders and a fear comes over him like those he felt at the earlier time; then he gazes at him with the reverence due a god, and if he weren’t afraid people would think him completely mad, he’d even sacrifice to his boy as if he were the image of a god. Once he has looked at him, his chill gives way to sweating and a high fever, because the stream of beauty that pours into him through his eyes warms him up and waters the growth of his wings. Meanwhile, the heat warms him and melts the places where the wings once grew, places that were long ago closed off with hard scabs to keep the sprouts from coming back [...] Now the whole soul seethes and throbs in this condition. Like a child whose teeth are just starting to grow in, and its gums are all aching and itching—that is exactly how the soul feels when it begins to grow wings. It swells up and aches and tingles as it grows them.17 This sensation, compared to the pain that the infant feels when it teethes or to a woman in labor, is the feeling of the soul that contemplates the beauty of a being that appears to it as the perfect image of the original divine beauty. Now, Plato calls this bodily and emotive feeling of beauty by a particular name. It is “desire,” which “palpitates like a wrist that beats furiously,” and which will later on be called “Eros”: “surge of desire,” “impulse of desire,” here is a dynamic description of the feeling of the beautiful that strongly contrasts the somewhat statuary Kantian aesthetic contemplation of nature or of art. And one understands why this is so once it is known that the referent of this sensation of beauty is, for Plato, a young boy, the reminiscence of divine beauty. This erotic experience, eminently relational and intersubjective, is in effect the paradigm of the experience of the beautiful for Plato: “But when it looks upon the beauty of the boy [...], when [the soul] is watered and warmed by this, then all its pain subsides and is replaced by joy.” And again, …the pain simply drives it wild—but then, when it remembers the boy in his beauty, it recovers its joy. From the outlandish mix of these two feelings—pain and joy— comes anguish and helpless raving: in its madness the lover’s soul cannot sleep at night or stay put by day; it rushes, yearning, wherever it expects to see the person who has that beauty.18 Shivers, pain, suffering, torment, explosion [déroute], all have a dynamic nature: they “transport.” Some would speak of “ecstasy” or “euphoria.” The feeling of the beautiful is therefore not astonishment, paralysis, but neither is it calm contemplation: it is the motor of the joy in which it immediately revels. This is what leads Plato to write about this feeling at play in the thrill of beauty, of a “mix…of feelings” in which the explosion of rage and the delight of pleasure coexist.

17 Plato, “Phaedrus,” in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997), 251a–251c. 18 Ibid., 251d.

102  Natalie Depraz We clearly have to do here with an antinomic emotion, one that is born of the tension of contraries that are shiver and heat, joy and pain, and which for Plato is the summation of the dynamic emotion that is desire. If it is really the vision of beauty that generates these contrary sensations and emotions, and which is crystalized in the antinomic temporality of desire, strictly speaking the “terror of the beautiful” nevertheless does not exist in Plato. There is, rather, a shiver, a joyous suffering. In the first Ennead, in the famous treatise VI “On Beauty,” §4 and 5, Plotinus takes up again Plato’s vocabulary: But such a sight must be reserved for those who see it with that in the soul by which it sees such things, and seeing it are delighted and shocked and overwhelmed much more than in the previous cases, inasmuch as we are now speaking of those who have already got hold of true beauties. For these are the states one should be in regarding something which is beautiful: astonishment, and sweet shock, and longing, and erotic thrill, and pleasurable excitement.19 But, from suffering and thrill, Plotinus moves more radically to “terror,” and this terrifying experience of beauty is in fact more elevated than that of sensible beauty: “We should next ask those who are indeed enamoured of the beauties not available to the senses, [...] ‘When you see your own “interior beauty,” what do you feel?’ And ‘Can you describe the frenzied and excited state you are in and your longing to be united with yourselves, when extricating yourselves from your bodies?’”20 But the terror that accompanies pleasure is no longer, then, a liberating feeling; it becomes a passion of the soul: Only a few remain whose memory is good enough; and they are startled when they see an image of what they saw up there. Then they are beside themselves, and their experience is beyond their comprehension because they cannot fully grasp what it is that they are seeing.21 The question posed by these Platonic and Plotinian analyses is that of the experience that responds to this antinomic emotion of terror-desire, so much so that Plotinus specifically calls it desire in Platonic terms and describes it as a suffering-joy. It is the experience I have of beauty, of a divine vision. We noted before, with Kant, that the contemplation of the beautiful can just as well generate emotions that are completely different from the Platonic ones: serenity, peace. These correspond more to a state than to a movement of the soul, and they have a positive and univalent valence. Jean-Louis Chrétien affirms, following Plato and against Kant, that the encounter with the beautiful is an experience that does not leave us unharmed. Terror is the first “gift” of beauty, and painful joy is the dimension forgotten by aesthetics, which, for its part,

19 Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Lloyd P. Gerson et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), §1.6.4, 13–18. 20 Ibid., 1.6.5, 1–8. 21 Plato, “Phaedrus,” 250a.

Surprise in art  103 relegates it within the confines of the sublime, forever distinct from the beautiful. One must, he says, overcome aesthetics to think beauty, if beauty is to be the face of Being itself: Humanity becomes for Kant or for Schiller the exclusive site of the openness to beauty. […] Plato thinks this connection. Beauty is not contained within the limits of the human, and the harmonious play of human faculties does not give us the measure of its being […] This Platonic meditation, ahead of its time regarding this terror, is found in the arduous and magnificent pages of the myth of the Phaedrus. In them, it is not first a matter of thinking beauty, but rather love (…).22 Later on, it is in Martin Heidegger’s work on Nietzsche, on the “luminous pages” from which Chrétien admittedly draws much, that one discovers an unprecedented and unique analysis of the terror brought about by the beauty of Eros. The beautiful is what advances most directly upon us and captivates us. While encountering us as a being, however, it at the same time liberates us to the view upon Being. The beautiful is an element which is disparate within itself; it grants entry into immediate sensuous appearances and yet at the same time soars toward Being; it is both captivating and liberating. Hence it is the beautiful that snatches us from oblivion of Being and grants the view upon Being.”23 The experience of beauty is here rapture and rift. It refers to an extreme emotional experience which makes the subject all at once absolutely passive and places her outside of herself while capturing her totally (to the highest point). These two characteristics of absolute subjective passivity are the conjugation, in the coincidence of emotion (the “outside oneself”) and attention (being captivated), of the fulgurating state of surprise in art. At this point, I would like to follow another line of thought, one that centers on the antinomic emotion “suffering-joy,” but without referring it immediately to the experience of the beautiful. Why do this? First of all, because the experience of beauty—we have seen this with Kant—can take paths other than that of rapture and rift, for instance that of serene contemplation. Rift is not therefore necessarily referential to, nor all the more is it exclusive for, igniting the experience of beauty. Consequently, with what experience is one concerned in the case of suffering-joy? Does this experience equally play a role in artistic experience? 7  Aesthetic experience of suffering-joy: surprise as interior opening In fact, Plato already presents to us a figure of suffering joy, one which is anchored in a desire that is tied to the contemplation of the beauty of a beloved, and which is formulated in terms of a transporting suffering. Yet one can easily find other situations, aesthetic or not, where I encounter this intense, dynamic emotion that allows joy and suffering to coexist. My dog did not return

22 Jean-Louis Chrétien, L’effroi du beau (Paris: Cerf, 1987), 33–34, my translation. 23 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art, Vol. 2: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperOne, 1991), 196.

104  Natalie Depraz home last night, and it has been two days that I’ve been looking for him: in seeing him return this evening, I overflow with surprise and my tears well up. I literally cry with joy. I was so afraid that I would lose him that the relief of finding him intensifies my joy by way of contrast, releases my tension, and brings about, one could say, an opening of the heart. It is a very common experience that each of us has surely had. But its extreme intensity stands out against the weakness of our everyday background. Another situation: I have not returned in a long time to the place where I spent all of my vacations as a child. Thinking about this is painful and makes me sad, despite the fact that the memory of that place is for me an intense source of joy: here, too, there is an interplay between suffering and joy, an extreme pain due to the absence and distance, and an intense joy at the memory of that place. It is a contradictory tension inherent in the emotion of nostalgia, which the Greek and German languages (νοσταλγία, Heimweh) have preserved: literally, “pain (άλγος) of returning (νόστος),” or, more commonly said, “homesickness” or “pain (Weh) of home (Heim).”24 In a similar vein, Husserl describes, in the same Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins cited above, a new extreme emotional situation which is, this time, strongly antinomic: The difficulty consists in tracking correctly the layers in which the differences a “quietly blessed,” a “turbulent,” a passionate joy, an overwhelming and surprising joy—the heart is still and a great surge of bliss invades the wide-open heart, then tumultuous and painful joy, heart almost bursts with joy— the even-tempered, ordinary love without passion, etc.25 In this passage where Husserl distinguished different types of joy, positive with uniform tranquility or negative with overwhelming passion, he identifies, tertium datur, a “painful joy, [where] the heart almost bursts with joy.” Put briefly, he gives here a concise description of what he himself calls Freudenschmerz, which corresponds to an extreme degree to joy as surprise (Freudenüberraschung). Unlike the previous modalities of joy, this “painful joy” provokes an “explosion” where the heart threatens to implode, a characteristic which illustrates the antinomy of the heart and of its center, and which defines the aesthetic surprise of suffering-joy as an explosion internal to the subject. In their own way, this is what the Neptic Fathers, the Hesychasts, those who practice the prayer of the heart from the first centuries of our age describe.26 At the apex of the interior journey of the one who prays comes the rare experience of the “gift of tears” in which the heart is opened and dispossession is achieved. At this stage, suffering and joy are one. Symeon the New Theologian, one of the hesychast fathers, describes such a

24 In reference to this, see Barbara Cassin, La nostalgie: quand donc est-on chez soi? Ulysse, Énée, Arendt (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2013), and also Vladimir Jankélévitch, L’Irréversible et la Nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1983). 25 “Die Schwierigkeit ist es, der Schicht gerecht zu werden, in der die Unterschiede der ‘still beseligten,’ der ‘stürmischen,’ leidenschaftlichen Freude, der Freudenüberwältigung und―überraschung―das Herz steht still und eine große Woge der Seligkeit strömt in das weitgeöffnete Herz hinein, dann Aufregung oder Freudenschmerz, Herz droht zu zerspringen vor Freude― der ausgeglichenen sonstigen Liebe ohne Leidenschaft usw. . Husserl, Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins, II, 176, my translation. 26 Nikodemus the Hagiorite & Macarius of Corinth, The Philokalia: The Complete Text, 4 vols., trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber & Faber, 1979, 1981, 1984, 1995).

Surprise in art  105 catharsis. This catharsis is expressed in poetic images that invoke light and, in particular, a painful dazzlement: “a translucent veil dims the blinding brightness of divine light: the stream of tears that at once veils the sight and illuminates the inner gaze by purifying it.”27 In these different experiences of suffering-joy, the object is not so much divine beauty itself, as with the terror of the beautiful in Plato and Plotinus, but rather the emotive experience of an interior opening of the heart that engenders an attitude of receptivity and absolute abandonment. With this, one finds oneself within the experiential boundary where erotic aesthetics and spiritual catharsis are one and the same. 8 The surprise of sober drunkenness: the oxymoronic shock of opposites in language

A third figure of antinomic emotion, “sober drunkenness” (νηφάλια μέθη), dear to the theologian Gregory of Nyssa, will allow me to invoke another aspect of extreme antinomic emotional surprise, one situated on the boundary between aesthetics and spirituality. This thinker and mystic of fifth-century Christianity presents the milestones of spiritual life, from initiation to mystical life, in his treatise on the perfection of virtue entitled The Life of Moses. His central idea is that perfection is not a goal, a result, but advancement itself. Gregory of Nyssa proves to be fond of images showing what belongs to the realm of the unsayable, images which would be univocal if formulated directly by means of a concept. This is the sense of mystical or apophatic theology, which follows positive and symbolic theology, other milestones of the spiritual life that still operate through reasoning and concepts. For Gregory, the images proliferate: alongside the “sober drunkenness” that he particularly loves, one finds also “vigilant sleep” (which will find a tacit echo in the philosopher Levinas and his experience of insomnia, especially in his book of essays entitled Existence and Existents28), or the image of “luminous darkness,” which will emerge as central in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who was, as is well known, deeply influenced by Gregory.29 All these images are characterized by the same structure of internal opposition that is commonly called oxymoron. This term indicates, in its etymology, the concrete experience of what is simultaneously sharp and blunt or, according to another possible meaning, the “sharp madness” of the spirit, otherwise known as “mad wisdom.” Whatever it may be, these images, in their linguistic form, attempt to account for a movement of spirit and body, a “motion” determined by its internal tension without mediation, in the same way that the form of the image does not contain any articulation, but rather allows them to coexist without opposing them to one another. The first mention of this “sober drunkenness” is found in the Greek philosopher Philo, who describes a movement of the spirit wherein coexist restraint and explosion, calmness and exaltation, or, as one also says, “enstasy” and ecstasy, nepsis (νηπσις), the first

27 See Myrrha Lot-Borodine, “Le don des larmes,” in La douloureuse joie. Aperçus sur la prière personnelle de l’Orient chrétien (Abbaye de Bellefontaine: Éditions de Bellefontaine, 1993), 159. 28 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988). 29 Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. C. Luibheid and P. Rorem (London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1987).

106  Natalie Depraz characteristic of attention, and Dionysian drunkenness (μέθη), according to the same dynamic of interiority and transcendence, or entry and exit. It seems that Gregory, in a sort of revolution, describes with such a powerfully antinomic expression the double movement of which Plato and Plotinus, on the one hand, and the Neptic Fathers, on the other, each capture a phase: the phase of ecstasy in the terror that the Platonic soul encounters at the sight of beauty, the perfect imitation of the divine essence of the beautiful, an extreme departure from oneself; the phase of “enstasy” in the painful joy associated with the descent of the spirit that the Neptic Fathers explore repeatedly in the prayers of the Philokalia, in order to allow an interior openness of heart to emerge. Gregory experiences the terror of the beautiful and painful joy himself as a “wound of love” that culminates in “epektasis,” a central concept in his treatise Life of Moses and quintessence of antinomic emotion. To conclude, I cite a passage that requires no commentary: O Moses, because you tend with a great desire toward what is in front of you (ἐπεκτεινόμενος τοῑς ἔμπροσθεν) and because your journey knows no weariness, know that near me there is a space so large that in moving through it, you will never find the end of your pilgrimage. But this journey is, from another point of view, a stability. In fact, I will establish you on the rock. It is the most paradoxical of all things, that stability and movement be the same thing. Ordinarily, the one who moves is not still and the one who is still does not move. But in this case, he moves in the very fact that he is still.30 9  Conclusion: the antinomic emotional figures of the art of release How shall we understand the internal tension at play in these three antinomic emotions? One could say that it is a productive tension that belies in itself an opening onto something not given ahead of time, and, despite this, already present. Such a dynamic responds, it would seem, exactly to the dynamic of surprise, which consists of a process in which attention, on the one hand, and emotion, on the other, are the modal mirroring and complementary structures.31 Taking up once again Gregory’s formula: I move in the very fact that I am still; I am attentive, I am touched because of my surprise, just as I am surprised against the background of my attention and emotion. Starting from this surprise, a relation is opened that is internal to this attention and this emotion, in a way that here is characterized by an experience that was discovered in an eminent sense by the psychiatrist and philosopher Henry Maldiney in terms of “fulguration of the instant”32 and already by Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human.33 In this model of surprise, examined as instance, attention is imminence, emotion is fulguration, and surprise is release.

30 Gregory of Nyssa: The Life of Moses (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), 305. I also refer in this context to a magnificent work by Jean Daniélou, Platonisme et théologie mystique. Doctrine spirituelle de Grégoire de Nysse (Paris: Aubier, 1944), especially 259–309. 31 Cf. Depraz, “Le sujet de la surprise. Un sujet cardial.” 32 Henri Maldiney, Penser l’homme et la folie (Grenoble: Jérôme Millon, 1991), 81. “Being pre-sent (Lat. prae-sens) is to be before oneself. Imminent to oneself, presence is to precede oneself.” 33 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Gary Handwerk (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

Surprise in art  107 In summary, the figures of aesthetic-spiritual release that we have examined in the course of this chapter—the outside-oneself of surprise-terror, the interior explosion of surprise as suffering-joy, and the opening of the heart proper to surprise as sober drunkenness—comprise the variations on this distinctive instance, one where imminence and fulguration almost come to coincide. Attention and emotion are here crystallized in the intense vertigo of an instant outside of time which presents a surprise without reserve. Translated by Bruno Cassara and revised by Crina Gschwandtner

7 Atmospheres of boredom in Martin Heidegger and David Foster Wallace Elisa Magrì

Abstract  In contemporary philosophy of emotions, it is often argued that moods facilitate certain ranges of object-directed emotions, but they form a class apart in that, unlike emotions, they never target specific objects. From a phenomenological and existential angle, however, moods bring to light a specific element, namely the quality of one’s sense of reality. This chapter aims to further develop the analysis of moods by investigating whether they manifest attunement and sensitivity to intersubjective experience. Through a comparison of Martin Heidegger’s and David Foster Wallace’s respective approaches to boredom, this chapter explores how boredom is influenced by receptivity to other people’s states, an aspect that is crucially missing in H ­ eidegger’s account of boredom. Keywords  Moods; Attunement; Boredom; Atmospheres; Martin Heidegger; David Foster Wallace When we speak of writing something in the book of oblivion, we are indeed suggesting that it is forgotten and yet at the same time is preserved. S. Kierkegaard, Either-Or

1 Introduction In contemporary philosophy of emotions, it is often argued that moods facilitate certain ranges of object-directed emotions, but they form a class apart in that, unlike emotions, they never target specific objects.1 Typically, one is in a grumpy or in a joyful mood, but never about one person or an object in particular. Nonetheless, moods exhibit a specific form of affective intentionality, including a feeling component and an evaluative

1 See Tim Crane, “Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental,” in ed. O’Hear, Current Issues in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 136–157; Julien A. Deonna and Fabrice Teroni, The Emotions. A Philosophical Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2012).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-8

Atmospheres of boredom  109 component, which indicates the appraisal of the situation.2 The characteristic intentionality of moods is oriented towards the surrounding world, which is perceived as affecting the self in varying degrees of depth and intensity. Such a view can be traced back to at least Kant3 and Nietzsche,4 and it is epitomized by Husserl’s concept of Stimmung5 and Heidegger’s notion of Befindlichkeit. On this view, moods disclose the affective and prereflective ties that connect the subject to their situation or environment. More precisely, in phenomenology and existential phenomenology, moods capture the quality of what Matthew Ratcliffe has called “the sense of reality” of subjective experience, namely the horizon of inter-sensory and practical possibilities that can be taken up by the self, and that constitute the fabric of everyday life.6 The sense of reality underpins the experience of coping with a world that is usually taken for granted. As such, the sense of reality accompanies and permeates our everyday actions, thoughts, and feelings. On Ratcliffe’s account, alterations and changes to the sense of reality are constitutive of it. Indeed, an altered sense of reality is not to be equated with an impaired epistemic access to some external reality. Since the sense of reality unfolds and changes over time, any ruptures or fragmentation of the flow of experience reflects a variation in kind of the patterns of salience and expectation that characterize the subjective quality of experience. Far from producing a split or detached orientation from reality, any diminishment of the sense of reality highlights its fundamental fragility and vulnerability. From this point of view, being in a mood coincides with a form of emotional situatedness, which is embedded with an evaluative component towards events and situation. Moods can be compared to emotional spaces that are permeated by one’s memories and expectations, revealing the values and expectations to which the subject is sensitive. In this sense, moods represent enduring and relatively objective states that influence our perception of the world. However, it is not always clear to what extent moods manifest receptivity to the sense of reality experienced by others. Given their affective and

2 Regarding the concept of affective intentionality, see Jan Slaby, “Affective Intentionality and the Feeling Body,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 7 (2008): 429–444. Concerning the intentionality of moods, see Lauren Freeman, “Towards a Phenomenology of Moods,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 52/4 (2014): 445–476; Matthew Ratcliffe, “The Phenomenology of Mood and the Meaning of Life,” in ed. P. Goldie, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 349–372; Andreas Elpidorou, “Moods and Appraisals: How the Phenomenology and Science of Emotions Can Come Together,” Human Studies 36/4 (2013): 565–591; and Jonathan Mitchell, “The Intentionality and Intelligibility of Moods,” European Journal of Philosophy 27 (2019): 118–135. 3 In his Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant refers to the relation of cognitive powers that takes place in the experience of beauty as a mood (Stimmung) or disposition, which is expressed through feeling. The harmony (Übereinstimmung) of cognitive powers provides the basis for the aesthetic judgment. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Akademie-Ausgabe Bd. 5 (vol. 5), in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1908–1913), § 21; English translation: Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a discussion of Kant’s notion of Stimmung, see Michel Chaouli, Thinking with Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 63ff. 4 See Stanley Corngold, “Nietzsche’s Moods,” Studies in Romanticism 29/1 (1990): 67–90. 5 I have explored Husserl’s account of Stimmung in Elisa Magrì, “Emotion, Motivation, and Character: A Phenomenological Perspective,” Husserl Studies 34 (2018): 229–245. 6 Matthew Ratcliffe, Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

110  Elisa Magrì changeable nature, moods can generate both detachment from the world as well as a prereflective and shared sense of attunement to the world experienced by others. To further examine this aspect, I will focus on Heidegger’s account of attunement (Befindlichkeit) as a way of finding oneself in the world, taking into account the case of boredom. Unlike anxiety, which abruptly severs our boundaries with the world as we know it, boredom holds us fast to reality in a way that is both enticing and alienating. According to Heidegger, boredom leads to a state of suspension even when one is immersed in the events of everyday life. As a mood, boredom is a factual (or ontic) manifestation of attunement,7 which is the disposition underlying the fundamental structures of human existence. Most notably, the analysis of boredom has important implications for the investigation of moods, particularly with regard to the relation between moods and sensitivity to others’ affective states. As Heidegger suggests, moods do not isolate us from the world but rather expose us to it. This means that moods, in principle, are not indifferent to the states of other individuals who share our environing world. Yet Heidegger’s account ultimately points to a sense of boredom that appears impervious to intersubjective experience. This is not to say that Heidegger’s account of attunement is solipsistic but that permeability and receptivity to others’ experiences are not constitutive of it. In order to illustrate an alternative and more promising account of moods, I will refer to David Foster Wallace’s fiction, particularly his short story The Soul Is Not a Smithy, published in the collection Oblivion: Stories in 2004. Wallace’s fiction provides a narrative exploration of boredom that sheds light on the intersubjective character of moods in a way that differs significantly from Heidegger’s existential and ontological framework. Before tackling Heidegger’s and Wallace’s respective accounts, however, it is important to clarify the characteristic intentionality of moods, focusing in particular on the affinity between mood and atmosphere. This will help illustrate a key aspect of boredom that appears in both Heidegger’s and Wallace’s works, namely the close relationship between boredom and lived space. 2  On moods and atmospheres The most important quality of moods is the experience of “sinking in,” as happens in contemplating a work of art, whose affective tonality reverberates on the spectator. Moritz Geiger, former disciple of Husserl and member of the Munich circle, paid particular attention to the aesthetics of moods or atmospheres (Stimmungen) and the influence of landscapes and paintings on affective states. Drawing on a survey whose outputs were discussed and published in 1911,8 Geiger examined the moods evoked by colours, paintings, and landscapes, which he called “mood empathy” (Stimmungseinfühlungen) to distinguish it from the affective resonance produced by music, lines, or architecture, involving some activity or stirring of the self (Tätigkeitseinfühlung). Geiger argued that

7 See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, GA 2, § 29; English Translation: Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1962), 172ff. Henceforth, Being and Time will be abbreviated BT. For clarity, I refer to “attunement” to translate Befindlichkeit in Heidegger, without following Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation of Befindlichkeit as “state of mind,” which can be misleading. For a discussion, see Matthew Ratcliffe, “Why Mood Matters,” in ed. Mark A. Wrathall, The Cambridge Companion to “Being and Time” (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 157–176. 8 Moritz Geiger, “Zum Problem der Stimmungseinfühlung,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 6 (1911): 1–42.

Atmospheres of boredom  111 the experience of empathizing with the mood of a work of art cannot be explained simply in terms of the effect of the work of art on the subject or by invoking the animating power of cognitive faculties. Rather, empathy of moods involves the reciprocal relation between the subjective and the objective quality of affective experience. On Geiger’s view, feelings have both an objective and a subjective character. The subjective side concerns the positionality of the self, namely the fact that emotions like joy or sadness are my joy and sadness. The objective character refers to the fact that feelings can color objects and situations, infusing an affective hue (Gefühlston) that attaches to the external object or event. Geiger’s argument is that mood empathy is based on a fundamental affinity between subjective states and their objective counterparts to the point that it is often difficult to neatly distinguish between the two of them.9 For example, the city that I visit for the first time, just like the room where I give my talk, has an objective sentimental character that evolves and changes over time the more familiar the room and the city become to me. Regardless of how familiar each space is to me, both the city and the room have an individual affective quality that colours them like an aura. From this point of view, the sentimental character of the object and my own lived experience continuously flow into each other. It follows that there is no absolute separation between the atmosphere produced by the object and my affective response, for a unique co-lived experience takes place through their interaction. This represents what Geiger calls the highest point of empathy, namely the coincidence between the subjective and the objective character of affective experience. Unfortunately, Geiger does not expand much on this type of empathy. While he maintains that different attitudes underlie empathy with works of art, he argues that the climax of mood empathy is not simply an emotional state that stands opposite an external object.10 Contemporary aesthetics and particularly the New Phenomenology movement have paid particular attention to the objective quality of moods. One of the key concepts of the New Phenomenology is that of “atmosphere,” which identifies those room-filling phenomena whose locus is the inseparable unity of felt body and space.11 An atmosphere fills the space by pouring out in the outer world the affects experienced by the body. On this basis, different forms of affect can be distinguished in terms of their capacity to fill the space and stir the body. According to Schmitz, the use of the concept of atmosphere is primarily meant to overcome any form of dualism between soul and world. In so doing, the notion of atmosphere echoes Benjamin’s notion of aura as a strange web of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour becomes part of their appearance, this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch.12

9 Ibid., 21. 10 Ibid., 42. 11 See Hermann Schmitz, Atmosphären (Freiburg/Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2014); Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013); Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres. Aesthetics of Emotional Spheres (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 12 Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography,” in ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others, The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (Cambridge MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2008), 285.

112  Elisa Magrì According to Benjamin’s description, an atmosphere reflects the unity between the objective quality of the landscape and its resonance on subjective experience. From this point of view, moods highlight the inseparability between the feeling body and the surrounding world, shaping and altering how we perceive and evaluate the environment, including our involvement in it. When we are in a mood, even the most familiar things manifest themselves to us with a different aura, as it were. In these cases, we are more inclined to pay attention to certain evaluative properties of the object that match our mood. For example, when I am in a good mood, the sound of my colleague typing on the keyboard does not affect me in the slightest, but reminds me joyfully of the time passing and bringing me closer to meeting the person I love, to the class I am excited to teach, or to the phone call I have been waiting for. But, when we are in a gloomy mood, the same noise affects us otherwise, reminding us of the monotony of everyday life, of the lack of enticement of the future, of the intrinsic solitude of individual labour. In this respect, it is important to stress that, while moods influence our relation to the world, they do not coincide with a perceptual state.13 The experience of sinking in a mood is quite different from a perceptual state in that moods, like emotions and feelings, are rooted in self-affection, namely “they induce qualitative states in the experiencing subject rather than revealing qualities of their object.”14 To put it differently, moods signal modifications of the overall disposition of the self. What changes from one mood to another is not the content of the experience, but its practical significance, namely what matters to me in the given situation, which in turn affects my overall disposition to reality. Such a modification of the subjective sphere of concern attaches itself to the whole space inhabited by the self, posing significant difficulties to the identification of the motives underlying a particular mood. This difficulty is twofold. On the one hand, moods permeate the whole space inhabited by the self, thereby preventing opportunities for self-distancing and for neutral selfobservation. On the other hand, the intentionality of moods is based on a fundamental world-directedness that has no explicit value orientation. Even though moods impinge on our evaluative stance, they do not manifest a correlation with the sphere of values, as their significance is more diffuse and shifting than that of emotions. For example, being joyful about the meeting with a loved one reflects esteem and affection for the loved person, whereas euphoria as a mood is typically associated with a diffuse sense of elatedness that is not directly correlated with the assessment of the situation. Hence, the underlying motives of moods are often opaque. Despite this, the specific receptivity of moods to the environing world is worthy of attention, particularly when it comes to intersubjective experience. If moods are not perceptual states but forms of self-affection that reflect our sensitivity to the surrounding world, being with others represents a salient aspect of the phenomenology of moods. Are others simply perceived through the lenses of a given mood or atmosphere, or do other selves have an impact on the constitution and development of one’s mood? In the following, I aim to explore this issue by considering the case of boredom, one of the fundamental moods according to Heidegger’s existential approach, which is also paradigmatic of David Foster Wallace’s fiction.

13 See also Francisco Gallegos, “Moods Are Not Colored Lenses: Perceptualism and the Phenomenology of Moods,” Philosophia 45 (2017): 1497–1513. 14 Roberta De Monticelli, “Is the Perceptual Model of Emotions Still a Good Competitor? A Small Phenomenology of Feeling,” Phenomenology and Mind 11 (2016): 32–47, here 36.

Atmospheres of boredom  113 3  Attunement and boredom in Heidegger In Heidegger, mood translates both disposition or attunement (Befindlichkeit) and atmosphere (Stimmung). Befindlichkeit and Stimmung refer to the way in which human existence (Dasein) is thrown in the world and disposed towards it, although the former corresponds to a fundamental ontological structure of existence, of which the latter is a factual articulation. In Being and Time, Heidegger is very clear that moods are not psychic states, as they inform our disposition to the world at large and provide the basis for our attitudes, including the theoretical or philosophical attitude.15 In a way, as we will see, the analysis of boredom discloses, for Heidegger, the very disposition to philosophy. To begin with, Heidegger maintains that boredom is meaningful and relevant for human existence. As a mood, boredom discloses our fundamental attunement to reality. Yet the recognition of such disclosure is based neither on an intellectual act of evaluation nor on a perceptual state. Instead, perception and understanding are embedded with the affective tonality emanated by the mood in which we happen to be. Indeed, affectivity is, for Heidegger, a dispositional orientation to reality that is ontologically prior to thinking and speaking without being opposed to or independent from them. While Dasein is not in control of the affective tonality in which it is thrown, it can nonetheless understand it. It follows that, for Heidegger, we are “never free of moods.”16 For this reason, labelling moods in terms of “affects” or “feelings” is, for Heidegger, misleading since those concepts do not capture the ontological pervasiveness of moods. The difficulty of Heidegger’s account of moods lies precisely in this ambivalence of affectivity, which is both an intrinsic feature of understanding and an ontological determination.17 At the same time, the intersubjective character of moods is ambiguously determined. While Heidegger sometimes speaks of Mitbefindlichkeit, he purportedly refers to forms of affective sharing, which understanding and talking will eventually unearth.18 For Heidegger, moods reflect our involvement in the world, which certainly includes other subjects, but receptivity to the existential quality of others’ experiences is not constitutive of moods. To put it with Bollnow’s words, one could argue that, for Heidegger, Stimmung does not belong to an isolated inner life of human beings; instead, human beings are incorporated into the landscape as a whole, which in turn does not exist separately, but rather relates back to human beings in its own way.19

15 GA 2, § 29/BT, 138. 16 GA 2, § 29/BT, 136. 17 On the one hand, it is debatable whether Heidegger’s account of moods satisfactorily accounts for the relation between moods and emotions and for the bodily nature of moods. See, for instance, Ratcliffe’s critique, in “Why Mood Matters.” On the other hand, Heidegger’s view of attunement can be fruitfully read in light of Aristotle’s notion of pathos, as Heidegger himself recommends in Being and Time, § 29 and accomplishes in his 1924 lectures on Aristotle (GA 18). Drawing on such lectures, Niall Keane has shown that Heidegger’s view of attunement challenges metaphysical conceptions of modality, pointing to a deeper form of receptivity, which is both embodied and intersubjective. See Niall Keane, “The Affects of Rhetoric and Reconceiving the Nature of Possibility,” in ed. Christos Hadjioannou, Heidegger on Affect (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 47–67). See also Josh Michael Hayes, “Being-Affected: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Pathology of Truth,” in, ed. D. Dahlstrom, Interpreting Heidegger. Critical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 156–173; and Elisa Zocchi, “Stimmung and Trascendenza. Il ruolo del pathos in Martin Heidegger,” Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia e Psicologia 8/1 (2017): 47–60. 18 See GA 2, § 34/BT, 205. 19 Otto Friedrich Bollnow, “The Nature of Stimmungen,” trans. Angelika Krebs and others, Philosophia 45 (2017): 1399–1418, here 1404.

114  Elisa Magrì Yet, if being with others is a fundamental dimension of existential situatedness, the role of intersubjectivity appears vaguely sketched and almost of no relevance for the constitution of moods. This contrasts with the intuition that other selves can not only co-institute and co-create shared atmospheres, but also penetrate and shift the mood in which we happen to find ourselves. In order to elucidate this issue, I will consider more closely Heidegger’s account of moods. As is well known, in Being and Time, anxiety features as the most fundamental mood that brings Dasein back to itself. For the purpose of this chapter, however, I would like to focus on Heidegger’s analysis of boredom in his 1929–1930 lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.20 This discussion is noteworthy for two main reasons: first of all, it suggests that anxiety is not the exclusive mood of human existence, and that different types of Stimmungen define our being in the world. Secondarily, the 1920-1930 lectures provide clear insights into the relation between attunement and affective responsiveness to others. Here, Heidegger distinguishes three basic forms of boredom: being bored by, being bored with, and profound boredom. The first form of boredom is the most familiar: it is the experience of being bored by something that is not engrossing. The typical example is a boring movie, which frustrates us because of its sloppy plot, or because of its superficial directing and acting. On Heidegger’s account, we cannot explain boredom either in terms of cause-effect or as a psychological state. The cause-effect relation is insufficient because boredom is a way of being disposed towards reality at large, and not a feeling induced by an external cause. Surely, the movie has an impact on me, and yet it does not produce a clearly identifiable state, like the pain caused by the high volume of the TV set, which hurts my ears. For Heidegger, as long as we are not “provoked” at all by the movie, we are drawn to an empty disposition, to a limbo. The movie is not really an inducing cause, but an element of the spatiotemporal situation whose relation to us has been altered. By the same token, Heidegger rules out any psychological explanation, for the experience of being drawn to a limbo does not rest on psychological association but on a different sense of time. To illustrate this, Heidegger refers to the experience of killing time in a railway station. We constantly look at the watch because we are waiting for the train to arrive; we want to shake off boredom. Common to both the movie and the waiting in the railway station is a sense of time as duration, namely as a sequence of now-moments that drag us on. We want time to pass; hence, we fight against its slowness. However, the dragging of time contains something paralyzing: “Becoming bored is a peculiar being affected in a paralysing way by time as it drags and by time in general, a being affected which oppresses us in its own way.”21 Time as duration is paralyzing because––like a Hegelian “bad infinite”––is devoid of teleological orientation. Not knowing what the purpose of the passing of time is, we slip from the experience of a factual event (e.g., the waiting of the train) to the annihilating experience of not knowing what the ultimate purpose of time is. In this respect, boredom is a dimension that is within us and that “everyone finds within them,”22 allowing a further distinction, namely the transition from “being bored by” to “being bored with.” 20 Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt, Endlichkeit, Einsamkeit (GA 29/30); English translation: The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995). Henceforth abbreviated FCM. 21 FCM, 98. 22 Ibid., 92.

Atmospheres of boredom  115 While being bored by something is governed by the oppressive duration of time, a certain detachment from the object can also occur, and this is what Heidegger calls “being bored with.” This second form of boredom is slightly less familiar, but it turns out to be very common upon closer inspection. In this case, there is no distinct object that awakens boredom, for “boredom radiates out over other things.”23 Boredom “now gives our Dasein a strange horizon over and beyond the particular boring thing. It does not merely relate to the particular thing that is boring us, but settles over several things, over other things: everything becomes boring.”24 Heidegger’s famous example is the party that we enjoy only to find ourselves strangely empty and dissatisfied at the end of it. This is the first explicit reference made by Heidegger to the intersubjective character of moods. Indeed, in this modality of boredom, it becomes apparent that other people have an impact on our sense of reality. However, the focus of Heidegger’s analysis is not the impact of others on one’s mood, but rather the extent to which one surrenders to inauthentic ways of being. In this case, time does not drag on, but it is actually repressed: we are not occupied in a genuine way, as we are simply complying with the social expectations of the situation, passively conforming our attitude to what is expected of us. As Heidegger puts it: “We went along just to spend the evening. […] In this seeking nothing further here, which is self-evident for us, we slip away from ourselves in a certain manner.”25 Being left empty in this second sense is a form of existential emptiness, adumbrating guilt and responsibility because of the possibilities we have not pursued out of pure conformity to social standards. Profound boredom is the last and deepest form of boredom, wherein discrete duration is no longer apparent. The third modality of boredom is not about emptiness of goals or standards. In this deepest form, we are no longer speaking of ourselves being bored with…, but are saying: It is boring for one. It—for one—not for me as me, not for you as you, not for us as us, but for one. […] This boredom, does not comprise some abstraction or generalization in which a universal concept ‘I in general’ would be thought. Rather it is boring [es langweilt]. This is what is decisive: that here we become an undifferentiated no one.26 It would be tempting to understand profound boredom as an abstract, theoretical achievement, but in fact this is not the case, for Heidegger’s example is the following: “It is boring for one to walk through the streets of a large city on a Sunday afternoon.”27 Profound boredom cannot be compared to a psychological state, nor to a relationship between events and subjects, because it involves a fundamental form of self-displacement and dispossession. Unlike the first two modalities of boredom, which maintain the reference to an environing world that is still—in principle—capable of soliciting us, profound boredom refers to the experience of being in a world that fails to motivate us despite its familiarity.

23 Ibid., 92. 24 Ibid., 92. 25 Ibid., 119. 26 Ibid., 134–135. 27 Ibid., 135.

116  Elisa Magrì Unlike the first two modalities of boredom, profound boredom is not triggered by any given object or event, because it manifests itself when the ties to reality are suspended. Following Heidegger, we can succeed in understanding this form of boredom only if we consider how the structural moments of being left empty and being held in a limbo become conspicuous when we are not engaged in the world in any relevant way. In this case, boredom reflects our exposure to the profound indifference and withdrawal of beings. Whether this realization occurs on a Sunday walk or in being otherwise disengaged from the world (for example, when browsing TV channels), the crucial element is not just the lack of involvement and goals that characterize those situations but the detachment through which that very lack of involvement becomes conspicuous. According to Heidegger, when the world withdraws from us, ceasing to solicit us, it suddenly manifests itself as an empty space of possibility. This is why, in profound boredom, one is compelled to attend to the very possibility of being, namely to the “it is boring.” Unlike being bored by or being bored with, in which one feels dragged by time but still preserves the sense of one’s past and future orientation, profound boredom does not point to anything beyond (or behind) it. Yet profound boredom is not entirely passive either. Even if Heidegger describes it as a form of entrancement, he also argues that profound boredom calls for a disposition to the “unexploited possibilities as possibilities of Dasein.”28 These possibilities are not appraised in an evaluative and reflective manner because they are not “arbitrary possibilities of myself, they do not report on them, rather this telling announcement in such telling refusal is a calling.”29 The calling indicates a shift from temporal duration to temporal intensity in the form of entrancement, namely as the widening and merging of the temporal dimensions.30 Boredom is close to wonder in that Dasein is confronted with the whole expansion of the temporal horizon, which solicits us without prompting to any specific action. This is the reason why boredom brings no liberation but reveals the very foundation of being of Dasein, namely temporality as the ontological structure of reality. For Heidegger, an exceptional awakening can take place in profound boredom, although he does not specify what it consists of. Is the awakening brought about by boredom a resolve to take responsibility for one’s actions?31 Or is boredom an unexplored space of possibility that becomes available once “we let go of the fixation upon ‘meaning of life?’”32 It appears that Heidegger is not interested in indicating any specific outcome of boredom, but rather leaves open the range of possibilities disclosed by the experience of profound boredom. Interestingly, however, the attunement engendered by boredom brings to light not only the dimension of temporality as the ontological ground of Dasein but also individuation, for Dasein finds itself placed “among beings in the world.”33

28 FCT, 142. 29 Ibid., 143. 30 See Jan Slaby, “The Other Side of Existence. Heidegger on Boredom,” in ed. S. Flach and J. Söffner, Habitus in Habitat II. Other Sides of Cognition (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 101–120. 31 This is, for instance, the view defended by Felix Ó Murchadha, The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 226 ff., as well as by Lauren Freeman and Andreas Elpidorou, “Affectivity in Heidegger II: Temporality, Boredom, and Beyond,” Philosophy Compass 10/10 (2015): 672–684. 32 Jan Slaby, “The Other Side of Existence,” 119. 33 FCM, 169.

Atmospheres of boredom  117 Yet, despite being “among other beings” and disposed to the most fundamental structure of subjective existence, the experience of Dasein revolves around the motifs of emptiness and being left in limbo, two dimensions that are linked to disconnection and profound isolation from others. In this sense, a neglected aspect of Heidegger’s account of boredom is whether and how it includes an intersubjective dimension.34 An answer to this could be that boredom resonates with the finitude of Dasein; therefore, a strong emphasis must be placed on singularity and uniqueness. Accordingly, boredom makes one attuned to a shared world that is primarily encountered in absorbed contemplation. In this way, Heidegger’s analysis sheds light on the emotional disconnection that is characteristic of moods, for it is in the holes of the fabric of everydayness that Dasein comes to a realization of the sources of the possibility of meaning. Nonetheless, Heidegger’s argument leaves little room for understanding the affective receptivity of Dasein to others’ experiences. The affective disclosure provided by boredom is grasped in solitude, and it does not translate into a form of openness and permeability to others’ emotional atmospheres, let alone their experiences of affective fragmentations. It is precisely in relation to this aspect, namely to the relevance of attunement to others’ emotional atmospheres, that I wish now to turn to David Foster Wallace in order to better understand in what sense moods like boredom can have a deeper and richer intersubjective quality. 4 Boredom and peripheral awareness in Wallace David Foster Wallace certainly represents one of the most prominent voices in contemporary American literature. Rightly described by Kelly as a “novelist of ideas”35 for his talent at creating characters and events that embody profound concepts, Wallace had the courage to explore states and moods like depression, dullness, and the soul-crashing boredom that engulfs subjects in everyday contexts and work environments shaped by consumerism and entertainment. While Wallace is mostly known for his monumental novel Infinite Jest, his short stories certainly deserve just as much attention for the complex, non-linear pace of the narration as well as the intensity of the characters’ experiences. The story I will be referring to is The Soul Is Not a Smithy, taken from the 2004 collection entitled Oblivion.36 The Soul Is Not a Smithy is in itself a great example of Wallace’s literary style, combining the technique of the stream of consciousness with intense and introspective reflections. As Wallace himself commented during an interview, the story exhibits an anti-Kafkan climax in that it starts with surreal elements until it reaches a more human and realistic pace.37 The Soul Is Not a Smithy weaves together the memories of the narrator as a 10-year-old child in 1960 with the reflections of the narrator as an adult. The core element of the narration consists of short vivid sequences or tableaux that describe the narrator’s daydreaming when he was a child sitting in a boring civic class on the day of a traumatic event, of which the narrator himself seems to have little memory.

34 See also, for a related criticism of Heidegger’s account, Tanja Staehler, “How Is a Phenomenology of Moods Possible?” International Journal for Philosophical Studies 15/3 (2007): 415–433. 35 Adam Kelly, “Development through Dialogue: David Foster Wallace and the Novel of Ideas,” Studies in the Novel 44/3 (2012): 267–283. 36 David Foster Wallace, The Soul Is not a Smithy in David Foster Wallace, Oblivion: Stories (London: Abacus, 2004). 37 Steve Paulson, “To the Best of Our Knowledge. Interview with David Foster Wallace,” in ed. Stephen J. Burn, Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012).

118  Elisa Magrì The event in question regards the sudden breakdown of the substitute teacher, who starts writing on the chalkboard the words “KILL THEM ALL” instead of the XIII Amendment, repeating those words in a mad sequence of imperatives. Overcoming his initial puzzlement, the teacher keeps writing the imperative in a sort of frantic convulsion, until the children are so frightened that they leave the classroom in mass, hurting each other while reaching to the door. The narrator and three other children remain in the classroom, arguably witnessing the killing of the teacher by the police, although the story does not go into detail about this tragic ending. The narrator’s focal point is the boredom that he experienced as a child, therefore the narrative centers on the stories that the narrator used to tell himself to distract himself from the tedious class. In the course of the narration, however, the reader gradually realizes that something odd was taking place on the day of the civic class taught by the substitute teacher, for the narrator’s memories of his childhood daydreaming appear tinged by dark undertones and vivid contrasts. The different stories conjured by the narrator as a child give away surreal and violent elements that reveal his receptivity to the traumatic events unfolding in the class. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the narrator’s daydreaming is not a lazy escape from everydayness, but rather a painful confrontation with reality, which unfolds in series of vignettes apparently unrelated to each other. To paraphrase it with Wallace’s words, what teachers and the administration in that era never seemed to see was that the mental work of what they called daydreaming often required more effort and concentration than it would have taken simply to listen in class. Laziness is not the issue. It is just not the work dictated by the administration.38 The narrator’s childish imagination works like a cinematic or cartoon-like vision that keeps the reader in a state of tense premonition. The constellation of episodes that the narrator describes are elaborate series of tableaux that fill the space he occupies in the classroom, turning his seat near the window in an affective space dense with premonitions, fears, and uncertainty. As the window’s glass is divided into rows of mesh squares, it allows the narrator to transform his physical space in the classroom into a storyboard that seems to have little to do with his being in the classroom. Among the stories that unfold in the panels of the window and that are recollected by the narrator, one can find the adventures of a dog that escapes home (only to be tormented and forced by other dogs to leap into a cement pipe), and the intricated subpatterns of a tragic story involving the dog’s owners (these include the narrator’s schoolmate Ruth, a vision-impaired child who is bullied in the school, and her parents). All the stories and sub-stories that unfold in the narrator’s imagination have a characteristic climax, whereby the sub-story or “panel,” as Wallace calls it, becomes increasingly violent in conjunction with the gradual change of atmosphere in the classroom. For example, it is only after the teacher writes the word “KILL” on the blackboard that the sequence of events involving Ruth’s father takes a turn for the worst in the narrator’s fantasy. This produces a paradoxical situation, wherein―on the one hand―the narrator appears so self-absorbed in his own fantasies that he seems oblivious to the events unfolding in the

38 Wallace, The Soul Is Not a Smithy, 77.

Atmospheres of boredom  119 classroom, while―on the other hand―the narrator also reveals increased sensitivity to the changes affecting the class’ atmosphere. There are several elements that make Wallace’s story compelling, besides its surreal and unsettling undertones. To begin with, boredom permeates the unfolding of the narration as an affective atmosphere. With regard to this, Bennett has argued that “in his writing, Wallace confronts boredom as one of the fundamental problems in and of human existence, and like the philosophical pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, he repeatedly links it to death, and specifically to suicide.”39 For Bennett (who mainly draws on Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King), Wallace considers boredom an intrinsic quality of human existence, which however also discloses the potential of a bliss, of a quasi-transcendence that can be achieved through ascesis. This state of liberation, on Bennett’s view, comes into play when the subject forsakes his fruitless and endless quest for fulfilment in favour of self-abnegation. However, it is questionable whether boredom effectively plays such a role in Wallace. Many elements in The Soul Is Not a Smithy suggest that boredom represents in Wallace an existential mood that is emotionally penetrable, disclosing the abyss of the characters’ interiority and their longing for human communication rather than the potential bliss of ascesis. To clarify this, it is crucial to recall Heidegger’s three modality of boredom, considering whether and how they emerge in Wallace’s story. While I do not intend to argue that Wallace was inspired by Heidegger in the composition of the story, re-reading Wallace’s description of boredom in terms of mood will prove beneficial to understanding not only why Wallace departs from Heidegger but also why the pervasiveness of boredom in Wallace’s story is not to be reduced to Schopenhauerian pessimism. The most apparent and immediate form of boredom is what Wallace calls “fidgety boredom that is more like worry than despair,” the boredom of “Sunday afternoons when there was nothing to do.”40 Paralleling Heidegger’s notion of being bored by, fidgety boredom in Wallace corresponds to a state of emptiness and lack of engagement, typically triggered by the monotony of the class, which the narrator seeks to avoid by entertaining imaginary cartoon-like scenarios. At the same time, the description of the school evokes an oppressive atmosphere: the narrator recalls his classroom as a space filled with rows of desks “bolted securely to each other and to the floor,” assigned school supplies and seats, and spaces in-between where children move in single-file lines in a “silent, alphabetical, and closely supervised” manner.41 It appears that the narrator is not exclusively bored by the civic class but also bored with the conformity and strict routine imposed by the institutional setting. This second form of boredom reflects the narrator’s attunement with his absentminded father, which plays a key role in the narration. While the narrator admits that he had “no insights whatsoever”42 into his father’s life, he painstakingly portrays the sense of boredom and oppression that must have been distinctive of his father’s job, having to seat every day in a row of desks under fluorescent lights. As the narrator recalls: For my own part, I had begun having nightmares about the reality of adult life as early as perhaps age seven. I knew, even then, that the dreams involved my father’s

39 Andrew Bennett, “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Head: Attention, Loneliness, Suicide and the Other Side of Boredom,” in ed. R. K. Bolger and S. Korb, Gesturing Toward Reality. David Foster Wallace and Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 76. 40 Wallace, The Soul Is Not a Smithy, 105. 41 Ibid., 68–69. 42 Ibid., 89.

120  Elisa Magrì life and job and the way he looked when he returned home from work at the end of the day. […] The nightmares themselves always opened with a wide angle view of a number of men at desks in rows in a large, brightly lit room or hall.43 There is certainly a parallel between the narrator’s nightmares about adult life and the daily routine of his father. The analogy is elicited by the oppressiveness of the environment, with the rows of desks echoing the alienation experienced by the narrator at school (as well as by the bored IRS employee in The Pale King). This indicates that, even though the narrator was only remotely paying attention to the class he was attending, he was at the same time enacting his attunement to the emotional atmospheres of other people (e.g., his father’s, his schoolmates’), including―albeit indirectly―the changes affecting the classroom on that particular day. Indeed, when the substitute teacher finally spreads panic among the children, compelling them to run away, the narrator’s storyboard reaches a tragic crescendo that culminates with the death of Ruth’s parents in absurd circumstances. It is possible to elucidate this element of affective penetrability to others’ emotional atmospheres by focusing on what Wallace calls “peripheral awareness,” namely momentary context-less snapshots and flashbacks that appear and disappear without any time to digest them, like nightmares. […] And the part that stayed with you the most vividly and kept popping into your mind’s eye at odd moments while brushing your teeth or getting a box of cereal down out of the cereal cabinet for a snack, and unsettling you all over again, perhaps because its very instantaneousness in the dream meant that your mind had to keep subconsciously returning to it in order to work it out or incorporate it.44 How can we make sense of this notion of “peripheral awareness”? Peripheral awareness is neither an indirect form of attention nor a weak form of consciousness. It rather stands for the way in which our attunement to events and situations tinges the present with unexpected and unsolicited nuances. In this sense, peripheral awareness is the modality through which our mood in the present shifts and changes depending on our sensitivity to other people’s moods, so that a new emotional atmosphere takes place without our control. Accordingly, what Wallace calls flashbacks and snapshots are salient features of the emotional atmosphere that we inhabit, which creates an affective aura that is permeable to the experience of others. In such moments of emotional awakening, we become suddenly attuned to those aspects of other people’s lives to which we believed we had not paid any conscious attention. Some of these are memories that are “not done with you yet,”45 as they emerge in our waking life, unsolicited and yet filled with the intensity of the lived atmospheres that are attached to them. This is the reason why the third form of boredom that one can find in The Soul Is Not a Smithy is not a metaphysical disclosure of the meaning of being but rather corresponds to the peak of emotional intensity engendered by the narrator’s attunement to his father’s

43 Ibid., 103. 44 Ibid., 94. 45 Ibid., 94.

Atmospheres of boredom  121 mood. Profound boredom is, for Wallace, the “soul-level boredom”46 of his father’s job, which―this time like Heidegger’s profound boredom―is not related to any specific object or event but it is rather grasped in understanding, when the narrator realizes, as an adult, his emotional connection to his father. Unlike Heidegger’s description of profound boredom, however, Wallace’s view of “soul-level” boredom is in many ways an illustration of depression, understood―as Ractliffe argues―as the experience of not being able to find anything practically significant in life.47 It is precisely at this level that it is possible to identify an important difference between Heidegger and Wallace concerning the relation between boredom and the apperception of others. In Heidegger, boredom implies attunement to others only ex negativo, for boredom may reveal lack of authentic communication and interaction, as in Heidegger’s example of the party. However, at its climax, boredom is a dimension that lacks affective penetrability, as it centers on solitude. Instead, in Wallace’s fiction, the narrator’s daydreaming belongs to a limbo whose affective quality is inherently intersubjective. Even though the narrator’s fantasies are a symptom of acute loneliness (rather than solitude), such loneliness is tinged with the loneliness of other subjects. Accordingly, for Wallace, profound boredom brings to light a relentless, often acute, sensitivity to others’ emotional spaces, which are nonetheless opaque and elusive because of the failure to communicate with them authentically. It is noteworthy that being attuned to others’ emotional moods includes elements of empathic intentionality,48 but this is not how Wallace understands it. For Wallace, affective attunement to other’s emotional atmospheres co-exists with the quest for an impossible communication, as he reveals when he insists, towards the ending of the story, on his difficulty to access his father’s existential horizon. Despite being affected as a child by his father’s soul-crashing boredom, the narrator remarks that his father’s interior life was unknown to him. For the narrator, the person who used to come home every day after work was a man affected by a deeper sense of alienation and disconnection, due not only to his having to work “at a metal desk in a silent fluorescent lit room, reading forms and making calculations [….] with only a small and sunless north window”49 but also to a deeper failure at expressing and communicating his feelings to his family. The problem of establishing a genuine communication with others lies at the core of Wallace’s writing. In this regard, Adam Kelly has noticed that Wallace’s fiction appears similar to a Dostoevskian model, with Wallace’s characters shown to be prone to internal division and constantly engaged in dialogue with themselves and others. But Wallace adds an extra-element

46 Ibid., 105. 47 Ratcliffe, “Why Mood Matters,” 173 ff. See also Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression. A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 48 In this respect, Breyer speaks of interaffectivity as the interplay between expression (Ausdruck) and impression (Eindruck). Being receptive to another’s expression produces an impression in the perceiver, generating a spiral of embodied resonance. Within this context, Breyer also refers to the constitution of “empathic atmospheres”: “Es ist dann aber nicht mehr nur von den subjektiven Dispositionen der Einzelnen abhaengig, wie sich die Empathie entfaltet, sondern es entsteht eine gewisse Objektivitaet der empathischen Atmosphaere selbst.” See Thiemo Breyer, Verkörperte Intersubjektivität und Empathie. Philosophisch. Anthropologische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2015), 194. 49 Wallace, The Soul Is Not a Smithy, 105.

122  Elisa Magrì to the mix, which rests in the anticipatory anxiety his characters feel in addressing others. Speakers in Wallace’s fiction are often depicted as desperate for genuine dialogue, but find that their overwhelming need to predict the other’s response in advance blocks the possibility of finding the language to get outside themselves and truly reach out to the other.50 While Wallace shares the Heideggerian view of language as a medium of intelligibility and understanding, he also points out the difficulty of expressing one’s interior life, referring to the “difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know.”51 As Kelly argues, anticipatory anxiety prevents characters from expressing themselves adequately. Perhaps, this is also the reason why Wallace chose the ironic title The Soul Is Not a Smithy, referring to the passage in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where Stephen sets off to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race.”52 Prima facie, Wallace’s characters appear unable to attain Stephen’s triumphant independence. Anxiety and guilt overwhelm them, but not because they experience―in Heideggerian terms―the thrownness of their existence. In Wallace, guilt is the result of Sisyphus’ effort of trying to express oneself and to access another’s existential horizon, except that one ends up failing. This is the sense of guilt evoked by the narrator when he recounts his conversations with his wife about the movie The Exorcist, whose symbolic iconography reminded him of his failure to care for others (the reader thus apprehends that the narrator’s mother died alone). The narrator’s sense of guilt is connected to his realization that he never really understood his father when he was alive, and that he would still fail to establish with him a meaningful form of communication.53 He admits that he did not know what the core of his parents’ marriage was, particularly the little things they would do for each other as a form of genuine care.54 Despite this strong claim about the difficulty of accessing another’s interior life, Wallace does not make a case for solipsism.55 That other people not simply exist but are also apperceived in the interiority of one’s own life is evident from the way he describes boredom as a mood that is intersubjectively penetrable. Wallace’s concern is that achieving a form of communication with others is a daunting task, which is structurally limited by a deepest form of inauthenticity. For Wallace, the very fabric of language makes it impossible to absolutely separate genuine communication from contemporary forms of expressions, which are constantly

50 Kelly, “Development through Dialogue,” 270–271. 51 David Foster Wallace, Good Old Neon in David Foster Wallace, Oblivion, 178. 52 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2001), 225. 53 Wallace, The Soul Is Not a Smithy, 107: “I have no idea what he [his father] thought about, what his internal life might have been like. And that were he alive I still would not know.” 54 Wallace, The Soul Is Not a Smithy, 106: “Our mother’s making his lunch was one of the keystones of their marriage contract, or that in mild weather he took his lunch down in the elevator and ate it sitting on a backless stone bench that faced a small square of grass with two trees and an abstract public sculpture, and that on many mornings he steered by these 30 minutes outdoors the way mariners out of sight of land use stars.” 55 See also Marshall Boswell, “‘The Constant Monologue Inside Your Head’: Oblivion and the Nightmare of Consciousness,” in ed. M. Boswell and S. J. Burn, A Companion to David Foster Wallace Studies (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 151. Boswell notices that “Oblivion looks beyond mere solipsism to explore the multiple ways in which his characters are not only alone inside their heads but also controlled, sometimes to the point of madness, by the layered, nested, entropic workings of their interiors.”

Atmospheres of boredom  123 exploited by entertainment and narcissistic culture. This is the reason why Wallace does not prospect any form of resolve against inauthenticity but fully embraces and depicts the effects of loneliness as a form of oblivion from authentic life. In this way, in Wallace, boredom reveals loneliness rather than Heideggerian solitude. Loneliness is an existential dimension, which “affects an individual’s ability to understand and interpret social interactions, initiating a devastating chain-reaction, the consequence of which is to further estrange them from their fellows.”56 For Wallace, loneliness produces that sense of hypervigilance that constantly induces his characters to inhibit their contacts with others, no matter how badly that very contact is longed for or desired. While loneliness is as much a product of a historical condition as an intangible atmosphere that grows around individuals “like a mould,”57 it is worth noting that it does not preclude sensitivity and openness to other people’s states and experiences. The narrator’s recurrent nightmares are also evidence of his attunement to his father’s emotional atmosphere. This indicates that the emotional atmospheres inhabited by other selves are neither closed spaces without windows, nor private experiences. Moods are horizons that can be grasped through feelings, but it takes attentiveness and cultivated discernment in order to understand them. Such attentiveness is revealed by the narrator when he describes the details of his father’s gestures upon coming home, e.g., his way of opening the door, taking off the coat, and hanging it.58 This is the acquaintance that is engendered not simply by repetition and proximity but rather by the awareness of partaking in the atmosphere of another life. Contrary to the focused attention of the employee in a bureaucratic setting, who is oppressed by the mechanical rhythm of his work routine, the narrator’s attentiveness to his father’s gestures recalls what Wallace in This Is Water calls “real freedom,”59 namely concern and care for others. For Wallace, care and concern manifest themselves as forms of attentiveness and attunement to the affective quality of another’s existence. Attentiveness transforms the atmosphere that surrounds the self, forging a caring disposition and hope for a more authentic communication. This entails cultivating peripheral awareness in order to be able to connect to the atmospheres of others. Such an attitude is epitomized by the narrator’s mother in The Soul Is Not a Smithy, when she seeks a spot in the graveyard for her husband that is surrounded by trees. As the narrator explains, his father used to sit on a bench under the trees at lunchtime, and that represented the only place and time where he could possibly feel free. Honouring the memory of a loved one by establishing an impossible act of communication with the most elusive part of their former life is one of the forms in which Wallace’s view of peripheral awareness manifests itself as an act of care and concern. In a way, the striving for authentic communication constellates Wallace’s writings, producing sudden cracks and apertures in the wall of oblivion and loneliness. Real freedom, for Wallace, lies in the effort to prevent the soul-crashing boredom of everyday life from annihilating the

56 Olivia Laing, The Lonely City. Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Edinburgh: Canon Gate, 2016), 28. 57 Ibid., 28. 58 Wallace, The Soul Is Not a Smithy, 103. 59 David Foster Wallace, This Is Water (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), 8. “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the ‘rat race’—the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

124  Elisa Magrì awareness of mutual relatedness and attunement. Thus, despite his relentless critique of contemporary culture, Wallace nonetheless puts forward in The Soul Is Not a Smithy an account of affective attunement to others’ emotional atmospheres that resists loneliness and brings to light the intersubjective quality of moods. 5 Conclusion To conclude, let me go back to Heidegger’s example of profound boredom, i.e., walking the streets of a big city on a Sunday afternoon. Certainly, the stroller that Heidegger had in mind in this context has little to do with the flaneur evoked by Baudelaire as “the lover of universal life that makes the whole world into his family,” who “moves into the crowd as though in an enormous reservoir of electricity.”60 If anything, the Heideggerian stroller would serve as a good caption for one of Edward Hopper’s paintings, which portray an acute sense of estrangement and isolation from the world the more familiar the world presents itself to the subject. Yet while such detachment is, for Heidegger, a prelude to philosophy, for Wallace that very estrangement captures the atmospheric quality of another’s lived experiences to which we can become attuned. Ultimately, however, both Heidegger and Wallace argue that boredom, far from representing an obnoxious state to be avoided, highlights the possibility of a response. Such a response is based on the idea that estrangement and loneliness are not problems to be fixed but rather intrinsic features of our being in the world. Acknowledgements I presented an earlier version of this chapter at the conference Phenomenology and Art at NUI Galway in March 2018, and I submitted the final manuscript in 2020. I wish to thank the participants of the Galway conference, and particularly Felix Ó Murchadha, for their questions and feedback. I am especially indebted to Adam Kelly for reading and commenting on the first draft of this chapter, and to Andrew Winson and Fotini Vassiliou for their corrections and helpful insights.

60 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” in Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. P. E. Charvet (London: Penguin Books), 27.

8 Engaging with physical atmospheres The aesthetics of weather Madalina Diaconu

Abstract  Despite its emphasis on the primacy of experience, phenomenology mentions the daily experience of the weather only incidentally, due to its programmatic delimitation from naturalism. Nevertheless, the poetics of nature and eco-phenomenology can contribute to the outlining of a meteorological aesthetics in the Anthropocene. This project is also a desideratum in the so-called aesthetics of atmosphere, which should integrate the concept of engagement in a broad meaning, extend the field of descriptive sources beyond art, include (scientific) cognition, and contextualise the subject and reintegrate it in community, in order to assign to it ecological responsibility. Keywords  Phenomenological Aesthetics; Environmental Aesthetics; Weather; Atmosphere; Corporality; Cognition; Anthropocene But just as politics is too important to be left to generals, so nature is too important to be left to the natural sciences. David Wood1

1 Introduction Contrary to the perceptual poverty of astronomic space and the abstraction of climate as a scientific construct based upon average values of physical parameters, weather― with its forms, colours, patterns, sounds, temperature and humidity, not to mention the actinic, chemical, neurotropic, electric and electromagnetic properties of the air― is experienced with the entire body. Neither remote, nor abstract, weather consists of ­phenomena, events, processes and quasi-things which condition not only our practices, but influence our moods as well and can even affect our physical state. The inescapability of the weather despite modern technology, the qualification of the atmospheric condition as “beautiful,” “nice,” “ugly” or “terrible,” along with the booming ecological thrillers, and the artists’ environmental commitment raise the question of whether phenomenology and a suitable aesthetic theory of weather can serve this purpose.

1 David Wood, “What Is Eco-Phenomenology?” in Eco-Phenomenology. Back to the Earth Itself, ed. Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine (New York: SUNY Press, 2003), 211–234, here 228.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-9

126  Madalina Diaconu In order to answer this question, it is first necessary to examine the concept of nature in phenomenology and its relation to natural sciences and environmental philosophy, including its possible contributions and limitations with respect to an aesthetics of weather. Further on, I will critically discuss the phenomenology of the atmosphere and the aesthetics of engagement and argue the necessity to amend the former with the aid of the latter. Finally, suggestions will be made regarding how to properly engage with the atmosphere(s). These are the following: to identify further phenomenographic sources beyond quotidian experience and art, in order to acknowledge the positive role of cognition and to contextualise the abstract phenomenological subject, as a prerequisite for assigning it ecological responsibility. Other phenomenological analyses that support the aesthetics of weather and a better understanding of contemporary climate art were examined on other occasions.2 In short, the following scrutiny is meant to prepare the outline of an aesthetics of physical atmospheres in the Anthropocene. Whether we call this emergent field within the environmental aesthetics and the aesthetics of everyday life meteorological, celestial, aerial or atmospheric, its denominations here are less important. 2  From antinaturalism to eco-phenomenology and the poetics of nature Phenomenology was founded in a time in which positivism and natural sciences celebrated considerable successes and was a reaction to their reductionist monopole on scientificity. Throughout its history, phenomenology incessantly delimited its descriptive and interpretative approach from the causal explanations provided by the natural sciences. Further, starting with Husserl, phenomenology declared war on common sense and its “natural” approach to the encountered, emphasising the deliberate confinement of the phenomenological subject to the phenomenality of objects. For example, the sky is a space, yet in a different way than we tend “to grasp […] naturalistically,” by conceiving it as an “‘objective’ infinite quantity of empty positions.”3 No matter how legitimate this anti-naturalistic emphasis in phenomenology may be, it certainly makes difficult a dialogue with ecology. Later, some phenomenologists acknowledged the necessity to rediscover “a natural world that is inherently and primordially meaningful and worthy of respect” in order to overcome “cultural estrangement” and “nihilism” in relation to nature.4 For this purpose, attempts were undertaken to reread the classics of phenomenology from an ecological perspective. While some scholars are engaged in the dispute over whether Heidegger’s physis, the concepts of the self-concealing earth and fourfold are reconcilable with environmentalism, others count on Merleau-Ponty’s être sauvage to reintegrate nature, or dehumanise the Levinasian visage and diagnose environmental distress on the “face” of the

2 See my conference papers “Heat: A Phenomenological Approach” at the conference “Bei Sinnen sein? To Be in One’s Senses?” (University Koblenz-Landau, 27.09.2018) and “Interaktivität und ästhetisches Engagement. Von der Wetterdarstellung zur Politik der Landschaft in der Kunst” (“Interaktion und Interaktivität. Phänomenologische Ansätze zu Kunst und Neuen Medien,” Husserl-Archive, University of Cologne, 25.11.2016). 3 Klaus Held, “Sky and Earth as Invariants of the Natural Life-world,” in Phenomenology of Interculturality and Life-world, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and Chan-Fai Cheung (Freiburg, Munich: Alber, 1998), 21–41, here 32. 4 Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine, “Eco-Phenomenology: An Introduction,” in Brown and Toadvine, EcoPhenomenology, IX–XXI, here XX.

Engaging with physical atmospheres: the aesthetics of weather  127 landscape. More radically, David Wood claims that phenomenology should overcome the “trauma of its birth in opposition to naturalism”6 and expects eco-phenomenology to mediate between intentional and causal models by emphasising pre- or non-intentional aspects of nature. A major difficulty in outlining a phenomenological ecology or an ecological phenomenology is related to the epistemic anthropocentrism of phenomenology. Things being regarded in their fundamental correlation to the subject makes it difficult to legitimate the intrinsic or even objective value of natural objects and thus to strongly support environmental activism beyond anthropocentric arguments. From a phenomenological perspective, the ecological engagement ultimately requires “a model of the whole as something that will inevitably escape our model of it.”7 As a response to this dilemma, phenomenology can either push the phenomenological method to the limit and emphasise nature (or weather-producing forces) as alterity, like Adorno, or broaden the view by expanding the subject-object relation into the worldview of a universal interaction, on the assumption that human bodies belong to nature. Paradigmatic for the first model is Ted Toadvine. According to him, the only way to recover the sense of nature would be a paradoxical “‘impossible phenomenology’ of nature” which stretches the phenomenological method to the limit, “perhaps to the breaking point.”8 This approach neither falls back into the dualism of human vs. nature, nor integrates humans into nature. The natural itself is neither an object for human agency (as in the humanist tradition) nor a self (as in the Romantic philosophy of nature and deep ecology), but it appears to us as a mystery and unpredictable miracle, which is―following Merleau-Ponty―simply wild (être brut), before acquiring the specifications of wilderness, environment, mineral, plant or animal. Apart from its il y a, this original nature can be described only negatively as that which resists experience, conceptualisation and mastery, the “outside” that “calls” us at the margins of experience. The second model is based upon the subject’s being in the world and natural corporeality. To paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, the subject is not a disembodied, unsituated consciousness, but a fold within the sensible that is engaged in an incessant communication with it. An interesting example for a synthesis between the alterity and the kinship model can be found in Mikel Dufrenne’s poetics of nature. For Dufrenne, the art of poetry, as well as all other arts, is based upon a poetical state of mind that is sensitive to the enchantment of the world (“magie quotidienne”) and to the reciprocal resonances of things.9 Specific to the aesthetic experience are the sense of wonder, the urgency to dwell upon phenomena and the receptivity to the expression of the world beyond information and representation. Even if intuition and feeling (sentir) are the main faculties that come to the fore here in contrast to the conceptual knowledge of science and practical interests in daily activities, the état poétique opens the access to a non-theoretical kind of ­meaning― for Nature speaks in cyphers which can be decoded by feeling them. 5

5 See the studies collected in Eco-Phenomenology, in particular Michael E. Zimmerman’s, Monika Langer’s and Edward Casey’s. 6 Wood, “What Is Eco-Phenomenology?”, 213. 7 Ibid., 217. 8 Ted Toadvine, “The Primacy of Desire and Its Ecological Consequences,” in Eco-Phenomenology, 139–153, here 140. 9 Mikel Dufrenne, Le poétique (Paris: P.U.F., 1963), 77.

128  Madalina Diaconu Consequently, Nature expressed in art is neither the construct of the natural sciences nor nature as it is experienced in the common life, but the “real world” that presents itself to the consciousness. Above all Nature is, as for Spinoza, the productive power of a natura naturans, the poiein of which continuously creates new forms and produces images in time.10 In the poetical state the artist and her reader/spectator/listener experience Nature as “the wild being, the pure and simple being in its irrefutable, brilliant and obstinate evidence,” having the feeling of being in the middle of the “plenitude of being”11―which anticipates Toadvine’s aforementioned emphasis on the “there is.” Most importantly, the phenomenology of the “poetic” Nature overcomes both idealism and scientific naturalism, being based upon the presupposition of a “pre-established harmony” or “union” between the subject and the world.12 This “agreement” is at the origin of the humans’ different categories of a priori, including the affective a prioris of the aesthetic experience.13 Nevertheless, for Dufrenne, the a priori is both transcendental and ontic, the human himself being not only a correlate of Nature but also a part of it. To sum up, Dufrenne’s kinship view implies that poetry and art in general are possible precisely because they extend from the poetical being of Nature. Nature is the primary source of all a priori, and poetical disclosing is an ability which is ultimately not initiated by humans.14 However, there is a sort of latent Hegelian teleology in Dufrenne’s approach, given that Nature somehow needs the human’s poetical state in order to find back to itself; transcendental phenomenology is thus overcome in ontology. What are the implications of these models for the aesthetics of weather? The alterity model is obviously compatible with the awe unleashed by the splendour of the sky or by large-scale and even threatening weather events, from rainbows to thunderstorms and tornados. Intensive experiences are caused by meteorological phenomena that leave the impression of confusedly signifying something that transcends the phenomenal data15 and make us think beyond and despite any available scientific explanation. The lucky spectator of rare and spectacular tubular cloudscapes, white rainbows, glory (when the light is diffracted in cloud or fog droplets), ball lightning or leaping sundogs has the overwhelming feeling that she has been elected as a witness and thus bears the responsibility for recording and communicating her experience to the less privileged.16 In other cases, people “pilgrim” to places where exceptional phenomena can be observed; such situations challenge the subject’s power of representing space and time, push the aesthetic

10 Also, for Wood temporality is essential for the phenomenological understanding of Nature. 11 “l’être brut, l’être pur et simple dans son évidence irrécusable, éclatante et obstinée. Nous sommes dans le plein de l’être” (Dufrenne, Le poétique, 164). 12 Dufrenne, Le poétique, 136, 163. 13 The essence of art in Dufrenne’s view is based upon the affective a prioris which enable to surpass the representation of the real to become an expression of it [Mikel Dufrenne, Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique, vol. 2 (Paris: P.U.F., 2011)]. 14 “Nature naturante conçue comme la source de tout a priori” (Dufrenne, Le poétique, 4); “une puissance de dévoilement dont l’homme n’a pas originellement l’initiative” (Dufrenne, Le poétique, 162). 15 In Dufrenne’s words, “leur sens déborde le donné” (Dufrenne, Le poétique, 175). 16 In such cases, neither the phenomenological reduction nor the eidetic reduction make much sense: the phenomenological reduction because it affects the value of the experience (even if we know that a certain spectacular event is only a phenomenon based upon an illusion that can be scientifically explained, it does not matter to us), and the eidetic reduction because we may have only one experience of the kind in our entire life which impedes any mental variation.

Engaging with physical atmospheres: the aesthetics of weather  129 experience to its limits and plunge the spectator into deep-reaching feelings which are saturated with an existential meaning.17 The other model, which stresses the human’s being in the world against the background of a cosmic entanglement, involves a relational mode of thinking and corresponds through that to the complexity of the atmospheric condition and of its experience.18 Not only does the complexity of the atmosphere challenge scientifically explanatory models and predictions, but also the aesthetics of weather has to integrate multisensory perception with emotional conditioning, (metaphysical) imagination and symbolic worldviews, vital, cognitive and existential values, etc. The assumption of a kinship between bodies and nature is unavoidable when it comes to giving an account of the communication between the physical atmosphere and one’s physical and emotional “weatherworld,” as when stable “fine” weather induces well-being, turbulent weather causes irritation and a long-lasting, monotonous rain provokes spleen. Just as “nature is too important to be left to the natural sciences,” as David Wood said, so also the correlations between weather and feelings ought not be left to biometeorology for at least two reasons: first, these involuntary affective correspondences influence the common appreciation of the weather in aesthetic terms, and second, they are sources of inspiration for any art that cultivates emotional and “atmospheric” qualities―think of the poetics of the rain in French symbolism.19 The subject’s affective resonance to Nature is commonplace in the aesthetics of nature, from Dufrenne to Martin Seel20 and the so-called phenomenology of the atmosphere. However, before discussing the latter, let us first summarise the potential of the theories discussed so far for an aesthetics of weather. 3  Phenomenology of nature and the aesthetics of weather The possible contributions of phenomenology to environmentalism in general include its accurate descriptions of lived experience, the critique of dualistic ontologies and the quest for alternatives, as well as the reflected use of language, which may also inspire the environmental discourses.21 Yet the same qualities also have their drawbacks, such as descriptivism, a high level of abstraction that hinders readability and the diffusion in broader circles, and first and foremost the atemporal universality of the subject, devoid

17 Ronald W. Hepburn pointed out that it is practically impossible to avoid any metaphysical perspective in the aesthetics of nature, even if this does not imply to assign a systematic metaphysic worldview to the spectator, but only one in the mode of ‘as if.’ See Ronald W. Hepburn, “Landscape and the Metaphysical Imagination,” Environmental Values 5 (1996): 191–204. 18 The relational model promises also to enable the encounter between phenomenology, which is rooted in the modern Western tradition of an individual subject, and Asian traditions of environmental philosophy that include the human self in a fabric of cosmic relations. On the latter see J. Baird Callicott, “Afterword. Recontextualizing the Self in Comparative Environmental Philosophy,” in Environmental Philosophy in Asian Traditions of Thought, ed. J. Baird Callicott and James McRae (New York: SUNY Press, 2014), 377–390. 19 Madalina Diaconu, “Singing (in Several Voices) in the (Same) Rain. Cultural Symbols and Cognition in the Aesthetics of Weather,” in Aesthetics Today. Contemporary Approaches to the Aesthetics of Nature and of Arts, ed. Stefan Majetschak and Anja Weiberg (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 51–67. 20 Seel distinguishes between nature as a space of contemplating the play of sensory phenomena, as a stage for imaginative projections and as a place of correspondences that includes the “Antönen an Seele und Gemüt” (Eine Ästhetik der Natur, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), in particular 89–134. 21 Monika Langer, “Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Some of Their Contributions and Limitations for ‘Environmentalism’,” in Brown and Toadvine, Eco-Phenomenology, 103–120, here 106.

130  Madalina Diaconu of age, gender, social status and culture.22 Regarding the weather, it is striking that the phenomenology of nature, no less than the aesthetic theories of nature, lay the stress on the earth, mentioning celestial events rather incidentally.23 One may of course reply that  the phenomenological concept of nature precedes any specification of it as earth, sky and the same; in this sense Toadvine cautions against equating the “brute” being of Nature with experienceable wilderness, ecosystems or species.24 However, this makes any impact of a phenomenological aesthetics of weather on nature lovers without appetite for speculations problematic from the outset, whereas I am interested in an aesthetic theory that would support environmental ethics. Also, according to the principle of correlation, phenomenology tends to underscore the distinctions between the aesthetic, scientific, practical and other attitudes to nature. This typical Western, modern emphasis on the autonomy of the aesthetic experience turns out to be a hindrance in accounting of the manifoldness of the experience of weather and is hardly reconcilable with an ecological approach.25 In their endeavour to defend philosophy from scientific positivism, the phenomenologists who reflected on nature brought to the fore non-cognitive faculties, such as sentiments, intuition and imagination. On the one hand, this eases the junction with aesthetics, yet on the other it obstructs the understanding of contemporary climate art and of the artists’ environmental commitment. The old principle of phenomenology to focus on works as detached from their creators’ motivations and psychology fails in such cases. In contrast to Dufrenne’s ingenuity of aesthetic feeling,26 in line with Merleau-Ponty’s earlier comments on Cézanne, environmental artists often seek inspiration for their “poetical state” of wonder in natural sciences. Besides, the eulogy of immediacy may nowadays be easily misunderstood as an irresponsible flight into environmental illiteracy, which environmental philosophers like Holmes Rolston III would certainly dislike. Neither the traditional contemplation nor the spectator’s mobilisation in the interactive art, acclaimed by Dufrenne,27 suffices to cope with the contemporary artists’ ecological engagement. This kind of engagement requires Arnold Berleant’s broader understanding of the concept, in a way that transgresses both the constitution of the aesthetic object through perception and imagination (discussed in phenomenology) and the constitution of the physical object through movement (interactive art). 4  Engagement vs. atmospheres The move to interactivity in art was one of the catalysts of Arnold Berleant’s theory. In an early phase, he enlarged the subject-object relationship to an aesthetic field consisting 22 This widespread critique was formulated in aesthetics by Arnold Berleant and Richard Shusterman, and can be found also in Hartmut Böhme, Aussichten der Natur. Naturästhetik in Wechselwirkung von Natur und Kultur (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2017), 17. 23 See Brown’s and Toadvine’s subtitle: “Back to the Earth Itself.” 24 Toadvine, “The Primacy of Desire,” 149. 25 This convergence of stances and values has already been remarked by John Llewelyn: “The aesthetic, the ethical and the scientific belong to each other. Together they make up an ecology, like the so-called faculties of the mind […]” (John Llewelyn, “Prolegomena to Any Future Phenomenological Ecology,” in Brown and Toadvine, Eco-phenomenology, 51–72, here 68). 26 Poetry restitutes the reader the “état de nature,” the “immédiateté” and “innocence du sentiment” (Dufrenne, Le poétique, 85). 27 Dufrenne, “Phänomenologie und Ontologie der Kunst” (1969), in Ästhetik, ed. Wolfhart Henckmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1979), 123–147, here 135–136.

Engaging with physical atmospheres: the aesthetics of weather  131 of the work of art, the artist and the spectator/reader/listener, and the performer. Later, he outlined an encompassing aesthetics of natural and artificial environments that was included in Brown’s and Toadvine’s bibliography in eco-phenomenology. Berleant, too, starts his analyses from the immediate experience and therefore characterises his approach as “a kind of radical phenomenology.”28 However, his enrolment in phenomenology is selective, since he mistrusts Husserl’s transcendental turn and is discontent with the abstract universality of the phenomenological subject, yet he appreciates Merleau-Ponty’s late work.29 Also, Berleant rejects the methodological scepticism of the epoché; his broad understanding of aesthetics as “aisthetics” leaves unquestioned the reality of experience. Moreover, instead of seeking genuine aesthetic experiences (like Moritz Geiger) and confining his view to “high art,” to be contemplated and interpreted in a decontextualised manner (think of Heidegger), the influence of pragmatism makes Berleant consider the practical consequences of the aesthetic experience for life, society and nature. The humanistic basis of Berleant’s aesthetics, who shares Schiller’s conviction that aesthetic and ethical values ultimately converge, explains how easily he can move among different arts, the aesthetics of everyday life, the politics of urban aesthetics and landscape planning.30 At the core of his aesthetics lies his rejection of the Kantian disinterestedness, which he replaces with the concept of aesthetic engagement. The latter covers bodily exchanges with the environment, the shaping of the sensory material in perception (Gestalt theory), the imaginary filling of “blank spaces” (like for Ingarden), empathy, atmospheric attunement (in the sense Martin Seel’s and Gernot Böhme’s), semantic interpretation and performativity, as well as civic activism and ecological commitment.31 Discussing the experience of the sky during airplane flights and space missions, Berleant focuses on the change of our perspective on Earth, seen from above (for instance, as it is photographically recorded), and not on the atmospheric phenomena as such.32 His conclusion that “we must remain content with an earthly perspective in which we can still feel delight and wonder at celestial phenomena”33 eventually reminds one of Brown’s and Toadvine’s call to return “to the Earth itself.” From the perspective of his so-called environmental aesthetics, Berleant could not avoid the question whether we are entitled to speak of a “celestial ecosystem” and a “celestial ecology”―which he finally denies, since this would entail a need to ascribe order and finitude to the universe. Also, in line with the phenomenological mistrust of natural sciences and consequent to his own polemics against cognitivism in the aesthetics of nature, Berleant is worried if the poetics of the sky can still be compatible with the currently prevailing scientific image of the universe.34 According to him, the primary, perceptual experience of the sky―the view of which is often obstructed in the city―generates a “direct and pure pleasure,”35 along

28 Arnold Berleant, Sensibility and Sense. The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2010), 214. 29 Ibid., 20–30, 69–70. 30 See also Berleant’s essays in Aesthetics and Environment. Variations on a Theme (Burlington: Ashgate, 2005) and Aesthetics beyond the Arts (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012). 31 See my article “Engagement and Resonance: Two Ways Out from Disinterestedness and Alienation,” ESPES. Journal of Society for Aesthetics in Slovakia 6/2 (2017), 40–49. 32 Berleant, “Celestial Aesthetics,” in Sensibility and Sense, 137–153. 33 Ibid., 153. 34 In contrast to Holmes Rolston III, who emphasises the positive contribution of astrophysics to aesthetics in “Celestial Aesthetics: Over Our Heads and/or in Our Heads,” Theology and Science, 9/3 (2011), 273–285. 35 Berleant, “Celestial Aesthetics,” 144.

132  Madalina Diaconu with the feeling of humility, even if he remains neutral with regard to its possible religious dimension. Berleant’s engagement is primarily bodily and so to speak “geocentric,” leading immediately to the imperative of ecological responsibility in life and politics. A different approach to physical atmospheres was inspired by phenomenology on the other side of the ocean. In the 1960s, the concept of atmosphere was more or less simultaneously introduced in pedagogy by Friedrich Otto Bollnow, in psychology and psychiatry by Hubert Tellenbach, and in the New Phenomenology by Hermann Schmitz.36 However, Gernot Böhme, who took over the concept of Atmosphäre from Schmitz and introduced a series of new aesthetic categories in order to better understand atmospheres in natural, social and artistic environments, was ground-breaking for aesthetics.37 In the meantime, the discourses on atmospheres (French: ambiance) have gained specific relevance in architecture, literature, film, art, media studies, human geography, the aesthetics of landscape, urban sensescapes and even economic psychology.38 These studies invariably contrast the concept of atmosphere in phenomenology with that used in natural sciences; the lived atmospheres refer to integral entities that resist any analytic and even descriptive approach, though they are intersubjectively felt as evident, powerful and effective. According to Schmitz, an atmosphere is “a total or partial, in any case considerably broad occupation of a surfaceless space in the field of what is experienced as present.”39 In a less cryptic formulation, the atmosphere defines “a qualitative-sentimental prius, spatially poured out, of our sensible encounter with the world.”40 If atmospheres correlate emotions with places and refer to feelings encountered by bodily subjects in situ, both feelings and space require special discussion. For example, the issue of whether atmospheres are really emanated by external environments, are subjective projections or are in-between subject and object generated a long controversy. Schmitz recalls that in the pre-classic Greece external powerful emotions could “invade” humans, as when in Iliad Achilles is seized by rage and loses self-control; only later Greek philosophers introjected them as subjective sentiments. Böhme, however, opts for a relational character of atmospheres: this starts with the feeling that a certain quality is present in a space; in this stage feeling something (“it is cold”) and feeling myself (“I am cold”) are still indistinct.41 From this situation, a gradual dissociative objectification lets two poles of the relation emerge: the object on one side, on the other, the subject. The first step in this process of distancing from spatial feelings makes the transition from

36 Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Die pädagogische Atmosphäre (Heidelberg: Quelle & Mayer, 1964); Hubert Tellenbach, Geschmack und Atmosphäre. Medien menschlichen Elementarkontaktes (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1968); Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie III.2. Der Gefühlsraum (Bonn: Bouvier, 1969); Hermann Schmitz, Atmosphären (Freiburg, Munich: Alber, 2014). 37 For example, atmospheric characters, moods, synaesthetic features, physiognomic characters, scenes, “Ekstasen,” signs/symbols (Gernot Böhme, Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine ­Wahrnehmungslehre, Munich: Fink, 2001). 38 A selective bibliography includes Christiane Heibach (ed.), Atmosphären. Dimensionen eines diffusen Phänomens (Munich: Fink, 2012); Jürgen Hasse’s analyses of atmospheres published with Alber Verlag (e.g., Was Räume mit uns machen – und wir mit ihnen. Kritische Phänomenologie des Raumes, 2014); as well as my own applications of the atmosphere to olfactory art [Tasten, Riechen, Schmecken. Eine Ästhetik der anästhesierten Sinne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005)], urban smellscapes [Sinnesraum Stadt. Eine multisensorische Anthropologie (Münster: Lit, 2012)], and the weather. 39 Schmitz, Atmosphären, 69; my translation. 40 Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetic of Emotional Spaces (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 5. 41 Böhme, Aisthetik, 46.

Engaging with physical atmospheres: the aesthetics of weather  133 pure atmospheres (like coldness) to the “quasi-thing” of the “atmospheric” (e.g., the wind, the night, the winter). Obviously, this theory raises a plethora of questions beyond aesthetics regarding the ontology, knowledge, production and social application of felt atmospheres, including their commercial or political manipulation in design, architecture and media. Tonino Griffero even claimed that the complexity of this issue legitimates the grounding of a new discipline called “atmospherology”42―which has nothing in common with the atmospheric studies in the natural sciences. At this point, it must be asked whether it is not precisely the aesthetics of the atmosphere which can provide the sought basis for the aesthetics of weather. The frequently incriminated polysemy of “atmosphere” should indeed be regarded as a chance to investigate the aesthetic experience of meteorological phenomena. At a closer look, however, the scarce presence of weather in the phenomenology of atmosphere is (or at least it was until recently) downright surprising. Weather events are most often mentioned briefly and sporadically, used only as exemplifications, and the attempts to integrate physical atmospheres were rather exceptions left to natural scientists.43 In the light of the previous incursion into the phenomenology of nature, the rarity of “primary atmospheres”44 can be traced back to the same effort of phenomenology to delimit itself from naturalism. Gernot Böhme himself did not pursue his project of a phenomenology of nature in cooperation with natural scientists anymore.45 Nevertheless, he occasionally undertook the attempt of sketching a “phenomenology of the weather,” which he characterised in 2003 as a desideratum.46 Common German expressions and literature build the platform on which Böhme, following Schmitz, remarks upon the kinship between weather and feelings; the aim of a phenomenology of the weather would be to classify the correlations between the nature ruled by laws (physical atmospheres) and the way in which they are felt bodily―which in fact repeats the phenomenological inquiry regarding the noema–noesis correlation. Exemplary in this respect, for Böhme, is Goethe’s Versuch einer Witterungs­ lehre (1825). His continuation of Luke Howard’s famous classification of the clouds represents a “genuine phenomenological moment,”47 but remains insufficient, since―in contrast to his Farbelehre―it eludes the effects of the cloudscapes on the viewer. In addition, Goethe “betrayed” the primacy of immediate experience, combining observation with measurements enabled by physical devices. Finally, the corporeal subject disappears in this theory and is replaced by a symbolic theory of the clouds with pantheistic connotations and by a speculative explanation of the atmospheric phenomena as the interplay of warmth and heaviness. Böhme’s alternative remained until his death in 2022 a work in progress. Regarded as a phenomenon, weather is first and foremost an integral unity, called “total impression,” 42 Griffero, Atmospheres, 101–141. 43 Noteworthy is Mins Minssen, “Zur Phänomenologie des Windes und der Windmusik,” in Phänomenologie der Natur, eds. Gernot Böhme and Gregor Schiemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997), 232–255. 44 According to Christiane Heibach’s classification in primary (physical), secondary (social) and tertiary (medially constructed) atmospheres in her introduction to Atmosphären, 9–24. However, the most metatheories of the atmosphere collected in this volume, starting with Peter Sloterdijk’s, regard the social atmospheres as elementary. 45 Böhme and Schiemann (eds.), Phänomenologie der Natur. 46 Gernot Böhme, “Das Wetter und die Gefühle. Für eine Phänomenologie des Wetters,” in Gefühle als Atmosphären. Neue Phänomenologie und philosophische Emotionstheorie, eds. Undine Eberlein and Kerstin Andermann (Berlin: Akademie, 2011 [2003]), 153–166. 47 Ibid., 158.

134  Madalina Diaconu which modifies the subject’s experience of space48 (as a matter of fact, it even precedes or “shapes” it). First, Böhme attempted to introduce a conceptual order in the protean experience of the weather by applying the categories he had recently introduced in Aisthetik (2001). For example, the characters of weather (usually answers to the question how the weather is like) fall mostly under the categories of synaesthetic features (the weather is sticky or brisk), moods (bright or dull weather), kinetic impressions (unstable weather), etc. Sometimes, objective, physical manifestations that can be meteorologically identified, like rain and wind, come to the fore and become the releasers (Erzeugende) of affective atmospheres. These releasers correspond to what Schmitz and Böhme previously called das Atmosphärische, when the atmosphere acquires certain object-like features. Finally, a third field of the projected phenomenology of the weather, besides characters and releasers, is represented by the weather events. However, weather escapes this will for a systematic approach and Böhme himself admits in the end that the weather events are somehow also releasers and kindred with the characters. In his last studies on the weather49 Böhme’s intentions are more modest: to set forth Goethe’s Witterungslehre from the point where he lost the subject, to describe the different moods released by the types of clouds known at that time (cirrus, cumulus, nimbus) and to bring a few exemplifications from painting. In other words, the author focuses here on one “releaser” and attempts to establish the correlations between its phenomenal modalities and the subject’s sentiments.50 These descriptive analyses require a metatheory regarding the role played by the language, and a further paper discusses the aforementioned analogy in Goethe’s Faust.51 5  Engaging with the atmosphere(s) Böhme’s development during the past two decades has departed more and more from the intended project of outlining a phenomenology of nature in cooperation with the natural sciences. Also, his return to Goethe does not suggest any notable progress in dealing with the topic. In his turn, Berleant has been engaged for years in a controversy with Allen Carlson, who is open to the positive contribution of sciences to the aesthetic experience,52 while Berleant regards the aesthetic and theoretic approach as distinct and even incompatible. On the whole, the phenomenology of weather still seems to be in the phase of a “sketch,” as Böhme himself put it, tentatively exploring its way forward. First impulses for the revitalisation of this project can come in my view from bringing previous valuable contributions in this field together, which also implies a rapprochement of

48 Ibid., 163–164. 49 Gernot Böhme, “Wolken und Wetter: Zu Goethes Meteorologie als Anfang einer Phänomenologie des Wetters,” in Leib: Die Natur, die wir selbst sind, ed. Gernot Böhme (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019), 128–139. 50 The concept of Befindlichkeit, previously borrowed by Böhme from Heidegger in order to avoid the psychological implications of the ‘sentiment,’ has receded in the meantime and Böhme follows Schmitz in speaking about Gefühle. 51 Böhme, “Das Wetter in der Sprache der Gefühle mit besonderer Berücksichtigung Goethes,” in Leib, 140–152. 52 See Allen Carlson’s Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 2000) and Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

Engaging with physical atmospheres: the aesthetics of weather  135 different cultural traditions.53 In general, the phenomenology of atmosphere represents a fertile approach to be set forth with some amendments regarding the integration of cognitive, social-communitarian and ethical-critical aspects. Only then can the aesthetics of atmosphere convert from a Romantic cloud-watching daydreaming to a propaedeutic for engaging in a responsible way with the atmosphere. Instead of misusing aesthetics, this would also open the perspective to a broader view of nature and a better understanding of our role within it. 5.1  Phenomenographies and their sources

Böhme’s analyses of the correlations between the weather condition and moods have a series of predecessors, with the geographer Willy Hellpach as probably the most famous of them.54 Accurate descriptions of physical atmospheres and of their effects can also be found not only in literature (a favourite example so far in the aesthetics of weather) but also in other traditional as well as modern discourses: weather sayings,55 memoirs by the pioneers of modern meteorology, studies in human geography, etc. If phenomenologists, from Merleau-Ponty to Tellenbach and Schmitz, invoke other people’s experiential reports in favour of their theories, then meteorologists and laypeople with strong interest in the weather (e.g., storm watchers and so-called “trusted spotters”) could also be asked about their motivations and experiences of special atmospheric events.56 No matter how legitimate the phenomenological distinction between different approaches to the same object may be, phenomenology certainly betrays its own commitment to experience as it is if it sacrifices the complexity of our experience of the weather for the sake of theoretical consistency. In other words, the aesthetics of weather should include descriptions of scientific observation, particularly as the meteorologists have to train their ability to discriminate various sensory clues and thus are even more “aisthetic” subjects than “disinterested” average individuals who trust weather apps instead of reading the sky. 5.2  Perception, emotion and cognition

In Berleant’s view, the aesthetic experience of natural environments engages all senses (and in particular kinaesthesia), as well as imagination and cultural symbolism. In turn, the phenomenology of atmosphere underlines the subject’s corporeal presence, perception and affectivity. Its emphasis on receptivity corresponds to a more general tendency in phenomenology to weaken the subject’s intentionality and to the emotional turn in other sciences, yet―in contrast to Berleant’s multifariously engaged subject―it ultimately

53 It is striking that no public dialogue took place between Berleant and Böhme, although they conducted correspondence. Only recently Benno Hinkes compared both, however, with respect to the built environments (Aisthetik der (gebauten) menschlichen Umwelt. Grundlagen einer künstlerisch-philosophischen Forschungspraxis, Bielefeld: transcript, 2017). 54 Willy Hellpach, Geopsyche. Die Menschenseele unterm Einfluß von Wetter und Klima, Boden und Landschaft (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1939). 55 See my paper “Experience, Knowledge and Appreciation in the Implicit Aesthetics of the Weather Lore,” Contemporary Aesthetics 15 (2017), http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article. php?articleID=805. 56 A beginning was made by Alexander Keul, Thomas Krennert, Thomas Hübner and myself in “Wissen, Erfahrung und Motivation österreichischer Citizen Science – Wetterbeobachter,” presentation at the 19. Austrian Climate Day, Salzburg, 23–25 April 2018.

136  Madalina Diaconu develops a “pathic aesthetics.”57 This is not devoid of problematic consequences for our topic, because aisthetics in its various versions often supports the imperative of cultivating sensitivity, which may lead us in the wrong direction when it comes to weather, for it would approve and favour meteosensitivity. Of course, raising sensitivity to the diversity of nature and awakening the sense of wonder that underlies even the average weather condition belong to the aims of the aisthetics of weather.58 However, sometimes it is precisely the scientific knowledge which may open our eyes to the most banal weather, let alone draw our attention to rare phenomena that we may otherwise overlook. That “atmospheric perception is perfected not so much through knowledge but rather by way of an exercise”59 is only half of the truth, for perception can be trained well by gaining proper knowledge. Therefore, the sciences of the atmosphere, as long as they are based upon observation, are able to refine our discriminative perception and by that increase the pleasure taken in spotting the weather condition, instead of compromising the aesthetic experience. It goes without saying that the aesthetic and the theoretical way go in parallel only briefly, ultimately having other goals and criteria of evaluation, but as long as they remain close, we ought not to artificially draw fences between them.60 The cases in which eco-dystrophy and environmental pollution are the real causes of apparently “beautiful” weather phenomena deserve separate discussion. According to the purism of modern aesthetics, the aesthetic appreciation of weather is entitled to remain untouched by ethical considerations; however, this contradicts the real practice. In my view, criteria already known in the environmental ethics, such as the functionality and “health” of ecosystems, may help environmental aesthetics to argue that environmental “ingenuity” can lead to problematic, if not incorrect aesthetic judgements. In this respect, the statement that, in contrast to art, there is “no privileged stance we should take to ‘properly’ appreciate a particular weather condition”61 has to be put into perspective―there is indeed no single “proper” way in the aesthetic appreciation of the weather, but there still are situations of improper aestheticism or of para-aesthetics, as when someone finds the smog poetic or admires aerosol sunsets, well knowing their causes and damaging effects. For those who would fear the covert reintroduction of an extrinsic normativity in the aesthetic appreciation, it suffices to recall here once again the everyday experience: the aesthetic theory may well distinguish analytically between various components (cognitive, emotional, vital, ethical, political, religious, etc.) that have repercussions on the evaluation, but in fact these alleged purely aesthetic and non-aesthetic criteria are all mingled together when the subject is immersed in the flow of the experience. This means that the judgement on (natural) beauty emerges quasi-spontaneously, as if it were prior to any reflection.62 However, we can discern here two situations: first, 57 Tonino Griffero, Places, Affordances, Atmospheres. A Pathic Aesthetics (London: Routledge, 2019). 58 See my paper, “Longing for the Clouds – Does Beautiful Weather Have to Be Fine,” Contemporary Aesthetics, 13 (2015), http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=719. 59 Griffero, Atmospheres, 19. 60 Holmes Rolston claims that in the future there will be no civic moral competence without ecological competence and environmental literacy and argues in favour of a reflected aesthetic attitude on nature: “the more we know the more is to see, and the more to be admired. Seeing becomes both wisdom and art” (Holmes Rolston III, Conserving Natural Value, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 122). 61 Yuriko Saito, “The Aesthetics of Weather,” in The Aesthetics of Everyday Life, eds. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 156–176, here 161. 62 In other words, the judgement of taste is not intellectual. This observation stems from the heritage Kant’s and of the British theory of taste in the eighteenth century.

Engaging with physical atmospheres: the aesthetics of weather  137 the average subjects who admire aerosol sunsets without knowing the cause of their vivid colours feel disappointed and even swindled as in the case of a “fake” once they receive this information; this common reaction is obviously different from rationally censoring a positive emotion as a result of moral deliberation. In general, small pieces of information are able to change the felt atmosphere, the experience of which is thus not totally deterministic, in terms of a univocal answer to the weather condition.63 In a second case, most subjects who would already know the causes of aerosol sunsets would presumably not develop a positive emotional response; deviations from this common reaction are possible, yet belong to what may be called an environmental para-aesthetics. To sum up, the aesthetics of physical atmospheres should underline the positive influence of cognition and in particular of meteorology on the everyday experience, including how one feels atmospheric qualities. This approach accounts not only for the complexity of experience―the subject being itself a knot of intricate relations no less than the environment―but also has implications for environmental ethics. The initiatives of motivating people to take a moral stance in environmental issues would expectedly be more effective if technical scientific information were supplemented by references to personal experience, interests, cultural stereotypes and emotional atmospheres. 5.3  Language, history and culture

One of the pillars of the phenomenology of atmosphere regards the analysis of language; in particular Schmitz and Böhme draw upon the terminological analogy between weather events and emotional states in common German, as well as in the early modern German literature. Such studies can be extended to other languages and inspire cross-cultural investigations. Related to this is the question regarding the relevance of the cultural context for the aesthetics of weather. A noteworthy beginning was made by Yuriko Saito’s examples from the classic Japanese literature.64 Further, the “same” phenomenal appearance may evoke different atmospheres not only person- and circumstance-dependent, but also varying with the general societal context; for example, a red cumulus cloud can be admired for its spectacular chromatic quality, yet it inspires for Joseph Beuys a diffuse Angst in the atomic age.65 The correspondences between physical and emotional atmospheres are not linear, but embedded in historical and cultural contexts that influence both our common perception and art.66 The universal and abstract individual subject of phenomenology exists only in plural. 5.4  Commons, community and commitment

In our age, the plural of “we” is even indispensable for introducing ecological commitment in the environmental aesthetics. Phenomenological aesthetics has seldom paid attention to the collective experience of “receiving” or making art. Meteorological events, however, take place per definitionem “in the open,” and are in principle accessible; there

63 Cf. Griffero, Atmospheres, 137. 64 Saito, “The Aesthetics of Weather.” 65 Beuys’s aquarelle “Red Cloud” (1956) was published in 1981 as offset print under the title “What does the cloud hide?” See its interpretation in Böhme, Aussichten der Natur, 76–80. 66 Cf. also Griffero: “it frankly seems impossible to entirely de-historicise atmospheric perception” (Atmospheres, 21).

138  Madalina Diaconu is no other more “public” experience than the perception of the weather. However, this common sense turns out to be treacherous as soon as we leave the terrain of generalities: we can well claim that the sun, the air and the sky belong to the perceptual commons67 and thus eventually to us all (which goes beyond the human living beings), but in practice the right to light and a proper air quality―including the right to see and feel the sky instead of having the view blocked by other buildings―has sometimes to be acquired and defended. Berleant’s sensitivity to this aspect might help phenomenological aesthetics to cope with environmental politics and the social regulation of perception. Whereas aesthetics traditionally laid stress on the individual contemplation, an aesthetics of weather that would keep the pace with the Anthropocene would have to find a way to complement it with the ethical and communitarian dimension of aesthetic experience. First, this would entail the inclusion of collective experiences of contemplating particular weather events.68 Second, the emphasis on the pleasure of contemplation risks endorsing a certain hedonism, as I suspect is still the case in the phenomenological aesthetics of atmosphere. The alternative would be to contextualise the aesthetic experience and not shy from asking why and how we do what we do and also if we have the right to do so with respect to the consequences of our actions; only so the weather experience can be integrated into processes of forming individual characters and sustainable social patterns. In my view, meteorological aesthetics should argue in favour of a reflected aesthetic attitude on weather, which would be inflected by both environmental sciences and art and build on the phenomenology of the body, the environmental aesthetics and the aesthetics of the atmosphere.

67 See Arnold Berleant, “The Aesthetic Politics of Environment,” in Aesthetics beyond the Arts (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 181–193. 68 Think of the tourists who gather in places where chances are higher to see polar lights. If they succeed, their common contemplation with its strong emotional intensity spontaneously coagulates unknown people into an aesthetic community.

9 Visual art and the reconstruction of the artist’s gesture Phenomenological arguments for an alternative mirror theory Helena De Preester Abstract  This contribution supports the idea that research on the beholder’s response to visual works of art benefits from recent suggestions from cognitive science about the role of embodied motor processes in experience. However, it argues that the current hypothesis of the beholder’s motor engagement that follows from the mirror neuron theory suffers from an inadequate view on the production of visual art, in particular with regard to the nature of the gestures involved. It therefore offers an account of the perception of visual works of art in which the role of embodied motor processes is central, but avoids a too “intentionalist” view on the artist’s gestures. Keywords  Visual Art; Embodied Cognition; Mirror Neurons; Phenomenology; Gesture But for us, who are our hands in their movements and who are the receivers of the result of these movements, the hands are the source of truth, beauty and value. Vilém Flusser1 Let us not forget that the stroke of the painter is something where a movement ends. […] We find ourselves in front of a motor element in the sense of a response, as it engenders, backwards, its own stimulus. Jacques Lacan2

1  Introduction: embodied cognition and the perception of visual art In Book 35 of his Natural History, Pliny the Elder distinguishes two lines that represent two poles of graphic meaning: the line of Parrhasios, inflecting itself into space and often serving the purpose of representation, and the line of Apelles, the trace of the artist’s

1 Vilém Flusser, Les Gestes (Cergy: D’ARTS Editeur & Paris: Editions Hors Commerce, 1999), 184. My translation of “Mais, pour nous, qui sommes les mains dans leurs mouvements et qui sommes les récepteurs du résultat de ces mouvements, les mains sont la source de la vérité, de la beauté et de la valeur.” 2 Jacques Lacan, Les Quatre Concepts Fondamentaux de la Psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 104. My translation of “N’oublions pas que la touche du peintre est quelque chose où se termine un mouvement. […] Nous nous trouvons devant l’élément moteur au sens de réponse, en tant qu’il engendre, en arrière, son propre stimulus.” DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-10

140  Helena De Preester gesture and as such a sign of the presence of the artist himself.3 Although these two “lines” are rather two dimensions of one single line, our perceptual focus can distinguish between them. Parrhasios’ line is the line as illusion of reality, the line as reference to a fictional object of representation. Apelles’ line is the line as the indexical trace of its creator, the permanent record of the act of the drawing hand. Both David Rosand and Nigel Wentworth4 elaborate the idea that the trace of the artist’s gesture enables the beholder of a work of art to imaginatively participate in its production. For Wentworth, in his phenomenology of painting, this partaking is part of our appreciating paintings. “Through learning to see the way it [a work of art] has been made to work, he [the beholder] comes to see it as the end-product of a process, thereby gaining some appreciation of that process.”5 Also from a phenomenological perspective, but discussing drawing, Rosand puts it more directly: “As the direct record of motions of the body, a drawing inevitably takes us back to the drawing hand, to the body of the draftsman, in a kinesthetic circuit.”6 It is primarily in relation to the line of Apelles that this imaginative re-enactment of the drawing gesture involves a reaction to the path of motion we follow, and to the particular qualities of the line, i.e., “the way in which it was drawn, the nature of the marker’s tracing, its material, the weight and velocity of the hand behind it, the physiognomy and affective resonance of the line.”7 This means that the line of Apelles gains value precisely in light of this imaginative projection of our own body to the drawing. For example, changes in density of the line are a manifestation of the velocity of the drawing gesture, or the thickening of a line may be a manifestation of a repeated gesture. The marks of the draftsman are physiognomically distinctive, similar to the way individual handwriting is distinctive. Like in the case of painting, a level of connoisseurship is necessary in order to recognise the individuality and the particularities of the style of a particular draftsman. This implies that our pre-reflective responses can embody more or less knowledge of how a draftsman draws a line. The shift to embodied theories of cognition in aesthetics is notable not only in reflections by artists, art historians, and philosophers, but also in a number of reflections by neuroscientists.8 In cognitive neuroscience, the theory of embodied cognition has made its way in reflections about the perception of visual works of art. This development has been prepared by neuroaesthetics, which studies the neural underpinnings of aesthetic experience, often with a focus on visual art.9

3 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1947). For an instructive account, see David Rosand, Drawing Acts – Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 4 See Rosand, Drawing Acts; Nigel Wentworth, The Phenomenology of Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 5 Wentworth, Phenomenology of Painting, 228. 6 Rosand, Drawing Acts, xxii. 7 Ibid., 3. 8 See, for example, work by Nigel Wentworth (painter), David Rosand (art historian), Paul Crowther (philosopher), and Vittorio Gallese (neuroscientist) in collaboration with David Freedberg (art historian). They all share a point of view influenced by phenomenology. 9 The term “neuroaesthetics” was coined by Semir Zeki in “Art and the Brain,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6/6–7 (1999): 76–96.

Visual art and the reconstruction of the artist’s gesture  141 A neuroscientific account recently applied to the perception of visual works of art and emphasising the importance of gestures is the mirror neuron theory.10 Freedberg and Gallese get back to the early idea that observers of paintings feel bodily engaged by the movements represented in the painting.11 They propose that this phenomenon can be explained on the basis of the mirror neuron system.12 In particular, the observation of an action, even when merely represented in a painting, would activate in the observer the same neural networks that are active during the execution of that action. This would be the case in particular for goal-oriented actions.13 In short, the identification of the representational content of a visual work of art is sometimes served by sensory-motor processes resonating with the movements represented in the work. It is clear that this kind of motor resonance does not capture the specificity of aesthetic experience,14 nor do all visual works of art represent movement. But Freedberg and Gallese also offer an embodied account that focuses on the movements or gestures behind a work of art. In other words, they also focus on the traces of the creation process, perceivable in the material or plastic qualities of a work of art, and thus comparable to the line of Apelles. They underline that the traces of the artist’s gestures must be explicitly present, as in “vigorous modelling,” “fast brushwork,” or other “signs of the movement of the hand.”15 Also, they see a substantial larger presence of the embodied empathic response to the artist’s gestures only in the perception of non-figurative modern and contemporary art. The reason is that, generally, in modern and contemporary art, artists no longer try to conceal the traces of their painting gestures in favour of the illusional quality of the (figurative) representation.16 Or, in terms of Pliny the Elder, the line of Apelles is no longer concealed in favour of the line of Parrhasios. When it comes to the response to the artist’s gestures, the mirror neuron hypothesis is straightforward: We propose that even the artist’s gestures in producing the art work induce the empathetic engagement of the observer, by activating simulation of the motor program that corresponds to the gesture implied by the trace. The marks on the painting or

10 See David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Science 11/5 (2007): 97–203; Vittorio Gallese, “Mirror Neurons and Art” in Art and the Senses, ed. Francesca Bacci and David Melcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 441–449. 11 See Robert Vischer, Über das optische Formgefühl: ein Beitrag zur Aesthetik. Dissertation, Tübingen (Leipzig: Hermann Credner, 1873); Theodor Lipps, Die ästhetische Betrachtung und die bildende Kunst (Hamburg/Leipzig: Verlag Voss, 1906); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945); English translation: Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York/London: Routledge, 1962). 12 The central finding of mirror neuron research is the discovery of so-called mirror neurons. In the original research on macaques, “mirror neurons are premotor neurons that fire when the monkey performs object-directed actions such as grasping, tearing, manipulating, holding, but also when the animal observes somebody else, either a conspecific or a human experimenter, performing the same class of actions” (Marco Iacoboni et al., “Grasping the Intentions of Others with One’s Own Mirror Neuron System,” Public Library of Science: Biology 3/3 (2005): 0525–0535; emphasis added). 13 Cf. Freedberg and Gallese, Motion, Emotion and Empathy. 14 Cf. Roberto Casati et al., “Mirror and Canonical Neurons are Not Constitutive of Aesthetic Response,” Trends in Cognitive Science 11/5 (2007): 410. 15 Freedberg and Gallese, Motion, Emotion and Empathy, 199. 16 Cf. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism (vol. 4), ed. John OʼBrian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993 [1960]), 85–93.

142  Helena De Preester sculpture are the visible traces of goal-directed movements; hence, they are capable of activating the relevant motor areas in the observer’s brain.17 The emphasis on the goal-directedness of movements is an essential characteristic of the mirror neuron theory. In a study by Leonardo Fogassi and colleagues, monkeys were trained to either grasp a piece of food in order to put it in their mouth, or grasp it in order to put it in a container positioned next to the monkey’s mouth.18 Mirror neurons responded preferentially and selectively to the goal of the action (grasping-to-eat versus grasping-to-place), not to the visual trajectory of the grasping movements, which was very similar in the two conditions. Mirror neurons thus primarily code over the goal of an observed action, not over the visual/sensory or motor features of an observed action. This finding explicates the idea that mirror neurons only respond to the observation of goal-directed movements, and further supports the idea that we can read the intention of the acting individual from the gestures we observe. Two aspects of this hypothesis will be under discussion in what follows. First, it will be argued that the gestures involved in artistic practice are not adequately characterised by focusing on the goal-directedness of the movements involved in drawing or painting. Second, it will be argued that an alternative characterisation of the artist’s gestures opens up the expressive dimension proper to them, and enables us to discuss some of the aesthetic aspects of the perception of works of art. The critique that the mirror neuron theory does not explain the specific aesthetic dimension of our perception of works of art is pertinent in our view, and we explain that this is partly due to an inadequate characterisation of the artist’s gesture implicit in the mirror neuron theory. In the following sections, we look at different phenomenological accounts of empathic engagement with the artist’s gestures and the issue of goal-directedness. We start with a general and high-level account offered by Edmund Husserl, and continue with more fine-grained and lower-level accounts by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and contemporary phenomenologists. 2  Edmund Husserl: empathy and artefacts Edmund Husserl identifies the need for empathic feelings in the perception of artefacts in a text originally from 1930.19 In this text, Husserl analyses our understanding of cultural products on the basis of our accessing the praxis that produced it. Empathy is a central element in this. “The remaining work, even when it does not come into being in front

17 Freedberg and Gallese, Motion, Emotion and Empathy, 201. 18 Leonardo Fogassi, et al., “Parietal Lobe: From Action Organization to Intention Understanding,” Science 308/5722 (2005): 662–667. 19 Edmund Husserl, Text nr. 37 “Grundmodi des Handelns und die zum Handeln gehörigen Horizonte: Momentanhorizont, eigentlich praktischer Horizont, Universalhorizont ‘Welt.’ Die Welt der Werke und Güter,” in Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 357–384. Henceforth cited as Hua XXXIX. Thanks to Christian Ferencz-Flatz for pointing out the existence of these passages. For a more elaborate analysis, see Helena De Preester, “The Role of the Artist’s Gesture in the Perception of Art and Artistic Style,” in Art and Science IX, Proceedings of a Special Focus Symposium on Art and Science, The 23rd International Conference on Systems Research, Informatics and Cybernetics, ed. George E. Lasker, Hiltrud Schinzel, Karel Boullart, Helena De Preester, and Jerry Galle (Tecumseh: The International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and Cybernetics, 2011), 15–19.

Visual art and the reconstruction of the artist’s gesture  143 of one’s very eyes, is originally understood on the basis of empathy, as originated from someone etc. acting.”20 When seeing cultural artefacts, we understand that they are made by someone, and that their shape is not accidental, but purposeful, pointing to the producer and the production process behind it. In another text, originally from 1932, Husserl explains this on the basis of the notions of appresentation and apperception.21 In appresentation, something (an object, a quality, a relation,…) is not directly or itself present, but only indirectly. Appresentation is the indirect presentation of something in perception. Husserl gives the example of perceiving something in front, e.g., a table, the perceptual meaning of which is always co-­determined by the appresentation of its backside, which we do not perceive directly. Cultural objects (such as books, houses, tools, and works of art) form a special case of appresentation. The reason is that we perceive them not only in their concrete, thingly, and sensory properties and qualities, but at the same time we apperceive them with cultural properties and qualities. When perceiving cultural objects, the people who have made these objects according to their intentions are apperceived, and also apperceived are people for whom these objects count as purposively made. Husserl’s description is interesting for its similarities and dissimilarities with the mirror neuron theory. First, his description is pertinent for the broad category of cultural, i.e., non-natural, human-made objects. What unites these cultural objects into a single category is the presence, or rather the appresentation, of fellow humans who intentionally made them. In other words, and similar to the mirror neuron theory, the perception (or rather the apperception) of a (past) intention is essential in the perception of something as a cultural object. Second, and also similar to the mirror neuron theory, when pointing out their rootedness in an intention, Husserl does not account for the specific aesthetic or artistic qualities of cultural objects. Third, Husserl’s description embraces a larger category of objects than the mirror neuron theory: the past actions are not limited to bodily actions or motor movements. The production process can also involve nonbodily, mechanical production, and mechanically produced objects are also perceived as cultural objects. What matters in order to count as a cultural object is the intention at the origin of the production chain. And finally, and also dissimilar to the mirror neuron theory, Husserl’s recognition of the appresented purposeful production process withholds us from narrowing down empathic perception to the straightforwardly visible traces of human activity. Husserl thus identifies a high-level characteristic shared by all cultural objects: the human intention behind them and our ability to somehow discern this intention when perceiving cultural objects. The central importance of the intention behind the work of art brings the mirror neuron theory close to Husserl’s account. Husserl, however, does not enter the details of the relation between the intention or goal behind a work, and the way in which the work manifests its production process. The mirror neuron theory does so and can therefore be considered a concrete account of a more general Husserlian idea, but limited to these cases where the object shows the visible traces of a past, intentional production process.

20 Hua XXXIX, 370; my translation of “Das bleibende Werk, auch wo es nicht vor seinen Augen ersteht, wird durch Einfühlung ursprünglich verstanden als früher, als von irgendjemand etc. handelnd entsprungen.” 21 Edmund Husserl, Text nr. 40 “Zur Theorie der Apperzeption: Perzeption und Apperzeption. Verschiedene Arten der Apperzeption,” Hua XXXIX, 409–437.

144  Helena De Preester However, the idea that in the work of art visual traces are the result of intentional or goal-directed gestures is questionable. In what follows, we argue that the intention behind a work of art, on the one hand, and what is visible in the traces, on the other hand, are to be situated on different levels. As a result, the visible traces of the gestures in works of art do not directly embody goal-directed or intentional states, as is claimed in the mirror neuron theory. 3  Maurice Merleau-Ponty: intention and expressiveness Reaching for a glass of water in order to drink and closing a door are clearly intentional and goal-directed movements, even when we execute these movements semi-­ automatically. Observing someone’s reaching for a glass or closing a door, we perceive these actions as resulting from the agent’s intention and thus as goal-directed. In this section we look at the goal-directedness proper to the artist’s gestures and argue that they are not without purpose, but neither are they goal-directed in a way similar to reaching for a glass of water or closing a door. In particular, we argue that the temporal relation between intention and action in the artists’ gesture is different from daily, functional gestures. We start with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of truly expressive gestures and his distinction between authentic speech (parole parlante) and second-order expression (parole parlée) in his Phenomenology of Perception. In authentic speech, the signifying intention is not formed beforehand, but nascent in the act of speaking itself, whereas in second-order expression the words are merely the externalisation of a thought or of a signifying intention already present and formed beforehand. “Thus [authentic] speech, in the speaker, does not translate ready-made thought, but accomplishes it.”22 Authentic speech is truly expressive and creative: meaning arises in the act of speaking itself and while searching for the right way of phrasing something that was only indeterminately present in one’s mind. Second-order expression is more functional, externalising a signifying intention that is ready-made in one’s mind. The indeterminate nature of the intention in authentic speech and the specific temporal relation between the act of speaking and intention are expounded in the following passage: If speech presupposed thought, if talking were primarily a matter of meeting the object through a cognitive intention or through a representation, we could not understand why thought tends towards expression as towards its completion, […], why the thinking subject himself is in a kind of ignorance of his thoughts so long as he has not formulated them for himself, or even spoken and written them, as is shown by the example of so many writers who begin a book without knowing exactly what they are going to put into it.23 From this passage, it is clear that the act of speaking does not refer back to a preformed intention, but to an indeterminate intention that pulls the speaking in order for the intention to become clearer. That the act of speaking tends towards its completion means that

22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la Perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 207; English translation: Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York/London: Routledge, 1962), 178. 23 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 206/177.

Visual art and the reconstruction of the artist’s gesture  145 it is pulled by the foresight of the completion of its intention or meaning. In the creative gesture, the meaning does not drive the gesture, but gesture and signifying intention come into being simultaneously. Mirror neuron theorists seem to share the idea that a movement translates a preformed goal or intention, and that this ready-made goal or intention can be read from the movement by the observer (cf. supra). In phenomenological terms, the mirror neuron theory seems to focus primarily on goal-directed movement in the sense of second-order expression. In Merleau-Ponty’s account, acts can be truly creative next to being a mere translation of a preformed intention. This may imply that the observation of truly creative acts does not witness the execution of a preformed intention, but rather the coming into being of an intention in a complex and dynamical process. 4  The artist’s gesture: phenomenological descriptions of intentionality The mirror neuron theory assumes that the marks on a painting are the visible traces of goal-directed movements. We think that this assumption follows from a too intentionalist description of the artistic production process and argue that the gestures of the artist cannot be understood as straightforward realisations of preformed intentions. Recent phenomenological descriptions of the artistic process agree that the artist’s gestures are not coded over an explicit goal. However, the rejection of an intentionalist analysis does not mean that a whole lot of decisions in artistic production (e.g., rough composition, genre, overall colour scheme, and things represented in a painting) are not planned ahead.24 In Husserlian terms, these planned decisions are probably apperceived in the perception of a work of art. When we zoom in, however, the picture changes, and the concrete gestures in drawing or painting are no longer guided by a preformed intention that determines the gesture. As Wentworth states, “[T]he painter does not know exactly what the end-product is to look like and so cannot intentionally work towards it.”25 This situation reminds us of what happens in authentic speech, which is not guided by a preformed signifying intention. The major differences between Wentworth’s phenomenological account and the mirror neuron theory account are twofold. Emphasising the pre-reflective nature of the activity of painting, Wentworth discusses the traces left by manipulating the brush. In contrast to Freedberg and Gallese,26 he does not limit these traces to the explicitly visible traces of the brush or the hand. Of course, in many paintings, e.g., those by Willem de Kooning, we almost literally see the brush that was used to work the paint. Georges Seurat’s brush, in contrast, in his later paintings “seems to cease to be a brush completely, appearing to become instead a mere

24 Cf. Wentworth, Phenomenology of Painting. 25 Ibid., 7. Wentworth’s description is not meant as a discussion with Stephen Davies’ analysis of the definitions of art―in Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (London: Cornell University Press, 1991)―in which intentionalist, functional and procedural approaches to the definition of art are discussed. His rejection of the intentionalist account of the painter’s practice does not mean that art’s nature is to be caught in a functional or procedural account, in which conventions of art stand above the artist’s intentions. The opposition is rather one between conscious, explicit and reflective decisions versus the pre-reflective, bodily dimension in the act of painting. 26 Freedberg and Gallese, Motion, Emotion and Empathy.

146  Helena De Preester marker, formal and devoid of sensuality.”27 But even in cases where the brush strokes are invisible, we cannot but apperceive the painting as being painted by someone, i.e., as the deliberate product of a human activity. This means that we understand the brush as trying to be invisible, and this invisibility is, as Wentworth remarks, clearly conspicuous. The gesture is thus “visible” not only in the brush strokes, but more generally in how paint is manipulated with the brush. This interaction between brush and paint manifests itself also when explicitly visible brush strokes are absent. Direct or explicit awareness of the brush strokes or the hand movements is thus not required, and is indeed largely absent when the painter, attaining the effect of illusion, conceals the visibility of his gestures in the paint. In short, what is at stake is how the paint has been worked, and this may or may not involve visible brush strokes, or other explicitly visible traces of instruments.28 How the paint has been worked always constitutes the visible trace of a gesture, also when the gesture itself is not visible in it. A second major difference between Wentworth’s account of the artist’s gesture and the mirror neuron theory is the following. Wentworth’s rejection of the intentionalist account of the painter’s activity is at odds with the mirror neuron theory emphasis that mirror neurons only respond to the observation of goal-directed movements, and that we can read the intention of the acting individual we observe. In Wentworth’s account, the gestures of the artist are not functional, i.e., not driven by an explicit intention. This lack of a preformed intention does not mean that the artist’s gestures are beyond her or his control or that they are not goal-directed in any sense. The artist’s gestures are part of a bodily dynamics that is embedded in a practice that is globally intentional, like making a particular painting, but on a more local level, the gestures are not directed by an explicit intention. The role of the brush makes this clear, since the brush is able to act out the wishes of the eye without thought; without the eye even looking or being able to see, for the brush is generally so large and thick, as well as in continual motion before the painter, that he cannot see exactly what it is doing. Yet it still manages to do as he bids, even with detailed work, almost as a new appendage of the body.29 What the observer of the painting therefore sees is, e.g., that the body of the painter is kept under control, like in the case of Seurat, who concentrates all his energy in the tip of the brush, whereas other paintings manifest to the beholder that the painter let her or his body loose in the activity of painting. That a practice is overall intentional, e.g., that the painter wanted to paint a still life of a fruit dish on a snow-white table cloth, is compatible with the locally pre-reflective and non-intentional nature of the artist’s gestures. Interestingly, the recognition and the understanding of a work of art share not only in the overall intentionality with the artistic practice but also in these pre-reflective, nonintentional features of the practice. The globally intentional nature is something a work

27 Wentworth, Phenomenology of Painting, 34. 28 The specific manipulation of the brush or any other tool is only one of the elements of the gesture of the artist. Together, the different elements make up the gesture of an artist and help explaining why no two visual artists have the same gesture and why each has a particular style. For a more elaborate analysis, see Wentworth, Phenomenology of Painting, and Rosand, Drawing Acts. 29 Wentworth, Phenomenology of Painting, 49. For a more elaborate analysis of the gesture, the materials, the plastic, and the figurative elements in painting, see Wentworth’s Phenomenology of Painting.

Visual art and the reconstruction of the artist’s gesture  147 of art shares with other cultural objects, and is in accordance with Husserl’s characterisation of empathy involved in the perception of cultural objects. The account of the local gestures, which are pre-reflective, embodied, and non-intentional, can be refined and further elaborated on the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s idea of authentic speech. 5  The artist’s gesture and its retrospective relation to an intention Both Wentworth and Merleau-Ponty emphasise that creative gestures are not preceded by a ready-made intention. But whereas Wentworth qualifies the artist’s gesture as not lead by a (local) intention but as part of an overall goal-directed practice, Merleau-Ponty holds on to the idea that an intention is born in the expressive gesture itself, which tends towards meaning as its goal. Although Merleau-Ponty is thinking about speech, his notion of “gestural meaning” is useful for explaining what happens when a gesture is not preceded by an intention, but nonetheless makes sense for an observer. There is, then [in the case of authentic speech], a taking up of others’ thought through speech, a reflection in others, an ability to think according to others which enriches our own thoughts. Here the meaning of words must be finally induced by the words themselves, or more exactly, their conceptual meaning must be formed by a kind of deduction from a gestural meaning, which is immanent in speech.30 In hearing authentic speech, we move along with the words and the coming into being of meaning in someone’s act of speaking. We resonate with the gestural meaning that is immanent in speech, not preceding speech in the form of an explicit intention or a preformed meaning. Gesture and meaning co-originate in the activity of speaking. Wentworth’s qualification of the artist’s gesture as pre-reflective can be further elaborated on this basis. The issue of temporality is the first step in this elaboration. MerleauPonty returns to this temporality proper to all truly expressive acts in a famous passage in Signs.31 Describing a slow-motion recording of Henri Matisse at work, he makes the comparison between the gesture of painting and the act of expressive speech, and points to their dissimilarity with functional movements. Expressive speech does not simply choose a sign for an already defined signification, as one goes to look for a hammer in order to drive a nail or for a claw to pull it out. It gropes around a significative intention which is not guided by any text, and which is precisely in the process of writing the text.32 In the same way, the gesture of the artist is expressive because the trace that will be produced by it is not represented beforehand in the mind of the painter; the gestures are led by “a significative intention” and it is only retrospectively possible to say that it was this mark or that trace that was intended. This constitutes at once the fundamental difference

30 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 208/179. 31 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960); English translation: Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). 32 Ibid., 47/46.

148  Helena De Preester with functional instrumental gestures, like hammering a nail, in which this retrospective dimension proper to expressive gestures is absent. Jacques Lacan suggests a similar retrospective relation between gesture and intention in painting.33 For Lacan, the gesture of a painter is a response that engenders, in a backward way, its own stimulus. The artist’s gesture is thus a response to a stimulus that does not yet exist, but that is precisely produced by the gesture. This is not merely an awkward reversal of the causal chain. It means that the artistic gesture is a proper way of expressing, since expression is a process in which the expressed “pulls” the gesture of expression. An expressive gesture can therefore only fail when the trace it produces turns out to be inadequate in relation to the expressive intention that arises in the gesture itself. A second step in the elaboration of the artist’s gesture is to return to drawing and the distinction between the two dimensions of a line, which helps us in clarifying further the intentional and the non-intentional aspects of the artist’s gesture. As Rosand explains, drawing is a matter of establishing a successful dialogue between some goal the draftsman has in mind and the own will of the line, which starts to assert itself as soon as the draftsman has started to draw the line. This is something painters and draftsmen time and again acknowledge: after a while, what happens on the surface commands the attention and the gestures of the artist. The emerging graphic construction asserts its autonomy and resists to the purpose of representation. Drawing thus clearly has an intentional dimension, sometimes counteracted by the medium and the material. If I want to represent two apples, my drawing movements are directed on the basis of this intention of representing two apples. The line of Parrhasios, serving representation, is thus a matter of intentional action. What happens in terms of the line of Apelles, however, is much more a matter of dynamical coupling between the drawing hand (or the body in the case of larger fields) and the medium of drawing. Here, the gestures of the hand are no longer intentional, although they remain goal-directed in the sense that the artist has the intention to make a particular work, e.g., painting two apples. The line of Apelles thus does not seem to match an intentionalist analysis, whereas the line of Parrhasios does. If I see two apples painted, I think the artist must have had the intention to represent two apples. The line of Apelles is globally guided by the goal that determines the line of Parrhasios, but also by the dynamic interplay of the artist’s gestures and the medium of drawing. It thus makes no sense to say that drawing, or painting, is intentional and reflective, or that it is not intentional and pre-reflective, because this depends on the perspective one takes: the line of Parrhasios or the line of Apelles. In reality, the artist’s gestures are both at the same time, exhibiting at the same time an overall intention that is preformed and realised in the activity of drawing or painting, and a reversed temporality that determines the expressivity of the artist’s gesture and in which an intention arises. This implies that the observation of truly creative acts does not only witness the execution of a global preformed intention, but also the coming into being of an intention in a complex and dynamical process that is acted out more locally. Consequently, it may be the case that in the observation of creative acts, we become co-creators of the meaning or the intention that is being formed in the artist’s gesture. It is this co-creative aspect that may contribute to the aesthetic dimension in the perception of works of art.

33 Lacan, Quatre Concepts, 104–105.

Visual art and the reconstruction of the artist’s gesture  149 6  An alternative mirror theory: kinematics and an a posteriori reconstruction The above account of the artist’s gesture does not support the idea that mirror neurons that code for a goal are active when observing a work of art. In particular, with reference to the line of Apelles, the idea that the mirror system is active on the basis of the coding of an action over a goal does not match the phenomenological descriptions. This does not rule out that a mirror system of some kind is active when observing expressive gestures. Before turning to the static traces of gestures, we have a brief look at the dynamical and live movements of dancers. Studies on watching dancers perform revealed that premotor areas show stronger activations when dancers watch dance movements that they can perform themselves, compared to movements not present in their repertoire.34 Interestingly, the observer’s brain is mostly active because of detailed movement parameters of the dancer’s movements. The response of the observers is driven by specific kinematic details of the movements observed. This contrasts with the approach of the mirror neuron theory, which focuses on goal-directed actions and states that the action is not primarily coded in terms of its kinematic parameters, but in terms of its goals or intentions.35 In the case of dance, motor understanding would thus primarily be based on representing the motor commands required to perform the movement in its kinematic details. The fact that activation is stronger in the case of movements belonging to one’s own repertoire suggests that understanding movement is deeply rooted in the motor capacities of one’s own body. In order to count as a distinct functional mirror system, the parts involved in the recognition of movement also have to be involved in movement generation. This means that it is not just about visual recognition, something recent studies in mirror neurons are rather ambiguous about.36 The results of studies on dancers point to an alternative mirror hypothesis, in which movements are coded in kinematic terms, and revivify the original mirror neuron idea that mirror circuits have a purely motor response over and above visual representations of action, meaning that we do not understand actions only by visual recognition, but on a motor basis. The perception of the static traces of an artist’s gestures poses a challenge for a motor account, because the observation of the gesture that has produced the visible trace is no longer possible. Only the static result is visible. A motor account is therefore faced with the problem that the drawn or painted trace is a static mark in relation to the dynamic gesture that has produced it. The recognition of handwritten letters is a nice example of this challenge. The recognition of handwritten letters would be possible on the basis of a “dynamic mental image of a letter,” or, more simply, on imagining the letter being drawn.37 This means that learning how the letters of an alphabet are written may be crucial for learning to read that alphabet. For example, Jennifer Freyd describes how she learned to read and write Japanese, and found that if I wanted my characters to be recognizable by native Japanese readers, correct stroke order was important. Printed Japanese characters have stylized indications 34 Beatriz Calvo-Merino, et al., “Seeing or Doing? Influence of Visual and Motor Familiarity in Action Observation,” Current Biology 16 (2006): 1905–1910; Beatriz Calvo-Merino, et al., “Towards a Sensorimotor Aesthetics of Performing Art,” Consciousness and Cognition 17 (2008): 911–922. 35 Cf. Iacoboni et al., “Grasping the Intentions of Others.” 36 Cf. Calvo-Merino et al., Seeing or Doing? 37 Jennifer Freyd, “Representing the Dynamics of a Static Form,” Memory and Cognition 11/4 (1983): 342– 346, here 343.

150  Helena De Preester of stroke order (thick and thin ends, etc.), and when hand-written they often also include thin strokes that only indicate ‘where the pen moved through the air’.38 This suggests that people use knowledge of dynamic processes in the perception of static forms. Knowledge of the production rules is a tacit form of knowledge about the implicit motor rules in handwriting. The recognition of handwriting seems to be based on the (imagined) production of the handwriting. In order to be able to recognise a handwritten alphabet, it seems necessary to be able to produce it. This situation is in agreement with an alternative mirror theory that focuses primarily not on the gesture’s goal but on its kinematics. First, the emphasis is on the motor nature of the form produced, in particular the kinematics of the written letters. Second, there is a strong resemblance with the results found in the case of dancers: movements present in one’s own repertoire support motor understanding of the observed movement or trace. Third, a recent study explored the idea that an observer is sensitive to differences in the static traces of drawings produced by a human and by a robot, even when the drawings of the human and the robot agent only differ in subtle kinematic cues.39 Recent studies support this approach. Knoblich and colleagues show that the more an observed action resembles the way one would carry out the action oneself, the more accurate the simulation of that action.40 Importantly, the activation of the motor codes attached to the visual representation “results in a prediction of the action in terms of future events.”41 This is unlike the idea of a predictive chain in the mirror neuron theory,42 because the prediction does not happen on the basis of the assumption of a goal, but on the basis of the form produced by the movement. This means that a static form may be understood or recognised on the basis of a kind of reverse engineering: the perceived form activates the relevant motor codes and these motor codes lead to a prediction of the resulting form, which matches the observed form in case of success. Similar observations are made in studying handwriting: […] because handwritten letters are static stimuli in which the movement is ascribed to the actor long time after the action has taken place, our data confirm that the brain is able to ‘reconstruct’ the action a posteriori on the basis of static information.43 In short, what happens in the perception of a static form is a simulation of the dynamical process that gave rise to it, and when there is sufficient match between the perceived form and the anticipated or predicted form, recognition of the (static) form occurs. 38 Ibid., 343. 39 Cf. Helena De Preester and Manos Tsakiris, “Sensitivity to Differences in the Motor Origin of Drawings: From Human to Robot,” PLoS ONE 9/7 (2014): e102318. 40 Günther Knoblich, et al., “Authorship Effects in the Prediction of Handwriting Strokes: Evidence for Action Simulation During Action Perception,” The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 55A/3 (2002): 1027–1046. 41 Ibid., 1031. 42 Cf. Iacoboni et al., Grasping the Intentions of Others. 43 Marieke Longcamp, et al., “The Imprint of Action: Motor Cortex Involvement in Visual Perception of Handwritten Letters,” NeuroImage 33 (2006): 681–688, here 687. See also Marieke Longcamp, et al., “Premotor Activations in Response to Visually Presented Single Letters Depend on the Hand Used to Write: A Study on Left-Handers,” Neuropsychologia 43 (2005a): 1801–1809; Marieke Longcamp, et al., “The Influence of Writing Practice on Letter Recognition in Preschool Children: A Comparison Between Handwriting and Typing,” Acta Psychologica 199 (2005b): 1801–1809.

Visual art and the reconstruction of the artist’s gesture  151 The activation of motor codes is thus not sufficient. An additional assumption is necessary, namely that the activation of motor codes leads to a prediction of future results of the movement. The so-called “forward model” by Chris Frith provides the basis for this additional assumption of sensory prediction44 and is relevant for the elaboration of a broader perspective in which our faculty of imagination is inherently motor-based.45 A logical consequence of this hypothesis is indeed that action simulation is more accurate for actions that are part of one’s own motor repertoire because prediction of the sensory consequences of one’s own movement is more accurate. This may help explain why there are so many different degrees of connoisseurship in aesthetic perception, since aesthetic perception, in this account, requires a certain degree of familiarity – practical or at least theoretical – with the way the work has been produced. At this point, we have to clarify a possible misunderstanding of the term “simulation” as we use it in the present context. Freedberg and Gallese interpret the activation of mirror neurons in terms of simulation theory, i.e., they conceive of empathy as a projection onto others of inner modellings or representations.46 This simulation approach has been criticised from phenomenological and enactivist perspectives,47 arguing that simulation cannot be a sub-personal process. Alternatively, they defend a perceptual model of neural resonance that is not incompatible with the account offered here. However, the focus of Gallagher when he criticises the account of Freedberg and Gallese is on the representation of others and their movements,48 not on the traces of the dynamic process that gave rise to the drawing or painting. In considering the perception of the traces of gestures, we came across another use of the term “simulation,” namely as used by neuroscientists to refer to motor control processes for action planning. Frith’s forward model mentioned above is an example of this, and the way his model can be applied to the traces of gestures does not face some of the problems faced by simulationist interpretations. For instance, we do not have to meet the pretense condition implied in the simulationist approach: there is no “as if it were I” involved in our account. A fortiori, bodily motor resonance does not have to be attributed to myself or another. The motor resonance is not a simulation (in the sense of simulation theory) of the gestures of the other, but rather mediates the perception of the traces of the other.49 We gain two insights from the above. First, static traces carry information about their production in terms of the kinematic parameters of the gestures behind it. The kinematics of a gesture are determining for many plastic elements of a visual work of art, for the working of paint and the drawing of lines, and thus for the way lines, composition, tone,

44 Cf. Chris Frith, The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1992); Chris Frith, et al., “Abnormalities in the Awareness and Control of Actions,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences 355/1404 (2000): 1771–1788. 45 Cf. Helena De Preester, “The Sensory Component of Imagination: The Motor Theory of Imagination as a Present-Day Solution to Sartre’s Critique,” Philosophical Psychology 25/4 (2012): 503–520. 46 Cf. Freedberg and Gallese, Motion, Emotion and Empathy. 47 See Thomas Fuchs, “Levels of Empathy – Primary, Extended, and Reiterated Empathy,” in Empathy, ed. Vanessa Lux and Sigrid Weigel (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 27–47; Shaun Gallagher, “Simulation Trouble,” Social Neuroscience 2/3–4 (2007): 353–365; Shaun Gallagher, “Aesthetics and Kinaesthetics,” in Sehen und Handeln, ed. John Krois and Horst Bredekamp (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 99–113. 48 Cf. Gallagher, “Aesthetics and Kinaesthetics.” 49 For more details of this discussion, cf. Gallagher, “Aesthetics and Kinaesthetics”; Gallagher, Simulation Trouble, and Fuchs, Levels of Empathy.

152  Helena De Preester and colour behave, and for the dialectics between medium and material.50 In short, the basis of expressive force in a visual work of art is how the plastic elements, including things like colour, line, tone, texture, form, and composition, are worked by the artist’s gestures. Second, there is converging evidence that the perception of handwritten letters and other static traces that are the result of dynamical processes implies an internal motor simulation of the way they are produced, a strategy that includes an a posteriori reconstruction of the visual outcome. Kinematic parameters are guiding the observer in this task. Nonetheless, there is also an important dissimilarity between the recognition of handwriting and the recognition of the traces of an artist’s gesture. As explained higher, in the artist’s gesture, the intention arises in the gesture itself, whereas we can assume that handwriting, like many other functional movements, is guided by preformed intentions. One could say that the a posteriori reconstruction of the artist’s gesture is therefore more creative than the a posteriori reconstruction of handwriting, even if both are based on the kinematic parameters of a static trace. 7 Conclusions The focus of this contribution was on so-called traditional artistic images, i.e., images produced by the human hand and not by apparatuses (non-technical images).51 A major part of artistic creation nowadays is no longer traditional in that sense, and it remains to be investigated what the consequences are both for our faculty of imagination and for our aesthetic perception and appreciation of technical images. With regard to traditional works of art, i.e., drawings and paintings produced by hand, we have argued for the following. First, we argued that the gestures involved in artistic practice are not adequately characterised by assuming that they are goal-directed. Although a high-level, empathic understanding of intentions is important in the perception of cultural objects (cf. Husserl’s account), the idea that visible traces in a work of art are the result of the artist’s intentions is questionable. In Merleau-Ponty’s account, truly creative gestures are not a mere translation of a preformed intention. The rejection of a too intentionalist account of the artist’s gesture has led to the recognition that the globally intentional nature of an artistic practice is compatible with the idea that the artist’s gestures are locally pre-reflective and non-intentional. Second, we argued that an alternative characterisation of the artist’s gestures opens up the expressive dimension proper to them, and enables us to discuss some of the aesthetic aspects of the perception of works of art. The alternative characterisation was led by the idea that the artist’s gestures have a temporality that differs from the temporality of functional gestures. The trace that will be produced by the artist’s gesture is not represented beforehand in the mind of the painter. Therefore, it is only retrospectively possible to say that it was this mark or that trace that was intended. We further specified the artist’s gesture by explaining that the line of Parrhasios, serving representation, can be considered as a matter of intentional action, but that what happens in terms of the line of Apelles

50 Cf. Wentworth, Phenomenology of Painting, for a phenomenological description. 51 For an account of the technical image, cf. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Visual art and the reconstruction of the artist’s gesture  153 cannot be understood in terms of preformed intentions. This implies that the observation of truly creative acts does not only witness the execution of a preformed intention (cf. the line of Parrhasios), but also the coming into being of an intention in a complex and dynamical embodied process (cf. the line of Apelles). Consequently, it may be the case that in the observation of creative traces, we become co-creators of the meaning or the intention that was being formed in the artist’s gesture. It is this co-creative aspect that might contribute to the specific aesthetic dimension in the perception of works of art. Finally, we argued for an alternative mirror account in which static traces carry information about their production in terms of the kinematic parameters of the gestures behind it. The perception of static traces that are the result of dynamical processes implies an internal motor simulation of the way they are produced, a strategy that includes an a posteriori reconstruction of the gesture and its visible results. Kinematic parameters are guiding the observer in this task. We concluded with the remark that the a posteriori reconstruction of the artist’s gesture is probably more creative than the a posteriori reconstruction of functional gestures like handwriting, because of the temporality proper to the artist’s gesture. Acknowledgements This chapter was funded by a research grant from KASK & Conservatory, the School of Arts of HoGent and Howest, part of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts (BE).

10 Schizophrenia, music therapy, and getting into “Groove” Michelle Maiese

Abstract  Available evidence suggests that when used in conjunction with standard care, music therapy can significantly reduce symptoms, improve social functioning, and lead to global improvement among subjects suffering from schizophrenia. But why? I argue that the structure of music together with the bodily entrainment involved in both listening and playing can help to restore selective attention, reintegrate the subject into the social world, and foster a more coherent sense of self. Particularly when such therapy involves collaborative improvisation, it helps subjects’ cognitive and perceptual processes become more well-integrated. 1 Introduction A patient is diagnosed with schizophrenia if they exhibit at least two of the following symptoms for at least one month: “positive” symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, and catatonic behavior; and “negative symptoms” such as flattened affect, alogia, or avolition. Phenomenological psychopathology assumes that there is some “underlying characteristic modification” of the world of experience that ties together these seemingly diverse symptoms of schizophrenia into a meaningful whole (a structure or Gestalt).1 After all, “negative” symptoms typically do not occur in isolation or as straightforward deficit states; instead, they go hand in hand with “positive” aberrations.2 Symptoms such as poverty of speech and a general inattentiveness to one’s surroundings are accompanied by disturbances in cognition, hallucinations, and hyperreflexive awareness of body sensations that ordinarily lie in the background. To provide a richer description and explanation of characteristic symptoms and their interrelation, we need to look beyond brain mechanisms, try to understand the “deeper” phenomena that are at work,3 and investigate how these symptoms are experienced by subjects. But how are they myriad of symptoms associated with in schizophrenia interconnected? A growing number of theorists have begun to emphasize that schizophrenia is characterized by anomalous self-experience and a diminished sense of self. This focus on self-disturbances has historical roots in the work of theorists such as Bleuler, Kraeplein,

1 Giovanni Stanghellini, “Phenomenological Psychopathology, Profundity, and Schizophrenia,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 18/2 (2011): 163–166, here 164. 2 Louis Sass and Josef Parnas, “Phenomenology of Self-disturbances in Schizophrenia: Some Research Findings and Directions,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8/4 (2001): 347–356, here 350. 3 Stanghellini, “Phenomenological Psychopathology, Profundity, and Schizophrenia,” 164. DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-11

Schizophrenia, music therapy, and getting into “Groove”  155 Minkowski, and Blankenburg; and more recently, Parnas and Sass4 have argued that disturbed ipseity represents the primary disorder of schizophrenia. Many of the “basic symptoms” that characterize the prodromal phases of schizophrenia, such as depersonalization, distorted bodily experiences, and subtle cognitive and perceptual disturbances, reflect aberrations in self-experience. Study of these experiences via the Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience (EASE) developed by Parnas, Møller, and Kircher et al.5 has revealed that the presence of these sorts of non-psychotic disturbances distinguishes schizophrenia from other clinical disorders;6 and positive symptoms (such as delusion) and negative symptoms (such as flattened affect) further reveal a disruption in the sense of self. Following in this tradition, I argue that an altered sense of selfhood is the primary disorder of schizophrenia, and that it can be traced, in large part, to a disruption in selective attention. Because subjects with schizophrenia have difficulty integrating contextual information and gauging relevance, their cognitive and perceptual processes become fragmented and they experience a lack of self-coherence. This leads to bodily alienation, so-called “unworlding,” social desynchronization, delusions, and language disturbances. How should we attempt to treat these disruptions to the sense of self and restore selective attention? Medication, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), and other modes of talk therapy continue to be the most common treatments for schizophrenia. While I acknowledge the potential benefits of such methods, it is important to recognize some of their limitations. While drug-centered approaches target brain chemistry, there is a danger that they do not address the subjective meaning that symptoms have for the patient or take into account anomalous bodily experiences. And while talk therapies target thinking patterns, they may not be very effective for subjects whose cognitive processes are seriously disjointed. What we need, I argue, are supplementary “bottom-up” methods that more directly target bodily experience to alter higher-level cognitive functioning. Novel strategies that emphasize affective, experiential, and behavioral processes7 hold great potential to strengthen selective attention and help subjects develop a more coherent sense of self. One “bottom-up” intervention that deserves further consideration is music therapy. The receptive modality allows subjects to listen to music, while the active modality invites subjects to play or sing, whether through improvisation or the reproduction of songs. Results from a (2017) Cochrane review8 suggest that when used in conjunction with standard care, music therapy can significantly reduce symptoms, improve social functioning, and lead to global improvement among subjects suffering from schizophrenia. But why? I propose that the structure of music together with the bodily entrainment involved in both

4 Josef Parnas and Louis Sass, “Self, Solipsism and Schizophrenic Delusions,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8 (2001): 101–120. 5 Josef Parnas, Paul Møller, Tilo Kircher, Jørgen Thalbitzer, Lennart Jansson, Peter Handest, and Dan Zahavi, “EASE: Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience,” Psychopathology 38/5 (2005): 236–258. 6 See, for example, Mad Gram Henriksen and Josef Parnas, “Clinical Manifestations of Self-disorders and the Gestalt of Schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 38/4 (2012): 657–660; Louis Sass, “Self-Disturbance and Schizophrenia: Structure, Specificity, and Pathogenesis,” Schizophrenia Research 152 (2014): 5–11. 7 Thomas Fuchs and Frank Röhricht, “Schizophrenia and Intersubjectivity: An Embodied and Enactive Approach to Psychopathology and Psychotherapy,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 24/2 (2017): 127– 142, here 137. 8 Monika Geretsegger, Karin Mössler, Łucja Bieleninik, Xi‐Jing Chen, Tor Olav Heldal, and Christian Gold, “Music Therapy for People with Schizophrenia and Schizophrenia‐like Disorders,” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 5/5 (2017): CD004025.

156  Michelle Maiese listening and playing can help to restore selective attention, reintegrate the subject into the social world, and foster a more coherent sense of self. Particularly when such therapy involves collaborative improvisation, it helps subjects’ cognitive and perceptual processes become more well-integrated. I utilize Solli’s9 description of a patient named Paul to help illustrate these potential benefits. 2  Disturbed ipseity and disruptions to selective attention Characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia include bodily alienation, “unworlding,” social desynchronization, delusions, and language disturbances. Following theorists who have described schizophrenia as a “disorder of ipseity,” I maintain that underlying the seemingly diverse signs and symptoms of schizophrenia is an altered sense of selfhood, which can be traced, in large part, to a disruption in selective attention at a pre-reflective level. Stanghellini and Ballerini10 point to the loss of bodily attunement that appears to be central to the distorted sense of self among subjects suffering from schizophrenia. Subjects often have a sense of depersonalization and experience a loss of ease in their actions, changes to body morphology, and an increasing sense of distance from their own bodies. Many subjects report not feeling fully or vitally in touch with their bodily dynamics, movements, postures, and expressions. Sometimes they also undergo “morbid objectification,”11 which involves attributing “thingness” to their own body and dismissing its emotional qualities. Schizophrenia appears to involve a disorder of coenaesthesia, or what might be described as an impairment of the “functional symphony” in which all of a subject’s various sensations are synthesized.12 Because intermodal integration of signals begins to break down, integrated perception of one’s surroundings becomes very difficult. Subjects may experience a lack of contact between various parts of the body, and sometimes report that “they feel their limbs detached from the prime initiator” of movement and experience their actions as “detached from the energy that should spontaneously feed it.”13 As a result of this crisis of sensory self-consciousness, some subjects begin to feel deanimated and devitalized and have a sense that they are observing their own mental processes from the outside. In addition, their immediate experience of thinking may be replaced by a second-order noetic awareness of perceiving that they are thinking,14 and they may begin to describe themselves as mere spectators or scanners of their own mental states. This objectification of thoughts and mental states may very well contribute to the phenomenon of thought insertion, in which subjects describe thoughts in their minds as not their own. Such self-detachment can also lead to an impaired capacity for cognitive engagement with one’s surroundings and experiences of derealization and “unworlding”: there is a

9 Hans Petter Solli, “‘Shut Up and Play!’: Improvisational Use of Popular Music for a Man with Schizophrenia,” Nordic Journal of Music Therapy 17/1 (2008): 67–77. 10 Giovanni Stanghellini and Massimo Ballereni, “Autism: Disembodied Existence,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 11/3 (2004): 259–268. 11 Ibid., 263. 12 Giovanni Stanghellini, Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies: The Psychopathology of Common Sense (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 13 Ibid., 157. 14 Ibid., 19.

Schizophrenia, music therapy, and getting into “Groove”  157 sense of strangeness about external objects that ordinarily would seem familiar and the cognitive or perceptual world undergoes fragmentation. Many subjects find themselves less able to engage with and “grasp” their surroundings and report that objects seem to lack their recognizable significance and relevance. Along these lines, Minkowski and Targowla point to “pragmatic weakening” and a loss of vital contact with reality15; and Stanghellini maintains that schizophrenia centrally involves a disruption of one’s basic indwelling and engagement with the world: things no longer “directly and immediately relate to [one’s] body as existentially relative utensils,”16 but instead appear devoid of meaning and may even become image-like and ghostly. Patients begin to feel cut off from the external world and experience their surroundings as a distant spectacle rather than “as a terrain of personally relevant opportunity and risk.”17 In addition, spatial and temporal relations undergo a profound change, and subjects have a sense that objects do not have a causal relationship with each other, nor with their own body. As for language disturbances commonly found in schizophrenia, they include the repetition of phrases, frequent uncompleted sentences, and the production of neologisms. There is also a loss of “common sense” in the social world and an inability to gauge how to interact with others within a particular context. Loss of attunement and responsiveness in social encounters often leads to social alienation: the behavior of others comes to be observed from a distant, third-person point of view rather than centrally involving embodied, second-person interaction.18 Social interactions ordinarily involve shared meanings that are produced by circular processes of action and mutual perception, as well as a background sense of trust: the underlying assumption is that we live in a world with shared values and expectations and reliable “rules of the game.”19 But for subjects suffering from schizophrenia, other people’s gestures often become movements without significance and begin to seem artificial and detached from reality. People and actions may seem to be stripped of their recognizable “affordances,” which can result in feelings of anxiety, wonderment, or awe. In addition, subjects sometimes experience a kind of temporal disintegration and disruptions to the “timing” of face-to-face interactions,20 resulting in social desynchronization. I argue that taken together, these characteristic features of schizophrenia indicate a general difficulty with selective attention. Integrating bodily sensations, perceiving one’s surroundings, processing linguistic stimuli, and engaging interpersonally with others, all require the inhibition of irrelevant information and the ability to attend selectively to what is contextually significant. However, subjects with schizophrenia exhibit an overall inability to coordinate and integrate contextual information in various cognitive domains. Because their Gestalt organizational processes are impaired, they experience “basic deficits in the perceptual organization processes that normally bind elements into

15 Eugene Minkowski and R. Targowla, “A Contribution to the Study of Autism: The Interrogative Attitude,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8/4 (2001): 271–278. 16 Stanghellini, Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies, 194. 17 Louis Sass, “Contradictions of Emotion in Schizophrenia,” Cognition and Emotion 21/2 (2007): 351–390, here 372. 18 Fuchs and Röhricht, “Schizophrenia and Intersubjectivity,” 133. 19 Ibid., 135. 20 Joel Krueger, “Schizophrenia and the Scaffolded Self,” Topoi 39/3 (2020): 597–609.

158  Michelle Maiese a context-appropriate coherent whole.”21 This results in fragmentation of perceptual and motor schemas and a loss of sensorimotor coherence: if “the regulator that funnels certain information to you and filters out other information suddenly shuts off”22 then every sight, sound, and smell will begin to carry equal weight, and every thought, feeling, memory, and idea will present itself with equally demanding intensity. Subjects with schizophrenia often are unable to gauge which thoughts, feelings, and ideas should come to the forefront of awareness, and these difficulties with selective attention interfere with the integration of contextual information, making it difficult for them to focus on relevant features of their surroundings. This, in turn, interferes with their ability to form a coherent perspective or sense of self. Along these lines, Elyn Saks describes a conversation that she had with her father one day when she was a child. She asks to go out to the cabana to go swimming, he scolds her for not listening, and she fears she’s disappointed him. And then, she says, something odd happens: “My awareness (of myself, of him, of the room, of the physical reality around and beyond us) instantly grows fuzzy. Or wobbly. I think I am dissolving.”23 In periods of what Saks calls “disorganization,” consciousness loses its coherence, one’s sense of self becomes hazy, and “the solid center from which one experiences reality breaks up like a bad radio signal.”24 A breakdown in selective attention thereby contributes to a loss of a coherent perspective, so that there is no “sturdy vantage point” or core to hold things together or to provide a “lens through which to see the world, to make judgments and comprehend risk.”25 Without an “organizing principle” to focus attention and put together successive moments in time in a meaningful way, the subject experiences sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings as random and unconnected. As a result, they may begin to feel alienated from their bodily experiences or attend explicitly to implicit aspects of bodily experience that ordinarily remain in the background, potentially resulting in socalled “hyperreflexivity.” This diminished capacity for gauging relevance also causes the subject to lose their grasp of the surrounding world. Just as the “me” becomes a haze, the world lacks a solid center and becomes fuzzy and wobbly. Devoid of their relation to one’s body, objects are experienced “merely as geometric, disembodied entities distributed within a purely geometric space”26 rather than as things with practical relevance. Some subjects experience deficits in perceptual grouping, so that objects do not stand together in an overall context and instead appear as meaningless details. They also have difficulty excluding distracting visual, auditory, and tactile input when trying to concentrate on selected parts of the environment.27 As a result, irrelevant elements of a given situation that normally would lie in the background take on hyper-significance and “begin to adopt a meaningful, sinister,

21 Jean-Remy Martin and Elisabeth Pacherie, “Out of Nowhere: Thought Insertion, Ownership, and ContextIntegration,” Consciousness and Cognition 22 (2013): 111–222, here 114. 22 Elyn Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (New York: Hyperion, 2007), 299. 23 Ibid., 12. 24 Ibid., 13. 25 Ibid., 13. 26 Giovanni Stanghellini, “Common Sense, Disembodiment, and Schizophrenic Delusions,” in Giancarlo Dimaggio and Paul Lysaker, eds., Metacognition and Severe Mental Adult Mental Disorders: From Research to Treatment (New York: Routledge, 2010), 134–149, here 146. 27 Brendan Maher, “Schizophrenia, Aberrant Utterance, and Delusions of Control: The Disconnection of Speech and Thought, and the Connection of Experience and Belief,” Mind & Language 18/1 (2003): 1–22, here 14.

Schizophrenia, music therapy, and getting into “Groove”  159 and threatening character.”28 Even other people may be encountered as fragmented constellations of unrelated bits,29 and when social situations begin to lack their recognizable significance and relevance, the subject may lose their sense of connection with others. In addition, subjects suffering from schizophrenia have difficulty processing contextual information related to linguistic stimuli, as well as information related to events to be stored in memory. Single elements of language or the perceptual field lose their function as carriers of intentional meaning and stand out separately from the background.30 Maher maintains that these disturbances are caused “by defective deployment of inhibitory activity necessary to exclude intrusions.”31 The ability to speak a sequence of words in a sentence is made possible by the ability to inhibit associations for each separate word, as well as the ability to screen out external sources such as the speech of others. In order to inhibit “irrelevant” input and screen out unneeded information, individuals must have some way of gauging what input is important. However, because schizophrenic subjects are deficient in these inhibition mechanisms and find it difficult to focus their attention on relevant contextual features, they are highly susceptible to intrusions, internal and external distractions, and word associations that are not relevant to the case at hand. Even the meaning of words may become abstract and divorced from context, which can result in so-called “word salad” and the overall jumble of speech. Consider the following examples from Saks: I’m being pushed into a grave, the situation is grave […]. Gravity is pulling me down. They’re all trying to kill me.32 I’m just kidding around […]. Kidding has to do with sheep. I’m sheepish. Have you ever killed anyone? I’ve killed lots of people with my thoughts.33 These characteristics, signs, and symptoms of schizophrenia indicate a profound alteration to lived experience. Because subjects with schizophrenia find it difficult to process contextual information and attend selectively to their surroundings, their perceptions, thoughts, and actions lose their structure and become disorganized and incoherent. 3  Standard treatments and the need for supplementary methods Common treatments for schizophrenia include medication, CBT, and other modes of talk therapy. While these treatment modalities sometimes prove to be quite effective, it is important to acknowledge some of their limitations. First, there is evidence that antipsychotic medications are not sufficiently effective in managing the debilitating symptoms of schizophrenia, such as delusions, hallucinations, and thought insertion. Many patients on medication continue to experience psychotic symptoms throughout their lifetimes,34 and also suffer from serious negative side effects, 28 Fuchs and Röhricht, “Schizophrenia and Intersubjectivity,” 135. 29 Krueger, “Schizophrenia and the Scaffolded Self.” 30 Fuchs and Röhricht, “Schizophrenia and Intersubjectivity,” 132. 31 Maher, “Schizophrenia, Aberrant Utterance, and Delusions of Control,” 19. 32 Saks, The Center Cannot Hold, 228. 33 Ibid., 215. 34 Stephen Pilling, P. Bebbington, E. Kuipers, P. Garety, J. Geddes, G. Orbach, and C. Morgan, “Psychological Treatments in Schizophrenia: Meta-analysis of Family Intervention and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy,” Psychological Medicine 32/5 (2002): 763–782.

160  Michelle Maiese including apathy, muscle stiffness, weight gain, tremors, and even cerebral abnormalities.35 Moreover, drug-centered approaches focused on brain chemistry do not sufficiently address subjective meanings, and medication alone does not help patients to develop coping skills or gain any sort of insight into their condition. One alternative treatment, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), helps subjects examine the relationships between their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors so that they can modify their thinking patterns and reduce the frequency, intensity, and duration of symptoms. By reflecting on and then modifying their patterns of thinking, subjects can learn to avoid self-destructive actions and beliefs, and some studies have found that CBT reduces the frequency of hallucinations and delusions36 and can be effective even in cases where medication is not used.37 However, as Škodlar and colleagues38 point out, there is good reason to think that CBT has certain limitations given its theoretical premises. CBT approaches delusions as if they were false or dysfunctional beliefs and encourages patients to evaluate these beliefs and adopt alternative ones. The role of immediate experience, sensations, and emotions is seen as secondary or not addressed at all.39 CBT thereby overlooks ways in which anomalous self-experiences can be explored and dealt with directly in psychotherapy. In addition, there is a worry that CBT’s focus on restructuring dysfunctional cognitions actually may “feed into” hyperreflexive processes and encourage inner vigilance and selfmonitoring,40 ultimately exacerbating a subject’s positive symptoms. Moreover, a therapeutic approach that focuses on changing a subject’s false beliefs will “fail to touch the essential nature of the experiences” or address their “profoundly felt altered reality.”41 Delusions are not interpretations or particular beliefs existing in isolation, but instead “reflect a global reorganization of consciousness, an altered, overall framework of experiencing and believing”42 and a profound existential reorientation.43 Another common treatment is the so-called “talking cure,” which gives subjects an opportunity to discuss issues, feelings, and life events and thereby gain insight into their experiences. Some theorists have maintained that phenomenologically informed psychotherapy centers around the therapeutic relationship and the use of dialogue and narrative. Such dialogue can establish an empathetic bridge between therapist and patient and allow the subject with schizophrenia to feel recognized, understood, and accepted. The you-and-I relationship involves feelings of “being-there” and mutual bodily presence that can alleviate feelings of depersonalization, and the mutual recognition that is established

35 Joanna Moncrieff and Jonathan Leo, “A Systematic Review of the Effects of Antipsychotic Drugs on Brain Volume,” Psychological Medicine 40 (2010): 1409–1422. 36 Anthony Morrison et al., “Cognitive Therapy for People with a Schizophrenia Spectrum Diagnosis Not Taking Antipsychotic Medication: An Exploratory Trial,” Psychological Medicine 42/5 (2012): 1049–1056. 37 Paul Chadwick, Max Birchwood, and Peter Trower, Cognitive Therapy for Delusions, Voices, and Paranoia (Chichester: Wiley, 1996). 38 B. Škodlar, Mads Gram Henriksen, Louis Sass, Barnaby Nelson, and Josef Parnas, “Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Schizophrenia: A Critical Evaluation of its Theoretical Framework from a Clinical-Phenomenological Perspective ,” Psychopathology 46/4 (2013): 249–265. 39 Škodlar et al., “Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Schizophrenia,” 252. 40 Marino Pérez‐Álvarez, José García‐Montes, Oscar Vallina‐Fernández, Salvador Perona‐Garcelán, and Carlos Cuevas‐Yust, “New Life for Schizophrenia Psychotherapy in the Light of Phenomenology,” Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 18 (2011): 187–201, here 190. 41 Škodlar et al., “Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Schizophrenia,” 259–260. 42 Ibid., 259. 43 Parnas and Sass, “Self, Solipsism and Schizophrenic Delusions.”

Schizophrenia, music therapy, and getting into “Groove”  161 during the interactive process can help the patient to reestablish a first-person perspective and reappropriate their own experiences.44 The subject “negotiates” with the therapist, in a sense, to construct stories that incorporate both of their understandings, which requires forging connections between two different perspectives. One goal is to enhance the subject’s ability to acknowledge another person’s point of view, reflect upon their own experiences and beliefs, and take an intentional stance toward them. Ultimately, psychotherapy may serve as a sort of “dialogical prosthesis” that helps to restore the subject’s narrative sense of self and reestablishes connections between bodily feelings, emotions, and interpersonal situations.45 Such engagement can be crucial for the management of symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations. While dialogue and narrative may very well help to alleviate some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, they (like CBT) are top-down interventions in the sense that they rely more on conceptually sophisticated modes of engagement in order to change self-­experience. However, the thoughts of some subjects suffering from schizophrenia are so chaotic and disjointed that they are unable to benefit from talk therapy; and they may feel so cut off from the social world that they are unable to partake in conversation or construct a coherent narrative. For these individuals, non-verbal treatment interventions may be absolutely crucial. Thus, although I agree that a strong therapeutic alliance can help to strengthen the subject’s capacity for self-narrative and interpersonal engagement, talking is not the only way to accomplish this. As Irarrázaval notes, “intercorporeality,” i.e., the sphere of non-verbal, bodily interaction, often is essential in developing a therapeutic relationship.46 For this reason, bottom-up treatment methods deserve serious consideration. By “bottom-up,” I mean methods that tap into pre-reflective bodily engagement and affective experience in an effort to bring about significant changes in more sophisticated cognitive processes. 4 The potential benefits of music therapy: social synchronization and self-integration If disconnection, disintegration (lack of coherence), bodily alienation, and desynchronization (of time, space, and rhythm) are at the core of schizophrenia, we need modes of therapy that target these disintegrative tendencies47 and help subjects to develop a more coherent pre-reflective sense of self. Examples of body-oriented psychotherapy include yoga and dance-movement therapy; these treatment modalities can help to strengthen subjects’ bodily attunement and certainly deserve further investigation. The research of Röhricht et al.48 showed that body-oriented psychological interventions had a positive impact on subjects suffering from chronic schizophrenia. This intervention included dance

44 Pérez‐Álvarez et al., “New Life for Schizophrenia Psychotherapy…,” 191. 45 Giovanni Stanghellini and Paul Lysaker, “The Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia through the Lens of Phenomenology: Intersubjectivity and the Search for the Recovery of First and Second-person Awareness,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 61/2 (2007): 163–179, here 174. 46 Lenor Irarrázaval, “Psychotherapeutic Implications of Self Disorders in Schizophrenia,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 67/33 (2013): 277–292. 47 Fuchs and Röhricht, “Schizophrenia and Intersubjectivity,” 137. 48 Frank Röhricht, Nina Papadopoulos, Iris Suzuki, and Stefan Priebe, “Ego-pathology, Body Experience, and Body Psychotherapy in Chronic Schizophrenia,” Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice 82 (2009): 19–30.

162  Michelle Maiese movement psychotherapy, sensory awareness exercises, and tactile self-­exploration. At the beginning of therapy, patients reported being unable to connect with themselves and having a diminished or distorted sense of their bodies. Their movements often were disorganized and uncoordinated, without any energy. After therapy, there was a clearer differentiation of movement, feelings of lifelessness diminished, and their ability to express themselves verbally improved. In addition, subjects showed improvement with respect to “ego-activity” (the ability to function as a self-directing, self-governing unity that intentionally directs one’s thinking and action), “ego-consistency” (the coherence and organization of self-experience), and “ego-demarcation” (the ability to differentiate between ego and non-ego spheres). Such evidence suggests that through body-oriented psychotherapy, subjects were able to engage directly with their bodies and that their selfexperiences became more unified and coherent. Does music therapy hold similar potential? The expressed goals of music therapy as a treatment for schizophrenia include improved general and interpersonal functioning and a reduction in negative symptoms. A (2013) Cochrane review includes eight studies examining the effects of music therapy on subjects with schizophrenia, all of which compared music therapy added to standard care with standard care alone. Therapy varied according to the use of active and receptive methods, level of structure, and degree of reliance on verbal reflection. This review found evidence that “high-dose” music therapy (involving numerous sessions over an extended period of time) can significantly reduce “negative symptoms,” improve attention and social functioning, and lead to global overall improvement.49 Likewise, results from a (2017) Cochrane review indicate that music therapy holds significant potential to reduce symptoms, improve social functioning, and lead to global improvement. But why? Mossler and colleagues propose that due to its ability to evoke emotion, music may be especially well suited to the treatment of negative symptoms such as affective flattening and loss of interest.50 In addition, I argue that due to its interactive elements and structural characteristics, music therapy has the potential to promote social synchronization, self-integration, and the coherence of thought, feeling, and action. Musicality “spans biological, social, and cultural modes of being,”51 powerfully taps into bodily feelings, and evokes emotions, moods, and other affective states. It does so, in part, by reproducing the dynamical-kinetic character of specific emotions52 and activating the bodily feelings and sensations involved in these experiences. For example, a piece of music that feels “angry” feels this way in part because it mimics the kinesthetic character and bodily feelings associated with anger. Music invites expressive movement and “advancing behavior,” which includes tapping one’s fingers, nodding one’s head, or entering into a more sustained and responsive mode of engagement that mirrors the acoustic structure and dynamics of the musical event one hears. “Angry” music, for example,

49 Karin Mössler, XiJing Chen, Tor Olav Heldal, and Christian Gold, “Music Therapy for People with Schizophrenia and Schizophrenia-like Disorders,” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 12 (2013): CD004025. 50 Ibid., 23. 51 Andrea Schiavio, Dylan van der Schyff, Julian Cespedes-Guevara, and Mark Reybrouck, “Enacting Musical Emotions: Sense-making, Dynamic Systems, and the Embodied Mind,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 16 (2017): 785–809, here 793–794. 52 Giovanna Colombetti, The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (Cambridge MA: MIT Press 2014), 120.

Schizophrenia, music therapy, and getting into “Groove”  163 instills a desire to shake and kick; music that feels “joyful” may cultivate a desire to bounce, spin, or wave one’s hands in the air.53 Listening to music results in heightened affectivity and emotional sensitivity, as well as increased interest and motivation. This can help to address some of the key negative symptoms of schizophrenia, namely affective flattening and loss of motivation. The music setting also affords opportunities for effective social interaction. First, listening to music together with others involves feelings of mutual bodily presence, and the acknowledgment of the other as a person can help to strengthen the subject’s sense of self. This is because the presence of a meaningful “other” in a music therapy setting can help to alleviate feelings of depersonalization and derealization and instill a sense that there is a joint partnership.54 When music shapes and coordinates the experience of multiple listeners, it affords a “mutual tuning-in relationship”55 that allows for bodily entrainment and provides a sense that participants are sharing in a musical event with others. Such entrainment can establish a mutual emotional resonance among participants and lead to a convergence of affective responses. The music therapy setting thereby serves as a striking example of what Krueger calls “we-space”: “an emotion-rich coordinative space dynamically structured via the ongoing engagement of social agents.”56 A shared wespace centers upon co-regulated interaction, whereby participants continually and mutually adjust their expressive gestures, gaze patterns, vocalizations, and actions. Insofar as music provides an expressive channel for subjects to explore and regulate emotions and share these emotions with others, it can help them to re-inhabit we-space. Second, in the active mode of music therapy, which involves playing musical instruments or singing, co-regulated interaction can occur by way of improvisation. The coordinated playing of musical instruments offers a way for participants to share intentions and construct felt contexts of sympathetic attunement,57 and potentially opens up a “shared bodily affective space”58 that causally supports the emergence of “new meaning and a different way of being with.”59 Because musical improvisation is a non-verbal means of expression, it can serve as a powerful therapeutic medium for subjects who find it difficult to express themselves in words. Coordinated musical improvisation gives participants a sense of being part of a meaningful shared activity and can serve as a means of inviting others into a relationship, conveying acceptance, and building trust.60 There are often moments in music therapy where there is a “buzz” between the two players, for example when they spontaneously come together at a cadence point or somehow know when to end or where to go next.61 This kind of “communicative musicality” allows those who are unable or unwilling to speak to express their feelings non-verbally and thereby offers

53 Joel Krueger, “Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind,” Frontiers in Psychology 4 (2014): 1–12. 54 Stanghellini and Lysaker, “The Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia,” 171. 55 Alfred Schutz, “Making Music Together: A Study in Social relationship,” in A. Broderson, ed., Collected Papers 2 (1976): 159–178, here 161. 56 Joel Krueger, “Extended Cognition and the Space of Social Interaction,” Consciousness and Cognition 20/3 (2011): 643–657, here 644. 57 Ibid., 649. 58 Colombetti, The Feeling Body …, 201. 59 Sabine Koch and Diana Fischman, “Embodied Enactive Dance/movement Therapy,” American Journal of Dance Therapy 33 (2011): 57–72, here 65. 60 Colombetti, The Feeling Body …, 200. 61 Anna Maratos, Mike Crawford, and Simon Procter, “Music Therapy for Depression: It Seems to Work, but How?” The British Journal of Psychiatry 199/2 (2011): 92–93, here 92.

164  Michelle Maiese them an avenue to overcome social isolation. In addition, it allows those who feel “out of sync” with the social world to feel more socially connected and “get back into the groove” of interacting with others. I maintain that this strengthened ability to “feel one’s way” through a musical improvisation ultimately may increase the subject’s capacity to “feel their way” through a verbal conversation. In order to be in sync during improvisation, musicians must attend to subtle modulations in tempo, volume, and intensity; that is, they must attend to relevant aspects of the musical encounter as it dynamically unfolds over time. De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s (2007) notion of “participatory sense-making” helps to make sense of music’s potential to foster social interaction and connectedness. They characterize participatory sense-making as “the coordination of intentional activity in interaction, whereby individual sense-making processes are affected” and new meaning is generated that was not available to each subject on their own.62 What they call “coordination” involves coherence or matching of behavior over and above what is expected given what the interactors are capable of doing. Examples include synchronization, mirroring, anticipation, and imitation. One striking illustration is the way in which caregivers and infants realize a shared world of meaning through their ongoing embodied-emotional interactions, including eye movements, gestures, and emotional expressions. Similarly, during a music therapy session, participants mirror each other’s movements, anticipate them, temporally synchronize or de-synchronize them, and alter them in response to what the other person is doing. In order to share expectations and coordinate their music playing, participants must attend to each other’s movements and complement their speed and style. The expressive playing of the therapist directly impacts what the patient plays next, and vice versa. What each participant does with their musical instrument is thereby dynamically integrated or “coupled” with the music playing of the other person. These dynamics of “mutual influence” are rooted in “a distinctive kind of bodily responsiveness comprised, at least in part, of patterns of motor-readiness and an affective sensibility to gestures and expressions.”63 This sort of bodily resonance attunes subjects to relevant aspects of the interpersonal encounter, increases their understanding of others’ feelings and desires, and ultimately may allow them to attend (at a higher cognitive level) to pertinent aspects of the social context. Coordinated music playing thereby has the potential to establish “a common communicative base”64 among participants and help them to develop a sense that they “belong” and have a place and purpose in the social group.65 For all of these reasons, music has potential to contribute to social re-synchronization. In addition, the salient structural features of music have the potential to alleviate feelings of “unworlding” and foster self-integration. Music is a structured sound-time phenomenon that involves cyclical patterns of rhythmic accentuation and goal-directed tonal movements. Even a relatively simple pop song is temporally extended and spatially and acoustically complex and involves its own internal organizational logic: there are implicit rules about where the music will go next. Cyclical patterns of rhythmic accentuation, goal-directed tonal movements, and modulations of volume, intensity, cadence, and 62 Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo, “Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (2007): 485–507, here 497. 63 Matthew Ratcliffe, Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 158. 64 Irarrázaval, “Psychotherapeutic Implications of Self Disorders in Schizophrenia,” 289. 65 Steve Matthews, “Dementia and the Power of Music Therapy,” Bioethics 29/8 (2015): 573–579, here 578.

Schizophrenia, music therapy, and getting into “Groove”  165 tempo help to contribute to music’s predictability. Such predictability can help to restore subjects’ implicit trust in their environment; even when there are unexpected musical transitions, this may generate feelings of surprise, which reinforces the subject’s sense of the song as a coherent whole. Krueger (2018) rightly notes that such trust is a central part of what is missing in so-called “unworlding” experiences. I hypothesize that music’s emotional salience together with its relatively predictable trajectory can help subjects to feel more “rooted” and alleviate their feelings of alienation from the surrounding world. In addition, modulations in volume and rhythm grab the listener’s attention, and particular sounds carry special weight by virtue of the tempo and rhythm of the unfolding melody. When a song dramatically speeds up or slows down, for example, or becomes significantly louder or softer, these segments of the music take on greater intensity. Some sounds come to the forefront, while others fade to the background. Because music grabs attention in a basic bodily sense, subjects may become more attuned to their own feelings and desires, eliminating the need to attend explicitly to their bodily experiences or become hyperreflexive. I argue that by gauging the relevance of musical transitions, subjects can become more attuned, at a pre-reflective level, to relevance more generally. This can help to strengthen selective attention over the course of more sophisticated cognitive processes. Indeed, due to its highly structured nature, music affords the building of perceptual wholes (gestalts), which may evoke expectations about how the music will sound next. Music demands that the listener or improviser engage with it as a coherent whole rather than as a series of individual notes; that is, it demands a contextual understanding. By tapping into bodily experiences and emotions to signal relevant turning points in melody or alternations in rhythm, music may help to render these contextual features more salient. This fosters pre-reflective selective attention and strengthens subjects’ capacity to apprehend the significance of the song as a whole (rather than focusing on disjointed and meaningless parts). In addition, there is behavioral coordination in response to rhythmic signals, and subjects’ entrainment responses to music are organized in a way that reflects its particular rhythmic and melodic structure. This rhythmic response to music can occur in the absence of the need for sophisticated levels of neurocognitive processing, 66 which may be especially beneficial for subjects suffering from schizophrenia with impaired cognitive processes. Different styles of music invite different patterns of entrainment with their own unique temporal signature and affective style; entrainment responses in classical music or hip-hop, for example, may differ significantly. Rhythmic structures keep time for the listener and contour the shape of musically induced bodily expressions and movement patterns. Thus, there is a way in which one’s body gears onto musical structures, and “rhythm becomes a key component for bodily marking the temporal development of a musical event.”67 I propose that this kind of bodily entrainment can help to foster sensorimotor coherence. Music inherently involves an “organizing principle” whereby successive moments in time (together with their corresponding thoughts, sensations, and feelings) become connected in a meaningful way. Bodily feelings and movements that become entrained with music are thereby anchored in the unfolding, highly structured musical expression. This can help to restore the body as a “sturdy vantage point” for worldly engagement

66 Ibid., 577. 67 Krueger, “Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind,” 3.

166  Michelle Maiese and an “organizing principle” for perception and action, strengthening pre-reflective selective attention and eventually leading to a more coherent sense of self at a more sophisticated narrative level. 5  Case study: getting into the “Groove” Solli’s (2008) description of a patient named Paul68 helps to reveal more fully these potential benefits of music therapy. Paul experienced positive symptoms such as paranoid delusions and negative symptoms such as flattened affect. He also encountered difficulties with impulse control, sometimes resulting in violent episodes, and was unable to benefit from verbal therapy due to the chaotic nature of his thoughts. Because Paul had a passionate interest in music and took guitar lessons as a teenager, Solli believed he might be a good candidate for music therapy. Solli decided to use the drum set as the main instrument to provide structure for their weekly sessions in music therapy. Rather than playing popular songs from the notebook, which tended to end in chaos, he decided to take a more improvisational approach to their interplay. Solli’s main goal was to make music therapy a collaborative project based on Paul’s own resources and musical interest in rock, blues, and jazz. In the early sessions, the sounds initially coming from Paul’s guitar sounded extremely chaotic and fragmented: Paul rasped his pick heavily across the strings, making sounds with no tonal center, pulse, or harmony. Solli asked Paul if it would be ok for him to play the drums together with him, and Paul agreed. Once Solli got a sense of the pulse in Paul’s playing, he began to play a 4/4 beat of straight rock groove. Paul almost immediately started to play in the same tempo, so that Solli was able to identify some chords and rhythmic patterns in his playing. In those early sessions, they would alternate between periods of interplay and periods of chaos. In some later sessions, Solli introduced Paul to the terms “counting in” and “joint endings.” They had to agree on a common tempo before they started to play, which in turn required them to look at and listen to each other to ensure that they both started at the same time. In addition, Solli started to emphasize eight-bar structures on the drums by playing drum fills that lead up to the “one” of the next period, and also introduced more of a verse-chorus organization to their interplay. These elements not only allowed for collaboration but also gave the music a stronger sense of structure. Solli notes that “these structural elements were…a way of increasing the focus on the two of [them] playing together; a way of positively expecting a musical cooperation and interplay.”69 After four months of therapy, Paul’s way of playing and relating had changed. He had become more attentive to, and synchronized with, the music-playing of Solli. He became more willing to follow a common pulse, and also played more dynamically with respect to both volume and expression. Paul’s musical expressions were less chaotic and featured more coherent melodies and chord structures. In addition, he became more verbal, which seemed to be “stimulated by a growing wish to communicate how the structures of the improvisations should be.”70 It appears that this experience of more structured musicplaying also facilitated more structured and coherent verbal expressions. By the later sessions, Paul was able to keep a steady blues groove for several minutes. He no longer

68 Solli, “‘Shut Up and Play!’ …” 69 Ibid., 71. 70 Ibid., 72.

Schizophrenia, music therapy, and getting into “Groove”  167 had violent outbursts and was considered healthy enough to move out of the hospital and join a structured day program. Paul’s experience with music therapy helps to illustrate how joint improvisation during a music therapy session cultivates behavioral coordination and promotes social synchronization. What Solli (2008) terms “groove” is an instance of participatory sense-making that requires attentiveness and responsiveness to the present time, and to the musical contributions of other people in that moment. Staying in “groove” requires that participants contribute to the joint creation of music by reciprocally adjusting their music-playing in response to what the other person does. While Paul initially fell out of synchronization very easily, his sense of pulse and rhythm became stronger over the course of their sessions and he was able to participate in a more present and focused way. As Paul and Solli negotiated their own variable, imperfect timing, they were able to generate their own highly relational groove.71 Music thereby functioned as a way to bring Paul into interpersonal contact with Solli and allowed him to experience moments of mutuality where he felt recognized, “seen,” and understood. This helped to satisfy Paul’s basic needs for social recognition and validation. The active movement associated with joint improvisation established a relationship of bodily attunement between Solli and Paul and appears to have facilitated Paul’s process of self-discovery. Paul’s participation in music therapy also helps to illustrate how conventions of popular music styles involve structural elements that create a sense of coherence and predictability. Solli notes that his own cyclic drum groove “provided a predictable and safe structure for the patient; something that provided a strong sense of coherence in the music, and therefore something that facilitated collaborative musicking.”72 This sort of structured, collaborative entrainment can be especially beneficial for subjects with schizophrenia, I maintain, due to the disruptions to selective attention they encounter. The rhythmic and textural features that constitute “groove” clearly helped Paul to become entrained with the unfolding musical expression and to gain a sense of coherence in his feelings, thoughts, and actions. This increased focus and attunement occurred at a basic bodily level, in response to music; but I hypothesize that gearing into relevance at this bodily level can help to foster a stronger sense of self that strengthens selective attention at higher levels of thought and language. The structural elements of music also facilitated the coordination of music-playing among Solli and Paul, allowing for a kind of social synchronization that allowed Paul to reintegrate himself into the social world. In addition, connecting with the music and with those around them, and possibly with their past, brings subjects back into contact with their personal story73 and has the potential to foster a more coherent self-narrative. For Paul, music therapy sessions involving rock music allowed him to tap into his own relatively clear musical tastes and his identity as a “rocker.”74 The regularity of the music encounter may also have helped to structure Paul’s day, and provided “a sensed future that contains something good to which one looks forward.”75

71 Ibid., 75. 72 Ibid., 74. 73 Matthews, “Dementia and the Power of Music Therapy,” 578. 74 Solli, “‘Shut Up and Play!’ …,” 73. 75 “Dementia and the Power of Music Therapy,” 578–579.

168  Michelle Maiese I have noted that subjects suffering from schizophrenia lose their practical grip on the things around them, so that objects and other people become saturated with a sense of unfamiliarity. However, according to Krueger (2018), subjects lose access not only to the world’s practical significance but also its affective and regulative significance: that is, they no longer recognize their surroundings as a space that affords predictable affective responses. The music therapy setting can help to repair this breakdown in affective trust; subjects can gain a sense of how particular kinds of music elicit and support particular kinds of emotional experience, and also begin to look to music to regulate their affective responses. In addition, music offers many expressive possibilities and thus can serve as crucial scaffolding for the exploration and regulation of emotion. For Paul, music came to function as a trustworthy “affective stabilizer”;76 it served as an outlet for emotional expression and provided an opportunity for him to develop and articulate his own affective style. At one point during a music session, Paul reported that he was searching for some kind of aggression when he played, and said, “Playing together with the music therapist gives me feelings.”77 The dynamism and vitality associated with musical improvisation clearly helped to alleviate Paul’s experience of bodily alienation and diminished affect and strengthened his capacity to attend to his desires and feelings and make sense of his personal narrative. 6  Concluding remarks The results of the Cochrane study together with the preceding case study indicate that music therapy has significant potential to reintegrate subjects into the social world, alleviate feelings of bodily alienation and “unworlding,” and foster a more coherent sense of self at both pre-reflective and narrative levels. Krueger’s (2014) notion of “musical affordances” helps to unpack how music can open up unique interactive possibilities that strengthen a subject’s sense of self. It seems clear that music offers up possibilities for action and engagement. When people encounter music, they immediately recognize it as “something with a distinctive activity signature that [they] can use or do things with.”78 First, both playing and listening to music with others involve feelings of mutual bodily presence that can expand possibilities for interpersonal interaction and thereby reintegrate the subject into the social world. Music allows for non-verbal expression among those who are unable or unwilling to speak and can help subjects who feel “out of sync” to “get back into the groove” of social interaction. In addition, the presence of a meaningful “other” can help to alleviate feelings of depersonalization and derealization and instill a sense of a shared reality. Particularly when participants play music together, they “tune in” to each other and adjust their behavior according to what the other person is doing. Coordinated musical improvisation can help to foster bodily attunement between participants and facilitate a process of relational self-discovery. In addition, listening to music invites expressive movement and “advancing behavior,” which includes tapping one’s fingers or nodding one’s head; and musical improvisation, which calls for movement and engagement, allows the subject to experience their own bodily agency and become enmeshed with an unfolding musical event in an even deeper

76 Krueger, “Schizophrenia and the Scaffolded Self.” 77 Solli, “‘Shut Up and Play!’ …,” 70. 78 Krueger, “Affordances and the Musically Extended Mind.”

Schizophrenia, music therapy, and getting into “Groove”  169 sense. I have suggested that bodily movements and feelings become entrained with musical expressions and that this can alleviate feelings of bodily alienation. Indeed, music’s salient structural features (e.g., its cyclical patterns of rhythmic accentuation, goal-directed tonal movements, and modulations of volume, cadence, and tempo) not only contribute to its dynamism but also provide a sense of stability and predictability that strengthens pre-reflective selective attention. Because “the desire for completion inherent in tones parallels human striving for resolution and wholeness,”79 music can foster self-integration and bolster subjects’ first-person perspective at a basic bodily level. Ultimately, music therapy may pave the way toward effect dialogue that helps to restore the subject’s narrative sense of self. Indeed, this opportunity to consider the meaning of their anomalous experiences without needing to rely on words or concepts may be an important first step in devising their personal story; eventually, this may help them to benefit from “top-down” modes of therapy that require verbalization and self-reflection, such as CBT. And because music therapy does not involve any of the negative side effects associated with medication, it might be a preferable “first line” of treatment for some subjects. For all of these reasons, music therapy deserves further consideration as a possible treatment for schizophrenia.

79 E. Pickett and Carolyn Sonnen, “Guided Imagery and Music: A Music Therapy Approach to Multiple Personality Disorder,” in E. Kluft, ed., Expressive and Functional Therapies in the Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (Springfield IL: Charles C. Thomas Publishing, 1993).

11 Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance – on Husserl’s theory of depiction Peer F. Bundgaard

Abstract  To Husserl, aesthetic image seeing is a subtype of plain image seeing. It is therefore also a perceptual act that reflects the tripartite structure of its object: the image as a physical thing, the image as the image subject it represents, and the image as the depicting surface in virtue of which we have access to the image subject. In this chapter, I will first examine key components of image seeing as such, namely the experienced “conflict” between, on the one hand, the depicting surface and the image thing, and, on the other, the conflict between the depicting surface and the image subject. The latter relation will be redescribed as a perceptual simulation of the image subject elicited by the depicting surface. Contrary to ordinary image seeing, aesthetic perception is, according to Husserl, characterized by an accrued “interest” or “delight in the appearance,” i.e., enhanced attention to the depicting surface. In the second part of the chapter, I will then, by means of examples, lay bare some essential properties of the depicting surface, which specifically inform aesthetic perception, and which belong to appearance proper and not to what appears. Finally, I will show the relevance of Husserl’s analysis for more recent discussions of depiction, revolving around Wollheim’s notion of “twofoldness.” Keywords  Husserl; Image Consciousness; Aesthetic Perception; Depiction; Two­foldness 1 Introduction In this chapter, I shall address essential properties of aesthetic perception through Husserl’s analyses of image consciousness and image seeing, mainly gathered in Husserliana XXIII, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung.1 Therefore, aesthetic perception is here exclusively considered in relation to the perception of images, and more narrowly the subset of images intentionally created or considered as artworks. This has two immediate consequences: first, aesthetic perception is essentially informed by properties that characterize image seeing at large; second, aesthetic perception must inflect from ordinary image seeing (and ordinary perception) in specific and describable ways. I shall here consider both these 1 Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen 1898–1925 (Husserliana XXIII), ed. Eduard Marbach (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980); English translation: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). Henceforth cited as Hua XXIII with German and English page references, respectively.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-12

Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance  171 aspects; i.e., briefly unfold Husserl’s theory of images and image seeing, and then, in more detail, show some of the specific characteristics of aesthetic perception as a deviation from plain image seeing. A key component in Husserl’s analysis, and therefore also the present analysis, is the notion of “appearance” (Erscheinung), which takes on an accrued signification in aesthetic image seeing to the extent that, according to Husserl, aesthetic perception can be characterized by its interest in appearance proper (and not simply in the depicted objects). I have therefore chosen to devote a series of subsections to show, by means of examples, some of the properties of “appearance,” and how aesthetic perception can be said to respond to such properties. To conclude, I shall show how a Husserlian description of aesthetic image seeing, based on his three-layer definition of the image, can contribute to clarifying some misunderstandings in more recent, mainly philosophical discussions of image seeing, often revolving around Richard Wollheim’s notion of “twofoldness.”2 Finally, a caveat is important: by “aesthetic perception,” I do not mean a “rewarding” perceptual experience of an image, for example, accompanied by a feeling of beauty. I simply mean the perception of an image considered as and designed to be considered as an artwork, irrespective of the value attributed to the image in case. I believe that the properties of this specific type of perceptual experience remain invariant whether or not the object gives rise to a positive aesthetic judgment. 2 The three essential aspects of “image”: image thing, image object, and image subject In the different texts gathered in Hua XXIII, Husserl systematically considers the image under its three essential aspects. First, we have the image in the sense of what is represented in the image, what Husserl calls the Bildsujet, the image subject, which can exist (Napoleon), not exist (Naiades), be a specific object (Napoleon, Naiades), or be a generic object (a horse leaping, a tired woman ironing). In short, the image subject is the scene writ large depicted in the image. Now, this depicted content should be distinguished from the second object in Husserl’s tripartite definition: namely, the image as a physical thing or the physical image, a framed canvas with paint on it, which can be moved from one wall to another, be covered with dust, have cracks in the paint, or hang a little askew; and can be attended to as such, for example, when we wipe away the dust from it, put it straight, or avoid leaning against it. Finally, the image as an image subject stands in opposition to yet another object, namely the so and so designed depicting surface with such and such colors, shapes, and lines, which is given directly in intuition, and through which we gain access to the depicted image subject. This is what Husserl calls the Bildobjekt, the image object, and which we will also call the depicting surface. Here’s how he himself puts it: When we distinguish between subject [Sache] and image in this case, we immediately note that the concept of the image is a double concept. That is to say, what stands over against the depicted subject is twofold: 1) The image as a physical thing, as this painted and framed canvas, as this imprinted paper, and so on. In this sense we say that the image is warped, torn, or hangs on the wall, etc. 2) The image as the image object [Bildobjekt] appearing in such and such a way through its determinate 2 Cf. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Henceforth cited as Painting.

172  Peer F. Bundgaard coloration and form. By the image object we do not mean the depicted object, the image subject [Bildsujet], but […] the appearing object that is the representant for the image subject.3 We have three objects: (1) the physical image, the physical thing made from canvas, marble, and so on; (2) the representing or depicting object; and (3) the represented or depicted object.4 A description of the image as a three-layered or three strata object naturally generates a description of the subjective correlate of the image, which reflects this ternary structure. It does so because image consciousness must respond differentially to these strata if it makes sense to claim their existence. Key elements of image consciousness, still according to Husserl, are similarity (Ähnlichkeit), on the one hand, and difference (Verschiedenheit) or conflict (Widerstreit), on the other. Now, if we are standing in front of the image and are attending to it as an image, not as a mere physical thing, the image object will give rise to a visual experience of its image subject: “We see the subject in the image itself; we see the former in the latter. The image (expressed more precisely: the image object) brings the subject to intuitive presentation in itself […].”5 This function of the image rests on the similarity, and the consciousness of the similarity, between the image object and the image subject; the stronger the similarity between the image object and the image subject, the stronger we “feel” the image subject as “present” in front of us;6 or to put it otherwise, the stronger is the immersion in the visual experience of the image subject. Obviously, however immersed the visual experience of the represented objects is, it is not fully illusory. Nobody would, under normal circumstances, mistake an image of their mother or the Eiffel Tower for their mother or the Eiffel Tower. In other words, image consciousness encompasses not only consciousness of similarity but also consciousness of difference or conflict. Consciousness of difference goes in two directions. First, image seeing is different from ordinary perception since the object of image perception, that is, the image object, does not stand in any functional relation to our moving body and the surroundings;7 for example, it does not covary with variations in its surroundings; the light is always the same in an image, independently of any changes in lighting conditions. Here, the conflict is one between the image object and the image as a thing: [the appearance of the image object] carries in itself the character of unreality, the conflict with the actual presence. The perception of the surroundings, the perception in which the actual presence is constituted for us, imposes itself through the frame and is there called ‘printed paper’ or ‘painted canvas’.8 3 Hua XXIII, 18–19/20. Also quoted by Frederik Stjernfelt, Diagrammatology: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Phenomenology, Ontology, and Semiotics (Dordrecht: Springer 2007), 291. Henceforth cited as Diagrammatology. 4 Hua XXIII, 19/21. Also quoted by Stjernfelt, Diagrammatology, 291. 5 Hua XXIII, 50/54. When elsewhere in this text I use the expression “[bring] into intuitive presentation,” I refer to this quote. 6 Hua XXIII, 51–52/55. 7 For the notion of “functional relations” between an object and its surroundings, see Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie II: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution (Husserliana IV), ed. Marly Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), 41–43. 8 Hua XXIII, 47/51. See also Hua XXIII, 51/55: “This is the conflict between the image as image-object appearance and the image as physical image thing.” Or, “It appears in the way in which an actual physical thing appears, but in conflict with the actual present that conflict-free perception brings about.” Hua XXIII, 54/59.

Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance  173 Any perception of the image object (and the subsequent immersion in its content) is accompanied by awareness of the thing that is the material support for the image object. To use Dominic Lopes’ term, we can say that image seeing is “doubled” with image-thing seeing (which Lopes would call “surface seeing”).9 Now, the consciousness of conflict also goes in another and for the present purpose more important direction: namely the one between the image object and its motif, the image subject. This implies that the image object has properties, different from those of the image thing, that elicit this consciousness of conflict. What would count as properties of the image object (and not simply the image thing), which elicit the consciousness of conflict? Husserl mentions the “aesthetic function” of “broad brushwork” or the “aesthetic effect” of “marble,” that is, cases where the creative gesture as expressed by the brushwork and the material which enables depiction in the first place take on an autonomous function by arousing curiosity about or aesthetic interest in the image object as such.10 So, we marvel at the softness of the human body as it appears in the hardness of marble; or we may pay attention to the brushwork―its orientation, density, and so on―as possessing a proper style of presentation. We shall return to this in much more detail, but before that let me mention two essential properties of the image object that are likely to elicit the consciousness of conflict with respect to the image subject and the image thing respectively, and which in aesthetic images may be exploited to arouse the interest (the “Gefühlsinteresse”) in the image object itself. (It should be noticed that these specific properties are not addressed by Husserl.) The first property is that the image object is framed, whereas the represented space or the image subject is not. Here, frame has nothing to do with the physical frame of the image thing. It is rather an inherent property of the image object. Any image object has a scope: within the same physical limits of the image thing, the image object can be endowed with an open set of presentational scopes; it can depict a face, a body, a group of bodies, a group of bodies in front of a house; it can zoom in and out any way it wants. Thus, an image is not only physically but also intentionally framed, and this frame is a moment of depiction, that is to say, it is a dependent part of depiction. This implies that any immersion in the image subject is necessarily doubled with awareness or consciousness of the image object by virtue of its intentional frame. The second property, which in figurative paintings goes hand in hand with the first, but which can be manipulated independently of it, is the fact that the viewpoint is locked. The image object and its figures come without variation, in only one adumbration (Abschattung). However much we change our position with respect to the image thing, the image object appears from the same point of view, in the same manner, invariantly. In this respect as well, it does not (contrary to the image thing) stand in any functional relation with its surroundings. Thus, image seeing, understood as the visual experience of an image subject, is doubled with both image-thing seeing and image-object seeing. At this point, at least two interrelated issues are in the air. These are, first, how the phenomenology of image seeing can be “doubled” (or comport an aspect of “conflict”) and still be unitary; and, second, what role does the conflictual or doubled character of image seeing play for aesthetic perception? I shall address the latter issue shortly and the former in my concluding comments on the relevance of Husserl’s image theory for recent

9 Dominic Lopes, Sight and Sensibility—Evaluating Pictures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 10 Cf. Hua XXIII, 52/55.

174  Peer F. Bundgaard discussions of image seeing, and in particular for a better understanding of Richard Wollheim’s notion of “twofoldness.” Before I do so, I’d like to further characterize the―aesthetically decisive―distinction between image object and image subject by introducing a property of image consciousness, which is not fully captured by the distinction between consciousness of similarity and consciousness of conflict, but one which is still founded in the difference between image object and image subject. This property is simulation, and the claim is here that the image object does not just refer to the image subject, it also triggers off, in the viewer, a visual simulation of the referent scene as it is encoded in it.11 3  Simulation in image seeing In this section, I shall introduce a supplementary distinction, namely one between the restricted image subject and the extended image subject. I do so in order to better capture the nature of the experience elicited by the image object; an experience I shall characterize in terms of “simulation.” Consider Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps and some portrait of Napoleon on St. Helena; both pictures have the same restricted image subject, Napoleon. It would, however, be unsatisfactory to content oneself with this similarity, for in David’s case Napoleon is triumphantly crossing the Alps on a piebald horse, while in the latter case he is portrayed as a broken man on an island. It’s likely that Hegel, upon seeing David’s painting, could have felt that he was witnessing the World Spirit on a horse, and we as well, but it is unlikely that the portrait of Napoleon on St. Helena would elicit the same feeling of awe. We will therefore say that they have different extended image subjects. The extended image subject of a picture would then be the content of a visual experience of a given depicted scene exceeding the specific scope of the image object as well as the emotional or empathy response its pictorial representation is intentionally designed to elicit, or more vaguely, the impression it is intended to produce in the viewer (either as direct empathetic responses to the scene or to feelings or as responses such scenes would elicit in beings participating in or witnessing them).12 A simulation is therefore a quasi-perceptual experience of, for example, Napoleon, not simply on a horse, in such and such a position, but triumphantly crossing the Alps. Husserl operates in fact with the same idea when he remarks that: […] I can also “project” myself into the image “in phantasy.” But that can only mean that I extend the image space over me and […] assimilate myself into the image, whereby I exclude my actuality. […] My participation is then the participation of a spectator in the picture […]. It is also true that I can have a world belonging to phantasy hover before me. Moreover, since this world presupposes a center of 11 My use of the term “simulation” is in its narrow sense tributary to Rolf Zwaan’s use of it in the domain of language processing where language is considered as “a set of cues to the comprehender to construct an experiential (perception plus action) simulation of the described situation,” Rolf Zwaan, “The Immersed Experiencer. Toward an Embodied Theory of Language Comprehension,” The Psychology of Learning and Motivation 44 (2004): 35–62, here 36. 12 David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese have developed a theory of aesthetic experience uniquely based on empathy response and simulation. While I consider their approach to be far too restrictive, since they seem to reduce the phenomenology of aesthetic perception to empathy responses and therefore fail to distinguish between aesthetic images proper and images in general, they are right in pinpointing the importance of simulation for image seeing. Cf. David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” Trends in Cognitive Science 11/5 (2007): 197–203.

Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance  175 apprehension at which I continually place myself, I will have in general and perhaps even necessarily a place in the phantasy world as phantasied Ego, quasi-seeing the phantasy world from the phantasied Ego’s standpoint.13 The simulation and its content (the extended image subject) could indeed be considered as “the participation of a spectator in the picture,” “quasi-seeing the phantasy world” (and responding accordingly to this experience), and we would then have a possible ‘split situation,’ as suggested above, with an actual perceiver actually responding to properties of the image object (its qualitative appearance) and a phantasized Ego participating in some way in the image subject, and responding accordingly. Finally, we may of course have cases where the design of the image object blocks for any phantasized participation and only elicits an actual spectator response (for example, a prototypical Rothko or a sufficiently close-up portrait, say Picasso’s portraits from the Blue Period, which do not leave any space for a phantasized spectator to “participate in the picture”). Thus, we need this, as we shall see, analytical distinction, not only in order to dispose of a descriptive schema capable of trivially distinguishing between pictures that represent the same person (Napoleon, say) or the same event (the Annunciation, for example), but also in order to properly characterize the visual experience elicited by the image object, which often implies a part of phantasy in Husserl’s sense. The notion of extended image subject is likewise necessary to capture the difference between pictures that represent strictly the same scene, as, for example, Matisse’s Luxury I and Luxury II or his The Dance I and The Dance II. Matisse’s two versions of The Dance have the same restricted image subject. Yet they have different extended image subjects, eliciting different visual experiences (or simulations) with corresponding contents, pertaining to the different color schemes, and particularly to the different apparent contours of the bodies or the different dynamic intertwining of their limbs on the image surface. Thus, the extended image subject of The Dance II is one of dancers moving faster and more extatically than the very same dancers in the preceding version. Importantly, however, this impression would be the same for a viewer who knows The Dance I, and is therefore able to mentally compare The Dance II to it, as for a viewer who doesn’t know it. The contents of the simulation, the extended image subject, are encoded in the design of the image object.14 Thus, the immediate image subject is always the extended image subject, and the distinction between restricted and the extended image subject is therefore only analytical: I can indeed recognize Napoleon in different pictures, but the visual experience of the pictures is not composed of one layer consisting of Napoleon proper, followed by another Fregean sense-like layer consisting in the manner in which Napoleon is given in the image (as a victor or as a vanquished): Napoleon comes in one shot, imbued with his sense, which is why an uninformed viewer, projecting himself or herself in phantasy into the depicted world, would have no difficulty in responding appropriately to the quasi-vision of a triumphant or a broken man.

13 Hua XXIII, 467/556. Stjernfelt has an enlightening analysis of this phantasied immersion into the depicted world in Diagrammatology, 304–319. 14 I here use Nanay’s expression, who defines the image object as the way the “three-dimensional object [is] visually encoded in the picture,” Bence Nanay, “Threefoldness,” Philosophical Studies 178/1 (2018): 163–182, here 171. Henceforth cited as “Threefoldness.” As will appear, my understanding of the image object goes beyond the way in which the image subject is encoded in a figure in the image object.

176  Peer F. Bundgaard Finally, what about unique images without a specific image subject (such as Napoleon or Zeus) and without doubles (as in Matisse)? Would such pictures not be essentially different from those with a specific image subject, since in the former case there isn’t any, as it were, baseline against which one can evaluate the way in which the image subject has been presented by the image object? Take as an example Constable’s Leaping Horse (Figure 11.1).15 As regards this subject, there is no other horse, no other man, no other tree to compare with (in the sense that there are many portraits of Napoleon to which we can compare David’s version). So in what sense can we say that the image object brings “into intuitive presentation” the extended image subject in Constable’s painting? The answer to this question is simple. It is true that there isn’t any other leaping horse to which we can compare the one in Constable’s painting, but there is an open set of other possible ways of painting, say, the leaping horse and the tree as well as their relation. It is safe to assume that Constable has designed his image object in such a way so as to elicit a certain visual experience with a certain content (what I here call a “simulation”). This―as in plethora of other cases―is obvious from the changes Constable introduced in the final version of the painting with respect to preceding sketches (see Figure 11.2). The final version and the preceding sketch of course depict the same thing, since (almost) the same elements appear in them, just in different shapes and in different places. However, when Constable, for example, moves the tree from a position in front of the leaping horse to a position behind it, it must be because he considers that the latter position elicits a better experience than the former; it opens the vista to the right, for example, and effaces a mismatch between the design of the image object in the sketch and the intended quasiperception of the image subject as elicited in the final version: in the study, but not in the final version, the tree visually blocks the leaping horse on the image object, thus visually hampering the impression of unconstrained forward dynamics yielded by the final version. The difference between sketch and final version shows that, for example, topological changes in the image object, affecting the spatial relations of the very same depicted objects, change the extended image subject, simply because they affect the visual experience or the simulation of the depicted scene; and that painters, inarguably, are aware of this. To sum up, we can draw two conclusions from this: (1) image objects, in Husserl’s sense, are designed to trigger off simulations of their image subject imbued with a certain sense―that is, they elicit a semiotic episode in vision, they produce meaning for vision16―by virtue of the qualitative organization of the image object; (2) the immediate image subject is the extended image subject.

15 All pictures in this article, except Paul Klee’s Chessboard, can be accessed at: www.wikiart.org. 16 Cf. Peer F. Bundgaard, “More Seeing-in: Surface Seeing, Design Seeing, and Meaning Seeing in Images,” Peer F. Bundgaard and Frederik Stjernfelt, eds., Investigations into the Ontology and the Phenomenology of the Work of Art: What Are Artworks and How Do We Experience Them? (New York, Dordrecht, London: Springer Open, 2015), 167–190. Henceforth cited as “More seeing-in.” In this article, I have proposed a more detailed analysis of Constable’s painting and its relation to the study. The notion of “semiotic episode in vision” is developed in Peer F. Bundgaard, Jacob Heath, and Svend Østergaard, “Aesthetic Perception, Attention, and Non-genericity: How Artists Exploit the Automatisms of Perception to Construct Meaning in Vision,” Cognitive Semiotics 10/2 (2017): 91–120. Henceforth cited as “Non-genericity.” It is important to stress that I do not use “semiotic” in any classic sign-theoretical sense, that is, I don’t take the image as a conventional sign in any way (I take it as a sign in the trivial sense that it can be considered as an iconic representation of for example Napoleon): By “semiotic episode in vision” I mean a visual experience imbued with meaning proper to the perceptual interaction between an experiencing body and an object endowed with such and such perceptual properties.

Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance  177

Figure 11.1  John Constable, The Leaping Horse (1825).

Figure 11.2  John Constable, Sketch for The Leaping Horse (1824).

178  Peer F. Bundgaard 3.1  Simulation and abstract painting

How about abstract paintings, then? They are images all right, but not with image subjects in the same recognitional sense as figurative paintings (they don’t have Napoleons, and they don’t have generic objects or beings such as horses, trees, and men). So, how are we to assess the relation between image object and image subject in this case? Abstract paintings do indeed raise intriguing questions as regards this relation, and in particular as regards the consciousness of conflict, which is its correlate, since abstract paintings, in some respects, are, or seem to be, exactly what they are: pure presence of qualitative gestalts (which, for instance, do not imply the representation of a depicted world that continues beyond the frame of the image object). Phenomenologically, the constitutive relation between image object and image subject also obtains in abstract images. This entails that the perception of the image object is in general not exhausted in the visual experience of what is given on the depicting surface. Rather, the latter gives rise to a visual experience with a certain content―a simulation, in the above sense―which does not coincide with the image object and its qualitative properties. Consider Paul Klee’s Chessboard (Figure 11.3). The image object is designed in such a way that it may elicit a visual experience of a pyramid (with a flat top) seen from above; or a hallway going inward (i.e., with the opposite perspective); or, by virtue of the chessboard configuration, as a plane surface of white and red squares with lines upon it. In other words, the same depicting surface triggers off three different, equally consistent visual experiences (or simulations) of a spatial arrangement.17 What can we conclude from this? Two rather unsurprising things granted the extended understanding of the image subject: (1) since abstract paintings are images, they behave as such. (2) Since the pictorial subject, in our extended sense, is one-sidedly dependent on the image object, painters apply their formal techniques to the image object with a view to elicit a visual experience with a certain content or meaning, a simulation or a semiotic episode in vision. Trivially, the character of this episode changes in accordance with the artist’s configuration of the image object. 4  Aesthetic perception: the case for enhanced appearance After having established the parallelism between images in general and aesthetic images in particular in terms of the triad [image thing – image object – image subject], we can now address the specificity of aesthetic images and, consequently, some of the essential properties of aesthetic perception.18 To this end, I will first consider the pragmatic func-

17 Klee’s painting indeed showcases how abstract painting also elicits a simulational perceptual act. However, not all abstract paintings unfold shapes and lines in quasi three-dimensional environments. It would, for example, be a stretch to claim that a Pollock (say, his Number 31) would activate a simulation of the same sort as elicited by Klee. Yet, it does trigger off perceptual activity, which does not simply coincide with a snapshot of the image object: Pollock’s paintings too have figure/ground structure, so that some drip configurations are indeed experienced as being closer to the viewer and others more in the background. Here, as elsewhere, there are limit cases: Yves Klein’s Blue Monochrome is an example of a picture where the depicting surface or the image object arguably coincides perfectly with the image subject. 18 I am aware that all my examples up to now have been artworks, but they have been dealt with as tokens of images in general (with the exception of Klee’s Chessboard, whose multiply depicting design is a distinctive property of aesthetic images).

Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance  179

Figure 11.3  Paul Klee, Chessboard (1931).

tion of everyday images or photos. From a semiotic point of view, such images or photos (of, say, my uncle or the Danish prime minister) have two functions.19 Images may have a purely iconic function, that is to say, they are intended to elicit a visual experience of their image subject as such.20 In this sense, they can be said to be referential. I see the photo and see that my uncle is in it, while other details, such as the exact day the photo was taken, the exact place, the exact circumstances, and so on, recede with respect to the visual experience of what is in the picture. Images may also have an indexical function, which can be as important as the purely iconic function. Photos in newspapers are often intended to show not only a prime minister, but a prime minister at a specific location, on a specific day, and thus serve to document that he or she was there, did or said such and such there. The phenomenology of image seeing is for such iconic and indexical images specific in that surface and design properties of the image thing and the image object, respectively, are hidden or reduced to a minimum by their function. Their design is transparent.21 The consciousness of conflict is of course there, still active, since I don’t mistake the photo of my uncle for my uncle, but properties such as framing or viewpoint are irrelevant with respect to its primary function. In ordinary images, the surface and the design are, as it were, not there; we see through them.

19 Cf. Stjernfelt, Diagrammatology, ch. 14. 20 Husserl develops the same argument. Plain photos are not perceived “aesthetically, but as an image of a friend, of a great man, and the like” (Hua XXIII, 52/56). 21 Husserl also highlights this property, e.g., Hua XXIII, 51–52/54–56. Jan Koenderink observes that the design structure of ordinary images is, as a rule, absorbed by the content they give access to: Jan Koenderink, “Gestalts and Pictorial Worlds,” Gestalt Theory 33/3–4 (2011): 289–324. Jerry Levinson makes the same point in his discussion of Wollheim’s twofoldness hypothesis: Jerry Levinson, “Wollheim on Pictorial Representation,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56 (1998): 227–233.

180  Peer F. Bundgaard What about aesthetic images, then? Here, it is important to recall that by “aesthetic” I do not mean an image that elicits a rewarding experience accompanied by some sort of appreciation, but simply an object intentionally designed to be an artwork (or believed to be so). I do so, in a sense, to make things a bit more complicated for me to describe; in particular, because such an understanding covers the entire category of those objects we know as artworks, not simply the subset of them we happen to like. Moreover, this definition of “aesthetic” allows us to characterize upfront those properties of “aesthetic” objects which trigger off a specific kind of visual experience that is different from the one of a photograph of my uncle or the prime minister.22 The first thing we can observe is that aesthetic images have a reduced iconic-­referential and indexical function (if any). Artworks may, of course, link persons to significant places; and they may, as an essential part of their content, depict certain persons, who should be recognized by the viewer. Yet, if one wants to know something about Napoleon’s crossing the Alps, there are better places to go than David’s painting of that deed. And, contrary to photos in news articles, we wouldn’t take a sentence like “That’s Napoleon crossing the Alps” as a satisfying description of David’s painting as a painting. Now, if the recognition of the image subject does not exhaustively capture the function of the artwork, its particular essence resides somewhere else, namely―as Husserl emphasizes it time and again (Hua XXIII)―in the image object, i.e., in the pictoriality of the image (its Bildlichkeit).23 Aesthetic images check the smooth transition to or consumption of the image subject and the spontaneous absorption of the design structure in the image subject. They operate, as Lambert Wiesing has put it a constitutive “transparency reduction”;24 and doing so they elicit the intentional attitude which is the condition sine qua non of aesthetic appraisal, according to Husserl, or, more generally, as I would claim here, the intentional mode which characterizes the perceptual interaction with artworks. Here’s how Husserl unfolds the argument. Imagine a wax figure that would be such a perfect imitation of a real human being […] that the moments of difference cannot produce a clean-cut and clear consciousness of difference; that is to say, a secure image consciousness. Image consciousness, however, is the essential foundation for the possibility of aesthetic feeling in fine art. Without an image, there is no fine art. And the image must be clearly set apart from reality […]. We are supposed to be taken out of empirical reality and lifted up into the equally intuitive world of imagery. Aesthetic semblance [Schein] is not sensory illusion [Sinnentrug]. The delight in blunt disappointment or in the crude conflict between reality and semblance […] is the most extreme antithesis to aesthetic pleasure, which is grounded on the peaceful and clear consciousness of imaging.25 Consciousness of pictoriality, of course, implies accrued allocation of attention to the image surface or the image object (“interest always returns to the image object and attaches

22 I have characterized aesthetic perception in terms of a specific type of intentional relation in Peer F. Bundgaard, “Feeling, Meaning, and Intentionality – A Critique of the Neuroaesthetics of Beauty,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12/4 (2013): 1–23. 23 Hua XXIII, 41/44. 24 Lambert Wiesing, “Phänomenologie des Bildes nach Husserl und Sartre,” Phänomenologische Forschung 30 (1996): 255–281. Henceforth cited as “Phänomenologie.” 25 Husserl, Hua XXIII, 41/44.

Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance  181 to it internally, finding satisfaction in the manner of its depicting […]”).26 This leads Husserl to take on a Kantian stance to the nature of aesthetic experience as disinterested seeing, interest in appearance proper. Here’s what he remarks in the Beilagen (from about 1906): We distinguish: Interest in the appearance [from] interest in the subject. It is the appearance that comes into question aesthetically. [The only aesthetic interest is] the interest in the appearance as it is, and not for theoretical purposes, such as the epistemological, the psychological, and so on. “Delight in perception,” but, much more, delight in the appearance.27 Aesthetic images are thus relatively opaque images, or images with more opaque surfaces that attract attention to their manner of appearance rather than simply to the appearing contents. In this sense, the reduction of transparency is accompanied by a reduction of pragmatic interest (as we also saw in the above quote): if we are interested in the depicted object, the interest is not about the object “as an element of the actual world with respect to its objective properties, relations, and so on, but precisely the appearance alone.”28 We can preliminarily conclude that, to Husserl, aesthetic perception is inflected from ordinary perception in that it is vision for appearance―and not vision for object recognition as is the case in ordinary seeing. At this point, it may be useful to consider in some more detail what is or could be meant by “transparency reduction” or “pictoriality,” that is to say, what it means for an image also to appear as appearance and not, as is usually the case, only as an iconic sign representing an object in the world. I will here mention three essential aspects of transparency reduction―including some of the formal techniques employed in producing this reduction―but only submit the last one to more in-depth scrutiny. These aspects are (1) style, (2) beauty, and (3) multiply depicting design (with a specific focus on brushwork and shape).29 4.1 Style

Lambert Wiesing has strongly emphasized artistic style as a global pictorial property pertaining to the depicting surface, 30 and, thus, a correlate of aesthetic perception proper that operates a transparency reduction. We may not simply see haystacks in an image, but also “a Monet” or “a van Gogh”; and we may see a Monet or a van Gogh even before we take in all the details of the image; or, at another level of abstraction, we may

26 Husserl, Hua XXIII, 37/40. 27 Husserl, Hua XXIII, 145/168. 28 Husserl, Hua XXIII, 145/168. 29 I have already at several occasions analyzed “non-generic viewpoints” as a formal technique which serves the function of enhancing the presence of the pictorial surface. This is why I do not include viewpoint in my presentation here. See Peer F. Bundgaard, “Towards a Cognitive Semiotics of the Visual Artwork – Elements of a Grammar of Intuition,” Cognitive Semiotics 5 (2009): 42–65. Bundgaard, “More seeing-in” and in particular Bundgaard et al., “Non-genericity.” 30 Here is how Wiesing puts it (my translation): “Style is a non-material form of appearance of the conflict [between image object and image subject] in images, for it is simply the syntactical manner and mode in which an object achieves visibility in an image. This manner and mode are eventually displayed in the treatment of the relation between image parts, that is to say, in the shaping of the image. Images with distinguishable styles are distinguishable structural formations” (Wiesing, “Phänomenologie,” 270–271).

182  Peer F. Bundgaard be in doubt whether the configuration of figures we see is a Bonnard or a Vuillard, but we may be certain that what we are seeing is a piece of post-impressionism. Inarguably, style as a correlate to aesthetic perception does not pertain to the thing―the thing hasn’t any style―so the transparency reduction does not work in that direction; it is a genuine property of the aesthetic object, appearing through design features such as color, stroke, brushwork, shape, framing, vantage point, and so on, which pervades the perception of the image subject represented in the image. To capture style (to see “a van Gogh”) is to be captured by a characteristic manner of appearance. 4.2  Beauty (or ugliness)

I said initially that I do not consider it a defining property of aesthetic objects that they elicit a rewarding feeling of beauty or arouse aesthetic interest. Other things do that as well. However, if an artwork―and this actually also goes for plain photos―does produce such an effect in a viewer, this effect arises in principle from its purely visual properties and (not only) from its image subject. It is as an image, in its pure pictoriality, that a picture is appreciated, that is, it is in virtue of its design it is considered aesthetically valuable. We are thus back to the same properties as in the case of style; it is the treatment of colors, brushwork, shapes, lines, light, and so on, which we find beautiful or aesthetically interesting (or, of course, ugly). When we appreciate (or aesthetically reject) images, our recognition of the depicted (concrete or abstract) objects is necessarily doubled with enhanced perception of the image as appearance, since it is in virtue of the latter that we appreciate what we see. 4.3  The image object as “multiply depicting design”

Style and Beauty are, respectively, a global property of the depicting surface and a response to such a property. I’d like, now, to pinpoint more specific properties of aesthetic depicting surfaces, which may help better understand what “appearance” is, in Husserl’s sense, and what accrued interest in appearance is; in short, properties that cause the intended partial detachment of the image object from the image subject and thus sharpen the aesthetic consciousness of conflict between the depicting surface and its image subject. The elements I have picked here―stroke, shape, and in general the pictorial surface as a multiply depicting object―of course don’t constitute a closed set of such properties; they are tokens of depicting properties, which may or are to be appreciated independently of the object that they represent, that is to say as quasi-autonomous configurations of lines, colors, and forms. 4.3.1 Brushwork

Consider stroke. Strokes, or in general the traces of brushwork, are necessary, dependent moments of picture-making. They are the inevitable indices of those acts that are necessary to bring paint onto the canvas and thereby construct a depicting surface. Thus, in many cases, strokes or brushwork have properties, accessible to vision, which are not relevant for image seeing, let alone aesthetic image seeing: they pertain, as it were, to the surface as a thing. If, for example, I put paint on a canvas with a brush, then my strokes will necessarily have an orientation, but there are countless cases where this orientation doesn’t carry any perceptual meaning; just like my breathing is a necessary condition for me saying whatever I intend to say.

Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance  183

Figure 11.4  Vincent van Gogh, Landscape with Trees and Figures (1889).

Now, it is well known that brushwork is not simply a physical sine qua non condition for constructing a pictorial artwork. It is also a depictive variable, as it were, i.e., a formal technique by means of which painters can choose to design the image object and thus shape its appearance. They can do it, as Ingres, by deleting any trace of brushwork (as in, e.g., the portrait of Princess de Broglie),31 or, on the contrary, they can choose to make it conspicuous, obtrusive to different degrees. In both cases, the treatment of brushwork affects the presentation of the image as appearance, that is, the image object, thus enhancing what Husserl called the pure “Bildlichkeit” of the image. Here, I’d like to point to yet another way of employing brushwork, and specifically stroke, in a pictorial way, that is to say, in a way that exceeds its mere function of representing objects. Take van Gogh’s Landscape with trees and figures (Figure 11.4). What we see, we see in virtue of the painter’s brushwork; so, the strokes elicit the visual experience of trees, field, mountain, sky, a woman, and so on. Now, the strokes in this picture, as often in van Gogh, are also treated as autonomous units that stand out perceptually as so many configurated figures: small, colored blocks to be appreciated in their own right or configurations of such blocks―perhaps most clearly in the sky (upper left and right corner). We have here, in the function attributed by the artist to his strokes, an example of what I have called “multiply depicting design.” On the one hand, we have

31 In Painting, 75, Wollheim remarked that the “invisibility of brushwork” is something that can claim attention on the pictorial surface.

184  Peer F. Bundgaard strokes that represent a part of the world and have us simulate a certain landscape (image subject); on the other, we have the very same strokes appearing as organized configurations of shapes with their own orientation and flow. The physical elements that allow us to recognize an object are re-configurated into autonomous groups of purely appearing figures. They serve the double function of representing objects and presentifying themselves. To enhance the “Bildlichkeit”―and thus the experienced tension between depicting surface and image subject―may be exactly this: the autonomy assigned to the strokes as ordered visual units does not reveal the image as a thing; the consciousness of conflict is, thus, not enhanced in that direction. We do indeed not experience those quasi-­ autonomous strokes as properties of the physical canvas; it is the sky that is blue, and it is the small (stroke) shapes that are simultaneously purple.32 In short, to enhance “ ­ Bildlichkeit” means to enhance the presence of the image object as a platform for the exercise of pure vision, that is to say vision, the finality of which is the act of seeing itself or seeing the appearance of something (not only recognizing such and such object).33 4.3.2  Shapes – the defunctionalization of represented objects

The shapes of represented objects can also be used, and are often used, to enhance the purely qualitative presence of the depicting surface and thus inflect perception from its routine function, i.e., object recognition. This is what I call the defunctionalization of represented objects (and their refunctionalization as pure shapes). In cases like this, the artist can be said to represent objects, not simply to convey a visual experience of these objects (in the way a portrait of Napoleon is intended to convey an experience of Napoleon), but because the objects are treated as proxies for shapes with interesting qualitative properties. Let me give an example of this, I believe, widespread use of objects as proxies for shapes. Consider Bonnard’s The Merchant of Four Seasons (Figure 11.5). It has the remarkable design property that the sea, in the represented background, and the carriage, in the represented middle ground, have exactly the same shape, are aligned on the depicting surface, and are the mirror-symmetrical counterparts of each other. Obviously, this is another example of an image with a multiply depicting design structure, but now at the level of shape. In images like this, the depicting surface is such that it both represents given objects (a carriage, the sea) and neutralizes this depictive function by treating the represented objects as pure shapes on the depicting surface. The function of the shape that represents the sea is to resemble the shape that represents the carriage, and vice versa: we can thus say that painters (and photographers) can at will

32 Space does not allow me to do justice to Roman Ingarden’s analyses of the double function of such image aspects. Ingarden notes that a moment or an element of an image can perform the function of bringing something to intuitive presentation, but moments can also perform a “decorative” function, “that is, they are themselves aesthetically valuable moments or bear such moments in themselves” independently of their representational function; Roman Ingarden, Ontology of the Work of Art (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1989), 167. 33 In an enlightening article, Jean-Marie Schaeffer considers auto-teleology a prime property of aesthetic perception: “[···] what is peculiar to the aesthetic inflection of attention is foremost the fact that it is not only attention-driven but has also a peculiar auto-teleology built into it: the aim of looking aesthetically at something is the process of looking itself,” Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Aesthetic Relationship, Cognition, and the Pleasures of Art,” Peer F. Bundgaard and Frederik Stjernfelt, eds., Investigations into the Ontology and the Phenomenology of the Work of Art: What Are Artworks and How Do We Experience Them? (New York, Dordrecht, London: Springer Open, 2015): 145–165, here 156.

Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance  185

Figure 11.5  Pierre Bonnard, The Merchant of Four Seasons (1899).

defunctionalize a qualitative region representing an object and refunctionalize it as pure shape. Bonnard’s picture is perhaps a too spectacular example of this procedure in so far as it morphologically couples two entirely different objects and makes them coincide exactly on the surface. However, this sort of operation needs not result in such conspicuous (or conspicuously playful) exact morphological coincidences: the use of approximate echo shapes (each representing different objects at the image subject-level) and the use of objects as proxies for shapes are indeed stock components of artists’ productive strategies throughout art history (both for purely aesthetic reasons and with a view to articulating semantic relations through morphological similarities).34 As regards shapes, we may have an enhanced tension or conflict between depicting surface and image subject, i.e., another type of objective Bildlichkeit-enhancing correlate to pure vision, or to the enhanced awareness of pure appearance, which is constitutive 34 Pictures with multiply depicting designs are thus far from exotic. Monet has made numerous pictures with depicting surfaces that elicit visual experience with both a representational content (say, trees, sky, pond) and an abstract content in which shapes (representing different objects) are recomposed into one and the same global configuration: many of his “Poplar” pictures are epitomes of such designs (so are, of course, many of his “Waterlilies” (accessible at wikiart.org)). Whistler’s cityscapes are likewise parade examples of the same pictorial phenomenon (cf. his Nocturnes). Similarly, there are many examples of abstract pictures that are analogous to Klee’s Chessboard in that they may elicit several, equally consisting 3D interpretations, where by “3D interpretation” I do not mean the different real world things the viewer may take the abstract shapes to represent in phantasy, but―as was the case for Klee―strictly speaking the different sets of topological relations that consistently obtain between lines and shapes in the image object. Jacques Villon’s L’Espace and many of Jean Arp’s Configurations are perfect counterpart examples to Klee’s Chessboard.

186  Peer F. Bundgaard for aesthetic perception. I repeat, in this case, and to different degrees from picture to picture, elements of the image object can take on autonomous perceptual signification, that is, appear as the content of a given picture experience, which again means, perhaps astonishingly, that elements which―as in the van Gogh above―at one level serve the function of enabling the visual experience of the sky can, at another level, be experienced as a qualitative pattern in their own right. If this description is correct, properties of the image object can indeed be experienced as elements of the image subject (and can be designed for exactly this purpose). Now, as regards shapes, the conflict can be taken one step further, as it were, since the very same image surface or design structure can give access to two genuine image subjects, that is to say, elicit two visual experiences with two different contents: one representational with, say, people, a carriage, the sky, the sea, some buildings distributed in a depicted world; and one purely presentational with two identical shapes, one blue, one dark, standing as straight figures mirroring each other on a background. Thus, we have the puzzling, but nevertheless frequently occurring case in which shape1 represents object1 and shape2 represents object2, and where object1 and object2 are clearly different, while shape1 are shape2 are functionally identical.35 Let me comment on this in some more detail in order to clarify the relation between image object and image subject as well as the notion of image object tout court that I intend to apply here. One aspect of the visual experience, the representational, is rather straightforward to characterize. Here, I perceive shapes as representations of different objects: shape 1 represents, say, a carriage, and shape 2 the sea in the background of a likewise depicted cityscape with people, and so on. All shapes represent the image subject by virtue of their resemblance with the latter. Thus, my experience of the image object is, among other things, one of perceiving a mine-sized carriage shape, mini-sized human figure shapes, and a mini-sized sea shape. The mini-sized shapes are given or present in perception, but the things they are the representatives of are not perceived as actually given before me, and they are not experienced as coinciding with the properties of the image object as regards color, size, and so on.36 Now, in the second aspect of the visual experience, the presentational one, I of course see the very same shapes on the image object, but no longer as shapes, representing a carriage and the sea, but as shapes that are identical mirror-symmetrical counterparts of each other, i.e., as moments of such a symmetrical configuration. How are we to describe this mode of givenness of the picture? Inarguably, when shapes are no longer perceived as representatives of objects, a “return,” as it were, to the image object takes place. However, this “return” to the image object is one where the shapes that are moments of the mirror-symmetrical configuration are not functionally identical with the very same shapes that are representatives of objects in the depicted world. In the second, presentational, experience of the picture, shapes do not resemble objects (carriage, sea); they do not gestalt anything in some respect similar to but different from themselves. This is, then, the difficulty. In the representational mode of experience, shapes must resemble (in some respect) objects, that is to say, the shapes that are representatives of the carriage and the sea must be some miniaturized version of the latter in order to be 35 John Hyman has made similar observations with regard to a painting by Degas, Dancers Practicing at the Barre, in which the watering can and the rightmost dancer have the same occlusion shape and the same part-whole structure; a visual pun Degas seemingly regretted. Cf. John Hyman, The Objective Eye (Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press, 2006). 36 Cf. Hua XXIII, 19/20.

Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance  187 representatives of them. In the presentational mode, however, the very same shapes do not and cannot be considered as resembling such and such objects; otherwise, they cannot be perceived as moments of a given abstract qualitative configuration. Consequently, the “return” to the image object in the second, presentational, mode of experience is not a return to the same kind of shapes on the depicting surface. Now, the somewhat puzzling character of this state of affairs cannot be solved by saying that the shapes perceived in the presentational mode are in fact perceived as properties of the image thing, because they are obviously not experienced in their mere physicality. They are experienced as moments of an intentionally constructed configuration with such and such properties, i.e., as elements of a picture, not accidents on a canvas. This, of course, also explains why picture consciousness (and possible aesthetic appreciation) is not checked when I cease apprehending the shapes as objects but as moments of a configuration. The proposal I develop above is therefore to consider a picture like Bonnard’s in analogy with for example Klee’s Chessboard where the image object has also been designed to elicit different visual experiences with different contents (which I consider as image subjects, since they are the contents of a visual experience or simulation elicited by the depicting surface). The difference between Klee and Bonnard is that in Klee the contents are all presentational, whereas in Bonnard we have one representational arrangement and one presentational arrangement, supported by the same image object. Only under this kind of characterization, the two types of contents afforded by the image object can remain aspects of one unitary (aesthetic) perception and not objects of two different modes of perception. So, what kind of image object is involved in this type of description, and what does this entail for the understanding of what the enhanced conflict between image object and image subject implies in aesthetic images? In regard to the latter question, images with multiple contents perform transparency reduction (and thus produce enhanced conflict and enhanced “Bildlichkeit”) not only by hampering the immediate absorption of representing surface properties by represented content but also by orienting perceptual attention toward the exceptional design property of their image object, namely that shapes in it can appear once as representants of objects in the world and once as figures in their own right. Consequently, the notion of image object employed here is also extended, as it were. The image object is often―as I did before, in a Husserlian vein―described as the figures in an image which bring into “intuitive presentation” the subject of the image. So, again, in a black-and-white photo I see my mother, I see her because the figure in the image resembles her in certain respects; but the image subject I experience in the image is not one that is, say, 8 centimeters tall and grayish, as it is in the image object, but a full-fledged human being, my mother. Here, however, by image object, I do not only mean those figures that elicit the quasi-experience of the image subject, but the full depicting surface with its style, its scope, its perspective, its beauty (or “ugliness”), its brushwork, color scheme, composition, and so on, and, thus, also with its capacity of being multiply depicting. 5  Consequences for aesthetic perception From this brief discussion of certain essential properties of the depicting surface, I would now like to draw some consequences for aesthetic perception, which I have already partially developed elsewhere (also within a Husserlian framework).37 37 Bundgaard, “More Seeing-in.”

188  Peer F. Bundgaard To my knowledge, Husserl’s theory of image seeing and his analysis of the image as a three-layered object has only very rarely, if at all, been integrated in recent philosophical discussions about the nature of “depiction” (outside the phenomenological community, of course).38 This is in a sense astonishing since his claims and arguments seem particularly relevant for the debate revolving around the phenomenology (writ large) of image seeing in general and Wollheim’s theory of its twofolded nature in particular. Astonishing, not simply because Husserl could be considered a precursor of some of Wollheim’s main claims, but also―and especially―because his characterization of the image as a threelayered object (and thus image seeing as a threefolded act with corresponding objective correlates)39 may serve to clarify certain confusions in the debate; confusions probably rooted in Wollheim’s somewhat ambiguous presentation of the constituent parts of twofoldness. I here pick up a couple of elements from my previous discussion of this issue. According to Wollheim,40 image seeing (or rather “seeing-in,” seeing something in something else) is a perceptual act with a complex content; it consists of two moments that can only be analytically separated from each other in case of seeing-in proper: a “recognitional” part, namely the object we see in the image (or in some other material support); and a “configurational” part, namely the awareness of the material support. Here is Wollheim’s famous illustration of seeing-in, which he all as famously transposes to image seeing: I look at a stained wall, or I let my eyes wander over a frosty pane of glass, and at one and the same time I am visually aware of the wall, or of the glass, and I recognize a naked boy, or dancers in mysterious gauze dresses, in front of […] a darker ground. I virtue of this experience I can be said to see a boy in the wall, the dancers in the frosty glass.41

Very simply put, the debate―elements of which have been unraveled by Nanay42―concerns the phenomenology of seeing-in in general and thus aesthetic perception in particular; that is, what does “awareness” actually read? Am I aware of the configurational aspect of the image the same way I am aware of its recognitional aspect? Wouldn’t that lead to an impossible split perceptual act with two separate contents the fused nature of which remains enigmatic or simply posited by Wollheim? Now, as Nanay has shown, the reason why the debate is partially confused is that scholars use the same term, say, “awareness,” without settling on its exact signification: does “awareness” for instance entail “consciousness about,” so that in Wollheim’s case I have a conscious experience

38 A remarkable exception is Bence Nanay, “Threefoldness.” 39 I use the term “threefolded” about image seeing in “More Seeing-in.” Fotini Vassiliou has brought to my attention an article by John Brough where he also uses the term “threefoldness,” and for the same reasons: John Brough, “Something that is Nothing But Can Be Anything: The Image and Our Consciousness of It,” Dan Zahavi, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Henceforth cited as “Something.” 40 Cf. Wollheim, Painting; Richard Wollheim, “On Pictorial Representation,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56/3 (1998): 217–226. 41 Wollheim, Painting, 47. 42 Bence Nanay, “Perceiving Pictures,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10 (2011): 461–480. Henceforth cited as “Perceiving.” Bence Nanay, “Inflected and Uninflected Experience of Pictures,” Catharine Abell and Katerina Bantinaki, eds., Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 181–207; and Nanay “Threefoldness.”

Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance  189 of the image content, and along with that I have the same kind of conscious experience of the material support? This is obviously not the case, but how are we then to understand the difference between awareness1 of the recognitional aspect and awareness2 of the configurational aspect? The main source of the ambiguity is here that Wollheim does not define sufficiently well what he means by the “configurational” moment of twofoldness; or, rather, he conflates the depicting surface and the image as a thing and subsumes them under one and the same concept. As we shall now see, the Husserlian distinction between image object and image thing can help us elucidate what it means to be aware of the configurational aspect while experiencing the image subject, and thus get a firmer grasp of the import of “twofoldness.” The problem, in Wollheim, is simple to pinpoint. Seeing a figure of a boy in a frosty pane of glass, as in the quoted example, or, say, a face in a cloud, is accompanied by awareness of the frosty pane or the cloud on which the figure appears. This is a very good example of twofoldness in perceptual acts involving the visual experience of recognizing something (a face) in something which it is not (a cloud). It comprises of course the awareness of both these objective correlates of the experience, which trivially explains why the cloud never ceases to be the full objective correlate of our perception while we see the face in it. In short, here, twofoldness can be described or captured phenomenologically in terms of consciousness of conflict, namely between what we see and the thing in which we see it. Awareness of the configurational aspect is here awareness of the object qua object. Now, how does this transpose to aesthetic perception? In a sense, it doesn’t, or at least not in the same descriptive format. If I see a painting of a girl reading a book, I see the girl in the same sense as I saw the face before (or let’s assume that), but I am not co-aware of the object it appears on in the same sense that I was aware of the object in which the face appeared. Seeing-in is here not “doubled” with “thing seeing” in the same way as it was in the case of the cloud. There is of course still conflict with the thing, but this conflict or object awareness does not inform the phenomenology of my visual experience of the girl reading a book. It would, for example, not be correct to say that when I see her reading, I see her appearing in front of or in the canvas so that my visual experience is also one of the canvas being blue here and purple there. However, that is exactly what is the case when I see a face in a cloud: I see the face, I see the cloud, and I see the properties of the cloud that is white here and gray there; the qualities I see specify and belong to the thing in which I see them.43 In contrast, qualities of intentional objects,44 such as images, do not belong to their physical substrate―the canvas, say―but to the objects depicted in them, or to the depicting surface such as it presentifies them. And this difference is due to the fact that natural things do not have depicting surfaces, while images do. There is, thus, a difference between seeing things in non-intentional natural objects and seeing them in intentional objects (images). Only in the former case, seeing-in is

43 Brough, “Something,” would consider seeing faces in clouds as cases of “seeing-as” rather than seeing-in. I see the cloud as a face or a torso. This explains, according to him, the interpretive leeway we accept in such cases. I can, for example, point at the sky and say “It looks like a face,” and you can answer “To me it looks more like a rabbit,” and there is not much I can do about that. Whereas if I point to the portrait of Princess de Broglie, I wouldn’t accept your rabbit experience as sincere or relevant. 44 I here use “intentional object” in a loose Ingardian sense, namely as objects that, contrary to stones, clouds, and the like, have been intentionally produced and therefore depend on an expressive intentionality (by the way also a consumer intentionality).

190  Peer F. Bundgaard doubled with thing-seeing that informs the experience of seeing-in. In the latter case, the experience of the image subject is also doubled with the awareness of the image thing (which never recedes), but it is not informed by it; it is―as we have already seen―only doubled with as well as informed by the image object. Here, the conflict goes in the other direction, it is one between image subject and image object.45 Despite Nanay’s attempts to dry out the sources of confusion in this domain,46 arguments remain misguided as long as the above distinction is not acknowledged. Opponents to Wollheim’s thesis of course have a point if―as part of Wollheim’s own argument suggests―one of the two folds in aesthetic image seeing is conscious awareness of the image thing. In such a case we would indeed have to posit some sort of impossible double vision consisting in seeing both that the reading girl’s dress is purple and that the canvas is purple. However, if we follow Husserl’s distinction, the situation is different and the description of the phenomenology of image seeing more accurate, or simply adequate. To each of the ontological strata of the image we can assign a subjective correlate, which does not need to be a conscious perceptual act proper. The correlate of the image thing is “object awareness,” which is, as we have already seen, a consciousness of conflict anchoring the experience of the image object and the simulation of the image subject in an environment of real objects. This consciousness is, in a sense, weak in that it does not inform image seeing itself otherwise as the horizon for the perceptual act. Phenomenologically, object awareness is akin to the awareness I have of the world behind me while I am consciously experiencing an object on my table. This could be a simple way of capturing the consciousness of conflict between my visual experience of the image object and the simulation of the image subject, on the one hand, and, on the other, my ongoing background awareness that I am also experiencing a thing in the world; the latter awareness does not shape my experience of the image subject, just as my awareness of what is behind me does not inform the experience of what is in front of me. The correlate of the image object is in contrast a genuine “fold” in image seeing, which informs its phenomenology in some of the ways and in virtue of some of the properties I have examined above. Thus, as regards this stratum, the conflict is in a way strong and constitutive for both aesthetic perception and image seeing in that: (1) it shapes its phenomenology: what we see is the image object, the content of our visual experience (the extended image subject) is a function of the image object and its design; (2) the distance between the image subject and that in virtue of which we simulate it, the image object, is essential for the category of images (artworks) whose essential function is not to refer or represent, but to appear and to make appear in determinate ways. The relation, and thus the difference, between image object and image subject comes in all sorts of ways. It may be given to and affect perception as fused with but still 45 Brough, “Something,” suggests that Wollheim only operates with one type of seeing-in: seeing-in doubled with object awareness. However, the problem in Wollheim is not that he is simplistic, because he is not, but that he is not explicit enough, i.e., he does not make the distinction sufficiently clear. When he remarks “But, long before the stroke became a required object of aesthetic scrutiny, there were plenty of other features of the marked surface that claimed attention: contour, modulation, punch mark, aerial perspective, fineness of detail, as well as, for that matter, smoothness of surface or invisibility of brushwork” (”Painting,” 75)―he is inarguably describing a case where seeing-in is doubled with perception of the image object, not the thing; and the image object he is operating with is the extended image object in the above-mentioned sense. 46 Nanay, “Threefoldness”; see also Nanay, “Perceiving.”

Aesthetic perception as vision for appearance  191 distinguishable from the experience of the image subject, as when we appreciate style or aesthetic qualities. It is also formally given in the inherent framing of the visual scene―its scope and its viewpoint―which constrains the simulation of the extended image subject; a case in point here could be some of Piero della Francesca’s paintings (e.g., his Annunciations or the Flagellation) which represent figures distributed in a somewhat compressed or eerily flat 3D world, not because there is something wrong with the perspective, but because the artist has used perspective with a view to producing exactly this effect. Here, the visual effect is not caused by the flatness of the canvas, nor is it a property of the depicted world, but of the pictorial surface and the formal techniques employed on it. And, finally, images with enhanced “Bildlichkeit”―appearance-maximizing images― can be multiply depicting surfaces which, as was the case for the Bonnard painting, bring into intuitive presentation both different objects distributed in a depicted world and similar shapes juxtaposed on a background; or as was the case in Klee’s Chessboard where one single depicting surface supports several structurally consistent interpretations of lines and surfaces distributed in a three-dimensional space. All these cases, however different, illustrate both how one type of seeing can be doubled with another type of seeing, and how aesthetic perception can be characterized as accrued attention to the hallmark of aesthetic objects, according to Husserl: their qualitative presence as presentifying surfaces, appearances in which we feel delight.

12 Seeing-in and seeing-out Husserl’s theory of depiction revisited Regina-Nino Mion

Abstract The aim of this chapter is to argue against the semiotic reading of Husserl’s theory of depiction according to which depiction [Abbildung] must necessarily involve symbolic function. I aim to show that Husserl’s notes on depiction can be divided into two parts: those that deal with internal depiction and those concerned with external depiction. This division provides a constructive way to explain Husserl’s asemiotic view on depiction, but it has not received proper attention from Husserlian scholars. Accordingly, I aim to show that it is internal depiction that is clearly deprived of any symbolic function. Keywords  Image; Sign; Depiction; Seeing-in; Seeing-out; Husserl 1 Introduction In Edmund Husserl’s writings, the most detailed description of depiction [Abbildung] can be found in his Göttingen lecture course from 1904 to 1905, published in Text no. 1 under the title “Phantasy and Image Consciousness” in Hua XXIII.1 Since the publication of Hua XXIII in 1980 and especially after the translation of Hua XXIII into English in 2005, a considerable amount of research has been published on Husserl’s theory of the three-fold depictive image consciousness. Among these papers, there is a lively discussion on how Husserl defines his theory of depiction in comparison with symbolic representation. The discussion is often motivated by comparing Husserl’s phenomenology with semiotics,2 and the typical aim is to show how unsuccessfully Husserl defines the ‘pictorial sign’ compared to the theories of semiotics, or the incompleteness of an image as a

1 Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der Anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigung. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1891–1925), Husserliana XXIII, ed. Eduard Marbach (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1980); English translation: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005). 2 See Lambert Wiesing, Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory, trans. Nils F. Schott (Stanford: Stanford University press, 2010); Susan Petrilli, “Image and Primary Iconism: Peirce and Husserl,” Semiotica (August 2010): 263–274; Göran Sonesson, Pictorial Concepts: Inquiries into the Semiotic Heritage and Its Relevance to the Interpretation of the Visual World (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1989). DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-13

Seeing-in and seeing-out  193 sign in Husserl’s writings. Lambert Wiesing admits that, according to Husserl, pictures can be images that are not signs, but in that case these are not depictions anymore. He gives an example of the abstract photograph that can be taken as an ‘image’ but only because it does not or is not meant to refer to anything at all: “If we understand abstract photography in this sense, then the medium of photography is not used for picturing [abbilden] or visibly reproducing something but for forming [bilden] and visibly producing something.”4 The purpose of my chapter is to defend the reading of Husserl’s early writings according to which there can be pictorial representations that are not signs but are still depictions. To do this, I suggest that Husserl’s theory of depiction allows us to talk about internal depiction and external depiction. This division follows Husserl’s descriptions of ‘internal imaging’ [innere Bildlichkeit] and ‘external imaging’ [äussere Bildlichkeit].5 Husserl does not use the term ‘internal depiction,’ but he mentions the externally depictive function [äusserlich abbildende Funktion] of an image that corresponds to the description of external imaging—the image refers to something outside itself.6 In my reading of Husserl, internal depiction is the seeing-in experience, and Husserl clearly states that no symbolic function is involved in internal depiction. External depiction is, however, a more complex and more problematic case, because here Husserl admits that it has symbolic characteristics. Following John Brough’s wording I call external depiction an experience of seeing-out, since Husserl attributes a sign function to external depiction. John Brough, in explaining the difference between image and sign, and the cases in which a sign consciousness can arise on the basis of image consciousness, calls images seeing-in and signs seeing-out experience.7 Of course, the cases of seeing something in the image and a seeing that goes beyond the image are mentioned and discussed by Husserlian scholars, even though the terms ‘internal depiction’ and ‘external depiction’ are not used by them. However, to my knowledge, the distinction between internal and external depiction has not been used to explain specifically the question of how images can have no symbolic function 3

3 For instance, Gören Sonesson thinks that for a complete description of Husserl’s pictorial consciousness, a fourth (although optional) element is needed, that is, in addition to the picture thing, the picture object, and the picture subject, we must distinguish an extrapictorial referent (a motive or a model). Sonesson, Pictorial Concepts, 276–281. Winfried Nöth criticizes phenomenological theory because it excludes cases in which non-real object are depicted. Winfried Nöth, “Prolegomena: Why Pictures Are Signs: The Semiotics of (Non)Representational Pictures,” in The Iconology of Abstraction: Non-Figurative Images and the Modern World, ed. Krešimir Purgar (New York and London: Routledge, 2020), 19–29. This is clearly not Husserl’s view. One of Husserl’s frequently analyzed pictures is a reproduction of Titian’s painting “Sacred and Profane Love,” which depicts a glorious, superterrestrial female figure. See Hua XIII, 183/154 (from now on the first page number(s) of Husserliana XXIII refers to the English translation and the second page number(s) to the original text in German). 4 Wiesing, Artificial Presence, 74. In Patrick Eldridge’s words, “Wiesing holds that consciousness only establishes a relationship to the Sujet when it takes the image to be a pictorial sign.” Patrick Eldridge, “Depicting and Seeing-in. The ‘Sujet’ in Husserl’s Phenomenology of Images,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17/3 (2018): 555–578, here 570. According to Wiesing, Husserl sketches the perspective of an asemiotic viewing of images, but it is a perspective that Husserl wants to marginalize as an aesthetic problem. Wiesing, Artificial Presence, 52. 5 Hua XXIII, 38/35. 6 Hua XXIII, 90/83. 7 John Brough, “Something That Is Nothing but Can Be Anything: The Image and Our Consciousness of It,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology, ed. Dan Zahavi (Oxford University Press, 2012), 545–563, here 555.

194  Regina-Nino Mion according to Husserl.8 Instead, we find some attempts to defend the asemiotic reading of Husserl’s description of the image that remain unsatisfactory because of the lack of a clear distinction between internal and external depiction.9 My aim is to show that the debate over whether or not Husserl has successfully defined the depictive image with no symbolic function cannot be solved if the distinction between internal and external depiction has not been taken into account or if the focus is on the examples of external depiction only. Thus, we need first to understand the distinction between ‘internal depiction’ and ‘external depiction,’ and then to show that internal depiction has no symbolic function. Before I start examining Husserl’s theory of depiction in detail, a need for the clarification of terminology is needed. First, Husserl uses the terms ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ interchangeably, as synonyms.10 Accordingly, the adjectives ‘signitive’ and ‘symbolic,’ ‘significational’ and ‘symbolical’ are used interchangeably as well. Second, the German word ‘Vorstellung’ is sometimes translated as ‘presentation’ and sometimes as ‘representation.’11 Thus, when Husserl talks about image presentation [Bildlichkeitsvorstellung] or physical-image presentation [physisch-bildliche Vorstellung],12 it does not mean that here the ‘image presentation’ is equated with perceptual presentation, as when Husserl distinguishes ‘presentation’ [Gegenwärtigung], which characterizes perception, from ‘representation’ [Vergegenwärtigung], which characterizes memory, expectation, phantasy, and image consciousness.13 Third, in the manuscripts of Hua XXIII, Husserl talks about image presentations, presentations that symbolize by means of resemblance, and presentations that symbolize by means of mere signification (without an analogizing relation).14 In my chapter, I leave out the last category—the presentations that symbolize by means of mere signification—for my focus is only on pictorial representations that represent through analogy or resemblance. Internal depiction and external depiction are both examples of representations by means of analogy. In both cases the relation to the image subject presupposes some resemblance or analogy. As I will show in this chapter, the difference is that, in internal depiction, the subject is intuited in the analogizing moments of the appearing image object; in external depiction, the subject is intuited in a separate act that is a more perfect or more complete presentation of the subject, of what is (already) seen in the image object.

8 It is one thing to point out that Husserl mentions a class of images that function as signs and have external relation to the subject (like analogical memory signs); it is another thing to specify thereby how the subject is intended in cases of images with no symbolic function and images with symbolic function, for instance. 9 I will discuss an example in § 5 External depiction. 10 As he writes in the Logical Investigations: “A synonym for ‘signitive’ is ‘symbolic,’ to the extent that the modern abuse of a word ‘symbol’ obtains―an abuse already denounced by Kant―which equates a symbol with a ‘sign,’ quite against its original and still indispensable sense” (VI Investigation, Chapter 1, § 8, footnote no. 5). 11 As John Brough, the translator of the Hua XXIII, writes in footnote no. 1: “‘Vorstellung’ will usually be translated as ‘presentation,’ though occasionally as ‘representation’ or ‘phantasy,’ when the sense demands it,” Hua XXIII, 1. 12 Hua XXIII, 17/15. 13 See John Brough’s footnote no. 1 in Hua XXIII, 1 and Hua XXIII, xliv. Note that Eduard Marbach suggests a slightly different translation into English, Gegenwärtigung—presentification, Vergegenwärtigung—representification. Eduard Marbach, “Edmund Husserl: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898– 1925),” Husserl Studies 28/3 (2012): 225–237, here 236. 14 Hua XXIII, 96/89.

Seeing-in and seeing-out  195 2  Depictive image consciousness Husserl believes that resemblance [Ähnlichkeit] is the foundation of depiction.15 However, it must be noted immediately that Husserl does not think that we experience the depictive resemblance between the picture as a physical thing and the depicted subject. As Husserl writes: If we speak of the image in this way, and if we say in criticism that the image fails, that it resembles the original only in this or that respect, or if we say that it resembles it perfectly, then naturally we do not mean the physical image, the thing that lies there on the table or hangs on the wall.16 Instead, there must be some resemblance between the appearing image object [Bildobjekt] and the image subject [Bildsujet]. The presentation by means of an image “consists in the fact that an appearing object is taken to be a depictive image for another object perfectly like it or resembling it.”17 One could say that Husserl builds the theory of depiction around the notion of the image object [Bildobjekt] and its relation to both the ‘physical image thing’ and the ‘image subject.’ How the image object is related to the image subject—how it resembles and conflicts with the image subject—becomes the central question when Husserl explains the difference between image consciousness and symbolic consciousness. Before I come to this distinction, I will give the outline of Husserl’s three-fold image consciousness. In his lecture course, “Phantasy and Image Consciousness,” Husserl calls the experience of seeing pictures an image consciousness [Bildbewusstsein] or imaging consciousness [Bildlichkeitsbewusstsein].18 He first distinguishes two ‘objects’ in the experience: the image [Bild] and the subject [Sache].19 The latter is also called the image subject [Bildsujet] or the depicted object [das abgebildete Objekt].20 Then he claims that the concept of the image is, in fact, a double concept: we distinguish (1) the physical image [das physische Bild] from (2) the image object [Bildobjekt]. Thus, image consciousness involves three objects altogether. We have three objects: 1) the physical image, the physical thing made from canvas, marble, and so on; 2) the representing or depicting object; and 3) the represented or depicted object. For the latter, we prefer to say simply “image subject”; for the first object, we prefer “physical image”; for the second, “representing image” or “image object.”21

15 See the title of the Appendix III, Hua XXIII. 16 Hua XXIII, 20/19. This could also be taken as an answer to Goodman, who famously claimed that resemblance cannot be a sufficient condition for pictorial representation or depiction. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis/New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1968), 4. To quote Christian Lotz: “Goodman, in other words, conceives pictures as if they were only material signs, in this way radicalizing the sense in which, for instance, the word ‘table’ has no similarity with real tables and hence has its signified outside of itself. However, Goodman’s thesis is not convincing, insofar as—spoken in Husserlian language—he reduces pictures to what Husserl calls ‘picture things,’ and in so doing Goodman overlooks the phenomenon of ‘seeing-in’ and therefore cannot account for the visuality in its own terms.” Christian Lotz, “Depiction and Plastic Perception. A Critique of Husserl’s Theory of Picture Consciousness,” Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2007): 171–185, here 177. 17 Hua XXIII, 89/82. 18 Hua XXIII, 37/34. 19 Hua XXIII, 19/18. 20 Hua XXIII, 21/19. 21 Hua XXIII, 21/19.

196  Regina-Nino Mion As an example, Husserl frequently analyzes a reproduction of Titian’s painting “Sacred and Profane Love” (“Sacred Love”).22 The physical thing in this case is the printed reproduction on a paper that can be torn, destroyed, and so on. The sensuous contents that we receive by looking at the physical thing are apprehended as an appearing image object [Bildobjekt] that represents the subject [Bildsujet]. Husserl describes the pictorial experience of Titian’s painting in the following way: In the painting I at first see a white form, very tiny, etc.; this is the “Sacred Love.” I see the “background” — a grey landscape, distant church tower, flock of sheep, and so on. Of course, I do not take what I see to be “real.” It does not exist. Indeed, it conflicts with the reality surrounding it. However, it does appear as an object. But then it represents something.23 This is a description of the image object [Bildobjekt] that represents something. There can be no depiction without the image object.24 Husserl even writes that the Bildobjet is das Bild im eigentlicheren Sinn.25 Husserl also gives some specific descriptions of how the image object appears. He writes that the image object appears three dimensionally: A three-dimensional body, with colors spread over it, does indeed appear to us in the engraving — let us say, the Emperor Maximilian on his horse, a figure appearing three-dimensionally but built up visually from shades of grey and from enclosing boundaries.26 What he means is that the surface of the physical image thing is two-dimensional, but the appearing image object is three-dimensional, which is why the representing image object is “not a part or side of the physical image.”27 To quote Husserl: “The semblance thing is a three-dimensional body with color spread over the body; it is not identical with the surface of the paper and its chromatic gradation of tints.”28

22 Hua XXIII, 178/149. 23 Hua XXIII, 177–178/149. 24 As is well known, Husserl later revised his theory of image consciousness as depiction by saying that not all art must necessarily be depictive representations. In a theater play, the actors produce an image which is not a depictive image. Husserl writes: “The actor’s presentation is not a presentation in the sense in which we say of an image object that an image subject is presented in it. Neither the actor nor the image that is his performance for us is an image object in which another object, an actual or even fictive image subject, is depicted” (Hua XXIII, 616/515). John Brough reads this later text in the way that we still experience an image object when we see a theater play, only that the image object is not depictive. John Brough, “Some Husserlian Comments on Depiction and Art,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly LXVI/2, (1992): 241–259, here 257–259. Accordingly, a more precise definition of depiction would be that there is no depiction without the ‘depictive image object.’ 25 Edmund Husserl, Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1893–1912), Husserliana XXXVIII, ed. Thomas Vongehr and Regula Giuliani (Dordrecht: Springer, 2004), 533. 26 Hua XXIII, 21/20. 27 Hua XXIII, 118/109. 28 Hua XXIII, 118/109.

Seeing-in and seeing-out  197 Husserl also writes that it is the plastic form of an object that appears three dimensionally in the image object.30 Even more, Husserl believes that the plastic form is the core of pictorialization: 29

Under all circumstances, plastic form, though not qualitative determinations, must belong to the bearers of the pictorializing of a physical thing. In pure pictorializing consciousness, the subject is seen in the image with regard to this core, which bears the consciousness of pictorialization and is identified purely with it.31 Husserl does not explain why the plastic form must necessarily make up the foundation of an image consciousness, but he never changes this requirement either. Interestingly, we find similar statements by other picture theorists. Robert Hopkins says that we must experience the outline shape of an object (that is more than simply a silhouette).32 Richard Wollheim claims that the painting is two-dimensional, but what we see in the traced lines is something three-dimensional: For it is a deep-seated feature of our perceptual apparatus that, whenever we look at a surface marked to any degree of complexity, we shall, while continuing to observe the marks on the surface, at the same time see one thing in front of, or behind, another.33 This experience is called seeing-in by Wollheim. It must be noted, however, that for Wollheim the minimum requirement for a seeing-in experience (to have representational content) is that we “see one thing in front of, or behind, another,”34 that is, three-dimensionality, but it does not need to involve any outline shape or plastic form. This is why most abstract paintings are already representations according to Wollheim.35 Husserl would disagree. Husserl takes the seeing-in experience to be a figurative depiction, and thus the minimal requirement, according to Husserl, is to see the plastic form or spatial contour36 of an object. The plastic form is an analogizing moment in the image object. The analogizing moments are pictorializing moments, the moments of resemblance [Momente der Ähnlichkeit].37 In

29 Hua XXIII, 35/34. 30 “The drawing is flat; the plastic form is three-dimensional” (Hua XXIII, 156/138). 31 Hua XXIII, 90/82. 32 Robert Hopkins, Picture, Image and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 57. 33 Richard Wollheim, “On Formalism and Pictorial Organization,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59/2 (Spring 2001): 127–137, here 131. 34 Wollheim, “On Formalism and Pictorial Organization,” 131. 35 He says that very few abstract paintings lack the representational content, and it is because they require us to attend only to the marked surface. Wollheim, “On Formalism and Pictorial Organization,” 131. 36 John Brough, “Picturing Revisited: Picturing the Spiritual,” in The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski, ed. John J. Drummond and James G. Hart (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 47–62, here 56. 37 Hua XXIII, 33/32.

198  Regina-Nino Mion the strict sense, “[o]nly these moments produce an image consciousness,”38 for we see the subject through these moments. As Husserl puts it: The consciousness of the subject extends throughout the consciousness of the image object with respect to aspects of the analogizing moments. As far as the moments reach, a consciousness of identity is given, such that we in fact see the subject in them. 39 In addition to analogizing moments, there are non-analogizing moments in the image object that have no depictive function. The image object consists of both analogizing and non-analogizing moments. As Husserl emphasizes, non-analogizing moments are cointended.40 It is because of the non-analogizing moments that we experience discrepancy or conflict between the image object and the image subject.41 The depictive image must always involve resemblance and conflict between the image object and the image subject. Husserl also writes that we intuit the subject in the analogizing moments of the image object: We see the subject in the image itself; we see the former in the latter. The image (expressed more precisely: the image object) brings the subject to intuitive presentation in itself, and it does this to a greater or lesser extent depending on whether the number of pictorializing moments is greater or smaller.42 In other words, the image object intuitively illustrates the subject.43 Husserl specifies that only in perceptual presentation is the subject directly intuited. In imaging presentation the subject is intuited indirectly because the subject itself does not appear. Only the image object appears in the strict sense, and it is the image object that illustrates intuitively the subject. Thus, the subject does not appear itself in depiction, but it does not appear separately either. As Husserl writes: If the depicted object were independently constituted by one act and the image by a second and separate act, then we would have neither an image nor something depicted. We would have one object presented here, another object presented there.44 How the subject is intended makes the difference between images and signs. As Sokolowski explains Husserl’s theory, signitive intending is empty intending, while both pictorial and perceptual intentions are intuitive.45 To quote Sokolowski: “The crucial distinction is be-

38 Hua XXIII, 32/31. 39 Hua XXIII, 33/32. 40 See Hua XXIII, 161/141. 41 It is a matter of interpretation of Husserl’s theory whether we can also talk about indeterminate and vague analogizing moments or whether indeterminately depictive moments are also non-analogizing moments. 42 Hua XXIII, 54/50. 43 Hua XXIII, 150/136. 44 Hua XXIII, 28/27. 45 Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 25. As Thomas Byrne specifies the terminology, Husserl employs the term ‘signitive’ too broadly in his early texts, thinking that all non-intuitive acts are signitive. Husserl later revises this theory by saying that all non-intuitive intentions should be termed ‘empty’ acts. Thomas Byrne, “Husserl’s Theory of Signitive and Empty Intentions in Logical Investigations and Its Revisions: Meaning Intentions and Perceptions,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 52/1 (2021): 16–32, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.2020.1743953.

Seeing-in and seeing-out  199 tween meaning the object on the basis of signs or expressions, which is empty intending, and directly meaning it either in its own presence or in its image.”46 The empty intending can be fulfilled by an intuitive presentation, but then the fulfillment takes place in a separate act. To sum up, the depictive image consciousness occurs if the following conditions are met: • we experience three objects: the physical thing, the depicting image object, and the depicted image subject, • the image objects appear three-dimensionally and with the plastic form, • there is some resemblance between the appearing image object and the image subject, and some conflict between the two; the resembling moments in the image object are analogizing moments, • we intuit the image subject in the analogizing moments of the image object, we see the subject in the image object (we have the experience of seeing-in), while the subject is not intuited in a separate act. In the following two sections I discuss the two extreme cases of internal depiction: when the image object and the image subject resemble perfectly and when they resemble too little. These are the borderline cases because not all requirements of depiction are easily detected, which is why one can also critically assess Husserl’s examples as not being depictions in the strict sense. 3 Pure internal depiction In a depictive image we see the subject in the image object. They must resemble each other at least with respect to the plastic form. Now, Husserl thinks that some pictures are perfect, that is, we see the image subject in the image object perfectly: “we take all of its internal determinations to be intrinsic parts of the subject.”47 Although Husserl thinks that this perfect coinciding is a rare case, it is nevertheless an important example to be analyzed because it challenges one of the requirements of depiction, namely that there must be some resemblance and conflict between the image object and the image subject. For instance, in Appendix V in Hua XXIII, Husserl talks about genuine image consciousness, which is a pure [reine] re-presentational consciousness. More precisely, the subject intentions and the image object intentions coincide, but in some cases the coinciding is pure and in other cases impure. He describes the pure coinciding in the following way: “consciousness of perfect likeness, indeed, consciousness of identity: one sees the subject in the image; it appears in the image just as it actually is.”48 This wording is clearly problematic, because as Nicolas de Warren accurately points out, the complete overlap is, in fact, an impossibility. To quote De Warren: It is only as an ideal that we can speak of a complete “overlap” (Deckung) between image-object and image-subject, that is, an instance of image-consciousness in which the distance between image-object and image-subject is entirely reduced. In such an ideal instance, we would completely see the image-subject in the image-object. Husserl

46 Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations, 25. Sokolowski does not make the distinction between directly intuitive and indirectly intuitive presentations in this context. 47 Hua XXIII, 35/33. 48 Hua XXIII, 162/142.

200  Regina-Nino Mion grants that such an ideal remains a limit-case (Grenzfall). Indeed, this ideality defines a necessary impossibility. If we could behold a perfect image, we would paradoxically no longer be conscious of a difference between image-object and image-subject, and consequently, we could no longer behold an image of something. A perfect image would suppress the distinction on the basis of which an image is at all possible.49 One could argue that the perfect overlap must be on a minimal level, that is, with respect to the plastic form. This way to explain the perfect overlap would also be in accordance with the definition of depiction. Take, for instance, Husserl’s discussion of different levels of adequacy in the presentation of the image subject by the image object. The levels of adequacy can be with respect to extensity [Extensität] or with respect to intensity [Intensität].50 By extensity he means the range of the depictive moments, in the sense that the range is greater in an oil painting than in a drawing, for instance. What interests us here is the level of adequacy with respect to intensity, because he suggests that we only need one moment— the plastic form—for the perfect consciousness of internal imaging. As Husserl writes: “A drawing that suggests only outlines can give them in perfect resemblance, and thus with respect to this one moment furnish a perfect consciousness of internal imaging.”51 However, even if the image is perfect with respect to the plastic form only, Husserl does not specify or give any examples of the conflicting moments, the non-analogizing moments that were supposed to be co-intended. The only thing we can say with certainty is that the image object and the image subject are still two distinct ‘objects’ in the depictive image consciousness and thus are differentiated even in the case of the ‘perfect image.’52 Perhaps we must say that the ‘perfect image’ does not really function as an internal depiction but as an external depiction. As Husserl writes, even if the image is perfect, it conflicts with the external moments that belong to the depicted subject as it is in reality. He writes: In the case of a perfect portrait that perfectly presents the person with respect to all of his moments (all that can possibly be distinctive traits), indeed, even in a portrait that does this in a most unsatisfactory way, it feels to us as if the person were there himself. The person himself, however, belongs to a nexus different from that of the image object. The actual person moves, speaks, and so on; the picture person is a motionless, mute figure.53 The ‘moving’ and ‘speaking’ of the depicted subject are the external moments that cannot be seen in the picture.

49 Nicolas de Warren, “Tamino’s Eyes, Pamina’s Gaze: Husserl’s Phenomenology of Image-Consciousness Refashioned,” in Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences: Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl, ed. Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, and Filip Mattens (Dordrecht/Heidelberg/London/New York: Springer, 2010), 303–332, here 324. 50 Hua XXIII, 61/56. 51 Hua XXIII, 61/56. See also “In pure pictorializing consciousness, the subject is seen in the image with regard to this core [the plastic form], which bears the consciousness of pictorialization and is identified purely with it” (Hua XXIII, 90/83). 52 See how Husserl describes the exact depiction in phantasy: “Thus what appears turns into an image object of itself, as it were; that is, into an image object of the same object that appears there, except that it belongs elsewhere and consequently certainly cannot be the same in strict identity, but only something that is perfectly like it” (Hua XXIII, 34/33). 53 Hua XXIII, 33/32.

Seeing-in and seeing-out  201 4  Impure internal depiction Husserl calls impure images children’s drawings, Indian signs, hieroglyphs, or just rough silhouettes of something.54 These are impure cases because of the imperfect or impure coinciding of the subject intention and the image object intention. We hardly recognize what is being depicted in these pictures. There are various degrees of impurity. Sometimes we see the depicted subject only just a little. To quote Husserl: If, however, the silhouette deviates greatly, as it might in a child’s drawing of a human being, then the image means a human being — we know this, we are reminded of a human being and know that the image is supposed to represent a human being – but for all that we no longer see a human being in the drawing. Or perhaps just a little.55 Gören Sonesson suggests that these impure pictures are intermediate cases between pictorial consciousness and analogous signs, because “the problem with these seems to be that they do not adequately render three-dimensional space.”56 Thus, we could say that they are not depictions because we do not experience three-dimensional image object. The condition of the image object appearing three dimensionally is not met. In my view, impure internal depiction is not a clear case of depiction because we no longer (or hardly) see the subject in the image, and thus it becomes questionable whether we still intuit the subject in the image object. This explains why Husserl sometimes calls the impure cases symbolic presentations. As he writes: “If the resemblance is slight — sufficient to bring to mind what resembles but not to see [schauen] what resembles in it — then the image operates entirely as a symbol.”57 Nevertheless, the impure internal depiction does not necessarily function as a symbol; we can still experience it as an (internal) depiction. What makes the difference is where our interest or attention is focused. The symbolic relation to what is symbolized is an external one, that is, a sign points away from the symbol to what is symbolized.58 Now, Husserl writes that the more we focus our attention to the analogizing moments, the less external is the relation to the object.59 In the same way, if our interest is directed to the non-analogizing moments, then we feel pulled outward, that is, to go outside or “leave 54 Hua XXIII, 164/143. 55 Hua XXIII, 164/143. See also how De Warren explains the different grades of intuitive fulfillment in Husserl’s theory of depiction: “A minimum of recognition is thus implied and implicit in any form of imageconsciousness. I must recognize an image as the image of something. However, I may perceive marks on the caves of Lascaux as constituting an image of some kind without explicitly grasping clearly the identity of its depicted subject matter. Moreover, the recognition of the depicted subject admits different grades of intuitive fulfillment. Even if I just recognize that an image is painted on the wall, these mysterious images are still given in the consciousness of an image, albeit as an image that I fail to identify in particular. And yet, I still see something depicted in the image, if only the indeterminacy of a visual question mark—is it a shaman or a strange animal? By contrast, if I recognize the image of Napoleon, I clearly apprehend the image subject in the image object: I see Napoleon in the painting.” De Warren, “Tamino’s Eyes, Pamina’s Gaze,” 322. 56 Sonesson, Pictorial Concepts, 276. 57 Hua XXIII, 185/155. See also “[…] in the case of a silhouette that gives a rough indication of something— say, in the catalogue of a publisher of artistic reproductions (Nonny). Here the resemblance operates only symbolically, only as signifying” (Hua XXIII, 186/156). 58 Hua XXIII, 186/156. 59 “The more we immerse ourselves visually in the image (the image object), and in doing so focus our attention on the moments of agreement, on the analogizing moments, the less the relation to the object is an external one, pointing away from the image object” (Hua XXIII, 186/156).

202  Regina-Nino Mion the image behind.”60 Husserl even goes so far as to claim that, because of the concentrating of interest, impure depictions can be experienced as pure internal depictions: “A rough silhouette can still be sensed as an image [Bild], and indeed quite purely [rein] if we concentrate our interest precisely on what comes to presentation there.”61 If Husserl means by this that the rough silhouette can still give us a perfect plastic form of the depicted subject (with respect to intensity), then, indeed, it would not differ from the case of pure internal depiction. At this point, what Husserl means by the ‘concentrating of interest’ to the representation must be clarified. The way Husserl describes the case of impure image consciousness might lead us to think that the more non-analogizing moments there are (accordingly, the less analogizing moments there are) in the image object, the more the ‘image’ changes into a ‘sign.’ However, this should not be understood as if the amount of non-analogizing moments prescribes whether the picture is an image or a sign. First, there need not be a wide range of analogizing moments to have a depiction; we only need the plastic form. Second, as I pointed out previously, what matters is our turning of interest to analogizing moments, to look at them, “emphasizing them in consciousness,”62 in order to have a depiction. In that case, the co-intended non-analogizing moments will not be operative, and they do not have symbolic function either, which is another way to explain why internal depiction is not a signitive function. As Husserl writes: In the case of a steel engraving or of a plaster bust, for example, the plastic form of the image object has this status [the status of moments that illustrate intuitively], but not the shades of black and white. The latter moments, hence the supplementary group of moments constituting the appearance belonging to the image, are deprived of the mentioned distinctive character or status. They are there in the image, but they are not operative. We do not intuit the subject in them. They do not even have a symbolic function; they do not point as signs to corresponding, though differently determined, subject moments. They have no relation to the latter at all.63 A last clarification is required here. Impure internal depiction is not external depiction. The impure internal depiction can lead us or push us to go outside of the picture to experience the image as externally depictive. Only in this sense one could say that impure internal depiction is not yet external depictions (bearing in mind that it does not need to become external depiction).

60 “If our interest is directed specifically toward the color, or also toward the color, then we feel the colorlessness of the engraving as an absence. We cannot carry the colors into the image, since it offers the appearance of a sensuous present. We can only form a new appearance in phantasy, produce a reproduction of the subject: We must therefore go outside; we must leave the image behind” (Hua XXIII, 187/157). 61 Hua XXIII, 164/143. 62 Hua XXIII, 54/50. 63 Hua XXIII., 54/51.

Seeing-in and seeing-out  203 5  External depiction Husserl distinguishes internal imaging [innere Bildlichkeit] from external imaging ­[äussere Bildlichkeit],64 or internal representation [innere Repräsentation] from external representation [äussere Repräsentation].65 As I said at the beginning of my chapter, I call these ‘internal depiction’ and ‘external depiction.’ In this section, I will first explain the difference between the two, then why ‘external depiction’ is a problematic term in Husserl’s theory and therefore not suitable in defending the asemiotic reading of Husserl’s description of the image. As Husserl writes, we distinguish internal imaging from an external (transeunt) imaging, which is “a different mode of representation by means of resemblance.”66 In other words, while both are examples of representations by means of analogy [Repräsentation durch Analogie],67 there is a difference in the way in which the subject is intended. In immanent imaging, the subject is seen in the image object; we intuitively intend the subject in the analogizing moments of the image object. The image object “brings the subject to intuitive presentation in itself.”68 In external representation, however, we intuitively intend the subject in a separate act. As Husserl writes, the external re-presentation pushes outward toward another exhibiting, toward another appearance of the subject. What motivates us to go outward or go beyond the image is very often the inadequate representation of the subject in the image object.69 It should be noted that external depiction has some affinity with internal depiction. To quote Husserl: “The immanent image function: to see the object in the image; the transeunt symbolic function: one already has the consciousness of the internal image and, in addition, a new intention aimed at a new appearance.”70 We first see a picture as an internal depiction—we see something in the picture. But we might feel that the image does not suffice and then we are pointed beyond what appears in the image. As Husserl writes: “In that case, however, the intention aims at the substitute, the supplement, or at the improvement and corresponding modification of the image moments while the residual image is kept in mind.”71 This transcendent image-function gives us a more complete phantasy intuition or a memory “in which I would have a more adequate intuitive consciousness of the object.”72 Thus, one could argue that because external depiction is based on internal depiction, it belongs to the category of presentations that symbolize by means of analogy. In fact, this allows for another explanation of the way in which external depiction differs from impure internal depiction: the inadequacy of the image subject will not be fulfilled in a separate act in the case of an impure internal depiction. We are, so to say, satisfied with the inadequate presentation of the subject without performing a separate act to have a more 64 Hua XXIII, 38/35. 65 Hua XXIII, 183/154. 66 Hua XXIII, 56/52. 67 Hua XXIII, 38/35. 68 Hua XXIII, 54/50. 69 Hua XXIII, 188/158. 70 Hua XXIII, 39/36. 71 Hua XXIII, 188/158. 72 Hua XXIII, 189/158.

204  Regina-Nino Mion complete presentation of the subject. As explained previously, the conflicting moments in an image object are not operative in internal depiction. We are satisfied with what appears to us, and the co-intended non-analogizing moments do not even function emptily.73 In external depiction, we do not have a seeing-in experience. Instead, we go outside of the image, we have a seeing-out experience. We do not have the subject’s intuitive presentation in the image object. Instead, the depicted object is independently constituted by a separate act. But this is exactly what a depiction should not be.74 Thus, if we take depiction to be a seeing-in experience with all of the requirements listed above, and if we want to defend the view that depiction is distinguished from symbolic representation, then it becomes questionable whether ‘external depiction’ is depiction in the strict sense, especially if we recognize that Husserl himself calls it symbolic. The consciousness of coincidence, however, can also be impure; […] The latter are the phenomena of transition to the image consciousness that functions symbolically. The image then refers outside itself; it refers to something else that distinguishes itself from the image, which the image brings to mind by virtue of its resemblance and which, as resemblance-representant, it depicts. This externally depictive function [äusserlich abbildende Funktion] also inheres in the “faithful” image as soon as attention is directed toward those moments of the image object that display a deficit with regard to the exhibiting: namely, toward the moments that do not exhibit at all. There are always such moments: The image is not itself the original.75 One could answer the question of whether ‘external depiction’ is really a depiction by suggesting that Husserl accidentally used the term ‘externally depictive function’ in this passage when describing the symbolic representation. Even so, it is difficult to defend the view that Husserl distinguishes image consciousness from symbolic consciousness, or that there are images with no symbolic function, if the difference between internal and external imaging is not clearly pointed out or if we base our analyses on the examples of external imaging or external representation only. I will give one example. Patrick Eldridge argues against the view that the relation to the depicted subject is symbolic or signitive in Husserl’s phenomenology of images,76 and for this purpose he critically assesses Lambert Wiesing’s arguments that the relation to the subject has a signitive character. Eldridge writes that one of the reasons that the Sujetintention has a signitive character according to Wiesing is that: “the Sujet itself does not appear, so there is nothing to see, hence the consciousness of it is not intuitive.”77 Eldridge answers this criticism 73 As John Brough points out, the ‘imperfection’ can also contribute to the aesthetic value of an image: “In such cases I do not take the deviant features as occasions to abandon image consciousness and turn to phantasies or memories that might fill the gaps and correct the distortions. Instead I contemplate the image aesthetically, immersing myself in it, distortions and all.” Brough, “Something That Is Nothing but Can Be Anything …,” 559. 74 As I pointed out previously, Husserl clearly states that the depicted object is not independently constituted by a separate act: “We do not have two separate presentations, and above all we do not have two separate appearances” (Hua XXIII, 28/27). 75 Hua XXIII, 90/83. There are many examples in Husserl’s texts where he calls the external imaging or external representation symbolic. For instance, he says that “[a]n image can function as externally representative in a manner that is essentially equivalent to the consciousness belonging to symbolic representation” (Hua XXIII, 38/35). 76 Eldridge, “Depicting and Seeing-in …,” 555. 77 Eldridge, “Depicting and Seeing-in …,” 570–571. The other two of Wiesing’s reasons are that the Sujetintention is the consciousness of a rule and that the Sujetintention is just an optional denotation.

Seeing-in and seeing-out  205 by arguing that the Sujetintention is an ‘empty intuition’ or ‘empty quasi-perception.’79 Eldridge’s paper is definitely an important contribution to the study of images in Husserl’s phenomenology, but unfortunately he does not convincingly answer Wiesing’s argument about the non-intuitive character of the subject.80 Eldridge argues that the Sujetintention requires a separate act to achieve intuitive fulfillment, either in perception or in phantasy. He quotes Husserl: “The subject intention finds fulfillment through an original. [It finds] provisional fulfillment through an intuitively perfect phantasy presentation.”81 While his explanation of how the subject intention finds fulfillment through an original is correct, his description of the ‘empty intuition’ corresponds to Husserl’s account on external imaging.82 But since Husserl often calls the external depiction the symbolic function of an image, Eldridge’s argument that Sujetintention is an empty intuition does not convincingly explain why the intention to the subject is not signifying function. What Husserl calls (accidentally or not) the ‘external depictive function’ is a signitive function of an image, and we cannot defend Husserl’s idea that there are images without sign function by actually referring to an external imaging that has symbolic characteristics. Not all requirements of ‘depiction’ are met in external depiction: a more complete presentation of the subject is given in a separate act. If we want to defend Husserl’s idea that only images, not signs, give us a seeing-in experience, and if we agree that only internal depiction is a seeing-in experience, then any function that points us away from the image cannot be a depictive, seeing-in experience. Of course, one could ask whether external imaging always follows internal imaging: do we normally always ‘go outside’ the image? If someone would claim that external depiction must always follow internal depiction in order to have a ‘complete’ depiction, then, yes, images always function as signs. But this does not seem to be Husserl’s view.83 What he claims instead is that the immanent re-presentation “can be combined with transcendent re-presentation but does not have to be.”84 78

Acknowledgments This work was funded by the European Regional Development Fund and the program Mobilitas Pluss no. MOBJD203.

78 The ‘empty intuition’ can be taken as Eldridge’s own coinage. He explains it in the following way: “It is possible to intuitively intend a determinate object even when it lacks sensory givenness. You can blindly search for your keys between the couch cushions without (yet) seeing or feeling them. You have a perceptual relation to precisely those keys, even though they are completely hidden.” Eldridge, “Depicting and Seeing-in …,” 571. 79 Eldridge, “Depicting and Seeing-in …,” 573. 80 In my view, the claim that images can only be pictorial signs because the subject does not appear itself is already a mistake. It is a wrong interpretation of Husserl’s phenomenology because, according to Husserl, if the meant object appears itself, it is neither signified nor depicted object, it is a perceived object. 81 Hua XXIII, 162/141. 82 See the example of an external, transeunt imaging where an image brings to mind a person depicted in the image: “The person himself, however, who exists for us intentionally in a second and separate, though related, presentation—for example, in a phantasy presentation (but perhaps also in a merely empty intention)—the person, I say, then appears as what the image brings to mind” (Hua XXIII, 56/52). 83 It is true that Husserl mentions the cases in which we ‘go outside’ of the image and then ‘return’ to the immanent imaging (Hua XXIII, 40/37), but this is not the only way to see images. 84 Hua XXIII, 188/158.

13 Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl) Ivo De Gennaro

Abstract  Based on an initial determination of ēthos, elaborated in the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology (§1), the chapter explores the central tenets and ethical import of Sergiu Celibidache’s musical phenomenology (§2). The pivotal notion of Celibidache’s thinking is found in his understanding of musical tempo. In contrast to the common concept of tempo as speed, or pace, of a piece of music, for the Romanian director tempo has nothing to do with speed, and indeed with what he calls “physical” or “mechanical” time, i.e., clock time; seeing that the tempo is “nothing but a condition [for] the intertwining identification of vertical and linear simultaneity in our consciousness,” it cannot be grasped in terms of “units of time,” which are altogether alien to the dimension of music. In fact, notwithstanding the fact that a musical performance can always be timed, music itself “has no duration,” meaning that its extension in “physical time” is, musically speaking, meaningless. Instead, a notion of “original time,” as can be gathered from Celibidache’s considerations, is suggested as a theoretical key for understanding the notions of “vertical” and “linear” “simultaneity,” and of their “identification,” that is, their unification in the Same. “Tempo” finally turns out to be a name for the above-defined ēthos, experienced in its original temporal structure; this, in conclusion, allows us to identify some ethical implications of Celibidache’s musical thinking for our epoch marked by the will to power. Subsequently (§3), the chapter ventures on a brief analysis of Husserl’s lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. While Celibidache himself refers to his approach as “phenomenology of music,” and acknowledges his indebtedness to Husserl, he also mentions that “at a certain moment, the paths diverge.” According to Celibidache himself, the reason for this divergence lies in the “false” presupposition, shared by Husserl and Brentano, that “any consciousness is the consciousness of something.” The scope of the interpretation of Husserl’s lectures is therefore to hold the “identification of vertical and linear simultaneity in our consciousness” against the consciousness of internal time. According to Husserl, the latter is based on the time-constituting act of absolute subjectivity, which occurs in the “primal impression.” Keywords  Musical Phenomenology; Transcendental Phenomenology; Hermeneutic Phenomenology; Phenomenological Ethics; Time; Consciousness; Transcendence Regarding our entire musical history, they’ve made mountains where there were splendid valleys. If music today has disappeared from the world—and it has, it no longer exists—the evil

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-14

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  207 has been that of not identifying what was objectively there, made by a human being for another human being; thus, the human being has been annulled.1 Music is an articulation: the coincidence, in time and in the mind, of beginning and end, of end and beginning.2

1 Introduction What is the relation between ethics and time? Can the attempt to bethink the foundation of human ἦθος forego an enquiry into the nature of time? In this chapter, the word ἦθος is taken to indicate both the abode, or dwelling, of man, and, simultaneously, man’s bearing, or countenance, as the indweller of that abode. In other words, ἦθος refers to the relation between the abode as borne by man and the constitutive trait of man’s being, which is the indwelling that bears (holds open, sustains) the abode itself. The latter is neither “the world” (as a whole of sense relations) nor the sphere of “things.” Rather, that abode is the “in-between” which entwines world and things all the while keeping them apart, thus letting the things gather the world and the world offer things. The constitutive trait of man’s being, which consists in bearing the thus determined abode, can be called transcendence. Consequently, transcending implies exposing oneself to—and indeed bearing in the first place—what is neither world nor things, but the “weird” “inbetween” (das Inzwischen), which originally intertwines those two.3 This intertwining “in-between” is the dimension of that which, in this chapter, will be referred to as “the Same” or “the One.” “The One” generates the in-between as its own openness or truth. This openness is informed by pure ascendancy. As such it needs, and avails itself of, the transcendence which, in return, bears it. Hence, the ἦθος can be determined as the simultaneous relation of the ascendancy of the One’s openness or truth and the transcendence of man’s indwelling. How, then, does time come into play when we bethink the foundation of human ἦθος? Answer: through that openness or truth—the in-between of ascendancy and transcendence—insofar as it is constituted as space-offering time, and hence always as a space-oftime. An ἦθος is therefore always the ἦθος of a space-of-time, in the sense that human transcendence each time bears the configuration of the space-of-time of the One’s ascendancy for the interplay of world and things: a world’s openness for true things, things open to the truth of a world. The awareness of the circumstance that an ἦθος always consists in the generation of space-offering time thus becomes the very initiation of ethical thought. The colloquy with art provides for thinking a unique occasion for this awareness to arise. Specifically, the contention of this chapter is that, according to Celibidache, music is 1 Sergiu Celibidache, “La musica è sparita” (extract from a lesson on musical phenomenology given in Saluzzo, 1974), at 0:05–0:30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ77zHmwLlo. All translations from Celibidache are mine. Square brackets [...] in quotations indicate explicative additions, while angle brackets indicate additions that are to be read as part of the text. 2 Sergiu Celibidache, La musique n’est rien. Textes et entretiens pour une phénoménologie de la musique, trans. H. France-Lanord and P. Lang (Arles: Actes Sud, 2012), 23. 3 When Heraclitus says (B 119, Diels-Kranz): ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων, he is arguably implying that “the abode for man is the the δαίμων,” where the latter “is and is not” (cf. B 32) the “weird inbetween” whence is attributed (or weirded: δαίομαι) the lot, namely an attuned configuration of the relation between man and his thing-world.

208  Ivo De Gennaro nothing but the generation—borne in human transcendence—of the space-of-time for the interplay of world and things. In short, music itself is the advent of an ἦθος. In the Introduction to his lectures on the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Edmund Husserl writes: The first person who sensed profoundly the enormous difficulties inherent in [the analysis of time-consciousness] was Augustine. Even today, anyone occupied with the problem of time must still study Chapters 14–28 of Book XI of the Confessiones thoroughly. For in these matters our modern age, so proud of its knowledge, has failed to surpass or even to match the splendid achievement of this great thinker who grappled so earnestly with the problem of time. We may still say today with Augustine: si nemo a me quaerat, scio, si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio.4 If asked to name the advances our epoch has made, concerning the knowledge of time, since this statement was put forward, we could (other than mentioning Husserl’s own attempts) largely limit ourselves to three words in their two meaningful permutations: Being and Time (1927) and Time and Being (1962).5 However, the very thinking whose path is in a sense defined by those two titles has alerted us that, concerning the awareness of the original relation of man and time, and therefore our capacity to think in the direction of a likely6 future ἦθος, another form of human knowledge is to be acknowledged as a neighbor of thinking, and therefore needs to be heard in the context of a seminal ethical consideration. This other form of human knowledge is art. “Listening to art,” letting it speak to us, is not merely a matter of disposition: it presupposes the capacity for hearing what art has to say as an original and autonomous knowledge of the ἦθος. This, in turn, requires, first, that the hermeneutic horizon which we bring to the encounter with art be open to, and sufficiently spacious for, its word; and, second, that on this basis we succeed in building a proper hermeneutic sphere for that word to be understood as such: namely, in its intact autonomy. The following is an attempt to contribute to an initial awareness of the original space-of-time, and thus, eventually, to the configuration of a likely ἦθος, along two separate, but related lines: on the one hand, I will outline the notion of time, and of the

4 Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (1893–1917) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2013), 3; English translation: On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893– 1917), trans. John Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 1991), 3. (For the phrase in Latin: “As long as nobody asks me [viz. what time is], I know; as soon as I want to explain it to one who asks, I don’t know.”) 5 Respectively: Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986); Martin Heidegger, Zeit und Sein, in: id., Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988). 6 “Likely,” here, does not mean probable, but rather seemly, promising, expectable, acceptable. That which is likely is what likes, and therefore is likeable, in the first place. In this understanding, likely and likelihood indicate the same as möglich (whose original meaning is “able,” hence also “enabling”) and Möglichkeit (“ability”) in the context of hermeneutic phenomenology [see Ivo De Gennaro, The Weirdness of Being. Heidegger’s Unheard Answer to the Seinsfrage (London: Routledge, 2013), 15–26].

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  209 consciousness of time, provided within Sergiu Celibidache’s phenomenology of music;7 on the other hand, I will ask to what extent Husserl’s phenomenology of time, as presented in the above-mentioned lectures, can accommodate and, in turn, clarify that notion. Both lines of interpretation are informed by a basic understanding of the “sake of thinking” germane to hermeneutic rather than to transcendental phenomenology. Both remain sketches which, aside from possible errors and shortcomings, can only hope to spark further and more profound engagement with these issues. 2  The concept of time in Celibidache’s Phenomenology of Music The “annulment” of man diagnosed by conductor Sergiu Celibidache in the abovequoted passage is closely related to the annihilation of musical time; to wit, of time itself as experienced and instituted in music.8 In turn, the key to musical time in Celibidache’s experience is a peculiar notion of simultaneity. Concerning the experience of simultaneity in music, Mozart writes the following: For instance, when travelling by coach, or on a walk after a good meal, and by night when I can’t sleep—that’s when thoughts occur to me best, and in streams. Those which I like most I keep in mind, and perhaps also croon them to myself (at least that’s what others have told me). As I retain that, soon enough one after the other comes to mind: what use there could be for a certain chunk, so as to make a pasty out of it, based on counterpoint, based on the sound of different instruments, etc. etc. Now that heats my soul (if I’m not disturbed, that is); and so, it becomes bigger and bigger, and I spread it out ever further and brighter, and indeed the thing almost gets finished in my head, even if it’s long, so that afterwards I look it all over

7 Celibidache’s musical thinking is delineated in a few brief writings of his own [notably, in Sergiu Celibidache, Über musikalische Phänomenologie (Celibidachiana I) (Augsburg: Wißner-Verlag, 2008)], as well as in a number of recorded conversations, interviews, lessons, and rehearsals, mostly held in German, French, English, and Italian; the most comprehensive collection of written sources can be found in Celibidache, La musique n’est rien. As for interpretive studies, Giulia Accornero, La fenomenologia musicale di Sergiu Celibidache, in G. Accornero, et al., Il suono vivo. Storia, composizione, interpretazione (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2016), 87 ff, is particularly noteworthy for its attempt to highlight some key concepts of Celibidache’s musical phenomenology in a quasi-systematic manner on the basis of an ample apparatus of references to primary sources. The present study greatly benefited from this scholarly contribution. 8 We often hear artists making statements about “art” rather than just the kind of art they practice (take, for instance, Paul Klee’s famous phrase: “Art does not render the visible: it makes visible”). Moreover, we hear them drawing conclusions from the state of art for the state of the world at large. The reason why artists naturally speak about “art” rather than just “their” art is that art exists neither as a general concept nor in the form of specific artistic disciplines, but exclusively in artistic experiences and works of art which we understand as such in the very instant of the genesis of art itself. As to the implications of the state of art, arguably art is itself the domain in which the humanity of man is constituted and preserved in the first place; it is the domain of the creation of thing-worlds. In the words of Barnett Newman, the “artistic act is man’s personal birthright,” and “whatever reality we have as human beings has been created by the artist and only the artist” [see Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 159 and 245]. Hence, without art there is no humanity, no human reality, no thing-world. For Celibidache, the diagnosis concerning music is ipso facto a diagnosis of our epoch.

210  Ivo De Gennaro in my mind with one glimpse, almost like a beautiful picture or a pretty person; and I don’t hear it in my imagination in succession, as it must come afterwards, but rather at once all together. What a treat! All finding and crafting now occurs in me only in a beautiful intense dream. However, that hearing it all over, so all together, is truly the best.9 Hearing the piece “at once all together” implies, in a sense, the simultaneous sounding of all tones, that is, their sounding in the same one instant. However, this cannot mean that all tones—even if they are, in the present case, only imagined—sound concurrently, which clearly would result in an unintelligible cacophony. When hearing perceives the piece “at once all together,” it senses all tones in their relations of likelihood;10 or rather, it senses the unique likelihood which articulates itself in and through the instantaneous coming (i.e., the advent) of those relations. Musically speaking, these relations are the contrasts and the resulting tensions between different sounds—that which these sounds, as it were, have to say to each other. We call the insonorous, unique likelihood, the “one thing” a musical piece has to say in the “at once” of the entirety of its relations, the “unison.” While gathering all parts of a musical piece in its unique instant, the unison, without sounding itself, dictates the relations that govern, in all respects, the succession of their contrastive, “tensive” sounding. However, where is the unison as the mind pieces together what comes to it as an afflux of “chunks”? Is the unison there from the beginning, or is it found only at the end? Necessarily both! It must perforce “be there” at the beginning—otherwise one would not know what could guide the “hearing mind” as it joins together tone after tone and measure after measure. However, the unison is fully there only at the end, namely when, with the last tone, the piece ends in its beginning, and can finally be perceived “at once all together.” For what are beginning and end? The (path of the) coming of the unison itself! And what does it mean that the end is “in the beginning”? That the end is—sit venia verbo—the fullending (a now obsolete word for accomplishment), the achievement, of the beginning itself, so that the unison can now fully be perceived as such—as the “best of all treats.” This, however, implies that the “law” that governs all movements of a musical piece is the coming of the unison in the form of the very beginning’s intention to end in itself; in other words: the initial silent unison is the original musical intentionality. 2.1 Simultaneity

We must presume that the beginning’s intention to end, the path of the silent unison, the likelihood and expectability of “the best,” or, as we have come to call it, the original musical intentionality, is what ought to inform each single indication of a conductor both during rehearsals and during a performance. This means, among other things, that he will judge the likelihood (or adequacy, suitability, convenience) of each sounding tone with respect to the entirety of the piece: hence, a note may be likely with respect to the notes in its immediate surroundings, or to those of one or more measures, or those 9 See “Wie wird komponiert? Äußerungen von W. A. Mozart,” in Das Musikleben. Melos Allgemeine Ausgabe, Jahrgang 1, Heft 1 (Mainz: Der Melosverlag, 1948), 18; quoted in Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1992), 117 f. 10 This likelihood (see note 6) is itself the gift (i.e., the giving) of time.

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  211 of one or more movements, and yet be unlikely with respect to the entirety of the piece, namely—to employ Celibidache’s words—to the “truth” of the unison (the simple unity of all relations) which needs to “materialize” through the unique sound of the note, or chord, in question.11 The coming of the unison, its journey toward itself, “lives” in the continuously obtained instant of simultaneity of all sounds, or sound-relations. Celibidache determines this instant as the conjunction of two simultaneities: vertical and linear; instead of linear, he also says horizontal. The tempo is nothing but a condition, a catalyst, which makes likely [möglich] the intertwining identification of vertical and linear simultaneity in our consciousness.12 We will come back to the notion of tempo later. The term “vertical simultaneity” refers to the presently offered space of resonance for the tonal mass of a tone or chord (including the associated overtones). However, “linear simultaneity” indicates the entwining, in one and the same instant,13 of the no-longer-sounding (viz. the already-sounded) in its once-open space, and, scinded from it, the not-yet-sounding (viz. the yet-to-sound) in its soon-open space. The simultaneity of (or rather for) the present sounding of a tone or chord, Celibidache says, is intertwined with the simultaneity of the already-sounded and the yet-to-sound. The intertwining, which results in the single space of resonance for the actual sound as the perceptible and concerning materialization of the unfolding of all relations, is a consequence of the identification of the now-simultaneity with the no-longer-not-yet-simultaneity: it is, as we have heard, an intertwining by identification. Identifying, here, means reducing, viz. reconducting, to “the same.”14 This “same” is arguably the silent unison itself in its original intentionality, in whose unity the likelihood of the sounding, the already-sounded, and the yet-to-sound are “at once all together.”15 The instant of “the same” (from now on, let us write this as: the Same) governs the evolving of the interplay of these three modes of sounding. However, in order for this interplay

11 On two occasions I’ve had the opportunity to witness musical master classes given by Celibidache’s closest collaborator, Konrad von Abel. While I cannot give a qualified judgment as to the above-mentioned differences, I could, nevertheless, verify that the instructor’s directives concerning the way in which each single note was supposed to be played were unfailingly, and each time in a fully accountable manner, informed by the perception of likelihood with respect to the entire piece. 12 Sergiu Celibidache, “Über Musik und Musikleben heute. Gespräch mit H. Ludwig,” Das Orchester 24 (1976): 305–317, here 313. I translate verbindend with “entwining” (rather than “linking,” “tying,” “connecting,” “joining,” “uniting,” etc.) to indicate a unity which preserves the “twoness” of what is united (see note 14). 13 The instant is, clearly, not a “moment,” or a “point,” “in (already constituted) time.” Instantaneousness, here, indicates the extemporal flagrancy of the accord, and reciprocal awareness, of (overtaking-undertaken) unison and (overtaken-undertaking) mind. 14 We may understand verbindende Identifizierung as an identification by means of entwining or as an entwining resulting from an identification: either way, an identity, or sameness, must be presupposed. What is identical, that is, selved-up in the “same,” is at once unified and scinded; it is different while equally being the same. The identifying same itself “intertwines,” to wit, it scinds while it entwines and entwines by way of scinding: it is the entwining scissure, the primordial, inceptive schism. 15 As they are in Mozart’s imagining perception.

212  Ivo De Gennaro to take place, the consciousness must mind, or perceive, that instant, in fact: it must be (that is, sustain, assume) it while transcending16 sensations of sound. [Interviewer:] How does one transcend sensations of sound?—[Celibidache:] By not inertly perceiving the single sensations of sound; by alertly listening beyond the single sensation of sound; by cultivating [maintaining] perception within the simultaneity; by not sensing the “now” as a dead border between what was and what will be, but experiencing it as a unifying becoming, in which the past steadily becomes the future.17 In each tone there is the constitutive trait of the whole before and after phenomenological reduction. Only by transcending, somehow leaving, the sound (after having perceived it, appropriated it), can one live its forming function, and its function is: to operate now, here and that far from the beginning; now, here, and this early or late, before or after the point of maximum expansion; now, here, and thus close to the end. In each moment of the musical evolution the receiving, correlating mind is there, and everywhere on the becoming line as well. This is simultaneity. This is likely only if one steadily brings to mind continuously future-becoming past.18 Thus, the present is a continuous genesis in music: the now is continuously attached to the beginning and to the end, but at the same time it is free of any element which could compel it to do something different from its musical function. 19 Consciousness is required to cultivate “perception within the simultaneity,” which means to experience the now as a “unifying becoming, in which the past steadily becomes the future.” However, the past can “steadily become” the future only if the now, in the first place, continuously unifies past and future in a simultaneity according to the original intentionality. How so? Thanks to the fact that, in the identical simultaneity of the now, the intentionality (having availed itself) of the already-sounded sets free, and is in turn set free by, the intentionality (that is about to avail itself) of the yet-to-sound. The meaningfulness, the intensity and tenor of that which sounds in the space of resonance of the now, consists in the instant of identity (or identical instant) which unifies, or intertwines, the twofold “no” (retainment in the no longer—detainment in the not yet) with and for the now itself; thus, the latter is in steady (instantaneous) identity with the twofold “no.” Because this identity steadily offers the space of resonance for the actual sound, the latter is identically related to the no-longer-sounding and the not-yet-sounding. In other words, the actual tone resounds “from” the twofold “no” of past and future sounds on the basis of the silent unison, in which vertical and linear simultaneity are reduced to the Same. Cultivating and maintaining the transcending perception within the obtained identity of simultaneities is not an action, or a practice, performed within a given continuity of consciousness; say, for instance, by directing consciousness itself toward a certain

16 This transcending “transcends sound”—or rather maintains itself in a transcendence with respect to sound—insofar as it has always already descended unto the ascendancy of the Same’s openness, and there “thinks unto time.” As we shall see, his sense of transcending is fundamentally different from the transcendence of transcendental subjectivity with respect to the “original impression” of the sound. (See also note 25.) 17 Celibidache, “Über Musik und Musikleben heute,” 306. 18 Ibid., 307. 19 Sergiu Celibidache, “Sergiu Celibidache on His Philosophy of Music” (uploaded 2013), at 12:50–13:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SthKs40ClCY.

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  213 phenomenon. Rather, it is a “breaking out in consciousness,” a becoming-conscious, or becoming-aware, in which we are free from the inertia of merely being impacted by, and reacting to, sensations of sound. While that inertia is also, in a sense, a “conscious state,” it implies a debarment from the instantaneous alertness to the initial intertwining unity and its intentional becoming. It is a sentience that in philosophy is called “becoming-conscious” as opposed to “being-conscious:” not grasping, but steadily becoming aware, and in each moment knowing where one is [viz. relative to beginning and end]. I must sense the C sharp in relation to the line and the combination of intervals which led to that C sharp, for they are contained in that C sharp itself. And, in the same manner, the future of this C sharp is contained within itself. Thus, I must sense in the past and in the future. But where? In the simultaneity! This means: becoming-conscious, rather than grasping for the consciousness [of something].20 The essential linearity of consciousness, which is always the consciousness of something, cannot grasp it: it is exclusively the monopoly of pure becoming-conscious, exclusive right of the mind.21 Thus, the continuous identification of vertical and horizontal simultaneity in the instantaneous now, (that identification) sustained by, and grounded in, the alertness of a becoming-aware, constitutes the space-of-time of the evolving original intentionality.22 A sound is likely—namely, a “vehicle” conducive to the truth, or simply, as Celibidache says, to “how it is”—insofar as it “materializes” (i.e., shelters in a sound-form) that evolving, whereas it is unlikely in all other cases. At this point, we can go back to the notion of “tempo,” which we left behind when the notion of simultaneity was first introduced. 2.2 Tempo

The tempo, Celibidache says, “is nothing but a condition, a catalyst, which makes likely the intertwining identification of vertical and linear simultaneity in our consciousness.” The word catalyst comes from the Greek verb καταλύω “dissolve, bring to an end”; a catalyst is conducive to letting different elements compose or assemble themselves in a certain manner and toward a certain end. In the present context, the composition aims at identifying the relations of the two involved simultaneities in our consciousness, or, in other words, at reducing them, letting them resolve unto the unifying-scinding unity of the unison. This re(con)duction, however, is likely only if the consciousness itself is from the outset guided by the reference to, or the accord with, that unity, as well as with the relevant sub-unities that, in turn, are to be composed within and transcended toward it.23 By virtue of this reference or accord, the consciousness continuously establishes and

20 Sergiu Celibidache, “Interview with Dr. Klaus Lang,” 29.11.1974, 1–7, here 5, http://www.gerhard-greiner. de/inter.pdf. 21 Celibidache, “Über Musik und Musikleben heute,” 307. The passage immediately follows the one referred to in note 18. Hence, “it” (“[...] cannot grasp it. It is exclusively [...]”) refers to the “bringing to mind” achieved by the correlating mind, which in this manner obtains the identification of the two simultaneities. 22 Note that this continuous identification does not result in the constitution of an “arrow of time.” 23 Note that while the original unity may be articulated in sub-unities, the sum of the latter does not, in turn, constitute the original unity, which is in itself simple.

214  Ivo De Gennaro sustains (the likelihood of) the space-of-time for the reduction of all relations to the original intentionality of the silent unison, so that this very unison (which Mozart perceives when he experiences the “treat” of hearing the piece “at once all together”) can have its way, and find its affirmance, in the becoming “materiality”24 of the piece. The space-oftime—held in the original accord of the mind with the unifying unity—as a condition for the becoming composition of all elements in the conscious Same and in view of the transcendence into that Same: this condition and catalyst is the tempo. A consequence of this characterization is that the tempo has no relation to “time,” when the latter is intended as a computational parameter whose constitution is independent of man, i.e., as clock time. In fact, the tempo is not a measurable quantum, and any attempt to measure the tempo is, from a musical point of view, senseless. Celibidache calls time, when it is conceived as an independent parameter, “physical” or “mechanical time.” The tempo taken as an object, in the manner of the idiots who write on their score “the quaver [eighth note] at 72,” doesn’t exist. The tempo is the condition for the multiplicity of phenomena that present themselves to my consciousness to be reduced by that force which the consciousness possesses: the unique force of reducing the multiplicity, and of making of it a very complex whole, a unity one can make one’s own [qu’on peut s’approprier],25 and then leave and transcend, in order to find oneself free before the subsequent unity. The greater the multiplicity, the slower the materialized tempo, i.e., the tempo seen in the physical dimension of time. But, in truth, the tempo isn’t slow. It is neither slow nor fast. Today, the tempo has become an object that can be characterized by means of a physical measure. The convention of physically measuring the tempo is idiotic. Physical time doesn’t exist in music. And yet the critics and imbeciles who teach in the conservatoria keep measuring it! The tempo has nothing to do with speed.26 “Speed,” here, is the measurable pace, which is the common notion of musical tempo. However, slowness indicates an immeasurable quality of the “catalyst”: understanding slowness as a measure of speed (i.e., slowness = low speed) would be a 24 “Materiality,” here, refers to the resounding concreteness of an ēthos; musical sound—as any work of art—is a world-thing devoted to pure ethicality. 25 This s’approprier, or making one’s own, in view of transcending, is, at first sight, somehow reminiscent of the unifying (enfolding and representing) action of the Leibnizian monad. However, this reference does not provide a sufficient notion of the relations involved in that transcending. “Making one’s own,” here, is the same as reducing; this implies following the initial unity’s intention to end by sustaining the tempo through successive reductions, until, in the ultimate resolution, the initial unity itself finally “ends up” in itself, and freedom (namely, the freedom of the self in the freely swaying truth of the initial unity) ensues. Thus, the tensions experienced by the consciousness in the perception of tonal contrasts are, properly speaking, temporal-spatial articulations of that “intention to end”: the route, which that intention traces in order for the initial unity to end in itself, demands the reduction of these articulations unto the unity whence they originate, i.e., the liberation of (and simultaneous liberating oneself of) their space-of-time. The fact that a reduced multiplicity becomes “one’s own” does not mean that it becomes a possession of the reducing consciousness; rather, it implies that, at each accomplished reduction, the space-of-time is set free, which was, as it were, handed to the consciousness for it to be sustained for the sake of reduction, and, together with it, the consciousness itself is set free, which is restored to its original belongingness to the inceptive unity. 26 Sergiu Celibidache, “De la direction d’orchestre. Entretien réalisé par M. Anissimov,” in Celibidache, La musique n’est rien, 111–112.

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  215 misconstruction. With this caveat in mind, we can read the following statements on speed and “slow tempi”: – When someone tells you that you go slowly when playing Bruckner, these people have no idea what they are talking about! – [Celibidache:] They have an entirely mechanical concept of slowness; they take slowness as speed. The tempo has nothing in common with speed, the tempo is the likelihood of seizing the multitude in which consists the richness, and this richness is not reducible. You may ignore it, you may not let it come, not let it materialize, that’s up to you, but that has nothing to do with speed. However, the slow tempi—adagio, largo—are the tempi in which the composer expresses himself in the totality of his richness. – Speed has nothing to do with tempo; the tempo is the condition for the richness to be perceived. However, the circumstance that the richness is likely to arise and then be perceived—none of these points of view exist today. Yesterday I heard Mozart on television: it’s an insult to sanity and reason. – Speed has no dealings with tempo. The confusion of tempo and speed is a conception of the total lack of music in our time. Each tempo has a special color, for the sound isn’t the materialization of all elements at the same time: the epiphenomena, the lateral phenomena, appear in time; with time, sound becomes richer, each sound is an irreducible solar system. Now, what happens if I go from one solar system to another without having granted the first one the time to unfold completely? It’s a cutting-off of the richness of expression. I cut off the first through the presence of a second one. The result is an aridity, I relinquish the richness. Thus, richness is a quality that belongs to slowness, in the slow tempo there is richness: the slow tempo is a spectrum, each tempo has a spectrum, each tempo is a unique composition of certain epiphenomenal values, which depends on a thousand things: the culture of the conductor, the acoustics of the hall, the phantasy of the musicians—all of this plays a determining role in interpretation. Or rather, since I hold that there is no interpretation, it’s more an “umsetzen,” i.e., I transform what I perceive into a movement.27 The richness of sound, which includes “epiphenomena, lateral phenomena” (overtones), is irreducible: one can let it unfold as such, or fail to do so. However, that unfolding requires time, namely (not some chronological interval, but) a transmuting space-of-time, which—this is the decisive point—has nothing to do with clock time and the notions of speed, or pace, that are based upon it. Why not? Because that space-of-time—the tempo—is the element not “of” the multitude of sounds (i.e., modeled after them), but for that multitude, insofar it is the element “of” the unity of the unison and its sub-unities (i.e., belonging to the unity), to which the likely tone-relations must be reduced by the consciousness: only thanks to this reduction can the richness, which is itself irreducible, arise and be perceived.28 In fact, there are two manners in which the richness can be perceived: in the succession of tones and “at once all together.” However, the perceiving consciousness (as well as what is perceived) is the same in both instances, insofar as it 27 Sergiu Celibidache, Rencontres avec un homme extraordinaire. Textes réunis par S. Müller et P. Lang (Paris: K-films Editions, 1997), 77–78. 28 This circumstance defines, in essence, the ethical relevance of music (see §2.4).

216  Ivo De Gennaro must be a consciousness of the “advent” of the unique original intentionality. Relative to the latter and its articulation, there is no scope for interpretation (a mountain is a mountain, a valley is a valley), but only, each time—depending “on a thousand things”—a unique manner of Umsetzung or transformation (namely, a transposition into a modulated sound-form, a recreation in harmonies of sound), or, as Cézanne would say with reference to chromatic modulations, a unique “realization.” Because the consciousness and what it perceives are the same in both instances of the perception of richness, necessarily also that which the consciousness bears in the first place, namely the space-of-time or tempo, is the same: in other words, there is no difference between the tempo experienced when the multitude is perceived “at once all together” and the tempo of the executed piece—the space-of-time of both “events” is the same; both take place in, and as, the same instant. The fact that, in the case of a musical performance, the same (“time-spacious”) instant is built in a succession of sounds has no bearing on the sameness of the respective instants. Nor, of course, does it make a difference in this regard that, in one case (i.e., the experience that takes place “in the blink of an eye”), the clock records a minimal movement on the line of time, while in the other (i.e., the experience that undergoes a multitude of contrasts and tensions one after the other), the movement on the clock is more sizeable. That we, from the outside, speak respectively of “almost no time” and of “a relatively long time” “having passed” represents a use of the word “time” which is unsubstantial in musical terms.29 Now, what are the irreplaceable conditions in order for the reduction of tonal phenomena to take place? One of them is the “tempo.” Well, what the tempo is, is [...] impossible to define. The tempo can have a correlate in the physical world, but it has nothing to do with physical time and its course. In relation to tempo all temporal characterizations, such as “slow,” “fast,” “not slow,” “not so fast,” “too fast,” “right,” or “wrong,” are not even remotely applicable. The statement that a greater multiplicity requires more tempo than a smaller one in order to be reduced, is as erroneous as the hope of scientists to be able to attain fundamental, not further divisible unities by means of eternal partitions. Given that tempo is a unique or singular [einmalig, literally: one-time] condition, it cannot, beyond that, be bigger, smaller, less or different; it is, precisely, unique.30 The tempo is not based on, and therefore cannot be grasped in terms of, an underlying, absolute parametric, measure-giving entity. Phenomenology teaches that tempo is not a reality that subsists in itself (i.e., it is in no way reducible to the scales of time measurement of the world); rather, it is a living consequence that results from many concurring factors.31 While it is always possible to associate a figure obtained from a clock or a metronome with a certain “musical event,” there is no relation between that figure and the

29 So much so that, in fact, it would stand to reason to stop using the word “time” for that which is measured by the clock. 30 Celibidache, Über musikalische Phänomenologie, 35 f. 31 Celibidache, “Über Musik und Musikleben heute,” 312.

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  217 tempo of the piece. In other words, that association of tempo and “physical time” is fundamentally “arbitrary.”32 2.3 Duration

Things, we say, endure. They have a certain “duration in time.” Time is the parameter that measures the duration of things. Duration is a quantum of time. What about the duration of music? Let us recall what was said above concerning music experienced “at once all together,” on the one hand, and music experienced as the unfolding of the original intentionality within the succession of tones, on the other: both, we contended, take place in the (spaciousness of the) same instant, i.e., they are the same incoming of the unison under the condition of a one-time tempo. If this is true, it implies that music does not endure, that it has no duration in the common meaning of this word; in fact, as we have just seen, the parametric notion of time does not appear in the domain of music— again, regardless of the fact that I can always bring a stopwatch to a concert and “time” a musical performance, or any part of it. If someone has the feeling that is too long or too short, he’s already out. Music has no duration in this sense. There are no long and short movements; only from an external viewpoint are there long movements, short movements, strong movements, soft movements, and so on.33 When the end is in the beginning—where, then, is time? In order to have “slow” and “fast,” one must go through units of time. there aren’t any there! Hence the prodigious statement, which of course for the broader public makes no sense: music doesn’t endure.34 A sharp distinction between “inside” and “outside” is made: while the former refers to the instantaneous experience in which the tempo allows music to take place, the latter indicates the “tempo-lessness,” in which we are excluded from that instant and secluded in the sphere of mere sensations of sound, i.e., tones reduced to brute (though possibly “engaging”) sounds and our inert perception reduced to the brute (though possibly “engaged”) “experience” of sound impacts; the inertia of perception is its incapacity to transcend unto inceptive ascendancy. If, by “duration,” we intend either the subjective “feeling that is too long or too short,” or its objective correlate, namely the quantum of persistence measured by the clock (“it took her six minutes to perform

32 Sergiu Celibidache, “Zum 75. Geburtstag von Sergiu Celibidache. Ein Gespräch,” Musica 41 (1987): 336– 341, here 339. However, the indication provided by the clock has an operative relevance for an operatively defined event in an operative context. For instance, as a janitor, it might be relevant to my consciousness that, for security reasons, “the concert” “ends” “by 11 p.m.”; if it is still not over by 11:30, I say that “the concert” “is lasting” “too long,” and that it might be necessary to take appropriate measures “in the near future.” So far, so good. The question is, again, whether we should—without further qualifications—define the mentioned circumstances as “temporal,” and the related phrases as statements “about time;” in other words, we need to ask whether the ontological constitution that characterizes an operative (or functional) context, and the corresponding “state of consciousness,” should be the basis for our notion of time. 33 Sergiu Celibidache, “Musik dauert nicht,” in ed. J. Schmidt-Garre, Celibidache. Man will nichts—man läßt es entstehen (München: Pars, 1992), 29–42, here 37. 34 Sergiu Celibidache, “Ende im Anfang–Anfang in Ende,” in ed. J Schmidt-Garre, Celibidache. Man will nichts—man läßt es entstehen (München: Pars, 1992), 43–68, here 56.

218  Ivo De Gennaro the piece”), then we cannot but conclude that “music has no duration in this sense” and that it “doesn’t endure.” What “this sense” of duration implies more specifically becomes clear as we consider a sense, or notion, of duration, which, however, is relevant to music. It would seem that music is born from the instability between various moments, from an antagonism between two entities. One cannot seize both together. The One that it seizes is immediately contradicted by that other entity... [C.] It’s not contradicted, but that element, of which it seizes the presence, is under the screen of the other. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any relation between the two. The entire process is a series of unique moments. What is interesting, is that, on the one hand, all elements are linked, while on the other, each one of them has the likelihood of affirming itself in contrast to the other. In mechanics this opposition doesn’t exist. Nothing opposes itself to anything, the elements merely repeat themselves. However, where there is musical composition, the opposition comes from the fact that I can seize only one of these two moments: since the one is the consequence of the other, I must move on to another moment in order to seize the previous one: that is duration.35 Reduction is the end of contrast. […] Contrast isn’t a physical fact. If it were of a physical nature, I could define it in terms of ratios of numbers. Now, that is not the case. […] There exists a duration which leads to reduction and one that is irreducible. To reduce or not, this doesn’t influence duration. Contrast is the prerogative of duration. In order for there to be a duration, there must be conflict. If there is conflict, there is duration. Under special conditions, this duration can be reduced to a unity.36 Opposition is the enlivening source of vigor, which is responsible for the origination, maintenance and limitation of duration. But not all oppositions generate vigor and constitute duration. Only oppositions which stand against each other in a complementary manner; in other words: only those which, in the activation and diminution of the expansion, have one or more common parameters, equalize as a result of reduction.37 The sense in which music has no duration, viz. “doesn’t endure,” now seems clear: when duration refers to oppositions or contrasts that are not, or cannot be, reduced, there is, in fact, no scope for music. These non-reduced or irreducible contrasts can appear “too long” or “too short” to a consciousness that is stuck in “music-less” inertia—either because it has failed to reduce, and thus has fallen out of musical space-of-time, or because there is nothing to reduce in the first place. The perception of a non-reduced succession of tones by an inert consciousness is the common platform both for subjective “temporal feelings” (such as those just quoted) and for correlated objective “temporal measurements” (as provided by the clock or the metronome). “Where there is musical composition” (which is not necessarily the case for all “pieces of music”), the contrasts and oppositions are reducible; in other words, they are composed, posed together, in complementary relations, and thus in an expectancy, a “hope,” of reduction. This expectancy, or hope, claims and needs man’s anticipating and 35 Sergiu Celibidache, “La fin est dans le commencement,” in Phénoménologie de la musique, revue Prétentaine 22 (2007): 15–101, here 43. 36 Ibid., 45. 37 Celibidache, Über musikalische Phänomenologie, 39 f.

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  219 transcending perception of the unity (“the end of the contrast”) into which all contrasts and oppositions are to be resolved, as well as the correlative perception of complementarities, etc. (“one after the other comes to mind: what use there could be for a certain chunk, so as to make a pasty out of it, based on counterpoint, based on the sound of different instruments …”). The tonal firmness of reducible contrasts, which cannot be expressed numerically nor produced mechanically, is what defines duration in a musical sense. However, the reduction to a unity is likely to take place only “under special conditions.” These conditions come together in the one-time tempo, which both the composer and the conductor (as long as they “are inside”) originate and sustain instantaneously: either “at once all together,” or through the successive spawning of contrasting tones in the identity of vertical and horizontal simultaneity. In reference to the “oppositions in expectancy of reduction,” Celibidache frequently uses a topographical analogy, describing them as the “mountains” and “valleys” of a landscape which the composer conceives, and consequently somehow fixes by means of a score. The trait of “expectancy” calls upon the entire being of the musician or listener (“mindful body” and “living mind”), and, in the first place, the constitutive trait of that entire being to create the conditions for reduction.38 In response to this call, the musician or listener collaborates in originating and sustaining the tempo; the accomplishment of reduction implies a capacity for correlating tonal oppositions in the space-of-time of the coming unison in the original intentionality. When, however, the topography is misunderstood and one sees mountains where, instead, there are “splendid valleys,” the expectancy intended by the composer and, together with it, the “expecting” humanity of man collapses: what is left are unreduced, “needless” oppositions, which do not call upon the constitutive trait of man’s being but at most engage “mindless bodies” and “dead minds” in musically arbitrary (though, as to their impact, measurable) reactions; in the resulting sound combinations—no matter how artfully computed and skillfully produced, no matter how acutely discerned and distinctly perceived—music “has disappeared” and “man has been annulled.” 2.4  Ethical implications

The distinction between musical and ordinary duration allows us to formalize a critical conclusion, which, though implicit in previous argumentation, has so far not been spelled out: while both musically structured tonal articulations and “arbitrary” combinations of sounds imply a succession (an “after-one-another”), only the latter translates smoothly into the common notion of time as a linear flow of punctual “nows”. The former kind of succession finds in that notion of time only an external “correlate”: that correlation, however, involves an ontological scissure, indicated by the oppositions “inside–outside,” “music–not music,” “integral, eventually free, human being–inert human being.” The same conclusion can also be formulated like this: the after-one-another of contrasting tonal structures—finally reduced to the initial unity thanks to the tempo which obtains (is) the space-of-time of the unity itself—is, as such, not locatable in (or relative to) any

38 The constitutive trait of man’s being is the original ethical capacity in which his humanity consists. We can also refer to this capacity as man’s native artistic trait, namely—to quote Barnett Newman quoting Rashi— his being “a creator of worlds” [Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, 159]. In other words, as stated in note 8, without art there is neither a humanity nor a human abode.

220  Ivo De Gennaro point, nor within (or relative to) any interval, of the “time-line.”39 Our natural tendency to underlay any “process” with that line derives from an operative understanding of a metaphysical (ultimately Aristotelian) notion of time. Celibidache himself seems to take the time-line for granted, when he speaks of sensations of sound appearing “in time” “one after the other,” and mentions the “spatio-­temporal continuum,” in which the “musical act” “manifest[s]” itself and “materialize[s]”: When the reduction hasn’t taken place, the tempo wasn’t wrong, but the sensations of sound, which in [physical] time appear one after the other, remain what they were, and couldn’t be reduced to a simultaneous structure.40 The act of thought and the musical act both manifest themselves, materialize, in the spatio-temporal continuum. However, in their essence they are extra-temporal, simultaneous.41 In a series of sounds which present themselves to your consciousness, once the first has disappeared, here comes the second... where do they go? They disappear! What remains? The relation between sounds, which is not of a physical nature. Music is an articulation: the coincidence, in time and in the mind, of beginning and end, of end and beginning. Music manifests itself in a spatio-temporal unfolding, but it is something different from this continuous development.42 There, end and beginning are simultaneous, which in speech is impossible. For example: measure 35 [...] hasn’t fallen from the sky, but is the result of other measures. Through different correspondences, which have been generated in my affective world, the piece continues; measure 35 is a resulting consequence. However, measure 35 also contains the end, for if I disrupt that measure, I no longer have the end. Since at measure 35 I am both at the beginning and at the end, the only likely [acceptable] proposition is: I’m there because I’m not there.43 One could infer from these propositions that Celibidache maintains, with respect to time, a dualism reminiscent of what is commonly identified as the Platonic two-world scheme: on the one hand, the domain of non-appearing, immaterial essences, in which everything is “extratemporal, simultaneous” (the “inside”); on the other, the sphere of appearing (or manifest), material contingencies, in which everything is placed on the given, continuous time-line, as well as in the coordinated given continuum of space (the “outside”). However, by attributing this inference to Celibidache, we would overlook the essential: concerning the sensations of sound appearing one after the other, the decisive point is not the opposition of a succession to a “simultaneous structure,” but the circumstance that the expectancy of reduction (offered by the composer) has not been fulfilled; that, consequently, the succession could not be reduced to the space-of-time in which that same succession appears as being spawned by the original musical intentionality; that in the ontological condition characterized by unreduced sensations of sound (i.e., “brute” tones perceived by a non-transcending conscience), a sense of endless (unachieved and unachievable) succession can prevail, which, in turn, can serve as 39 In the perspective of mathematical physics, on a sufficiently large scale (in combination with considerations on entropy), this line has the form of an irreversible “arrow of time.” However, on a sufficiently small scale, “time”—or rather, the particular sequential movement which is under scrutiny—is reversible. 40 Celibidache, Über musikalische Phänomenologie, 36. 41 Ibid., 39. 42 Celibidache, La musique n’est rien, 23. 43 Celibidache, “Zum 75. Geburtstag von Sergiu Celibidache,” 338.

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  221 a basis for a “physical” conceptualization of time in terms of a “linear” succession; finally, this very concept of time may join with an analogous notion of space to form the concept of a “spatio-temporal continuum.” However, what Celibidache does certainly not imply is that there is, in the first place and fundamentally, a given, “physical” “spatio-temporal continuum,” which, in the domain of music, is somehow abandoned in favor of a transcendental simultaneity. The fact that the latter is called “extra-temporal” does not mean that simultaneity is, in general, “outside of time”;44 rather, the simultaneity is unrelated to the “physical” “spatio-temporal continuum” precisely insofar as it is the original space-of-time which bears the extemporaneous original intentionality of the coming unison.45 As the initial reference to the annulment of man suggests, the issue concerning the distinction between what we might call the “reign of simultaneity” and the “regime of clock time” is just as much a musical as—therefore—an ethical one. In fact, we can provisionally spell out the following ethical implication of that distinction: either man holds himself in an alert-minded relation to reducible oppositions/contrasts (viz. oppositions/contrasts appearing in the expectancy of reduction), and thus within the likelihood of an equalizing or evening out (a harmonization) of those oppositions/contrasts in the unifying simultaneity of the “fullended beginning” (or, as we can also say, in the “at once” of the “finited inception”); in this case, the in-itself contentious dimension of the struggle for the truth, hence for the free configuration of an ἦθος, is bestowed. Or man finds himself engaged with irreducible oppositions/contrasts (i.e., those oppositions/contrasts which lack the expectancy of reduction), and thus confined in a domain of arbitrary oppositions without beginning and end; in this case, the contention of truth (the struggle for a harmonization of the harmonizable), hence the likelihood of the free generation of an ἦθος, is denied. What Celibidache calls the “total lack of music” of our time implies this denial, and thus marks the “untrue” and hence “unethical” character of our epoch.46

44 Even though Celibidache’s way of thinking about time is compatible with an identification of the simultaneity that takes place “inside” with the original space-of-time, he himself does not formalize this step, and continues to call the “inside” extra-temporal, while “outside,” i.e., in the “physical world,” there are “units of time.” However, we need to account for the fact that there are sequences both inside and outside, with the difference that “outside” the simultaneity of these sequences is not only unrealized, but mostly forgotten. Hence, when Celibidache says that “the musical act” “materialize[s] in the spatio-temporal continuum,” I suggest that this be understood as follows: from an outside perspective, the in-itself simultaneous musical act materializes in what, in that perspective, appears as the given spatio-temporal continuum (however, doesn’t the musical act also “manifest itself” and “materialize” “inside”?). 45 Tempo, Celibidache says, is “a living function.” In other words, while functioning as a catalyst, it is a function of, i.e., depends on, other things. One of them is the acoustics of the room where one is playing. Thus, the functional space-of-time, created as a consequence of the acoustic circumstances, implies a living function “time” and, consequently, a living function “space.” Hence, while “from outside” it appears that a musical event is taking place in a given space, music is not played, and does not sound, in a given space, but requires the continuous creation of a likely space: “Raum wird eine Funktion, er ist es nicht von allein” [Sergiu Celibidache, “Es gibt keine Alternative zur Musik,” in ed. R. Schmoll, Die Münchner Philharmoniker von der Gründung bis heute (München: Wolf, 1985), 315–324, here 320]. “Space becomes a function, it isn’t one by itself,” namely, independent of the reduction that creates it based on given acoustic circumstances. 46 We need to distinguish between at least three circumstances, all of which belong to the same, in-itself contentious phenomenon: (a) the circumstance that reduction does not take place and therefore fails; (b) the circumstance that the likelihood of reduction is “locally” denied and forgotten; (c) the circumstance that the likelihood of reduction is “epochally” denied and forgotten. The denial and forgottenness of the ethical contention, in turn, points to a contention of a higher order, involving the very inner constitution of the original, unifying unity of the Same: in other words, the fact that the ethical contention can be denied or granted indicates that the Same itself is the contention of bestowal and denial. The contentious Same (the very “sake” of thinking) grants itself in granting the ethical contention (in which it remains absconded); it denies itself in denying that contention (and becoming flagrant in this denial). The flagrant experience of the self-denial of the Same (viz. of the Same as self-denial) is the peculiar prerogative of a tragic epoch.

222  Ivo De Gennaro Based on this diagnosis, a number of critical questions can be asked with regard to the “ethical state” of our time: what is the nature of the contrasts/oppositions in our political, economic, and social institutions? In what form do contrasts/oppositions, and their resolution, appear in our laws? How do we conceive of the contrast/opposition between the human and the divine? What quality of contrast/opposition informs the relation between different human beings?—and so on. For each of these questions, the critical distinction is between contrasts in expectancy of reduction (or “expectant contrasts”) and, on the contrary, irreducible contrasts. Reduction, however, does not imply the eventual elimination of contrasts, or the conflation of what was opposed in the first place. In fact, music teaches that while contrasts and oppositions, as relations, end in the unifying unity, the intentional structure through which the latter is achieved precisely implies the uncurtailed and irreducible richness of “living” contrasts: enfranchising the greatest richness of contrasts for the affirmation of the “finited inception” is, again, just as much a musical as an ethical need. However, “relinquish[ing] the richness” as a consequence of the disregard for the wholeness of the piece, structured according to the original intentionality, results in a—musical as well as ethical—“aridity,” the mutual exhaustion of contrasting elements in a senseless clash of sounds impacting our inert humanity. In short: instead of a “loving contention” ending in its own inception, namely in contentious love itself, a will that only wills itself for the sake of this very willing makes use of the unleashed arbitrariness of a “power struggle” without beginning and end. When contrasts end in the unifying unity, differences shine bright and rich in their asylum, namely the equality of the different original reference to the Same; however, when contrasting elements are abandoned to the pursuit of mutual overpowering, differences disappear in the indigent uniformity of prevailing and succumbing forces.47 At this point, however, one might demur to the actual contribution which the understanding of music can provide to ethical reflection. Does not the philosophical tradition— from Plato to Hegel and beyond—hold in store an abundance of positions concerning the (somehow “dialectical”) relation of opposites and their “reduction” to a higher unity? Do we not, in an epoch prior to that of the foundation of philosophy, find in Heraclitus— the thinker of λόγος as πόλεμος, ἔρις (“contention”), ἁρμονία, ἓν πάντα (“One [gathering] All)”—an accomplished meditation on the unification (or “coincidence”) of opposites? Has not Heraclitus already said that “common is inception and end on a circumference” (B 103)? That “the cold heats up, the warm cools down, the humid dries, the parched wets itself” (B 126)? That “illness makes health pleasant and good, hunger satiety, toil rest” (B 111)? That, finally, “the god day night, winter summer, war peace, satiety hunger: he transforms himself like fire, which, when mixed with spices, is called after the flavor of each” (B 67)? No doubt. And yet, Celibidache’s musical thinking not only provides a new “aspect” or “context” to the reflection on contrasts and their likely unity, but shifts that reflection entirely “elsewhere,” namely, to the ἦθος of (musical) time. But what does “ἦθος of (musical) time” mean? Let us recall the understanding of ἦθος indicated at the beginning of this text: “ἦθος refers to the relation between the abode as borne by man and the constitutive trait of man’s being, which is the indwelling that bears (holds open, 47 Oppositions informed by the will to power are in principle irreducible: in this case, any interaction ends up in a—somehow “negotiated”—relative gain or loss of power, but never in a reduction in the specified sense. Systems characterized by irreducibility necessarily require irreducible opposition, and hate reducible contrasts; in other words, they cultivate scarcity (“aridity”) and cannot bear richness.

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  223 sustains) the abode itself”; in turn, the human abode was characterized as the in-between which entwines world and things. This allows us to conclude that “ἦθος of (musical) time” does not refer to a presumed ethical quality of making music; rather, it is another way of saying tempo. When tempo, then irreducible richness. The original phenomenon is the unifying unity (the Same), which, intending to finalize itself as the unique inception, bestows itself as the instantaneous space-of-time in which the simultaneity of the no-longer and the not-yet is gathered into the Same with the simultaneity of the now. Human attention in the first place is claimed to tune in with the attuning silent unison of that unity, and to sustain its space-of-time as a condition and catalyst for the reduction of all musical relations, or expecting contrasts, to their initial, simple likelihood. Finally, in the “becoming-conscious” of the accordance of the attuning space-of-time of original intentionality and man’s endured belongingness to that spaceof-time, truth itself, as music, is generated in the while of an instantaneous duration: the while of the perception of all likely tonal relations “at once all together,” or the while of the perception of the simultaneity of successive tones. These tones, then, announce and mark the self-achievement of the beginning, namely, the coming of the instant that has already become, or the advent of the initial grace: the gift of the space-of-time for the free interplay of world and things, while man’s being is finally in accordance with the initial giving of that gift. This accordance we can call freedom.48 According to Celibidache, freedom, not beauty, is the goal of music and of all art.49 The way to freedom through the experience of time, namely, the space-of-time of the original intentionality of the point of inception50—this is the ethical promise of music and therefore of art as such. Through the borne space-of-time—the tempo—of the initial, unifying unity, all contrasts are to be reduced in order for that same space-of-time to be established as the generative element of an entwining of world and things. Only “from outside”—that is, from a perspective that is unaware of the forgottenness of original time on which it is based—can the becoming-aware of the instantaneous temporality of musical tempo appear as an experience that deviates from what, instead, appears as the “normal” consciousness of time as an independent infinite sequence of lapsing nows. In fact, that “normal” consciousness has meanwhile shown itself as the “feeling” of unexpecting duration (or enduring “unexpectancy”), in which the tempo is quantifiable, all relations

48 This freedom precedes the distinction between a “freedom from” and a “freedom to,” just like “pure becoming-conscious” precedes, and is presupposed by, the “consciousness of something” (see note 53). 49 Celibidache, “Sergiu Celibidache on His Philosophy of Music,” 17:32–17:36 (see also 19:24–19:40). For reasons of space, I forego the characterization of the structural moments of this path of self-achievement, notably those which concern the “dynamic of tension” relative to the culmination of the piece, to wit, the turning point in the relation of the point of inception to its truth. With regard to this turning point, Celibidache writes: “This turning point, where the extroverted direction of expansion reverts into the introverted one, is the most cardinal pivot, around which any form of musical architecture is functionally articulated. Because of its unique significance, it rigorously falls out of any doctrine of forms. Everything that happens in the expansive phase experiences an organic, reduction-fostering supplementation in the compressive phase. If that is not the case, the conclusion is not the consistent, unavoidable consequence of the beginning. However, if the conclusion is the genuine consequence of the beginning, it is simultaneously present with the beginning, just like in the act of thinking.” (Celibidache, Über musikalische Phänomenologie, 38 f.A promising “research question” would be: what is the relation between this turning point and Heidegger’s Kehre im Ereignis, i.e., the turning from the truth of being [Seyn] to the being [Seyn] of truth?) 50 In the above-quoted conversation, Celibidache refers to that which, here, is called “the intentionality of the point of inception,” as “central vibration.”

224  Ivo De Gennaro are grasped through “ratios of numbers,” and perception is confined to the impact of brute sensations of sound on the “sphere of life.” 3  Husserl’s notion of internal time Celibidache acknowledges that his phenomenological approach to music has its point of inception “in Husserl, but, at a certain moment, the paths diverge.”51 The reason he gives for this parting is an “axiomatic supposition,”52 which Husserl, through Brentano, shares with the entire philosophical tradition, namely the supposition that “any consciousness is the consciousness of something.”53 According to Celibidache, this supposition is grundfalsch;54 that is, not simply fallacious, but failing to attain, and precluding access to, what is fundamental. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to retrace in detail Celibidache’s notion of (musical) phenomenology, and its relation to that elaborated by Husserl, the above-mentioned point of divergence provides the perspective in which we will briefly consider Husserl’s analysis of time-consciousness. Following Celibidache’s statement, we must indeed presume that the consciousness involved in his notions of simultaneity and tempo, which he indicates as “pure becoming-conscious,” is not “the consciousness of something”; rather, it is, as it were, the “coming to” of consciousness itself from out of itself, namely from its relation to an “internal” source which, while letting consciousness spring forth as such, is other with respect to it. Hence, with regard to Husserl, a crucial question for us is whether there is, in his phenomenology of time, a consciousness that is not the consciousness of something.55 51 Sergiu Celibidache, “Celibidache,” Interview with U. Padroni, Piano Time 54 (1987): 23–33, here 24. 52 Celibidache, “Zum 75. Geburtstag von Sergiu Celibidache,” 338. 53 Ibid. Cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Husserliana, Band III/1 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 222. 54 Celibidache, “Zum 75. Geburtstag von Sergiu Celibidache,” 338. 55 When Celibidache talks about “pure becoming-conscious,” he does not refer to the fact that a subject becomes conscious of something. “Pure becoming-conscious” is an instantaneous “event,” namely the advent of a “relation” that has the following form: the central vibration’s awareness attains the mind and the mind, in turn, bears the awareness of the central vibration. Neither of the central vibration (= the One, the Same, the unison, the original intentionality, etc.) nor of its awareness we can, rigorously speaking, say that they “are.” The only thing that “is” in this relation is the mind, and its “being” consists precisely in the mentioned bearing of the awareness itself. A different way of saying the same is the following: in Husserl, there is a subject (an “I”) that is conscious, that has, or consists in, a consciousness (namely each time a consciousness of something, i.e., of some material or formal object). In Celibidache, “there becomes” a consciousness, which is not human (i.e., it involves neither a subject nor an object, it is neither somebody’s consciousness nor the consciousness of something, but it belongs to the central vibration), and this consciousness of the central vibration means for itself a mind to sustain it. The relation between the central vibration’s consciousness and the mind is the (instantaneous, unenduring) tempo. The latter “transcends” in Celibidache’s sense. Hence, the mentioned “crucial question” (becoming-conscious vs. consciousness of something) can also be formulated in terms of “transcendence unto [the] ascendancy [of the central vibration]” (Celibidache) vs. “transcendence with regard to beings as such [in the direction of their ground of absolute subjectivity]” (Husserl). Celibidache’s notion of “becoming-conscious,” which implies the absence, in the mind, of any form of (categorial) thinking, is informed by his encounter with, and practice of, Zen Buddhism. In fact, letting music generate itself is, for Celibidache, a form of meditation (as opposed to the preparatory “noetic phase” of studying and rehearsing).

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  225 3.1  Basics: primal impression, retention, and protention

In §1 of his lectures on internal time consciousness, Husserl declares what his analysis does not presuppose, namely “objective time,” and what, however, it assumes as indubitably evident, namely: (1) “appearing time, [i.e.] appearing duration as such,” which is an “absolute givenness” and (2) “existing [literally: being (seiend)] time,” i.e., “the immanent time of the flow of consciousness.”56 The givenness of the latter is made clear as follows: “For the circumstance that the consciousness of a tonal process, of a melody, which I am presently hearing, shows an after-one-another, (for this circumstance) we have an evidence in light of which any doubt or denial appears senseless.”57 While the appearing temporal configuration (“world time, real time, the time of nature in the sense of natural science, and of psychology as the natural science of what pertains to the soul”58) is transcendent, and therefore not a phenomenological datum, the steady consciousness of duration—to wit, the sensation of time in light of which an enduring, temporal object appears—is. The phenomenology of time strives to clarify “the a priori of time” “by exploring the consciousness of time, by bringing its essential constitution to light, and by exhibiting the apprehension-contents and the act-characters that pertain—perhaps specifically—to time, and to which the a priori temporal laws essentially belong.”59 These evident laws are that the fixed temporal order is a two-dimensional infinite series, that two different times can never be simultaneous, that their relation is a nonreciprocal one, that transitivity obtains, that to every time an earlier and a later time belong, and so on.60 “Time,” here, indicates in the first place what later will be called now-point or temporal position, which is itself not a “point in time,” but rather a punctual datum of consciousness carrying with itself the notion of “earlier and later,” which (that datum) is constitutive of time-consciousness itself.61 Basically, musical experience consists in the unity of primal impressions (Urimpressionen, which include the perception of overtones), primary memories (retentions), and primary expectations (protentions). A musical piece is an enduring object whose

56 The circumstance that “objective time” (i.e., the time that can be measured with a chronometer) is not taken as given also means that phenomenology is not merely interested in establishing the conditions of likelihood of that time. Rather, it attempts to clarify the time-constituting acts which eventually result in the phenomenon of objective time. 57 Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, 5/5; trans. modified. 58 Ibid., 4–5/4–5; trans. modified. 59 Ibid., 10/10. 60 Ibid., 10/10. 61 The relation between Husserl’s phenomenology of time and the “acroamatic” definition of χρόνος in book Δ of Aristotle’s Physics cannot be discussed here; however, the Aristotelian (and, more immediately, Augustinian) lineage of Husserl’s concept of internal time is decisive for clarifying the latter’s relation to the notion of musical time in Celibidache (see §3.2).

226  Ivo De Gennaro subjective production springs from a “source-point” (“Quellpunkt”), namely, an actual primal impression: This consciousness is in a state of constant change: the tone-now present “in person” continuously changes (scil. consciously, “in” consciousness) into something that has been; an always new tone-now continuously relieves the one that has passed over into modification. But when the consciousness of the tone-now, the primal impression, passes over into retention, this retention itself is a now in turn, something actually existing. While it is actually present itself (but not an actually present tone), it is retention of the tone that has been.62 In this manner, any tone-now is joined with a continuous series of retentions, any element of which is, in turn, retentionally modified as it moves further back into the past with the coming of a new tone-now. [While] a motion is being perceived, a grasping-as-now takes place moment by moment; and in this grasping, the actually present phase of the motion itself becomes constituted. But this now-apprehension is, as it were, the head [core; Kern] attached to the comet’s tail of retentions relating to the earlier now-points of the motion. However, if perception no longer occurs, if we no longer see the motion, or—if it is a melody that is in question—the melody has run its course and silence has ensued, then the perception’s final phase is not followed by a new phase of the perception but simply by a phase of fresh memory, and so on. Thus, a pushing back into the past continually occurs. The same continuous complex incessantly undergoes a modification until it disappears, as a weakening, which finally ends in imperceptibility, goes hand in hand with the modification.63 A melody as a whole can be called “perceived,” even if only the now-point is actually perceived, [insofar as] the extension of the melody is not only given point by point in the extension of the act of perceiving, but the unity of the retentional consciousness still “holds on to” the elapsed tones themselves in consciousness and progressively brings about the unity of the consciousness that is related to the unitary temporal object, to the melody [...] [T]he whole melody appears as present as long as it still sounds, as long as tones belonging to it and meant in one nexus of apprehension still sound. It is past only after the final tone is gone.64 In fact, if “perception” is taken as “the act that places something in front of our eyes as the thing itself, the act that originally constitutes the object,” and thus as “the act in which all ‘origin’ lies, the act that constitutes originally, then primary memory [i.e. retention] is perception.”65 Both actual perception and primary memory are acts of primal giving, viz. presentation, rather than acts of representation; they are, respectively, the original 62 Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, 29/30–31. 63 Ibid., 30–31/32. 64 Ibid., 38/40. 65 Ibid., 41/43.

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  227 “time-creating now-act [zeitschaffender Jetztakt]” and the original “time-creating pastact [Vergangenheitsakt].”66 The role of primary expectations (protentions) in the constitution of a “nexus of apprehension,” i.e., of a musical unity, is that of an “empty constitution” of what is coming: “Every process that constitutes its object originally is animated by protentions which emptily constitute what is coming as coming, which catch it and bring it toward fulfillment.”67 Thus, every now-apprehension, together with its “comet’s tail of retentions,” constitutes a likely protentional horizon (a horizon of tonal likelihood), which forms and escorts the coming tone as such. Again, the question is whether this now-apprehension is the same, that is, has the same source, as the above-mentioned steady “bring[ing] to mind continuously future-becoming past.” In other words: is that apprehension the same as experiencing the now as a “unifying becoming, in which the past steadily becomes the future”? In short, is it the same as Celibidache’s “perception within the simultaneity”? 3.2  Physical now—identical instant

In order to answer this question, we need to look more closely at the constitution of the actual now as the source-point of time-consciousness. Among the most relevant analyses in this regard are those in §31 of the lectures on time, where the problem of the constitution of the notion of objective time, with its fixed time-spots, is addressed; this notion as such, Husserl says, is problematic because, as previous analyses have shown, any (preobjective, original, lived-through) now-point is permanently in flux and subject to continuous modification as it sinks further and further back into the past. What, then, fixes such a time-spot in the first place; that is to say: what originates it, thereby making it absolute? Husserl’s answer is: the primal impression itself, which, as such, is an “impression of the original temporal position.”68 The latter constitutes the absolute individuality of every sensation of sound, including sensations of the same quality (pitch, intensity, etc.): “The tone-point in its absolute individuality is held fast in its matter and in its temporal position, and it is the latter that first constitutes individuality.”69 The following passage contains most of what we need in order to characterize the punctual now: What “individual” means here is the original temporal form of sensation, or, as I can also put it, the temporal form of original sensation, here of the sensation belonging to the current now-point and only to this. But the now-point itself must, in strictness, be defined through original sensation, so that the proposition asserted has to be taken only as an indication of what is supposed to be meant. The impression, as opposed to the phantasm, is distinguished by the character of originalness. Now with the impression we have to call special attention to the primal impression, 66 Ibid., 41/43; trans. modified. Cf. p. 45/47. 67 Ibid., 52/54; trans. modified. 68 Ibid., 68/70. The German word (cf. p. 74/78) is ursprüngliche Zeitstellenimpression: the impression of the original temporal position is, at the same time, the original impression of the temporal position. 69 Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, 66–67/69. I understand the absoluteness in terms of the source character which, according to Husserl, belongs exclusively to the Urimpression (but not to the horizon). The fact that the Urimpression is perceived relatively to retained and “protained” impressions does not affect its absolute individuality. In other words, on the level of the phenomenon at hand I see no contradiction between absoluteness and relativity.

228  Ivo De Gennaro over against which there stands the continuum of modifications in primary memorial consciousness. The primal impression is something absolutely unmodified, the primal source of all further consciousness and being. Primal impression has as its content that which the word “now” signifies, insofar as it is taken in the strictest sense [my emphasis]. Each new now is the content of a new primal impression. Ever new primal impressions continuously flash forth with ever new matter, now the same, now changing. What distinguishes primal impression from primal impression is the individualizing moment of the impression of the original temporal position, which is something fundamentally different from the quality and other material moments of the content of sensation. The moment of the original temporal position is naturally nothing by itself; the individuation is nothing in addition to what has individuation.70 From here, Husserl goes on to show how, on the one hand, in the flow of original time (i.e., the progressively growing distance of the formerly actual now-point from the continuously springing new primal impression as the “living source-point of being”)71 both matter and the temporal position remain the same, while, on the other hand, their manner of givenness changes into a givenness of the past (Vergangenheitsgegebenheit). This is the basis for the objectivating apprehension of the “temporal flow,” i.e., of the objective duration of an “individual,” whose identity “is eo ipso identity of temporal position.”72 Finally, “[e]very perceived time is perceived as a past that terminates in the present. And the present is a limit [Grenze]. Every apprehension, however transcendent it may be, is bound by this law.”73 The primal, source-like spontaneity of consciousness, in which time is constituted, is not itself something that endures or runs its course; its elements are themselves not in a now, nor do they follow each other or exist at the same time. In fact, the flow itself is not “something objective in time.” It is absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to be designated metaphorically as “flow”; of something that originates in a point of actuality, in a primal source-point, “the now,” and so on. In the actuality-experience we have the primal source-point and a continuity of moments of reverberations. For all of this, we lack names.74 Thus, all temporal phenomena are, in a sense, simultaneous, in that they are all included in the same self-constituting actuality of absolute subjectivity as a perennially renewed source that is itself without duration and that only—to use a previously introduced distinction— “from outside” can be perceived as something which occupies a point, or a stretch, “of time.” We focus on the constitution of the now-point within absolute subjectivity. Every now, Husserl says, is (the mark of) the “flashing forth” of a primal impression: thus, the impression itself is, as it were, a pricking or puncturing (Latin pungere, punctum: point), in which consciousness itself and that of which it is conscious light up; in other words, the impression consists in the blazing of a light in which both the appearing and that which

70 Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, 67–68/69–70. 71 Ibid., 69/71. 72 Ibid., 68/71. 73 Ibid., 69/71. 74 Ibid., 75/79.

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  229 appears are constituted in their identity and individuality.75 This punctual impression itself, Husserl says, “has as its content that which the word ‘now’ signifies.” In the Greek element—to wit, the element of the original relation of φύσις (the arising into the openness, or ἀλήθεια, brought about by that arising itself) and ψυχή, and therefore of κίνησις and νοῦς—the punctual “light,” which is the νῦν, breaks forth, from the spontaneity of φύσις, as the noetic becoming-aware of an always already actual, individual setting-in-motion within a tension from before to after. In other words, to the appearing of that which appears, i.e., to the ὄν as such, belongs this always-alreadybeing-on-the-move from an earlier to a later: the νῦν is, as it were, the unique, individual, actual “tensorial” unit, the perceived (minded) punctual flagrancy of the original temporal intentionality which characterizes any being as such.76 However, in the element of absolute subjectivity, the light of the primal impression, which is the lived-through now, breaks forth from the spontaneity of absolute consciousness as the actual perception of a motion, or tonal sequence, which (that perception) contains in itself not only a tail of retentions and a horizon of protentions but, in the first place, the source of its own renewal and therefore of the continuous modification of the givenness of what is (primarily) remembered and expected.77 In other words, the primal impression consists in the flashing of the intentional consciousness of something in a continually renewed, unique position within the spontaneous, punctually generative flow of consciousness, with each new position showing itself as the limit of a no-longer (which it retentionally holds open as a tail of actual past impressions) and, as this same limit, as the entrance point for a not-yet (which it protentionally holds open as an empty horizon of likely future impressions). On the one hand, the difference between the Aristotelian and the Husserlian version of the now couldn’t be more marked: here the “alethic” light of φύσις, in which the νοῦς becomes aware of the ὄν as such; there the evidence flashing forth from the spontaneity of absolute consciousness, in which appearances themselves are sensed, perceived, and thought. Nonetheless, the two nows belong to the same lineage, namely the tradition of thinking in which awareness—no matter how pure, no matter how far removed from the actual grasping of a thing—is always the awareness of something, i.e., of a being. Because this structure of awareness is decided for all subsequent philosophical thinking by the Greek understanding of being as φύσις, we can speak of a “physical lineage,” and, in this sense, of a “physical now” (i.e., the now in the tradition of φύσις) and include in the latter both the Aristotelian νῦν and the Husserlian jetzt.78 The “physical now” is characterized by the circumstance that it is “nothing by itself”; namely, that it is a point of individuation which “is nothing in addition to what has individuation,” in this case the sound of the single tone or chord. In other words, the 75 This does not refer to isolated tone sensations, but to original, and thus individual and identical ones. “Original” here means “originating the relation with what is before and what is after.” 76 To my knowledge, the most profound phenomenological analysis of the Aristotelian νυ˜ν that we have today is contained in Gino Zaccaria, “Gli inizi del tempo (Sofocle, Aristotele),” eudia. Yearbook for Philosophy, Poetry, and Art 13 (2019): 1–28 (here especially 15; Zaccaria refers to the νυ˜ν as atomo tensore, tensor atom, or atomo dell’antero-posteriorità, atom of antero-posteriority). See also Gino Zaccaria, Meditazioni scismatiche. Il nulla e il tempo, l’infinito e l’arte (Firenze: Olschki, 2022), 109–122. 77 The primal impression as a source, i.e., as absolute subjectivity, is present, as their constitutive trait, in the entire tail of retentions and on the entire horizon of protentions, which are therefore, again, all simultaneous in the springing forth of this source. 78 The meaning of “physical” is not to be conflated with the meaning of the same adjective in Celibidache’s expression “physical time.”

230  Ivo De Gennaro “physical now” is, again, the individuation of something (a something now actual, now past, now future). However, the now of musical time consists in a spaciousness (a clearance) for the unique richness of sound precisely in that it is the space-of-time, the in-itself swaying “nothing” for the selfhood of sound-forms—and therefore not the constitutive, transcendentally ground-giving dimension (the “a priori”) of what eventually is fixed as “objective time” and computable duration of something. We can now retrace the main lines of our previous analysis of musical time, and explicate its theoretical core in light of the phenomenological notion of the “physical now”: (a) in Celibidache, the space-of-time for the actual sensation of sound consists in the instantaneous identification of vertical (now-)simultaneity and horizontal (no-longernot-yet-)simultaneity; we call the point of identification of the two simultaneities “identical instant”; (b) in this identification, it is the no-longer-not-yet-simultaneity (the simultaneity of the twofold “no”) which creates, or rather clears, the space for the now-simultaneity: the intensity, which calls for “materialization,” for a shelter, in the present sound-form, is the intensity of this space-of-time; (c) the identification itself—that is, the tensive interplay, in the identical instant, of the simultaneity of the retainment in the no-longer and the detainment in the not-yet, with (and for) the intensity of the now—is contained in the coming of the original intentionality, i.e., of the beginning’s intention to end in itself; this coming is, as it were, the fourth, but primal temporal dimension: the dimension of the intentionality, which, while pertaining only to itself, carries the interplay of, and identifies in itself, the two simultaneities; (d) the interplay of no-longer and not-yet in the now, as the coming of the original (primal) intentionality, intended and held out in a steady becoming-aware, is the tempo: the tempo itself is neither measurable clock time nor immeasurable inner time, but the catalytic “nothing” for the reduction to the Same in its intentionality; (e) finally, the consciousness of the now, insofar as it is primarily an instantaneous becoming-aware of the coming of the fullended intentionality of the Same in its unique tempo, is not the consciousness of something: “something,” namely the becoming sound-form of a musical articulation, is perceived in steady transcendence toward the (ascendant) “central vibration,” to which the consciousness already belongs, but begins to belong only in “pure becoming-conscious,” and finally belongs (for the “best treat”) only in the free sway of the beginning itself as the space-of-time for an intertwinement of world and things, or, simply, for a human world. 4 Conclusion It is well known that, while Celibidache would usually not object to his rehearsals or concerts being recorded, he himself never engaged in recording. With regard to this stance vis-à-vis the production of records he stated: “The reason I never made a recording is that I never found anybody who could make a recording. Those are photos of a reality which cannot be photographed.”79 This reality, namely music, consists in the instantaneous

79 G. Fauré—Requiem, Sergiu Celibidache in Rehearsal London Symphony Orchestra BBC 1983 (uploaded 2017), at 15:03–15:14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf_1kaf2Otc.

Ethics of musical time (Celibidache, Husserl)  231 becoming of the initial unison through the unique tempo of a perceived richness. Since music does not endure, but is gathered in that unique identical instant of becoming, which is also the instant of the “coming to” of a consciousness, the experience of music is finally always the perception of an articulation “at once all together”—independent of the fact that the moments of that articulation may evolve in a succession.80 In Celibidache’s experience of music, the intentional origin of time, the origin of temporal intentionality, is neither in the kinetic tension from earlier to later which characterizes the noetically perceived ὄν nor in the “impressed,” retentive-protentive spontaneity of the absolute consciousness of (what thus appears as) a being;81 rather, that origin is in the instantaneous trait of identification, the unifying “traction of the Same,” which is the beginning’s intention to end in itself. This original intentionality, in turn, needs and intends, and thus kindles and steadily avails itself of, what is the primal human attentiveness; to wit, the human capacity for in die Zeit denken,82 i.e., thinking into time, and thus correlating, joining, unifying, and reducing. Through the space-of-time of the accordance of original intentionality and intended awareness, the beginning finally attains its free sway in the truth for a human world, while the human being “comes to,” that is, attains the freedom of his selfhood, in the transcendence toward this truth. Here, “transcendence” does not imply “rising over and beyond” objective temporal appearances so as to attain the time-constitutive acts of consciousness which spring from absolute subjectivity; rather, it consists in the instantaneous attentiveness to the temporal conditions for the ascensive Same to make its way, and concern us, in the coming of a unique richness. In a today in which “music has disappeared from the world,” this extemporal attentiveness offers the avenue for a new ethical awareness.

80 We can therefore formulate the following dictum: “When music plays itself, it is perceived, as the Same, at once all together.” 81 In the perspective of transcendental phenomenology, the intentionality which characterizes the entire “nexus of apprehension” of a musical piece constitutes the unitary consciousness of what is now and of what, within this same now, is (in continuous modifications) primarily retained and expected. However, while this intentionality determines how that which is, that which has been, and that which will be, is meant, it is not itself (namely, as intentionality) constitutive of present, past, and future; in other words, the constitution of time remains exclusively with the primal impression, while the unity of apprehension determines when that source, as it were, ceases to spring, causing the givenness of the whole nexus to shift from being perceived to being “freshly remembered.” 82 Bartók - Concerto for Orchestra - Rehersal Sequence - Celibidache, MPO (1995) (uploaded 2017), at 4:11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9t1XVaMRJk.

14 Time and the photograph John Brough

Abstract  I will first look at the photograph through the lens of Edmund Husserl’s understanding of image-consciousness, arguing that Roland Barthes and Husserl agree that time is at the essence of the “straight” photograph. I will discuss the photograph’s capacity to arrest the flow of time and preserve the flow’s moments in images. I will then examine various ways in which time enters into photographs and conclude with the questions of what it might mean to experience a photograph aesthetically and whether, in the case of the photograph, aesthetic experience excludes any interest in existence and therefore in reality and real time. Keywords  Photography; Phenomenology; Time; Images; Edmund Husserl; Art; Aesthetics The old-fashioned straightforward photograph, the kind of photograph I will talk about in this chapter, is an intersection, a traffic jam really, of themes fundamental to the phenomenological understanding of photography and of the visual arts generally. What, for example, is the relation between the world existing around us at any moment in perception and the world that presents itself in the photographic image? What is the relation of the photographer and the photograph’s audience to both of these worlds? What does it mean to take the photograph as a work of art and to value it aesthetically rather than to see it simply as an epistemological instrument standing in for perception and yielding information about the world? These questions are related; and inhabiting them all, in one way or another, is the issue of time. Time is involved in everything we experience, including the arts, but in photography its involvement is particularly pronounced, nuanced, and complex. 1  Photography and image-consciousness To see a photograph is to see an image. Hence if we are to understand the photograph phenomenologically, it is important to understand the nature of images and of our awareness of them. Edmund Husserl’s account of image-consciousness is helpful here. In this first section of the chapter, I will discuss the key elements in Husserl’s approach to imageconsciousness. In the remainder of the chapter, I will try to show some of the ways in which Husserl’s view sheds light on the questions raised above, and especially on the question about the place of time in the photograph. I will conclude with some tentative comments about the connection between time and reality and the photograph’s artistic and aesthetic significance. Where appropriate, I will also draw on sources other than Husserl’s texts.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-15

Time and the photograph  233 Husserl distinguishes three moments or “objects,” as he sometimes calls them, in image-consciousness.1 These moments are mutually dependent, and any photograph exemplifies all three of them. One is the “physical image,” which is the physical or material support of the image I see when I look at the photograph. The physical support of photographic images has traditionally been paper, though it has and can be any number of other things, including metal and, particularly in the age of the iPhone, glass. The physical support is part of the real world and subject to the forces at play there: it can fade in the sunlight, be ripped, wrinkled, burned, scratched, or shattered. Changes in the photograph’s physical underpinning can alter the image it supports, affecting its aesthetic value and its market value. Time especially can take its toll on the photograph’s support, as it can in the case of any other physical thing. This may not be the most important way in which time enters into the photograph, but it is one of ways that leads us to describe a photograph as “old.” When we look at a photograph, our perception of its physical support is largely suppressed. We do not see the paper on which the photographic image is printed in the way in which we see the paper on which the text of this chapter is printed, unless there is a tear in the photograph or the image covers only part of the sheet supporting it. What we do see is the “image object” (which Husserl variously calls “semblance,” “perceptual figment,” “iconic image,” “representing image,” or simply “image”). The image, and certainly the photographic image, has a number of unique characteristics. It “appears to us,” Husserl observes, “with the full force and intensity of perception.”2 Roland Barthes writes in the same vein that “the photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force […].”3 The perception of the photographic image is therefore not a “perception-as-if” like memory and phantasy, neither of which re-presents its object with the strength and vivacity of perception. Still, seeing a photograph is not a normal and full perception, since what appears to us in the image “is not taken to be actually present,”4 not there in the flesh, “in person,” as the object of a normal perception is. When I look at the photograph, it is the image-object, not its subject, that is perceived, present, and there in person. The ontological status of the perceived image, however, is odd, in that I take it “neither as existing nor as non-existing.”5 It is “a nothing,” a nullity. “The photographic image-object (not the photographed object),” Husserl writes, “truly does not exist. ‘Truly’—that does not signify: [not] existing outside my consciousness; on the contrary, it signifies not existing at all, not even in consciousness.”6 In Husserl’s technical language, it is neither reell (a psychic datum immanent to consciousness) nor real (an existent in the spatio-temporal world). The photographic image-object is thus not a picture

1 Edmund Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung (1895–1925) (Husserliana XXIII), ed. Eduard Marbach (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 19; English translation: Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925), trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 21. Henceforth cited as Hua XXIII with German and English page references, respectively. 2 Hua XXIII, 57/62. 3 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang: 1982), 91. Henceforth cited as CL, followed by the relevant page number. 4 Hua XXIII, 40/43. 5 Ibid., 385/457. 6 Ibid., 110/119.

234  John Brough really existing in the mind like a photograph hidden away in a drawer. Indeed, after some hesitation, Husserl seems to have come to the conclusion that there are no such “mental” images even in memory or phantasy, which accordingly (and surprisingly?) turn out not to be forms of image-consciousness at all.7 In memory, therefore, I do not entertain an image in my mind that in turn indirectly re-presents or pictures something or someone past. On the contrary, in memory I re-present what is past itself: “That,” Husserl writes, “is certain.”8 If I remember my mother, I remember her directly and not through the medium of a present picture or image floating in consciousness. To say that the memory re-presents what is remembered itself should not, however, be construed to mean that what is remembered is present “in person.” To be an object of memory is to be something or someone past and therefore precisely not to be there in person, but to be experienced “in differing ‘freshness’ and ‘vividness,’ in differing ‘fullness’ and ‘fragmentariness,’ as if I were seeing through a sort of thick fog.”9 I could, of course, remember a photograph of my mother, but in that case, I would be conscious of the photograph itself in the mode of memory and not of some mental picture resembling it. That the photographic image-object I see is not something that exists in my mind does not mean, however, that it exists in the spatio-temporal world in the manner of its physical support. It is nonetheless an object, specifically, an image-object that I see intuitively. In Husserlian parlance, it is “ideal,” 10 not tethered to a particular time and place, apart from its time of origin and the location of its physical support. Prints of Louis Faurer’s Eddie, a photograph depicting a young man, perhaps autistic, holding a flower and standing on a sidewalk in New York, can be located in many different places simultaneously and yet in each case present the same image to the viewer. The loss of a particular print to fire or flood does not entail the loss of the image that we know as Eddie. In that sense, the photographic image-object escapes time in a way that the photograph’s physical support, its “physical image,” does not and cannot. When the image-object does have a specific temporal determination, the determination accrues to it only derivatively through its subject matter, its physical support, or the time at which the photographer took the picture. Its own being is that “it merely appears, it has never existed and never will exist,”11 that is, as one more thing numbered among the worldly things it depicts. It is something timeless and non-existent with the remarkable ability to re-present the temporal and the existent. The third moment in image-consciousness―the third thing of which one is conscious when one confronts an image―is the image-subject. In the case of photography, this is what the photograph is about, what it re-presents. This could be a person, a busy city street, a mountain―anything that the photographer perceives through the camera’s lens and that finds its way into the photographic image. In viewing the image, the spectator is then conscious of its subject. The photograph is ordinarily not functioning as a sign or symbol when this occurs. The point of a sign is to direct one to something outside the sign, as a symbol in an airport points passengers to the nearest restaurant or bar. In the case of the photographic image, however, I see the subject in the image;12 and this is true

7 Ibid., 71–72/79, 85–86/92–93, 161/192, 503/604. 8 Ibid., 201/241. 9 Ibid., 202/241 10 Ibid., 537–538/647–648. 11 Ibid., 109/118. 12 Ibid., 34/37.

Time and the photograph  235 even though the image itself is ideal and its subject existed in the real spatio-temporal world when the photograph was taken. The image invites, indeed compels, us to see its subject just as it presents itself in the image. The sign, however, instructs us to find its subject beyond the sign itself. The sign pushes us out; the image pulls us in, encouraging us to dwell in its subject and to explore it.

Louis Faurer, Eddie. Copyright Louis Faurer Estate, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. Reproduction rights have been granted.

To say that the photograph and its subject are two different “objects” does not mean that one could be experienced without the other. “A specific photograph,” as Roland Barthes reminds us, “is not immediately or generally distinguished from its referent,” that is, from what it represents.13 Photographs are “laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both.”14 The photographic image and the subject it exhibits are distinct but inseparable. Barthes goes on to say that “a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”15 Husserl would agree that in straightforward image-consciousness, I “live totally in the new apprehending that grounds itself on the appearance: in the image, one sees the subject.”16 But Husserl also insists that I see the subject just and only as the image represents it, and that entails an awareness of differences between the image and what it depicts. I don’t confuse the two. “Human beings as 13 CL, 5. 14 Ibid., 6. 15 Ibid., 6. 16 Hua XXIII, 26/27.

236  John Brough they appear photographically are not to be found anywhere in reality,” Husserl notes.17 There are no human beings in photographic colors, at least not in shades of black and white, and the image and its subject will differ in other ways as well: what appears in the photograph is strangely stationary and constant, for example, while human beings in the world with their turns, strides, twitches, and blinks are not; even the color of a snow-capped mountain varies with changes in light. Thus, in looking at a photograph, we are almost never tricked into thinking that we are seeing the subject before us in real space and time, as sometimes happens with trompe l’oeil paintings and sculptures, such as Duane Hanson’s highly realistic figures decked out with all the trappings, cameras included, that you might see on visitors at a popular tourist spot and which regularly deceive museum goers. Husserl would agree with Barth about the laminated character of the photograph. However, he would locate it squarely within its function as a “re-presentation, a pictorialization of the object,”18 which demands that the two moments of image and subject imaged remain distinct in our experience, although they can no more be separated than the image and its physical support without undermining the photograph’s being. Thus, we may rightly say “there’s Sartre” when we look at Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of Sartre on the Pont Neuf in Paris, but we know that this imaged Sartre is not Sartre himself present in person and that it would be futile to ask him to sign our copies of Being and Nothingness. Only the really existing Sartre could do that. Photographic transparency therefore has its limits. To transgress them would be to go beyond photography itself. It would be to enter the realm of deception and illusion. 2 The photograph and the mastery of time: showing time in the photographic image That time flows is a familiar and telling metaphor. Time, however, is not so much something with qualities, among which flowing is numbered, as it simply is flowing; flowing is its being. And since reality is saturated by time, the very being of reality might be said to be flowing too. Thus, to be something real is not merely to be in time but to be temporal through and through―to be something that now exists or that did exist or that will exist in the future, or to be all three of these at once. The temporal flow does not proceed in fits and starts; it is relentless and incessant. In a fundamental sense, we never rest; we are always flowing away from ourselves and toward ourselves, away from what we have been and toward what we will be. It is no surprise, then, that human beings have long sought for ways to master time―not to halt its flow, which would erase time and subvert our being―but to make it more manageable, to compensate in some degree for what it steals from us. Sundials and clocks and other time-measuring instruments, even ancient monuments that may have served as observatories making it possible to mark the seasons and the optimal times for planting and harvesting, were inventions that let us introduce order into the flow of time and to tame its propensity to sweep us along and deprive us of control over our lives. But instruments that measure time, however useful they may be in channeling time’s stream, do not compensate for what time takes away from us. The moment in which we are now living recedes immediately into the past

17 Ibid., 132/146. 18 Ibid., 26/27.

Time and the photograph  237 along with all that it contains. It is true that we can remember, more or less intuitively, the past moment and what it embraced, but such memorial possession is secure for only as long as the memory lasts. Once no one is left who has a personal memory of someone or of something past―of Cleopatra, say, or of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria or of the Battle of Salamis―no intuitive consciousness of the past and its content remains. We then rely on oral tradition or on accounts written by others who had personal memories of the past or who themselves had to rely on secondhand accounts left by others. In these cases, time no longer shows or exhibits itself intuitively in the mode of the past. Such “evidence” leaves us with empty intentions waiting for intuitive fulfillment that will never come, with questions answered by words, not images. One might argue, of course, that artifacts such as paintings and sculptures, which are images, can give an intuitive presentation of historical figures and events. Such artistic images, however, while yielding intuitive appearances and sometimes establishing themselves as aesthetic masterpieces, can at best only purport to depict an event as it actually occurred or a person as that person appeared at a given moment. Even if the artist has seen firsthand what he or she depicts or has taken into account eyewitness reports, the image remains very much the product of the artist’s imagination. However much the painter’s or sculptor’s efforts to salvage what the flow has swept away may owe to perception and however much they may reflect the desire to master time, their creations ultimately belong more to phantasy’s domain than to perception’s. This situation changed dramatically with the invention of the camera. The camera was a machine that arrested time, rescuing passing moments from the temporal flow and setting them forth in images. The photographer Edward Weston nicely captured the significance of this revolutionary advance when he exclaimed in his “Daybooks”: “What a valuable way of recording just such passing moments is the camera!”19 Photography enabled us to see, in the mode of image-consciousness, moments of the past and what they contained as they had once actually appeared, and to do so after they had flowed away. It let us restore what time had stolen by making possible intuitive images of the past perceptual world, which, thanks to the camera, originally arose straight from that world itself. After the advent of photography, personal memory with its privacy and finite life and its fluctuating and fleeting appearances was no longer the principal and perhaps sole way of preserving the past intuitively. In addition, the photographic image not only preserved the past but, wedded to its material support, had a permanence and constancy that let us return to it again and again, and a publicity that made it available to multiple viewers across time and space. Photography thus offered a radically new mode of time-consciousness. It showed and preserved time―not imagined time but real time―and, above all, the past. This showing is essential to photography and makes it unique among the visual arts. Husserl observes that in the photograph “something not now, an earlier situation, is presented.”20 When we look at a photograph, we have “an image-object that appears as present” and “exhibits what is not present―in this case, what is past.”21 Something present, the image-object,

19 Edward Weston, “Daybooks 1923–1930,” in Photography in Print, ed. Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 303–314, here 312. Henceforth cited as “Daybooks,” followed by the relevant page number. 20 Hua XXIII, 166/201. 21 Ibid., 166/201.

238  John Brough “‘brings to mind’ something not present.”22 The time of the object depicted is not the time in which the image is seen. The latter is the present; the image is seen now. The time the image depicts is past; it was now. In a photograph I therefore see a non-present subject in a present image. The photograph thus restores in a limited but compelling manner what the flow of time has carried away, exhibiting intuitively and perceptually what is no longer present. The photograph shows its subject as it appeared at a moment in the past, in a now that has gone by in which the photographer and the photographed were simultaneously present to each other. The photographer cannot photograph the past: for example, the Parthenon as it existed in 332 BC. The Parthenon of 332 BC. is simply not there to be photographed. Only its being in the present is available to the photographer. The person viewing the photograph, however, looks at the image in the present and is present to it but not to the subject photographed, except insofar as it appears in the image. For the moment the photographer opens and closes the shutter, what is photographed, as photographed, is past, and its pastness will be lodged forever in the image. So, while the photographer cannot photograph the past, the viewer can see only the past in the photograph and never the present. The present, however, is still there for the viewer in the sense that the past the viewer sees is a past present. What appears did exist and had once been present in real time. The photographer who took the picture did not simply imagine what he or she photographed but actually perceived it. The photograph is a record of that perception. In photographic time-consciousness, I do not perceive the past―if I did perceive it, it would be present, not past―but I do re-present it intuitively in the image and see it there in at least some of its original sensuous garb. It appears to me as the past of someone or of something that has been. What is depicted in the photograph might still exist, of course, and even exist without discernible change, but it is presented in the photograph as it appeared to the photographer at a particular moment in time that is now irretrievably past, lost, except for the image it has left behind. The photograph obviously can go only so far in mastering time.23 In many ways it remains, like everything else, time’s servant. The image it offers of a past present, however, is by no means a merely Pyrrhic victory over the temporal flow. What Husserl says quite straightforwardly―that the photograph exhibits the past― Roland Barthes says more dramatically and with greater elaboration. He also adds something that Husserl, at best, only implies. Barthes writes: I call ‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real thing to which an image or 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. […] Contrary to these imitations, in photography I can never deny that the thing has been there.24

22 Ibid., 166/201. 23 The sense of nostalgia and the feelings of sadness and loss that photographs can induce are rooted in photography’s unique preservation and showing of time and the past. Photographs more generally can function as “engines of memory” (Hua XXIII, 52/56). 24 CL, 76.

Time and the photograph  239 The different ways in which the painted portrait and the photographic portrait are related to the past sheds some light on this claim. The photograph is tied to a past present in the sense that what it depicts was once present to the camera and to the photographer in a specific now-moment. Its subject therefore appears as it did in that moment―in a now that has gone by and cannot be retrieved except in memory or in the photographic image. The subject of a painted portrait, however, is detached from any particular past moment; it is not tied inextricably to time as the photograph is. If the subject of the painted portrait is a pure invention of the artist’s imagination, then it was never real and was never present at any time. Thus, Barthes writes, in the photograph “there is a superimposition of reality and the past. And since this constraint exists only for photography, we must consider it […] as the very essence, the noème of photography.”25 Barthes accordingly names photography’s essence: “‘That-has-been.’”26 I think Husserl would agree that the subject of a photograph is something that has been and was once real and “absolutely, irrefutably present.”27 However, he never seems to have claimed that the essence of photography is to present time and temporal determinations, and above all the mode of the past. On the other hand, as we have seen, he certainly does claim that photography exhibits what is not present, specifically, the past, which implies that he too takes the exhibition of the past to be essential to photography. In any event, the key point is that this claim places time―real time―at the center of the photograph’s being, which, I would argue, is just where it belongs. At the least, the photograph testifies “that the object has been real”28 and “has indeed existed.”29 It shifts “reality to the past (‘this-has been’).”30 Or I could say that the photograph displaces me into the past by displacing the past intuitively but re-presentationally into the present by means of an image. It gives me “reality in a past state: at once the past and the real.”31 While Barthes finds that time is the essence of the photograph, he tends to focus on the mode of the past at the expense of the future. He thinks that the photograph interrupts the constitutive style of the temporal flow of consciousness because “it is without future (this is its pathos, its melancholy); in it, there is no protensity […]. Motionless, the photograph flows back from presentation to retention.”32 Yet Barthes’s own example of the photograph of a young assassin awaiting execution undermines this claim. In looking at the photograph, Barthes writes, I see that “He is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been.”33 Generally speaking, a photograph includes in its temporal essence both an indeterminate future and an indeterminate past. They become determinate for the viewer when the viewer knows about what in fact has happened to the subject in the course of its history. After September 11, 2001, for example, one cannot look at a picture of the World Trade Center’s twin towers without being aware that what one sees in the image once existed, was destined to be destroyed, and has been destroyed. The image has acquired a definite and indelible sense of the subject’s consum-

25 Ibid., 76. 26 Ibid., 66. 27 Ibid., 77. 28 Ibid., 79. 29 Ibid., 82. 30 Ibid., 79. 31 Ibid., 82. 32 Ibid., 90. 33 Ibid., 96.

240  John Brough mated future. It is definite, of course, because what was once an open future has, with the passage of time, come to be filled in a specific way. Hence the only determinate future of which one can be conscious in a photograph is the one realized in retrospect, a future that is no longer truly future, a past future. The photograph’s attachment to time derives in part from its nature as a mechanical medium. An image will result automatically if the photographer aims the camera at something and opens the shutter. The image, of course, may or may not be of any aesthetic worth. The point is that it comes about less through a process of “making” than of “taking.” A painter may be said to make a painting or a sculptor to make a sculpture; there is nothing automatic about it. A painter cannot decide to make a painting of the Flatiron Building in New York, set up his or her easel in front of it along with some brushes and tubes of paint, and then, with a single strategic flick of a finger, expect an oil painting to appear instantaneously. The painter will have to apply paint to a flat surface and work the paint until an image emerges in which one can see the Flatiron Building. However―to apply a simplistic analogy―what the photographer does with a camera is “take” a picture much as someone takes something from the shelf of a shop. The scene is ready-made, there in the viewfinder of the camera and ready to be “taken.” Again, this may or may not yield art. But whether or not it does, it is a process different from painterly making; and the image that results is different in one essential respect from the painted image: it is bound to the particular temporal moment that the camera-machine registered. Precisely that image could not have been taken at any other time. This can also be expressed in terms of causality. The Flatiron Building may be the occasion for the creation of a painting, but it does not cause the painted image. A photograph of the Flatiron Building, however, is caused by the building through the medium of the camera, which records what is presented to it. It is a “tracing of patterns of light reflected from its object.”34 It points to its cause by picturing it; or as Barthes puts it: “The photograph is literally the emanation of the referent.”35 In the case of the photograph of Barthes’ mother, which plays a central role in Camera Lucida, the image, he writes, “is for me the treasury of rays which emanated from my mother as a child, from her hair, her skin, her dress, her gaze, on that day.”36 The photograph is anchored in reality, in real time, through the camera as a mechanical device. (This does not mean, of course, that there are not many things the photographer can do to shape the photograph as a work of art and as an object of aesthetic experience. These aspects of photography and their relation to time will be discussed later in the chapter.) It is important to note here that a photograph, particularly a digital photograph, can be manipulated to such a degree that, although it looks like an ordinary photo, it loses any specific connection to the past and therefore to reality. For example, Nancy Berson’s manipulated image First Beauty Composite depicts a woman’s face, but the woman whose face appears never in fact existed. The image may indeed have had a hydra-headed source in multiple photographs that were “emanations” from five different film stars, all of whom once really existed and regularly graced the silver screen. What one sees when one looks at the “composite,” however, is a pictorial blend that, despite the faint intimation of a few facial features of the stars whose images were purportedly among the blend’s ingredients

34 Jonathan Friday, “André Bazin’s Ontology of Photographic and Film Imagery,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005): 339–350, here 343. 35 CL, 82. 36 Ibid., 82.

Time and the photograph  241 (are these Marilyn Monroe’s lips? are these Grace Kelly’s eyes?), does not record the appearance of anyone who ever existed. It may look like a photograph of someone who did exist and posed before the camera, but it is a kind of illusion. It is not what it appears to be. The photographs that are the focus of this chapter are what they appear to be: images of time and reality. They are not tricks and they were not made to simulate or deceive. 3  Photography, time, and reality Around 1918, in making a spare but intriguing inventory of various types of art, Husserl observed that art can move between two extremes. Time is central to both of them, though in quite different ways. In the first case, Husserl writes, “the given world and time” appearing in the work “can be as fully determinate as our surrounding world is for us now. […] For example, the Berlin of today.”37 The other extreme embraces art that offers a time and world that do not belong to today or to any other period in human history. This is the realm of “once upon a time, somewhere, in some fable land, in some world with entirely different animal beings, even natural laws, and so on.”38 The first extreme is represented by what Husserl calls “realistic art”; at the other extreme lie the productions of pure phantasy, including fairy tales. In this section, I will assume that photography in most of its manifestations is a species of realistic art. Husserl never seems to have made this classification himself, choosing instead to limit his discussion of realistic art to realistic fiction, although he does acknowledge that painting and sculpture can also be realistic.39 It is likely that Husserl did not think that still photography could be at once fictional and realistic in the manner of literature or, presumably, painting and sculpture. And although he occasionally refers to cinema in his early texts on image-consciousness, he never mentions (but also never denies) the possibility that a film could combine a real setting that is shot on location at particular moments in time―such as gritty mid-twentieth century Hoboken, New Jersey―with a fictional story, as happens in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. It is certainly the case that the vast majority of still photographs do not have an imagined subject comparable to the fictional themes found in realistic novels; they are tied exclusively to something real that actually occurred at a specific moment, not to something manufactured or staged with the intention of implying a narrative. It is also the case, however, that photographs can indeed sometimes be fictional. They can present scenes that are intended to be taken as fiction or whose purposeful ambiguity raises questions appropriate to fiction. Jeff Wall’s light-box images, brilliantly illuminated from behind, and Gregory Crewdson’s large-format color prints offer recent examples. At first glance, they appear to be straightforward photographs recording real situations and events occurring at specific times, albeit presented to the viewer in unusually dramatic and almost cinematic fashion. In fact, however, they are carefully staged scenes whose making involved actors, crews, sets, and lighting typical of movie production. They depict settings that appear to be real―a room in a small-town home, a street in Vancouver, a photographer’s studio―but also suggest with considerable force that what they depict is not simply ordinary, everyday reality. There is something uncanny and often disturbing about them. They suggest a story, imply that something is in the process of happening

37 Hua XXIII, 540/651. 38 Ibid., 540/651. 39 Ibid., 540/652.

242  John Brough as it might in fiction but that the image captures only one of its moments. The staging of Jeff Wall’s photographs, in fact, often draws on literature (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man), painting (Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère), and even Japanese prints. His intention, in part, is to challenge the documentary and evidential quality of traditional straight photography, and in that respect falls into the postmodernist camp. But to the degree that he and Crewdson introduce fiction into their photographs, Husserl’s description of the realistic novel applies to their work as well: “It constructs fictions in which characteristic types belonging to the time present themselves.”40 Or one can say that they inject an imagined story into a setting that otherwise appears to be real and to belong to the time in which we live, making it reverberate with fictional implications. This kind of photography is the antithesis of the practice of Gary Winogrand, for example, who wandered the streets of New York alone, equipped only with his camera at the ready for whatever might suddenly emerge into salience out of the city’s teeming life. Although images such as Crewdson’s and Wall’s can fascinate the viewer and raise intriguing questions for the philosopher about photography’s possibilities, they occupy a narrow and specialized niche in the medium. Most photographs are not fictional and do not intend to be. They are “straight” and realistic. Husserl’s understanding of realistic art, if it is not restricted to literature and the element of fiction is removed, can shed light on straight photography’s ability to present the world in its reality and temporality. In that case, photography in its most common form could be described as “documentary,” if the term is taken broadly. Indeed, as David Featherstone observes, “the concept of documentation is inherent in the nature of the photographic process. That is, the camera makes a record of the ‘event’ within its field of view at the instant of exposure.”41 Beaumont Newhall thought that documentary still photography “is analogous to, and perhaps inspired by, the school of documentary film-makers in Great Britain [in the thirties] headed by John Grierson, who used documentary to describe films made of what he called ‘actuality’ or the ‘real world,’” as opposed to Hollywood’s contrived photoplays with professional actors performing in staged settings.42 On this analogy, one can say that most still photographs are documentary, since “the overwhelming majority of photographs are taken ‘on location’ and do, in fact, visually record the ‘real world.’”43 If most still photographs are documentary in this generous sense, then, to borrow Husserl’s description of realistic art, they could be said to present landscapes, human beings, human communities, destinies […] in the fullest possible ‘characteristic’ concreteness, as if we were seeing them and, within a fixed frame, witnessing everything related to them in the richest possible fullness and in the substance of their being.44

40 Ibid., 541/653. 41 David Featherstone, “Preface,” in Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography (Untitled 35), ed. David Featherstone (Carmel: The Friends of Photography, 1984), vii–viii, here vii. Henceforth cited as “Preface” with the relevant page reference. 42 Beaumont Newhall, “A Background Glance at Documentary,” in Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography (Untitled 35), ed. David Featherstone (Carmel: The Friends of Photography, 1984), 1–6, here 1. Henceforth cited as “Documentary,” with the relevant page reference. 43 Newhall, “Documentary,” 1. 44 Hua XXIII, 541/652.

Time and the photograph  243 Though this description may suggest an unattainable ideal, any straight photograph that is successful succeeds precisely because it goes some distance toward attaining it. The description also suggests photography’s hospitality and capacity for intuitive re-presentation. All of this occurs within the horizon of time: “The photo-document,” Anselm Adams wrote, “is always dated.”45 Consider, for example, Husserl’s claim that realistic art characterizes “a situation in a time and the time itself, the level of culture, the sort of life and life-form of this quarter of the globe, of this city, and so on.”46 Husserl mentions “the Vienna of [the novelist] Schnitzler” as an example, but one could just as well choose Bill Brandt’s photo-book London in the Thirties, 47 which is a multi-dimensional photographic story or biography of London in the decade leading up to World War II. Brandt published London in the Thirties in 1984, but the images he selected and carefully organized for the book had for the most part appeared in various outlets 50 years earlier, affording Londoners of that time the opportunity of seeing themselves and their city as they then existed. The photographs show various neighborhoods and the social classes― poor, middle, and upper―who inhabited them. The book does not have an imagined plot unfolding in fictional time; instead, it has a structure shaped by real time. Each of its three parts traces the typical day―and thus follows the quotidian temporal flow―in the life of one of the classes from morning to night. The activities and settings differ for each class. All three exist simultaneously (itself a temporal mode). Their lives run parallel to each other and at times interact, but what they have in common, at bottom, is the city and the time they share and that the photographs present. “For most of [Brandt’s] pictures,” Paul Delany writes, “the time of their taking is of the essence; and they can deliver that time to us today.”48 In arresting particular temporal moments, Brandt’s photographs capture an era. They tell us what we were and, to the degree that the past is embedded in the present, what we are now. But Brandt’s photographs have another temporal aspect as well: they are caught up in time’s continuous advance. They are images of the past, but not static images. Thanks to their republication at a later date in a new book and in a fresh form, we now view them―indeed must view them―through the temporal prism of the radical changes London and the world have undergone since the images were first made and seen. The sense of contemporaneity they once had has become enveloped in an aura of history, of time irretrievably past. Their meaning has changed in many other ways as well, suggesting that a photograph’s sense, which was first established at the moment the photograph was taken, shares in time’s fluid and accumulative character, absorbing ever new layers of significance the longer it endures. Realistic art also has the capacity to present characteristic realities or, in Husserl’s formulation, “types belonging to the time.”49 This happens regularly in the kind of photographs we have been discussing. Brandt’s pictures, for example, depict, among other things, a servant drawing a bath in a Mayfair mansion, inhabitants of the East End drinking in a dingy pub, and a middle-class family sitting down to dinner in an orderly dining room. Each of the images can be taken as portraying types belonging to the classes found in London in the thirties. The maid, the denizens of the bar, and the family, however,

45 Newhall, “Documentary,” 2. 46 Hua XXIII, 541/652. 47 Bill Brandt, London in the Thirties (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 48 Paul Delany, “The Charm of the Alien,” The Guardian Website, 20 February 2004. 49 Hua XXIII, 541/653.

244  John Brough are not simply types. They are unique individuals, recorded in their singularity by the camera. Each of them existed and was engaged in the world at a specific moment captured by the photographer. Thus, what appears momentarily in perception is first of all a concrete individual, not a general type; and that is equally true of what is depicted in the photograph that records the moment. So, while general types characteristic of an era may appear in photographs, they do so on the basis of depicted individuals belonging to specific, unrepeatable moments. One then sees the type in the individual or sees the individual as of a certain type. Because it is the individual photographed at this moment that is at the core of the photograph, whatever else the photograph is or may show is built on that. Simply put: the camera records time, and time is the habitat of individuals. The camera therefore records and describes the individual, whether person, thing, or event, which may in turn exemplify a type. 4  Documentary photography, the life-world, and humanism From the phenomenological perspective, the realistic or documentary photographs we have been discussing can be said to have as their subject what Husserl called the “lifeworld,” the world that surrounds each of us and is the setting for our perceptual, practical, affective, and vocational lives. The life-world is not a world sealed up in itself and detached from human involvement. On the contrary, it is precisely the world as it appears to the subjects who live and act in it and bring it to presence (in Husserl’s technical parlance, it is the world as it appears to transcendental egos). Photographers, by whom I mean those who dedicate themselves to the medium, are conscious subjects too, of course, but subjects who occupy a special position. They do not simply live in and engage the life-world in ordinary ways: they also record it through the camera in the mode of representational imagery. The world they represent is a human world, not because a human being is necessarily depicted in their photographs―many photographs of the lifeworld do not picture anyone at all―but because a human being, the photographer, has seen something at a given moment and has taken a picture of it, an action that captures the object in an image just as the photographer perceived it. The object has not simply passed through the lens of a camera; it has also passed through a particular subject’s way of seeing it. Every photograph of this kind is a document certifying that this is how the world appeared in its specificity and richness to an individual human being at a particular moment in time. Since documentary photography shows the life-world as it has been perceived and recorded by the photographer and therefore as a human world, it has been broadly characterized as “humanistic.” One species of documentary photography, however, wears its “humanism” on its sleeve, so to speak. This is the sort represented by the work of such photographers as Jacob Riis, Louis Hine, and Dorothea Lange, and is probably the kind of photography most often associated with the term “documentary.” These photographers made photographs “from a specifically humanistic point of view.” They have as their subjects “human activities and […] situations affecting the human condition.”50 They photographed aspects of the society in which they were living―the “culture at that period of time”51―such as the wretched conditions of the poor in New York City in the 50 Featherstone, “Preface,” vii. 51 Newhall, “Documentary,” 5.

Time and the photograph  245 late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, child labor during the same period, and the poverty and displacement wrought by the Great Depression in the 1930s. From the perspective of temporality, they documented the times in which they lived, emphasizing particularly the social conditions they encountered around them. They did so, however, with a view to changing those conditions by presenting them in images that were often raw and confrontational―that is, they presented the present in images meant to motivate change in the future. Documentary photography of this type is therefore often seen as an instrument of social reform. In that respect, it is both realistic and “idealistic.” Husserl included what he called “idealistic art” in his condensed inventory of the arts mentioned earlier. His own remarks about it focus on literature, as they did in the case of realistic art, but what he says can also be applied to photography of the reformist sort. “The idealistic author,” Husserl writes, “does not merely see facts and types belonging to regions of the empirical world and empirical life; he sees ideas and ideals, and, in seeing them, values them and sets them forth as values.”52 The purely realistic photographer, to borrow Husserl’s terms, would have an empirical or “positivistic focus,” while the “idealistic” photographer would have a “normative focus […].”53 It is this normative focus that distinguishes the work of humanistic photographers such as Riis, Hine, and Lange. Their realism produced powerful, even shocking images. Their point, however, was not simply to shock but to promote change. They pursued the realistic portrayal of the world for the sake of an idealistic or moral end. It is not surprising, then, that proponents of this kind of photography argue that the photographer “as an artist undertakes not only risks but responsibility”54 and responds to a moral imperative to employ the medium in the service of a better world. Lange thought that “photography seems often more concerned with illusion than reality. It does not reflect but contrives. It lives in a world of its own. Living in a world of its own, it is not, either as art or science, successful.”55 Photography succeeds, Lange argued, when it does not turn its back on conditions in the world, however disturbing, but embraces its responsibility to depict them. “It is the nature of the camera to deal with what is,” 56 that is, with present reality, which means, in Lange’s case, with the present human condition. This is to “take the view of man” and “to make photographs that are “full of the world,”57 that speak with and for their subjects.58 In this way the photographer will be focused on “that with which, in the end, photography must be concerned―time, and place, and the works of man.”59 The reformer therefore sees photography’s relation to time normatively. The photographer should focus on the present life-world and must be a realist in that respect. That is part of the photographer’s responsibility. But this realism records the present for the sake of a better future. In that respect, it is idealistic. The reformer melds idealism with realism.

52 Hua XXIII, 541/653. 53 Ibid., 542/653. 54 Dorothea Lange and Daniel Dixon, “Photographing the Familiar,” Aperture 1/2 (1952): 5–15, here 6. Henceforth cited as “Photographing,” with the relevant page reference. 55 Lange and Dixon, “Photographing,” 15. 56 Ibid., 15. 57 Ibid., 9. 58 Ibid., 15. 59 Ibid., 15.

246  John Brough Obviously not all photographers who make or have made images of the life-world see their vocation in idealistic and reformist terms. Bill Brandt does not seem to have done so, though he photographed the poor of London. And Edward Weston and Walker Evans, two of the most important American photographers of the twentieth century, were quite clear that they were not motivated by an ideological or moral-utilitarian purpose. This difference in viewpoint implies a different conception of what the photograph’s relation to time is or should be. Weston thought that photography “existed in order to deal ‘with the immediate present, and with only one moment of that present.’ As a result, his subjects seem to be devoid of historical context, independent of social commentary.”60 His governing focus on probing what appears in the immediate present signals that he does not take photography to be in the service of the future. His photographs, however, are not devoid of temporal context. Insofar as they re-present what was present and the present always carries with it the horizons of past and future, his images re-present the past and the future as well, at least in a minimal way. Walker Evans took a similar stance, even if his photographs of impoverished southern sharecroppers in the 1930s might seem to fall into the reformist camp. “Evans,” Geoffrey Dyer writes, “explicitly disavows any ideological component in his work (‘NO POLITICS whatever’).”61 Dorothea Lange, firmly rooted in the reformist camp, would find such an attitude irresponsible at best. If the times cry out for change, then the photographer’s responsibility is to promote change photographically; that is, to make “timely” images. Lange’s implied rebuke amounts to a claim that photographers who ignore the social dimension of life fail to appreciate fully the temporal character of photography because they effectively ignore the future. Weston would respond that time is indeed deeply involved in his images and that he takes photography above all to be a way of revealing what appears in the present to a prepared and perceptive subject, first of all to the photographer and then to members of a wider audience. He might observe in addition that both his powerful portrait of Tina Modotti and Lange’s compelling image of a migrant mother with her children record a moment in time when their respective subjects, actually present before the camera, revealed something of their essential being. Both images preserve that moment and thereby achieve what Weston thinks every successful photograph achieves: “the significant presentation of the Thing Itself with photographic quality.”62 Weston’s “Thing Itself,” with its echoes of Husserl’s call to return to the “things themselves,” is not an abstract essence; it is something unique and real caught in image by the photographer at a particular instant in time’s flow. 5 Time and the photograph as a work of art and object of aesthetic interest: aesthetically affective features of the image Photographs can function epistemologically, giving information about the world and, within limits, providing evidence and a degree of certainty. Thus, in looking at Eddie, Louis Faurer’s photograph, one might note that Eddie is holding a flower of a particular kind. But photographs can also be works of art and targets of aesthetic experience. In

60 Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 97. Henceforth cited as Ongoing, with the relevant page reference. 61 Dyer, Ongoing, 97. 62 Weston, “Daybooks,” 313.

Time and the photograph  247 that case, the point is pleasure and delight, not simply fact. According to Husserl, the aesthetic response would be to how Eddie-standing-on-the-sidewalk-and-holding-the-flower appears in the image. “It is the appearance that comes into question aesthetically,” he writes, and it is in the appearance considered “precisely as it is and not for theoretical purposes, such as the epistemological, the psychological, and so on,” that we take aesthetic delight.63 It is significant that Husserl does not leave the consciousness of the image-subject out of account here. Aesthetic feeling or interest “fastens onto the image object,” he writes, but “the consciousness of the image-subject is there too and [is] in no way inessential, for without it there is no aesthetic image.”64 An appearance, aesthetic or otherwise, is always the appearance of something. There is no “How” without the “What.” In the final section I will examine whether and how the reality and existence of this “What” make a difference in the aesthetic experience of the photograph. If a photograph is to be art and of genuine aesthetic worth and not simply a mildly pleasing snapshot or source of information, it must excel as an image. It must have features that unite to form an aesthetically satisfying whole that beckons to the viewer. It must, Husserl writes, offer a “most favorable” appearance. A “most favorable” appearance is one “that contains in itself the maximum stock of sensuous contents and the particular combination of such moments that arouses pleasure.” Husserl further suggests that the photographer, like any other artist, must ask: “Among the innumerable particular positions that actually occur, which is the one ‘noticed’? And among those that are noticed, which is the ‘best,’”65 the most favorable? Furthermore, a most favorable image or appearance should include “nothing indifferent, nothing random” and have “as much unity as possible.”66 It should also possess “as much expression as possible; that is to say: excitation with the greatest possible wealth of appearance, the most powerful and most intuitive excitation of the consciousness of the object.”67 In presenting something, aesthetic appearances express something. “What expresses nothing is a matter of aesthetic indifference.”68 Photographs are bound by this rule just as much as paintings and other forms of visual art. If the elements in the image combine felicitously and an expressive whole results, it will exert an aesthetic pull on the viewer. Not all appearances are equivalent “in this affective direction.”69 Some will draw us more than others, which is why the photographer must select and make choices. Edward Weston thought that in photography―the first fresh emotion, feeling for the thing, is captured complete and for all time at the very moment it is seen and felt. Feeling and recording are simultaneous―hence the great vitality in pure photography and its loss in manipulated photography […].70

63 Hua XXIII, 145/168. 64 Ibid., 52/55. 65 Ibid., 145/169. 66 Ibid., 145/169. 67 Ibid., 146/169. 68 Ibid., 146, n. 1/169, n. 7. 69 Ibid., 145/168. 70 Weston, “Daybooks,” 313.

248  John Brough

Andre Kértész, Meudon, 1928, © 2019 Estate of André Kertész/Higher Pictures.

Weston’s “pure photography” is grounded in a selection that is “entirely [the photographer’s] viewpoint as seen through the camera.”71 This is at least one sort of selection that yields, in photography, Husserl’s “most favorable” appearances. André Kertész’s photograph, Meudon, is an interesting example of this selective process. As a straight photographer, Kertész was compelled to work with what reality offered in successive moments. In the case of Meudon, he took several shots before he got the image he wanted. The photograph he finally selected shows a man in a top hat crossing a street with a package under his arm while a train, belching smoke, steams across an elevated viaduct in the background. It has the “maximum stock of sensuous contents” felicitously united that, according to Husserl, characterizes the aesthetically pleasing appearance. One of Kertész’s trial photographs on the way to this image captures only the viaduct, the street, and the buildings lining the street. Another image adds the train crossing the viaduct, but not the man with the package. Then came the moment in real time in which the train, the buildings, and the man crossing the street with the package under his arm all appeared together simultaneously, the moment in which they were “seen and felt.” Kertész opened the shutter of his camera and the scene was transformed into a remarkable image. This confluence of objects and events occurred in a fleeting instant in 1928, but thanks to the photograph we can contemplate it today in the image it has left behind. Kertész’s Meudon illustrates the importance the depiction of simultaneity can have for the aesthetic significance of photographs. There are many other ways in which photographs become aesthetically compelling by exhibiting time. One of these is waiting,

71 Ibid., 313.

Time and the photograph  249

Bill Brandt, Parlourmaid and Underparlourmaid Ready to Serve Dinner, 1936. Bill Brandt © Bill Brandt Archive.

which Bill Brandt’s Parlourmaid and Under-Parlourmaid Ready to Serve Dinner, a photograph included in his London in the Thirties, vividly captures. The maids are waiting to serve dinner in a Mayfair mansion. Since to photograph “waiting,” a temporal state, is to photograph time, the image of the maids is replete with references to past and future. It depicts them standing motionless and alert at their post ready and waiting to serve; but their “present” stationary stance behind a lavishly prepared table also intimates that before assuming the position and posture we see in the photograph, they were busy setting the table in anticipation of the arrival of the guests, and that when the guests do arrive, they will spring into action again. The static present in which the maids stand and wait is animated by a horizon of activity past and of activity to come. The image embraces at once impressional, retentional, and protentional moments. Walker Evans’s Negro Barber Shop, Interior, Atlanta (1936) is another example of the way in which the temporal horizons of waiting can contribute to the aesthetic appeal of a photograph. The shop appears to be open, but no one is sitting in the chairs. Geoff Dyer writes of this image: “In the vacant meantime, the chairs wait. Despite being old and worn, they have almost no memory, these chairs. Their attention is fixed entirely on who will sit in them next.”72 Expectation accrues to the photograph through the way the

72 Dyer, Ongoing, 208.

250  John Brough

Gabriel Orozco, Waiting Chairs, 1998. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright: Gabriel Orozco.

things depicted in it appear―in this case, through empty barber chairs patiently waiting for new patrons in need of a trim. Their past is not altogether absent, however: the “old and worn” chairs show the embedded time that comes with age and use. They stand at the crossroads of an embedded memory that looks to the past and an expectation that looks to the future. The same description could be made of Gabriel Orozco’s Waiting Chairs, a photograph of empty seats in a bus terminal in India. Here the image has an abundance of “memory”: the past is there to be seen in the stained patches of wall behind each seat, souvenirs left behind by the heads of waiting and perhaps dozing passengers. But the memory is again matched by expectation. That the seats were empty at the moment the photograph was taken points to a future in which they will again be filled. The aura of waiting that envelopes such images is a constant interplay of past, present, and future. The depiction of waiting can also be expressive of the feeling and emotion that is often inseparable from aesthetic appeal. Images of railroad tracks receding into the distance in a flat and empty landscape can express loneliness. Images of train stations and platforms filled with people awaiting the arrival or departure of trains often express a sense of excitement: someone one loves will arrive in a few minutes; or a sense of sadness: someone one loves is about to leave on a long trip. The depiction of age is another temporal dimension that can contribute to the aesthetic effect of photographs. This happens in the case of certain portraits of children or of the aged. But the process of aging itself can also appear in photographs. This occurs in Nicholas Nixon’s images of the four Brown sisters, whose passage through time and time’s passage through them Nixon has unflinchingly recorded in a series of photographs of the sisters taken annually for over 40 years. The images track the progress of the women from youth to the threshold of old age. Each photograph, taken in isolation, implies a past and a future. But in the series of photographs, one sees aging unfold and the fulfillment, in later images, of the empty future intended in the prior images; one

Time and the photograph  251 also sees the earlier images as collectively re-presenting the past as it recedes further and further away. One might find in these interwoven relations of past and future support for Barthes’s assertion that “the photograph tells me death in the future.”73 Aging appearing in the image would then reveal itself as one more mode of waiting and death as a moment of arrival that fills an empty intention, even if we are not aware of it when it happens. 6  Existence, reality, and time in the aesthetic experience of the photograph In the previous section, I discussed a few of the features that can contribute to a photograph’s aesthetic appeal, focusing particularly on those having to do with time. Since photography as I have been taking it in this chapter involves an essential connection of the photograph and its subject to a particular temporal moment, it is reasonable to ask whether this link plays a role in the photograph’s aesthetic appeal. A claim that it does might take the following form. Husserl’s view of image-consciousness, applied to straight photography, entails that the image-object that appears when we look at the photograph has a specific subject, such as a person, place, thing, or event. The photograph’s meaning depends, in part at least, on its subject and the manner in which the subject presents itself in the image. This would hold of the aesthetic response to the photograph as well. One might argue, however, that the importance of the subject to the photograph’s aesthetic significance does not necessarily include the subject’s actual existence at a given moment in time. Here it is helpful to recall Barthes’s claim that the photograph scrubbed clean of the prior existence of what it depicts―of the subject’s having-been―would not be a straight photograph at all. This suggests that the connection between the image I contemplate and “the realm of my natural being belonging to the real world”74 may prove to be of great interest aesthetically, and that this would be equally true of the realm’s temporal component. The time of the photograph is not the “once upon a time” of fairy tales, nor is it simply the generalized time of an era. It is real time in the sense of the time of what existed just as it appeared at a singular moment recorded by the camera. If there is to be an aesthetic experience of the photograph, then existence, reality, and time, far from being matters of aesthetic indifference, would seem to be involved explicitly or implicitly in its aesthetic appeal. Put another way, not taking them into account would be to ignore the existential-temporal horizon that necessarily surrounds the subject of the photograph. For the straight photograph, along with certain films, represents a kind of visual art―the only kind?―whose subject must have actually existed and been present to the artist and the camera at precisely the moment the work was created. Otherwise, given the nature of the medium, there would have been no photographic work of art at all. The role of reality, of real temporal existence, in the aesthetic experience of the straight photograph would seem, then, not only to be possible but likely, perhaps even necessary.75 Furthermore, given the essential nature of photography as a medium that records what is actually there in front of

73 CL, 96. 74 Hua XXIII, 587/704. 75 If this is to be the case, one must be aware that one is looking at a photograph and not, for example, at a painting. One might add that, in the digital age, one must also know whether or not the photograph is a straight photograph or a computer-generated image whose subject is a cyber-invention. It is certainly possible to take a highly manipulated digital image, such as Nancy Berson’s composite portrait discussed earlier in the chapter, to be a straight photograph, which means that one could be mistaken in thinking that what is depicted once actually existed. Such images would succeed in deceiving us, however, precisely because they mimic photographs that do depict something that once actually existed.

252  John Brough the camera, it borders on the counterintuitive to think that the existence in time of a photograph’s subject is aesthetically irrelevant. This does not mean, however, that the subject’s temporal existence must always be aesthetically significant. Thus Husserl notes that an image can be apprehended “‘without belief’76 […] [as] in the case of many works of art,” 77 which, as works of art, would presumably be candidates for aesthetic appreciation. And there are myriads of passport photos and ordinary snapshots that do record the existence of people or things but do not register aesthetically at all. What it does mean is that the subject of a straight photograph always appears, in a manner more or less pronounced, as having existed at a specific moment in the constant horizon of the world and its time, and that this can be aesthetically important. Certainly, the experience of a photograph of the four Brown sisters, unlike, say, the experience of a Renaissance painting of the three graces, would be entirely different if the sisters had never actually existed as the photograph depicts them, that is, as at a particular moment in their lives. That something had being in the world and still has being in the photograph can thus be key elements in the fascination and attraction that photographs regularly exert on us. Indeed, among the various kinds of iconic images, it is particularly in the photograph that this occurs, because it is there that I am conscious of “something that has already been posited as actual at some time, something that has already been perceived.”78 Two objections to this claim immediately come to mind. One is that photography is hardly unique in depicting actual persons, things, and events. Husserl notes the obvious when he writes that in pictorial re-presentation “the image can furnish a picture of actual events, of actual battles and of battles taken to be actual, in an artistically free way; or it can just as well be a mere photograph.”79 Paolo Uccello’s paintings of the fifteenthcentury battle of San Romano, with their broken lances and warriors’ bodies arranged on the battlefield in tidy perspectival order, are notable instances of images that depict a historical event in “an artistically free way.” Similarly, Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Parliament pictures a well-documented conflagration that occurred in London in October of 1834, though Turner’s painting is executed with considerably less artistic license than Uccello’s. The fact that these paintings depict actual events arguably plays some role in their aesthetic effect. The “mere photograph,” however, distinguishes itself from such historical paintings by re-presenting the event exactly as it appeared before the photographer’s camera at the moment the shutter was released, allowing, of course, for adjustments the photographer may have made that affect the way in which the image presents the subject. The straight photographer, whose medium is rooted in a mechanical process, generally does not have the degree of freedom enjoyed by the painter. This disadvantage is balanced by the photographer’s distinct ability to capture in an image a real thing or event at precisely the time it occurs, uniquely enhancing the image’s aesthetic effect. The photograph nails the image and its appearing subject to an irrecoverable moment in time. The second objection arises from the fact that there are paintings, often derived from photographs, which look like and could be taken to be photographs themselves. Such works might appear to represent the “having-been” of real things and events directly and immediately in the manner of a photograph, but without actually doing so. “Photorealist”

76 That is, without belief in existence. 77 Hua XXIII, 226/275. 78 Ibid., 384/456. 79 Ibid., 384/457.

Time and the photograph  253 or “hyperrealist” paintings sometimes fall into this category. Although the issue of photorealism’s existential dimension is too complex to be discussed adequately here, it is possible to indicate a few directions such a discussion might take. One could observe, for example, that paintings that “copy’ photographs are usually less concerned with depicting reality than with producing or probing the “look” of a photograph. They tend to present a surface; it is thus the appearing skin of the copied photograph, usually with its epidermal qualities enhanced, which is the painting’s true subject. The spectacle of the painted surface, which can indeed be spectacular, assumes center stage rather than the “thing itself,” which is the subject of the straightforward photograph. It is the work’s surface appearance that is the home of the painting’s aesthetic qualities and that draws the viewer’s attention. The element of something’s having-been at a particular point in time, the photograph’s existential core, the being that one glimpses through and beneath the surface, has receded, and its horizons have been clipped. Furthermore, it is usually when they are reproduced in books or magazines that photorealist paintings look most like photographs and are most likely to be mistaken for them. When hanging on the wall of a gallery and examined in the flesh, they are apt to reveal themselves for what they are: paintings, not photographs.80 We noted earlier that Husserl insists that appearance and aesthetic response are essentially connected. However, in Husserliana XXIII, there are a number of statements in which Husserl suggests that the link between appearance and aesthetic response entails

80 Some works are particularly challenging in this respect. An example is Gerhard Richter’s Uncle Rudi (1965), a painting Richter created by copying a snapshot, taken during World War II, of his uncle wearing a German army uniform. The uncle was killed shortly after the photograph was taken. When seen in reproduction, the painting, which was done in shades of gray, looks like a blurred photograph. In fact, the blurring was introduced by Richter himself by dragging a dry brush across the painting’s wet surface. Thirty-five years later, in 2000, Richter photographed the painting, blurring the new image still further, and published it as a multiple. In this complex case, three images are intertwined: the original snapshot of his uncle, which was probably not a work of art; then the painting, which is derived from the snapshot and is a work of art; and, finally, the photograph of the painting, which is another work of art and has the painting as its subject. Richter’s photograph of his painting is a photograph of something that exists; namely, of the painting. One could be forgiven, however, for taking it simply as an out-of-focus photograph of a soldier in uniform. Indeed, both the painting, at least as reproduced in a museum catalogue, and the photograph may appear to be straightforward photographs, like the original snapshot. Furthermore, it is possible to say that a residue of the snapshot’s depiction of real existence persists in the painting and in the photograph of the painting (the archetype, the Platonist might say, leaves its traces in its progressive imitations). It is also possible that the aesthetic effect of the “having-been” of the original persists both in the painting and in the photograph of it. If it does persist, however, it is not because the painting and the photograph are trompel’oeil images. Richter takes pains to indicate to the viewer that they are not. He makes the painting larger than the photograph, blurs it, and otherwise gives it a surface that the spectator can see is painted. When he goes on to make a multiple from a painting by photographing it, he introduces further changes into the image: “In the photograph, I take even more focus out of the painted image, which is already a bit out of focus, and make the picture even smoother. I also subtract the materiality, the surface, of the painting, and it becomes something different.” He may also change its dimensions and put it under plexiglass—all changes through which “it somehow becomes an independent object” (“Interview with Gerhard Richter,” in Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 291). Ideally, if one could hang all three images on the wall together―the original snapshot, the painting, and the photograph of the painting―one would see the differences and the transformations the initial image has undergone as it passes from a photograph to a painting and back to a photograph. One would also grasp the differences in the representation of reality at each stage and that both the painting and its later photographic “copy,” though bearing a family resemblance to their ancestor and to one another, are autonomous works, each with its own relation to reality and its own aesthetic appeal.

254  John Brough the exclusion of real time and existence; that is, even if the latter are moments of the photo’s meaning, they are not aesthetically significant moments. On this view, the aesthetic pleasure we take in the well-formed, expressive image―and this would presumably include the photographic image―“leaves existence out of play and is essentially determined by the mode of appearance.”81 Thus, when I approach a photographic image aesthetically, “only what ‘appears as it appears,’ which comes to harmonious unity in this presentation, interests me.”82 One could reasonably conclude from these remarks that Husserl holds that time, real time, the time in which things and people exist, is left out of play as well. Although Husserl often seems to give short shrift to temporal existence as an element in aesthetic experience, there are other texts in which he implies that there is a place for it, a place into which photography would fit quite nicely. We have seen indications of this in Husserl’s account of “realistic art,” which, although its characters and plot may be fictional, is set in the time of a particular period, place, and society, and which, Husserl says, is surely art and can even be “wonderful art.”83 He adds that “all art is ‘aesthetic’; it is delight in what is seen in concreto.”84 Straight photography certainly presents the world in concreto, which, given the nature of photography, includes actual existence. If that is the case, then it seems appropriate to say that we can take aesthetic delight in the real and concrete existence at a particular point in time of what is recorded and displayed in the photographic image. The key issue in addressing the aesthetic dimension of the photograph, then, is whether the appearance, which Husserl identifies as the target of aesthetic experience, can be taken in an expansive and generous sense to include the actual existence of the subject not at just any or some random time but at this particular time. In “aesthetic image-­ consciousness,” as we have seen, “my interest is directed toward the image-object itself just as it exhibits the image-subject.”85 Since the subject of the image actually existed when the photograph was taken, its having-existed is experienced in the appearance―that is, in the photographic image. Furthermore, “the manner of appearing is the bearer of aesthetic feeling-characteristics. If I do not reflect on the manner of appearing,” Husserl writes, “I do not live in the feelings, I do not produce them.”86 This implies that if having-been is a fundamental moment of the manner of appearing of the object as photographed, or if it is necessarily a dimension of the object’s horizon, then “reflecting” on the manner of appearing, which includes the having-existed of what appears, would play a role in producing an aesthetic response. “The object […] receives an aesthetic coloration because of its manner of appearing,” 87 which, on our reading, includes the object’s having-been. Husserl distinguishes between actuality or existential feelings and aesthetic feelings, which are correlated, respectively, with “thing-belief, […] [the] positing of the object

81 Hua XXIII, 145, n. 1/168, n. 6. 82 Ibid., 587/705. Ιn these statements Husserl seems to plant himself firmly in the mainstream of aesthetic theory in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, according to which aesthetic experience arises principally or exclusively from the contemplation of appearances and is disinterested in the existence of what appears. Husserl refers to Kant in this connection (Hua XXIII, 145, n. 1/168, n. 6). 83 Hua XXIII, 541/653. 84 Ibid., 542/654. 85 Ibid., 161, n. 8/193, n. 11. 86 Ibid., 389/462. 87 Ibid., 384/402.

Time and the photograph  255 pure and simple” and “aesthetic belief, the belief pertaining to the aesthetic object.”88 The existential delight that an objectivity can motivate in the viewer is not, in itself, aesthetic. “But the aesthetic pleasure that depends on the manner of appearing can combine with this delight (understood as something actual), and the whole has the character of an enhanced aesthetic delight.”89 The enhancement comes from delight in the inclusion of existence in the manner of appearing. Husserl mentions in this respect the interplay of actual delights in the phenomena of nature, in “fruit bearing trees,” and so on, and of “sorrows and other actual position takings,” which are “principal” parts “of truly aesthetic delight.”90 This is precisely the generous sense of appearance that welcomes actual temporal existence into its realm. “Manner of appearing” therefore includes not only the manner of the presentations but all of the ways in which we are conscious of objectivities, insofar as these different ways ground one’s own particular feelings, one’s own particular position takings, which, thanks to these ways of being conscious, are then feelings about the objectivities.91 Consciousness of actual existence in time is among these ways of being conscious of objectivities that find a place in appearance. One might argue, however, that this may still not be enough to grant existence an aesthetic role. As evidence, one might cite Husserl’s observation that feelings directed toward something or someone actually existing―love would be an example―are indeed founded on a belief in existence but that this belief “is not the object of the feeling; it does not contribute to the primary object of the feeling as a determining moment.”92 Thus, if I love someone, the focus of my feeling is the person I love and their charms and virtues. The loved one’s existence is simply assumed and not thematized; it is at most a peripheral object, even though without existence there would be no one with appealing “determining moments” to love. This is akin to the situation of the image-object in photography: the photograph’s physical support founds the image-object, which is the “primary object” when one looks at the photograph, while the physical support itself is a secondary or tertiary object. However, in the case of aesthetic feeling, as opposed to actuality feeling, existence can become a determining moment. In aesthetic feeling “position takings combined with ways of exhibiting and the like can become, as united into one, the object of the feeling.”93 In that case, Husserl writes, “the belief in actuality is itself aesthetically co-determining.”94 This is the blending of temporal existence and aesthetically pleasing form that defines the aesthetic experience of photographs that achieve the level of art, a level reached by capturing time, not by escaping it.

88 Ibid., 587/705. 89 Ibid., 390/462. 90 Ibid., 390/462. 91 Ibid., 390/462. 92 Ibid., 391/464. 93 Ibid., 391/464. This is a revised and corrected version of my translation of this sentence in Collected Works XI suggested by Fotini Vassiliou. I am grateful to Professor Vassiliou for drawing my attention to the passages from Hua XXIII, text No. 15h, cited in this paragraph, which, she noted, may be read as supporting my argument in this part of the chapter. 94 Hua XXIII, 391/464.

15 Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Abstract  The aesthetic unity of dancer and dance is a unique phenomenon in the art world. In exploring the nature and consequences of the aesthetic unity, this chapter first focuses on a dancer’s and an audience’s experience of dance, pointing out in the process an affective difference and a difference evident in an audience’s recognition of technical virtuosity. The chapter then turns to writings of writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag and of eminent choreographer/dancer Merce Cunningham, and to those of Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown and world-renown choreographer Pina Bausch, all of which describe in different ways the aesthetic unity of dancer and dance, ways that heighten understandings of dance, its uniqueness in the world of art, and its challenges. The well-known ending line from Yeats’s poem “Among School Children”—“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”—­ epitomizes just such a range of perspectives. The temporal awareness that runs like an undercurrent through the perspectives centers on the fleeting “nowness” of dance, its existential impermanence, hence the temporal unity of dancer and dance, and the temporality of movement itself, both of which are major factors in the challenge of preserving the art of dance. The chapter shows how this challenge may explain wayward phenomenological assessments and understandings of movement and of being a body, hence wayward phenomenological assessments and understandings of the aesthetic realities of dance and of dancing the dance, and more particularly the phenomenological neglect or faulty assessment and understanding of the sensory modality of kinesthesia. The writings of Merleau-Ponty and of Heidegger, and of various present-day phenomenologists such as Gallagher and Zahavi are of particular concern in this regard. Of contrasting concern are the highly informative and indeed edifying first-person experiential writings of notably famous choreographers/dancers Doris Humphrey and Merce Cunningham that highlight the centrality of kinesthesia to life as well as to dance, of notably famous theater directors Jacques Lecoq and Stanton Garner, and of music composer Roger Sessions, all three of whom write pointedly, experientially, and in thought-provoking ways of the centrality of movement to their art, in no way diminishing the uniqueness of the art of dance but both documenting and broadening the relevance of movement to aesthetic creativity. Keywords  Aesthetic Unity of Dancer and Dance; Similarities in Creating the Dance and Learning the Dance; Temporal Wholeness of Life and of Dance; Preserving an Art That Is Ephemeral; Its Fleetingness a Deterrent to Philosophical Studies of Dance; Dynamically Felt Tactile-Kinesthetic Body

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-16

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance  257 O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? (W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children”)

The Absolute Unity of Dancer and Dance Each form of art—music, sculpture, architecture, theater, and so on―is unique as is each art work within each particular form. Dance, however, is unique in a further way. It is in fact different from all other forms of art precisely in light of the absolute union of dancer(s) and dance. Dancer and dance are one in a way that pianist and sonata or clarinetist and concerto are not, that painter and painting or sculptor and sculpture are not, that poet and poem or novelist and novel are not, that playwright and theater play are not, and that even actor and film or actor and theater play are not. In short, the dance does not exist apart from the dancer or the dancer from the dance. The aesthetic unity of dancer and dance is indeed unique. Merce Cunningham eloquently captures the ontological, even metaphysical nature of their oneness from the point of view of the dancer: You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive. It is not for unsteady souls.1 The aesthetic unity of dancer and dance may be described from an audience point of view as well, perhaps nowhere more unusually and stunningly than by Lamentation, a dance choreographed by Martha Graham. In that dance, Graham is completely enclosed in a cloth enclosure, a garment bag of sorts that writhes and twists, bends, flails, turns, and extends contortedly in ways that mirror the tortured torsions of grief. There is no dancer as such, no in-the-flesh bodily form. Movement pure and simple is all that is present—it is the whole of the dance. Sheer movement is indeed the dance from beginning to end. A further aspect of the dance, however, an aspect integrally tied to movement, is evident—or may be evident—for the audience. That aspect centers on the affective resonance of movement and its anchorage in the qualitative dynamics of movement. Four qualities constitute those foundational dynamics: tensional, linear, areal, and projectional qualities. The qualities do not exist separately; they are formative of movement itself, any movement, and are apparent only analytically.2 While the qualitative dynamics that constitute the dance are essentially the same for audience and dancer, they are basically experienced in distinct ways: “what is kinesthetically felt as sharp, attenuated, swift, expansive, limpid, strong, jagged, erratic, intense, and so on, is visually-kinetically perceived as sharp, attenuated, swift, and so on.”3 For the audience, that visual-kinetic expe1 Merce Cunningham, Changes: Notes on Choreography, ed. Frances Starr (New York: Something Else Press, 1968), unpaginated. 2 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance (Philadelphia/Rome/Tokyo: Temple University Press, 2015 5th ed. [1966]). 3 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “From Movement to Dance,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 11 (2012): 39–57, here 53.

258  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone rience may furthermore be affectively charged: the movement that is visually-kinetically perceived may be perceived simultaneously as a kinetic-affective phenomenon: A sharp, strong, swift qualitative dynamic may have an aura of aggressiveness about it, for example; an expansive, limpid, attenuated qualitative dynamic may have an open, generous, even soft bountifulness about it; a jagged, erratic, intense qualitative dynamic may have an aura of anguish, fear, or even grief about it. Whatever the affective resonance, it is of a piece with the qualitative kinetic dynamics of the dance, and this on the basis of the natural dynamic congruency of affect and movement.4 While unusual, Martha Graham’s Lamentation is nonetheless a classic example of the dynamic congruency. Dance and theater critic Joseph Mazo’s description of the dance is testimony to the congruency. He describes the dance as “a moving sculpture of grief.”5 The dance furthermore strikingly exemplifies in an unusual way what Edward Bullough, in analyzing the nature of aesthetic experience, describes as “aesthetic distance.” In the broadest of terms, aesthetic distance is a measure of both audience and artist engagement with a work short of personalizing it, a relationship that Bullough describes as variable, “both according to the distancing-power of the individual, and according to the character of the object.”6 Bullough states that the most desirable engagement for both audience and artist is the “utmost decrease of Distance without its disappearance.”7 A distinction, however, is critical to recognize with respect to dance, a distinction tied to the fact that, as indicated above, the qualitative dynamics that constitute the dance are experienced differently by dancer and audience. Unlike members of an audience, dancers are unmoved affectively by the qualitative dynamics. That they are so is a matter of their being fully and wholly in the qualitative dynamics of movement itself. More precisely and with respect to “aesthetic distance”: Though the dance is clearly affectively charged, its affective charge is nowhere present for the dancer: the natural, everyday, real-life dynamic congruency of emotions and movement does not obtain, and this because the dancer, as described above, is ­totally—consummately—engaged in the kinesthetic unfolding of the dance. Thus, rather than there being “the utmost decrease of distance without its disappearance,” there is actually for the dancer the greatest increase of distance in an affective sense.8 As specified further by way of comments of a prominent dance critic with respect to Lamentation, The dancer is not enveloped emotionally in lamentation, but is formally elaborating its felt dynamic quality in movement. Well-known dance critic Arlene Croce underscores this purely formal dynamic when she first describes the dancer, who

4 Ibid., 53. 5 Joseph Mazo, Prime Movers: The Makers of Modern Dance in America (New York: William Morrow and Co, 1977), 194. 6 Edward Bullough, “‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle,” in Problems in Aesthetics, ed. Morris Weitz (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 646–656, here 652. 7 Ibid., 651. 8 Sheets-Johnstone, “From Movement to Dance,” 53.

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance  259 is “sheathed from crown to ankle in a tube of stretch jersey, sits blocklike on a low bench, rocks incessantly, strains from side to side, plunges fists deep between her knees,” then immediately describes the dance: “The form of the dance says it all—solid geometry as live emotion.”9 The qualitative dynamics of the dance are indeed an intricate tapestry of shifting intensities and energies that are spatially and temporally elaborated: “The smallest movement spreads itself over the whole, and not languidly like a ripple in a pond, but severely, burdensomely, drawing all parts of the ensheathing fabric that cloaks the dancer with it, no dimension remaining apart.”10 In contrast, the audience’s experience of the dance remains clearly affective, precisely as Croce indicates. Indeed, what the audience sees is “not a story about grief, a tale of lamentation, but its felt form. The movement dynamics echo the bodily pangs of grief, the keening, wailing cries of a body that grieves, the felt spasms and warpings of a body in pain.”11 The difference between being bodily engaged in the dance in its very unfolding and beholding that unfolding from the outside could not be more striking.12 The above descriptions bring to light in beginning ways how, unlike the human movement that creates paintings, novels, poetry, symphonies, and more, the human movement that creates dance is indelibly the dance itself. In effect, a dance is not a work of art that can be separated from the movement creating it or the dancers dancing it. Moreover, since the aesthetic unity of dancer and dance is in fact constituted in and through movement, the dancer is, as noted earlier, unlike the clarinetist, the actor, and so on. Notable instances occur nevertheless in which the dancer is separated from the dance, not by the dancer, but by audiences of dance. The instances are readily recognizable: they are instances in which technique outpaces aesthetic form—for example, instances when audiences clap in view of the technical virtuosity of the dancer or dancers. In such moments, technical virtuosity effaces the dance: the doing of movement outstrips the purely kinetic dynamic realities of movement. In a word, technical brilliance outstrips aesthetic form. Dancer and dance are no longer one, but separate entities. In fact, and as indicated, when the complex qualitative dynamics that constitute the dance are superseded by technical virtuosity, the dance itself disappears. What appears is a technically astounding bodily form that is moving in ways that are not just dazzling, but literally extra-ordinary. Interestingly enough, novelist, essayist, and human rights activist Susan Sontag has written perspicuously about the uniqueness of the art form of dance. Her observations about dancer and dance are particularly illuminating with respect to what is literally extra-ordinary, not in terms of technical virtuosity, however, but quite the opposite: in terms of the unique aesthetic unity of dancer and dance, a unity that exists in light of both the very nature of dance and the challenges that nature poses for the dancer. Early on in her essay “Dancer and the Dance,” Sontag points out, “Dance cannot exist without

9 Arlene Croce, Afterimages (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 163. 10 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, M., “On Bacteria, Corporeal Representation, Neandertals, and Martha Graham,” in In the Beginning: Origins of Semiosis, ed. M. Alac and P. Violi (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 105– 136, here 125–126; Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009), 300. 11 Sheets-Johnstone, “On Bacteria …,” 126; Sheets-Johnstone, The Corporeal Turn …, 300. 12 Sheets-Johnstone, “From Movement to Dance,” 53–54.

260  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone dance design: choreography. But dance is the dancer.”13 She elaborates on this unity when she states: Though a performer […], the dancer is also more than a performer. There is a mystery of incarnation in dance that has no analogue in the other performing arts. A great dancer is not just performing (a role) but being (a dancer).14 With respect to being a dancer, Sontag calls attention to the fact that insofar as dance “is the enactment of an energy which must seem, in all respects, untrammeled, effortless, at every moment fully mastered,” the art form of dance “demands a degree of service greater than any other performing art, or sport.”15 She has earlier described this “greater degree of service” as a “standard against which dancers measure their performances,” a standard “not simply that of the highest excellence—as with actors and singers and musicians,” but the standard of “perfection.”16 She points out in relation to the dancer’s standard of perfection that “In my experience, no species of performing artists is as self-critical as a dancer,”17 an observation that ties in with her insightful conclusion, namely, that “Dance enacts both being completely in the body and transcending the body”18—a literally extra-ordinary feat, one that is clearly tied to, and indeed, the foundation of the aesthetic unity of dancer and dance. Sontag does not describe how this literally extra-ordinary feat is possible, but it is experientially evident that dancers are both “being completely in the body and transcending the body” in and through movement: it is in and through movement that they become the dance. Cunningham’s description of the process of choreographing his dance “Untitled Solo” (1953) offers insights into this “becoming”: A large gamut of movements, separate for each of the three dances, was devised. Movements for the arms, the legs, the head and the torso which were separate and essentially tensile in character, and off the normal or tranquil body-balance. The separate movements were arranged in continuity by random means, allowing for the superimposition (addition) of one or more, each having its own rhythm and time-length. But each succeeded in becoming continuous if I could wear it long enough, like a suit of clothes.19 Cunningham’s description attests to the fact that the process of learning a dance—a preliminary to ultimately dancing the dance “untrammeled, effortless, at every moment fully mastered”—is challenging. For the dancer who is to learn it, the dance is, after all, a new territory whose complex landscape and boundaries are unknown. That new territory is a matter of sheer movement from beginning to end, sheer movement that is ultimately performed not by an object in motion but by a moving form, a moving form that is, in fact, not performing movement but being movement, precisely as Sontag suggests when she writes: “A great dancer is not just performing (a role) but being (a dancer).” The aesthetic unity of dancer and

13 Susan Sontag, “Dancer and the Dance,” in Reading Dance: A Gathering of Memoirs, Reportage, Criticism, Profiles, Interviews, and Some Uncategorizable Extras, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 334–339, here 335. 14 Ibid., 335–336. 15 Ibid., 337. 16 Ibid., 336. 17 Ibid., 336. 18 Ibid., 338. 19 Cunningham, Changes …, unpaginated.

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance  261 dance is in fact realized by that moving form as it cannot be realized by an object in motion, for an object in motion cannot transcend the objective body it is. More explicitly, to be an object in motion is to be a body “changing position,” as standard dictionaries would have it, that is, a body moving in space and in time, not a body that is creating the spatio-temporalenergic dynamic that is movement.20 To transcend the body is precisely to become the qualitative dynamics of movement that are moving through the body and that constitute the dance. Carolyn Brown’s description of dancing the dance—Brown was a founding member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company—is eloquent and striking in this regard. Of dancing the dance, she writes, The essence of performing is its ‘nowness’—no mind, no memory. Just that brief time when one has the chance to be whole, when seemingly disconnected threads of one’s being are woven and intertwined into the complete present. No other. No past. No future. No mind as an entity distinct from the body.21 Martha Graham’s comment that “Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body”22 might be taken as an attempt to capture the transcendent wholeness that Sontag pinpoints and that Brown describes, while the comment by French poet Charles Baudelaire that “dancing is poetry with arms and legs”23 might be taken as an attempt to capture “the hidden language” that Graham later identifies as dance. Such descriptions of dancing the dance and of dance itself implicitly show how the art of dance is an aesthetic unity of dancer and dance. They do so only implicitly for what grounds the unity is not explicitly recognized and thus given its due. In short and as indicated above, to dance the dance is both to be completely in the body and to transcend the body in and through movement. The centrality of movement at the core of transcendence is implicit also in Cunningham’s description of the challenge to surpass the initial separate movements of the dance “Untitled Solo” and arrive at a continuous flow of movement, thus to dance the dance. The nature of that essential challenge is pointed up further in an elaboration of his description: The continuity of the form, the integral wholeness of the dance, is a matter of shifting dynamics, and a matter of learning a new—and challenging—kinetic logic. When Cunningham succeeds in dancing the dance, he is no longer moving through “[a] large gamut of movements,” but is, as he says, “wear[ing] it […] like a suit of clothes.” In effect, in the end, he is not going through certain motions he has “devised.” If he is wearing the movement “like a suit of clothes,” then he is not moving through a form, the form is moving through him. Indeed, unless the movement is moving through him, the dance does not exist.24

20 For more on the difference between movement and an object in motion, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “On Movement and Objects in Motion: The Phenomenology of the Visible in Dance,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 13/2 (1979): 33–46. 21 Carolyn Brown, “At the Theater de Lys,” in Reading Dance, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 475–479, here 477. 22 https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/dance 23 https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/charles_baudelaire 24 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Movement: The Foundational Reality of Life,” in Choreographic Strategies. New Perspectives, ed. Tomasz Ciesielski and Mariusz Bartosiak (Łódź: University of Łódź Publishing House, 2017), 47–61, here 60.

262  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone As will become ever more apparent in the extended analysis that follows, the transcendent body is the basis of a transcendent wholeness, that is, a unity of dancer and dance, which is grounded in movement, which, in turn, is the existential basis of the fleeting nature of dance, its unbroken “nowness”—its quintessential impermanence. In light of its quintessential kinetic impermanence, the art of choreographing is as challenging as the art of learning the dance. The two arts are in fact of equal significance with respect to the transcendent wholeness of dancer and dance. The process of creation—of choreographing—demands not a stringing together of now this movement, now that movement that the choreographer likes and favors because he/she does it well, but a potential or actual continuity of movement that is formally of a piece. Pina Bausch points up the challenge, even the painful ordeal, she experiences in choreographing: [I]t is no pleasure to do a piece at all. I never want to do one again. Each time it is a torture. Why am I doing it? After so many years I still haven’t learnt. With every piece I have to start from the beginning again. That’s difficult. I always have the feeling that I never achieve what I want to achieve. But no sooner has a premiere passed that I am already making new plans. Where does this power come from?25 Bausch’s feelings in face of choreographing anew resonate in certain ways with Leonardo da Vinci’s feelings in face of the entrance of a great cavern: At first I stood before it dumbfounded, knowing nothing of such a thing; then I bent over with my left hand braced against my knee and my right shading my squinting, deep-searching eyes; again and again I bent over, peering here and there to discern something inside; but the all-embracing darkness revealed nothing. Standing there, I was suddenly struck by two things, fear and longing: fear of the dark ominous cavern; longing to see if inside there was something wonderful.26 Feelings of longing may not only be a “longing to see if inside there was something wonderful,” but a longing to create and to continue creating, a longing that may itself be “full of wonder,” that is, a longing driven by wonder. Wonder can indeed be a driving force, the “power” in Bausch’s words, behind the pursuit or creation of something new and wonderful. It can drive people to go beyond the everyday, to explore, to try out, to “see if …,” and so on. Eugen Fink, Edmund Husserl’s assistant for many years, wrote: Wonder dislodges man from the prejudice of everyday, publicly pregiven, traditional and worn out familiarity […], drives him from the already authorized and expressly explicated interpretation of the sense of the world and into the creative poverty of not yet knowing […].27

25 Pina Bausch, “What Moves Me,” speech held on the occasion of the Kyoto Prize award ceremony (2007): https://www.pinabausch.org/en/pina/what-moves-me 26 Leonardo da Vinci, Philosophical Diary, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Wisdom Library, 1959), 19. 27 Eugen Fink, “The Problem of the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl,” trans. Robert M. Harlan, in Apriori and World: European Contributions to Husserlian Phenomenology, ed. William McKenna, Robert M. Harlan, and Laurence E. Winters (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 21–55, here 24.

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance  263 Wonder is indeed a driving force that displaces one from the familiar everyday world and into what might initially be described as a “longing to know,” and thus to an erasure of “the creative poverty of not yet knowing.” This “longing to know” and “creative poverty of not yet knowing” are actually evident across a range of questions that artists and philosophers have asked and that ancient Greek philosophers recognized in terms of philosophy itself. Writing of the spiraling shells of molluscs, for example, French poet and essayist Paul Valéry asks, “why not one turn more?”28 German philosopher Martin Heidegger asks, “Why are there essents [i.e., existent things] rather than nothing?”29 Of wonder, Plato straightforwardly states, “[The] sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher.”30 Aristotle echoes Plato’s observation: “[I]t is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize,”31 though it should perhaps be noted that Aristotle later states that philosophy is for those who are at leisure and that philosophy has no purpose other than itself.32 For a choreographer, it is not so much a matter of “not yet knowing” as of “not yet being there,” that is, of not yet arriving at the aesthetic integrity of the whole. As Bausch states, “With every piece I have to start from the beginning again.”33 In effect, “[f]ear of the dark ominous cavern”—the uncharted venture into an artistic enterprise—and the “longing to see if inside there was something wonderful”—the wonder leading to creation—are indelibly linked. These same dual aspects of wonder are succinctly evident too in Paul Taylor’s confession: “My passion for dance does not prevent me from being terrified to start each new piece, but I value these fears for the extra energy they bring.”34 The wonder that drives exploration and creativity and even “the creative poverty of not yet being there” is furthermore evident in Cunningham’s inquisitive attitude toward movement itself. In the course of answering questions about his background and work, Cunningham remarks, What I was trying to find out was how people move, within my own experience, which I kept trying to enlarge. If I saw something that I didn’t understand then I would try it. I still do. There are lots of things I can see I don’t understand. […] What I’m trying to say in all this is that it remains always interesting if you get outside yourself. If you are stuck with yourself you stay with what you know and you can never attempt anything outside that.35 Cunningham might seem at times to slip into a dictionary-like notion of movement, as when he at one point specifically asks “how do you go from one step to another?” and answers, “I would think that is what makes up dancing.”36 His answer, however, points precisely to

28 Paul Valéry, “Man and the Sea Shell,” trans. Ralph Manheim, in Aesthetics (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964), 3–30, here 11. 29 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (Garden City, New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1961), 1. 30 Plato, Theaetetus, 155d. 31 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982b12. 32 Ibid., 982b23–982b28. 33 Pina Bausch, “What Moves Me.” 34 Paul Taylor, “Why I Make Dances,” in Reading Dance, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 1211–1214, here 1213. 35 Merce Cunningham, “The Dancer and the Dance,” in Reading Dance, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008): 462–475, here 470. 36 Ibid., 470.

264  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone achieving a continuity rather than a separation of movement, a continuity that “makes up dancing” and is thus an acknowledgment of the challenge of going “from one step to another” to dancing the dance. His question is nonetheless critically relevant to the common dictionary definition of movement as a “change of position.” As already said above, this commonly accepted definition fails to specify the dynamics that constitute movement and that indeed describe movement, and describe it not as an objective phenomenon in time and in space, but as the qualitative dynamic that it is, a dynamic that, in the process of unfolding, creates its own spatio-temporal-energic character—swift, expansive, jagged, circular, languid, accelerating, and so on, and so on. Movement is indeed not a matter of change but a matter of dynamics, a fact that can sizably affect people’s attitude toward movement, most notably their attitude toward impermanence, for impermanence describes the very nature of movement—and dance. Cunningham is indeed not the only person to recognize the fleeting nature of movement and the consequences of that fleeting nature, namely, that dance is not for “unsteady souls.” Before turning to that wider awareness and to a wider entourage of “unsteady souls,” particularly with respect to their philosophic implications, we turn to a fuller awareness of how the creative poverty of not yet being there is present for both the choreographer creating the dance and the dancer learning the dance and the singular experiential meaning it has for both. As introduction to that experiential meaning, we note an important fact: when the choreographer in the process of creating the dance and the dancer in the process of learning the dance return the day following their previous day’s work, there is no something that they look at or listen to, no score, no script, no draft, no sketch. Whatever the piece to date, it is now to be drawn out by their bodies in movement: it is not somewhere outside, but inside them. Movement is indeed not stored someplace other than in kinesthetic memory for both choreographer and dancer. This fact speaks precisely to the experiential reality of “not yet being there,” that is, of both choreographer and dancer not yet arriving at the aesthetic integrity of the whole. Their artistic conjunction―the one in the process of learning the dance, the other in the process of creating the dance―highlights in beginning ways Irish poet William Butler Yeats’s well-known question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Yeats asks the question in the very ending line of his poem “Among School Children”: O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?37 From one perspective, the question might be viewed as stylistic, a flourishing climax to a poem centered on what many consider the basic unity of life. In an essay titled “Among School Children by William Butler Yeats: Summary,” K. N. Sharma underscores this very unity, centering attention precisely on the last stanza of the poem. The last stanza is an emphatic re-affirmation of the poet’s maxim that life is an organic whole made up of opposites. Just as chestnut tree is neither leaf blossom or trunk, but the sum total of all three, so also man is neither mind nor body nor soul but an untitled entity

37 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: Volume I, The Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1997), 221.

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance  265 of the three. Life becomes really fruitful and labor is truly rewarding when the diligence of the scholar does not make him clear eye [sic]. Just as a dancer cannot be isolated from the dance, so also the body cannot be separated from the soul. Harmony between the two is indispensable for self-fulfillment [, ] for the bloom, and beauty of the tree of life.38 Online essays that describe the poem highlight in various ways what Sharma describes as a “harmony” that is basically an aesthetic union. They emphasize how all aspects of life—e.g., being and doing, mind and body, parts and whole—are one in just the way dancer and dance are one. In doing so, they call attention in particular to the temporally nuanced nature of the “oneness” or harmony.39 The temporal awareness that runs like an undercurrent in the online essays is significant. The awareness in fact has a twofold significance with respect to the aesthetic nature of dance. The awareness constitutes not only a recognition of the temporal unity of dancer and dance—the one does not exist without the other—but a recognition of the temporality of movement, hence the temporality of both dancing the dance and of the dance itself— what Cunningham describes as “the fleeting moment when you feel alive” and what dance critic Joan Acocella describes as the “ephemeral” nature of dance, an ephemerality that she likens to “the butterfly of one summer, the flower of an hour.”40 Such awarenesses of the temporal nature of movement and dance constitute and even underscore an awareness of the essential impermanence of movement―and dance. At the same time, however, and as is apparent, the essays point up in near celebratory ways how dancer and dance are a

38 K. N. Sharma, “Among School Children by William Butler Yeats: Summary,” BachelorandMaster, 23 November 2013: bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/among-school-children.html 39 One essay, for example, points up how the unity of parts and whole, and of ideal and real are unities characterized by a certain temporal edge, that is, a certain awareness or even aura of temporal unity, a temporality reflected in the existential unity of dancer and dance: “It is the final image of the dancer [that] successfully symbolizes the union Yeats seeks. Turning from the entirely natural and organic unity of nature to a dancer whose body and ‘brightening glance’ are separately addressed, emphasizing the parts which contribute to the whole of the effect of dancer and dance, Yeats finds his marriage of ideal and real in the self as expressed over time. ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’—of course we cannot, since the dance is dependent upon the dancer. Without dancer, there is no dance; without dance the dancer is no dancer” (https://thefifthe. wordpress.com/2016/12/04/the-dancer-from-the-dance/). Another essay points up the way in which moments of life form a temporal whole, a whole analogous again to the aesthetically anchored existential unity of dancer and dance: “People unwittingly create false images of what it is to be human, thereby creating false hopes and expectations. Yeats suggests that since there is no choice but to move forward, one should imagine the fullness of each moment as having an inextricable harmony with all others. Life is like a dance that does exist independent of a dancer but has no shape or form without the dancers” (https://www.123helpme.com/ essay/Among-The-School-Children-by-William-Butler-168331). Yet another online essay gives prominence in a distinctly different way to the temporally nuanced aesthetically anchored existential unity of dancer and dance. In this instance, the unity is given prominence not in conjunction with “the fullness of each moment as having an inextricable harmony with all others” nor with the “marriage of ideal and real in the self as expressed over time,” but with the inseparable realities of life and death: “In the final stanza, Yeats recognizes that although people are the sum of their separate deeds, life is an amalgamation of actions. Instead of viewing life in parts, like ‘the leaf, the blossom, or the bole,’ Yeats argues for one, united view of life. Like one’s inability to separate the ‘dancer from the dance,’ one cannot separate life from death. These two parts are not independent. Instead, they are one in the same. No one has life, without death. So, one should not view them independently” (http://ireland.wlu.edu/landscape/Group3/sectionfour.htm). 40 Joan Acocella, “Must the Show Go On?” The New Yorker XCV/18 (July 1, 2019): 26–29, here 26. It should be noted that Acocella’s concern centers on the founder of dance companies and the challenges the company dancers face in preserving the founder’s choreographic legacy when the founder dies.

266  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone temporal unity and in doing so stress the related temporal unity of body and soul, of ideal and real, of part and whole, of life and death. In effect, they stress a temporal harmony of opposites: there is no body without a soul, no ideal apart from a real, no part apart from a whole, no life without death. This temporal harmony of opposites attests to a basic complementarity, what might be termed a basic existential complementarity that is actually documented at length in The Complementary Nature, a book written by the scientists J. A. Scott Kelso and David Engstrøm.41 Kelso and Engstrøm specify complementarity precisely in contrasting a “both~and” attitude and thinking with an “either~or” attitude and thinking, the tilde graphically illustrating a “both~and” complementarity of concepts throughout the book, as in “individual~collective,” for example, and “yin~yang,” and by extension, “body~soul,” “ideal~real,” “life~death,” “part~whole.” Binary oppositions, especially dogmatic ones, can readily block awareness of just such conceptual complementarities.42 From this perspective, the basic aesthetic unity of dancer and dance might well be graphically illustrated as “dancer~dance.” While dancer and dance are not typically opposites, any more than pianist and sonata or painter and painting are typically opposites, dancer and dance clearly constitute a unique unity in the world of art, a unity that anchors both the “nowness” of dancing the dance and the ephemerality of dance, and thereby the uniqueness of the art of dance in the world of art. The relationship of dancer to dance warrants further elucidation with respect to learning the dance, and in particular, to learning something that has no script or score, and further, to learning a particular style of movement in being a member of a particular dance company. With respect to such learning, the comments of celebrated and internationally known ballet choreographer George Balanchine are particularly relevant. In an interview about his work with dancers, he states: When you want to persuade somebody to do something, you have to show them. […] You learn by looking, not by talking. I don’t believe in a teacher who sits in a chair, I don’t believe in it at all. […] I always say it’s like you have a mother bird and you have little birds and they have to start. How do they do it? Mother doesn’t say, “Come on, move your tail five hundred degrees.” Same thing with us. We don’t say it. We do it. That’s the only way to teach. There’s no other way.43 Related to this non-dependence on words are remarks by dance critic Joan Acocella. She states first that modern dance companies, “in their various ways, are struggling with the question of what modern dance actually is”44 and goes on to ask questions pertinent to that question: Does the identity of a choreographer’s work reside in the dancers and their specific way of moving, or does it lie in the dances themselves, if such a thing can be conceived of in an art that has no original texts? (Unlike plays or symphonies, dances

41 J. A. Scott Kelso and David Engstrøm, The Complementary Nature (Cambridge MA/London: MIT Press, 2006). 42 See Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Binary Opposition as an Ordering Principle of (Male?) Human Thought,” in Feminist Phenomenology, ed. Linda Fisher and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 173–194. 43 W. McNeil Lowry, “Conversations with Balanchine,” in Reading Dance, ed. Robert Gottlieb (New York: Pantheon Books, 2008), 84–105, here 93–94. 44 Acocella, “Must the Show Go On?” 29.

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance  267 don’t exist independently of the manner in which they’re danced. There is no score, no script.) And is it more important for us to preserve the steps, or the ethos that went into their creation?45 Her ending comment―“Even as things are saved, something is lost”46—appears pessimistic, but understandable in terms of her central concern, which is with the legacy of modern dance choreographers who are founders of modern dance companies. As she points out, “Everything comes from the founder: the training, the vision, the company’s distinctive movement style and technique.”47 In this context, she calls attention to the fact that “the question of what happens after the founder is gone has become urgent.”48 Indeed, if companies disband when the founding choreographer is gone, there will no longer be anyone to perform the dances properly, in the style passed down through generations of dancers. The work will cease to exist. It would be as if, when Rembrandt died, all his canvases were taken out into the back yard and burned.49 In sum, the challenge of preserving a dance and of learning the dance to begin with makes dance unique in ways beyond the here-now aesthetic unity of dancer and dance. Doug Reside, Curator of the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library, writes perceptively and knowledgeably about the challenge of preserving an art that is ephemeral, thus basically about the challenge presented by an art that is movement through and through. Reside points out that the work of dance preservation is a difficult one. Literary or musical art can be transcribed to paper using a widely understood encoding system (e.g., the alphabet) and passed on to future generations. Documenting and preserving dance is not so easy.50 He then calls attention to pertinent facts related to the difficulty: Some choreographers have developed written notational systems like those used to transcribe music. The most common of these systems are those descended from the work of the early twentieth-century Hungarian dancer Rudolph von Laban. Although these systems are learned and understood by many dance artists and scholars, literacy is far from universal and only a relatively small subset of dances have been completely transcribed in any system.51 Reside calls attention furthermore to the fact that “In recent history, companies like The American Dance Machine have attempted to preserve early twentieth century theatrical

45 Ibid., 29. 46 Ibid., 29. 47 Ibid., 26. 48 Ibid., 26. 49 Ibid., 26–27. 50 Doug Reside, “How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?” May 2, 2011: https://www.nypl.org/ blog/2011/05/02/how-can-we-know-dancer-from-dance 51 Ibid.

268  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone dance by learning and performing the works of the previous generation,”52 and then goes on to provide even further details: Since the mid-twentieth century, many dances have been documented with video recording. Unlike written words or musical notes which encode sound by abstraction and are understood only by shared conventions, video transcribes the sensory experience itself and requires no special education to interpret. NYPL [New York Public Library] has one of the largest collections of dance video in the world at the Library for the Performing Arts. Although video has a few obvious advantages over oral tradition or abstract notional systems, it is in other ways more limited. The technology forces the videographer to select focus and perspective and so flattens the experience of a dance from three to two dimensions and narrows the expansive view of a stage to the small confines of a video screen. Some choreographers and scientists (such as William Forsthye [sic: Forsythe] and Ohio State University’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design [ACCAD]) have developed tools to allow an audience to switch between multiple synchronized camera views, but recording and presenting dance in this way is time consuming and expensive and only captures a limited number of perspectives on the dance.53 In sum, Reside’s detailed account is further documentation that the art of dance is quite unlike other forms of art. Indeed, the art of dance is the art of impermanence, an art totally dependent not just on here-now, present bodies, but here-now, present moving bodies, bodies whose everyday realities of being alive are artistically transcended in their becoming the dance. This is not to say that there are no notational scores of dance, but such scores are limited;54 in no way do they compare to the fecundity and seemingly limitless number of music scores—for example, sonatas, concertos, symphonies, and ­operas—and of written plays going back more than 2,500 years ago to Greek tragedies and comedies. Given this aesthetic transcendence, one might well wonder whether dance has been philosophically neglected in relation to other forms of art precisely because of its temporal fleetingness. Dealing with something that basically does not stay still, and furthermore, something that cannot be readily inspected by way of a score or has even been scored to begin with, or something that cannot be experienced from time to time as in a museum or park, and so on—all such limitations might well be deterrents to philosophical studies of dance. Moreover, certain philosophical assessments and understandings of movement as well as dance, and further, not only assessments and understandings of movement but of being a body―i.e., not having a body but being a body―have implicitly or explicitly diminished the aesthetic significance of dance. Such assessments and understandings warrant specification, particularly and even essentially since they come from phenomenological philosophers. They in fact warrant not just specification but exemplification and questioning in relation to the art form of dance, for a second but no less significant uniqueness that describes the art form of dance and may well not just further,

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 The Dance Notation Bureau was founded in the 1940s. It uses Labanotation to notate movement, a symbolic system developed by Rudolf Laban in the late 1920s.

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance  269 but initially prompt the philosophical neglect of dance in relation to other art forms. The section that follows critically addresses the issues involved in these assessments and understandings and thereby opens the way to a recognition of the second uniqueness of the art form of dance. Kinesthesia and the Qualitative Dynamics of Movement To begin with, consider Merleau-Ponty’s assessment and understanding of dance. Merleau-Ponty states that dancing is a “motor habit”55 and that “forming the habit of dancing is discovering, by analysis, the formula of the movement in question, and then reconstructing it on the basis of the ideal outline by the use of previously acquired movement, those of walking and running.”56 It can surely be said that no other art form is judged to be a kind of habit, and further, that in no other art form is it said that “forming” the habit is a matter of discerning the “formula” of whatever project is being undertaken and then “reconstructing” that formula by finding its basis in “previously acquired” everyday skills. As remarks by Cunningham and Bausch indicate and in fact document, choreographing a dance and dancing the dance are aesthetically challenging in ways that far transcend “motor habits” and “formulas of movement.” Consider too Heidegger’s elision of the body in relation to Dasein. In the context of discussing the directionality of Dasein in terms of left and right and thus raising the question of the “bodily nature” of Dasein’s spatiality, Heidegger writes in parentheses, “(This ‘bodily nature’ hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here).”57 Heidegger does not in fact treat Dasein’s “bodily nature” in phenomenologically significant ways anywhere, a fact that is not surprising given his experiential specification of feelings. As critically noted elsewhere: Feelings […] have no place within Heidegger’s metaphysics. Feelings are factical entities and as such are metaphysically replaced by “states-of-mind,” “states” defined as “moods,” and “attunements.” In effect, feelings such as sadness, fear, delight, shyness, and so on, are in Heidegger’s words possible “states-of-mind,” possible “existential structures in which the Being of the ‘there’ maintains itself.” [Heidegger Being and Time, 182–83]58 Yet an undeniable recognition of feelings surfaces in Heidegger’s analysis of boredom, an analysis in which three forms of boredom are described. Heidegger describes the first two forms as a doing of this and that to relieve the boredom, while the third form is a distinctly different kind of boredom, the experience of which does not involve a doing of any kind but a distancing of oneself from the world. Thus, however metaphysical Dasein is claimed to be, Dasein is not ontologically bodiless and hence without feeling any more than it is without the apparently “problematic” reality of directionality. The

55 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 146. 56 Ibid., 142. 57 Martin, Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Jon Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 143. 58 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “On the Enigma of Being-toward-Death,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 29/4 (2015): 547–576, here 566.

270  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone point is significant because, as should be apparent, certain bodily feelings are essential to choreographing a dance and to dancing the dance, notably feelings grounded in moving bodies, hence in kinesthesia. As the following précis of Heidegger’s analysis shows,59 we indeed find not just a body, but a felt moving body in all three forms of boredom that Heidegger so finely describes: in being bored by and being bored with—two everyday forms of boredom—and in “being held in limbo.”60 In the former two instances, we find explicit references to being a body in the course of “passing time”: “We walk up and down [the local road]”; “[we] draw all kinds of figures in the sand”;61 “we […] remember a repeated, though suppressed yawning”;62 we find that being “in other people’s company […] it was inappropriate to drum our fingers on the tabletop, as we were tempted to do.”63 In contrast to the former two instances, in the latter instance, there is no “passing the time.”64 Heidegger describes this profound form of boredom, this being held in limbo, as “it is boring for one.” What is experienced in “it is boring for one” is a distinct form of boredom, a profound emptiness in which, Heidegger states, “passing the time is factically entirely absent.”65 Yet in this form of boredom too, Dasein is not ontologically bodiless and therefore lacking a felt body: ­Dasein is “left entirely in the lurch […] suspended among beings and their telling refusal of themselves as a whole.”66 Apparently Dasein has no solid ground under foot but is swaying while hanging from something above—“in the lurch,” “suspended among beings.” […] [A]lthough Heidegger restrains himself, he admits to the temptation of feeling. With respect to being held in limbo, he writes that one is “almost tempted to say that in this ‘it is boring for one’ one feels timeless, one feels removed from the flow of time.”67 In short, in all forms of boredom, a body is livingly present, affectively and kinesthetically reverberating at the core of Being. To recognize the tactile-kinesthetic body—whether in terms of directionality or of walking up and down, drawing figures in the sand, yawning, or of drumming fingers, not to mention bodily tensions and pressures felt in feelings such as anger, timidity, and joyous excitement, and certain qualitative dynamics felt in running toward, edging away, and stomping off—is to recognize a dynamically felt body, a recognition of central epistemological and ontological importance warranting phenomenological acknowledgment and study. The “bodily nature” of Dasein is indeed “problematic” only for those who contain it in a “factical” cage of one sort or another, that is, who objectify it, as in perceiving not movement but an object in motion, and as in seeing movement as a “change of position” or as a force in time and in space rather than as the spatio-temporal-energic dynamic created by movement itself. Being a body is not a metaphysical liability but a metaphysical reality, both in ­being-toward-death and in dancing the dance, i.e., in transcendently becoming the dance. Impermanence—the impermanence not only of bodies themselves but of the movement 59 The following paragraph is taken from Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “On the Enigma . . . ,” 566. 60 Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. W. M ­ cNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), 108–10, 131, 140ff. 61 Ibid., 93. 62 Ibid., 110. 63 Ibid., 111. 64 Ibid., 134–135. 65 Ibid., 136. 66 Ibid., 139–140. 67 Ibid., 141.

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance  271 of moving bodies—testifies to that reality. The aesthetic transcendence of dancer in becoming the dance is grounded in that foundational “bodily nature.” We might indeed ask where the dance would be for both dancers and audiences short of that foundational “bodily nature”? While it is true that neither Merleau-Ponty nor Heidegger pursues the study of art forms, each nonetheless focuses on a particular art in his writings, Heidegger notably on poetry, Merleau-Ponty notably on painting, hence, on language in the one instance and a visual entity in the other, neither of which is close to a transcendent body, the fleeting nature of movement, and the ephemerality of dance. A highly significant and all the more peculiar sensory dismissal, specifically of kinesthesia, in Merleau-Ponty’s experience-based judgment of his own moving body underscores the need for a veritable phenomenological study of movement and the aesthetic acuity that such a phenomenological analysis would afford with respect to dance. In particular, Merleau-Ponty claims, “The consciousness of my gesture, if it is truly a state of undivided consciousness, is no longer consciousness of movement at all, but an incommunicable quality which can tell us nothing about movement.”68 His judgment bypasses a veritable phenomenological investigation of kinesthetic consciousness and runs counter to Husserl’s description of the integral relationship of Body and soul that implicitly validates a moving body and a real-life, real-time kinesthetic consciousness, a description in which, interestingly enough, dancing comes readily to the fore: [T]he apprehension of the human, the apprehension of that person there, who dances, laughs when amused, and chatters, or who discusses something with me in science, etc., is not the apprehension of a spirit fastened to a Body. […] Man, in his movements, in his action, in his speaking and writing, etc., is not a mere connection or linking up of one thing, called a soul, with another thing, the Body. The Body is, as Body, filled with the soul through and through. Each movement of the Body is full of soul, the coming and going, the standing and sitting, the walking and dancing, etc.69 Merleau-Ponty’s earlier claims concerning movement are equally dismissive, even to the point of discrediting his later claim that “consciousness of my gesture” is “an incommunicable quality which can tell us nothing about movement.” For example, he earlier claims, “Motion is nothing without a body in motion which describes and provides it with unity.”70 Oddly enough, the claim also runs counter to his earlier admission: And yet I walk, I have the experience of movement in spite of the demands and dilemmas of clear thought, which means, in defiance of all reason, that I perceive movements without any identical moving object, without any external landmark and without any relativity.71

68 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 276. 69 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht/ Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers), 252. 70 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 272. 71 Ibid., 269; italics added.

272  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone In effect, however confused and unelucidated phenomenologically, Merleau-Ponty clearly has, or states that he has, “the experience of movement,” though by his own admission, that experience of movement tells him “nothing about movement.” In this confused context, he offers a rambling account of “the experience of movement”—or rather of “motor intentionality.” In his exposition of a motor intentionality, he indeed devalues kinesthesia, stating forthrightly that “[a]s a mass of tactile, labyrinthine and kinaesthetic data”72 the body gives us no special spatial orientation whatsoever. Verticality, he has earlier insisted, is simply one “spatial level” among all other possible ones.73 Thus, not only is bipedality not formally distinguished as a distinctively human mode of locomotion, but kinesthesia is not epistemologically relevant or privileged in any way: as a sensory “function” or “content,” Merleau-Ponty declares, it gives us no definitive ups, downs, tilts, horizontals, or whatever. In a word, it offers us nothing in the way of knowledge or kinetic meanings: “Our bodily experience of movement,” Merleau-Ponty says, “is not a particular case of knowledge.”74 Its only office, he continues, is to “[provide] us with a way of access to the world and the object,”75 and is thus no more than a purely practical kind of knowing. Though Merleau-Ponty states that this “praktognosia” “has to be recognized as original and perhaps as primary,”76 and though he goes on to quote neuropsychologist A. A. Grünbaum to the effect that “Already motility, in its pure state, possesses the basic power of giving a meaning,” and that “Motility is the primary sphere in which initially the meaning of all significances is engendered in the domain of represented space,”77 he stops neither to reflect upon the conjunction of meaning and our bodily experience of movement nor to account for the foundational significance of the latter. In effect, kinesthetic consciousness is, save for practical purposes [i.e., “access to the world and the object”], a still-born consciousness, and moreover one that, while acknowledged “as original and perhaps as primary,” is nowhere seriously thought of as ever having been [or as ever being] vitally present.78 Clearly, the ready-made mesh of body and world that is always “all there,”79 as Merleau-Ponty describes it, constitutes an impassable barrier to knowledge of how our bodily dynamics come to have the meaning and value they do, hence to veritable phenomenological investigations and insights that are basic to a veritable phenomenological aesthetics of dance. In doing so, the ready-made mesh makes movement merely a bridge between body and world, merely “a way of access” by which we reach “the world and the object.” Moreover, it nowhere seems to occur to Merleau-Ponty that there is a difference between kinesthetically feeling movement and visually-kinetically perceiving movement. Between his claim that dancing is a “motor habit” and his “defiance of all reason” in admitting that he walks without there being an experienced “object in motion,”80

72 Ibid., 249. 73 Ibid., 248ff. 74 Ibid., 140. 75 Ibid., 140. 76 Ibid., 140. 77 Ibid., 142. 78 This paragraph is taken from Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2011/1999), 210/243. 79 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 198. 80 Ibid., 269.

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance  273 Merleau-Ponty leaves us essentially with a confused maundering about the realities of movement and dance: he completely bypasses the integral qualitative dynamic structure of movement, its spatial, temporal, and energic qualities, and hence not only the kinesthetically felt qualitative dynamic realities of his own movement and those of a dancer dancing the dance, but the visually-kinetically perceived qualitative dynamic realities he perceives of others and those perceived by audiences of dance, and more extensively, the often visually-kinetically, affectively charged qualitative dynamic realities one perceives of others and those perceived by audiences of dance.81 The above specifications, exemplifications, and questionings of well-known and in fact widely quoted phenomenological texts highlight how, whether implicitly or explicitly, assessments and understandings of movement and of being a body can devalue the aesthetic realities of dance and of dancing the dance. As is apparent from the previous discussion, these aesthetic realities are grounded in the sensory modality of movement, in kinesthesia, a fact duly recognized and highlighted from distinct but highly complementary perspectives by two illustrious choreographers and dancers who indeed shaped the course of modern dance and whose choreographic legacies are far from forgotten. In her book The Art of Making Dances, Doris Humphrey―a pioneer of modern dance―affirms the centrality of kinesthesia to life by calling attention to its neglect and to our need to resuscitate it. She points out that “[w]hen man ceased to run and leap for his food the decay of the kinesthetic sense began.”82 Furthermore, she emphasizes that the sensory modality of kinesthesia “needs to be enlarged by education and training; nothing else about us,” she comments, “has been so much allowed to atrophy.”83 In effect, Humphrey highlights the fact that the neglect of kinesthesia has an extended history, so much so that humans need to be educated experientially as to its centrality to life. She actually put kinesthesia in an extended perspective earlier when she wrote of movement and its integral ties to both life and dance. Every movement made by a human being, and far back of that, in the animal kingdom, too, has a design in space; a relationship to other objects in both time and space; an energy flow, which we will call dynamics; and a rhythm. Movements are made for a complete array of reasons involuntary or voluntary, physical, psychical, emotional or instinctive―which we will lump all together and call motivation. Without a motivation, no movement would be made at all. So, with a simple analysis of movement in general, we are provided with the basis for dance, which is movement brought to the point of fine art. The four elements of dance movement are, therefore, design, dynamics, rhythm, and motivation.84

81 For a phenomenological account of the qualitative structure of movement, see Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance; Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement. For an empirical-phenomenological account of the relationship of movement and emotion, see Sheets-Johnstone, “Emotion and Movement. A Beginning Empirical-Phenomenological Analysis of their Relationship,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999): 11–12. 82 Doris Humphrey, “What A Dancer Thinks About,” in The Vision of Modern Dance, ed. Jean Morrison Brown (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1979), 55–64, here 61. 83 Ibid., 61. 84 Doris Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances, ed. Barbara Pollack (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1959), 46.

274  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone Merce Cunningham calls attention to the fact that kinesthesia is a common human sensory faculty. Most notably, he affirms that “the kinesthetic sense […] allows the experience of dancing to be part of all of us.”85 Cunningham does not spell out just how “the kinesthetic sense […] allows the experience of dancing to be part of all of us,”86 but an explanation hardly seems necessary. As pointed out elsewhere: [H]is recognition of the fact that kinesthesia is a common human sensory faculty makes his affirmation virtually self-explanatory. We all move. We all thus have the potential to dance and to experience ourselves kinesthetically in dancing. Though as members of an audience watching a dance we are not kinesthetically engaged in dancing the dance, we are kinetically attuned to the foundational qualitative dynamics of movement that we are visually experiencing and that constitute the dance.87 The second uniqueness of dance among the arts is thus understandably tethered essentially to kinesthesia, hence to the qualitative dynamics of movement, dynamics that testify not just to the fleeting nature of movement and the ephemerality of dance—to impermanence—but to being a body, a living body that by its very nature is an inherently moving, animated body. Such bodies may well pose a problem for philosophers, bearing out Cunningham’s caution that dance is not for “unsteady souls.” Such souls may indeed be unsteady because they are dismissive of being a body, and thereby dismissive of the experiential realities of a kinesthetically felt lived body. In Husserl’s words, they are bodies that are short of being “full of soul.” In forsaking a kinesthetically felt lived body, abandoning it in favor of body image and body schema, for example, and of giving prominence to proprioception over kinesthesia, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi elide the experiential realities of movement, often following Merleau-Ponty’s wayward diminution of movement.88 For example, we might ask with respect to Gallagher and Zahavi’s observation, “The body tries to stay out of our way so that we can get on with our task,”89 whether it is “the body” that “tries to stay out of our way,” or “we” who try to keep the body out of our way, or what “our way” would be had we not learned our bodies and learned to move ourselves and in the process forged those myriad familiar dynamic patterns that inform our everyday lives and that run off so effectively without our having to monitor them.90 Gallagher and Zahavi’s adultist stance and distanced attitude are clearly offshoots of Merleau-Ponty’s ready-made mesh that makes movement merely a bridge between body

85 Cunningham, Changes …, unpaginated. 86 Ibid., unpaginated. 87 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “Moving in Concert,” Choros International Dance Journal 6 (2017): 1–19, here 14. 88 Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 2nd ed. (London/New York: Routledge, 2012). 89 Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 163. 90 See Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “On the Origin, Nature, and Genesis of Habit” Phenomenology and Mind 6 (2014): 95–116, here 107; Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “The Body Subject: Being True to the Truths of Experience,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 34/1 (2020): 1–29, here 15.

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance  275 and world, merely “a way of access” by which we reach “the world and the object” and “get on with our task.” We find in such elisions of the lived body and movement that phenomenology itself has been elided, that is, that the practice of phenomenology has been bypassed and thus the initial practice of bracketing has been sidelined. We furthermore find in such expositions that bodily awareness is often reduced to positional awareness, as in the following claims that are anchored in Sir Charles Sherrington’s coinage of the term “proprioception” to designate “where the limb is”:91 Proprioception is the innate and intrinsic position sense that I have with respect to my limbs and overall posture. It is the ‘sixth sense’ that allows me to know whether my legs are crossed, or not, without looking at them.92 Like other perceptual modalities, proprioception is phenomenological since a distinct qualitative feeling is normally associated with the perceived properties: there is something it feels like to experience that one’s legs are crossed.93 Kinesthesia and movement go similarly unrecognized when phenomenologists make breezy, unsubstantiated claims about infant self-awareness and self-experience, as in the following instance in which the task of learning one’s body and learning to move oneself goes unrecognized, in which “praktognosia” reigns, in which the lexical band aid of “embodiments” take the place of veritable phenomenological analyses, and in which having a body overrides the experiential realities of being a body: [I]t now appears that even very young infants present a surprisingly rich form of self-awareness rooted in an ecological experience of their body and their body’s practical relation to the world. They seem to grasp implicitly that they have a body, and they feel that this body can be made to do things […] despite neither having seen their body nor possessing any sort of linguistic or narrative understanding of it. This capacity points towards a range of embodied self-experience and skills […]. The young infant is immediately acquainted with its body and the things its body can do; […] This immediate acquaintance with oneself as an embodied perspective on the world is a phenomenologically minimal form of self-experience.94 The above critiques may appear a long way from a consideration of a phenomenological aesthetics, but the uniqueness of the art form of dance and the methodological specifications of phenomenology require attention to such critiques if a veritable aesthetic phenomenology of dance is to be achieved. It is highly relevant in this context to call

91 Sir Charles Sherrington, Man on His Nature, 2nd ed. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 1953), 249. 92 Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind, 162. 93 Dorothée Legrand, “The Bodily Self: The Sensori-Motor Roots of Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 5 (2006): 89–118, here 106. 94 Joel Krueger, “The Who and the How of Experience,” in Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions, ed. Evan Thompson and Dan Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 27–55, here 42.

276  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone attention to Husserlian scholar Robert Sokolowski’s phenomenologically distilled observations of kinesthesia. Sokolowski points out, Kinesthesia is immediately subject to our wills. It is a capacity we can actualize without intermediaries and without internal conditions, except those of inner timeconsciousness, which is the condition for everything. Even our capacity to perceive is not as basic as kinesthesia, for it depends on the latter for its own possibility.95 His earlier observations about the intimate relationship of touch and movement are equally notable. His observation of the relationship begins as follows: “The process of touching, furthermore, is a spatial motion, as one part of the body moves to another, and thus kinesthesia and touch are essentially related.”96 Sokolowski ends his observation of the relationship by pointing out that “the lived body is an identity within complex manifolds, tactile and kinesthetic, actualized and potential; it is the field where sensations, moods and feelings take place.”97 Relevant in this context too are inquiries pursued by earlier phenomenologists, inquiries pertinent to the art form of dance through their direct concern with the human body. Erwin Straus’s “Born to See, Bound to Behold: Reflections on the Function of Upright Posture in the Esthetic Attitude,” for example, centers in the beginning on a critique of Sir Charles Sherrington’s Gifford lectures that comprise his book Man on His Nature. Straus’s focus is not on Sherrington’s coinage of the term “proprioception” but on Sherrington’s attempt to join “the opposition of energy and mind,”98 an attempt that results in Sherrington’s claim: “The biological usefulness of mind for the concrete individual appears to be the improvement and control of the motor act,” a claim Straus finds unacceptable: “The mind, banished to the inner realm of the neural switchboard, is unrelated to the world.”99 In short, what Straus finds wholly lacking is an awareness of the lived body—the Body “full of soul,” as Husserl describes it. Straus’s chapters “The Forms of Spatiality,” “The Upright Posture,” and “Lived Movement” in his book Phenomenological Psychology examine other ways in which a reduction to a biology or physiology of motion utterly transmogrify what may be described as the real-life, real-time animated dynamics of lived experience.100 He in fact uses dance throughout “The Upright Posture” to draw concrete attention to ways in which movement is a basic reality of lived experience. Gabriel Marcel’s painstaking, extended reflections on being a body that center on the affirmation “I am my body” are further examples.101 His reflections are revealing of both the complex meanings of the affirmation and the effort involved in veritable phenomenological probings, questionings, and analyses of being a body. Though kinesthesia is unmentioned in Marcel’s reflections or in Straus’s investigations, it is the obvious

Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 96–97. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 95. Erwin W. Straus, “Born to See, Bound to Behold: Reflections on the Function of Upright Posture in the Esthetic Attitude,” in The Philosophy of the Body, ed. Stuart F. Spicker (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 334–361, here 337. 99 Ibid., 338. 100 Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966). 101 See Gabriel Marcel, “Metaphysical Journal and a Metaphysical Diary,” in The Philosophy of the Body, ed. Stuart F. Spicker (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970), 187–217. 95 96 97 98

Exploring the aesthetic uniqueness of the art of dance  277 sensory modality underpinning their observations concerning human bodies and movement and the conclusions they draw from their observations regarding the aesthetic unity of dancer and dance and the dynamically felt tactile-kinesthetic body. Finally, in this context of genuine phenomenological inquiries into the lived body and movement, it is of central aesthetic significance to note the writings of theater directors Jacques Lecoq and Stanton Garner, and music composer Roger Sessions, all three of whom write pointedly and eloquently of movement in relation to their art. Examples from their texts demonstrate their lucidity. Jacques Lecoq’s prose poem at the end of his book The Moving Body: Teaching Creative Theatre begins with the lines, “Everything moves/Everything develops and progresses/Everything rebounds and resonates” and ends with the lines, “In what has neither beginning nor end./Naming it, endowing it with life, giving it authority/For a better understanding of what moves/A better understanding of what Movement is.”102 Garner’s book is titled Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre: Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement. The book is “a study of movement and movement perception in theatrical performance.”103 In the context of describing and discussing “kinesthetic resonance,” Garner writes, The concept of kinesthesia has sometimes been equated with proprioception, which refers to the direct sensation one has of bodily posture, limb extension, and the relative position of body parts. […] Because of its explicit grounding in movement, though, I favor the term kinesthesia in my discussion of theatrical embodiment and perception over proprioception, which gravitates toward the body at rest.104 Sessions writes, “It seems to me that the essential medium of music, the basis of its expressive powers and the element which gives it its unique quality among the arts, is time, made living for us through its expressive essence, movement.”105 He goes on to explain, Time becomes real to us primarily through movement, which I have called its expressive essence; and it is easy to trace our primary musical responses to the most primitive movement of our being—to those movements which are indeed at the very basis of animate existence. The feeling for tempo, so often derived from the dance, has in reality a much more primitive basis in the involuntary movements of the nervous system and the body in the beating of the heart, and more consciously in breathing, later in walking.106

102 Jacques Lecoq, The Moving Body, trans. David Bradby (New York: Routledge, 2001), 169. 103 Stanton B. Jr. Garner, Kinesthetic Spectatorship in the Theatre: Phenomenology, Cognition, Movement (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), v. 104 Ibid., v. 105 Roger Sessions, “The Composer and His Message,” in The Intent of the Artist, ed. Augusto Centeno (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 105. 106 Ibid., 108.

278  Maxine Sheets-Johnstone In short, Sessions’s keen, experience-based understandings of movement, its dynamics, and its intimate ties to breath and to emotion point us toward a recognition of kinesthesia.107 Lecoq’s, Stanton’s, and Sessions’s writings neither diminish nor nullify the significance of movement to the uniqueness of dance but rather highlight the broader relevance and even centrality of movement to aesthetic creativity and the “aesthetic mind.” Moreover, in so doing, they can heighten an awareness of movement not simply at the creative and aesthetic core of dance, but of movement being the dance from beginning to end, and even further, an awareness that such aesthetic movement exists only in virtue of a moving body capable of dancing the dance, hence of both being completely in the body and transcending the body in and through movement. One might conclude that the fleeting nature of movement and the impermanence of dance conspire to make dance a challenge to philosophers who might be more inclined toward something solid and readily or easily accessible, something that has some kind of tangible existence, that it has its place so to speak, and is situated somewhere, a somewhere not dependent on animate bodies. Movement itself may appear too elusive and slippery a phenomenon for aesthetic consideration and bodies themselves may appear such everyday phenomena and perhaps a reminder of being-toward-death that they are outside aesthetic consideration. Phenomenologists in particular would nevertheless be wise to sit up and take notice of dance, for it would give them insights into the aesthetics and qualitative dynamics of movement and the experiential realities of kinesthesia. The art of dance is indeed an art totally dependent on bodies, moving bodies, hence bodies that are not dead, but bodies whose aliveness is artistically transcended in dancing the dance. That the impermanence of dance is admittedly challenging is why to dance and to appreciate dance require in Cunningham’s words “a steady soul.” English novelist and writer D. H. Lawrence captured both the “nowness” and the transcendent encompassing nature of this steady soul when, in view of our mortality, he wrote, The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living incarnate cosmos.108 His words resonate along the ending lines of Yeats’s poem, with both being a body and transcending the body in and through movement, thus with the aesthetic unity of dancer and dance.

107 For further details on Sessions’s movement-tethered analysis of music, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, “The Lived Body,” The Humanistic Psychologist 48/1 (2020): 28–53. 108 D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse: And the Writings on Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1980), 199–200.

16 What is moving in the movie Hans Rainer Sepp

Abstract  It will be shown that the film-immanent is about a structure that underlies all narrative contents and the movie as a final product. One could paraphrase this with the complex themes of corporeality and movement, so that the question of what moves in the movie still includes the other question: what moves the movie? What does the specific shape of the shot tell us in relation to the instrumental extension of the human body of the camera’s operator who determines the perspective and the frame? Thus, it will be explained in which way film is the movement of the camera body, which makes movements visible in the presented construction of imaginative but reality-saturated worlds and becomes itself visible in the movements of this making visible. Keywords  Photography; Film; Corporeal Movement; Imagination and the Real; Continuity and Discontinuity In the following, I want to give an answer to the question formulated in the title. This question could also be expressed in more detail: what is the moving moment of the form of representation first called cinematography, then commonly known as the movie? In order to answer this question, we do not choose as a methodological starting point the path of referring primarily to the content of film works; consequently, the subject of our investigation is not the narrative structure of films, regardless of whether this structure could be analyzed phenomenologically or semiotically, or according to its psychological, sociological, or historical aspects. Our subject is also not the preconditions and circumstances that determine the production of films, and is therefore not expressed in questions about the biographical, economic, social, or political background of their creation. In all these thematic perspectives, existing movies form the object of observation as finished results, whereby the focus is on the narrative structure inherent in a film on the one hand, and on its external production conditions on the other. In contrast, our thesis is that the film-immanent is not to be equated with the storyimmanent and is still more than the respective movie itself. It is about the presence of a structure that underlies all narratives and the movie as a final product. One could paraphrase this basic research with the complex themes of corporeality and movement, so that the question of what moves in the film should be formulated to the extent that it still includes the question: what moves the movie? What does the specific shape of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-17

280  Hans Rainer Sepp shot tell us in relation to the camera body,1 that means in relation to the author who determines the perspective and the frame? Every framing of a camera shot correlates, in photography, with the corporeal2 facticity of the person who determines the camera frame—and in the case of film the possibility of movement is added.3 1  Beginnings and basics 1.1

A phenomenological description of the moving capacity of film, the “running pictures,” can be introduced with a genealogical consideration of the genesis of film in the nineteenth century. As we all know, the technical prerequisites of film lie in the development of photography, which had its breakthrough around 1830 and realized a preliminary stage of the moving image with the chronophotography developed after 1870 by Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, and Ottomar Anschütz: the development of shorter exposure times made it possible to capture phases of a single movement in serial individual pictures.4 For a genealogical observation, however, these facts are only the occasion and not yet the actual object. For in this context, the moving moment of the movie is not of interest in terms of its technical prerequisites, but rather in terms of the question of what changes in access to reality and in the understanding of the world resulting from it. Let us first look at photography. The invention of photography played a decisive role in fundamentally changing the autonomous, absolute subject as it had been constituted since the European modern era. This change unfolded in several areas, such as the Romantic Irony of Friedrich Schlegel,

1 The abridged concept of “camera body” refers here not to the instrument of the camera itself, but to it as an instrumental extension of the human body of its operator. See for this the author’s article “Kamera und Leib: Film in statu nascendi,” Studia Phaenomenologica 16 (2016): 91–109. 2 The terms “corporeal” and “corporeality” used here are meant to express the idea that experience is always this two in one: on the one hand our inner bodily experience, which is on the other hand an experience by means of our own physicality. This does not refer to an objectified body, but designates the physical firmness and mass of the corporeity with which we encounter the resistant real with resistance on our part. 3 Vivian Sobchack still refers to the film work itself when she discusses the correlation of the seeing and seen gaze, the viewing-view and the viewed-view. However, she puts the genetic processes of the film that are constitutive for the human living body in the foreground when she realizes that the articulation and visualization of my perceptive encounter with the world depends on my body, even though my body remains invisible in this visualization. At the same time, the film can be understood, according to Sobchak, as the process of an incarnation, in which the “body” is the camera and projector. These, however, cannot be grasped merely as mechanical instruments: “In this sense, the film can be said to genuinely have and live a body.” [Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye. A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992), 205.] In contrast to this, we want to direct the view of the film as a finished product to the condition of the possibility of this visualization: we want to refer to the invisible itself and not just take it as a boundary concept within a world that is visualizing itself or is already visualized. It is then not a matter of the film’s body, but of the corporeal place of those who―by means of the camera body at the intersection of the encounter with reality and the use of imagination and on the basis of technical equipment―construct the movie. 4 Another precursor of film was the praxinoscope which Charles-Émile Reynaud developed around 1877. The praxinoscope is a flat rotating cylinder open at the top, the inside of which contains single pictures (photographs or drawings) of a cyclical sequence of movements. A prism with mirrors is mounted in the center of the apparatus, the number of which corresponds to the number of pictures. By mirroring the images from the inner wall of the cylinder to the center, they seem to stand still for the viewer despite the rotating cylinder, giving the impression of a continuous sequence of movements.

What is moving in the movie  281 Solger, and Kierkegaard, which was based on Fichte and at the same time transcended his thinking and lastingly questioned the exceptional position of the subject. What is special about photography, however, is that it brought about this change not through prior theoretical reflection but through its simple practice. This practice, which changed the positionality of the subject, can be described according to three points of view: (a) The subject experiences decentralization by being placed in a reality that it is not able to master completely. The photographing subject, who wants to “capture” the world, is now dependent on light conditions, the weather, the motif, and so far, all circumstances which it cannot control. (b) Nonetheless, the subject does not lose itself in the stream of this unpredictable reality. On the contrary, it is precisely the experience of standing in the middle of the real that strengthens the natural centrism of human existence, while at the same time the subject experiences the relativity of its (respective) position, for what it sees and wants to capture with the camera is thus only revealed for a certain moment in time for a certain position, for its position. The fleeting nature of the moment―and the randomness of its location―forms the basis for the subject to exchange his or her superior position in the world for the experience that his or her individuality is realized in unique situations. In one fell swoop, the camera thus becomes a testing ground for human existence or a process by which the life of the subject immediately testifies to itself―according to its bipolarity―as the life of a living self and, as such, stands in reality and, in this standing, in testifies to the real itself. (c) The new positionality of the subject as the being-in―namely to be so in itself that it is at the same time within the real―is determined by the photographic process and provides the means to describe this process more precisely, that means to explicate what happens when a photograph is taken. What is special about the photographic reproduction of reality is that it is neither a subjective draft nor a duplicating copy of the real. The way in which reality is reflected in the photograph refers to an inbetween and thus infiltrates the traditional subject-object dichotomy. The reflection at work here is a special kind of a self-imprint of the real. Although the real is in the grip of the positionality that correlates with the subject (location of the person taking the picture), the perspective given by this position (direction of view), and the chosen detail (framing of the picture), the subject is not able to do more. It must reach the favorable moment that occurs between it and the real, but when it does, it is the real that “inscribes” itself by means of the technical apparatus. This inscription differs from an ordinary reflection in that, if it succeeds, it has a greater temporal durability in its end product than any ordinary reflection can have. But this does not yet sufficiently capture the inscription of the real. The mirroring―the self-imprint of the real―does not take place through signs. If the house depicted in the photo were to be seen merely as a sign for the house in reality, this would fall short. The sign, like any imaginative activity, belongs on the side of the subject. Admittedly, one can say that the “reproduction” of a real thing in the photograph requires a mediating moment, and this mediation is provided by chemical and physical processes on the one hand and the imaginative performance competence of the photographer on the other. These means subject the real to the photographic process, but without being able to tame it completely. However, the real is also subjected to a restriction in its givenness. In this way, it is transferred into a new form of existence that gives itself, but

282  Hans Rainer Sepp at the same time it is captured in this form, since its traditional domain is not the imaginative. To appear in the imaginative as itself and yet at the same time not be allowed to be real has the consequence that the real in the photographic image revolts against its imaginization. The revolt consists in the fact that it is the real thing that gives itself: it imprints itself, gets its imprint from itself, which as such cannot be produced by any tricks on the part of the subject.5 The pressure with which a real thing prints itself onto a photograph is the central characteristic for the fact that it is the real itself that leaves its trace here.6 But the real thing is not a mark in the sense of something that merely refers to another, original thing. Rather, it manifests itself as itself, but in the image. A semiotic description does not go far enough, since the real thing in the photograph is not experienced by an indexical sign. The given reality is not exhausted with the determination that an indexical sign meets an existing object, because on the one hand an unexplained relationship between subject and object is presupposed and on the other hand the “meeting” is not clarified or only presented in such a way that the experience of the indexical object is a sign-making act of the perceiving subject. Photography, however, imposes something that is beyond the pictorial and is not relative to the subject producing or experiencing the picture. At the same time, the real and the perceiving subject do not confront each other without any agency. The mediation (via the chemical, physical imaginative processes) thus contains a paradox that cannot be resolved, a dichotomy in the same medium. 1.2

In order to understand this paradox, the reference of the experiencing subject to the reality surrounding must not be reduced to a meaningful contact. Rather, the genuine experience of something real occurs before and outside of meaning and language through the experience of pure resistance. I experience that something is real by touching it physically. The corporeal contact with something that resists me and that I can touch creates a field around me that is not limited in principle and that is naturally there for me as real space. The senses of sight and hearing take their place in this space, so to speak. Thus, the view, despite its distance from a real thing, not only receives the offer of a physical examination of its palpability but rather “moves” from the beginning into that real space which I have literally felt out since childhood. Even when turning away from the situation of living experience, for instance in memory, there is still something left of it―even though the connection to a real experienced resistance here has to be completely provided by the imaginizing (remembering) performance. An analogous case would be the reproduction of a real thing through a drawing or painting. What still maintains contact with the real in this case is done through the mediation of the imagination. It is different in the case of photography. Here, the real expresses itself, similar to the mirror image, the mirage or the upside-down and laterally reversed image of a light

5 Any manipulative treatment of a photograph presupposes this original gift of reality. 6 “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.” [Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977), ch. “The Image-World”; e-edition (New York: RosettaBooks LLC), 120.]

What is moving in the movie  283 reflection caused by a small opening such as in the case of the camera obscura―only with the difference that in the case of the photograph the resulting image is fixed. A mirror image is a special image. The mirrored is the imprint of a real thing that presents itself in the mirroring as an image―because the mirrored real thing is not the reflecting real thing― and is fixed on a carrier, in the short or long term, without any imaginary activity (which can of course occur at any time) interfering with it. This imagination-free gift makes the given appear as a real thing in the picture. Since the gift of the real locks itself against its imaginary suspension into the picture, the real also emerges as real in the image-mediated reflection: it touches me, seizes me with the same force of its inevitable factuality as in the experience of a real that is not mediated by the picture. In this impression that touches me, it evokes a corresponding response from me; it imposes on me to touch it, as if it were really to be touched.7 This leads to a connection between my real corporeal presence and the reality presented in the picture: when I look at a photo, I enter a world of images, but the world of images is given as a real one, not as a fake. In other words, while the pictorial image interrupts the horizon reference of a real space, to which I currently belong, with the imagination working within it, in the case of the photo the appearing real renews the contact between its real space and its real time with my here and now―not through horizon references, but with the evidence of a real that I encounter through touchability. In this mostly passive contact, a fusion of my current time-space with the presented takes place, in that what appears is inserted into the time-space continuum of my reality. In this way, the appearing real touches me in the concrete sense of touching: I could―if it would allow the bridging of time and space within the (such an extended) continuum―enter into a physical contact with it, just as it already presses me, touches me because of its real factuality that I have recognized. 1.3

The photograph, which “freezes” for a moment, as it were, already contains the seed of a movement. Since what is shown―fitting into the horizon-continuum opened up to me―proves to be a real thing distant in time and space, I know that the rigid pose only represents the fixed moment of a sequence of movements; in other words, the photograph already contains the film. It is above all this trait that is already present in photography that becomes relevant for film: the fact that the photographic image is saturated with reality in the way that is briefly outlined here. Saturated with reality means that a real situation expresses itself both in the photographic image and by means of it and that it expresses itself in the respective how of the corporeal position of the camera, the resulting perspective, and the chosen picture frame. In this way, a continuous time-space opens up in which I am able to participate through the photograph―despite the possibility that the real appearing in the picture is located

7 Photography becomes a new kind of evidence that is “no longer merely induced: the proof-according-toSt.-Thomas-seeking-to-touch-the-resurrected-Christ” [Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), Nr. 33, 80; La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 1980), 125; see also Roland Barthes, Le préparation du roman (I et II)]. Notes de cours et de séminaires au Collège de France 1978–1979 et 1979–1980, ed. Eric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2003), ch. “La photographie.”

284  Hans Rainer Sepp in a more or less large temporal and spatial distance from my living presence.8 The photo―and then the film―thus expands my current horizon experience of the real world in a way never seen before. As far as the film is concerned, simply put, it no longer just reflects a real thing, but a real thing in its natural movement. Here I not only guess that what is shown has its dimension of movement, but I see it, it is shown to me, and this presentation increases the character of reality, the reality saturation of the real that is shown. At the same time, the capacity of what is moving here splits, because I do not only see living beings that move, trees that sway in the wind, but I still see how the one who lets this be seen moves in turn, and also lets this movement be seen: the corporeal position of the person who operates the camera is still visible in what is shown on the basis of this positionality and mobility. But there is another important difference between photo and film, apart from the moment of movement: while the photo is used more to document a real thing,9 film tends to tell a story, and even in the case of documentary film, the border to narration is crossed. The reason for this lies in the film’s increased saturation of reality compared to the photo, which includes not only the movements of what is shown but also the use of language.10 At the moment, however, when the story gains power and captivates the viewer, the movement of what is shown comes to the fore, while the movement of the camera body that shows this recedes. But it is precisely this latter movement which―together with the movements of the real actors―forms the real moment of the film, while the narrative is an imaginative staging based on those movements. However, as the movements of the film characters are carried out by their actors, the narrative layer is inextricably linked to the real of its carriers, whereby this real, unlike in the case of the theater, is determined by the distance of time-space that generally characterizes the photographic image. This will be examined more closely in the following. 2 Motion profiles 2.1

The story shown in a film is the result of a multi-stage process that “carries” the story, but cannot be accessed from it. The three moments already mentioned in connection with photography―position, perspective, and framing―are now explicitly supplemented by the moment of movement. These four moments can be grasped with the term filmic shot. Setting the shot means first of all the positioning of the camera―not as an objective place but as a subjective anchorage. The movie camera becomes (like the photo camera) an extended corporeality, in that the position of the camera is that of a living human body that anchors itself in reality by means of its corporeity and experiences its surroundings from its

8 This is also the reason why we can feel strange in a photo that shows ourselves. Foreignness presupposes the experience of a real thing in the context of an approximation, that is identifiability in the same space-time continuum. 9 Of course, the subjective attitude―the direction in which the motif is viewed, but also a possible guiding intention―remains unaffected. The special case of the fictional photo novel, which is related to the comic, creates a “film” in still images. 10 The development of film shows this intensifying saturation of reality: from silent film (which already inserted language into the pictorial process with the possibility of intertitles), to sound film, to attempts to reproduce reality three dimensionally.

What is moving in the movie  285 bodily interior. This positioning results in a field of vision, exactly as a subject experiences the reality around him or her in a corporeal way. Thus, second, as in the case of experiencing subjective existence, the real only ever shows itself in perspective, relative to the positional anchoring that opens it up. The camera body repeats this perspectival bound of human existence in an artificial way, for it is not subject to a practical necessity―in order to live, it is not necessary to shape the experience of reality through the use of the camera. But if it happens, there is a chance that human existence―in its style of experiencing reality―captures itself by mirroring itself in this way. The third thing that is added is the chosen section. While the perspective view in the case of the normal experience of reality focuses (takes certain things into view) but does not frame what is focused, the camera body adds such a boundary line. The framing intensifies the reflection on the perspective of the experience since, in this way, the seen is presented specifically as a detail. There is a peculiar parallel here between the photographic and cinematic shot and the attitude, as it becomes thematic in phenomenology; in German, both are referred to by the same word: Einstellung. In both cases, the corporeal anchoring of human existence and, in relation to this, the way in which reality is grasped in perspective become apparent: in phenomenology in descriptive-analytical reflection; in photography or film, with the specific mirroring repetition of the experience. Positionality, perspective, and framing are photo and film together but film adds movement. A shot is therefore only fully described in relation to the film when the moving moment is added. “Movement” has at least a threefold profile in filmic terms: (1) the movement of the camera body; (2) the movement in the image, such as of the persons appearing; and (3) in the case of fictional depictions, the movements of their imaginary characters. Terms (2) and (3) are related back to (1); they are only what the moving camera body lets them be. The self-moving body of the camera, the “unleashed camera”―for example in Murnau’s Der letzte Mann of 1924―was at the end of a development that gradually increased within the three decades after the invention of cinema;12 from then on, the statuary setting itself was a special case of the moving camera. With its capacity for movement, the body of the camera operator realizes itself in the full sense as a kinesthetically experiencing human body. The full kinesthetic repeatability makes it a perfect counterpart of phenomenological analysis. By experiencing for us, by realizing subjective experience, the camera body not only makes visible what it shows in the picture, but by making visible, it also puts the visible-being itself in front of us. The camera body takes on the function of the phenomenological explication of moving transcendental subjectivity; it makes the functioning of subjectivity―its world views―visible, and does this in the image―analogous to the text of the explicative phenomenological analysis. Film and phenomenology teach us that when we experience, we do not simply experience reality, but that what is real is experienced in the how of our subjective access. This may be another decisive difference to the theater: the body of the camera becomes the conductor of the gaze; it presents us with something that we do not simply experience, but which we grasp in an already actualized experience that is of the same nature as ours: positional, perspectival, focusing, and in all of this especially kinesthetic. 11

11 In the film, this is expressly reflected in subjective “point-of-view-shots,” but which are used in the context of the story to be told. However, it should not be forgotten that every camera shot is subjective, namely corporeally anchored. 12 La vie et la passion de Jésus Christ (1903) by Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet not only features camera pans, but the Spanish film pioneer Segundo de Chomón, who worked on this film, also used a moving platform for tracking shots indoors (after the moving camera had previously only been used outdoors and from moving vehicles such as cars, trains, and ships).

286  Hans Rainer Sepp 2.2

The movement of what is shown in the movie is thus based on the one hand on the movement of the real camera body and on the other hand on the movements of the realia shown (the persons and their movements) as well as in the reality-saturated space-time of the filmic image ground. But it is precisely this reality saturation—the reproduction of which is completed by the cinematic repetition of the kinesthetic movement of human existence―that supports the tendency that the interest in watching a film is only in what is shown―and not in the way it is shown by the acting camera body. This is aggravated in the case of films with narrative content. The question of what motivates interest in a narrative story can be answered in two ways. The first moment, which supports the narrative in film, is the specifically cinematic saturation of photographic impressions of reality and the cinematic recording of real movements in the overall context of the cinematic reproduction of kinesthetic experience. However, there is another one. The interest in the narrated story is guided by the orientation toward the finally constituted product; it is thus an object-guided interest that exhibits a totalizing trait, insofar as it terminates in the story. This interest is not only to be found in all narrative genres, but already characterizes the natural experience. The latter is determined by the fact that (a) it is related to objects in the broad sense and hides the ability to be related; that (b) in its object reference, it can never stop at certain objects; but also that (c) in a principally unclosable openness, it refers to further objects. This basic structure of the opening world has the disadvantage that human experience is placed in a state of uncertainty precisely because of this fundamental openness. For in the will to appropriate objects, it will miss certain objects and will have to abandon what it has already acquired. But since natural experience knows nothing other than the reference to objects, it will try to stabilize its own existence through this object reference itself. Moreover, such stabilization can only take place with the means that an existence has at its disposal on the basis of its respective positionality and its perspective. In other words, the greater the offer of the opening of the world becomes and the more the uncertainty increases (which does not necessarily have to be the case), the stronger the tendency to close the circle of experience grows―in that position and perspective are strengthened in their respective limitations, that means detached from their respective actual dimensions of experience and made absolute, and in this way solidify their object reference. This can be seen in the shaping of world views that tend to have their specific character leading to a closing of the existential positionality underlying them. The institution of the narrated stories is an important element in closing one’s own border. The mythical encirclement in the protective armor of the narrative reveals itself as a double-edged sword: securing one’s own position is bought at the high price of existence becoming trapped in the totality it creates. Each of these closures already contains a reflexive potential insofar as existence in the imago of the delimiting inclusion reserves its positionality for itself. But this mirroring does not generally lead to a realization of the relationality of one’s own place; it merely interprets it and rather seduces to an exclusive setting of one’s own interpretation, without reflecting it in its boundaries.13 The strengthening of one’s own place therefore runs the risk of conjuring up new counterforces, since societies that arm

13 From this could be taken a criterion for a narrative that is no longer or not entirely subject to the convention of the own.

What is moving in the movie  287 themselves in this way with imaginative means and tend to absolutize their positionality can come into real confrontation with the world views of other societies. The basic structure of natural attitudes is thus characterized by a peculiar ambivalence, in which opening and closing the world come together in a tension. The escape into the narrative, which strives for security, is continued through the genres of the imaginary, which human existence has produced in the course of its cultural development up to the movie. In the movie, the ambivalent existential facts of opening and closing meet the immanent filmic ambivalence, which exists between an intensification of narration on the one hand and the potential for cinematic reflection on the other, which in the mirroring repetition of human existence is able to reveal its tendency to live in the (narrated) object. It is precisely where the existential escape into the totality of one’s own positionality can be reflected that the highest, reality-affine potency for increasing this totalization on the basis of filmic narration functions at the same time―a potency that is based on the filmic saturation of reality and the horizon continuity of kinesthetic experience reproduced in film. In terms of the possibility of the filmic immanent reflection of this totalizing tendency of human existence, each movie is a document: it documents not only the mode of experience of the natural setting by repeating it from the experiential position, perspective, and kinesthetic of the camera body, but also the ambivalence of natural experience, which alternates between openness and a closure that tends toward a whole, in that its narrative capacity―based on reality-saturated and kinesthetic reproduction—also repeats this tendency toward totality. The fictional in film is like a veil that covers reality; if the narrative layer in a movie with fictional events were to be removed, the movements of the actors would remain as they were preserved in the filmic medium.14 Consequently, the difference between a documentary film and a movie with a narrative plot is quite fluent. A documentary film can contain narrative structures (when persons, animals, plants, landscapes, objects shown are given a fictitious role), and it can have a narrative structure within the authors’ framework.15 While in documentary film the border to the manipulative reproduction of reality can be crossed, the fictional film topic is not about manipulation―this is specifically required by the fictional framework―but implicitly the intensified repetition of the natural tendency to totalize the horizon of experience is at work here. If the interest of the movie viewers is tending to the narrative of the plot, the basic potential of the cinematic, which documents the essential structure of the movement of human existence―i.e., the possibility of revealing the natural totalizing orientation toward the object precisely through its repetition within the film―remains unused. In the opposite case, movies that break the termination in the story create a tension between the narrated story and the fact of its disclosure. It is important to take a closer look at

14 To avoid any misunderstanding, it should be emphasized that it is not a question here of eliminating imaginative structures and narrative content, but rather of how to deal with them: whether they are used in such a way that they do merely function as a special case of the natural totalizing belief in objects, or in such a way that a distancing approach to this belief will be realized, which also enables us to make this belief thematic. 15 The difficulty of certifying a movie as “pure documentation” is evident from the very beginning of the film. For who is able to decide whether the approaching train in L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) by the Lumière brothers is just a simple documentary or has already been shot with an intention to surprise the viewers with the train rolling toward them? In the second case, there may still be an essential difference between whether the camera movement itself creates content-related structures and whether it merely provides auxiliary services for an imposed story.

288  Hans Rainer Sepp this breaking process. It coincides not only with milestones in film history but also with avant-garde art in general, be it visual art, literature, theater, or music. It can be described as a peculiar sequence of movements of continuity and discontinuity. 2.3

The natural world experience is already continuous and discontinuous in one.16 Its worldopening function is based on the fact that a continuous time-space is generated in the network of horizons. This continuity is, however, as already mentioned, always endangered; not only can expectations be disappointed, but entire contexts of meaning can be broken. In the face of the ever-present threat of a collapse in the realization of its world-opening power, human existence devises counter-measures; such measures involve a setting of continuity driven by imaginative means, which, however, correlates with the formation of a respective basic life-worldly attitude and tends to close off and totalize this attitude. The global media triumph of film may be explained by the fact that its way of imaginative mediation works with a tool which, unlike literature, is not only made of imaginative material, but is saturated with reality, and which, unlike theater, is in turn capable of imaginatively capturing this reality saturation and reactivating it again and again, at any time and in any place. But here, too, a danger lurks; for if the continuity imaginatively promoted in the narrative becomes too strong and tends toward closure in the sense described, the real implications of the imaginative presentation will be absorbed by it. In the worst-case scenario, there is then only one real reference left, which is the total factuality of the imaginative itself. The correlative existential attitude closes itself off, just in the filmic demonstration of its own disposition to an enlightenment of this disposition, to such an extent that what is presented becomes an imaginative blueprint for the experience of reality itself. However, since the film has an ambivalent structure that oscillates between an intensification of the narrative on the one hand and a reflection of human existence that tends to narrative wholeness on the other, it is also suitable for responding to this tendency toward an absolute continuum by creating a discontinuous counter-movement. And in this respect, its development is in line with, and to a certain extent even supports, the emergence of avant-garde forms at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is distinguished by the fact that in it, unlike in all other genres, the real and the imaginative work together most strongly. The real imposes itself as a discontinuity-creating counterforce where imaginative connections are broken. Epic theater calls this the “estrangement effect.” In film, where the imaginative meets the reality-saturated, independent of the here and now, and the camera body guides the receptive view, this has a completely different effect. In film, too, the practice of estrangement is an inhibition of the uninterrupted narration, but here it is achieved with film-specific means. A simple means is the filmic

16 Here the concept of “discontinuous continuity” of NISHIDA Kitarô can be referred to (see his essay “Sekai no jikodôitsu to renzoku” [1935] [“Self Identity and Continuity of the World”]; in Nishida Kitarô zenshû [Complete Work Edition], vol. 8 (Tôkyô: Iwanami Shoten, 1988), 7–106). The relation between continuity and discontinuity is not an either-or. Continuity remains, because without it there would be no discontinuity either. For Husserl, the discontinuous is in fact only a deviation from a fundamentally continuous one, the “unity of the world,” which is always persevering, while Nishida―due to his more radical concept of the absolutely individual—considers continuity and discontinuity to be interwoven and interdependent in the relationship between the absolutely individual and the absolutely general.

What is moving in the movie  289 cut, which blocks a movement and its relevance for the story to be told, but can also be covered by the narrative’s overall concept and integrated into it. The same applies to the plan sequence, because this too can be subordinated to the story and thus only functionally runs or develops its own power and thus expresses, for example, the positionality and perspective of the camera body’s attitude as a mirror of experiencing human existence, as Dreyer demonstrated in Ordet (1955) and Gertrud (1964). It should not be forgotten that even a movie which, due to its saturation of reality in combination with its narrative structure, offers an intensive identification with the content presented, in any case, also creates discontinuity: with its beginning, when the first ray of light falls on the screen, and likewise when it ends; it does not end, for example, in the happy end, but in the end of the happy end, when the light goes out and darkness embraces us again. Even that a story ends still belongs to it, but as its real factor, and reflects the finiteness of our existence. 2.4

Two examples may illustrate what has been said. Fellini’s Otto e mezzo (1963) demonstrates the end of narration and the real beginning of the cinematic: the impossibility of telling a coherent, continuously developing story on film without imposing something different, a narrative layer, on the filmic movement and without covering up what is actually cinematic. Otto e mezzo is therefore not simply the narrative of a film director who is unable to realize his new movie. Rather, it is shown in the broken form of representation, how the protagonist experiences resistance both in his profession of telling stories and in his life in general―in other words, what is presented is something that transcends imagination, using imaginative means that go to the limits of themselves. This resistance is demonstrated by the fragmentation of narrative continuity, in such a way that the fragmentation itself marks the way the protagonist experiences his failure: it is not told by an outside observer―the film is not a narrative about the protagonist’s ­failing―but the screening, the movement of the camera body, works to give the fragmented inner perspective of the protagonist himself. The discontinuous course of a personal life is shown, a director’s life that seeks to establish continuity through the film and literally breaks at this goal, but which is saved where the protagonist accepts this fact in the end. This fragmenting story, which finds its continuity only in the discontinuousness of the shots, thus reveals the form of the cinematic as such, as well as the way it corresponds to actual life. It is only in the resistance of the continuous story, which withdraws from itself, that the form is found that life is able to realize in film and with which the film can hold up a mirror to life. Hitchcock’s Psycho of 1960 treads a superficially different path. Although the audience is seemingly conventionally carried away by the story, it is done in such a way that the viewer’s identification with the story is constantly broken, without it being dissolved. The narrative thus reaches its limits precisely because the narrative radicalizes its identity-creating potential. The story works with abrupt surprises, which always follow a certain staged pattern: actions anticipate a tense and expected consequence, which never comes to fruition or ends in a completely unexpected situation. Marion, who flees with the money she has stolen, first attracts the attention of a policeman, then of a car dealer, but both remain without consequences, contrary to what is indicated by the staging. After she checks into Norman Bates’ Motel, the owner makes it clear to her that his mother does not want him to have contact with women, and before her conversation with him, she hears him arguing with an elderly female person. After talking to Bates, she considers

290  Hans Rainer Sepp returning the stolen money, but, quite unexpectedly, she is murdered in the shower by a figure in women’s clothes. A detective, who is put on Marion’s trail, is also attacked by a figure in women’s clothes in Bates’ house and falls down the stairs. However, only at the end does it become clear that it was Bates himself who became his mother and put on her clothes while he kept her mummified body in the house. In his conversation with François Truffaut, Hitchcock emphasizes that he was concerned with continually destroying the viewer’s attitude of expectation. Murder in the shower, in particular, was to have the sole purpose of coming abruptly and unexpectedly.17 Hitchcock uses filmic means―i.e., the use of discontinuous breaks in the context of a continuously narrated story―to realize the phenomenology of a continuously discontinuous world-experiencing life: the viewer’s natural interest is turned toward the story in an object-fixed way, as in the unreflected mode of natural world experience. The author’s interest, however, correlates with a reflection on this natural way of life, in that the build-up of tension is based on the intended production of what can be called the “inductivity” of world experience.18 The natural attitude realizes itself in such a way that in the now, mediated by the temporal and spatial horizons that open up with this now, it is always referred to that which does not yet exist, so that contents are inserted into the future from the point of view of the given now. Not only do magic practices and conspiracy theories function in this way, but, as Husserl has already explained, inductive sciences too. In essence, this describes the fact that human existence, by its anticipation guided by interests, identifies itself with an imaginatively acquired inventory that is motivated by its own momentary experience. By artificially incorporating such anticipatory arcs of expectation into the narrative construction of a story but then not fulfilling them or fulfilling them contrary to expectations, the constitution of the totalizing tendency of natural world experience emerges—both in terms of the apperceptive style in the case of narrative structures in particular and of the real execution of life in general. The movie reflects this style, whereby the reflective attitude that reveals it is not a theoretical one, but is used in the interest of the film’s effect. Unlike in Epic theater, the surprise effects in this and other movies by Hitchcock do not aim to free the viewer from his or her attitude of identification, but rather to build it up, only to disappoint it continuously. While Fellini’s movie pushes the breaking of narrative by reflecting on the profession of the director who reaches the limits of cinematic narration in and with the film itself, Hitchcock does the same in a different way. With the help of cinematic narration, he demonstrates its breaking by showing how in the endless openness of world experience, expectations lead to closures of the experience potential. 2.5

As a result we can state: film is saturated with reality in relation to what it shows and as the human body operating the camera repeats the kinesthetically realizing human existence. In this way, it reveals both the reality profile to be experienced and the modes of 17 In his conversations with Truffaut, Hitchcock emphasizes that neither the subject nor the characters were important to him in Psycho, but rather the arrangement of purely cinematic means. The result, he says, is a “pure movie,” but one that is at the same time intended to capture the audience. Cf. François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), ch. 13. 18 Cf. Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchungen zur Genealogie der Logik, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1972), 28.

What is moving in the movie  291 experiencing reality. Reality saturation and repetition of the kinesthetically realized existence emerge through the imaginative performance of photographic and cinematic visualization. As a documentation of the real, they simultaneously contradict this imaginization without being able to escape it, because they need the image in order to be able to manifest themselves in this way. If the imaginative is caught up in the object of the story to be told, the reflection of the experience of reality and the experienced real is covered by the narrative layer of the film. In one sentence: film is the movement of the camera body, which makes movements visible in the presented construction of imaginative but realitysaturated worlds and becomes itself visible in the movements of this making visible. But if the core of the cinematic is the expression and self-reflection of human existence in its real-imaginative double nature, then it should be asked whether it is sufficient to simply tag a philosophy of film with the label of aesthetics, anthropology, or media science. If a philosophy of film is not a philosophical special discipline since it leads to the center of moving human existence, the ground and full scope of the potential of the movement of movies can only be made comprehensible from there.19

19 This chapter was written at the Faculty of Human Sciences, Charles University in Prague.

17 Topographies of memory Husserl’s “Ever-New Present” and recollection in urban art Sanem Yazıcıoğlu

Abstract  The aim of this chapter is to explore how the surrounding world influences and transposes artistic production. The “new” is an inalienable feature of artistic production, even in reproduction. Husserl’s views of perception and how it is intrinsically related to the “new” offer an enriching theory of aesthetics and philosophy of art salient to this specific feature. This relation is first exposed by showing that adumbrations in retention are the first stage to the adumbrations in perception; second, memory is considered as a topography that binds adumbrations and variations in recollection. These variations cannot always be productive in the artistic sense, and can remain repetitive, depending on their “fillings.” This point is explained by comparing concrete walls to the glass façades of contemporary architecture and how they can influence the work of an artist, as they do in the case of Burhan Doğançay. Keywords  Husserl; Aesthetics; Retention; Recollection; Topography; Memory; Topography of Memory; Urban Art; Ever-New; Artistic Production 1 Introduction On a number of occasions, Husserl uses the image of a house. In most of these instances, the house represents the first encounter with the world—which, despite its simply being there, presents the complexity of perception. For Husserl, the house and its walls are emblematic of the experience of encountering ordinary objects and of our doxic attitude toward the objects of perspective. Husserl’s presentation of the problem begins principally with the unseen parts of objects—the parts that always stand in need of further explanation regarding their temporality, since objects of perception are at the center of our lived experience, which “terminates” past experience “in an ever-new present.”1 Artistic production is not a sterile segment of one’s lived experience, as attested by the work of Burhan Doğançay, a Turkish-American artist whose work has been devoted to urban walls as transmitters of culture. Doğançay’s painting and collage series on walls

1 Edmund Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten, 1918– 1926 (Husserliana XI), ed. Margot Fleischer (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 208; English translation: Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures on Transcendental Logic, ed. Rudolf Bernet (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 259. Henceforth cited as Hua XI with German and English page references, respectively. DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-18

Topographies of memory  293 in cities amount to a tribute to what Husserl would call the “ever-new.” Husserl’s notes on active and passive synthesis contain a stunning characterization of the challenge of the “new”: “Perception brings something new; that is its nature.”2 In his different series on walls, Doğançay explores wall surface as an expression of plasticity that constantly challenges the wall’s still presence. Similarly to Husserl’s employment of the house, Doğançay’s wall has a segmented existence. It is both a static object of return and a unity of its ever-changing forms and colors altered by people; it is also subject to natural corrosion. Both kinds of change reveal its temporality in different ways. In their simultaneous stability and change, urban walls present a special topos of memory, in terms of both individual and collective memory whose retrieval is ever-new. In the constitution of the temporality of an enduring object, Husserl uses an analogy between “spatial things” and “temporal things” and their capacity to insert themselves into the “spatial world” and the “temporal world.”3 In this analogy the “world” is invoked as a special location, indicating that no constitution is possible without an insertion between foreground and background, or between before and after. The term “topography of memory” is being introduced here in a similar sense indicative of the possibility of configuring recollection as an insertion into conscious flow as such. In this sense, the term makes no reference to memory as a fixed property or anything similar to Locke’s “storehouse” that one can return to. Topography of memory instead figures as the capacity to gather and bind spatial and temporal fulfillments in terms of foreground and background, or before and after which together manifest the possibility of an insertion into the reproduced appearances in the flow of one’s experiences.4 A wall, similarly to any other object of constitution, has the character of constant change in its unity in each constitutive act. Nevertheless, the wall’s essential feature of shaping space by means of insertion within it as a concrete object makes a wall special among other appearances. By their very character of being concrete and at the same time changing appearances, walls interact with the surrounding world and people, changing the perception and memory in the process. Within the limits of the same capacity, walls can exemplify (i) how perceptual and temporal flow can form new topographies of memory in each encounter with them, and (ii) how the material objects of the world can be transformed into cultural objects and transfigured as works of art, persisting as the new and durable objects of the world par excellence. Moreover, if we highlight these two forms of the new as an artistic category influencing reproductions in memory, the richness of Husserl’s contribution to aesthetics and philosophy of art becomes more apparent. Husserl’s investigations of the temporality of constitution emphasize that the new is not the result of perception, but rather its character. This claim reaches further clarity in his investigations of the relation between (i) retentional adumbrations, (ii) adumbrations of physical appearance in their changing perspectives, and (iii) constantly changing appearances awakening in each recollection. Husserl explores these relations on several occasions, including the 1905 lectures on the consciousness of time. In light of these lectures, retentional adumbrations and their 2 Hua XI, 211/263. 3 Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins, 1893–1917 (Husserliana X), ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 55; English translation: On the Phenomenology of Consciousness of Time, 1893–1917, trans. John. B. Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), 57. Henceforth cited as Hua X with German and English page references, respectively. 4 Hua X, 60/62.

294  Sanem Yazıcıoğlu influence over the originary field of impressions are going to be examined in Section 2. The third section will discuss how retention (primary memory) links to recollection (secondary memory) and how together they form new topographies of memory. The meaning of repetition and return in each recollection will be discussed in this connection. The overarching claim is that recollection can be evoked by different types of adumbrations, which can influence the capacities of memory either as a field of repetitions or creative reproductions. This claim will be explained by comparing concrete and glass surfaces of urban walls, demonstrating that differences among the surrounding worlds that one encounters can significantly change artistic production. In the final section, this claim is applied to Doğançay’s works on urban walls. 2  The source of multiplicity: primal impression and primary memory Husserl devoted his investigations on the consciousness of time to an extensive explanation of the intrinsic relations between time, perception, and memory. In one of the most remarkable passages describing the relation between time and perception, he states: “if we call perception the act in which all ‘origin’ lies, the act that constitutes originally, then primary memory is perception.”5 Husserl’s description is explained in a series of arguments concerning continuity and the significance of recollection in constitution and in succession of time. As he explains, the continuity of time can be constituted only if we understand the “now” in terms of what Husserl calls the running-off phenomena in their constant change.6 The “running-off phenomena” do not only present the “modes of temporal orientation” but also indicate the unique content that is received in the flow of time. Husserl depicts each “now” as a point in the flow which necessitates a beginning or a source point. This presumed source point is the “production of the primal impression” related to an object.7 However these produced series of primal impressions are not sufficient in themselves to form the “now;” they need to be available to capture in succession. This is the stage in which Husserl describes the moment when the primal impression passes over into retention “each earlier point of series is adumbrated in its turn as a now, in the sense of retention.”8 This availability is only possible if something that prevented those impressions is to fade away. Indicating this possibility in the later texts, Husserl refers to retention as primary memory. Retention is primary memory that “continuously attaches itself to the ‘impression,’”9 famously characterized as a “comet’s tale” where Husserl clarifies the point: “we characterized primary memory or retention as a comet’s tale that attaches itself [schliesst sich] to the perception of the moment.”10 What is remarkable here is that, from the beginning, primal impression presents itself in adumbrations, as shown by the figure of “a comet’s tale.” Another critical addition to these explanations is Husserl’s remark that perception has less to do with reality. Primary memory, Husserl elaborates, is possible after a preceding sensation and perception whether they take place in reality or not.11 This means that retention can be directed toward a real or an imagined

5 Ibid., 41/43. 6 Ibid., 28/29. 7 Ibid., 30/30. 8 Ibid., 30/31. 9 Ibid., 31/32. 10 Ibid., 31/32, 36/37. 11 Ibid., 33/34.

Topographies of memory  295 object. Nevertheless, in either case, retention cannot produce objectivities to which one can return “but only holds in consciousness what has been produced and stamps on it in the character of the ‘just past.’”12 These points make clear that an examination on perception’s influence over artistic production cannot begin with mere recollection; rather, it is essential to take into account that, first, adumbrations already exist at the retentional level, and, second, that the retentional modifications can belong to a field that has no existence in physical reality. Artistic production can therefore be seen as a capacity embedded in the field of retentional modifications, which enfolds vast quantities of momentary impressions from the very beginning of the perceptual process. Although Husserl carefully distinguishes the levels of retention and recollection, in describing retention as a special form of intentionality, as further illustrated by the figures of a comet’s tale or an echoing sound, he invites us to think of these series in their modifications. If we try to recall a moment in which we saw a comet’s tail, we can configure the moment with any number of slight differences, in such a way that it would not be immediately obvious which one among them has reference to the real. Husserl sees it as essential to preserve the field of recollection as the field of objectivities, shifting from the question of which modification corresponds to what is real to the question of whether a comet’s tail has been seen. The secondary memory, or recollection, is the field that can be returned to in each recollection, as recollection builds itself up in the continuity of retentions, and it has the capacity to produce enduring objectivities.13 Yet, since this building-up depends upon representations (Vergegenwärtigungen) and re-presentational modifications of the perceptual process, recollection has the character of an “index of reproductive modification.”14 These series of reproductive modifications are completed in succession and form the continuity of possible return. In the flow of constitution of temporal moments and their perceptual contents, the flow of time between retentions and recollections is preserved in succession. In succession, original impression (Urimpression) prevents constitution from an infinite regress by holding the moment and making it ready to transmit it to recollection. This transition is necessary for the continuity of time and the succession that builds itself up in this continuity. In both processes, that of retentional modification and that of reproductive modification in recollection, the temporal flow becomes a source of infinite artistic production due to the infinite different impressions that these modifications hold. This relational scheme that unites retention, impression, and their relations to memory is crucial not only for the texts of 1905–1910 but also for Husserl’s later texts, particularly those pertaining to the structure of recollection in passive synthesis.15 The contextual continuity can be observed in light of two premises developed in Husserl’s earlier texts, where he explains the essential role of perception and its intrinsic relation to memory in general. The premises behind his claim are that (i) primary memory is perception16 and (as the salient texts further explain) (ii) time-constituting acts constitutive of past and present cannot be possible without perceptions of temporal objects. Recollection builds up objectivities in order to make it possible to return to these temporal objects in an

12 Ibid., 36/38. 13 Ibid., 36/38. 14 Ibid., 37/39. 15 Ibid., 206/208, 257/259. 16 Ibid., 41/43.

296  Sanem Yazıcıoğlu intended order. These key arguments elaborate the earlier claim that, from the very beginning, time-constitutive acts cannot be conceived without retentional modifications and the multiple series that they generate in perception. As indicated earlier, “adumbrations of retention” and the “index of reproductive modifications” are conditions that correspond to the multiplicity of constituted content in each singular unitary form, including artistic production. What Husserl’s account suggests can be formulated as the promise and the possibility of the “new” in each synthesis and in each form. Nevertheless, differences in repetitive acts can challenge the idea of return and the promise of the “new.” What now needs to be addressed is the meaning of what it would be “to return” to these objectivities. 3  Recollection and repetition The previous section’s examinations aimed to show that there is always an assumed transition between different temporal and perceptual moments of constitution. As a result, the constitution of a perceptual act cannot be conceived separately from temporal constitution, and this affirms the necessity to think of time and space neither in a privileged order nor as a static field. Further, the inclusion in the analysis of perceptions of real and phantasy objects alike expands the field of memory. If memory is a field that holds these objects either in their relation to a real space or a space-in-phantasy, one can understand recollection with respect to this relation and its capacity to return (in the dual sense of return to and return of) one of these constitutive moments. Since, in both memory and recollection, the spatial references are kept as part of perception and therefore of constitution, they give rise to a “field” of memory. In this section, memory will be elaborated in terms of this enlarged and genetic field. The intent is to show how recollection between perceived spaces (either physical or phantasy spaces) and the field of memory that holds multiple and indexical unities of these perceived spaces interact as an infinite field of return.17 In order to keep the twofold spatial references in memory—as a field that holds the unities in continuity and that which enables the return to the particular moment in each recollection—I will use the term “topography of memory.” From the perspective of the philosophy of art, the emphasis on the role of memory does not partake in the reductionist aspects of explaining the imagination solely as grounded in recollections, yet without memory, neither successions nor continuity or any form of (re-)productions are possible. Therefore, the term “topography of memory” refers both (i) to the continuity of conscious acts, despite the possible discontinuities or gaps in recollection, and (ii) to the intertwined reference to space and time and to their mutual constitution. As the first point indicates, succession and continuity are only made possible by the transition between different temporal moments, and by the possibility of repeating these moments in recollection. Yet transitions and repetitions require a field which might carry these potentialities, as signified by the term “topography of memory.” Further, this term indicates that the repetition inherent in the idea of a return to something can only be possible as configured within a spatio-temporal order. Husserl treats all recollections as temporal objects that constitute objectivities and can be returned to. For these reasons, understanding memory as a topos in this special sense can clarify the idea of return and provide us with insights into the encounter with the “new” and the special circumstance when this encountering is “repetitive.”

17 Ibid., 43–44/45–46.

Topographies of memory  297 For Husserl, recollection is the capacity for re-presentation and re-production. The German and English suffixes of ver- (Vergegenwärtigung) and re- (re-presentation/RePräsentation) invite us to notice the fact that both of these acts include a form of repetition in returning to something that has already been constituted. This capacity is also unignorable in recollection and in the term Wiedererinnerung. The reference to space of return has its roots in the originary temporal field, since it is described as the “original temporal field to which the recollection itself belongs.”18 In this description, the relation between the original temporal field of perception and recollection makes it possible to conceive memory where these coexistent fields are preserved and interact in concomitant topographies. Although these topographies can appear in their variations in each recollection (and therefore exists in plural in the form of topographies), it is not always easy to distinguish between the variations of topographies and the meaning of return: if we imagine ourselves looking at the same object twice, as it is in Husserl’s example of looking at a chalk twice,19 we can neither form two distinct fields fully overlapping with one another and reducing the sameness of the chalk into an identity, nor can we fully distinguish the difference between the repetitive contents. To take a more complex example of a memory, let us consider a childhood memory, which can present different form of repetition. If someone returns to a place of childhood memory, to one’s childhood home, for example, a sound or a visual impression can evoke past memories in that person, and either type of sensual impression can reproduce the perceptions of past moments. Similarly, a taste or a smell can transport one into feeling of being back at one’s childhood home. Those moments of repetition are only made possible by the transition between temporal moments that hold those fillings in their spatial references. In both instances of recollection, the transition between the moments and even its very possibility spring from the correspondence between a certain physical topography and a certain topography in memory that I referred as concomitant topographies. The ideas of transition and repetition are only made possible by the coexistent spatial fillings in constituted memory. Husserl’s analyses, with their special sense of repetition and its promise of a new recollection and reproduction, convey an enriching interpretation of appearances. From the beginning of 1905, Husserl examines adumbrations in retentions. In Thing and Space, this point is probed in Husserl’s famous conceptions of variation and adumbration. In the same lecture series, Husserl explains variation as follows: The general essence of continuous-unitary perception of things includes the possibility of variation in the temporal relations, while the fillings that extend over time with various degrees of density are preserved. […] Thus the appearance is gradually transforming itself into an ever new one.20 Works of architecture have the capacity to expand variations not only in singular memory but also in the form of collective memory. The notion of topography presents works of 18 Ibid., 51/53. 19 Ibid., 8/8. 20 Edmund Husserl, Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907 (Husserliana XVI), ed. Ulrich Claesges (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 99; English translation: Thing and Space. Lectures of 1907, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), 84. Henceforth cited as Hua VII with German and English page references, respectively.

298  Sanem Yazıcıoğlu architecture as a special segment of memory. Monumental uses of space, in the forms of memorials, squares, and historic buildings, offer a stable and concrete physical topography (the physical environment) transmittable to the topographies of memory in personal experience. Therefore, such monuments provide a common physical topography and a ground for recollections at the personal and the collective levels. These recollections are collective experiences that build a common topographical reference in memory. In contrast to a singular recollection of a childhood home, for instance, a public square is a common object of recollection in its various aspects and variations, and thereby shapes the topographies of collective memory. The shape and history of every public square is unique, as each of them attaches to its surrounding environment and the recollections of the events that they sheltered in the past. In that sense, a public square is a place where events can unfold in different aspects for those who have been there, a place that holds the center of these recollections, and therefore a place that can hold the unity of these recollections by attaching them to a single place. Not only does this center stabilize the recollections of an event in unity, it supplies also a possibility of altered recollections in virtue of its role as the ground for collective memory. What makes a square the heart of both the city and collective memory is its potential to conduct the transitions between the topography of a place and the topography of memories attached to it. It is not accidental that, throughout history, ideological movements with an agenda to rewrite public history strove to demolish these topographies, disrupting the possibility of return to these spaces of collective memory.21 Altering memory requires altering space. Only an “altered nexus of relations”22 can uncouple the memorial and spatial topographies of individual and collective memory. 4  Concrete walls and transparent walls One could not possibly confuse images of Taksim Square and Alexander Platz or Time Square, yet this is readily imaginable with pictures of the commercial centers of the same three cities, respectively. Steel and glass, as they are used in modern architecture, and the appearances they create, construct a different world and alter the capacity for recollection in significant ways. This becomes evident in comparing the ways in which concrete walls and glass walls influence perception and memory. The difference of transparency between glass and concrete walls influences not only recollection but also the individuals’ artistic and creative interactions with the city. Even the smallest sign on a concrete wall can be seen as a sign of habitation around it, whereas glass remains mostly detached and resistant to interaction. The notion of the concrete has been at the center of modern aesthetics since the moment of Hegel’s claim that an idea appears in its presentation.23 Husserl’s call for a “concrete ontology”24 and Heidegger’s notion of facticity align with this call for the concrete

21 For further explanations on symbol and collective memory in Husserl and Ricoeur, see Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Collective Memory and the Historical Past (The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 73–74. 22 Hua XI, 269/404. 23 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Werke XVIII, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Mich (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1986), 29. 24 Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (Husserliana I). ed. S. Strasser (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950) 181; English translation: Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 155.

Topographies of memory  299 in these philosophers’ phenomenological investigations. It is this notion of the concrete that is challenged by the present-day glass architecture and its concomitant suggestion of transparency. As a notion, transparency stems from at least two components: the quality of something that is itself translucent, and the second quality of allowing one to see what stands behind. The latter quality can be seen as a positive gathering of the distinction between in and out, as seen in the various studies it has inspired.25 At the same time, “transparency” refers to a deceptive distinction between inside and outside without any gathering or separation, as represented by glass. In this very capacity, transparency can be used as an instrument of deception. Indeed, the rise of the technologies underlying glass architecture has accompanied a concurrent rise of transparency discourses of the late-1990s governments, and similar rhetorical gestures continue to inspire and rely on glass architecture to this day. Together with the ideal of political transparency, the extensive use of glass presents a glamorous and shiny outfit for the buildings as a symbol of economic success. Almost without exception, commercial city centers follow this trend, immediately recognizable in the widespread use of immense glass surfaces. Concrete walls stand in contrast with today’s glass buildings. Urban walls of wider public use, such as the walls of historic buildings, the timeworn buildings in old parts of a city, and the suburbs, contain significantly less glass and are constructed with materials such as brick, stone, and concrete. Although Bauhaus architecture presented a modern form of concrete walls and used materials, including glass, in their simplicity, attention was given to maintaining the plasticity of space and unifying the functional and aesthetic aspects of the building. The inordinate reliance on glass in present-day architecture is radically at odds with the aims of Bauhaus architecture, even as attested by its recent examples. The concrete walls of a city, whether they belong to a historic building or located in a suburb, allow the onlooker to encounter the surrounding world in its multilayered forms. These layers can be historical or social, but in all circumstances a monumental building presents history and memories of the past. An urban-area wall can be covered with murals or graffiti that display the manner of its attachment to the surrounding people and the way in which the wall is part and parcel of its surroundings. Only within the interaction to their surrounding world, people are actively involved in history that is the original presentation of meaning-formations, what Hopkins refers to as “the past history of the original presentation of what is manifest in these meaning-formations, including all ‘objectivities’ and indeed the meaning-formation that comprises the universal horizon of the world itself.”26 The processes of recollection and meaning-formation while walking among glass buildings are destined to be different from the same experience amidst mural-covered walls. The experience of walking among glass walls is comparable to Husserl’s example of observing and experiencing a chalk twice, which exhibits two different constitutive acts with a repetitive content. In this example, repetition engenders different constitutions despite the sameness of content; experiencing the chalk for the second time is still a new experience, although the content of the series that it evokes will remain the same.

25 One of the most prominent texts in this context is beyond doubt Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Nothwestern University Press), 19 and 69. 26 Burt C. Hopkins, “The Transcendental Problematic of Generativity and the Problem of Historicism. Remarks on Steinbock’s Home and Beyond,” The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 1 (2001): 377–389, here 383.

300  Sanem Yazıcıoğlu This example permits the drawing of an analogy between the chalk and the glass. When we compare the sameness of glass surfaces to the qualities of a concrete wall, especially a wall embellished with signs, such as murals, it will always remain a source of evernew fillings. Similarly to a chalk, a glass surface can be seen from different perspectives, thereby gaining new fillings. And yet, in the case when primary memory is limited to the production of repetitive series, the result will be that the secondary memory will not have recourse to any series to return in a significant spatial or temporal order. In spite of the differences of constitutional level, the indifference of recollecting these series can be described as a lack of attachment to any particular topography of memory, since their spatial and temporal references provide a very weak ground of return. Without this attachment and references, neither recollection nor any active synthesis is possible. Consequently, without these topographies of memory, neither active engagement nor active artistic production would be possible. This claim will be elaborated with the example of Burhan Doğançay’s works. 5 Doğançay’s walls and artistic production The walls are a part of a city that undergoes constant change, either by displacement or by changing its shapes and colors. This feature of the walls is comparable to the Husserlian description of memory which summons us to see it as a realm of constant change and displacement. Doğançay binds the changes between walls and recollections, and stabilizes the constant changes in a unique form by means of his art. Doğançay’s and Husserl’s interests are remarkably similar with regard to the way in which a wall or a house can challenge memory, becoming an infinite source of new variations. The similarity of their inspirations is comparable in two particular ways: first, the way in which they see the changing physical structure of the walls in their changing layers and surfaces, backgrounds and foregrounds, attachments to and detachments from their surrounding environments, and second, in correlation to these changes and changing experiences, how the act of seeing a wall or a house can be the source of ever-new perceptions and recollections for the surrounding people. Doğançay’s works transpose this astonishing capacity for encountering the change within walls; they gather the signs and traces left on them by people. Doğançay adds one more feature to these signs of interaction and expands the challenge of the new by the inclusion of changing light and natural corrosion. The artist describes the tantalizing effect of unpredictable light and of the colors that a wall can reflect but momentarily with a sheer contrast to the simplicity of a momentary vision. What he calls tantalizing with respect to a moment is its resistance to being captured fully in gusting wind or changing light. For Doğançay, the tension between seeing and capturing turns into an ultimately resourceful moment of return, of looking back. One such moment may have been transposed into Doğançay’s Augenblick,27 created in 1988 (Figure 17.1). In light of the conceptions of primary memory and its adumbrations, what Augenblick depicts can be compared to the adumbrations of retentional moment. If one thinks of retention in light of Husserl’s description of “a comet’s tail,” Augenblick may

27 Eleanor Flomenhaft, “Doğançay: An Adventure of Heroism” [“Doğançay: Bir Kahramanlık Serüveni”], in Burhan Doğançay Retrospektif, ed. Zeynep Rona (İstanbul: Duran Yayınları, 2001), 63.

Topographies of memory  301

Figure 17.1  Augenblick, 1988 (Private Collection).

refer to a transition from moments that have no capacity to “create objectivities” to the “unforgettable” moments of memory. This vision of a moment and what it exposes follows: “rather than timelessness, it is this very moment in the present that they host and the potential inherent in this moment to shape our world.”28 The concrete material of the world is not only a part of a historic segment of a city or of an environment under the sun, but an appearance that is always within the radius of different perspectives in an irreducible multiplicity. The wall, a solidly shaped space, orchestrates the movements of the people around it and provides us with its unseen perspectives as a result. For this reason, collage is the principal technique of Doğançay’s work, “as he feels it is the perfect means to reflect realistically the look of urban walls by irrationally joining various foreign realities on a common ground, just as they become joined on walls themselves.”29 The artist’s transfiguration of peeling boards and slanting light on protruding poster edges and their shadows is the beginning of Doğançay’s threedimensional series known as Cones, Ribbons, and Breakthrough of the early 1970s.30 In these series, fragmented visions on walls become the ground for gathering disparate lives and perspectives in order to transform them into the common ground of collective memory. This simultaneously limiting and gathering capacity of walls and open

28 Levent Çalıkoğlu, “Half a Century of Urban Culture: The Recording of History and the Anatomy of Walls,” in Burhan Doğançay, Fifty Years of Urban Walls, ed. Angela Dogançay and Birnur Temel (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2012), 16. 29 Clive Giboire, “Doğançay’s Series: Content and Technique,” in Burhan Doğançay, Fifty Years of Urban Walls, 38. 30 Brandon Taylor, “Doğançay’s World,” in Burhan Doğançay, Fifty Years of Urban Walls, 25.

302  Sanem Yazıcıoğlu square-spaces engenders an interplay between urban walls and squares—an interplay that generates the horizon of memory. Only within this horizon can the empty outer horizon of experiences be fulfilled in different series, creating an ever-new present. Husserl’s words point to this “marvelous” capacity of consciousness: Consciousness is not only a streaming original present in which rememberings occasionally show up, and lived-experiences do not merely follow upon one another in the process of streaming through the steady form of this primordial present, and not only are there lived-experiences in an ordered sequence, in a fixed temporal form, lived-experiences that make up a unity of a past stream terminating in an ever new present.31 An appearance such as a wall can present the marvelous capacity of consciousness and the meaning of the temporal structure of the present, which can turn into collective memory, and how it can also turn into a work of art with the same capacity. Collectivity is not a reduced series of common experiences, but a possible collection of recollections of the same place, which co-belongs to its own present. If the genesis of consciousness refers to the “possibilities for series of rememberings,”32 we can see the series of the painters as an artistic contribution to the creation of a “present.” Between the Grego and Ribbons series, Doğançay’s artistic technique and manner of expression show significant differences in shaping his recollections (Figures 17.1–17.3).33 In Ribbons, the tactual material used in Grego turns into carved ribbons of papers and posters on the wall. These works show that the present of the art operates always within the horizon of past and future images, since the artist collects them with a prospection. In Husserl’s terms, “the streaming consciousness constantly projects a protentional horizon ahead of itself.”34 In Doğançay’s series, this projection reveals itself in the interplay between the past, the present, and the future. The sterile surface of glass projects a radically different type of attachment to the temporal order. Glass is not to be layered with other materials such as paper or paint. If corrupted by one of these materials, it loses its essential feature of transparency. What is repeatedly affirmed by glass is the shiny fragile present moment. Our perception of glass is all but circumscribed by circular retentional fillings, devolving into a repetition devoid of creative reproduction. For the same reason, glass surface relates no cultural historical order, since its brittle substance allows it neither to participate in durability nor to be layered in the cultural transformation. A glass façade can therefore belong to any place at any time, following the development of the technology that makes its construction possible. Arguably, this lack of any historical order can itself be transposed into artistic production; nevertheless, under these conditions, the work would have to proceed from the lack, and not from memory. Under the aspect of memory, tripartite division of time is requisite not only to explaining recollection but also to the genesis of consciousness. Without these components of time, neither a new synthesis nor a perceptual ground for new topographies of memory would be possible.

31 Hua XI, 208/259. 32 Ibid., 210/262. 33 Burhan Doğançay, Figure 17.1: Augenblick, 1988 (Private Collection); Figure 17.2: “Ribbons on Gray,” 1984; and Figure 17.3: “A Wall in New York,” 1993 (Doğançay Museum, Istanbul). 34 Hua XI, 212/263.

Topographies of memory  303

Figure 17.2  “Ribbons on Gray,” 1984.

Figure 17.3  “A Wall in New York,” 1993 (Doğançay Museum, Istanbul).

6 Conclusion By presenting an understanding of the surrounding world as a field of ever-new constitution, Husserl’s phenomenology opens a venue for a dynamic and creative understanding of aesthetics. The first encountering of the world can influence the outcome significantly. Retentional analyses show us that primal impressions attach themselves to the perception of a moment. From the beginning, this attachment provides the core for recollection, as recollections are objectivities in memory that one can return to. As a general characteristic of all conscious acts, each return in the form of recollection is new. This novelty is not sufficient to be the source of artistic production alone, despite the fact that it benefits from novelty in different forms: only gatherings of differences and changing relations, which hold the diverse recollections of lived experiences of the world, can inspire artistic production. Viewed under this aspect, glass façades and concrete walls present polar opposite cases, crystalizing the difference.

304  Sanem Yazıcıoğlu A glass façade can be purely repetitive in different topographies, as it resists interaction and participation in the surrounding world. In contrast, a concrete wall offers a solid and durable possibility of interaction. Not only does it have the capacity to shape the world in general, it can also become a part of the surrounding world with respect to the inhabitants. In the same capacity, at the level of originary impressions, the concrete walls of a city represent an infinite field that can be returned to in recollection, enriching the topographies of memory. The glass façade, however, presents only repetitive content and indifference with regard to location, which cannot attribute to constitute topographies of memory. Burhan Doğançay’s walls contribute to our understanding of how Husserl’s investigations of memory pertain to the meaning of the surrounding world. They allow us see this world within the horizon of its ever new constitution and in its transposition into art.

Part II

Heidegger and contemporary French philosophy (eds. Richard J. Colledge, Claude Romano)

18 Editor’s introduction Richard J. Colledge and Claude Romano

The chapters in this part, which are devoted to the theme of “Heidegger and Contemporary French Philosophy,” started as a set of papers given at a two-day seminar with the same title in June 2019 at Melbourne campus of the Australian Catholic University. This seminar was part of an ongoing annual series that is still run at ACU, convened by the two authors, under the loose appellation of the “Australian Heidegger Research Network.” Since 2017, these meetings have drawn together scholars working in Heidegger studies and phenomenology more generally from across Australia, as well as a series of international guests. Why Heidegger and Contemporary French philosophy? Of course, the theme is hardly a new one. Over the past few decades, there have been many articles and several booklength treatments concerned with this relationship.1 This is hardly surprising, given that so much of the history of post-war European philosophy is told via this compelling association. Such has been the immense influence of Heidegger’s thought on French intellectual life over the past century. In a way that is perhaps rivaled only by Nietzsche, the traces of Heidegger’s influence on French philosophy are to be found everywhere: from phenomenology and existentialism, to post-structuralism and deconstruction, to hermeneutics and literary theory, to theology, to environmental thought, to feminist theory, and more. It is almost impossible to imagine the work of Sartre or Levinas, Foucault or Derrida, Deleuze or Lacan, Irigaray or Ricœur, or a myriad of other key figures in recent French thought without the towering influence of Martin Heidegger and the work that he produced for over half a century. That is true whether Heidegger’s influence is understood in terms of his direct legacy to recent European philosophy, or rather more indirectly in terms of the key themes (or even the “atmosphere”) of European thought from the inter-war years onward. Alluding especially to the latter, it is difficult to overlook Tom Rockmore’s comparison between the “gravitational pull” of Heidegger’s philosophy that has “shap[ed] and determin[ed] the nature and course of French philosophical debate”

1 Tom Rockmore’s Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being (London: Routledge, 1995) was a major English language contribution in its own right, but the standard was set shortly thereafter by Dominique Janicaud’s standard work: Heidegger en France (Paris: A. Michel, 2001), Vol. 1, Récit; Vol. 2, Entretiens. Translated as Heidegger in France, François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (trans.) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). Henceforth, references will cite HF. David Pettigrew and François Raffoul’s own collection, French Interpretations of Heidegger: An Exceptional Reception (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008) was based on a conference of the North American Heidegger conference that was inspired by Janicaud’s recently published volumes (translated by Raffoul and Pettigrew), and at which Janicaud himself spoke. DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-20

308  Richard J. Colledge and Claude Romano and a massive dark star that exerts vast influence even while remaining largely invisible.2 Indeed, I would add, this prodigious influence is evidenced whether his thought is being explicitly utilized and developed, indirectly assumed and imbibed, or even when his legacy is being explicitly challenged and critiqued. Such is the pervasiveness of Heidegger’s historical and current influence on French thought and intellectual life that it is easy to forget just how unlikely it is that Heidegger could ever have become the maître à penser of so many branches of recent and contemporary French philosophy. Heidegger’s championing of the singular importance of the German language – which in his view alone matched the philosophical importance of Greek – stands in stark contrast to the high esteem of the French for their own language in its style and sophistication. While he did express admiration for the poetry of René Char, there is little other indication of Heidegger’s esteem for the French language as a medium for originary thinking. Further, Heidegger’s own heavily idiosyncratic linguistic style contrasts sharply with the refined standards of modern French literary conventions. Of course, this is not to downplay the very real linguistic gulf between the German and French languages that made translating Heidegger into French incredibly challenging, but this is yet another reason to marvel at the French reception of his work. It is extraordinary that Heidegger’s status in France could have been as exalted as it was in the post-war era without a full translation of Sein und Zeit being available until 1985 (with Martineau’s translation coming more than two decades after Macquarrie and Robinson’s English rendering). Even more striking about his French reception was Heidegger’s low estimation of the French tradition of philosophy itself. Far from building bridges with French philosophy after the war, Heidegger never made any secret, for example, of his ongoing antipathy for the iconic figure of Descartes or the recently minted philosophical hero, Sartre. Nor did he ever do much to dispel what seems to have been a general disinterest in the intellectual traditions exemplified by French political and moral philosophers, let alone their essayists and novelists. Indeed, in his famous 1946 “Letter” to Jean Beaufret, not only does Heidegger fail to even mention the great French philosophes, but he explicitly rejects the very traditions of Cartesianism and Humanism that they embodied. Far from endearing himself to a national philosophical tradition that, since at least Montaigne, placed the individual subject at the center of concern, and which in Descartes was raised to the level of a supreme metaphysical principle, Heidegger was unrelentingly critical of not only the metaphysical subject but philosophical anthropology tout court. If Being and Time was focused on “the kind of Being which belongs to those entities which we ourselves are,”3 it did so not by focusing on the primacy of the subject but by programmatically decentering it. Yet in doing so, Heidegger inaugurated what became a defining feature of French thought in the second half of the twentieth century, one which stands in stark contrast to the earlier philosophical trajectories that were largely inverted in the great metabolē of the post-war period of French philosophy.4

2 Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy, xi. 3 SZ: 50/75. 4 This striking situation even prompted Alain Renaut to call for a thorough reckoning to explain this deeply odd occurrence: “One day, someone will have to decide to write not only a history of the reception of Heidegger’s thought in France, but also an account of the amazing process spanning three generations, in the course of which, in our country, in the field of philosophy and far beyond it, there has occurred a Heideggerianization of thinking that compares to nothing else in any other country” (quoted by Janicaud in Heidegger in France, 416).

Editor’s introduction  309 In addition to the inauspicious fit between French language and philosophy and Heidegger’s attitudes to the same, the profile that Heideggerian thought came to have in French intellectual life is even more astonishing given the clash of European political ideologies and geo-political contestations in and around which this prodigious influence took place. Heidegger’s introduction to French intellectual circles – via Georges Gurvitch’s lectures at the Sorbonne in 1928 and his translation of “What Is Metaphysics?” in 1931 – occurred during the early rise of National Socialism in Germany, growing German dissent against the Versailles settlement, and heightened anti-German feeling in France. Yet, as Janicaud notes, Heidegger’s first French admirers were not drawn from right-wing French political dissidents, but from among liberal intellectuals, many of whom were themselves Jewish.5 Of course, Emmanuel Levinas’s famous 1934 essay on the new Heideggerian thought, De l’évasion,6 reveals both a vast fascination with Heidegger and a profound set of reservations that could not fail to have been informed by his reflections on the philosophy of Hitlerism published the same year. 7 But still, Heidegger’s star continued to rise in Paris. The strangeness of this juxtaposition was sustained after the end of the war. Even as Heidegger’s standing suffered via the denazification hearings that began in July 1945 and his subsequent teaching ban, his philosophical reputation in France continued to grow through the 1950s and 1960s through the agency of Beaufret and Char, seminars given in Provence, Lyon, and Le Thor, and various scholarly visits the other way, to Todtnauberg. It wasn’t until the translation of Farias’s Heidegger et le nazisme in 1987 that Heidegger’s post-war allure came under serious examination and contestation.8 Of course, at the same time, it needs to be emphasized that the French reception of Heideggerian thought was never a matter of mere importation or imitation. Rather, Heidegger provided French philosophers with resources that drove new turns within – and indeed, beyond – their own extant traditions of thought. The advent of Sartrian existentialism is itself a case in point. Even as Sartre drew on a whole series of key tropes from Heidegger’s Daseinanalytik, his L’être et le néant is no mere “misunderstanding” of Heidegger. It was rather a blending of Heideggerian (and inter alia Hegelian) ideas with French Cartesian and Humanist philosophical traditions, with the result being something very different from Heideggerian orthodoxy. Its temerity was in its creative attempt to fold (perhaps force) Heideggerian thought, albeit in a transformed sense, partially back into a tradition that he had already disavowed (as is shown, for example, by his translation of Heidegger’s “Dasein” by “réalité-humaine”). As Françoise Dastur noted some time ago, for Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, it was a question, of finding in the ‘philosophy of existence’ that came from Germany, through Husserl and Heidegger, the means of breaking out from a Cartesian-inspired reflexive philosophy, and of thinking the concrete situation of human beings in the world and in history.9

5 Janicaud, Heidegger in France, 7. 6 Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape: De l’évasion, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 7 Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Sean Hand. Critical Inquiry, 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 62–71. 8 Victor Farias, Heidegger et le nazisme (Paris: Verdier, 1987). 9 Dastur, “The Reception and Nonreception of Heidegger in France,” in French Interpretations of Heidegger, 267.

310  Richard J. Colledge and Claude Romano In this sense, Heidegger was the occasion for an epoch-bending transition. If this happened to be largely continuous with a Humanism (broadly conceived and newly rendered) that was not of interest to Heidegger, then so be it.

*** Such is the vast importance of the attempt to understand not only the French reception of Heideggerian thought but also the way that this thought has powerfully shaped French thought in some of the ways described and despite all the reasons just considered. However, the focus here is not simply on the twentieth-century reception in French thought; to the contrary, the influence of Heidegger on contemporary French philosophy is ongoing. It is in this spirit that the essays to come in this issue of The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provide new studies into this rich historical and philosophical thread in ways that build on, and in some ways update, the studies on Heidegger and French philosophy alluded to earlier. Further, the focus is not on documenting the nature and extent of Heidegger’s influence on French philosophy but on exploring specific cases of interaction in detail, noting why the issues at stake matter and where future developments may emerge. Françoise Dastur (Emeritus of the University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis) was a key player in the French reception of Heidegger’s work in the later decades of the twentieth century, as well as being a major interlocutor and contributor for both Janicaud’s twovolume 2001 study and the 2015 edited collection by Raffoul and Pettigrew. Indeed, her interview with Janicaud in the second volume of his book, as well as her essay in the Raffoul/Pettigrew collection, makes for excellent companion pieces to the essay she provides here. What she offers here is something that is more specific – dealing with a particular seminal philosophical theme: difference/identity – while also retaining a focus on a broad sweep of philosophical history from German phenomenology (specifically, Husserl to Heidegger) to the extensive development of this theme in later twentieth-century French phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty and Derrida). Dastur begins by sketching something of the prodigious profile of the theme of difference in the history of philosophy (from Parmenides and Plato to Kant and Hegel), the general quest to find higher senses of identity, and how this provides a larger context for twentieth-century German and French phenomenology. In her account, the theme of difference/identity plays out in Husserlian thought particularly in terms of the tension between immanence and transcendence, of the evolution in his understanding of the relationship between consciousness and the body (or ideality and incarnation), and thus ultimately of the relationship between phenomenology and Kant’s transcendental idealism. Heidegger, she notes, looked to move past the Husserlian dualism of immanence and transcendence by emphasizing that Dasein is always already within-the-world. However, his early work remains marked by a focus on ontological difference (the difference between Being and beings) that is addressed in his later work by the effort to simply think Being as such. It is in this context that she explores Heidegger’s method of crossing out Being (in the letter to Jünger, which was to be so important for Derrida) and especially his seminal later lectures titled, Identität und Differenz. In Dastur’s account, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida respond in contrasting ways to this Heideggerian legacy. Even in titling his late unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty followed the later Heidegger in striving to overcome dualistic notions of sense and the sensible by showing how they are indissolubly intertwined. Picking

Editor’s introduction  311 up on Heidegger’s crossing-out strategy, his focus was not on the opposition of object and subject, but on their very crossing or “chiasm.” In Derrida, however, there is a rejection even of such a strategy which for him retains lingering indications of the thinking of Being as presence. It is for this reason that Derrida suggests thinking through and beyond Heidegger to Nietzsche’s thinking of forces with its focus on the free play of signification that is entirely free of any “transcendental signified.” Dastur leaves us with a clear impression of her own view, however, that in this Derrida under-estimated the radical nature of Heidegger’s movement from his earlier thinking of ontological difference to the thinking of Ereignis. Claude Romano (Sorbonne and Australian Catholic University), in his chapter, “Heidegger and Ricœur on Ipseity,” further develops a theme related to his recently published monograph on the history of conceptions of being-oneself or authenticity, Être soi-même (2019).10 The chapter provides a re-reading of the idea of ipseity in Heidegger (Selbstheit) and Ricœur (ipséité), and how this fundamentally differs from the Cartesian and Lockean traditions with their egologies or conceptions of the self as a matter of (numerical) identity. But more than that, the chapter also challenges aspects of Heidegger’s and Ricœur’s approaches, and he suggests a way toward a more holistic response to these questions of a kind he develops at length in his L’Identité humaine en dialogue (2022). Romano begins by noting that Heidegger is concerned first of all in Sein und Zeit with the question of “being oneself [Selbst-sein and Selbstheit]” and that it is his English translators and interpreters who introduce into his texts the traditional terminology of “the ego” and “the self,” thus downplaying the originality of his conception. This is true also for Ricœur’s ipseité in Oneself as Another. The result is that these seminal twentieth-century phenomenological thinkers tend to be read in continuity with – and not in contradistinction to – the modern egologies of Descartes and Locke and the many others who followed in this line of thought, within which contemporary Analytic philosophy largely continues to move. Consequently, their originality is easily missed. Romano then goes on to explore four main assumptions underlying the classic egologies, a survey that then allows Heidegger’s and Ricœur’s alternative approaches to be sketched in more compelling relief. Key points of contrast include the difference between the “what?” and the “who?” questions, the understanding of “interiority,” the relative primacy of the first person perspective, and assumptions about intrinsic or extrinsic sociality. Central to Romano’s interpretation is that Descartes’s “ego” and Locke’s “self” deal with a completely different set of problems to those addressed (each in their own way) by Heidegger’s Selbstheit and Ricœur’s ipséité. If the Cartesian and Lockean notions of selfhood deal largely with the issue of numerical identity through time, Heidegger’s and Ricœur’s notions deal more with qualitative identity and issues arising, such as authenticity of self-portrayal and responsibility to others. In the final section, however, in the context of asking about the relationship between these two very different approaches, Romano challenges Ricœur’s suggestion – on both philosophical and linguistic grounds – that these different senses can be traced back to the difference between the Latin terms “ipse” and “idem.” To the contrary, there are not so much competing answers to the one question, as much as two different questions – one numerically orientated and the other qualitatively orientated – the answers to which can be thought together.

10 Claude Romano, Être soi-même:Une autre histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Folio, 2019).

312  Richard J. Colledge and Claude Romano Justin Clemens (University of Melbourne) introduces a different set of interlocutors vis-à-vis Heidegger in his chapter, “Badiou contra Lacan contra Heidegger: Truth, Being, Subject, Polemos.” Starting from a provocative remark in a 1982 seminar by Michel Foucault concerning the dominant importance of Heidegger and Lacan on the question of truth and the incommensurability of their respective perspectives, Clemens suggests that Alain Badiou’s approach to questions of subject, truth, and language draws on both of these thinkers, and Heidegger in particular, in developing his own approach. Even given the many ambiguities in this area, he argues (as he puts it in the chapter’s conclusion) that Badiou’s work is “fundamentally in dialogue” with Heidegger, even given that this is a dialogue that is often “abrupt, violent, highly polarized, and characterized by misunderstandings as well as extraordinary insights.” Clemens takes us back to the opening pages of Badiou’s Being and Event (1988), noting the profile that is afforded to Heidegger by name and the themes that dominate the book that have a clear Heideggerian resonance: being, truth, subject, event. He acknowledges the seminal importance of Heidegger’s distinction between truth and knowledge, the centrality of ontology, the focus on language and poetry, and the theme of polemos (auseinanderzetung). However, the place accorded to mathematics sets Badiou’s approach sharply apart from Heidegger’s, even if Badiou credits Heidegger with a far deeper understanding of the place the mathematical in its emergence within the history of ontology than is the case in Analytic traditions of philosophy that are more programmatically deferential to the mathematical. It is to explain the surprising twist by which Badiou presents mathematics as ontology (even claiming that this secures some of Heidegger’s major ontological claims) that Clemens turns to Badiou’s reading of Lacan and specifically to his presentation of the founding “algorithm” of linguistics that involves the separation of the signifier from the inexistent signified. Heidegger too, Badiou suggests, can be understood in terms of an algorithm, that of revealing-withdrawing, and even his later turn to poetry needs to be understood in the context of Heidegger’s own putative fusion of technology, mathematics, and logic! Whether one affirms Badiou’s radical engagements with Heideggerian thought, in whole or in part or not at all, Clemens succeeds in opening many insights into Badiou’s often surprising itinerary, with reference to its Heideggerian inspiration. The paper by Richard Colledge (Australian Catholic University), “From Mitsein to Volk: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Geschichtlichkeit Question in Heidegger,” both intervenes in a major debate in contemporary Heidegger studies through a close reading of the text of Heidegger’s key early work, and also deepens that reading via a substantial engagement with Jean-Luc Nancy: one of France’s most important recent Heidegger interpreters and independent philosophers. He begins by examining recent claims that Heidegger’s Being and Time is deeply implicated in his turn toward explicit association with National Socialism in the early 1930s, particularly as this relates to the notions of Geschichtlichkeit and Mitsein. These conceptions, Colledge argues, need to be understood in the context of Heidegger’s analysis of Schuld in that work. Indeed, he suggests that these three ideas are so intimately related in the text of Being and Time that they can be understood as forming something of a communitarian “triptych” at the heart of the work that in turn frames the way we read the emphasis on Eigentlichkeit and Jemeignigkeit. If Being and Time is read on its own terms in this way, he maintains, then it is difficult to justify (for reasons he outlines) the use to which Heidegger himself put Geschichtlichkeit only a handful of years later by implicating it with his ill-fated political agenda at that time.

Editor’s introduction  313 Colledge’s subsequent engagement with Jean-Luc Nancy’s own dialogue with Heideggerian thought (and to lesser extents with Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Emmanuel Levinas) in the second and later sections of the chapter provides a way of understanding both what is afoot in this trajectory between 1927 and 1932, and why it really matters for philosophical reflection more generally. For Nancy, Heidegger’s account of Mitsein is not simply of meta-anthropological and/or meta-ethical import; that other people are implicated all the way down in terms of the constitution of the individual. It is that, but more radically, what he calls “the Being-with of Being-there” is an insight into the plurality of Being as such: Mitsein as Being-in-common. Nancy’s sustained reflections on the “paradoxical logic” of singular-plural Being are thus both an immanent critique of Heidegger and a declaration concerning why his work remains of such importance in our own times. Heidegger’s catastrophic failure to do justice to his own incipient account of Mitsein should serve as a cautionary tale about the importance of developing a political ontology that is committed to the intrinsic singularity-plurality of Being, and thus the simultaneous and urgent demands of both the individual “I” and the collective “we.” Bryan Cooke’s (Ormond College, University of Melbourne) paper, “Another Night of the World: Affect and Eternity, Being and Time in Heidegger and Henry,” curates a return to Michel Henry’s reading through and beyond Heidegger, thus providing a reading not only of that relationship but also of Henry’s own core contentions in that light. It begins with a provocation by Spinoza concerning experiential knowledge of the eternal. The theme of eternity, and its affective discernment, is then explored in terms of Henry’s critique (in The Essence of Manifestation) of Heidegger’s Being and Time, as it concerns attunement and revelation, affectivity, temporality, and ipseity. After a short initial section in which he reminds us of Heidegger’s account of mood and attunement (Befindlichkeit) in Being and Time – and thus, the importance of affective access to the world in the Daseinanalytik – Cooke notes the intrinsically temporal nature of this attunement. Central to Heidegger’s account is the rejection of the more usual prioritization of the temporal present (as seen, in different ways, in Augustine and in Husserl). For Heidegger, time cannot be understood as the endless succession of “nows” or present moments, and with this critique of presence comes a rejection of the very notion of eternity. The eternal, for Heidegger, is associated with the radically enduring: that which does not pass away in the infinite succession of present moments. The programmatically futural orientation of ekstatic temporality means that the very idea of eternal presence in-the-world is ruled out. However, in leading us through Henry’s response, Cooke discusses Henry’s dissatisfaction with the Heideggerian notion of Dasein’s finite transcendence, his challenges concerning the possibilities for the manifestation of Being and the role of Dasein as the dative of that manifestation, and the way that his notion of auto-affective life emerges from out of this confrontation. Further, Cooke notes the place of Hegelism as Henry’s ultimate identified foe, specifically in terms of its vision of the kenotic dissolution of the eternal into temporality, and thus of the limitation of ipseity to partake of reality only through its own self-alienation. The brief conclusion draws together the various threads of this rich paper, while the “Coda” points the way toward a series of further reflections on the significance of Henry’s work in our own day. The chapter, “Is Anxiety Fundamental? Lacoste’s Reading of Heidegger,” is a contribution by Robyn Horner (Australian Catholic University) to mapping some of the key points of engagement between Heidegger and Jean-Yves Lacoste. Horner begins by providing an initial orientation to Lacoste’s relationship to Heidegger’s work (including vis-à-vis’ Jean-Luc Marion’s significantly different orientation). To this end, she clarifies

314  Richard J. Colledge and Claude Romano some key methodological principles of Lacoste’s work, including the porosity of philosophy and theology, and the meaning of “liturgical reduction.” The main focus of the chapter is Lacoste’s 2011 book, Être en danger. Here she explores eight key elements of Lacoste’s engagement with Heidegger, points of entry that demonstrate both his deep Heideggerian inheritance and the ways he moves through and well beyond Heideggerian thought. In the discussion of these points of entry, Horner notes the ways in which Lacoste wrestles with Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit/Stimmung distinction and the non-intentionality of moods which are self-disclosive rather than object-disclosive. The key area of critique involves his questioning of Heidegger’s privileging of anxiety as Dasein’s fundamental attunement, while his key area of innovation involves the proposal for a series of other non-intentional Grundbefindlichkeiten that do not appear within the mode of existing but only within “life.” These attunements – such as joy, being-at-peace, innocence, and also serenity – are “counter-existentials” that (as non-intentional) Lacoste characterizes as “en-static” rather than “ek-static.” To take one example, he suggests that Being-toward-death can be complemented by a factical attunement he calls “Being-at-peace.” Such an attunement retains some of the familiar formal temporal structures of Being and Time, but reconceived as “acceptance of the past and hope for the future.” The fundamental nature of such an attunement is glimpsed, Lacoste suggests, in the way that it can incorporate other attunements within its scope, and even “be maintained in the face of death, with an acceptance of finitude.” Discussed also is Lacoste’s distinction between objects (that appear to consciousness without appealing to affection) and the evental appearance of the thing that has a “sacred” resonance, and includes items of liturgical and theological significance. In the conclusion, Horner links the analysis of affect in Être en danger to Lacoste’s better-known discussion of the experience of God in affection in his Experience and the Absolute. Knox Peden brings Foucault’s late work into the mix with his “Starting from Heidegger, Arriving at Augustine: Selfhood and Christianity in Michel Foucault’s Late Work.” At the core of Peden’s discussion is the attempt to identify the deeply Heideggerian roots of Foucault’s evolving project even given the obvious differences between their respective bodies of work. However, he also shows up some surprising affinities between the two relating to their differently configured engagements with Augustine, especially in terms of the structures of the self. Of course, if Heidegger was interested in Augustine’s sketches of the self in terms of fundamental ontology, it was the accounts of desire and truth telling that interested Foucault. It is along these lines that Peden’s chapter provides a detailed analysis of Foucault’s genealogical itinerary in his History of Sexuality volumes, as he looked to understand and present the particular construction of the self in the movement from late antiquity to the Christian era, and the role of Augustine in this movement. Along the path of this itinerary, Peden finds a series of Heideggerian echoes. But ultimately, Heidegger’s Augustine and Foucault’s are very different. Heidegger’s Augustine focuses on the self-emptying self; Foucault’s on the self as willing, concupiscent. If Heidegger’s reading was interested in understanding temporal structures of self-being and the facticity of life, Foucault was interested in understanding historical transitions in the understanding of the self and its implications for desire and truth telling. If Heidegger’s reading contextualized the ­self-vis-à-vis the movement of Being, Foucault’s is more of a socio-anthropological inquiry. In this way, Foucault’s reading of Augustine is not merely an alternative reading to Heidegger’s, but one that challenges the whole project of fundamental ontology.

Editor’s introduction  315 The co-authored paper by Jack Reynolds (Deakin University) and Jon Roffe (Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy), with which this collection concludes – “Captivated by Life: The Life Sciences in the Heretical Tradition of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Ruyer” – takes the conversation in still other directions by placing the Heideggerian legacy into conversation with Merleau-Ponty’s and Ruyer’s interests in life, biology, and environmental science. Given that Heidegger’s lesser-known and idiosyncratic inquiries into this area in his Winter 1929–1930 course were not published until 1983, the line of influence to Merleau-Ponty’s Structure of Behavior and his Nature lecture course (and to Ruyer’s Neofinalism and other scientific works) was not direct. Indeed, in some ways, they amount to an area of French philosophy that was largely uninfluenced by Heideggerian thought. Nonetheless, the three comprise a tellingly heterodox (or “heretical”) tradition within twentieth-century philosophy of biology, linked by a shared rejection of both the dominant naturalistic (especially Neo-Darwinist) mechanistic approaches, and the new vitalisms, and the search for a via media between these two horns. Reynolds and Roffe begin with a discussion of Heidegger’s account of animal biology in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, noting that this is a rare case where Heidegger encourages (albeit ambiguously) something like a conversation between philosophy and the empirical sciences. For Heidegger, the gulf between the human and the animal is absolutely qualitative: if the human is involved in worldly doing and acting, the animal (that is famously “poor in world [weltarm]”) engages only in driven reactive performing (Trieben), within an “encircling” ring. Merleau-Ponty developed a more nuanced view, and in many ways shared with British emergentism the quest for a path between reductive naturalism (positivism and behaviorism) and non-naturalism. While distinguishing between matter, life, and mind, he emphasized that these three “planes” cut across human and animal life, and (unlike Heidegger) he was interested in forms of consciousness, knowledge, and tool-use in animals, even if this never meant blurring the human/animal divide. There is a determination to steer away from environmental determinism to seek a more holistic view of the organism’s interaction with its milieu. In Merleau-Ponty’s late work, this view matured into the notion of chiasm or intertwining, thereby contrasting not only with the merely reflexive view of animal behavior (promoted by Heidegger), but also Ruyer’s (opposite) siding with the living being over environment. In some senses, Ruyer – a scientist rather than a phenomenologist – was to be a continual impetus for Merleau-Ponty to refine his nascent phenomenology of the living being, even while retaining his commitment to transcendental subjectivity. As Reynolds and Roffe put it, this involved “the insoluble problem of a consciousness which remains the origin of the world, while being at the same time immersed in it.”

19 Phenomenology and difference1 Françoise Dastur

Abstract  The themes of identity and difference play an enormously important role in the history of Western philosophy, and this is certainly so in the case of the phenomenological movement in the twentieth century. In this chapter, this twin theme is traced through the German tradition of phenomenology, noting how this is continued in French thought. In Husserl, the question is closely connected to his account of transcendental philosophy and the question of dualism, while for Heidegger it is integral to the meaning of ontological difference and (later) Ereignis. In Merleau-Ponty’s final work, which develops some key late Heideggerian moves, the question of difference is central to the meaning of the visible/invisible relationship. Derrida’s notion of “differance” is developed in a context of rejecting what he perceived to be Heidegger’s nostalgia for presence, by taking a decidedly ­Nietzschean route. Keywords  Edmund Husserl; Martin Heidegger; Maurice Merleau-Ponty; Jacques Derrida; Phenomenology; Difference; Identity The theme of “difference” became very important in contemporary French philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century. It is enough to mention in this regard the names of Gilles Deleuze, who is the author of a book entitled Difference and Repetition, published in 1968, and of Jacques Derrida, who we know invented a new “concept” in writing the word difference with an “a” in a famous text published in 1972 in Margins of Philosophy. However, in order to give access to the texts of these two philosophers, which are not easy to understand, it is important to first try to show the importance of this concept in the Western philosophical tradition. I would like here to limit myself to a very simple remark: philosophical activity seems to be so linked to the establishment of differences that it seems possible to see historical philosophies just as various theories of difference. The central importance of difference in Western philosophy is clear. There is, for example, a theory of the difference between being and appearance in Parmenides; between the sensible thing and the idea in Plato; between the phenomenon and the thing in itself in Kant; between consciousness and spirit in Hegel; between the empirical and the transcendental in Husserl; and between the ontological and the ontical in Heidegger. The key “gesture” in all these great philosophies seems to involve the separation between two domains or levels, as if the paradigm of the 1 This text began as part of a series of lectures given in the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA) in October 2000. It has been revised for publication. Cf. also Françoise Dastur, Philosophie et Différence (Chatou: Les Editions de La Transparence, 2004), 81–105. DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-21

Phenomenology and difference  317 philosophical activity could have been given by the Parmenidian opposition between Being and Nothingness and by the khôrismos: the abyssal separation established by Plato between the idea and the sensible thing. But what is quite remarkable is the fact that in all these great philosophies which are all different theories of separation and difference, we find also, as it is the case for Plato himself, a strong aspiration toward identity. It is almost as though the purpose of the act of thinking is to find the unity of what has been separated. Difference should therefore no longer be conceived as a mere existing distinction, as the difference between two domains or two worlds, but as a difference in becoming, as a process of differentiation which unfolds itself in the course of philosophical activity. This thinking of a difference, which is no longer understood as the spatial opposition of two domains but rather as a temporal process, can be found explicitly in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. It is found in the “second” Heidegger’s thinking (in Identity and Difference) of the ontological difference as double fold. Merleau-Ponty thinks the difference of the visible and the invisible as a moving “écart,” a moving divergence. Meanwhile, Derrida writes difference with an “a” precisely in order to emphasize its temporal and not spatial character. My purpose here is to examine the status of difference in phenomenology, and its transition from German into French phenomenology. I will begin with the Husserlian difference between the empirical and the transcendental, the sensible and the categorial; going then to the ontico-ontological difference in Heidegger’s thought; before showing how the difference between the visible and the invisible in the later MerleauPonty and the Derridean differance (with an “a”) is based on Heidegger’s thinking of difference. There is indeed, in my view, something that reunites all these thinkers who have inscribed their questioning in the phenomenological field, the movement which incites them to go to the “things themselves,” even if it leads them to declare—as does Derrida—that “the thing itself always escapes” (la chose même se dérobe toujours).2 In this research, they are led to differentiate this thing itself from the given things, from “what is at first and most of the time” given, to use a Heideggerian way of speaking. But because for them, this thing itself is nothing else than the world and not something beyond of this world, not another reality than the terrestrial realm, this difference takes more decisively than before a temporal and not spatial sense. It becomes a chronological difference between two times, two attitudes, and can no longer be understood as a topological difference between two realms or two worlds, even in the case of Husserl who can be considered in a way as the most “dualistic” of all these thinkers. 1  Husserl’s difference between immanence and transcendence I will begin with Husserl, who is the founder of phenomenology and the instigator of the maxim of the “return to the things themselves.” It is true that after the discovery of the method of reduction in 1905, the Husserlian phenomenology takes a transcendental and idealistic turn. Husserl does not hesitate to declare in the Cartesian Meditations that “only the one who misunderstands the deepest meaning of the intentional method, or of the transcendental reduction, or even of both, can want to separate phenomenology and

2 Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène (Paris, PUF, 1967), 117.

318  Françoise Dastur transcendental idealism.”3 But idealism does not mean necessarily theory of the duality of the sensible and the intelligible worlds. The Husserlian transcendental idealism is precisely different from the Kantian transcendental idealism, which does not really oppose two worlds, in that Husserl makes no use of the concept of “thing in itself.” When Husserl affirms in the first volume of the Ideas that the eidetic phenomenology is a “true positivism,” he implicitly refers to his theory of the foundation of the ideal on the real, or the categorial on the sensible, which constitutes the main part of the Sixth Logical Investigation. Not only does the theory of categorial intuition in the Sixth Investigation invalidate the Kantian distinction between the always sensible intuition and the always spontaneously formed intellectual category, it also implies that the categorial act of ideation needs to be founded in a sensible perception. This results in the revelation, as Husserl says, of the absurdity of the idea of an intellect independent from sensibility. This theory of the foundation (Fundierung) of the intelligible on the sensible is still valid for the late Husserl. In Experience and Judgment (published just after his death), Husserl argued that, in spite of the fact that there is a difference between two kinds of idealities—the free ones, like the mathematical entities, and the “bound” ones, like the pictorial, musical or literary works of art, whose meaning is not separable from their sensible expression—we can nevertheless consider all these idealities as “bound” to the earth. This is because they all are born in a definite locality and time, which implies that their atemporality is in fact an “omnitemporality,” i.e., a form of temporality, in the sense that they are not outside time but have a validity for all times.4 Everything is therefore related to time for Husserl, the intelligible as well as the sensible, but of course they are not related to time in the same manner. What has to be explained is precisely the emergence out of the flow of temporality of something that pretends to overcome time by being valid for all times. From 1891 to 1938 (from his Philosophy of Arithmetic to Experience and Judgment), Husserl constantly tried to develop his first project of a genealogy of logic and ideality. By situating his transcendental idealism in the general frame of his thought, we begin to understand, as Husserl himself maintained, that this idealism is not so much a philosophical position as the necessary consequence of a thought that undertakes to account for its own genesis. It is the same for Heidegger, who does not consider idealism as a definite philosophical position. He explicitly says in Being and Time that if “the term idealism amounts to an understanding of the fact that Being is never explicable by beings, but is always already ‘the transcendental’ for every being, then the sole correct possibility of a philosophical problematic lies in idealism.”5 In 1927, then, Heidegger considers that the ontological difference, transcendentally understood, is the foundation of idealistically rendered authentic philosophy. Husserl, in spite of Heidegger’s critique of his transcendental turn, can be included in this authentic “transcendentalism” in the sense that, by means of the transcendental reduction, he institutes a difference between the given presence, the Vorhandenheit of things as they are found in the natural attitude, and the pure phenomenality of world which is revealed in the phenomenological attitude. Phenomenology is necessarily a transcendental science which implies the overcoming of immediate experience, something Husserl emphasizes in his 1907 lecture course, The 3 Edmund Husserl, Cartesianische Meditationen, Hua 1 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), § 41, 119. 4 Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil (Hamburg, Glaassen & Goverts, 1954), § 64 c. 5 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), § 43, 193 (208).

Phenomenology and difference  319 Idea of Phenomenology, where we find the first exposition of the transcendental reduction. Husserl explains there that the phenomenological task does not consist in simply opening the eyes to look upon things that are already there as if they were waiting to be seen.6 Rather, it means to show how things are “constituted” in a consciousness which is no longer considered, as it was the case in classical philosophy, as a mere receiver of “images.” The difficulty here is to understand that “constituting” things does not mean “creating” them; it means only to give them objective meaning. The transcendental reduction is the operation by which the constitutive power of consciousness can be revealed. However, the exposition of the transcendental reduction introduces a kind of khôrismos between consciousness and world. In Ideas I, Husserl goes as far as to say that an “abyss in meaning” separates them, consciousness being defined as an absolute being, whereas world is defined as a relative being7. In a way, Husserl seems here to be taking up an exaggerated Cartesian dualism of res cogitans and res extensa. It is only with the analyses of Ideas II—in Merleau-Ponty’s view, Husserl’s most important text—that Husserl clarifies that the transcendental reduction does not in fact presuppose any radical opposition of these two domains of being; on the contrary, it reveals the intentionality that unites them. This focus on the possible mediations between the two regions of consciousness and world is a function of the focus of Ideas II as a whole, which deals with the constitution of nature, of body and soul. In its emphasis on the constitutive role of one’s own body, indeed, on the indissoluble intertwining of body and soul, Ideas II contrasts sharply with the first book in which Husserl did not hesitate to declare that a consciousness without a body was thinkable.8 In the second book, however, Husserl wants to show that the physical thing, the object of the natural sciences, finds its root in the perceived thing, and that the constitution of all objectivities, including ideal objectivities such as logical or mathematical entities, assumes a grounding in the phenomenon of the incarnation of consciousness in a body. Husserl even declares that the absolute spirit, God himself, should have a body and sensorial organs if He wants to communicate with us.9 This continues a line of argument from Ideas I in which Husserl argued that God cannot perceive things better than we do, but exactly as we do, in a stream of Abschattungen of different profiles, and not in an instantaneous “intuition.” Unlike Kant who argued for a clear distinction between an “originary” intuition for God, and a “derivative” one for finite beings, Husserl maintained that there can only ever be only one possible kind of intuition. Consequently, we cannot consider our finitude as an imperfection compared to the actual infinitude of a divine being. In the late text, the Crisis of the European Sciences, we find an even more explicit refutation of dualism. Here Husserl argues that dualistic thinking is the result of the Galilean operation by which the universe of the bodies has been separated from the universe of the souls. Dualism is thus presented as a function of modern rationality, and thus as the origin of the crisis by which European traditions of knowledge have become scattered into specialized sciences that have become meaningless for living beings. Dualism involves the application of the same method to both nature and spirit, and it leads thereby to the 6 Edmund Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie, Hua 2 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 12. 7 Edmund Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch. Hua 3 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950), § 49, p. 117. Henceforth: Ideen I. 8 Husserl, Ideen I, § 54, 133. 9 Edmund Husserl, Ideen zur einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Zweites Buch, Hua 4 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1952), § 18g, 85.

320  Françoise Dastur naturalization of the soul. Only phenomenology can deliver us from the modern idea of a physics of the soul. The overall trajectory of Husserlian thought is thus to insist on the strong connection binding the phenomenon of incarnation to the constitution of ideality. But if Husserl succeeds in thinking the emergence of the intelligible out of the sensible, he does not go as far as conceiving the birth and death of the transcendental subject itself. In the rare passages where Husserl deals with death, he declares that while the empirical ego has to die, the transcendental subject knows neither death nor birth; for if this was not the case, there would be no radical difference left between the empirical and the transcendental, and the method of reduction would lose its validity. Husserl is therefore not finally able to think a real historicity and incarnation of consciousness, since transcendental phenomenology cannot be totally “genetic” without effacing the difference upon which it is founded. Thus, ironically, in spite of his critique of the Kantian difference between phenomenon and thing in itself, Husserl actually ends up in a very similar position. In spite of all the mediations that both Husserl and Kant undertook concerning their respective transcendental ways of thinking, the abyss between the empirical and the transcendental remains unbridgeable for Husserl, just as phenomenon and noumenon did for Kant. 2  Heidegger’s ontico-ontological difference A transcendental style of thinking is also found in Heidegger’s early thought, as seen in his notion of the ontico-ontological difference which constitutes the general frame of his problematic. Even if this notion is first explicitly elaborated in his 1927 course, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, we can nevertheless consider that it constitutes the implicit horizon of Being and Time itself, where the difference between Being and beings is emphasized in many places. In contrast to Aristotle—who in his Metaphysics asks the question of the on he on, of beings as beings, and sees in philosophy a science of beingness (Seiendheit)—Heidegger inquires rather about the meaning of Being as such (Sein überhaupt). Being, for Heidegger, is not what is common to all beings, but what constitutes the possibility condition of the beings and of the science of beingness. It is therefore not possible to say that Being is: only beings are, whereas “there is Being,” es gibt Sein. This is the reason why Being is even more “universal” than what the medieval thinkers called “universals” or transcendental notions, i.e., the attributes which can be applied to all beings. Heidegger underlines that Being is not one of these transcendental notions (like unum, bonum, verum, etc.), but is rather “the transcendens above all,” that which is beyond all ontical determination. In this sense, Being has to be conceived as similar to the Platonic idea of the Good, about which Plato says in the Politeia that it is “epekeina tes ousias,” beyond beingness. Heidegger develops the question of transcendence, which was only briefly mentioned in Being and Time (§69c), in a small text dating from 1929 and dedicated to Husserl: Vom Wesen des Grundes (“The Essence of Reasons”).10 Here he questions the Husserlian distinction between immanence and transcendence which is founded on the definition of the subject as a worldless being. In contrast, Dasein is defined as an ekstatic being which is not separated from the world, but is on the contrary a being in the world. Whereas in Husserl there is an intentional relation between the immanent sphere

10 Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen des Grundes,” in Wegmarken, GA9 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1976).

Phenomenology and difference  321 of consciousness and the transcendent sphere of nature or world, for Heidegger Dasein itself has the capacity of transcending the beings, in the sense that the epekeina, the “beyond,” is part of its most proper ontological structure. The intentional behavior allows only the discovery of beings, which presupposes the preliminary openness of Being. But this openness can only be made accessible by means of the transcendence of Dasein who opens the horizon of the comprehensibility of Being on the basis of which the beings can appear as such and such. This dimension of the “beyond” of beings is part of Dasein itself, who is not a substantial, but a temporal being. The ekstatic character of Dasein makes the transcendence of the world possible, in the sense that only a being which is not imprisoned in the present can “behave” in relation to things in general. Such a behavior or comportment requires the unfolding of the horizon of the world, from where it becomes possible to come back in an intentional manner to the beings in order to apprehend them as such and such. There is therefore no possible comportment in relation to beings which does not comprehend Being, and there is no comprehension of Being which is not rooted in a comportment in relation to beings. What defines the existence of Dasein is the immediate unity of the comprehension of Being and of the comportment in relation to beings. The difference of Being and beings is part of the existence of Dasein, which means that this difference is already there in a latent manner even if it is not expressly formulated. In referring to the difference of Being and beings in the slightly earlier Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger underlines that “existing means somehow to be performing this distinction” and he explains that when this distinction is explicitly understood, it is named “ontological difference.”11 It becomes clear from there that ontology is founded on a fundamental comportment of Dasein: it is because transcendence makes possible the thematization of Being, that the science of Being can be defined as a transcendental science. In order to insist on the absolutely transcendental character of Being in comparison with beings, Heidegger determines Being as “the absolute Other than all beings,” or as he puts in his 1943 Afterword to What Is Metaphysics?, as the Nothing.12 However, because the notion of ontological difference remains linked to the transcendental way of thinking—i.e., to the philosophical way of thinking—Heidegger is led to call into question this very notion during the period of the so-called Kehre, the “turn.” The ontological difference derives from a question which starts from beings and from beingness, in the sense that it involves going beyond beings toward Being itself, whereas now the question is no longer to start with the beings, but to “jump” directly into Being. The ontological difference appears in this light as a “transitional thought”: it is necessary in the sense that it provides the first elucidation of the problem of Being and allows us to get out of the traditional state of confusion between beingness and Being. But it is also “fatal,” as Heidegger says in Beiträge zur Philosophie (1936–1938), because it immediately brings us back to this state of confusion in the sense that Being is thought only in its relation to beings, and is therefore not thought in itself.13 The danger is to conceive Being not as “the Other” than beings, but effectively as another kind of being. This is the reason why Heidegger chooses to write Being under a crossing, so that in this way 11 Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, GA 24 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975), § 22a, 454. 12 Martin Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1960), 45. 13 Martin Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989), §266, 465 sq.

322  Françoise Dastur of writing it can appear as the disappearing of the form of something that could be the opposite of thinking, that could be “facing” thinking from the outside. In this period, Heidegger underlines this essential dimension of Being that is marked by withdrawal and even refusal. Being is not a subject or a substance, and therefore it can give itself only through self-denial. Because the ontological difference remains a transcendental notion, it constitutes the central structure of the domain of metaphysics, which, as Heidegger says in his 1949 Introduction to What Is Metaphysics?, “from its beginning to its end, moves in a strange way in a permanent confusion of Being and beings.”14 In Identity and Differenz, a text dating from 1957,15 Heidegger explains what is going on in metaphysics with the help of one of the Grimm’s fairytales, “The Hare and the Hedgehog.” In this tale, the hedgehog, who wants to win the race against the hare, asks his wife (who is undistinguishable from himself), to go ahead to the finish line in advance. The hare who is constantly running between start and finish always finds apparently the same hedgehog there and shouting to him: “I am already here!” In metaphysics we are in the same position as the hare in the sense that we cannot distinguish between Being and beings. When we look for Being we find beings, and vice versa. The illusion is caused by thinking the difference as a simple spatial distinction between a point of departure and a point of arrival. To overcome it, we must try thinking the difference itself and not what differs. For Being and the beings are not separate in the sense of being in two different localities; rather, Being changes itself into beings by a movement of transcendence which is at the same time the arrival of beings into presence. This implies that Being and beings are the same. In the event of their separation, in which they are thrown wide apart, they nevertheless always remain related to each other. That is the reason why when Being and beings are thought from the point of view of their difference itself, and not from the point of view of the terms of the difference (of what differs in the difference), they appear in the light of what Heidegger calls “Austrag.” In its ordinary use, this German word means “issue” or “settlement” of a quarrel. However, it is also the literal translation of the Greek dia-phero and the Latin dis-fero (difference), which also have the sense of “bringing to the end,” and of “bringing for,” or “bearing.” Thinking the relation of Being and beings in the light of the Austrag, or in the light of this “intermediate space” that is difference—for which Heidegger now uses the German word Unter-schied and no longer the word ­Differenz—means to became aware of the mutual relation of Being and beings, and of the event of their becoming apart. With Heidegger, the thought of difference explicitly takes on a temporal and no longer spatial meaning. The leading notion is now no longer Being but Ereignis, “the appropriating event,” on the basis of which Being itself has to be understood. Heidegger does not reject the notion of difference in spite of the fact that it constitutes the fundamental frame of metaphysics. For the question is not for him to “overcome” metaphysics, but to assume it. To the Nietzschean Überwindung or overcoming of metaphysics, Heidegger opposes his own notion of Verwindung, a word meaning “recovery.” This implies that metaphysics, like a disease, has become part of ourselves in losing its malignity. The oblivion of being which defines metaphysics is not something negative that should be eradicated; it is, on the contrary, the necessary fate of thinking in the sense that this oblivion shows

14 Heidegger, Was ist Metaphysik? 11. 15 Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 60.

Phenomenology and difference  323 the true “essence” of Being, which has to remain “forgotten” in order to let the beings appear. For Heidegger, the question is not to overcome or cancel the oblivion of Being in order to bring Being itself to appearance, for effectively that would mean taking up the Hegelian way of thinking which leads to the idea of an absolute knowledge of Being. The question is rather to experience this oblivion as oblivion, and not to stay in this oblivion of the oblivion of Being, which is metaphysics. It is this remembering of the oblivion of Being that Heidegger (remaining in a strange proximity with the Platonic reminiscence) calls Andenken: recollection-in-thinking. 3  Merleau-Ponty’s difference of the visible and the invisible We come now to two French post-Heideggerian phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, thinkers who both stand in close proximity to one another in important ways, while also being at great distance in other senses.16 When he suddenly died in May 1961, Merleau-Ponty was in the midst of the elaboration of a book to which he finally gave the title, The Visible and the Invisible. This title announces what seems to be a privileging of difference in the announcement of dualism. However, Merleau-Ponty’s project was not to oppose the two realms of the visible and the invisible or of the sensible and sense. On the contrary, his project was to make clear that they are indissolubly intertwined. What he intended to elaborate was in fact a “genealogy of the true” (which was the first title he gave to his project), a genealogy of philosophy and a thinking of its emergence out of non-philosophy. For him, there is no radical separation between philosophy and non-philosophy: the sensible experience is not illusory but on the contrary the very domain of truth, so that philosophy has no other task than to express the meaning of the “mute living experience,” as Husserl had said. In Merleau-Ponty’s view, however, philosophy should not ignore its own genesis, which implies that the philosopher cannot continue to consider himself as an absolute mind dominating the object from above. He can no longer presume to place himself—as per Husserl’s phenomenologist—in the position of an impartial spectator; he must instead recognize that he himself is implicated in the question that he is asking. The origin of the scientific way of thinking, which presupposes such a dominating look upon the domain of objects, is not in fact perception, understood as an intellectual activity, but something more passive that the later Merleau-Ponty calls “perceptual faith.”17 In fact, the word “perception” is banished in The Visible and the Invisible because it still implies an opposition between the visible thing that is perceived and the invisible state of mind that is the result of the perceiving act. Actually, the single event that is taking place is what Merleau-Ponty calls “the segregation of the ‘within’ and the ‘without.’”18 There is an interrogative dimension in perceptual faith which has already disappeared in all theoretical knowledge. Rather than conceiving of philosophy as the attempt to give a solution

16 Interestingly, Derrida never showed much interest in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, and indeed it took him a long time to acknowledge the importance of Merleau-Ponty’s late philosophy. He did so only in Mémoires d’aveugle (published in 1990), and in his book on Jean-Luc Nancy and touch (published in 1998), where a chapter is dedicated to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking of vision and touch. 17 Cf. Françoise Dastur, “Perceptual Faith and the Invisible,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 25, no. 1 (Jan 1994): 44–52. 18 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 118. Henceforth: Visible and Invisible.

324  Françoise Dastur to the enigma of the segregation of the within and the without—which could be either a realist solution when the philosopher declares that we are part of the realm of things or an idealist one, when he declares that things are part of ourselves—it should rather be defined as the perceptual faith itself in its perpetual questioning. For our experience is not the experience of the adequacy of the things with our “representations” but rather the measurement of their internal difference and inadequacy with themselves. If we try to leave aside all our theoretical prejudices, we will become aware of the fact that the sensible thing does not appear under the positive form of an absolutely objective being and is never completely present. On the contrary, it is always experienced as a presence interwoven with absence. The world is never present for us under the form of a collection of objects, but only as the allusive presence of a being which remains transcendent. That is the reason why its sense remains “invisible” (which does not mean that it is elsewhere, in a locality other than the visible). Consequently, Merleau-Ponty insists that “there is no intelligible world,” that “there is [only] the sensible world.”19 It is precisely because he wants to avoid the traditional opposition of the two worlds, the sensible and the intelligible, that he makes use of the same word, once in a positive form (the visible), and once in a negative form (the invisible), implying in that way that the difference between them is internal and not external. Sense, the invisible, is dissimulated in the visible, which is in itself nothing else than the presentation of the invisible. The invisible is not in fact “opposed” to the visible, but on the contrary the “secret counterpart” of it,20 so that it can be grasped only by remaining inside of it. There is therefore no “absolute” invisibility. To the contrary, the invisible is always the virtual focus of the visible, so there is no possibility for the establishment of the double structure of the two worlds theory. We cannot consider, as Merleau-Ponty says, the invisible as a possible visible for a being other than us (for example, for a God having an intuitus originarius or an intellectual intuition), because this would amount to destroying our relation to it. The invisible is not another realm from which we, finite beings, are separated.21We do not have two worlds, which could be structured in the same manner and possess the same positivity. Nor do we even have a sensible world that could possess a complete positivity and massiveness; for if this were the case, the invisible could not appear in filigree, as Merleau-Ponty says, inside of it, because this would imply a kind of loosening of the worldly texture, a kind of inherent indetermination or incompleteness of the world. What we do in fact have is a unique world that is neither all sensible nor all intelligible; this segregation is never already done once for all—“jamais chose faite”—but is always in process, in becoming. There is therefore no opposition of two realms, but rather an “identity” of the visible and the invisible. But this identity is not static or given once for all. This is the reason why such a thought remains a thought of difference, and difference should perhaps here already be written with an “a,” because the sensible is not “beside” the intelligible, but

19 Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 205. 20 Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 215. 21 Merleau-Ponty here follows Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit, where he shows that the theory of the opposition of the sensible world and of the intelligible world inevitably leads us to consider the second as the mere reproduction of the first, according to which the invisible is visible for eyes other than our own.

Phenomenology and difference  325 “pregnant” with it. There is, in fact, an identity in the difference of sense and the sensible, since, as Merleau-Ponty says, “transcendence is the identity in difference.”23 Lived experience is paradoxical: it situates us at the same time in ourselves and in the world, at the very point where the segregation begins. This passage in lived experience of the self into the world can be understood as the originary encounter of the Same and of the Other, as the crossing of two opposed movements which can be understood as one and the same. This is the reason why Merleau-Ponty repeats in different passages of his manuscript that “to get out of oneself is to re-enter in oneself and vice versa.” That which philosophy has to describe is not the opposition of the object and the subject, but this very crossing or “chiasm.” The chiasmatic figure, which can already be found in Heidegger, when he puts a cross on the word “Sein” and explains that this cross has to be interpreted in terms of the Fourfold (Geviert), is finally the figure which makes understandable the whole “essence” of difference, its spatio-temporal essence, and not only its topological meaning. That which has to be thought is not the regions that are separated by the movement of crossing, but the center of their divergence. For this center, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty use different words: Ereignis on one side, “spatio-temporalizing whirlpool” or “explosion of being”24 on the other. 22

4 Derrida’s differance Derrida came to the thinking of “difference” through a critique of Heidegger’s ontological difference. He seems, more than Merleau-Ponty, post-Heideggerian. Merleau-Ponty, we now know (via the published notes of his last courses in the Collège de France), had a deep understanding of Heidegger’s writings after the turn, and at the end of his life he was coming into a close proximity with the Heideggerian thinking of Ereignis. Derrida, however, always retained an ambiguous attitude toward Heidegger. Derrida’s ambiguity toward Heidegger concerns what he sees in Heidegger as an insufficient determination of the difference as difference between Being and the beings, insofar as it involves a thinking of Being as presence. The thought of difference, which is the biggest blow to the “metaphysics of presence” (in the sense that it involves what Derrida calls a “disruption” of immediate presence), is nevertheless also, under the form of the ontological difference, the greatest reinforcement of the presence-value of Being. That is the reason why Derrida invokes another gesture “more Nietzschean than Heideggerian”25 in order to open us to a differance (with an “a”) that is not already defined as difference between Being and the beings. Nietzsche seems, in Derrida’s view, a better thinker of difference than Heidegger because he is the thinker of forces, of which consciousness is not the cause but only the effect, and forces are only differences not presences. Nietzsche is for Derrida the thinker of the dynamic dimension of different forces which are nothing outside their differences, whereas Heidegger thinks under the name of the ontico-­ontological difference the distinction of two kinds of presence. It should

22 Of course, this does not imply that the Derridean thought of differance is identical to the Merleau-Pontian thought of the “divergence” or “partial coincidence” between the visible and the invisible. As will be seen, Derrida links the notion of differance to the notion of play, whereas Merleau-Ponty insists on our bodily commitment to the world. 23 Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 225. 24 Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 265. 25 Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Ed.de Minuit, 1972), 19.

326  Françoise Dastur be underlined here that Derrida relies in his reading of Nietzsche on the interpretation of the Nietzschean concept of force given by Gilles Deleuze in his famous Nietzsche and Philosophy which was published in 1962. Following Deleuze, Derrida in a way plays off Nietzsche against Heidegger. On one hand, Nietzsche thinks Being as the fallacious effect of the dynamic movement of difference which commands the metaphysical belief in the traditional grammar and logic (which extracts an imaginary subject from the pure event). On the other hand, Heidegger thinks difference as an effect of Being, and in this he remains more of a thinker of Being than of difference. Thus, siding with Nietzsche, Derrida invokes “a difference which is older than the ontological difference or the truth of Being.”26 Nevertheless, Derrida still insists on the importance of transiting through the Heideggerian Being-question. For him it is necessary to begin with the determination of difference as ontological difference before going further in cancelling this determination of difference. Differance (with an “a”) is not so much something other than ontological difference, as the next step after the thought of Being. With the crossing out of the word Being in his famous 1955 text dedicated to Jünger, Zur Seinsfrage (“On the Question of Being”)—a text which has the greatest importance for Derrida—Heidegger had in a way already implicitly withdrawn the privilege of Being and presence, and called into question the transcendental status of Being. What Derrida wants to do is to bring to the fore the free play of signification, which cannot be limited by a “transcendental signified” (the “thing itself” in the Husserlian phenomenology) or Being (in Heidegger’s thought). Phenomenology, in both its Husserlian and Heideggerian forms, remains for him “the dream of full presence,” the dream of “the reassuring foundation, of the origin and end of the game”;27 in short, the philosophical dream of a presence that could be external to the game of language. That is the reason why under the crossing which cancels the word Sein in Zur Seinsfrage, Derrida discovers (in close proximity to Levinas, who was from the beginning the main reference for his reading of Husserl and Heidegger) what he calls a “trace.” This is a “pure difference” which is devoid of all positivity, which refers to no presence of any kind, and which has a signification only through its interplay with other traces (as it is already the case in the Saussurian language model). For Derrida, then, the process of signification has no origin and no end, which means that the concept of trace presupposes the indefinite differing (in the sense of postponing) of presence. It is quite clear here that, without any explicit reference to him, Derrida makes use of the Wittgenstein notion of play or game. This signifies the limitlessness of the process of signification in which there is no signified as such, no “real” difference between signified and signifier. This means that the signified can always also function as a signifier. In De la Grammatologie, he declares that it could be possible to name “jeu” (play or game)28 the absence of the transcendental signified, which means the limitlessness of the game and the shaking of onto-theology and of the metaphysics of presence.29 Such a thought of differance involves a thought of play, of the possible permutation of all terms without exception, and also a thought of writing, in the sense that writing is here nothing else than the erasing of the transcendental signified. The differance has 26 Jacques Derrida, “La Différance,” in Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: E. de Minuit, 1972), 3. 27 Jacques Derrida, “La structure, le signe et le jeu,” in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 427. 28 The differentiation between these two words in English does not exist in French, where we have only one word, jeu, to designate both. 29 Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: E. de Minuit, 1967), 73.

Phenomenology and difference  327 become identical to the process of signification in itself, which for Derrida is a process of supplementation in the sense that it takes place because of the lack of foundation of the signification process and as a replacement for the lack of presence. But this failure of presence, instead of being felt only as a loss, should be considered as an invitation to an “active” interpretation. This means, in Nietzschean terms, that we should be able to transform a passive nihilism, which is the negation of life, into an active one, and remain free from nostalgia and hope, indifferent to any archeological research as well as to any eschatological one. This could be the true triumph of a differance, which (in opposition to the Hegelian difference which is thought as a logical difference, as a contradiction) could never be brought back to identity because it is understood as a conflict of forces, a conflict which is at the origin of reason itself and not one internal to reason. Ultimately, the outcome of Derrida’s work on these themes is mixed. On one hand, the originality of his thinking is seen in the way he shows that philosophy can never lead to affirmative or conclusive propositions, but can only be found in the erasures and crossings out of a text and a certain manner of writing. But on the other hand, his reading of Heidegger is questionable. Derrida sees Heidegger as exclusively a thinker of the ontological difference, but as we have seen, Heidegger himself, in his later work, criticized this notion. Nor is it sustainable to simply oppose Heidegger, as a thinker of Being, to Nietzsche, as a thinker of becoming, since after the “turn” Heidegger’s main concern is the thought of Ereignis, of the appropriating event. By this thought, Heidegger was intent to show that the event of difference has to be understood as the co-appropriation of man and being by which alone the world can appear.

20 Heidegger and Ricœur on ipseity Claude Romano

Abstract  It is common to read that Heidegger in Being and Time and Ricœur in Oneself as Another both developed a conception of “the self.” This chapter attempts to show why this commonly held assumption is misguided. Albeit with different emphases, both Heidegger and Ricœur advanced an original concept that was completely distinct in its “economy” from “the ego” of Descartes or “the self” of Locke. This concept of Selbstheit (translated into French as ipséité) refers first of all to a “way of being,” to an existential attitude of truth and faithfulness in one’s own existence. Therefore, ipseity is less to do with questions of numerical identity through time (that privileged by Locke and his followers) than with qualitative identity towards which we bear a responsibility before others. Keywords  Self; Selfhood; Ipseity; Authenticity; Identity In Sein und Zeit, Heidegger developed an original conception of what he labels Selbstheit, selfhood, or Selbstsein, Being-oneself, an attitude or a way of being (Weise zu sein) that he sets in contrast with being in the mode of the They [das Man-selbst]. The originality of this approach to what we would be inclined to call “the problem of the self” has been, in my view, largely under-evaluated and even misunderstood by the commentators. In Oneself as Another, Paul Ricœur advanced a conception of what he calls “ipséité” (a term I shall translate as “ipseity” rather than “selfhood”—the choice of his translator, Kathleen Blamey—for reasons which will appear later on), which bears strong affinities with Heidegger’s approach in Sein und Zeit. My intention in the following reflections is to do justice to the originality of these two approaches with respect to the philosophical mainstream of “theories of the self” as they unfold in all sectors of contemporary philosophy. My contention will be a strong one: I think that the “problem of the self” isn’t at all (contrary to what many philosophers think) an “eternal problem” pertaining to a kind of philosophia perennis that could be traced back as early as the beginnings of philosophy itself.1 It is rather a very specific problem, entirely attributable to specific and contingent features

1 This is a common assumption among historians of philosophy. See, for instance, Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life and Death (Oxford: Clarendon, Press, 2006); Christopher Gill, Personality in Greek Epic, Tragedy and Philosophy: The Self in Dialogue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Pierre Hadot, La philosophie comme manière de vivre. Entretiens avec Jeannie Carlier et Arnold I. Davidson (Paris: Albin Michel, 2001), 140–143, 169, 173. For a contrary thesis, see Vincent Carraud, L’invention du moi (Paris: PUF, 2010); Frédérique Ildefonse, “L’idion hêgemonikon, est-ce le moi?” in Le moi et l’intériorité, ed. Frédérique Ildefonse and Gwenaëlle Aubry (Paris: Vrin, 2008), 71–81.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-22

Heidegger and Ricœur on ipseity  329 of modern philosophy. It is, I will argue, strongly connected to Descartes’s lexical invention of a new use of “ego” in Latin and “moi” in French; a nominal use of these pronouns, promoted to a new philosophical function. In other words, the self is a philosophical invention2—by Descartes, Locke and their followers—that is connected with very specific conceptual problems. It is not a presuppositionless neutral concept that can be applied indiscriminately to the history of philosophy as a whole. Given that the self is a philosophical invention, as I will argue, the question of the assessment of such an idea, of its relevance to philosophy, cannot be eluded. We cannot just take for granted the claim that we are “selves,” as it is so often repeated, without asking ourselves what presuppositions such a claim bears with it. Now, I contend that Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit, did not propose a new version of a “theory of the self,” along the lines of Descartes’s or Husserl’s, as it is often assumed. To the contrary, he takes his distance from such a conceptuality very seriously and deeply revises the presuppositions on which it rests.3 Strictly speaking, there is no “theory of the self” at all in Sein und Zeit, and it could be claimed that Dasein doesn’t have any self at all. What is rather an ontological feature of Dasein is Selbstheit, or Selbstsein, and what it is important to notice about these expressions is that they refer to ways of being or ways of existing of Dasein, and in no way to a reality at hand, to an entity of any kind, be it mental or corporeal: to something that is the “inner core” of Dasein. Heidegger clearly dismisses the view that Dasein would be endowed with such a “nucleus [Kern].”4 The only being we have is actually Dasein itself, and selfhood is a way of being of such an entity, by contrast with another possible way of being, namely being in the mode of “the They,” fallenness [Verfallen]. That the only “thing” under consideration, here, is a way of being: something that can be rendered by a verb and not by a noun. This represents a complete break with the way in which the question of the self has been traditionally formulated, and it is this break that I would like to consider more closely. This is true also for Ricœur, since his own conceptuality rests on the same kind of paradigm-shift, from a nominalized “self” to selfhood understood as an attitude—an attitude of reliability or truthfulness in front of another. In this respect, we can compare two affirmations, the first from Sein und Zeit, and the second from Oneself as Another: The selfhood of Dasein has been defined formally as a way of existing [eine Weise zu existieren], that is, not as a being present-at-hand [nicht als ein vorhandenes Seiendes]. I myself am not for the most part the ‘who’ of Dasein, but the they-self is. Authentic being-oneself shows itself to be an existentiell modification of the They, which is to be defined existentially.5 My working hypothesis [is] that the distinction between selfhood and sameness does not simply concern two constellations of meaning but involves two modes of being.6

2 See Carraud, L’invention du moi. 3 See, for instance, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 16è éd., 1986), 46; English translation: Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), 43: “One of our first tasks will be to show that the point of departure from an initially given ego and subject totally fails to see the phenomenal content of Dasein.” See also §26, 116. 4 See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 117. 5 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §54, 267; Stambaugh translation, 247 (modified). 6 Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990); English translation: Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 209.

330  Claude Romano Two terminological remarks are in order. First, it is important to emphasize that the term chosen by Ricœur, “ipséité,” is actually the same as the one translating Selbstheit in the available French translations of Sein und Zeit (by Martineau and Vézin). This is not, of course, coincidental. Second, it is striking that in both of the English translations the specificity of Heidegger’s terminology tends to be lost by a homogenizing nominalized use of “the self” where there is no such word in German. For example, “Selbst-sein” is translated not as one would expect as “Being-oneself,” but rather as “Being-one’s-Self” (Macquarrie and Robinson) and “Being-a-self” (Stambaugh). Similarly, both translations render “Selbst-sein-können” as “potentiality-for-Being-one’s-Self.” But the German doesn’t say Ein-selbst-sein, it says Selbst-sein, which is very different, since no nominalization of the personal pronoun is made. All this amounts to more than a mere nuance. In introducing “the self” where there is no such thing in Heidegger’s text, many commentators inscribe Heidegger’s conceptuality volens nolens in continuity with that of the classic egologies, thereby missing its radical novelty. My aim in this chapter is not to give a full exegetical account of Heidegger’s or Ricœur’s conceptualities in their own terms. Instead, I will propose a broader philosophical reflection on what is at stake in their approaches. 1  The constellation of the egologies In order to assess the originality of these approaches, I shall start with a very simple and sketchy characterization of the main assumptions underlying the classic egologies associated with the names of Descartes, Locke, Kant, Fichte, Husserl and many others. I will try to encapsulate these presuppositions in four main features: 1 The invention of the self takes form against the background of the new concept of objectified nature of modern science. This objective nature, reduced to mechanism, “expels” the mind or the spirit, and relegates it to a second, heterogeneous realm, as a self-enclosed domain incommensurable to it. The invention of the self goes hand in hand with the emergence of a new concept of interiority that I will label “strong interiority,” an interiority such that nothing can enter it nor exit it: “sans portes ni fenêtres [without doors or windows],” to borrow Leibniz’s phrase. Such an interiority contains only “ideas,” that is, modes of thought, representations, “lived experiences”; it is separated from the world by an “abyss of meaning,” as Husserl puts it. Such an interiority is of course completely different from the one that can be found in ancient or medieval thought. For Socrates, as much as for the Stoics, the human soul can be inhabited by a kind of otherness, by a daimon, and this soul is itself part of the world, it has its natural place in the cosmos. This is also true of the Augustinian soul—which is in no way a “self”—in which God himself resides, interior inimo meo, and which to that extent can be said to be a templum mentis.7 In Descartes, by contrast, it is no longer God who inhabits the human mind, but the idea of God, and this makes all the difference; the mind has become a self-enclosed realm, separated absolutely from what differs from it, from reality as a whole, including God himself.

7 Augustine, De magistro, I, 2, in Œuvres, Vol. 6, Dialogues philosophiques, III (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer / Institut d’Études augustiniennes, 1952).

Heidegger and Ricœur on ipseity  331 2 However, the emergence of a new concept of interiority isn’t sufficient to account for the apparition of the self. The self is not only the modern mind, with its strong interiority, in its opposition to nature; it is this very mind insofar as it is given to itself first-­personally. The invention of the self rests on this “primacy of the first-person” of which, of course, the cogito of Descartes bears testimony. The Cartesian cogito is valid, and possesses its status as a principle, only when formulated in the first person of the singular in the present tense. Consequently, the self is the Cartesian (modern) mind but only insofar as I occupy a unique perspective on this mind, a perspective that no one else can occupy, or only to the extent that this mind is given to itself “in the first person.” Hence a new problem, the problem of the “primacy of the first person,” unknown as much to the Greeks as to pre-modern thinkers. It is striking, in that respect, that the first to have framed the argument of the cogito in a very different context, namely Augustine, has formulated it not only in the first person but also in all the other persons in the grammatical sense. First person: “Quid si falleris? Si enim fallor, sum.”8 Second person: “Si non esses, falli omnino non posses.”9 Third person: “Quandoquidem etiam si dubitat, vivit; si dubitat unde dubitet, meminit; si dubitat, dubitare se intellegit.”10 3 This primacy of the first person or this essentially perspectival character of the self leads to a problem unknown to philosophy before modern times: the problem of solipsism. Since I am the only one whose existence is absolutely certain because I am given to myself in an original and direct way, in a first-personal way, while all the rest and all the other selves are given to me only indirectly, through my ideas or representations, the possibility remains always open that I am the only one in the world. It is here important to note that solipsism takes the form of an objection, and is in no way a claim that any of the modern philosophers would have made. Of course, no modern philosopher ever said (not even Berkeley) that the ego or the self exists alone in the world. But it is not necessary to make such a claim to fall under the accusation of solipsism; it is enough that this possibility follows as a possibility from the basic premises of one’s conception. 4 Finally, for the egologies as a whole, the self has a fundamental task to perform. It is not only a vague “subject of knowledge,” it has also the function of identifying ourselves, of providing the conditions of our identity through time. This is why the self is absolutely not the human being in the world. The conditions of identity of the human being, of the human animal, are those of a continued life into a continuous, while changing, body. But these aren’t the conditions of the persistence of a self. It is Locke, of course, who made this distinction clearly, but it is already implied in Descartes, since le moi, which is the philosophical subject of the Meditationes, is utterly different from the author of the book, the human being René Descartes. This is why the— perhaps disastrous—invention of the self goes hand in hand with the view that we should distinguish, for each of us, two identities: our public identity as a human being, grounded on public criteria (our name, visual aspect, fingerprints and so forth) and a purely private identity, grounded on different criteria, an identity assessable only in

 8 Augustine, De Civitate dei, XI, 26, in Œuvres, Vol. 14, Les Confessions. Livres VIII-XIII, ed. Martin Skutella and Aimé Solignac, trad. fr. Eugène Tréhorel and André Bouissou (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer/Institut d’Études augustiniennes, 1992).  9 Augustine, De libero arbitrio, II, 3, 7, in Œuvres, Vol. 6, Dialogues philosophiques, III (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer /Institut d’Études augustiniennes, 1952). 10 Augustine, De Trinitate, X, 10, 14, in Œuvres, vol.16, La Trinité. Livres VIII-XV, ed. Paul Agaësse and Joseph Moingt (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer /Institut d’Études augustiniennes, 1991).

332  Claude Romano the first person. As Locke famously expressed it: consciousness makes personal identity, which means that a self is identical to itself insofar as it considers itself as being identical, or identifies itself as such on the basis of the continuity of its memory. The considerable problem raised by such conceptions is that purely first-personal criteria of identity are very difficult to formulate, and it is unclear that anyone has managed to improve on Locke’s conception. For to be the same, it cannot be enough to consider oneself as being the same, or to rely on memory alone to ground the continuity of oneself. However, whether there is or is not a way of solving Locke’s problem, what seems uncontroversial is that the invention of the self is inwardly connected to the attempt to account for our numerical identity through time on the basis of criteria that are different from the public criteria commonly used to identify ourselves as human beings, and are even irreducible to these. All the analytic literature on the “self” over the last 50 years is nothing other than an endless attempt to refine Locke’s position and to solve the problems left unsolved by it. But it is not clear that it has succeeded in doing so. 2  The alternative approach in terms of ipseity I would like now to return to Heidegger’s and Ricœur’s proposals. I shall proceed, for sake of clarity and brevity, by stating a few claims that are at least in part shared by them and which strongly contrast with the whole picture drawn thus far. Again, I will avoid the specific terminology of the two authors, especially the terminology of fundamental ontology, since my focus here is not exegetical but is rather an effort to set the problem itself in a new light. 1 Let’s start with the last of the four features of the egologies as previously defined. The problem of the egologies was to elevate the self to the rank of the true condition of our identity to ourselves, by contrast with a purely apparent identity, the identity we have as human beings, with the ordinary criteria used to assess it. Now, the question in Sein und Zeit is no longer that of our identity in that sense; it is no longer the question of numerical identity. Granted, Selbstheit (which I will translate from now on by “ipseity” to emphasize its heterogeneity to “the problem of the self,” and for ulterior reasons that I’ll explain shorty) allows us to give an answer, says Heidegger, to the question of the “Who [Wer]?” addressed to Dasein. The question that must be addressed to Dasein does not concern its Washeit, its quiddity, but its Werheit, its whoness. This question of the “who?” as Heidegger understands it, has little to do with the modern question of numerical identity. Heidegger is very clear on this point in a passage from Die Grundprobleme der Phenomenologie in which he contrasts two meanings of identity: the first being the logical usual sense pertaining to a “formal ontology” (in Husserl’s sense) and expressed by Identität; the second, as expressed by the German term Selbigkeit, being a specific sense of identity that applies only to Dasein: Dasein is not only, like every being in general, identical with itself in a formal-ontological sense—every thing is identical with itself [identisch mit sich selbst]—and it is also not merely, in distinction from a natural thing, conscious of this selfsameness [Selbigkeit]. Instead Dasein has a peculiar selfsameness with itself in the sense of

Heidegger and Ricœur on ipseity  333 ipseity [Selbstheit]. It is in such a way that it is in a certain way its own sich [zu eigen ist], it has itself [es hat sich selbst], and only, on that account can it lose itself.11 Heidegger invites us here to shift our attention from the traditional problem of selfidentity concerning numerical identity through time (according to the principle of identity A=A), to a completely different problem of identity: the question of self-­ ownness, of existence as oneself, of existence in the first person, that is, the problem of existence as proper or authentic [eigentliche].12 This is what is at issue with ipseity. Of course, the Dasein is identical to itself, as everything in the world is; it satisfies the principle of identity, but this is not what ipseity is about. Ipseity is the mode of existence of Dasein in which it owns itself and owns its existence: it exists that existence in person [ipse]. This way of existing stands in complete opposition with that in which the Dasein discharges itself of the burden [Last] of its existence and delegates its decisions to ­“others”—that is, to everyone and no one, to “the They”—thereby eluding its inescapable responsibility and freedom. Here, of course, a question becomes pressing: why does Heidegger label this kind of self-possession, distinctive of ipseity, “identity,” albeit in a new sense? After all, the problem of becoming master of one’s own existence, of possessing oneself in that sense, is one thing, while the problem of being identical to oneself is another. Perhaps this strange use of “identity” is more misleading than illuminating. But actually there is at least some connection between the problem of self-ownness in that sense and that of identity. After all, possessing oneself (as distinct from losing oneself in the They) is also expressed by the phrase “being oneself” in a very common use of that expression. But what does “to be oneself” actually mean? It is easy to see at least what it doesn’t mean. It cannot mean “to be identical with oneself”; otherwise, this possibility could hardly be considered as an achievement. If “to be oneself” means to be identical with oneself, then everyone “is himself” by definition, since everything that exists is selfidentical: no entity without identity, to borrow Quine’s phrase. It is for this reason that Oscar Wilde’s remark is witty: “Be yourself, all the others are already taken!” The wit here comes from a deliberate misinterpretation of the sense of the common expression. It is clear that the possibility of “being oneself,” conceived of as an achievement, cannot be understood that way, on the basis of identity as numerical identity. But then, how can it be understood? A key comment in Sein und Zeit can help shed some light on this question: “Das Dasein versteht sich selbst immer aus seiner Existenz, einer Möglichkeit seiner selbst, es selbst oder nicht es selbst zu sein.”13 The Stambaugh translation states: “Da-sein always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of its possibility to be itself 11 Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1997), GA 24, 242; English translation, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982), 170. Translation modified. 12 It must be emphasized that the word authentês in ancient Greek, sometimes also written autoentês, is a compound of autos, “by oneself,” and of hentes, “who carries out, achieves.” At the beginning, the word authentês meant “the responsible author,” and especially the responsible author of a crime, the murderer, but it took on successively a broader meaning, that of “lord,” “ master,” expressing the same idea of selfmastery and self-ownness that can be found also in Eigentlichkeit (self-ownness, being as one’s own). See Pierre Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968), 138; Louis Gernet, “AUΘENΤHΣ,” Revue des études grecques, 22 (1909): 13–32. 13 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §4, 12.

334  Claude Romano or not to be itself.”14 It is clear that these alternatives cannot be understood as being those of being identical with itself vs not being identical. For what could the latter possibility mean? The contrast highlighted by Heidegger is precisely the one that is captured by very common sentences such as “She was no longer herself,” “He became again himself” and “Be yourself!.”. The French linguist Lucien Tesnière offered a very interesting analysis of such sentences. In them, he clams, the personal pronoun (“himself,” “herself”) no longer plays the syntactic function of a pronoun, which could leave room for the question: “who wasn’t she anymore?” “who did he become?” “ who should I be?” and so on. Such questions are nonsense. This is because “herself,” “himself” and “yourself” in those sentences are no longer pronouns but, as Tesnière puts it, “structural equivalents of a verb.”15 This means that we have no longer to do with the verb to be, in its usual sense, but, in a way, with a new verb, the verb to be oneself, in which “oneself” becomes a quasi-attribute. “To be oneself” therefore means something like: to exist in conformity to oneself, to match one’s own true possibilities, to accomplish oneself, to exist at one’s own level. This shows that the new meaning of “identity” (which isn’t actually identity but rather conformity to one’s own true possibilities) is completely different from the one which underlies the question of the self. This first, very important shift of focus is related to the three other features mentioned above. Given limitations of space, I shall only give a brief sketch of these. 2 While the conceptuality of the ego/self depends on the emergence of a new concept of interiority, “strong interiority,” ipseity bears no dependency at all on such a concept. It is rather a feature of Dasein qua In-der-Welt-sein. In breaking decisively with the Cartesian, and more broadly, modern meaning of the mind as a self-enclosed domain, Heidegger conceives of Dasein as more internal as any interiority and more external than any exteriority. His development of Dasein places it in the vicinity of the Aristotelian soul as the very openness to the entirety of being. Ipseity is an ontological feature of Dasein, and this means of a being existing essentially beyond itself, in the world. This is true also for Ricœur’s conceptuality, since ipseity, as he defines it, always refers to the human being in the world and not to mind in the modern sense.16 3 In the conceptuality of ipseity, there is room for a certain “primacy of the first person,” but this primacy is never an absolute primacy, along the lines of the primacy constitutive of the modern concept of the self (there being no other concept of the self than the modern one). Granted, Dasein has a relation to itself completely different to that which it entertains with others, to the point that Heidegger can propose to substitute for the Cartesian cogito a sum moribundus in which the moribundus would 14 To use the neutral expression, “itself” in this context, as it is the case in the standard English translations, is puzzling. After all, the question of ipseity is the question of the Who, and “who” calls for an answer in terms of being oneself, that is, himself or herself—not “itself.” This is also a problem in the German, and this could raise the question whether the neutral Dasein could really replace in all its instances “human being.” 15 Lucien Tesnière, Éléments de syntaxe structurale (Paris: Klincksieck, 1988), 161. 16 I won’t enter here into the puzzling question of the possibility/necessity of a distinction between man and Dasein. In brief, I don’t believe any more that Heidegger was ever really able to distinguish in a consistent way Dasein from man. Dasein retains too many features that are understandable only in close connection to the human being to be really free of any anthropological tie. I’m not sure this “anthropological horizon” can really be broken.

Heidegger and Ricœur on ipseity  335 provide the true meaning of the sum. Death as an ownmost possibility is only as mine, it is only in the first person, and this is true also of authentic existence as such. Indeed, to “be oneself,” Dasein must relate itself/himself first-personally to its own existence in order to assume it and decide for it. This could remind us of some declarations of the modern theories of the self, but in fact this comparison is misleading. There is no true asymmetry governing the concept of ipseity in Heidegger between the first person and the other persons in the grammatical sense. Ipseity is neutral with respect to the distinction of Ich und Du, as Heidegger explicitly emphasizes: “Ipseity […] is neutral with respect to the Being-me and the Being-thou, and even more with respect to sexuality.”18 So according to this conceptuality, unlike the egologies, ipseity is not primarily given to itself and then “extended” to others, to Mitdasein, thereby making them into an alter ego. It is rather the contrary: Dasein exists primarily in the mode of an indistinction with others, because as lost in “the They,” Dasein “is the others.”19 In fact, it can only access itself (become itself/himself), in its ownmost possibilities, by stripping itself/himself down to this ontological dependency to “others.” 4 This is why the conceptuality of ipseity, contrary to that of “the self,” doesn’t make any room for the very possibility of an existence in complete isolation, for solipsism. Dasein, as is well known, is originarily and primarily Mit-sein, Being-with, and this undermines solipsism from the outset. Not only is ipseity a feature of Dasein as Mitsein, but ipseity is itself something intrinsically relational since it is a way in which the Dasein takes a stance in relation to Being by being “true” in its primary sense. Here, an essential feature of the conceptualities of ipseity comes to the fore: the inner connection that they establish between selfhood and being true. In fact, what Heidegger calls Selbstheit, ipseity, is actually nothing other as resoluteness (Entschlossenheit),20 that is, a way of existing in which Dasein appropriates its existence and makes it its own by deciding about it, and resoluteness, in turn, is defined as a mode of disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), as “primordial truth”21 for Dasein. Ipseity is a kind of fidelity or loyalty (Treue)22 to oneself. 17

This aspect of ipseity is even more emphasized by Ricœur in Oneself as Another, in a slightly different spirit, since he takes as the heart of the concept of ipseity, fidelity to one’s word. He understands ipseity as a kind of reliability, the reliability of the one who keeps his word, a faithfulness that is also compared by him to that which we expect from the truthful witness. This is why the “password for [his] entire book” is “attestation.”23 Ipseity is basically attestation, the attitude of the truthful witness who doesn’t elide her responsibility and is faithful before and towards others. Ricœur thus implicitly criticizes the still too “monological” conceptuality of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger’s quasi-Stoic grounding of ipseity in Being-towards-death and resoluteness, and replaces these existentials by 17 Martin Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, GA 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988), 437–438 (my translation). 18 Martin Heidegger, Wegmarken, GA9 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1978), 157–158. Own translation. 19 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 129; Stambaugh translation, 120: “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself.” 20 For this equivalence, see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 298: “As authentic Being-oneself, resoluteness … .” 21 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 297; Stambaugh translation, 273. 22 Heidegger Sein und Zeit, 391; Stambaugh translation, 357. It should be noticed that Treue has the same root as true in English. 23 Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, 335, note 1; Blamey translation, 289, note 82.

336  Claude Romano a more dialogical or intrinsically social approach in which one can be himself or herself only in front of others and towards them. It isn’t possible to be oneself (in the sense of ipseity) by oneself, in isolation. Ipseity is an attitude that we endorse in front of someone, and thus it amounts to a form of responsibility. This is what Ricœur purports to capture through the notion of “attestation”: the attitude of the faithful witness who doesn’t withdraw herself into her responsibilities. These four characteristics of ipseity—(1) it brings forth a new concept of identity; (2) it doesn’t rest on strong interiority and even challenges it; (3) it excludes any absolute asymmetry between the grammatical persons; and (4) it completely excludes solipsism— allow us to realize how far ipseity stands from the traditional “problem of the self.” But it leaves also many questions open. One important problem is how these different features are related to one another, and what makes this concept genuinely unified and consistent. For instance, what is the exact relation between identity and truth? How are we to understand the connection between a new sense of identity and a form of faithfulness? Indeed, what exactly does “identity” in this new sense mean? Both Heidegger and Ricœur are more prone to say what “identity” isn’t, than what it is. Granted, if ipseity is a new form of identity, it cannot be numerical identity (the concept which has provided their guiding thread to the “theories of identity” from Descartes to contemporary analytic philosophy). But then, what is it? 3  Ipseity beyond its thematization by Heidegger and Ricœur At this stage, we need to depart from the treatment of this notion by Heidegger and Ricœur and try to elaborate it further in a free way. The question is, how is ipseity supposed to be at the same time (1) a form of identity; (2) a way of being or a way of existing: i.e., an attitude one can adopt or abandon; and (3) a form of reliability or of existential truth before others (and oneself)? How can one concept link all these apparently diverse meanings? A place to start is to return to the concept of “identity” involved. In Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Heidegger suggests that ipseity is a specific kind of identity, but then he adds that it is a form of self-possession, something that can hardly be understood as identity. Thus, the problem remained completely unsolved. In Oneself as Another, Ricœur attempts to push this problem one step further by suggesting a contract between two senses of identity, on the model of two Latin expressions: idem and ipse. Accordingly, he distinguishes two major meanings of ‘identity’ […] depending on whether one understands by ‘identical’ the equivalent of the Latin ipse or idem. The equivocity of the term ‘identical’ will be at the center of our reflections on personal identity and narrative identity and related to a primary trait of the self, namely its temporality. Identity in the sense of idem unfolds an entire hierarchy of significations […] permanence in time constitutes the highest order [of this hierarchy], to which will be opposed that which differs, in the sense of changing or variable. Our thesis throughout will be that identity in the sense of ipse implies no assertion concerning some unchanging core of the personality. And this will be true, even when selfhood adds its own peculiar modalities of identity, as will be seen in the analysis of promising. I won’t comment on all the aspects of this very dense passage, but I shall pause on the distinction between idem and ipse. As Ricœur presents these two Latin expressions, they

Heidegger and Ricœur on ipseity  337 would represent two meanings of “identical,” showing an “equivocity” of that term. Idem would emphasize strict identity, that is, permanence in time, whereas ipse would refer to a looser form of selfsameness which would make room for change and difference, on the model of my keeping my word without thereby remaining necessarily self-identical. However, this analysis is puzzling at two levels: at the linguistic level, as an analysis of the two Latin expressions; and also at a philosophical level. Let’s start with the latter. Ricœur’s typology necessarily implies that there is some incompatibility between identity (in the usual sense of idem) and change, and that such incompatibility calls for a different concept of “identical.” But actually, there is no such incompatibility. For A to be identical to B, it is necessary, according to the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals (Leibniz’s law), that they have all their properties in common. But this means only that if A is identical with B, then they share all their properties at each moment of time, at t1, t2, t3 and so forth. But Leibniz’s law shouldn’t be applied diachronically; it doesn’t mean that A and B must share all their properties from one moment to the other, from t to t′, tʺ, etc., because otherwise identity would amount to immutability, and almost nothing in the world would be identical. But if there is no incompatibility between identity and change (rather, change implies identity), then there is no necessity of a second concept, “identity-ipse,” in addition to the usual one, “identity-idem.” Now, what about the meaning of the Latin words: does this duality betray an “equivocity” of “same” in Latin? At this linguistic level, Ricœur’s analysis is also quite implausible (albeit in ways that turn out to be informative for elaborating the philosophical notion of ipseity). In Latin, idem and ipse are not two words to express identity; rather they are two expressions whose use is utterly different. Idem is the word that expresses identity, sameness. But ipse is a word endowed with a very specific meaning and use related to variation. As Ernout and Thomas explain in their Syntaxe latine, ipse is “an intensive which is used with an idea of latent contrast [intensif qui s’emploie avec une idée d’opposition latente]”; ipse means: “him by contrast with another considered explicitly or not.” 24 For instance, if I say Caesar ipse venit, what I mean is actually that Caesar came in person (with an emphatic nuance), and not by the intermediary of a representative or a spokesperson. This is the “contrast” that is implied here. To use ipse is to suggest a contrast between two ways of doing something: you can do something by doing it yourself, in person and by taking full responsibility for it, or you can delegate this action to others. But this is exactly the same kind of contrast that is suggested by Heidegger’s concept of Selbstheit when he writes that Dasein oscillates between two possibilities or potentialities-of-being: that of being oneself or not being oneself; that of making its existence its own by deciding for it, or delegating its ownmost decision to “the They”; in other words, that of existing in person or existing by proxy. Selbstheit, exactly as ipse in Latin, expresses a latent contrast between these two ways of being: existence in person (ipse) or existence under the mask of “the They.” This is why the translation of Selbstheit by “ipseity” is probably the best one, since the “contrastive” use of the Latin root fits remarkably well with what Heidegger wants to capture. The provisory conclusion of all this is that, contrary to what Ricœur claims, one cannot really rely on the difference between the two Latin terms to argue for an “equivocity of identity.” Ipseity and identity cannot be opposed as two answers—one better and one worse—to the same question of the “Who?” Actually, the question of permanence in

24 Alfred Ernout and François Thomas, Syntaxe latine (Paris: Klincksieck, 2002), 189.

338  Claude Romano time and the question of existence in person (an existence fully responsible for itself in the mode of truthfulness) are just two different questions. Moreover, ipseity in the sense of this specific way of being, in which one endorses the full responsibility for one’s being by deciding for it, presupposes the numerical identity of the one who exists in this mode. Does this amount to a reductio ad absurdum of the very distinction between identity and ipseity? Quite the contrary! It is true that neither Ricœur nor Heidegger were able to clearly connect the question of ipseity as a way of existence and the necessity of a different concept of identity than numerical identity. They were unable to explain, I believe, what this second sense of identity would amount to. But this doesn’t mean that it is impossible to do so, and, thus, that it is impossible to articulate the three features of ipseity that I have distinguished so far: (1) a form of identity, (2) a way of being, (3) a form of existential truth. In the concluding remarks that follow, I provide some cursory suggestions about how this might be attempted. There is indeed a second sense of identity, in addition to numerical identity, often called by logicians “qualitative identity.” Qualitative identity can be defined as the set of characteristics that make an entity the entity it is, without however allowing us to say which one it is among a multiplicity of entities; without allowing us to identify it in the strict sense. If we limit ourselves to persons, we can say that numerical and qualitative identities correspond respectively to two different meanings of the question “who?” in English. If, for example, I ask the question “Who is Oedipus?” this question can take on two meanings, depending on the circumstances of its use. Suppose that I am a theatre producer watching a group of actors performing Sophocles’s tragedy. In this context, what I want to know is who, among this plurality of actors, is playing the part of Oedipus. What I am looking for is an identification, which might be provided by one of the actors raising his hand or answering “I am.” This has to do with numerical identity. But now, suppose that I am a High School teacher commenting on Sophocles’s play for my class, and I ask the question, “Who is Oedipus?” Obviously, I am not needing one of the students to raise their hand, or to gesture towards the character on the book cover. That would be silly. What I am asking for isn’t an identification of Oedipus but a relevant description of the character in Sophocles’s play. What I am looking for is the set of characteristics that make this character the character he is; a set of defining properties. But no set of properties, by itself, can allow me to identity anyone in the strict sense, since those properties remain always general. The question “who?” can be used in both ways: to identity and to characterize someone. In the first person (the famous “Que sçais-je?” of Montaigne), “who?” is always used as a characterizing question, and not as an identifying one (except in very unusual circumstances like complete amnesia). It asks for qualitative identity, not numerical identity. What is exactly the relation between ipseity and qualitative identity? Well, if ipseity is taken as a way of being, a way of being in which one is making himself accountable in front of others for who he is, then “who he is” must be understood in the sense of qualitative identity. Ipseity is a way of being in which one makes oneself accountable for the inner characteristics of one’s qualitative identity, and therefore presents himself to others in a true and faithful light. Ipseity is a form of faithfulness in which our qualitative identity (who we are) is fully displayed to others. Thus understood, ipseity bears the three characteristics I have mentioned. First, even though it isn’t itself a form of identity, it has to be understood in close connection with identity—not numerical identity, but a qualitative one. To exist in the mode of ipseity is

Heidegger and Ricœur on ipseity  339 to endorse in front of others the more central characteristics of one’s identity, especially one’s true beliefs, true desires, true commitments, in a faithful way. It is to assume “who one is” in that sense. Second, as a way of being and a way of existing, ipseity is in no way a kind of reality (a substance, a psychological continuity, a transcendental pole). This way of existing is clearly something in which we can find ourselves or fail to find ourselves, and it is something that we can gain or lose. (Psychiatry describes modalities of such loss of capacity of being, something that I won’t enter into further here.) Moreover, ipseity thus understood is something socially acquired, and consequently an infant hasn’t ipseity in that sense. Third, this way of being consists in truthfulness. To be oneself means “ne pas faire défaut,” to use one of the favoured expressions of Ricœur. Truthfulness means here a showing of oneself as who one is, a displaying one’s qualitative identity in words and deeds. In other words, ipseity is to be defined in terms of authenticity.25 The intuition which, I believe, lies at the bottom of this paradigm-shift is that ipseity is something essentially social. In this, there is a sharp contrast with “the self” as it is understood in the framework of the egologies. One can “be oneself” only in front of another, because to be oneself means basically to exist in a truthful manner, and to exist truthfully is possible only towards another, including myself as another (hence Ricœur’s title). As Ricœur puts it, “I treat myself as a thou.”26 Ipseity closely and strongly links the veritative dimension of selfhood with its social dimension. Indeed the truthful revelation of oneself is fundamentally (not secondary or accidentally) related to the dynamics of becoming oneself and being oneself. Only because I am able to present myself in a faithful way to others am I also in the situation of becoming for them, and for myself, who I am. Truth has a constitutive role to play in the formation of my identity as a socially constituted identity. I conclude with a powerful expression of this very idea by Bernard Williams: Where the presence of other people is vital, sincerity helps to construct or to create truth. Drawn to bind myself to the others’ shared values, to make my own beliefs and feelings steadier (to make them, at the limit, for the first time into beliefs), I become what with increasing steadiness I can sincerely profess; I become what I have sincerely declared to them, or perhaps I become my interpretation of their interpretation of what I have sincerely declared to them.27

25 For a full re-elaboration of this notion of ipseity, see Claude Romano, L’identité humaine en dialogue (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2022). 26 Paul Ricœur, Philosophie de la volonté, vol 1, Le volontaire et l’involontaire (Paris: Aubier, 1950), 14. 27 Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 203–204.

21 Badiou contra Lacan contra Heidegger Truth, being, subject, polemos Justin Clemens

Abstract  This chapter examines a number of ways in which Alain Badiou seeks to draw from and displace the work of Martin Heidegger, particularly regarding the roles of being, truth, mathematics and poetry. Badiou takes mathematics as ontology, using it to remodel classical metaphysical propositions of being and nothingness, becoming and knowledge, a position which, on the face of it, could not be more flagrantly anti-Heideggerian. Yet, on closer examination, such a position retains key elements of Heidegger’s own. To show how this is the case, the chapter reconstructs from Badiou’s work his dependence on not only Heidegger but also Jacques Lacan’s conceptions of the subject, truth and language. Keywords  Badiou; Heidegger; Lacan; Truth; Being; Subject; Polemos 1  To repose the question of truth In the published text of his 1981–1982 seminar, Hermeneutics of the Subject (3 February 1982), there is the record of Michel Foucault’s perhaps surprising response to an insistent questioner: Let’s say that there have not been that many people who in the last years — I will say in the twentieth century—have posed the question of truth. Not that many people have posed the question: What is involved in the case of the subject and of the truth? And: What is the relationship of the subject to the truth? What is the subject of truth, what is the subject who speaks the truth, etcetera? As far as I’m concerned, I see only two. I see only Heidegger and Lacan. Personally, myself, you must have heard this, I have tried to reflect on all this from the side of Heidegger and starting from Heidegger.1 This extraordinary response—extraordinary, not least, for its intellectual candour, its richness and its decisiveness—requires extended commentary to do it justice. Here, I wish only to underline a handful of its claims and implications. First, it identifies truth as a question. In this, Foucault is expressly downstream of Heidegger, most proximately, but of course also to a dominant strain in the tradition of philosophy itself, all the way back to the pre-Socratics. Truth is not reached by means of dogma, doxa, adequation, or

1 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 189.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-23

Badiou contra Lacan contra Heidegger  341 invention, but primarily through the question, through questioning. Second, it identifies the question of truth as rare: “not that many people.” Third, it identifies the question of the relation of the subject to truth as integral to the question of truth itself. Fourth, this question is itself dynamic in the sense that it has an inner power of proliferation: to broach the question of truth is essentially also to broach the question of the subject of truth, which is to broach the question of the subject that speaks the truth… and so on. Fifth, it holds that two names above all—and perhaps only these two—are determining for this relation and these questions today: those of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Lacan, the German philosopher and the French psychoanalyst. Sixth, more speculatively and certainly more implicitly, it implies that these two names also denominate a kind of forced choice for thinking: if one is interested in the relation of the question to the relation of the subject to truth, then today you can take either a Heideggerian way or a Lacanian way but not both. In drawing on Foucault’s response to orient the current chapter—which primarily concerns the relation of the subject to the truth in the work of Alain Badiou insofar as it orients itself as a kind of negation of Heidegger’s—I will not speak further of Foucault’s own position. I will rather follow yet complicate his remark by reconstructing from Badiou’s work a singular relationship to both Lacan and Heidegger at once. This reconstruction will show how, from the irreducibility or incommensurability of the ways in which Heidegger and Lacan conceive of subject, truth and language, Badiou develops his own position; in doing so, how certain means, topics and positions of these thinkers continue to orient his work, even if in an inflected or negated fashion. This is, in other words, to draw from Badiou’s own work specific images of Heidegger and Lacan that, if not necessarily always “true,” “just,” “accurate” or “faithful” to these thinkers per se, nonetheless simultaneously illuminate—even if in a mode of contestation or circumvention—certain elements of their work in unexpected and interesting ways. Moreover, it will thereby also suggest how philosophy indeed might be said to “progress”—if this word is indeed properly applicable in such a context—by means of new constructions of the question or problem of truth. 2  Badiou contra Heidegger? Although some of the key claims and procedures of Badiou’s work are now relatively well known, their origin, function and import are often still in serious dispute. One could immediately cite such widely circulated general doctrines as follows: • • • • • • •

Plato is the proper founder of philosophy as such There are four and only four conditions of philosophy These conditions are the necessary and sufficient conditions for philosophy These conditions are science, love, art and politics Each condition constitutes a modality of truth These conditions are irreducible to one another, to the world and to language Philosophy is the work of establishing the compossibility of these conditions by constructing a singular place of thought

Accompanying these very general declarations are more particular (if still highly abstract) claims, such as the notorious “mathematics is ontology” or a defence of the “communist hypothesis.” I will return to several of these below.

342  Justin Clemens Although any card-carrying Heideggerian would immediately recognize the absolutely anti-Heideggerian animus of such propositions, it would not necessarily be as immediately clear that Heidegger was in fact a privileged target or, indeed, has established the ground site from which Badiou struggles to depart. After all, although Badiou has dedicated exceedingly closely handled seminars, chapters, articles and talks to many of the canonical thinkers in the history of philosophy—a short-list would include Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel and many more beyond—his references to Heidegger tend to be scattered and fragmentary, and few of the German philosopher’s appearances could be considered to constitute a fulsome discussion. Moreover, even when Heidegger is expressly in his sights, Badiou tends to proceed by using an image or trait allegedly emblematic of Heidegger’s work as a way of establishing a situation that he wishes to critique and depart from. Such invocations are simultaneously crucial insofar as they establish the where, the why and the how of Badiou himself is going to proceed, yet oddly gestural in that they only rarely extend themselves to cite Heidegger chapter and verse (as it were). Indeed, between 1968 and 1982, there is almost no mention of Heidegger at all, outside of a couple of glancing allusions; by contrast, the name and work of G.W.F. Hegel is near-ubiquitous.2 Then Heidegger suddenly starts to appear—with a vengeance, as the phrase has it. In Can Politics Be Thought? (1985), itself initially given as a seminar for the French “Left Heideggerian” Jean-Luc Nancy, a recognizably Heideggerian language of withdrawal, destruction and being starts to assert itself, supplanting Badiou’s own earlier recondite and rebarbative vocabularies of alienation, scission, splace (esplace) and outland (horlieu).3 In 1986 for his Habilitation, Badiou delivered a seminar dedicated to Heidegger (belatedly published in 2015).4 There are mentions of Heidegger in Being and Event (1988), Manifesto for Philosophy (1989) and several essays in Conditions (1992).5 Thereafter the references to Heidegger start slowly to disappear again: there are a few scattered mentions in Briefings on Existence (1998) and Inaesthetics (1998), in Logics of Worlds (2006) and in Immanence of Truths (2018).6 A slender co-authored book with Barbara Cassin on Heidegger has been near-universally panned for its lack of any real substance.7 Perhaps as a result of these features, and although some work has already been done on the “relation” between Badiou and Heidegger, it remains for the most part loosely “comparative” in the sense of comparing and assessing doctrinal differences between the two. Such secondary commentaries, moreover, have focused almost entirely on the

2 See Alain Badiou, «La subversion infinitésimale,» Cahiers pour l’analyse 9 (1968): 118–137; «Marque et Manque: à propos du Zéro,» Cahiers pour l’analyse 10 (1969): 150–173; Théorie de la contradiction (Paris: Maspero, 1975); Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London and New York: Continuum, 2009). 3 Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985). 4 Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Heidegger, L’être 3 – Figure du retrait (Paris: Fayard, 2015). 5 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York: Continuum, 2005); Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY, 1999); Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2008). 6 Alain Badiou, Briefings on Existence, trans. Norman Madarasz (New York: SUNY, 2006); Alain Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London and New York: Continuum, 2009); Alain Badiou, L’Immanence des vérités (Paris: Fayard, 2018). 7 See Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, Heidegger: His Life and Philosophy, trans. Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

Badiou contra Lacan contra Heidegger  343 questions of ontology and politics, and most do not make a case for any really close connection between the two thinkers.8 Indeed, Heidegger and Badiou are so different in their formation, their references, their ambitions and their discursive modes that such comparisons very quickly expose unbridgeable gulfs between the two, to the point where comparison itself can start to seem otiose. As Mark Hewson puts it, one can pursue this contrast to the point where the differences between Badiou and Heidegger appear so great that one has to conclude that it is simply a matter of two quite distinct philosophical enterprises, each with a basically different question, which only somewhat contingently and misleadingly cross paths on the word ‘being’.9 And yet, as Hewson immediately goes on to add: But one could also suggest that the coexistence of these alternatives on the philosophical scene invites us to preserve the sense in which they represent a fundamental alternative, a struggle in which the antagonists can take on their real shape (to borrow the pattern of Heidegger’s interpretation of polemos, Auseinandersetzung, the conflict that opens the space of thought). One can perhaps discern something of this conflict in the way that Badiou recurrently returns to Heidegger … as if he still felt a kind of fascination for the problem of being, in the Heideggerian sense, even from the position that claims to have bypassed it.10 Extending Hewson’s suggestions, I maintain that many of Badiou’s central theses have been expressly generated by means of a polemical assault on Heidegger’s work, and the “fascination” of which Hewson speaks here is itself a sign—a symptom?—of a fundamental relation. It is to several such aspects of Badiou’s work that I now turn.11 3  “The last universally recognizable philosopher” Being and Event is the key text in this regard. The book in fact opens by declaring that “Heidegger is the last universally recognizable philosopher.”12 Heidegger, in other words, is the most recent philosopher who is recognized as a philosopher in a genuinely global frame—even by the analytic philosophers who despise and condemn him. In this context, moreover, Heidegger’s import is due to the reopening of the ontological question

  8 For published commentary on the relationship, see inter alia: Miguel de Beistegui, “The Ontological Dispute: Badiou, Heidegger, and Deleuze,” in Philosophy and Its Conditions, ed. Gabriel Riera (Albany: SUNY, 2005), 45–58; Justin Clemens and Jon Roffe, “Philosophy as Anti-Religion in the Work of Alain Badiou,” Sophia 47 (2008): 345–358; Graham Harman, “Badiou’s Relation to Heidegger in Theory of the Subject,” in Badiou and Philosophy, ed. Simon Duffy and Sean Bowden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 225–242; Mark Hewson, “Heidegger,” in Alain Badiou: Key Concepts, ed. A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens (London: Acumen, 2011), 146–154; Frank Ruda, For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015).   9 Hewson, “Heidegger,” 144. 10 Ibid., 144. 11 The present essay extends my previous work on this subject, especially: Justin Clemens, “The Question Concerning Technology: Badiou versus Heidegger,” in Badiou and the German Tradition of Philosophy, ed. Jan Völker (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 113–130. 12 Badiou, Being and Event, 1.

344  Justin Clemens as determining for philosophy. In doing so, Heidegger is also held to have offered the strongest possible construction of the priority of finitude in the thinking of being, a finitude essentially correlated with the historicity of the eventing of being. Such historicity is articulated with an analysis of metaphysics which, throughout its diverse epochs, retains a (complex, paradoxical) unity insofar as it itself insists on the unbudgeable insistence of the “one” in post-Platonic thought. If this metaphysics is currently regnant in its solidarity with mathematical physics and mechanized technology, its “origins” lie with the emergence and establishment of Western thinking with the experience of the Greeks. In returning to the Greeks, tracking the vicissitudes of the institutionalization of such thinking, we also encounter another way of thinking that, although deeply implicated with metaphysics and philosophy, is not simply determined or reducible to these: the poem, poetry. Thus, with the poem as a kind of guide, we can recapitulate the history of thought to unleash other possibilities that, however infirm or indiscernible in the present, nonetheless retain traces of a non-metaphysical thinking, a different revealing of being. This, for what it is worth, seems a reasonably standard snapshot or summary of Heidegger’s accomplishment. But it is neither particularly unique nor detailed; it does not really engage with the means nor the complexity of what is indeed a titanic enterprise. Nor does it in itself provide the requisite leverage for a properly polemical (in the senses briefly invoked above) reconstruction of philosophy along the lines that explicitly concern Badiou. To do so means focusing more carefully on Badiou’s own references and shifting-points. There are four interlinked aspects in particular I wish to discuss: the distinction between truth and knowledge; the status of ontology, or, more precisely, the thinking of the ontological difference; the role of the poem as against that of the matheme; and polemic as such. 4  Truth/knowledge, being/beings First, Badiou everywhere credits Heidegger as giving the decisive impetus to the distinction between truth and knowledge, and takes it up wholesale throughout his own work. Badiou, however, hardly ever pinpoints any specific place where this distinction is discussed by Heidegger, taking it as patent and fundamental; he often simply invokes and relies upon it as a fundamental conviction crucial to any proper (philosophical) thinking. Thinking must concern itself not only with knowing and knowledge, but with truth or rather truths: incommensurable truths that must be extra-propositional or extra-logical in any received sense, not adequational, and yet not simply irrational nor extra-rational. That said, if the matter and means of this distinction prove to be altogether other for Badiou than for Heidegger, it is nonetheless Heidegger that Badiou always acknowledges as making the crucial intervention in this regard. Heidegger himself testifies that his own “turn” to truth emerges in the years following his own dissatisfactions with Being and Time, whereby his own questioning of the meaning of being transforms itself into an inquiry regarding the truth of being. Moreover, the ontological question that Heidegger has also so strongly reintroduced as a primary concern for thinking is not thereby simply abandoned—it is sharpened. And Heidegger does so by affirming absolutely the priority of language: “Language is the house of being, and there man dwells.” To undertake a reconstruction of the eventful historicity of the “forgetting of the forgetting of being” therefore becomes one of Heidegger’s life-long obsessions, and one of his primary modes of such a reconstruction concerns the necessity to undertake a deconstruction of the epochal becoming of technē itself. In doing so, the

Badiou contra Lacan contra Heidegger  345 role of the poem (or, at least, some poems) in thinking necessarily moves to the fore, as a modality of revealing that is non-propositional, non-adequational, non-reductive and non-unilateral. Perhaps most importantly and directly in this context, Badiou seems convinced that— if Heidegger’s axioms are accepted—then the struggle between technology and poetry delineated by Heidegger is not only irreducible in the contemporary age, but entails that the thinking of being itself cannot be separated from the thinking of eventing.13 Why not? Because if language is primary in any inquiry into thinking and if all thinking is necessarily downstream of language—these two theses being integrated by Heidegger—then the historicity of the development of even the most abstruse and apparently non-linguistic elements of contemporary technology can be shown to pass (or to have to have passed) through language, even if in an attenuated, disavowed and expropriative manner. Moreover, the questions of “logic,” “mathematics” and “science” are thereby also integrated into the reconstruction of the becoming of thinking, not least because, as Heidegger asserts and repeats from the early 1930s onwards: From earliest times until Plato the word technē is linked with the word epistēmē. Both terms are words for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it.14 Technē is thereby itself smitten by an original and asymmetrical doubleness, between poiēsis and epistēmē, truth and knowing. What is perhaps oddest here—at least for most readers of Badiou—is that Badiou seems to take Heidegger’s doctrines with a seriousness lacking in most of the commentary hostile to the latter (and indeed in some of the “friendly” commentary as well!). In fact, it is as if Heidegger has so set the current terms of engagement for any philosophical ontology that nobody else has satisfactorily managed to displace his arguments—except by departing from them. But, in doing so, the critics have also thoroughly lost, reduced, misunderstood or otherwise botched the ontological question as such. The beginning of Being and Event in fact announces Badiou’s own project as follows: • Along with Heidegger, it will be maintained that philosophy as such can only be reassigned on the basis of the ontological question. • Along with analytic philosophy, it will be held that the mathematico-logical revolution of Frege-Cantor sets new orientations for thought. • Finally, it will be agreed that no conceptual apparatus is adequate unless it is homogenous with the theoretico-practical orientations of the modern doctrine of the subject, itself internal to practical processes (clinical or political).15 Or, as Badiou telegraphically presents his ambitions: being, truth, subject. The immediate problem is, as he acknowledges, that the very strength of analytic philosophy in regard to mathematics and logic is also its weakness: its own putative ontological proposals suffer in comparison to Heidegger’s precisely because Heidegger has a strong and difficult 13 See Badiou’s remarks on Heidegger and technology in Manifesto for Philosophy. 14 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York and London: Garland, 1977), 13. 15 Badiou, Being and Event, 2.

346  Justin Clemens position regarding the historical emergence of the mathematical as an epoch of thought, one far superior to any of his analytic rivals. As Bernhard Radhoff glosses: “Heidegger’s distinction between mathematics and the mathematical illuminates the fundamental relation between mathematics in the foundations of modern science, the mathematical, and metaphysics: the mathematical is the common root of all three.”16 Moreover, the epochal domination of the mathematical itself establishes “history” as the site of homogenous objectivities. Yet it is also the case that this domination of beings by number that characterizes modernity is itself only one torsion in the great destining of being, being certainly not the first nor (necessarily) the last. It is perhaps remarkable that Badiou recognizes that analytic philosophy cannot compete with Heidegger in this regard; indeed, if it is true that “language” “precedes” “mathematics” in its very opening of the possibility of number per se, then Heidegger is fundamentally right and the analytics are wrong. And the arguments in favour of “language”—from the Romantics through the linguistic turn and beyond—are undoubtedly very strong. In any case, any philosophical attempt to justify modern science as ontology quickly comes a cropper on the rock of unjustifiable suppositions, not least regarding the problems of “adequation.” If Badiou, then, is going to use mathematics as an ontology, he is going to have to contest Heidegger’s demonstrations regarding what is essentially the derivative nature of mathematical knowing, and, above all, to separate mathematics from its dependence upon or relation to language as such. This is hardly an easy enterprise. 5  Enter the psychoanalyst Yet it is precisely on this point that Badiou has recourse to what might seem an utterly bizarre and unexpected source: the mathematical elucubrations of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. After all, aside from anything else, Lacan is notorious not only for his incomprehensibility, his dilettantish magpie-picking from any and all sources and his own commitment to a radical form of psychoanalysis not widely celebrated today (not least given its almost-universally debunked scientific claims). But the feature most crucial in this context is that Lacan is most influential for his commitment to the priority of “the symbolic” in psychoanalysis, that is, to the priority of language as such. Lacan, who followed Heidegger’s work very closely and indeed had translated the German thinker into French, would therefore seem a very unlikely candidate to provide the key arguments for the separation of mathematics and language. There is, nonetheless, a method in Badiou’s madness (it is perhaps worth mentioning in passing that such unlikely conceptual moves recur frequently in his thought). Here, it will entail finding a different way of separating or articulating truth and knowledge. Recall the quote from Foucault with which I began: both Lacan and Heidegger were centrally concerned with this distinction, although they conceived it very differently. What, then, in Lacan’s work speaks to this distinction, and how does Badiou use it to produce a new relation between ontology and mathematics not reducible to the Heideggerian position? In the famous essay “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” Lacan pauses to remark as follows:

16 Bernhard Radloff, “Ontotheology and Universalism: Heideggerian Reflections on Alain Badiou’s Political Thinking,” in Existentia, XXII, Fasc. 3–4 (2012): 307.

Badiou contra Lacan contra Heidegger  347 To pinpoint the emergence of the discipline of linguistics, I will say that, as in the case of every science in the modern sense, it consists in the constitutive moment of an algorithm that grounds it. This algorithm is the following: S — s It is read as follows: signifier over signified, “over” corresponding to the bar separating the two levels.17 Although much has been said (and there is much more to say) about Lacan’s remarks, in the current context—which demands only that I show what Lacan provides Badiou in order that the latter break with a certain aspect of Heidegger—I will be brief. Lacan insists that “every” modern science has a founding “algorithm.” Such an algorithm is necessarily “clear and distinct,” although not only in the Cartesian sense, precisely because—although it does indeed function as a halting point, much like the cogito itself— it is not a point of presence or presenting. On the contrary, the big S, the signifier, is necessarily a material mark of some kind; the little s, the signified, is nowhere attested in reality. It is nothing other than a kind of projection of the material mark itself: a supposedly particular absence as kind of “promise” that cannot be kept. Yet the signifier is not just any matter or material whatsoever, although it precisely can be made out of anything: it is one that, precisely, is cut off from materiality in general insofar as it purports to signify (that is, “point” to something that it itself is not). Yet it itself can only do so on the presupposition of a cut, a bar, a barrier between the material itself and its meaning, a non-negotiable division following from the very definition of a sign. What is the status of this barrier, then? It cannot be material, by definition; but it is not simply nothing, either, insofar as it must insist within every signifier as kind of unmarked marking of that signifier’s “signifyingness” as such. Yet if this “barrier” is itself nowhere existent, neither can it be equated with the same kind of inexistence as the (lacking) signified which this barrier makes possible as impossible. Finally, this signal triplet of such matter-that-is-not-just-matter, this inexistent-that-insists, and this lack-that-does-not-exist is itself only differentially or diacritically defined—à la the famous Saussurean conception of language as constituted by “differences without positive terms”—and so it is itself ghosted by its own negation, an irreducibly paradoxical quadrature whose functioning is nonetheless eminently describable in and by “modern science.” Whatever one makes of Lacan’s assertion—there is not the time to argue for or against it here, to show its antecedents or implications or even how it comes to function in his psychoanalytic praxis proper—it is vital to clarify its conceptual import. For Lacan, the algorithm (and its interpretation) provides a kind of diagram of a theory of the relation between truth, knowledge and meaning that is completely different from Heidegger’s. For example, this is why for Lacan we can “know” the signifier but the “truth” of the signified is null… because any signified (meaning) can only be produced as lacking, and “truth” itself is therefore only the index of the “necessity” of this lack. For Lacan, the subject of language, the “speaking being,” is the subject that supports signifying chains; this is precisely what he calls the split subject, giving it the notorious emblem of $, given that, in supporting language, the subject must also be cleft by the structure of the sign

17 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink with Hélène Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006), 414–415.

348  Justin Clemens itself. The algorithm also thereby becomes a generative matrix for a sequence of Lacanian doctrines regarding the status of formalization itself. For the inexistent bar or cut (the “—”), nominated as the “castration” that necessarily strikes every speaking being, also becomes for Lacan a kind of allegory of the impasse in and of formalization itself, all formalization finally foundering on the rock of its own impossibility. One might then well call Lacan’s “bar” his own take on Heidegger’s “ontological difference” insofar as it takes up the Heideggerian doctrines regarding the priority of language, the division of truth and knowledge, and the problem of existence—only to subvert them. Moreover, this “subversion” (the word is Lacan’s) has several consequences. It rejects ontology, indeed, all talk of “being,” as being simply an ineradicable mystification of the constitutive lack of the signified. It affirms modern science (the very science that Heidegger considers part of the age of the world picture and the planetary regime of technology) as introducing a new modality of clarity and distinctness that is not at all a presencing (for the aforementioned reasons). It considers psychoanalysis itself not as a science but as a practice that follows the emergence of the subject of modern science. If Lacan (like Heidegger) remains very often characterized as an incomprehensible charlatan, whose mystifying vatic utterances are, when not simply meaningless, harmful and wrong, for better or worse, the opposite is the case: he couldn’t be clearer or more precise on the topic of language, nor more committed to the differences that modern science makes. His algorithm of the “—” is anti-ontological (and anti-philosophical), pro-scientific and pro-language. Furthermore, if Saussurean linguistics and structuralism have themselves now receded into the arcana of the historically redundant sciences, this doesn’t in itself vitiate the insights of Lacan’s interpretation vis-à-vis that putative science, nor does it necessarily render the conceptual implications of that interpretation otiose or false. If Heideggerians (among others) might still genuinely find Lacan’s position crass and irritating—which it in many ways is—it can still proffer a suggestive clarification of Heidegger’s own “grounding algorithm.” For Heidegger can indeed be read as not without an algorithm of his own. Let us represent it as the following cipher—< >—to be read as something like “revealing-withdrawing.” What does this mean? Take a crude presentation of the phenomenology of the ontological difference. Being must always be the being of beings. Yet, given that it is shared by every being and that beings prove different to the extent that they may share no predicates, no particular predicate can be of being itself, not even such fundamental predicates as “being one” (and therefore we cannot even consider being “many”). But since being must “appear” in every being, it must still show itself in that from which it withdraws. Being can only therefore be properly characterized as “nothing”; but, as nothing, it is not simply an inert thing-in-itself, but must manifest a certain paradoxical “activity.” The “nothing” of being must therefore be said not only as the negation of every substance but as an operation of “to nothing.” Such an “operation” is fundamentally “temporal,” in such a way that it cannot be submitted to the linearity, punctuality or sequencing of vulgar notions of time. Alternatively, rather than to being, one might assign this movement to that of the differencing of being and beings “itself,” which would then lead to a significantly different deduction (certainly, just as minimal and “empty”). And if one is attentive to the particular language in which such movement both reveals and hides itself, opens and closes at once, it would also be impossible to affirm the claims of a putative metalanguage allegedly able to speak of being beyond the linguistic site in which such a questioning emerges.

Badiou contra Lacan contra Heidegger  349 Table 21.1  Heidegger v. Lacan on Language, Being, Subject and Formalization

Language Being Subject Mathematics Algorithm

Heidegger

Lacan

YES YES NO NO

YES NO YES YES -

Whatever one makes of such programmatic and compressed simulations of the genesis of a certain line of Heideggerian thought on the basis of such an attribution of an “algorithm” to Heidegger, it does at least (again, paradoxically!) affirm that a certain strength and consistency must be assigned to Heidegger’s own suspicions concerning mathematical thinking. Rather than Carnapian contempt, then, one has to accept that Heidegger’s returns to locutions such as “the nothing nothings” have rather more plausibility and power than any eagerness to speak of the verifiability of scientific propositions. It also enables us, in the current context, to indicate how both Heidegger and Lacan, despite their differences, seek to establish, as Foucault suggests, two quite new positions regarding the distinction between truth and knowledge. The “logics” both propose are precisely extra-logical in that they conform neither to Aristotelian logic (there is no law or principle of non-contradiction) nor to Hegelian logic (insofar as the differences they discern are not simply contradictory nor relatable according to contradiction). We can see, too, how these positions are both integrally committed to a position that renders language primary in any and all thinking. As such, they also require a fundamental transformation in the modes appropriate to thinking the consequences of such logics. But—and this is the third and most important point regarding the usefulness of assigning such “algorithms” to Heidegger and Lacan here—it enables us to stage in a stark and summary form from Badiou’s point of view the situation of thinking into which he seeks to intervene. Certainly, both have together helped to establish the limits of where thinking is today vis-à-vis truth, being and the subject, but have simultaneously made thinking these three elements together impossible. In order to reconstruct a philosophy that takes into account the stringent critiques of Heidegger and Lacan, then, but moves beyond their methods and conclusions, Badiou seeks to break with the priority of language in the realm of thought. To do so, Badiou has to argue that mathematics is irreducible to technology and that mathematics/logic is irreducible to language.18 And I have already noted that it by arraying Lacan against Heidegger that Badiou seeks to do this. But how is that possible? After all, as I have also noted, Lacan and Heidegger both agree that language is primary in any thinking, and in any analysis of thinking. 18 As Badiou puts it, commenting on both Wittgenstein and Heidegger’s animus towards mathematics: “On the one hand, there is the computational equating of mathematics and logic, which is subtracted from thought and slid over to the benefit of a blind and technical power of the rule. On the other, one finds the archi-aesthetic appeal to the pacific and enlightened power of the poem,” Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise of Transitory Ontology, trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany: SUNY, 2006), 109. In Badiou’s own terms: Being and Event is itself the formal demonstration of such a separation, Logics of Worlds the continuation of this argument into the realms of phenomenology itself, and Immanence of Truths the triumphal reconstruction of an absolute available only through contemporary mathematics itself.

350  Justin Clemens The key here is the particular doctrine that Lacan makes of mathematical formalization, touched on above: that it formalizes an impossibility, irreducible and irresolvable. If analytic philosophy has typically taken up the priority of formalization for thinking in physics, biology, pure mathematics and logic, it has also typically presented these zones as establishing what justified true belief must be for us, installing proper sense and reference, and giving philosophy the proper matter, means and modes by which any thought that is not just opinion, fantasy or literature must proceed. As Badiou himself phrases the situation: if one supposes that there is a referent of logico-mathematical discourse, then one cannot escape the alternative of thinking of it either as an ‘object’ obtained by abstraction (empiricism) or as a super-sensible Idea (Platonism). This is the same dilemma in which one is trapped by the universally recognized Anglo-Saxon distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘empirical’ sciences.19 Against that position, Lacan holds rather that “the real is the impasse of formalization,” that is, that formalization doesn’t affirm but breaks apart objects and ideas, showing them to be fantasy identifications (as he indicates with the algorithm discussed). And, as we know, for Heidegger the thinking of being cannot be the thinking of objects or objectivity. So what is going on here? How do we get from Heidegger’s thinking of being through Lacan’s refusal of it by means of formalization as impossibility to Badiou’s thinking of being as delivered by means of mathematical formalization? This is where Badiou’s commitment to constructions out of paradox really comes into its own. Take set theory, which is one of the great mathematical innovations of the twentieth century, purporting to refound and rewrite all prior mathematical results in its own language, while simultaneously opening vistas onto previously unexpected mathematical phenomena. In its standard axiomatized version—so-called Zermelo-Fraenkel with Choice (or ZFC for short)—there are nine or so axioms, which deal with the establishment and handling of finite and infinite sets. In Being and Event, Badiou not only gives many general arguments regarding the status and implications of mathematics and of set theory in general, but also, decisively, examines each of these axioms in turn and in detail. Let me give only one instance here: that of his handling of the fundamental axiom of the empty set or void. This axiom is simple: “There exists a set without any element.” The sign for this set is ∅. Badiou will parse this proposition ontologically as follows: “∅ is the proper name of being.” For both Heidegger and Lacan, this might seem prima facie a ridiculous claim; but let us pay it a little more attention. First, if relatively loosely, it is clearly connected to Heidegger’s ratiocinations on the “nothing”; just as clearly, it speaks to a Lacanianism that formalization speaks of the impossible barrier at its heart. But it also goes further in its precision: Given that ontology is the theory of the pure multiple, what exactly could be composed by means of its presentative axiom system? What existent is seized upon by

19 Badiou, Being and Event, 5.

Badiou contra Lacan contra Heidegger  351 the Ideas of the multiple whose axioms institute the legislating action upon the multiple qua multiple? Certainly not the one, which is not. Every multiple is composed of multiples. This is the first ontological law. But where to start? What is the absolutely original existential position, the first count, if it cannot be a first one? There is no question about it: the ‘first’ presented multiplicity without concept has to be a multiple of nothing, because if it was a multiple of something, that something would then be in the position of the one.20 “Being” is “sutured” to “discourse” precisely in this formal sense of the acknowledgement of a pure nomination that must name nothing for the discourse to take place consistently at all. Being is named by the language as subtracted from the very language that gives us knowledge of it. So the paradoxical nature of the axiom is not thereby neutralized, but rather emphasized—and the mathematical itself is thereby revealed as the most rigorous form of thinking which enables the support of (certain of) Heidegger’s own doctrines on being. Rather than falsifying the ontological question, such mathematics delivers the essence of Heidegger’s own intuitions regarding the difficulties of thinking the being of beings. Furthermore, where Heidegger’s project is founded on the < > and Lacan’s on —, Badiou’s can be considered as hinging on the name-of-void, as a subtraction in this peculiar sense that I have indicated. Note, however, that such a subtraction still relies upon the Heideggerian orientation towards the priority of the thinking of being on the basis of a separation between truth and knowledge, as it aims against the supposed fusions of the latter which ultimately render logic, mathematics and technology unto a single essence, that of Gestell. 6  The poem as event For Heidegger, the technologies of philosophy themselves ultimately came to be considered finite means of revealing, with their own generic limitations emerging as a result. These limits then become in turn a goad to more profound trans-philosophical investigations of the vicissitudes of extra-propositional thought—for which the poem becomes the crucial operator. Indeed, Heidegger will come to announce that: “Poetry that thinks is in truth the topology of being.”21 One can easily see how great poems become not merely legislators or legislative, but events in and of language itself, revealing in their finitude something of the essence of being as finitude too. Poems are events which at once constitute a breaking-of-form (the novelty of a poem exceeding the limits of contemporary language and its genesis), a concomitant revelation of the status of the forms-that-theyhave-broken (the “background conditions” of the constitution of language as such that these poems expose in the rupture) and a new bringing-of-truth that exceeds any technical closure or operation of knowing, which, in its very presentation qua re-gathering of the disparate, opens the possibilities of different modes of thinking beyond any proposition or prescription.

20 Ibid., 57–58. 21 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 12.

352  Justin Clemens As is well known, it is Hölderlin’s poetry that most captures Heidegger, particularly in the fraught years following his resignation of the rectorship during the Second World War.22 If there is no space here to examine Heidegger’s extraordinary interpretations in detail, I will list certain key aspects insofar as they will be explicitly targeted by Badiou. For Heidegger, Hölderlin’s poetry is no longer either art or metaphysics but must be confronted outside these epochal determinations.23 The poem is a “naming,” which simultaneously means “to call to its essence” and to ground such a nomination. The poet names his subject an “enigma” [Rätsel]; indeed, he “poetizes more mysteriously than these other poets.”24 Hölderlin does so historically, summoning the routines of the forgetting of being against the regime of modern machine technology, the “catastrophic unhistorical” that is Americanism. Against this, “The sign, the demigod, the river, the poet: all these name poetically the one and singular ground of the becoming homely of human beings as historical and the founding of this ground by the poet.”25 To dwell poetically in these destitute times as a modality of awaiting the return of the gods thus becomes a kind of submissive letting-be for Heidegger, with thought now placed almost entirely under the tutelage of the poem. Here, Badiou proposes some stringent local differences between himself and Heidegger. He offers a number of strong counter-readings of Heidegger’s staple references.26 His reading of the poem of Parmenides ends up looking very unlike the one recreated by the German.27 He notes how certain thinkers, untouched by Heidegger, undo the German’s historical sequencing and language claims: here, the non-appearance of the Latin poet Lucretius is determining.28 He gives a number of bravura interpretations of Mallarmé, of whom he remarks that “Mallarmé has for me been emblematic of the relation between 22 See inter alia Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (New York: Humanity, 2000); Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” trans. William McNeill and Julia David (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996). Among the now very extensive secondary commentary on this relationship, see W.S. Allen, Ellipsis: of Poetry and the Experience of Language after Heidegger, Hölderlin and Blanchot (Albany: SUNY, 2007); Adrian Del Caro, Hölderlin: The Poetics of Being (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991); Eric Santner, Friedrich Hölderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1986). It is worth remembering that, as Stuart Elden has put it, “All of the Hölderlin lectures post-date the explicit political career, but they are all written by a card-carrying Nazi, as he remained in the Party until 1945” (Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History [London: Continuum, 2001], 34). 23 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn, 26. 24 Ibid., 18. 25 Ibid., 154. 26 “Hermeneutics, identified with the names of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, has interpretation as its key concept, its method to confront the nihilist technological closure, and its aim to open the ‘closed’ to meaning.” What Badiou then identifies are two features which these otherwise heterogeneous orientations share. First, there is the common conviction of the “end of philosophy”: “the ideal of truth as it was put forth by classical philosophy has come to its end,” as evidenced in the work of Heidegger, Rudolf Carnap and Jean-François Lyotard. Second, there is the “central place accorded to the question of language” by all three (Badiou, Infinite Thought, ed. Justin Clemens and Oliver Feltham [London: Bloomsbury, 2014], 46.) 27 See Alain Badiou, Parménide: L’être I – Figure ontologique 1985–1986 (Paris: Fayard, 2014). 28 For example, De rerum natura “cannot be incorporated into the Heideggerian schema of metaphysics. Nothing in it is ontotheological; there is no supreme being for Lucretius, the heaven is void, the gods are indifferent. Is it not remarkable that the only thinker who is also an immense poet be precisely the one who causes the Heideggerian historical assemblage to default, the one who take the history of being through a disseminated multiplicity foreign to everything that Heidegger tells us of metaphysics since Plato?” (Infinite Thought, 86.)

Badiou contra Lacan contra Heidegger  353 philosophy and poetry.” As Badiou is concerned to underline with such interpretations, against the much-maligned Heideggerian claims that the Greek and German languages are privileged in the revelation of being, modern French poets such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud—alongside Germans, Russians and Portuguese too—must be given their place in the speaking of being, or, at least, the reuptake and extension of properly philosophical ambitions regarding the relation and non-relation to being. At times, Badiou implies that Heidegger, coming at the end of the age of poets, is himself still caught up in the default of philosophy after Hegel’s Romantic demotion of the conceptual import of mathematics; as such, Heidegger at once registers the closure of the age of poets without himself being able to fully exit it.30 This is why in the famous Der Spiegel interview, Heidegger himself reiterates that he is not doing philosophy but trying to engage in an “other thinking.” Fine, says Badiou, but that decision of Heidegger is itself destined by his fusion of technology, mathematics and logic in his upping of the role of poetry—and for Badiou this thus exhibits a point of falsification. This is clarified in Badiou’s own interpretation of Hölderlin in Being and Event, which, if necessarily “dependent” upon Heidegger’s interventions, offers a “few differences in emphasis.”31 These differences are directed towards making Hölderlin a thinker of fidelity to the event: “fidelity thus designates the poetic capacity to inhabit the site at the point of return.”32 Unlike the Heideggerian reading, Badiou emphasizes that fidelity is not a will to conservation or to a god’s return but a commitment to “the present of the storm.” Where Heidegger himself is (again, allegedly!) irreparably melancholic, Badiou is militant. As Badiou notes elsewhere of Hölderlin, “the question of the poem is thus that of the retreat of the gods. It coincides neither with the philosophical question of God nor with the religious one.”33 “Today the poem’s imperative is to conquer its own atheism,” he writes, for “The poem has only to be devoted to the enchantment of what the world is capable of—as it is.”34 Yet, despite these differences, Badiou nonetheless shares several key convictions with Heidegger regarding the destiny of poetry. If they differ on its details and implications, Badiou agrees that poetry is a work of nomination of the emergence of inconsistent multiplicity (an “event”). Every poem is essentially tied to finitude. They both also agree that great poetry “forces a decision upon us.”35 Poetry is not simply a cultural product, whether elevated or irrelevant: it is one of the indispensable modalities and conditions of thought itself. But, as I have also been at some pains to argue, Badiou also attends to the propositions of mathematics with the same care as Heidegger does to key poems and to poetry, and I have already attempted to give some minimal indications of this. And this certainly seems to separate him from Heidegger, who, to my knowledge, tends 29

29 See Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), note 16, 108; Badiou, Being and Event, 191–198; Badiou, Handbook of Inaesthetics, passim; Badiou, Theory of the Subject, passim. I would further remark that it is no accident that Mallarmé’s A Dice Throw is one of the last of that poet’s works. 30 See Antonio Calcagno and Jim Vernon, eds., Badiou and Hegel: Infinity, Dialectics, Subjectivity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015) for more extended accounts of Hegel’s impact on the relation between mathematics and philosophy. 31 Badiou, Being and Event, 255. 32 Ibid., 257. 33 See Badiou, Briefings, 28. 34 Ibid., 29. 35 Heidegger, Elucidations, 52.

354  Justin Clemens predominantly to handle mathematics and the mathematical at an entirely different level of generality. However well one thinks Badiou has interpreted and disputed Heidegger’s thought in this regard, it nonetheless still reinforces the fundamental claim made here: that Badiou’s own philosophical position is directly worked out in a polemic that is first and foremost with Heidegger. Which begs the question: what, exactly, is a polemic? 7  Polemic: sovereign or slave? It is in the polemic between Heidegger and Badiou about polemic that the thinkers’s ontological and poetic questions are articulated directly with questions of politics. As is widely known, Heidegger expended a great deal of thought on Heraclitus, and upon Fragment 53 in particular.36 In An Introduction to Metaphysics (1953; lecture course 1935) he writes: Conflict is for all (that is present) the creator that causes to emerge, but (also) for all the dominant preserver. For it makes some to appear as gods, others as men; it creates (shows) some as slaves, others as freemen.37 For Heraclitus, Heidegger claims, polemos “is a conflict that prevailed prior to everything divine and human, not a war in the human sense.”38 A few years prior to the original lecture course, Heidegger had exchanged letters with Carl Schmitt on the significance of this statement. In a letter of 22 August 1933, he writes: Your quote from Heraclitus appealed to me particularly, because you did not forget basileus (king), which gives definitive meaning to the whole maxim if one interprets it completely. I have had such an interpretation set down for years, with respect to the concept of truth – the edeize (proves) and epoiese (makes) which appear in Fragment 53. But I myself am in the middle of polemos (war) and all literary projects must take second place.39 Indeed. A few years later, in the Heraklit seminar of 1943–1944 (GA55), basileus is thought as lightning and fire in accordance with Fragments 64 and 66. As Bernhard Radloff notes, for Heidegger: “basileus is the name given to polemos as the principle of individuation of beings.”40 Aside from anything else, it is striking that, in articulating polemos as basileus as pyr, the doulos, the slave effectively vanishes from Heidegger’s account. It is further striking that much of the secondary commentary also loses this connection. For example, in his otherwise extraordinarily detailed text on the fate of spirit in Heidegger, even Derrida 36 Πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι, πάντων δὲ βασιλεύς, καὶ τοὺς μὲν θεοὺς ἔδειξε τοὺς δὲ ἀνθρώπους, τοὺς μὲν δούλους ἐποίησε τοὺς δὲ ἐλευθέρους (polemos panton men pater esti, panton de basileus, kai tous men theous edeixe tous de anthropous, tous men doulous epoinese tous de eleutherous). 37 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 61–62. 38 Ibid., 62. 39 Cited in Bernhard Radloff, Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism: Disclosure and Gestalt (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 282. 40 Ibid., 286.

Badiou contra Lacan contra Heidegger  355 occludes the reference. Instead, he enumerates four features: the unquestioned privilege of the question of the question, the “non-contaminability” of the “matrix statement” that “the essence of technology is nothing technological”, the discourse that relates animals and technology, epochality as such. Nonetheless, other commentators have indeed touched on the question of the slave that goes missing from Heidegger. Carol Bigwood notes how in What Is Thinking? Heidegger makes a joke about the Thracian slave girl (therapaina) from Theatetus 174b: that he revises the slavegirl into a housemaid (Dienstmagde) while claiming that the slavegirl’s laugh is notwendig (necessity). As Bigwood points out, Heidegger misses the allusion to Aphrodite, for whom Homer’s most common epithet is “laughter-loving,” and which further brings the poetry of Sappho into the picture.42 Nor does Gregory Fried overlook the issue in Heidegger’s Polemos, where he discusses the opposition between slaves and freemen at some length.43 The idiom is important: 41

In his translation from the lecture on Holderlin of just a semester before, Heidegger had rendered polemos as Kampf (struggle). Now he renders it as Auseinandersetzung, a word that can mean a confrontation or struggle but that also means a debate or discussion, a coming to terms and a settling of accounts, an explanation.44 Noting that the shift may partially be a repudiation of the Nazi Kampf jargon, Fried also underlines that: while he again renders pater as Erzeuger (sire, progenitor), in the later course he translates basileus (ordinarily, king) as waltender Bewahrer (reigning preserver), which implies a role as custodian, rather than simply as Beherrscher, a word that has the sense of “master,” as someone who possesses unquestioned and complete dominion. Moreover, and in a parallel manner, while he lets stand his translation of doulous as Knechte, he changes his translation of eleutherous from Herren, which has the sense of ruler and master, to Freie, the free.45 In doing so, Heidegger clearly vitiates the starkness of any master/slave dialectic, Hegelian or not.46 Whatever “doulos” or slavery might be for Heidegger, it seems the case that he doesn’t want to touch on the question at all. To the contrary, he wants to obscure or efface it. 41 Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 42 Carol Bigwood, “Sappho: The She-Greek Heidegger Forgot,” in Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, ed. Nancy Holland and Patricia Huntington (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2001), 165–195. 43 Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). For example: “the word here for slave is doulos, which, according to Liddell and Scott, indicates someone who is a slave by birth, in contrast to someone enslaved in war, an andrapodon,” 27. 44 Ibid., 32. 45 Ibid., 33. 46 As Fried points out, between Being and Time and 1945, this is the most extended reference to the fragment. Heidegger briefly discusses it again in his 1942–1943 course on Parmenides, but not at all in the 1943 and 1944 lectures on Heraclitus himself. In 1966–1967 course, the fragment comes up only once in passing. It does come up in the self-exculpatory essay “The Rectorate of 1933–34: Facts and Thoughts” (1945), and, though not in the Rectoral Address itself, there is the deployment of Kampf which is retrospectively parsed as polemos.

356  Justin Clemens The case is precisely the opposite for Badiou, whose work ceaselessly works to give a concept to the political subjectivity of revolutionaries, from Spartacus through Toussaint L’Ouverture to Lenin and Mao.47 As he himself points out in an essay on Hegel’s so-called (mistranslated) “master/slave” dialectic: “it certainly does not really touch the real of slavery.”48 Or, as he more generally puts the stakes in an essay on the Russian Revolution: The Neolithic revolution allocated humanity the means of transmission, existence, conflicts and knowledges without precedent, but it did not put an end to—far from it, rather in certain regards aggravating—the existence of inequalities, hierarchies and figures of violence and power on an unprecedented scale. This second revolution… will restore the unity of humanity.49 In sum, Heidegger’s is a polemos from above, while Badiou’s is a polemos from below. The former etymologizes or rather inventively philologizes, providing both radical insights and motivated occlusions; the second realizes or rather inventively historicizes, making little of the sovereigns, masters, rulers and so on, in the name of a slave revolt that would found a generic humanity. That said, if Heidegger and Badiou’s “senses” of the “term” “polemic” are certainly irreconcilable and perhaps antithetical, they are not entirely without-relation. For both, thought will be polemical—or it will not be. 8 Conclusion Given the restrictions of this chapter, I have only been able to indicate the most minimal aspects of the relationship between Badiou and Heidegger, not least as they are mediated by Lacan. However, in briefly passing through the questions of being, truth and knowledge, formalization, poetry and polemos, I believe that I have been able to establish that Badiou’s work is fundamentally in dialogue with Heidegger’s—even if this dialogue is abrupt, violent, highly polarized and characterized by misunderstandings as well as extraordinary insights. That this is the case should, at the very least, confirm what should be better known about philosophy: that it is indeed a warring discourse, one held together and transmitted by fundamental antagonisms and not (at least primarily) by ideas, concepts, techniques, love of truth, knowledge, the good and so forth.

47 A large number of Badiou’s titles contain such words as “polemics,” “confrontations,” and “controversies.” 48 Alain Badiou, “Hegel’s Master and Slave,” Crisis & Critique 4, no. 1 (2017): 45. 49 Alain Badiou, “On the Russian October Revolution of 1917,” Crisis & Critique 4, no. 2 (2017): 20.

22 From Mitsein to Volk: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Geschichtlichkeit question in Heidegger Richard J. Colledge

Abstract  Recent years have seen an accentuation in claims that early Heideggerian works are infected with totalitarian ideas that came to full realisation in the early 1930s. In challenging this claim, I suggest that the trajectory from Geschichtlichkeit and Mitsein in Being and Time to Heidegger’s later lamentable political involvements is both complicated and tenuous. After first defending this stance with reference to the account of Schuld in Being and Time, I draw substantively on the work of JeanLuc Nancy in arguing that Heidegger’s later political thought amounts to a perversion of his earlier admittedly under-developed accounts of Geschichtlichkeit and Mitsein. Further, with Nancy, I suggest there is much to be learned here more generally—both by Heidegger’s great insights and great failures—­concerning the dialectic of self and community. Keywords  Martin Heidegger; Jean-Luc Nancy; Geschichtlichkeit; Mitsein; National Socialism To condemn is one thing, to analyze is another.1

One of the great challenges for contemporary Heidegger scholarship is understanding the philosophical itinerary that the author of Being and Time traversed, in under five years, from the Daseinsanalytik’s emphasis on Dasein’s Eigentlichkeit (own-most-ness) and Jemeinigkeit (mine-ness) to the Rektoratrede’s championing of the “spiritual-historical Dasein … of the German Volk.” Simplistic explanations fail, be they to read Heidegger’s later “archē-Fascism”2 straight back onto the pages of Being and Time or alternatively to deny that there is any textual connection between Heidegger’s most famous early work and his later pronouncements. The situation is more complicated than either of these alternatives allow, calling instead for a nuanced assessment of this itinerary, and thus of what is at stake in Heideggerian thought as a whole.

1 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Banality of Heidegger (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 11. 2 Lacoue-Labarthe’s apt term. See his “The Spirit of National Socialism and its Destiny,” in Retreating the Political, ed. Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (London: Routledge, 1997), 143. DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-24

358  Richard J. Colledge If claims that Heidegger’s deployment of the notion of Geschichtlichkeit (historicality) in Being and Time reveals it to be a cryptic Nazi text are untenable (as I will maintain),3 in what follows I will nonetheless maintain that there is a trajectory—if not via a long bow, then at least via a strange arc—from §74 of Being and Time (1927) to the Rektoratrede (1933). Three questions are raised for discussion. First, what is the nature of this arc? Second, is this arc a fulfilment or a distortion of its origin? These two questions are not far from that posed by Lacoue-Labarthe several decades ago: “What was it in Heidegger’s thought that made possible—or more exactly what was it in Heidegger’s thought that did not forbid—the political engagement of 1933?”4 However, I will also ask a third question: was there an alternative trajectory that would have seen the promise of Being and Time developed differently, making possible an ontology of human being that simultaneously opens a way to an ethics and politics which steered a middle course between the Scylla of atomising libertarianism and the Charybdis of collectivist totalitarianism? In pursuing these questions, a dialogue will be enjoined with the work of Jean-Luc Nancy’s radical and insightful retrieval of Heidegger’s account. On the basis of this dialogue, I will suggest that the question of Heidegger’s itinerary between 1927 and 1933 can be rethought helpfully through an analysis of his own account of human be-ing as primordially both Da-sein (Being-there) and Mit-sein (Being-with). But further, I will suggest that Heidegger’s account of Geschichtlichkeit needs to be understood in the context of the treatise of which it is a part, before it is interpreted retrospectively from the vantage point of 1933. It is on this basis—guided by Nancy’s Heidegger retrieval—that a compelling alternative itinerary can be reconstructed. Such an approach stems from Nancy’s ontologically, ethically and politically sophisticated account of the radical interpenetration of self and community in the constitution of the human. 1  Mitsein—Schuld—Geschick: a triptych at the heart of the Daseinsanalytik In order to set the scene, it is important to elucidate the place and role of Geschichtlichkeit within the argument of Being and Time itself. This is best done, I suggest, by noting some of the key continuities and interdependencies between §74 of that work, and the discussions of Mitsein (§26) and Schuld (debt or guilt) (§58). The common cause that unites these three sections is so decisive that they effectively amount to what could be described as a communitarian triptych at the heart of Being and Time. The central positioning of §58 is significant, given the way that it orients how the other two panels are to be understood. Yet the separation of the panels of the proposed triptych is also important, for the ontological communitarianism of which it speaks needs to be read in continuity 3 Johannes Fritsche, for example, argued for such a position in his Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Earlier assessments had been more measured in this regard. While noting, in 1987, that “[i]n no sense can we read National Socialism into Being and Time,” Victor Farias nonetheless maintained that “we can identify philosophical beliefs that foreshadow Heidegger’s later convictions” (Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Paul Burrell [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989], 60). In his The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), Richard Wolin argued that while Heidegger’s own “deep-seated existential commitment[s]” were compatible with National Socialism, this does not mean that Nazism was an “inevitable outgrowth of the philosophy of Being and Time,” even if it “emphatically satisfied the desiderata of authentic historical commitment adumbrated in that work” (66). 4 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Transcendence Ends in Politics,” Social Research, trans. Peter Caws, 49, no. 2 (1982): 405.

From Mitsein to Volk  359 with themes of a more individualistic complexion within the existential analytic. The importance of such a reading is in the way that it points in compellingly different directions to the trajectory that Heidegger himself actually took only a handful of years after the publication of Being and Time by which his earlier thought was ambiguously implicated in his later misadventures. 1.1 Schuld

In the extraordinary central panel of the triptych, §58, Heidegger strikingly precludes any individualistic (let alone solipsistic) understanding of the Being of the human. In so doing, he not only effectively underscores and elaborates upon his account of Mitsein in §26, but also prepares the way for the later account of Geschichtlichkeit in §74. Together, the three panels are mutually reinforcing, though in some respects it is §58 that sets the terms for how the other two panels are to be understood. Section 58 is a key moment within Heidegger’s larger analysis of conscience (Gewissen), which is presented as a solution to the problem of how authentic potentiality-forBeing can be attested as an existentiell possibility by Dasein. Whereas for the most part it is the “they-self” that is the “who” of Dasein, heeding the call of conscience takes the form of an “existentiell modification” of this mode of existence, by which Dasein is individualised.5 And yet, while this silent call comes from Dasein itself in the uncanniness and nothingness of its anxiety,6 Heidegger denies that this call is to be understood in an individualistic sense. Instead, there is a striking and paradoxical insistence on the intrinsically plurivocal character of Dasein. The otherness from which the call comes is an otherness of Dasein to itself. The call “comes from me, and yet from beyond me.”7 The “who” of Dasein is never a monolithic subject: it is a self that is always shot-through with otherness, for it is a being that is to be regarded ontologically as Being-with. Interestingly, in the seven sections Heidegger devotes to his account of conscience, he rarely explicitly refers to Mitsein, and when he does it is usually in the context of the they-self that “as a Being-with … can listen to Others [Andere].”8 But as §58 makes very clear, authentic Dasein too is marked by an irreducible otherness. Dasein is othered; it is Beingwith, through and through. This sense is deepened by Heidegger’s account of the “what” of the otherwise contentless call of conscience that summons Dasein “to its ownmost Being-guilty [Schuldigsein].”9 This account of Dasein as Schuldig—a polysemous German word that can signify, in context, guilt, fault and blame but also debt and liability, and thus “owing” and “being responsible for” something10—is the crux of Heidegger’s analysis. Accordingly, Dasein is called back to the truth of its endemic indebtedness to sources of its own self (eigenes   5 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1967), 267, 277. English translation: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 312, 322. Henceforth, references will cite SZ, followed by the Niemeyer edition page and then the English translation.  6 SZ: 273/318; 270/314; 276/321.   7 Ibid., 275/320. Shortly after, Heidegger explains that “the ‘whence’ of the calling” (that is, the uncanniness of Dasein’s thrown individuation) is “the ‘whither’ to which [Dasein] is called back” (SZ: 280/326).  8 SZ: 271/315.   9 Ibid., 269/314. 10 See Ibid., 281–282/327. Macquarrie and Robinson render Schuldigsein as “Being-Guilty,” and Schulden haben as “having debts.”

360  Richard J. Colledge Selbst) that inescapably transcend it. This Schuld applies, Heidegger suggests, “[in] so far as any Dasein factically exists.”11 It is a function of the “not” or “nullity [Nichtigkeit]” that resides at the heart of Dasein’s Being. For Dasein—as thrown—is not its own basis [Grund], and yet must exist on the basis of the ground into which it finds itself thrown. Its very own ontological ground is not its own; it is rather something granted to it. In other words, alterity goes all the way down: Dasein is something that has been thrown; it has been brought into its ‘there’ [sein Da gebracht], but not of its own accord … As existent, it never comes back behind its thrownness … Although it has not laid that basis itself, it reposes under the weight of it … Thus ‘Being-a-basis’ means never to have power over one’s ownmost Being [eigensten Seins] from the ground up.12 However, Heidegger is just as clear that this ungroundedness at the heart of Dasein’s Being is nonetheless something inherited. Dasein must take it over as its own. This is what it is to factically exist, even as an authentic own-most (eigent-lich) self: to be “delivered over” to oneself, and to exist “only from [this basis] and as this basis,” even while being “never [able to] get that basis into its [own] power.” Heidegger could not be clearer on this point: “Dasein is not itself the basis of its Being … rather, as Being-its-Self, it is the Being of its basis.”13 This ungroundedness of Dasein is completely anterior to the authenticity/inauthenticity distinction. On one hand, “nullity is the basis for the possibility of inauthentic Dasein in its falling.” But more fundamentally, “[c]are itself, in its very essence, is permeated with nullity through and through” and “this means that Dasein as such is indebted [schuldig].”14 Authentic existence is simply the recognition of this truth, for “[u]ncanniness brings the entity face to face with its undisguised nullity.”15 This insistence on Dasein’s inherited and contingent ground speaks powerfully to the essential openness of the Being of the self. Even authentic projection is thrown.16 Since Dasein has not laid its own ground, it can never be the author of its own destiny in any genuinely radical sense, for its projections are always predicated upon a thrown/null/ ungrounded ground. Of course, in taking on such a ground as its own, existence takes on an authentic character. But authentic resoluteness (“choosing to choose a kind of Beingone’s-Self”),17 has nothing to do with a solipsistic causa sui heroism. Resolute Dasein is only ever possible on the basis of an indebtedness to an otherness intrinsic to itself. 1.2 Mitsein

This analysis of the ungrounded ground of Dasein, its intrinsic otherness, casts the earlier account of Mitsein into stark relief. If—as per Nancy’s contention (explored below)—Mitsein is a comparatively under-developed theme in Being and Time, it is still

11 SZ: 281/326. Consequently, ontic forms of “indebtedness [Verschuldung]” are “possible only ‘on the basis’ of a primordial Being-guilty [ursprünglichen Schuldigseins]” (SZ: 329/284). 12 SZ: 284/330. 13 Ibid., 284/85/330. 14 Ibid., 285/331. Translation modified. 15 Ibid., 287/333. 16 Ibid., 285/331. 17 Ibid., 270/314.

From Mitsein to Volk  361 the case that the exposition in §26 is worked through the treatise in important ways. Consistent with his critique of modern metaphysical understandings of subjectivity, Heidegger is very clear that understanding Dasein’s relations with others is in no sense a matter of “marking out and isolating the ‘I’ so that one must then seek some way of getting over to the Others from this isolated subject.” Rather, “the world is always the one that I share with Others. The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is Being-with Others.”18 There is, therefore, no basic groundedness of the self that is not already elementally implicated with otherness, with other Dasein. This includes the possibility of self-knowledge, for “[k]nowing oneself [Sichkennen] is grounded in Beingwith.”19 Dasein exists always already out there in the world, with others; it is Being-with, in-the-world. As elementally with-others, Dasein cares “solicitously” for them (to adapt Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation of Fürsorge), and this is the case whether it is done inauthentically (“leaping in”: dominating the other, making it dependent) or authentically (“leaping ahead [vorausspringt]”: liberating the other). Similarly, Da-sein is Mit-sein, whether this plays out as “absorption in Being-with-one-another” by falling into idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity,20 or instead as “concernful Being-alongside and solicitous Being-with … project[ing] itself upon its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.” Either way, Mitsein is part of the “structures essential to Dasein’s constitution,” that “have a share in conditioning the possibility of any existence whatsoever.”21 The implications of Mitsein are filled out further in the context of language and discourse (§34), in which the hermeneutical richness of Heidegger’s analysis comes to the fore. Here the insights of §58 are already prefigured in Heidegger’s insistence that all projective understanding (the core of Dasein’s eigent-lichkeit) depends on Mitsein through the medium of shared factical worldly understandings and attunements [Befindlichkeiten]: Through [communication] a co-state-of-mind [Mitbefindlichkeit] gets ‘shared’, and so does the understanding of Being-with. Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences, such as opinions or wishes, from the interior of one subject into the interior of another. Dasein-with is already essentially manifest in a co-state-of-mind and a co-understanding.22 This is the case with both speaking and listening. “In discourse, Being-with becomes ‘explicitly’ shared … Dasein expresses itself … because as Being-in-the-world it is already ‘outside’ when it understands.” Similarly, listening “is Dasein’s existential way of Beingopen as Being-with for Others.” Listening and understanding is only possible “if there is some co-understanding beforehand” and a dialogue is only possible on the basis of a prior understanding that is “already ‘shared’ in Being-with.” Dasein is “‘in thrall’ to Dasein-with” “carrying and hearing the voice of the friend … with it.”23

18 Ibid., 118/154–155. 19 Ibid., 124–125/161. 20 Ibid., 175/220. 21 Ibid., 263/308. 22 Ibid., 162/205. 23 Ibid., 162–163/205–206.

362  Richard J. Colledge 1.3 Geschichtlichkeit

However, Mitsein is not simply a matter of contemporaneous Dasein-with. Here there is an opening to the final panel of the triptych in which Mitsein and Schuld unfold into the analysis of Geschichtlichkeit that was already implicit in what had gone before. In §47, for example, Heidegger had noted that Mitsein extends also to the deceased who “can still be with” the living.24 The otherness and the Being-with that are utterly intrinsic to Dasein’s ontological constitution have a temporal structure in which those who have gone before and the world of their dwelling provide a heritage that is available (indeed unavoidable) in the present and which thus shapes future-facing projective understanding. A key hinge between the three panels represented by §58, §26 and §74 is exposed when Heidegger begins the account of Geschichtlichkeit by posing a question heavy with intra-textual reference: [W]e must ask whence, in general, Dasein can draw those possibilities upon which it factically projects itself… Have we not said … that Dasein never comes back behind its thrownness? … As thrown, Dasein has indeed been delivered over to itself … and exists factically with Others.25 Since historicality is a characteristic of Dasein’s Being, this structure applies both to inauthentic Dasein (that is “lost in the ‘they’” and “understands itself in terms of those possibilities of existence”) and to resolute Dasein. In the latter case, Dasein understands its factical possibilities in terms of “the heritage [Erbe] which that resoluteness, as thrown, takes over,” even if it need not “explicitly know the origin of the possibilities upon which that resoluteness projects itself.”26 Seen through the lens of §58, this heritage is an inherited thrown ground, not one that Dasein has laid itself, but which it resolutely takes over as its own. There is here hidden “a handing down to oneself of the possibilities that have come down to [it].”27 Accordingly, Dasein’s understanding of its own possibilities is not an act of an autonomous authentic subject; to the contrary, Dasein’s thrown understanding destines it within a shared heritage. Dasein does not project its own possibilities; rather understanding throws or “destines” Dasein. Insofar as this heritage is taken on in such a way, resolute Dasein embraces its fate [Schicksals]. Here “fate” functions not as fatalism concerning Dasein’s inexorable future trajectory but rather as an indication that Dasein has understood the facticity of its heritage. In this way, it actually points to an open future in a way that is precluded by any lostness in the “they” which fails to authentically engage its heritage: Once one has grasped the finitude of one’s existence, it snatches one back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities … and brings Dasein into the simplicity of its fate. This is how we designate Dasein’s primordial historizing, which lies in authentic resoluteness and in which Dasein hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen.28

24 Ibid., 139/282. 25 Ibid., 383/434–435. 26 Ibid., 385/437. 27 Ibid., 383/435. 28 Ibid., 384/435.

From Mitsein to Volk  363 Heidegger takes the motif of Dasein’s taking over its inherited ground and sees in this the conversion of powerlessness into empowerment, for fate is “that powerless superior power … of projecting oneself upon one’s own Being-guilty.”29 Fate-ful empowerment is a finite freedom, based on inherited ground, with a future orientation: Only if death, guilt, conscience, freedom, and finitude reside together equiprimordially in the Being of an entity as they do in care, can that entity exist in the mode of fate… by handing down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take over its own thrownness and be in the moment of vision [augenblicklich].30 However, Heidegger distinguishes between Dasein’s own resolute inherited fate and the collective inheritance of a people. Given Mitsein, Dasein’s heritage is a shared heritage; its “historizing is a co-historizing” and this is the meaning of the notion of a shared destiny of a people [Geschick], or “the historizing of the community.” It is from out of this larger communal heritage, handed down as destiny, that Dasein is bequeathed its “own” fate.31 Far from a pre-packaged future destination, or a fixed ideology of history, Heidegger describes destiny as a bestowal, or a “retrieval [Wiederholung] of possibilities from the past” that have come down to the community in the present and that can thus inspire creative negotiation.32 This is the context in which Heidegger refers to Dasein as being able to “choose its hero.” The point is not that Dasein should copy or blindly follow, but rather to make “a reciprocative rejoinder [erwidert]” to the fate that has been handed down to it, not “bind[ing]” the present but retrieving it in all its grounded possibilities.33 2 Jean-Luc Nancy’s retrieval of the co-originality of Being-there and Being-with The preceding survey of the tightly interwoven nature of Schuld, Mitsein and Geschichtlichkeit in Being and Time serves to ground these ideas clearly in the soil of Being and Time itself, prior to any consideration of their deployment in Heidegger’s later work. But it also helps orientate the following discussion of Jean-Luc Nancy’s interrogations of Mitsein (and with it, Mitdasein and Miteinandersein) in a series of works in the 1990s. These works remain some of the most incisive contributions to this important theme, not only for the light it sheds on Heidegger’s own texts but for the way they engage with live issues about ontology, politics and ethics that point well beyond Heidegger scholarship. At heart, Nancy’s reading amounts to a retrieval of Mitsein in the specifically Heideggerian

29 Ibid., 384–385/436. 30 Ibid., 385/437. 31 Ibid., 385/436. It is noteworthy that Heidegger here references (without further elaboration) Dilthey’s notion of a “generation”: overlapping temporal groupings of individuals who experience similar intellectual and socio-political frameworks of meaning. See Dilthey’s “Über das Studium der Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und dem Staat,” in Die Geistige Welt. Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens. Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 5 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990). 32 I have rendered Wiederholung as “retrieval” in preference to Macquarrie and Robinson’s “repetition,” given Heidegger’s own point about the need for Dasein to receive and appropriate rather than merely repeat. See below on Heidegger’s own sense of Wiederholung as outlined in the Kantbuch. 33 SZ: 385–386/437–438. It is important to note Heidegger’s words here. Notwithstanding the “co-historicising” that links Schicksal and Geschick, the hero is chosen not by the people on the basis of shared destiny but rather by Dasein itself on the basis of its inherited fate.

364  Richard J. Colledge sense of Wiederholung: as an “opening-up of [a basic problem’s] original long-concealed possibilities, through the working out of which it is transformed … and first comes to be preserved in its capacity as a problem.”34 For what Nancy provides is not just a Heidegger interpretation, but a reading with, through and beyond Heidegger. In standing on Heidegger’s shoulders, there is a looking both ways: to the pitfalls that befell Heidegger’s own thinking of Mitsein and Geschichtlichkeit, but also to what Heidegger left undeveloped in this respect, and thus what lies still to do in our own time. 2.1  Radicalising Mitdasein

For Nancy, Heidegger’s insights in Being and Time concerning Mitsein are both a genuine breakthrough in the history of Western philosophy and a great missed opportunity. On one hand, he emphasises the sophistication of Heidegger’s account of the primordiality of the Mitsein of Dasein, of “the Being-with of Being-there.”35 For him, this amounts to a dramatic reorientation of the standard Western philosophical approach that conceives of the constitution of the subject as primary, and only then tries to establish the importance of inter-subjective relations. If, instead, Dasein’s world is understood to be always already a with-world (Mitwelt), then this amounts to a revolution in ontology from which there can be no turning back. The very idea of the “I” considered in isolation no longer makes any sense. There could be no Dasein in the first place but for this “with.” The two are equiprimordial; there is a “co-originality [co-originarité]” that inextricably binds the two in mutual co-dependence.36 On this account, Dasein can no longer be confused with the auto-nomous Subject of western metaphysics. Its ground (as Heidegger noted) is never within its grasp. Dasein is thus independent of the metaphysics of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity. Mitdasein goes all the way down. Nonetheless, Nancy is critical of Heidegger’s failure to work this insight through his thought in a serious and transformative way. As it stands, Mitsein amounts to “no more than a sketch” in Being and Time, for “even while Mitsein is co-essential with Dasein [in that work], it remains in a subordinate position.”37 Once the breakthrough of Mitsein and Mitdasein is made, there is no extended analysis of these ideas, and consequently Heidegger’s Dasein remains far too subjectivistic, even as he seeks to overcome the same. Tell-tale signs of old unexamined assumptions about the primacy of the self litter Being and Time, Nancy suggests. Heidegger’s “thesis on the Jemeinigkeit of existence … has the drawback of veiling the Self under the Ego… [as] individual, subjective, and unilateral, despite the related theme of the Mitsein.”38 Mitsein itself is not introduced until after “the originary character of Dasein” is first established without it.39 Throughout Being and Time, “the assignation of this Dasein in the apparent form of a distinct individuality” 34 See Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, GA3 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2010), 204. Translated as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 143. 35 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Being-with of Being-there,” trans. Marie-Eve Morin. Continental Philosophy Review, 41, no. 1, (2008), 1–15. 36 Jean-Luc Nancy, Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996), 31. English translation: Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 26. 37 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 44, 93. 38 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Being-in-Common,” in Community at Loose Ends, trans. James Creech, ed. Miami Theory Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 3. 39 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 31.

From Mitsein to Volk  365 is maintained, “in the sphere of autonomic, if not subjective, allure.”40 He sees further indications in the way that Heidegger impugns his notion of das Man, “posit[ing] it only as a mediocrity.” In opposing the “they-self” to Dasein qua eigent-lich, “he remains firmly attached to the idea of the solitary, haughty, heroic individual.”41 But most tellingly of all—even if a single treatise cannot do justice to everything—Nancy notes that his discovery of Mitsein is not something to which Heidegger returns later, at least not in any serious way.42 Consequently, a retrieval of Mitsein is needed. Notwithstanding the inevitably contorted syntax that comes with the effort to explicate Heidegger’s radical notion of Miteinandersein (“être-les-uns-avec-les-autres”), Nancy attempts exactly that. In taking Heidegger at his word, Nancy insists that the “rigorous contempor[aneity]” of Mit-sein and Da-sein means that “the singular of ‘mine’ is by itself a plural”: a with others.43 This cannot mean a literal “in one another” (being “in each other’s place,” a kind of “common being”). But neither can it simply mean “next to,” or a “juxtaposed,” merely a being-alongside.44 Instead, the fullest sense of the “with-ness” of Being is that the singular and the plural (the “inside” and “outside”) mutually in-dwell (so to speak), presupposing each other. The “I” is only possible in its own integrity, because of the “we,” on the basis of which the “I” is. “Being-with is not added on to being-there,” he insists; “instead, to be there is to be with.”45 Dasein is indeed singular, but this should not be confused with an individual subject, for “singularity … is not individuality; it is each time the punctuality of a ‘with.’” The singular person is “at one and the same time … intraindividual and transindividual, and always the two together.”46 Nancy’s development of Mitdasein/Miteinandersein is undoubtedly compelling, though one might still have some quibbles. First, Nancy overstates the extent to which Mitdasein is “immediately closed off” as an insight as soon as it is announced in Being and Time.47 For reasons discussed above, it seems to me that the concept does more work in the text (both directly and indirectly) than Nancy credits, and something of the radicality he rightly seeks is not entirely absent from Heidegger’s account. Consider, for example, the links between Mitdasein and the more developed account of In-Sein [Being-in].48 Here, in noting that Dasein is not in-the-world as water is “in” the glass,49 Heidegger addresses the inadequacy of ordinary spatial modes of understanding Being in-the-world, and the need for a more sophisticated sense of in-dwelling. Accordingly, Dasein is in itself as itself, even when it is out in the world, and so there is no great mystery about how Dasein should be able to escape “the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness” to come to know the world, for “Dasein which knows remains outside, and it does so as Dasein.”50 But 40 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter O’Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 104. In an interview, Nancy even half seriously quips that “[t]he whole of Being and Time … should be written again differently, taking Mitsein or das Man as the point of departure.” (Jean-Luc Nancy, “‘Our World’: An Interview,” trans. Emma Campbell. Angelaki, 8, no. 2 [2003]: 50.) 41 Nancy, “Our World,” 51. 42 Nancy, “Being-with of Being-there,” 2. 43 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 67, 72. 44 Nancy, “Being-in-Common,” 6. 45 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 98. 46 Ibid., 85. 47 Ibid., 93. 48 Nancy does make some passing references to this connection: e.g., at Experience of Freedom, 66. 49 SZ: 54/79. 50 Ibid., 62/89.

366  Richard J. Colledge equally, insofar as Dasein finds itself always already thrown into a world of meaning, the world is in Dasein; or better, Dasein is in itself, as itself, even as it is given to itself in its thrownness. The powerful structural correspondence between Heidegger’s accounts of In-Sein and Mitdasein is no coincidence. Accordingly, Dasein is itself—it is “given” to itself—because of its Being-with-others. It couldn’t be itself without its being with others, any less that it could be itself without being in-the-world.51 Of course, human beings are what they are only insofar as they are all in-the-world, a world that is decidedly shaped by the beings that comprise it. Being-with and Being-in are thus part of the same insight, even if Heidegger doesn’t always make this as explicit as he might have done. Second, there are questions concerning Nancy’s assessment of Heidegger’s account of Fürsorge, which for him is of little help in providing anything like a deeper sense of the “with.”52 Nancy sees in Heidegger’s account of inauthentic Fürsorge (“leaping in”) a mode of ontological exteriority that reeks of subjectivistic individualism, and in authentic Fürsorge (“leaping ahead [vorausspringt]”) a mode of ontological interiority that points ahead to something like völkisch absorption.53 While Nancy is certainly correct that Heidegger’s account is extremely sketchy, there is every reason to read the idea of authentic Fürsorge quite differently. For example, Nancy seems to overlook Heidegger’s reference to Dasein’s “helping the other to become transparent to himself in his care, and to become free for it,” a reference that suggests a subtle combination of independence and common cause (not absorption).54 Of course, it is possible to read into being “devote[d] … to the same affair in common … becom[ing] authentically bound together” the odour of völkisch nationalism becoming National Socialism. But this is possible only if one reads the account from the specific vantage point of 1933, a practice that speaks more to strategic eisegesis than hermeneutically responsible attentiveness to the text. Seen in this light, the brief discussion of authentic Fürsorge in Being and Time is not so far from the idea of love that emerges in the 1925–1928 correspondence between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt which Nancy cites shortly thereafter. For is there not a strong anticipation of Fürsorge as “helping the other” towards transparency and freedom in Heidegger’s words to Arendt concerning a love that allows “the genuine space of a ‘we’ and of a world that can be ‘ours,’” the genuine “taking care” of the other, inspired by Augustine’s “volo ut sis” (I want that you be what you are)?55 In any case, Nancy’s radicalisation of Mitdasein has fundamental implications for mining the Heideggerian conception of a range of other key elements in Heidegger’s text, not the least of which concerns language and meaning. If Dasein’s Being-in-the-world involves a continual process of sense-making, this always happens in the context of sharing with others, not through a passing on of meaning from one already-constituted self to another, but of Dasein as existing in a plural world of shared meaning. Nancy declares 51 See Nancy’s remark that “the world of the Dasein is right away a world ‘that I share with others,’ or a ‘world-with.’” (Inoperative Community, 103). 52 Nancy, “Being-with of Being-there,” 7. In an earlier text, Nancy indicates a way of extending Heidegger’s account of authentic Fürsorge so that it does better justice to the “with,” even if as written it falls well short. However, his diagnosis of how it fails seems opposite to his later account insofar as he seems to see it as succumbing to ontological externalism: i.e., the “movement is still thought starting from an ‘I’ or from an ‘identity’ that goes toward the other, and it is not thought as what cuts across and alters I going to the other while the other comes to it” (Inoperative Community, 104). 53 See below on the implications of these twin alternatives. 54 SZ: 122–123/159. 55 Nancy, “Being-with of Being-there,” 14.

From Mitsein to Volk  367 it axiomatic that “[t]here is no ‘meaning’ except by virtue of a ‘self,’ of some form or another … But there is no ‘self’ except by virtue of a ‘with,’ which, in fact, structures it.”56 Meaning, by definition, is common. Meaning is “owned” by the we, and it is only thus that putatively eigent-lich Dasein can project understanding in the first place. For, to return to the crucial trope from §58, all projection is thrown; all meaning is factically shared. Language and communication are the demonstration of the reality of the “withness” of human dwelling in the world, for without the shared meaning that both makes language possible and to which language itself contributes, there could be no self, no “individual” understanding. The “we” is all about our common shared meaning: our “Being-in-common.”57 In Nancy’s hands, the Heideggerian hermeneutic circle becomes an emblem for the equiprimordiality of self and other in conversation, one that is always the confluence of singular voices made possible by their commonality. In his early essay Le partage des voix, Nancy emphasises that “the most general condition of hermeneutics [is] the pre-givenness of meaning [in] … the circular condition of a pre-understanding.”58 It is in this way that the plurality of voices is “conjoin[ed] … in advance,” for it is shared meaning that makes communication possible (“the Auslegung [is] ‘anterior’ to the Ausdrücklichkeit”).59 Each singular voice is therefore always already plural. This is the sense of Nancy’s familiar amplified refrain that “we are meaning.” For the gift of meaning’s selfgiving is seen in “the singularity of my voice, of yours, and of our dialogue.”60 Similarly—amongst various other implications that can’t be done justice here—­Nancy’s recasting of Heideggerian Mitdasein also finesses the sense of human freedom. Heidegger is clear that Dasein’s freedom is itself thrown,61 but prior to §74 there is little development of what this means in terms of its Being-with (other than a freedom from the “illusions” of das Man).62 It is only when Heidegger comes to speak of Geschichtlichkeit as the “superior power … of its finite freedom” that he then speaks of “fateful Dasein” in its Being-in and Being-with “co-historizing” with others and thus taking on its destiny.63 Nancy, though, looks to fill out the connection between Mitdasein and freedom in much richer and comprehensive terms. For him, freedom only makes sense insofar as it is understood as co-extensive with Being-with-one-another. “Freedom cannot be presented as the autonomy of a subjectivity in charge of itself and of its decisions, evolving freely and in perfect independence from every obstacle.”64 Freedom makes little sense in the context of such a conception. Rather, freedom, Being-in and Being-with are equiprimordial, and as such, any notion of a solitary individual “possess[ing] an unlimited right to exercise his will” makes no sense.65 Freedom is only possible (or even conceivable) insofar as human

56 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 94. 57 Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Forgetting of Philosophy,” in The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997), 66. 58 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Sharing Voices,” in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle Ormiston and Alan Schrift (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 215. 59 Nancy, “Sharing Voices,” 243–244. 60 Ibid., 244–245. See also “Forgetting of Philosophy,” Ch. 12. 61 SZ: 366/417. 62 Ibid., 267/311. 63 Ibid., 384/436. 64 Nancy, Experience of Freedom, 66. 65 Ibid., 71.

368  Richard J. Colledge beings are always already being-in-common. Freedom is always already “singular/common before being in any way individual or collective.”66 2.2 Radicalising Mitsein as Being-in-common

Of course, for Nancy, rethinking the significance of Mitdasein and Miteinandersein is not simply a matter of anthropology and ethics. Beyond human being alone, Mitsein is primary a revolutionary insight about Being in general; for Being is plural: “Being is in common. What could be simpler to establish?” And yet, he ironically notes, “is there anything of which ontology has been more unaware up to now?”67 As such, the ubiquitous issue of philosophy’s problem with multiplicity is raised, and in order to address this prodigious philosophical blind spot, it is necessary for the Seinsfrage to be translated into the “Mitseinsfrage”: the question of Being as Being-in-common. Nancy’s argument arises from out of the heart of Being and Time itself. If Dasein is the there, the topos of Being, and if that place is marked by both singularity and plurality, then Being as such needs to be thought in these same terms. So Being just means Beingwith; phrases like “Being-in-common” or “the ontology of the common” are technically tautologous (even if such terminology is still necessary in the interim). If Being is conceived in this way, then all beings need to be understood as always already with others, not in a relationship of externality, but insofar as they “are” at all.68 Transposed into the language of Being and Time, Nancy reframes that work as follows: If the world is Mitwelt, shared world, Being insofar as it is ‘in the world’ is constitutively being-with, and being-according-to-the-sharing. The originary sharing of the world is the sharing of Being, and the Being of the Dasein is nothing other than the Being of this sharing.69 In this irreducible ontological relationality of Dasein, Nancy sees a “paradoxical logic” of singular plural Being, in which he looks to do justice to both aspects of the doublet of singular/plural as it pertains to Dasein, and thus to Being-in-common in general: “Prior to ‘me’ and ‘you,’” Nancy explains, “the ‘self’ is like a ‘we’ that is neither a collective subject nor ‘intersubjectivity,’ but rather the immediate mediation of Being in ‘(it)self,’ the plural fold of the origin.”70 If “Being is singularly plural and plurally singular,”71 Nancy’s strategy to attempt to think this strange logic of co-essentiality is to juxtapose the terms of the problem—être singulier pluriel (being singular plural)—without presuppositions about their ­relation, without one of these terms grounding the others, and thus without any punctuation or “determined syntax.”72 Rather, “Being singular plural means the essence of Being is only

66 Ibid., 73–74. 67 Nancy, “Being-in-Common,” 1. 68 “[T]he in (the with …) does not designate any mode of the relation. It would designate rather a being insofar as it is relation … Being ‘is’ the in that divides and joins at the same time, that ‘partitions and shares’” (Nancy, “Being-in-Common,” 8). 69 Nancy, Inoperative Community, 103. 70 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 94. 71 Ibid., 28. 72 Sometimes Nancy prefers (Heidegger-like) to hyphenate the three terms: “being-singular-plural – which is a mark of union and also a mark of division, a mark of sharing that effaces itself” (Being Singular Plural, 37).

From Mitsein to Volk  369 as co-essence.” Co-essence here means that there is no “assemblage of essences” placed together after the fact so to speak. Rather, the singularity and plurality (or the plurality and the singularity) of Being are genuinely equiprimordial, with neither having precedence or priority, with both essential to what it means “to be.”74 Being “shows itself [se pose], gives itself, occurs, dis-poses itself (made event, history, and world) as its own singular plural with.”75 I would suggest that there is much to recommend such a compelling proposal as an intervention in the history of philosophy in general.76 But its great significance for the purposes of this chapter is that it specifically provides a tantalising glimpse of what a different kind of Kehre might have looked like for Heidegger in the 1930s—a different mode of thinking concerning the immanent turning from Dasein to Being itself—had he developed his insight concerning Mitsein quite differently from the way it actually played out. It is to this issue that the chapter now turns. 73

3  Fulfilment or perversion? Geschichtlichkeit and the trajectory of Mitsein Given such a position, what nonetheless is to be made of the apparent conversion of Mitsein and Geschichtlichkeit into the metaphysical racism and fascism that characterised Heideggerian thought most sharply in 1933? In turning to the question of the nature of this strange arc from Geschichtlichkeit in 1927 to Heidegger’s intensified embrace of German völkisch traditions and its twistings in the direction of Nazi ideology shortly thereafter, I will argue—on the basis of the preceding argument—against the view that this was a natural (even inevitable) trajectory by which an inherent corruption in Geschichtlichkeit (let alone Mitsein and Schuld) is revealed. Rather, I will maintain that—notwithstanding a crucial point of connection between the two—this transition amounts to a tragic perversion of Heidegger’s own account in Being and Time, a betrayal that is more easily identified in the context of Nancy’s retrieval of what was at play in Heidegger’s initial insight. It should be noted that my purpose here is not to assess the nature or biographical extent of Heidegger’s collaboration with National Socialism or support for its ideologies, nor of his personal and political predilections that may have provided the conditions for this development. Such matters have been extensively documented and analysed elsewhere. Rather, the focus is more narrowly on questions of philosophical trajectory—on the conceptual latency pertaining to Geschichtlichkeit and cognate existentialia and the compatibility of these ideas with their later development—as well as on the light shed by Nancy’s considerations of these difficult questions.

73 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 30, 37. 74 At one point, Nancy pushes this commitment all the way via an explicit analogy with Kant’s thesis on Being: “[O]ne could say: Community is not a predicate of being or of existence. One changes nothing in the concept of existence by adding or subtracting communitary character. Community is simply the real position of existence” (“Being-in-Common,” 2). 75 Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 38. 76 Such larger implications are beyond the scope of this chapter. Suffice to say that Nancy’s suggestion offers a compelling lens through which to critique and reassess a tradition that has often failed to think the always already “with-ness” of Being. Singulars (putatively καθ αθτό) are the obvious place for any ontology to begin insofar as they offer a “steady target” for thought. But steady targets are always simplifications and eventually falsifications of reality which is always richer and more dynamic and paradoxical than simplified thought experiments allow.

370  Richard J. Colledge 3.1  The destiny of Geschichtlichkeit?

That there are strange conceptual linkages from Heidegger’s conception of Geschichtlichkeit to his reprehensible political activity in 1933 (and beyond) is clear. As the recent publication of his lecture courses from 1933/1934 show, there can be no vacillations on the question of Heidegger’s enthusiastic utilisation of his earlier account in service to the goals of National Socialism at this time. There are indications in 1933 not only of Heidegger’s dedication to the party’s “Blut und Boden” approach to harnessing German völkisch sentiment to its own ends (support that would become less fulsome shortly thereafter), but also to the pursuit of the “internal enemies” of such an agenda.77 However, of particular note in this regard is the way that at the very outset of his winter 1933 lecture course, the language of §74 is utilised in a new and unequivocal way: The German people [deutsche Volk] as a whole is coming to itself, that is, it is finding its leadership [Führung]. In this leadership, the people that has come to itself is creating its state … [and] growing into a nation. The nation is taking over the fate of its people [das Schicksal ihres Volkes] … Who is this people with this history [Geschichte] and this destiny [Geschickes], in the ground of its Being?78 If Heidegger’s own words are not enough, there are also contemporaneous accounts from colleagues—perhaps none clearer than Karl Löwith’s famous recollection79—that Heidegger was fully aware of this specific development in his thought and the key role played in it by the concept of Geschichtlichkeit. On one hand, the connection (if not continuity) between Geschichtlichkeit and German völkisch traditions is evident. As §74 of Being and Time makes clear, Dasein is “thrown” into a heritage that, even as authentic, it must “take over” and which it can “never come back behind.”80 But just as Mitsein is never a universal human with-ness, the heritage that is passed down to Dasein, far from being universal, is (so to speak) piecemeal, fickle, surdic, parochial and often (especially prior to mass communications) local. As thrown, Dasein finds itself attuned to specific ways of Being-in, ways of seeing, that shape possibilities of understanding and that thereby make Dasein historical (geschichtlich). We might speak “ontically” about such structures of disclosure in terms of familial, social, cultural, political, educational, linguistic and historical (in the sense of Historie) influences. Accordingly, other ways of seeing—those that factically disclose 77 In his notorious winter 1933 lecture course, Heidegger speaks not only of “the deepest necessity … to draw on the fundamental possibilities of the proto-Germanic ethnic essence and to bring these to mastery,” but also—chillingly—of the internal enemy who has “attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein of a people,” and of the need to find, expose “or even first to make the enemy … to keep oneself ready for attack … with the goal of total annihilation.” (Martin Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit, GA36/37 [Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann: 2001], 89, 91. Translated as Being and Truth, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010], 71, 73.) 78 Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit, 3/3. 79 Written around three years after the event concerning his meeting with a Swastika-wearing Heidegger in Rome in 1936, Löwith reports having suggested to Heidegger directly that “his partisanship for National Socialism lay in the essence of his philosophy,” and that Heidegger agreed “without reservation,” adding that “his concept of ‘historicity’ [Geschichtlichkeit] was the basis of his political ‘engagement.’” (Karl Löwith, “My Last Meeting with Heidegger,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993], 142.) 80 SZ: 383/434–435.

From Mitsein to Volk  371 the world differently—will inevitably appear strange and foreign. This is especially so given the way in which Heidegger defines the “in” of In-Sein, tracing it to archaic German forms such as “innan,” meaning “to reside,” “to dwell,” that to which “I am accustomed,” that with which I am “familiar.”81 In its absorption, Dasein is embedded in a world that is disclosed in particular and parochial ways that are deeply shaped by a heritage which fates Dasein in particular ways in line with the there-ness of its dwelling. As historical Being-with, Dasein is thus inextricably indebted (Schuldig) to the ways in which it is factically bequeathed to itself. Given all this, we should regret, but not be surprised, by the emergence of certain “us and them” meaning-making mythologies that stem from particular forms of factical parochialism, just one example of which would be early twentieth-century forms of German völkisch nationalism. Such perverse outcomes stem from the very structure of human Dasein, as Heidegger so effectively explicated it. But on the other hand, as much as Heidegger’s own presentation in Being and Time can explain the emergence of virulent parochialism and as much as it is possible to retrospectively construct lines of support from its pages to justify the authenticity of German völkisch nationalism, there is no obvious link between—nor natural unfolding from—the analysis of Geschichtlichkeit in that work and Heidegger’s support by 1932 for a sociopolitical ideology that weaponised such movements. To the contrary, if such a movement is envisaged at all on the pages of Being and Time, it might be seen in Heidegger’s account of inauthentic Mitdasein: as a Being-alongside others that has Dasein standing “in submission [Botmäßigkeit] to others,” by which its Being is “taken away” in the “levelling down” of its possibilities.82 Whereas in 1927 “fate” is that towards which resolute Dasein comes as it “hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility which it has inherited and yet has chosen,”83 by 1933 Schicksal has become “the fate of its people” that is forming itself into a nation.84 In Being and Time, it is Dasein itself that has the task of discerning its own fate, “co-historizing” with others, as it “chooses its hero” in the act of retrieving and negotiating its heritage. By 1933, it is the anonymous “German people” (the völkisch “they”) who pre-determine Dasein’s fate in advance. “Potentialityfor-Being” thus becomes corporatised in a way that is not envisaged on the pages of Being and Time. In moving beyond “existential analysis” that Heidegger states in §74 “cannot, in principle, discuss what Dasein factically resolves in any particular case,”85 by 1933 Heidegger has essentially conflated the ontological category of Geschick with a specific existentiell commitment, to which it is reduced. Insofar as Dasein “remains in the throw” of its factical heritage, a heritage that can easily become calcified in the “idle talk” of either cultural complacency or perceived historical exigency, it is not difficult to see how a process of inauthentic cultural reification can take hold. Heritage becomes the heritage; destiny becomes the true destiny of the people. What began as a piecemeal inheritance into which Dasein and others are thrown and which can become the basis for authentic choice aware of its ungrounded ground becomes a pre-defined shared “mission” needing fulfilment, with the threat of “attack” hanging over anyone who resists and “total annihilation” facing internal enemies who 81 Ibid., 54/80. Heidegger draws here on the etymologies of Jacob Grimm, in ways that look ahead to later Heideggerian themes related to poetry, dwelling, the fourfold and his focus on Hölderlin and even Hebel. 82 SZ: 126–127/164–165. Translation modified. 83 Ibid., 382/435. 84 Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit, 3/3. 85 SZ: 383/434.

372  Richard J. Colledge are not of “the people.” Far from fulfilling the account of Being and Time, the proclamations of 1933 represent its perversion and betrayal. The crux of this betrayal is in the way that Heidegger comes to prescribe the meaning of Geschick in 1933, “levelling it down” in advance to just one authentic possibility defined by a very specific pre-determined nationalistic ideology. This ideology thereby colonises his account of Dasein’s historicality, clothing it in odious conspiracy theories and pompous nationalistic mythologies posing as inceptionary insight. Heritage thereby becomes fused with a nationalistic mythology that, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe points out, is overdetermined by the shadow of Nietzsche, who is the “hero” Heidegger has “chosen” for the 1933 Rectoral Address.86 In this, Heidegger stands in a long line of German post-Kantian thinkers who—in the wake of the eclipse of the authority of Christianity and the perceived “bankruptcy” of the Enlightenment (not to mention the disasters of the Great War, and in the aftermath of the Weimar republic)—turned to mythology to help define and appropriate the German people.87 On one hand, there are simple acknowledgements—that are essentially consistent with the account given in Being and Time—of the profound connection of people, place and heritage (of which the kinship of “the Blackforest and its people … [rooted] in Alemannian-Swabian soil,” as he puts it in 1934, are an example).88 On the other hand, there are all too frequent cases (especially in and around 1933–1934) where this notion is programmatically twisted and perverted into the “spiritual mission” and the “fate of the German people,” as he puts it in the opening lines of 1933’s Rektoratrede.89 The problem, therefore, is not only that in 1933 Geschick is reduced to ethno-nationalism by Heidegger, but also that it is reduced specifically to one kind of ethno-nationalism. Here Heidegger’s own existentiell particularities are projected upon existential analysis, as the implications of the parochialism of human thrownness are forgotten. As LacoueLabarthe asks, concerning Heidegger’s 1933 deployment of the 1927 concept of the cohistorisation that is determinative for Dasein’s destiny: “why should this privilege be accorded to the German people” in particular? For him, this decision, this “ontic preference,” is simply an indication a nationalism that was “a deliberate political choice.”90 Accordingly, as one (privileged) people are called to embrace their destiny (the ungrounded

86 Lacoue-Labarthe, “Transcendence Ends in Politics,” 432–434; Lacoue-Labarthe, “Spirit of National Socialism,” 146. 87 Lacoue-Labarthe, “Spirit of National Socialism,” 146–147. 88 “Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum Bleiben Wir in der Provinz?” in Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens. ed. Heidegger, Hermann, GA13 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1983), 10–11. Translated as “Why do I Stay in the Provinces?” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2010), 28. 89 “Die Selbstbehauptung der Deutschen Universität.” Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, GA16 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2000), 107. Translated as “The Self-assertion of the German University,” trans. Karsten Harries, Review of Metaphysics, 38, no. 3 (1985): 470. 90 Lacoue-Labarthe, “Transcendence Ends in Politics,” 426–427. Heidegger’s initial enthusiasm in 1933 seems to have quickly faded into a “private” National Socialism that increasingly rejected the “idle talk” of the Party and racialized forms of völkisch nationalism as the 1930s progressed. The recently published Schwarze Hefte documents sometimes bitter rejections of Nazi “culture” (e.g., Überlegungen VII–XI, GA95 [Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2014], 395–396). Of course, Heidegger is due little credit for rejecting biological racism even as he championed his own more idiosyncratic “metaphysical” nationalism, a point Nancy and Derrida both also make (see Nancy, Banality, 52). If he came to look scornfully upon more incendiary forms of völkisch revelry, he continued to cultivate a vision of a movement of Übermenschen resolutely taking up a specifically German völkisch inheritance, even if it was a future he grew to write about in increasingly eschatological terms.

From Mitsein to Volk  373 ground they have inherited), others are condemned as allegedly lacking ground, viz., the Jew who is without soil or history, and whose only identity is “calculative giftedness” connected to the dehumanisation that marks modernity.91 One is reminded here of Levinas’s 1961 remark in this connection that “[t]he biggest threat to humanity is not technology,” but rather “communal exclusivity and solidarity,” for “[e]nrootedness … [t]he attachment to Place … is the very splitting of humanity into natives and strangers.”92 In fact, the problem is not the particularity of communal solidarity as such, nor the enrootedness or attachment to place (for Geschichtlichkeit is always particular and rooted), but rather politically exclusive particularity that, in giving precedence to one’s own heritage, systematically sets it above and in opposition to others. 3.2  The elusive via media

If the perversion of Geschichtlichkeit, and the betrayal of Mitsein, is a feature of the passage of Heideggerian thinking from 1927 to 1933, how is this failure to be understood, and how might an alternative counter-factual trajectory be envisaged that would have seen the promise of Being and Time realised differently? It is here that Nancy’s powerful reading of Heidegger’s failure to grasp the opportunity opened by Mitsein is enormously helpful. For Nancy, Heidegger’s failure to negotiate a middle path between the extremes of individualism and totalitarian communitarianism is a case study in political ontology: on the implications for understanding human community—the ἦθος of the πόλις—in terms of its ontological ground. It is because of Heidegger’s eventually tragic failure to find the middle path between individualism and collectivism that Levinas is oddly justified in charging Heidegger (at different points) with both subjectivism (Dasein in its Jemeinigkeit) and collectivism (Mitsein as völkisch fusion, or as Nancy puts it: “the common as ownmost structure in itself”).93 Individualism dominated in 1927 (notwithstanding the unevenly integrated conception of Mitsein at this point) and collectivism in 1933. But if Levinas’s approach is to reject ontology and to develop an ethics built on the radical exteriority of self and other, Nancy argues instead for a return to an ontology that has Mitsein at its core, and which this time does full justice to the simultaneous singularity and plurality of Being. There is a need to avoid the extremes of “pure exteriority” at one end, and “pure interiority” at the other.94 For Nancy, it is precisely the breakthrough into a radical sense of the “with” that avoids not only the futility of modern subjectivity but also the curse of modern totalitarianism. The difficulty, of course, is with how to articulate and develop this middle path, which Nancy admits is “hard to name,” but which his own approach (surveyed above) is designed precisely to elaborate. As seen earlier, if Dasein is to be understood in its singularity, this is not an integrity defined by separateness from others, but rather in and because

91 Überlegungen XII–XV, GA96 (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 2014), 56. Translated as Ponderings XII–XV Black Notebooks 1939–1941, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 44. 92 Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us,” in Difficult Freedom, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 232. 93 Nancy, “Being-with of Being-there,” 4. 94 Ibid. Nancy further qualifies these extremes as “democracy” (as understood by Heidegger and others at the time) and “totalitarianism.” I suggest that the position Nancy identifies as “extreme” individualistic democracy is better termed “libertarianism.”

374  Richard J. Colledge of its elemental with-ness. Singular Dasein is possible because it is already plural, and at the same time, the plurality of community is possible because of the integral singulars that comprise it. Whenever there is a slanting in either direction, libertarianism or totalitarianism respectively threaten. After his initial breakthrough in Being and Time, Heidegger, Nancy maintains, never properly explored the difficult path of thinking which his own account had opened: to resolutely think the mit of Mitsein without compromise. Instead, he lurched from one extreme to the other. It was Heidegger’s failure to avoid the latter extreme that led him into—or that provided him with philosophical cover for an existing tendency towards—a form of völkisch thought that given the times was so easily turned towards fascism. In this way, the promise of Being and Time was squandered: to think the with “neither in exteriority, nor in interiority. Neither a herd, nor a subject. Neither anonymous [das Man], nor ‘mine [meines].’ Neither improper [uneigentlich], nor proper [eigentlich].”95 4  Conclusion: a perennial philosophical burden There are few philosophical responsibilities as urgent as the task of addressing the issues with which the debate surveyed here has been concerned. In a powerful sense, Nancy’s analysis of the lurching extremes of Heideggerian thought between 1927 and 1933 provides a heuristic for understanding major themes in western metaphysics, ethics and politics more generally, and it provides inspiration for the quest to build a robust alternative path between the horns of a dilemma that has played out so often in the western tradition. As Nancy has explored perhaps as clearly as anyone, there is a simultaneous need to affirm the centrality of both ipseity and alterity at the heart of both individual and community. The extreme positions are clear in their possibilities and their destructive implications: whether it be philosophies of atomised individualism, of selves as ontologically and ethically independent from vital relationships with others, reducing community to mere associations of externality and convenience; or collectivist philosophies through which the person is ontologically and ethically dissolved into a communitarian soup that submerges viable personal liberty and self-governance. The challenge is to affirm not simply the singularity of the self and the plurality of society, but just as strongly, and in the same stroke, the plurality and otherness of the self and the open singularity and integrity of community. Philosophically, we can no longer approach this challenge by indulging the luxury of setting up safe camp on one side of the channel between self and community, and only then attempting to bridge this gulf by sending out boats across the waves to affirm truths on the opposite shore. One cannot simply look to lock in the truth of the individual self and only then try to do justice to community; nor to set up camp on the other side and make free individuality an afterthought. There is no priority, no a priori, on either side. There is a need to affirm the primordiality of both shores, and to risk the perilous task of dwelling thoughtfully always in the midst of the philosophically turbulent waters between these two headlands. If Being is equiprimordially singular and plural, then there is no “choosing” between the two. Libertarianism and totalitarian communitarianism are both shown to be based on fundamental ontological misunderstandings.

95 Nancy, “Being-with of Being-there,” 11.

From Mitsein to Volk  375 However, elaborating and enacting the paradoxical togetherness of singular-plural Being remains the perennial philosophical burden of each generation. It is a task that is as ancient as it is urgently contemporary: a “fated” task for our own century that is still in its adolescence. For above the surface of philosophical debate, this is a tension that continues to play out tumultuously in contemporary society and politics. In retrieving its own history, philosophy needs to make a decisive contribution. In understanding the facticity of our philosophical heritage, in appropriating the shared philosophical “destiny” of western thought, we are granted an open future in which possibilities for rethinking Being as singular plural may be retrieved. As historical beings, we are granted an openness that is the gift of the ungrounded ground of our philosophical inheritance.

23 Another night of the world Affect and eternity, being and time in Heidegger and Henry Bryan Cooke

Abstract  This chapter juxtaposes Heidegger’s famous reading of affective attunements (Stimmungen) in Sein und Zeit with the critique of Heidegger made by Michel Henry in the latter’s L’Essence de la manifestation (1963). I attempt to show how Henry’s controversial radicalisation of phenomenology and his insistence on grounding phenomenology in a non-intentional ur-phenomenon emerge from a reckoning with Heidegger’s own thinking about the revelatory powers of affects and a dispute about how it is possible to pass from phenomenology to ontology. Keywords  Henry; Heidegger; Eternity; Time; Affect; Life; Manifestation One month after Heidegger’s inaugural speech, Karl Barth wrote his theological appeal against co-ordination [Gleichshaltung] with the reigning powers, ‘Theological Existence Today’. This paper was and remained the only serious expression of academic resistance against the raging time. To be capable of an analogous act, philosophy instead of treating ‘Being and Time’ would have to treat ‘the Being of Eternity’. — Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933.1

1  “That feeling when”: nos aeternos esse In the fifth book of Spinoza’s Ethics, there is a remark which has caused even its most scrupulous readers to suddenly break off and stare, puzzled, into the middle distance: “At nihilominus sentimus experimurque, nos aeternos esse.”2 In Curley’s translation: … nevertheless, we feel and know by experience [experimurque] that we are eternal.3

1 Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report, trans. Elizabeth King (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994): 37. (Italics in the original.) 2 Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethica E5P23 schol. (Spinoza – Works in Latin), accessed January 2, 2021, http:// users.telenet.be/rwmeijer/spinoza/works.htm. 3 Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. E. M. Curley, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 1996): 172 (E5P23 schol.) My italics.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-25

Another night of the world  377 Even if we acknowledge the semantic range of the word experīmur, the first-person plural of the verb experior (to undergo, to make a trial of, to experience),4 there is no way of sifting through the connotations of this word that could make the problem posed by the unambiguous sentimus (“we feel”) disappear. However much we might wrestle with the translation, we cannot escape the fact that far from declaring this “experience” a delusion, Spinoza never qualifies his statement in a way that would allow us to interpret the line as referring to something like what Kant, over a century later, would call a transcendental illusion.5 Instead, we see Spinoza here, uniquely and astonishingly, appearing to treat a feeling – a feeling “of” eternity no less – as if it were somehow, by itself, an index to an eternal truth. To understand what is so strange about this, we can ask a simple, albeit rhetorical, question: where else in his corpus does Spinoza write about a feeling as if it were endowed with a power to disclose reality, i.e., as if it were not merely the registration of an external cause and its effect on the human body (of which the mind is famously the “idea”)6 – an index to the growth or diminution of the body’s power of acting7 – but instead as if it could, by itself, achieve something to rival the deductive, geometric procedure to which the Ethics is committed and which it announces as early as its title? While the notion of eternity is hardly foreign to the Ethics – we only need to think of Spinoza’s reference to truths sub specie aeternitatis8 – the notion of immortality, and especially of the immortality of the soul, is profoundly at odds with many of the book’s central assertions. These include (a) Spinoza’s monism of substance which reserves the category exclusively for God/Nature; (b) the “parallelism” between the attributes of extension and thought, such that everything that happens in the body happens in the mind and vice versa;9 (c) the way that the individuation of human beings as modes [modī] of substance is a product of changeable ratios of motion which, as such, render every unity and the individuation of everything save substance precarious;10 and (d) the fact that for Spinoza – who in this respect has long been recognised as a thinker of the ­transindividual – anything that acts in concert towards a common goal becomes (in a way that is by no means merely metaphorical) the same body.11 While there are ways of reconciling the statement about “our” eternity with Spinoza’s system, most of which pass through a broadly Averroist conception of the intellect, I have not opened this chapter intending to take a position on how this statement should be read in the context of the Ethics. Instead, I want to use Spinoza’s strange remark as an entry point into another philosophical tradition, a tradition whose opponents have often turned to Spinoza as an alternative if not an antidote.12 The spectre of this other tradition – phenomenology – with all of its resources and aporiai is conjured almost as   4 The “que”-suffix at the end of experimur in Spinoza’s sentence has the effect of a conjunction, specifically an “and,” hence, “we feel and know by experience…”   5 Cf. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allan W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): A293/B349- A297/B353: 384–385.  6 Spinoza, Ethics, 39 (E2P13).  7 Ibid.   8 A phrase which occurs 11 times in Book V of the Ethics.  9 Spinoza, Ethics, 35 (E2P7), cf.: 39 (E2P12 & schol.). 10 Ibid., 41–43 (E2P13L1–7). 11 “If a number of individuals so concur in one action that together they are the cause of one effect, I consider to them all, to that extent, as one singular thing” Spinoza, Ethics, 32 (E2D7). 12 See for example Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014).

378  Bryan Cooke soon as we address Spinoza’s statement with a set of questions that it nonetheless cannot fail but to evoke: Do we, does anyone, today, “feel” and “know” (by experience!?) that “we” are eternal? Who, even and especially among the many thinkers who have found in Spinoza a contemporary, would affirm this unequivocally? Even if we put aside the reference to eternity as simply the last vestige of the old axiological hierarchy by which the most valuable and most real was correlated to that which was enduring rather than evanescent, we are still left with the problem posed by the very idea that a feeling (an affect, an emotion) might, by itself, show us something about reality per se. It could be argued that emotions play a central, perhaps even revelatory role with regard to ethics.13 But surely it is a claim of a different order to take them as a guide to metaphysics. In what follows, I will take up the question about both how and what affects may be said to reveal via an account of two thinkers who take rival positions on the question of this ostensibly revelatory power of affects: Martin Heidegger and Michel Henry. While Heidegger, for good or ill, is one of the most influential philosophers of the last century, Henry, apart from occasionally appearing on lists of names associated with a putative (and putatively travestying) “theological turn”14 in French phenomenology, has been so conspicuously absent from most of the major debates in twentieth-century philosophy as to prompt one French writer in the year before Henry’s death to speak of the on-going scandal of the latter’s “non-reception.”15 In bringing these two thinkers together, I will first discuss Heidegger’s “ontological” account of the affects in Sein und Zeit. From here, I will give an account of Henry’s critique of Heidegger in L’Essence de la Manifestation.16 At issue between the German and the French philosopher is the question of what it is that allows anything at all to appear and how appearances are connected to being. In Henry’s idiom, this is a question about phenomenality. But in explaining how each philosopher responds to these questions, we will also encounter another issue that will turn out to have been also adumbrated by the Spinoza fragment. If, in Heidegger, the question of veridical appearances opens to a question about the relationship between being and time, in Henry we will see an account of affects and appearing that surprisingly makes feeling into the medium of eternity. 2  Heidegger: how to tune into the world (and make it luminous) The obvious place to look for an account of the affects in Heidegger is in those sections of Being and Time devoted to the question of moods or attunements [Stimmungen] and “dispositions” [Befindlichkeiten].17 While he does also explicitly use the term “affects” 13 For a sophisticated account of the role of emotions in moral judgement, see Martha Craven Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 14 The idea that such “turn” exists and constitutes a misuse if not a betrayal of phenomenology originates with D. Janicaud. See Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 15 Alain David, “Michel Henry: Le Problème de la Réception,” Revue de la France et de l’Étranger 3, no. 126 (2001): 359–372. 16 Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). 17 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 130–138 (§29–31); 178–184 (§40). Stambaugh translates Befindlichkeit as “attunement.” My preference for disposition stems from several considerations. Many of these, such as Heidegger’s preference for the French disposition, are aptly summarised and defended by Christos Hadjoannou in his “Angst and

Another night of the world  379 [Affekte], Heidegger’s preference for the previous two terms derives from his belief that while merely ontic accounts of affects or emotions abound, they have not been the subject of “fundamental ontological interpretation” since Aristotle’s Rhetoric.18 But what makes an interpretation “ontological”? As every reader of Being and Time is aware, an ontic discourse treats of beings (ta onta), whereas ontology, “correctly understood,” 19 is a discourse (logos) on the being of beings. Heidegger’s insistence on the importance of this distinction can, however, lead us to overlook the way he treats the relationship between these two registers. The ontological and the ontic must not, we are told, be confused; this does not mean, however, that they are unrelated. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is concerned with what a later epoch will translate as the “passions of the soul,” a subject about which every rhētor (orator) must know if she is to excel at her art. Unlike Book Gamma of the Metaphysics, the Rhetoric does not, however, explicitly discuss the “being qua beings” [on hēi on].20 If the latter treatise is nonetheless “ontological,” this stems not from its subject matter but from the manner of its interrogation. In Sein und Zeit, the passage from one register to the other rests on attending to the inextricable knot that ties each register to the other, despite the necessity of their analytic or conceptual separation. For our purposes, it suffices to say that, first, every ontic account of phenomena will (qua ontic) both presuppose and operate within an understanding of the being of the entities accounted for. To remain at the level of the ontic is always to be governed by an implicit ontology.21 The fact that this ontology is often concealed means, for Heidegger, that it is likely to be both ungrounded in the ways that entities actually manifest themselves and suffused with assumptions that have been obliviously inherited through the history of metaphysics which the later Heidegger will go on to relate to something like the history of being’s own dispensation.22 By contrast, an ontological description of phenomena appears to be one in which the question of the being of the beings under investigation is raised explicitly, thereby touching on the question of the meaning of being qua being.23 Even with this in mind, how we pass from the ontic to the ontological remains far from obvious. To understand affects (or any set of beings) ontologically, we seem to require an understanding of the being of these beings purified of the received, ossified metaphysical assumptions that obscure being’s own fugitive (self-)revelation. But we are not in possession of such an understanding which would seem to require the completion of the project of the destruction/deconstruction of the history of metaphysics. Heidegger’s way of dealing with this problem is as follows: first, we can attempt to pass from the ontic to the ontological by simply attending to the ontological assumptions implicit in ontic accounts. Every ontic account of phenomena is grounded in a way of relating to the beings this account tries to elucidate. These ways of relating to beings, these dispositions, provide the conditions for beings to show themselves. For Heidegger, whatever permits

Evidence: Shifting Phenomenology’s Measure,” in Heidegger on Affect, ed. Christos Hadjioannou (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 69–104, esp. 94, 100–102. 18 Heidegger, Being and Time, 135 (§29). 19 Ibid., 10 (§3). 20 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1003a 1–21. 21 See Heidegger, Being and Time, 8–10 (§3). 22 Ibid., 19–25 (§6). 23 Ibid., 21 (§6).

380  Bryan Cooke beings to appear also reveals something of the being of these beings. As such anything which can inflect the shining forth of being and beings may be said to have an ontological capacity; it can be subject to an ontological elucidation precisely because it is tied to being’s own self-disclosure. To fully understand this point, it is worth recalling that for all the ways in which he departs from Husserl,24 Heidegger never ceases to take seriously the fundamental phenomenological principle by which any concept, if it is to be other than arbitrary or “empty,”25 must be grounded in some form of evidence. While a demand for evidence is hardly unique to phenomenology, Husserl’s insistence on evidence cannot be interpreted as the mark of an empiricism on the model of Hume or Locke. Instead, Husserl’s phenomenology, which treats “every presentive intuition [as] a legitimating source of cognition,”26 makes phenomenology into a radical empiricism that is also a “rationalism” insofar as the beings that can appear are not limited to what is given to the senses but include idealities: mathematical theorems, truth-values, states of affairs and, above all, essences.27 Both Husserl and Heidegger consider phenomenological evidence as something that requires a concept of appearance that (a) is not confined to sensory perception and (b) is distinct from any notion of “mere” appearance” or “seeming” [Schein].28 As Heidegger argues in the seventh section of Being and Time, the idea of something being merely apparent is unintelligible if it is not connected to (and ultimately derivative of) a prior acquaintance with veridical appearance, that is, with the self-showing of that which exists.29 If the significance of this point cannot be over-stated, this is because Heidegger’s attempt to show that being is something other than an empty concept (a mere hypostatisation of the copula or the most general and thus most vacuous of categories) requires that being is something that is already disclosed to us in some way. The strategy of Being and Time involves identifying ever more fundamental existential determinations of Dasein that are, as such, ways in which beings, Dasein’s being and being qua being are revealed. But the passage from what is revealed (constituted) to modes of revealing (constitutive) rests on a sort of recursive capacity whereby every power of manifestation manifests something of the being of that which it reveals. 2.1  The dispositions of time

We are now in a position to begin to understand some of Heidegger’s claims about affects, moods and dispositions. We are all familiar, Heidegger tells us, with the way in which certain moods can make the beings around us appear in a different light than they do ordinarily, to take on or to lose qualities that they normally seem to possess. In a rapture of joy, the world appears redolent with previously invisible charms and possibilities. In melancholia, the same

24 See Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985), 101–116. 25 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: M. Nijhoff; 1982), 155–156; cf. 345–348. 26 Ibid., 44. 27 Ibid., 7–14; cf., 40. 28 Heidegger, Being and Time, 27–30 (§7). 29 Ibid., 27–30 (§7).

Another night of the world  381 world is stripped (or separated from) the meaning, interest and value which suffused, illuminated, and differentiated it. The world thus denuded appears as a sterile promontory. But for Heidegger, Dasein is always marked by a mood of some sort: “[both]…undisturbed equanimity and the inhibited discontent of everyday heedfulness” are moods which, as such, possess ontological significance. In addition, Heidegger speaks of the particular existential significance of the “pallid lack of mood,” in which Dasein “becomes tired of itself.”31 In the face of such a mood, I am potentially plagued by questions of the sort: “why have I been in this place for so many years? Why have I devoted myself to activities of this sort for so long and should I do something else?” Under the right conditions, Heidegger claims, such questions can attest to the capacity of moods to “deliver us” to the “there” of our Dasein. Such moods “turn us away from the world and towards our ‘thrownness’ [Geworfenheit].”32 But such turning away from the world is only possible because moods, in general, are attunements; they are ways of tuning into (and thus potentially also out of) the world.33 Moods thus reveal something of our ineluctable relationship to a world that is not manifest as simply an indifferent aggregate of matter but as a universe of meaning that forms the mobile and enmeshed horizons of everything that appears. What appears to us, in but also as the world, appears already as beautiful or frustrating, glorious or idiotic, meaningless or majestic, proximate and distant, etc. Conceived ontologically, moods are “dispositions” and dispositions are primarily modes of being-in-the-world. As such they are that which opens (up) the world to us so that what happens “in” the world and to us matters and means something to us. A world, for Heidegger, is a structure of opening, a “clearing” in which beings are encountered. Dispositions inflect these encounters; they dispose the world differently just as different distributions of light affect what is given to perception. More fundamentally, however, the fact that Dasein is always disposed in some way means that Befindlichkeiten are necessary for the appearance of anything whatsoever. It is via this fundamental disclosive capacity that they show something about Dasein’s own existence. But does what Heidegger says here really add anything to the trivial truth that moods tell us something about our own state? Even if we grant that moods have an existential and not merely psychological significance, it is not so easy to see why this reference to our own existence might also relate to the being of beings? After all, don’t our moods, like our affects and emotions, tend to distort reality rather than reveal it? When Heidegger insists on talking about moods in relation to their capacity for ontological disclosure, he does not take the position that a mood is something that produces knowledge of entities “within” the world on the model of a concept correctly grasping an object. We can see the difference between Heidegger’s way of thinking about the disclosure of being, what he calls truth, and our everyday concept of knowledge if we look at his account of the disposition of fear.34 Intuitively, fear, of all moods, would seem to possess a capacity to lead us astray, to blind us to the reality of things in ways that make us act stupidly, impulsively or 30

30 See Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3–27. 31 Heidegger, Being and Time, 131 (§29). 32 Ibid., 132 (§29). 33 See Thomas Sheehan “Heidegger: παθος (pathos) as the Thing Itself,” in Hadjioannou, Heidegger on Affect, 29–36. 34 Heidegger, Being and Time, 136–138 (§30).

382  Bryan Cooke shamefully. Despite this, Heidegger says that fear as a disposition discloses something fundamental: namely the way in which Dasein’s existence is defined by care (Sorge).35 In its pin-like stabs and sea-sickness surges, fear both relies upon and points towards the knot that links concern for our own existence with concern for other beings. While this concern is also presupposed in loving solicitude, irrational hatred and even seeming indifference, fear reveals this concern as inextricable from what it means for the kind of beings that we are to exist. Fear does this insofar as it brings the object of our fear “existentially nearer” to us by virtue of its making manifest something that seems to threaten or to jeopardise what we care about. To say that fear “discloses” the fundamental existential structure of care through this increase in the existential proximity of the feared object may seem like a portentous way of saying that we can infer things about this structure of care from the phenomenon of fear. But to recall what we have said about Heidegger’s method: insofar as this inference is grounded in evidence it must be something shown (if not necessarily obvious) in phenomena themselves. For this reason, Heidegger presents himself less as having discovered the structure of care through a reflection on fear, so much as paying heed to what is already present within the phenomenon. But that this phenomenon reveals something of our being is not the same thing as saying it provides a reliable method for obtaining facts about the world, even if, as Heidegger will insist, being disposed is a condition of possibility for knowing anything at all. Instead, this capacity, as such a capacity, is related to Heidegger’s conception of truth as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit), by which being and beings emerge from a ceaseless play of concealment and unconcealment, where every revealing is also a concealing, and every concealing is a modality of a being’s own primordial apocalypse.36 This character of revealing as concealing and concealing as revealing is even more apparent in Heidegger’s account of what he calls the Grundstimmungen or “fundamental attunements.” The locus classicus of this account are those passages in Being and Time devoted to anxiety [angst].37 Anxiety interrupts the absorption into the world that Heidegger calls Verfallenheit.38 Most moods, we have seen, attune us to the world in ways that colour the world’s exhibition. Anxiety, by contrast, reveals the world in such a way that the interweaving of our existence with the world and what appears in it becomes visible by becoming strange. In anxiety, Heidegger says, Dasein is confronted with a sense of not being at home in the world; the world takes on the character of something uncanny [unheimlich].39 By forcing Dasein to encounter this state of not-being-at-home in its world, anxiety reveals nothing. There is not, as in fear, any apparent object of our fear; no entities emerge in the light of anxiety’s creeping nullity, neither what we fear nor what we fear for. In anxiety Dasein is confronted with its own being as something that belongs to the order of the possible rather than the actual.40 The possibilities that define our existence are not something that can be found either anywhere in the actual world, nor in any of our ontic determinations (the fact that I am witty, dyspeptic, Italian, divorced, etc.). While

35 Ibid., 137. 36 The Greek word apokalupsis (revelation) comes from the verb apokaluptein (to reveal), from apo (a negative prefix like “un”) and kaluptein (to cover or to obscure). 37 Heidegger, Being and Time, 178–184 (§40). 38 Ibid., 179. Stambaugh translates this word as both “falling prey” and “entanglement.” 39 Ibid., 182–183 (§40). 40 Ibid., 36 (§7).

Another night of the world  383 the relationship between anxiety and existential possibility is perhaps too familiar from existentialism, for our purposes, what is significant here is the way that Dasein’s being is made manifest through an affect. 2.2  From anxiety to eternity

Heidegger’s account of anxiety is the pivotal moment from which the entire movement of the second half of Being and Time emerges, revealing Dasein as care and thus opening up the topics of “being-toward-death,” “the call of consciousness,” authenticity, “resoluteness” and, finally, what will turn out to be that which ties all of these disparate moments together: what Heidegger calls temporality [Zeitlichkeit]. As Françoise Dastur notes, Heidegger’s discussion of temporality retroactively “accounts for all the structures of Dasein”41, all of which are revealed to be “structures of temporality or modes of temporalization.”42 Dastur goes on to say that while Heidegger’s talk of the unity and “equiprimordiality”43 of the three ecstasies of time (past, present and future) seems initially continuous with the claims about this threefold aspect of time in Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions and in Husserl’s Lectures on Internal Time Consciousness, in fact, Heidegger can be seen as breaking with both of his august predecessors in grounding the ultimate unity of the three ek-stases not by a privileging of the present but of the future. As Dastur puts this: where Augustine grounds “the threefold presence of the past, future and present in memory, attention and expectation in…the eternal present of God…”44 and Husserl finds the “unity of protentions and retentions in a ‘living present’” that derives ultimately from the presence of consciousness to itself, Heidegger’s account of temporality breaks with this priority of the present for the purposes of both understanding the being of Dasein and investigating how the meaning of being per se relates to time. Importantly, Dastur argues, Heidegger’s break with the ontological priority of the present comes by way of his description of Dasein’s “coming to itself,” a process that does not rely on any notion of Dasein’s “self-presence” but can only be explained if we follow the way in which Being and Time attempts to break with the history of metaphysics by displacing the aforementioned ontological priority of the present onto the future.45 This attack on the “ontological priority of the present” is perhaps the part of Sein und Zeit which comes closest to the explicit goal of the treatise. Many of the roads that Heidegger’s thought will wander down in his later years find their prototype here: in the idea that the history of metaphysics has, for the most part, understood being as presence [Anwesenheit] and presence through the ontological priority given to the temporal mode of “the present” [Gegenwart].46 In Being and Time, this privilege accorded to the present is criticised for, among other things, undermining what Heidegger describes as Dasein’s “historicity.”47 To treat the meaning of being in terms of being present is to affirm a vision of time as the infinite succession of present moments and thus an idea of being as

41 Françoise Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), 34. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 35; cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, 314 (§65). 44 Dastur, Heidegger and the Question of Time, 35. 45 For Heidegger’s own avowal of this priority, see, again, Being and Time 314 (§65). 46 Ibid., 24 (§6). 47 Ibid., 19–20 (§6).

384  Bryan Cooke a coming-to-presence that is radically dependent on the way that the present, eternally, succeeds to itself. Heidegger’s main objection to this flattening of time is the way that it renders every punctual, “evental” aspect of Dasein’s existence apparently lacking in any reality beyond the subjective. 48 Where only the present (not the evanescent now, but the continuous succession of such nows) truly is, the past and the future are but shadows. Consequently, it seems impossible to account for how Dasein can “come towards” its own existence by seizing and affirming its relationship to its constitutive past and can thus allow an authentic relation to its future.49 Significantly, at least for us, this polemic against the reign of presence/presents is also an attack on the idea of eternity. In the fourth section of the first division of Being and Time, Heidegger had already criticised the idea of “eternal truth” on the grounds that truth (as unconcealment) requires the existence of Dasein and that we have no reason to believe in Dasein’s eternity.50 However, what the final sections of Being and Time allow us to see is that this criticism was not only about the fact that, for Heidegger, unconcealment requires the existence of Dasein. It is also an implicit objection to the way that the idea of eternity – and particularly the idea of the eternal as that which is most real – relies upon and reinforces the dominant ontological status of the present over that of both the future and the past. Heidegger’s position on this issue is complicated but we can grasp something of it if we think about what it means to refer to something as “eternal.” That which is eternal is something that does not pass away in the infinite succession of “nows” but endures throughout the entire series. The idea of an eternal being would seem to be independent, qua eternal, of this sequence. However, if, as in, say, neo-Platonic metaphysics, that which is truly eternal is also that which is most emphatically – as in the case of the ens realissimum, from which contingent, “temporal” beings are said to derive or borrow their being via emanation – the priority of the present is affirmed because eternity is the eternal present of that which is eternally present.51 But if eternity is the measure of time, time as the endless succession of presents is affirmed rather than denied.52 From an attempt to think affects ontologically, we have seen that Heidegger arrives at a critique of the metaphysics of presence that includes a critique of the idea of eternity. With Michel Henry, we will observe another way of thinking about the connection between being and (disclosive) affects, an account that, passing by way of a critique of Heidegger, also ends up defending what Heidegger here disparages: the idea that what most deserves the name of being is anterior to time, present to itself and (thus) eternal. 3  Against the day: Michel Henry and the dispositions of eternal night 3.1  From Heideggerian finitude to life

Michel Henry’s magnum opus, The Essence of Manifestation, begins with an epigraph from Being and Time. In the quoted passage, Heidegger claims that Descartes’s discovery

48 Jacques Derrida, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 138–142, esp. 142. 49 See Heidegger, Being and Time, 312–314 (§65). 50 Ibid., 217 (§44). 51 Ibid., 402–403 (§80). 52 Without time to go into the subtleties of Heidegger’s account, we can perhaps say that for Heidegger the understanding being as presence and of presence in terms of “the present” “eternalises” the present.

Another night of the world  385 of the cogito is vitiated by the latter’s insufficient attention to the question of the meaning of the sum in cogito ergo sum.53 By beginning in this manner, The Essence of Manifestation appears to place itself under Heideggerian auspices. This impression only seems confirmed by the fact that the book’s opening chapter is devoted to the being of the ego. Contrary to these initial expectations, Henry will in fact argue that it is Heidegger and not Descartes who leaves the question of the being of the ego unanswered. The heart of Henry’s criticism can be put simply: Heidegger cannot properly account for what he reproaches Descartes for forgetting because he cannot properly explain the apparent link between phenomenality and ipseity (selfhood). What Henry thinks prevents Heidegger from properly accounting for this connection is that the German philosopher cannot think of this connection outside of the thought of transcendence, which Henry thinks is also a thought of finitude.54 The first question with which Henry confronts the project of Being and Time is this: how does being appear? In Henry’s own idiom, to ask this question is to ask about the essence of manifestation. This question opens on two further questions: what exactly is the role given to Dasein in suturing being to appearances? And what does the being of Dasein have to do with selfhood? For Henry, this second question reveals a point in Heidegger’s corpus in which the latter equivocates on what Henry regards as a decisive issue. What, Henry asks, is the exact role Heidegger assigns to Dasein with regard to the question of being? On the one hand, Henry claims, Heidegger acts as if the privilege accorded to Dasein is strictly methodological. From its opening pages, Being and Time claims that the investigation’s terminus ad quem is the being of beings in general. Why then does he devote so much time to the existential analytic of Dasein? Heidegger’s answer to this question is well known: we begin with the existential analytic of Dasein because it is the being that “we ourselves are,” the being “ontically nearest to and ontologically furthest from us,”55 the being whose own being is always a question for it. However, this, Henry points out, is highly ambiguous. Is Dasein the essence of manifestation? If so, he suggests, the fact that being appears is due to Dasein and its capacities to make being and beings enter into the space of their unconcealment. An appearance would always be an appearance to and for Dasein. How, then, does Dasein have access to being qua being, if this means the being of beings in general? Conversely, however, if  the being of Dasein relies (as Heidegger might say) for its very being on something about the being of beings in general, why would an analysis of Dasein’s existential determinations necessarily bring us any closer to this generic being? Earlier I showed how Heidegger’s depiction of the relationship between Dasein and the beings that it uncovers is bilateral: there is no luminosity of the world (no world properly speaking) without Dasein, but there is also nothing for Dasein to reveal, nor any self-revelation of Dasein, without being’s own coming out of concealment.56 Henry is eminently aware of this aspect of Heidegger’s thought.57 However, this “and…both” that constitutes Heidegger’s strategy for moving beyond the framework of subject and object 53 Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 1; cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, 23 (§6). 54 See for example Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 35, where Henry talks about the “bond that unites transcendence and finitude at their origin.” 55 Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 35–36. 56 Ibid., 35–39; cf. 351–357. 57 See Ibid., 446.

386  Bryan Cooke results in Heidegger answering the question of the being of the ego in a way that Henry thinks is either inconsistent or untenable. According to Henry, Heidegger’s most consistent answer to the question about Dasein’s being is that Dasein is, ontologically speaking, transcendence. Henry’s major source for this claim is Heidegger’s short treatise Vom Wesen des Grundes.58 In that text Heidegger does indeed explicitly affirm that Dasein is defined by its (self-) transcendence.59 In order to understand how Dasein can perform the function of revealing beings in their being, Dasein must be considered as a special being whose most fundamental ontological determination is surpassing itself [sich übersteigen], a going outside of itself that gives rise to the world as the space(s) in which beings are encountered and being is both manifest and obscured through its manifestations. If Dasein is, as Heidegger says, transcendence, the transcendence of Dasein is what allows for phenomenality, for the fact that being and beings appear, as well as for the temporalising that allows Dasein to authentically encounter its own existence.60 For Henry, however, this means that Heidegger’s answer to the question of the being of the ego (here, not understood as the me, the image in the mirror, the object of self-­ reflection, but that to which appearances appear) becomes fraught in a way that threatens to tear apart the link Heidegger wishes to establish between appearance (in the strong sense) and being. Henry thinks that if Dasein is primarily, ontologically, transcendence, then the being of Dasein is its transcendental capacity to stand outside of itself and thus open itself onto the world. Because of this, Henry thinks that the being of Dasein is either pure negativity or it “receives” its being from something in the world(s) opened by Dasein’s transcendence. But if the world only emerges via Dasein’s ecstatic self-projection then everything that appears within the world is an artefact of this self-transcendence and thus the product of a being whose being makes things manifest but does not itself appear except as one intramundane object among others.61 Heidegger is forced, therefore, to vacillate between talking about Dasein as an entity in the world and identifying it with a world-forming capacity to stand outside of itself that does not itself appear: the essence of the ego, the essence of manifestation is inferred but, as such, it is phenomenologically ungrounded. To understand what Henry is saying here, we must understand more about what he thinks ties the idea of transcendence to the idea of finitude. By referring to finitude (a central Heideggerian concept) as if it is the name of problem, Henry’s point is something like this: for Heidegger, being reveals itself, and we both participate in and find ourselves always amidst the simultaneous revealing and concealing (as well as the revealing as concealing) of being. What this means, however, is that being withdraws from every manifestation. But if being is never fully present in its manifestations, Heidegger seems incoherently to be both affirming Husserl’s idea that to be and to appear are the same, and suggesting that this is not really the case when applied to being.62 Certainly, one advantage of arguing for this withdrawal of being from its appearances is that it may seem to allow Heidegger to escape the pitfalls of a certain idealism. If being 58 Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Reasons/Vom Wesen Des Grundes, trans. Terence Malick (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1978). 59 Ibid., 29; 35–47. 60 Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 88–94; 107. 61 Ibid., 174–175; 355–359; 101–102. 62 Ibid., 110–111; 126–133.

Another night of the world  387 can never be reduced to or identical to its appearances, it cannot be conceived as simply the confection of transcendental subjectivity. However, if being cannot be exhausted by its appearances, does this not, conversely, run the risk of rendering the being of beings as something, ultimately, ineffable? The idea of the ineffable is hardly any less anathema to Husserlian phenomenology than it is to Hegel. Heidegger can deny that he has rendered being ineffable by saying that on his view being does indeed appear in the strong (phenomenological) sense of this word, it’s just that it does so in many ways, none of which need be illusory, just as none of them can be exhaustive. On this view, finitude, while raising the spectre of the ineffable, could appear as a condition for, rather than an obstacle to, the phenomena of truth. This is because a non-finite being, a nunc stans, could dispense with appearances and simply grasp reality as a whole in a single perfect intuition. Truth as unconcealment could mean nothing to such a being to which everything (and thus nothing) would appear. To speak of appearances, Heidegger could say, is to imply the finitude of that to which they appear. For Henry, however, this position is incoherent, first, because it would seem to attenuate the phenomenological meaning of appearance and, second, because the essence of manifestation is dispersed between Dasein’s capacity for (self-) transcendence and the obscure dispensations of being, which are both visible in the light of this transcendence and escape it. For Henry, however, if the essence of manifestation does not itself appear, the connection between being and appearance is at best hoped for rather than assured. Finitude means an absence of foundation, of certainty about being and thus about reality. It makes the reality of the beings that we are ultimately inaccessible to us. Seeking an escape from this ostensible aporia, The Essence of Manifestation puts forward a critique of what Henry calls ontological monism.63 By ontological monism, Henry means the idea that there is a single form of manifestation, a fundamentally univocal sense of what it means to appear underwriting all variants of the idea of appearance.64 Henry suggests, in a way clearly indebted to Heidegger, that this notion of manifestation has its roots in the Greek instauration of philosophy where it is attested to by metaphors of light.65 According to this univocal sense of manifestation, to appear always involves the idea of a dative of manifestation, that which something is manifest to – consciousness, Dasein, the (transcendental) subject, etc.66 The dative of manifestation is then accounted for in different philosophical frameworks through different explanations of the way this essence of manifestation both conditions and is conditioned by the various things which can constitute the genitive of manifestation – that which is manifest.67 In Husserlian phenomenology of the period of Ideas I, manifestation involves the correlate of an intention and something intended, and consciousness is the transcendental dative of manifestation. In Heidegger, the dative and genitive are ambiguous: the essence of manifestation is Dasein’s transcendence, but this is dependent upon both the beings which Dasein discloses with a power that owes its existence ultimately (but ambiguously) to the concealment/unconcealment of being. Against all such notions of

63 Ibid., 74–79; 108–111. 64 Ibid., 42. 65 Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 83–85. 66 On the idea of a dative and a genitive of appearance, see Dan Zahavi, “Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible,” Continental Philosophy Review 32, no. 3 (1999): 224. 67 Zahavi, “Michel Henry and the Phenomenology of the Invisible,” 224.

388  Bryan Cooke manifestation, Henry argues that there must be another kind of manifestation that does not involve transcendence because the genitive and dative of manifestation are in this case identical. In this form of manifestation, there is no “remainder” that could allow for a difference (as in Kant’s distinction between phenomenon and noumenon) between being and appearing. This second form of manifestation – something that is, significantly, unrecognisable as manifestation by the standards of ontological monism – is what Henry calls autoaffective life. In auto-affection there is no gap between what is manifest, the manner of its manifestation, and that to which the manifestation manifests itself.68 There is also no meaningful difference between the constitution of phenomena and something that constitutes them. Although this idea of auto-affection plays a significant role in both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s reflections on time (as well as both Heidegger’s and Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence),69 Henry does not make auto-affection a quality of time but instead makes auto-affective life into the condition of both ecstatic temporality and the ordinary (“worldly”) sense of manifestation.70 The domain of auto-affection is what Henry calls “life.” Life, for Henry, is neither a matter of biology nor the protagonist of a vitalist metaphysics à la Bergson, Deleuze’s plane of immanence.71 Henry’s notion of life is not the period between birth and death, nor is it some vital “spark” that separates the inorganic and the organic: it is phenomenal life, life which is its own ceaseless (auto-)phenomenalisation. Life, Henry claims, is the essence of manifestation – it is that which makes any appearance appear. But this power of making appear is derivative of the prior manifestation of this power in, through, and as life and living. Life has, or rather is its own unique way of appearing. This mode of manifestation is both prior to and the condition of possibility for ordinary (transcendent, worldly) appearing. Henry characterises living as an undergoing/an experiencing/a trial/a suffering, and an inescapable passivity to its own shifting tonalities.72 Henry calls these tonalities of life: affects. Henry makes a sharp distinction between affects insofar as they are represented and thus potentially named and reflected upon (e.g., “my intransigent despair,” “our ­unlooked-for joy”) and such conscious representations’ prototypes in auto-affection. The former, already “ecstatic” affective awarenesses are grounded in a more fundamental “affectivity” which Henry describes as existing prior to any “light” or ekstasis. In the latter, enstatic affectivity, affects are not conscious entities but a cavalcade of shifting modalities of the inescapable feeling of living that accompanies and undergirds all of our conscious, worldly experiences. From within this vision of things, Henry does not regard Heidegger’s notion of transcendence as false per se. Transcendence and finitude do mark the world of and as representation. But for Henry the effulgence of this world with all of its existential investments only emerges as a departure from the nonetheless inescapable 68 Ibid., 242–247. 69 For an excellent article on auto-affection in Derrida and Heidegger, see Cathrine Bjørnholt Michaelsen, “Auto-Affection and the Curvature of Spacetime: Derrida Reading Heidegger Reading Kant,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28, no. 3 (May 2020): 411–432. 70 Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 234–247. 71 For the differences between Henry and Deleuze, see James Williams, “Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry: Critical Contrasts in the Deduction of Life as Transcendental,” Sophia 47, no. 3 (Nov 2008): 265–279. To Williams’s excellent article, I would add only the mild objection that the word “theological” is overburdened in terms of what it can show about Henry’s position. 72 See Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 481–492.

Another night of the world  389 “nocturnal” phenomenality that underwrites everything that appears in either the everyday or phenomenological use of this word. But even if this auto-affective life exists, what, it might be asked, is so important about referring to it? The simple answer to this question is that Henry considers auto-affective phenomenal life to be nothing less than the absolute. Ordinary manifestation involves a notion of transcendence whose epistemological but also existential correlate is an unsurpassable finitude.74 It is thus a milieu, as Henry says elsewhere, shockingly, of “absolute unreality”75. By contrast, life’s revelation, being devoid of any gap between revealing and revealed, knows nothing of finitude. The most controversial and seemingly hyperbolic consequence of this vision of absolute life is Henry’s acosmism. On the surface, Henry’s way of consigning the world to a derivative status has obvious parallels to certain strands of idealism (and indeed those frequently deemed the most risible). However, his position is not that the “real world” only exists “within” or on account of the mind, nor that the in-itself is inaccessible to us – this would reprise the pathos of finitude for which Henry critiques Heidegger – but rather that we only know reality through the offices of this or that form of transcendental condition. Instead, for Henry, life as its own datum is apprehended immediately, absolutely, and inescapably. As the essence of manifestation, life is a dimension of pure phenomenological immanence. In this immanence, life delivers to the living a pre-representational sense of selfhood (“[a]ffectivity,” Henry says, “is the essence of ipseity”)76 that has nothing to do with the imaginary register of the ego (the mirror-self). The self comes to be through its awareness of life, even though Henry sees life as both inevitably individuated and paradoxically trans-individual. Phenomenal life is never consciously represented; it takes the form of an impressional “flesh” that is capable of hetero-affection only through auto-affection.77 Henry suggests that Descartes stumbled upon this aspect of auto-affective life, when he wrote that even after having subjected everything in the world to hyperbolic doubt it nonetheless still “seems” that he is seeing/ thinking/sensing.78 For Henry, this “seeming” is a feeling, a testament to the ineluctable nature of affectivity that is life’s auto-revelation. 73

3.2  The spectre of Hegel

Even if we were to somehow accept that all of this is true, it is still not clear why Henry thinks it is important to uncover this ostensibly neglected essence of manifestation. To understand, we must now turn to the Appendix of the Essence of Manifestation. Coming at the end of such a vast book, the appendix almost takes the form of a confession. It is a confession of the book’s true philosophical enemy and thus of its ultimate goal. The enemy, idiosyncratically understood, is Hegel.

73 For Henry’s poetic employment of the motif of “night” as a symbol of auto-affective life, see The Essence of Manifestation, 438–449. 74 See Ibid., 737. 75 Michel Henry, Entretiens (Paris: Sulliver, 2005), 12. 76 Ibid., 465. 77 Michel Henry, Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh, trans. Karl Hefty (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 47–71. 78 Michel Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 11–40, esp. 20–22.

390  Bryan Cooke Henry’s interpretation and critique of Hegel’s philosophy can be summed up in one word: kenōsis.79 In twentieth-century Christian theology, Hegel has been both celebrated and execrated for his interpretation of Christianity. Henri de Lubac, for example, charges Hegel with having a “fully realised” eschatology in which the transcendent God has become fully equivalent to the spirit of world history.80 While the theologoumenon of kenōsis (derived from Paul’s Letter to the Philippians) is generally associated with the Incarnation, de Lubac is neither the first nor the last thinker to read Hegel, as if the author of the Science of Logic undertakes a hyperbolic reading of the kenōsis in which the event by which the philosophical meaning of the Word becomes Flesh is the abolition of the difference between humanity and God, and the sublation of this difference into the spirit of the community.81 Lubac’s critique of this essentially charges Hegel with reading Christianity as if its core dogma is its own paradoxical self-secularisation, for holding that the God who empties himself into creation and subsequently into the “form of the slave” is fully sublated, in the end, by the on-going self-externalisation and self-alienation of spirit [Geist]. God is thus absorbed into society, the state and world history, into the procession, breakdown and sublation of the forms in which spirit reveals itself: subjectively, in the psyche; objectively in history and in socio-political institutions; and finally absolutely in art, religion and philosophy. For Henry, the problem is not, at least not in the first instance, with Hegel’s theology or with his conception of God but instead with what Henry thinks of as its disastrous hollowing out of ipseity. According to the appendix of the Essence of Manifestation, Hegel’s “central affirmation that the real is spirit” culminates in the idea that manifestation only occurs through the alienation of life, an alienation in which subjectivity – to obtain to the reality of what Hegel calls the concept – partakes of reality only through its self-alienation.82 The reality of subjectivity and interiority is nullified by the fact that its only reality is the reality of the (lifeless) world.83 The ultimate endpoint of this doctrine, according to Henry, is that: “death is, for Hegel, the only manifestation of life.”84 While Henry’s reading of Hegel can obviously be contested, its significance in the context of the Essence of Manifestation is that it reveals, by way of contrast, what Henry’s phenomenological philosophy is seeking: a concept of life and of subjectivity that is not fully and finally equivalent to the world, while at the same time refusing to posit any transcendent beyond of the world. 79 Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 731. On kenōsis see Phil 2:7 which speaks of Christ “emptying himself” [heauton ekenōsen] by taking the form of a slave [morphē doulou]. Hegel explicitly mentions kenosis in Phenomenology of Spirit §755 (trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], 457). The theme of kenōsis is also subtly present throughout Henry’s The Essence of Manifestation via his reading of Jakob Böhme as the Ur-thinker of Being as something divided from itself in order to appear (112–113). 80 See Justin Shaun Coyle, “Heterodox Hegels: Heresiology in de Lubac and Bulgakov,” Scottish Journal of Theology 73, no. 1 (Feb 2020): 34–35. 81 See Slavoj Zizek “The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity,” in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009): 57–59. Zizek speaks here of a “double kenōsis.” 82 Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 719: “Alienated-Being is identical to the fact of manifesting itself, to the phenomenon as such. The fact of manifesting itself finds its foundation in the work of the Concept. The fact of being alienated is precisely that which attests, in the fact of manifesting itself, to the work of the Concept. Alienated-Being which properly belongs to objective determination is what indicates its origin in this determination. The alienation of manifestation is the manifestation of the Concept.” 83 Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 737. 84 Ibid., 725.

Another night of the world  391 Hegel is so significant an opponent for Henry because Henry does not, like the Husserl of the Crisis, only wish to defend a notion of transcendental subjectivity whose invisibility to scientific naturalism, Husserl thinks, endangers the very sciences upon which the impulse to positivism depends.85 By singling out Hegel’s concept of manifestation as his primary opponent, Henry makes clear that his objection is not so much to positivism, nor to naturalism, but rather to what he sees as the more fundamental effacing of life that comes any time life and subjectivity is conceived as fully absorbable into the world. In the end, the whole of Henry’s project is directed against what he thinks of as the false choice between either a reality completely identified with the world and its representation or the belief in an inaccessible beyond. What Henry calls life, it must be stressed, is not in any sense something beyond or outside of the world. On the contrary, Henry refers to the truth of atheism as the truth of not seeking for anything within the world and its representations that would point to a beyond of this world.86 For this reason, in his final trilogy devoted to Christianity, Henry does not so much reveal his philosophy as the laying of the groundwork for Christianity, as to argue that Christianity is only intelligible through something like his phenomenology of life.87 3.3  What is to be done (with auto-affection)

But how are we to assess any of these claims? At once the difficulty and the ease of assessing Henry’s position is that for all that it claims to be a heterodox phenomenology, it shares with Husserlian phenomenology the idea that its legitimacy or illegitimacy turns on something more than the coherence or incoherence of the arguments that Henry presents. I am aware that this can sound like an absurd immunisation against argument, as if Henry could only be judged by those who had passed some initiation or on the basis of a leap of faith. This is not, however, what I mean. The wager of Henry’s work is that if something like auto-affective life exists in the way he describes, then it would have to already be manifest by means other than Henry’s description. This is a basic principle of phenomenology and one that I think, for all Henry’s phenomenological heterodoxy, he never renounces. Henry’s auto-affective life is not so much a concept, as a placeholder for something whose evidence (if it exists) must be presented prior to the concept, and must appear if the concept to be anything other than vacuous. Henry’s phenomenology of life is therefore valid if and only if life already reveals itself in the way Henry describes. But given that this answer cannot be, in

85 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1984). 86 Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, 405–407; cf. Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emmanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 236–238. 87 This tendency in Henry’s work creates numerous problems for Janicaud’s thesis that Henry is part of a movement whose goal is to press phenomenology into the service of theology. While Henry has much to say about Christianity that is laudatory, the fact that he praises Christianity for what he presents as its deep understanding of (Henry’s!) phenomenology of life is: (a) something for which he also praises the philosophy of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and the paintings of Kandinsky, and (b) raises questions about the extent to which Henry’s thought can be read as a Christian theology. On Henry’s religious heterodoxy, for example his possible Gnosticism, see Kevin Hart’s excellent essay: “Without World: Eschatology in Michel Henry,” in Phenomenology and Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now, ed. Neal DeRoo and John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 168–192.

392  Bryan Cooke itself, philosophically satisfying, we can also see that the rest of Henry’s corpus (post-The Essence of Manifestation) is devoted to showing how Marx, Nietzsche, the late Fichte, Kafka, Kandinsky and the doctrines of Christianity all point to and depend upon an awareness of life not, obviously, via Henry’s own concepts of life and auto-affection, but as a reality already disclosed. 4  Concluding comments We began this inquiry with a question about what affect reveals. With Heidegger, we saw that affects, conceived ontologically, could be seen to reveal the world but also pointed to the possibility of Dasein confronting its own being whose ultimate determination was the grounding of its existential determinations in a future that was the basis for its temporalisation. With Henry, we confront the thesis that what we know of as affect, and emotion is actually a vestige of, and an index to, another primary dimension of phenomenality and phenomenalising. It is another “night of the world” than Hegel’s, a realm that knows neither time nor death, that does not transcend but rather runs constantly underneath the brightness and obscurity of the world. It is also, to steal from Blake, an endless (eternal) night. For Heidegger, time and being must be thought together. Time may be, as Heidegger speculates, the horizon of being. For Henry, life and time are strangers who never meet, but only communicate through emissaries. Affects do reveal the being of beings, but in a space where revelation and being are not distinct. In life, we do not feel that we are eternal, but every feeling is a manifestation of life’s eternity. For Henry, this lived eternity is the birthplace of time and world. 5  Coda: against the day A final coda. In French, la manifestation is also a word for protest, following the same Latin model as the English word demonstration. Despite his extraordinary book on Marx, 88 Henry will never count as one of the great political thinkers, nor was he during his lifetime any kind of political radical, his “immediate, personal, dangerous, involvement with the struggles of the Resistance” against the Nazi occupation notwithstanding.89 Nonetheless, Henry’s corpus with all of its seeming excesses, the very hyperbole of its repeated central theses, may offer at least one central provocation to contemporary philosophy. That would be an insight into how that which could seem so distant or indifferent to the wisdom or the ways of the world in religion (but also in philosophy and art) could nonetheless have been the basis for transforming the world because of and not despite its lack of concessions to what the world, at a given time, proclaimed as an ineluctable reality. What if, counter-intuitively, there might exist a connection between an attention to something other than the world and the ability to change it, as if the ability to act in the world might have something to do with approaching the world from the vantage of something other than what our own (or any) time reveals?90

88 Michel Henry, Marx (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). 89 David, “Michel Henry: Le Problème de la Réception,” 359. 90 Cf. Henry, I Am the Truth, 236–239.

Another night of the world  393 In an age dominated by a contemporary “biopolitics”91 that seems singularly adept at bringing about death while also seeming to value nothing but bare life and profits, perhaps we require new ways of attending to the secret, silent protest with which Henry characterises living: a protest that, paradoxically, never ceases to make itself visible without light and audible without sound. Amidst the economic governance (management, administration, exploitation) of the planet for the benefit of global plutocracy, the constant declaration that what exists is only that which can appear in the blaze of technologically mediated and commercially controlled representation is arguably more starkly complicit with injustice and immiseration than any time previously. But what if a challenge to that order of representation required, alongside a comprehension of the world and its structures, an attention to that which – while being neither supernatural nor transcendent to the world – could never be manifest in the world’s blinding radiance? In the darkness of life – which knows nothing of hierarchies and distinctions – there is nothing but living beings in the silent communion of their joys and their suffering. If Henry is correct, however, it is only from out of that night that any world has ever been born. It is only here that we would find the creative capacities of billions of people, all the more efficiently exploited and abused by the ways of the world for the fact that they count for nothing within it. What if it is only from within this night that we might find the means to oppose what Maurice Blanchot once called “the madness of the day.”92

91 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Homo Sacer 1, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 92 Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981).

24 Is anxiety fundamental? Lacoste’s reading of Heidegger Robyn Horner

Abstract  This chapter examines Jean-Yves Lacoste’s reading of Heidegger in Être en danger (2011) where he questions Heidegger’s determination of anxiety as the affective tonality par excellence. In Lacoste’s view, no single mood discloses all of what it means to be human, and others (e.g., peace, joy, innocence) each have the capacity to bring Dasein face to face with the meaning of its being. There is a knowing whose domain is that mode of being which is life. Moreover, Lacoste observes that Heidegger does not allow for the possibility of a spiritual life that might be known by means of affective tonalities, even if such experience cannot provide certainty. Lacoste’s reading helps to open up phenomenological approaches that intersect with theology. Keywords  Jean-Yves Lacoste; Martin Heidegger; Moods; Affection; Attunement; Befindlichkeit; Stimmungen In this collection devoted to French readings of Heidegger, we turn to the generation whose intellectual lives were burgeoning at the time of the student protests of 1968, and particularly those whose encounters with Heidegger took place in dialogue with theology. Two thinkers, in particular, brought a substantial engagement with Catholic tradition to their studies in philosophy. The fact that both Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Yves Lacoste served on editorial boards for both the student journal Résurrection and the conservative Catholic Communio is testament to their belonging to a group of French intellectuals who were tutored at the feet of significant, twentieth-century theologians such as Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, among others. Balthasar, in particular, had a lasting influence on both thinkers, especially with regard to his reading of Heidegger and his views on the German theologian, Karl Rahner—another great reader of Heidegger, who, nonetheless, took Heidegger’s work in a different theological direction. Marion relates a telling anecdote from early in his philosophical career. When ­Bernard-Henri Levy became editor of Figures—a book series founded at Grasset to publish the work of the so-called “Nouveaux Philosophes”—Levy invited Marion, his contemporary from the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), to contribute what would eventually be released in 1977 as L’idole et la distance.1 Marion recalls that Maurice

1 Jean-Luc Marion, L’Idole et la distance. Cinq études (Paris: B. Grasset, 1977; repr., Paris: Livre de poche, 1991); English translation: The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, ed. John D. Caputo, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, Perspectives in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-26

Is anxiety fundamental?  395 Clavel—an activist who had been involved in the 1968 protests—“saw [the New Philosophers movement] as a great war machine against everything that needed to be destroyed … and we were all charged with ‘destroying’ something. … I had to destroy Heidegger. A simplistic and completely delirious idea….”2 Yet with this work, and subsequently Dieu sans l‘être (1982), Marion made his name both as a philosopher who tried to overcome Heidegger with theology and as a theologian who used Heidegger to overcome Thomas Aquinas. Needless to say, he pleased neither philosophers nor theologians. The younger philosopher and theologian, Jean-Yves Lacoste, undertook his agrégation at the ENS between 1972 and 1976, was ordained a Catholic priest in 1981 and completed his PhD in 1983 on the question of time. Less well known than Marion, because far less of a public figure and independent of a university, Lacoste is the author of some 11 books and many shorter works. While his knowledge of the philosophical tradition as a whole is encyclopedic, his close attentiveness to the texts of Husserl and Heidegger is especially evident. Lacoste’s reading of Heidegger in Experience and the Absolute, first published in French in 1994 and one of the few of his works having been translated into English, shows his capacity to read Heidegger sympathetically as well as critically. His work as a whole is profoundly influenced by “the philosopher,” perhaps nowhere more so than in Être en danger from 2011. In the present examination, we focus on Lacoste’s questioning of Heidegger in Être en danger with respect to the determination of anxiety as the affective tonality par excellence. Lacoste underscores the importance of anxiety and what it discloses about Dasein, while at the same time proposing a number of different, yet equally fundamental, disclosive moods. He also questions the priority of existence (as ek-stasis) in describing human being, suggesting that “life” (and en-stasis) is equally important to experience and analysing the character of that experience. Before proceeding further, however, two important aspects of Lacoste’s thinking must be noted. 1  Boundaries and horizons 1.1  Porous boundaries

Lacoste’s work is particularly evocative at the point of his phenomenological engagement with theology, an engagement occupying a number of contemporary French thinkers which in recent years has pejoratively—but arguably unfairly so—become known as “the theological turn in phenomenology” in France. This negative evaluation emerges from a belief that phenomenology is inherently atheistic as a methodology and that any dialogue with theology is ideologically motivated.3 However, while Husserl famously excludes God from the phenomenological reduction in Ideas 1, §58, this does not equate to a requirement for methodological atheism; while it clearly means that God is irreducible, Lacoste argues that it does not preclude an “experience” of God which could become the 2 La Rigueur des choses. Entretiens avec Dan Arbib (Paris: Flammarion, 2012), 29; English translation: The Rigor of Things, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 12. 3 For the beginnings of this critique, see Dominique Janicaud, review of Jean-Luc Marion. L’Idole et la distance (Paris: Grasset, 1977), Les Études philosophiques, no. 2 (1979); review of Jean-Luc Marion. Dieu sans l’être (Paris: Fayard, 1982), Les Études philosophiques, no. 4 (1983); Le Tournant théologique de la phénoménologie Française (Combas: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1991); La Phénoménologie éclatée (Combas: Éditions de l’éclat, 1998).

396  Robyn Horner subject of phenomenological analysis.4 Marion is well known for his use of phenomenology as a type of prolegomenon to theology and seeks to satisfy critics of this move by suggesting that the division between the disciplines occurs at the point where we seek to ascribe meaning to a phenomenon that is potentially revelatory.5 Lacoste rejects such a sharp distinction. For Lacoste, to have an atheistic starting point would reflect a predetermination that is unhelpful in phenomenology. Despite the evident historical tension surrounding the distinctions between theology and philosophy, Lacoste argues that the two disciplines have a number of questions in common, including the question of God and issues to do with the possibility of revelation.6 In this light, he argues that the thinking that is demanded of each discipline cannot be strictly demarcated: “We can therefore lose all interest in knowing which discipline we are practicing when we take an interest in God and in the things of God: we will simply be judged by the power of what we say.”7 Lacoste thus pursues phenomenology while resisting all calls to define his work in terms of either philosophy or theology. In the preface to the English translation of La phénomenalité de Dieu, he claims that his enquiries “do not define themselves apart from the two methodological requirements of letting-appear and making-appear. Letting-appear in every possible way is the service of intuition, making-appear is the labour of conceptualizing, required for more and better appearance.”8 1.2  The liturgical reduction

In Lacoste’s writings we find ourselves naturally within the Heideggerian horizon of “world” (or “earth”), a horizon opening onto phenomena—including objects, beings, things, persons and events—in their various modes of appearing. While the sacred interrupts this horizon, God is not to be found amidst the sacred (and we are reminded here that Lacoste is also a close reader of Levinas).9 It is for this reason that Lacoste discerns a need to transgress the horizon of the mundane in a different way. He does so by means of what he calls the “liturgical” reduction (or more commonly, “liturgy”). By liturgy, Lacoste does not mean a reduction to or of Christian worship. He explains in various contexts: “liturgy appears as a certain bracketing of world and earth”; it is “life lived before God … not at the measure of Dasein or the mortal”; liturgy is “the facts, gestures and sayings of people in the presence of God (coram Deo).”10 The liturgical reduction   4 As Lacoste notes: “‘experiences of God’ may refer simply to the content of that experience, so that God’s existence, the existence of gods, divinity, or whatever, is superfluous to the needs of the description. To put it classically, description of experience is not description of a transcendent object of experience.” Jean-Yves Lacoste, La Phénoménalité de Dieu. Neuf études (Paris: Cerf, 2008), 84; English translation: The Appearing of God, trans. Oliver O’Donovan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 65–66, trans. modified. Henceforth cited as Appearing of God with French and English page numbers respectively.   5 Jean-Luc Marion, Étant donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997), 10; English translation: Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 5.   6 Jean-Yves Lacoste, From Theology to Theological Thinking, trans. W. Chris Hackett (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014), 70–71.   7 Ibid., 84.  8 Lacoste, Appearing of God, 10/x.   9 Être en danger (Paris: Cerf, 2011), 117–118. 10 Expérience et absolu. Questions disputées sur l’humanité de l’homme (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994), 209; English translation: Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity

Is anxiety fundamental?  397 means neither that God is somehow brought within the dimensions of the horizon nor that God dwells in another world beyond this horizon, but that the world ceases to be our determining horizon: Experience lived within the horizon of the world lets itself be interpreted as a figure enclosed by experience, … liturgy enables us to break free from this closure. By giving itself, from within the world, a horizon not of the world, liturgy proves that the world is not intranscendable. Although it claims to represent a beyond only under the conditions obtaining on this side, it very much proves that the world loses for it the structure of a horizon: inherence enables the passage to the limit that enables liturgy to have for its hermeneutic site the frontier between the world … and the eschaton….11 While the liturgical reduction places us at a distance from the world, Lacoste does not imply the existence of a world beyond the world: “the limit separates two orders of experience, not two regions of being (the ‘this side’ is not a region from which the Absolute is absent).”12 The two aspects of Lacoste’s thought that have just been outlined are important because, as Lacoste points out in the introductory chapter of Être en danger, Heidegger’s attempt to inscribe the meaning of existence within the horizon of being-towards-death puts at risk the possibility that there can be a life of the spirit.13 Lacoste does not by any means seek to reinscribe the metaphysics as onto-theo-logy that Heidegger has sought to overcome. Yet, he questions whether Heidegger’s characterization of human being is adequate. It will be in his rethinking of Heidegger’s fundamental tonalities that Lacoste makes room for the possibility of a spiritual life. 2  Être en danger 2.1  Being in danger

The “danger” to which Lacoste refers in the title of his 2011 work is a reference to the ways in which he perceives various modes of being to be under threat: the work of art being treated as an object, for example, or human flesh being treated only as a body. This danger is heightened, for Lacoste, when it comes to considering “the mode of being proper to the human” (7), which is described by Heidegger in terms of the “existence” of Dasein in Being and Time, but as the mode of being of “the mortal” in his later works. Lacoste observes the risk, for example, that “an experience commensurate with Dasein will not be commensurate with ‘the mortal’” (7); moreover, he argues that there are phenomena that do not appear within the mode of existing but only within that mode of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 174; Le Monde et l’absence d’oeuvre et autres études (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000), 16–17; Recherches sur la parole (Louvain: Peeters, 2015), 202. Translations of texts only available in French are mine. Henceforth references to Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man will be cited as Experience and the Absolute with French and English page references, respectively. 11 Experience and the Absolute, 53/43–44. 12 Ibid., 53/44. 13 Être en danger, 8. Subsequent references to this book will usually be made using page numbers within the text itself.

398  Robyn Horner of being that he will come to call “life.”14 These include the phenomena of joy, being-atpeace and innocence. Lacoste also interrogates the status of Heidegger’s thinking of being. While not underestimating Heidegger’s achievement and while not seeking to subordinate the question of being to matters of regional ontology, he points out that after Heidegger, we can still say very little of being as such apart from its appearing fragmentarily in various modes of being—including that of existence. The aim of Heidegger, in Being and Time, is not to furnish a phenomenology of existence but to tear being from forgetting. In order to do this, however, it would still be necessary beforehand to admit the “existent” character of the question of being: existence—the mode of being proper to the human—is in this way immediately descriptive. A being thus conditions all access to being; and it will always condition it in a surreptitious manner when philosophy occupies itself with being starting from being (28). Given that access to being is by means of the being of the human, we are always concerned with an appearing that is an appearing to consciousness (31). Now, Lacoste argues that Husserl’s error with regard to appearance was to limit it to intellectual intuition, “as if we could perceive without feeling (ressentir)” (32).15 Of course, while Husserl does allow that feelings are intentional acts, he maintains that they are non-objectifying, reliant on objectifying acts in order to be constituted. As Levinas maintains, the doxic thesis thus ultimately predominates in Husserl’s work.16 However, as we will see shortly, Lacoste is not concerned with feelings as such but with the deeper moods that accompany knowing. In light of the limitations of Husserl’s understanding of the signification of what we will call, in this context, affective tonalities, Lacoste thus sees Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety to be extremely powerful, because it “reveals existence to itself in revealing the threat of nothingness—of death” (33). 2.2 Befindlichkeit

We cannot underestimate the emphasis that Lacoste places on affective knowledge, in the sense that it characterizes existentially the directedness of Dasein.17 Lacoste regularly underscores that he is not referring to “feeling” (Gefühl)—and repeatedly distances himself 14 See the discussion by Lacoste in “Marginal Remarks” (paper presented at the The Contemplative Self After Michel Henry, Symposia online, 10.9.2017). 15 Lacoste’s use of ressentir here is potentially confusing because of the distinction he observes, in line with Heidegger, between feelings (or emotions) and moods. 16 Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. II Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis I. TEIL (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1968), V, §41; Logical Investigations, trans. J.N. Findlay, 2 vols., vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 1970/2001), 2, V, §41. Emmanuel Levinas, La Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl, 1st ed. (Paris: Librarie Félix Alcan, 1930), 74–75; English translation: The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. André Orianne, 2nd ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), 44. 17 Note, however, Jan Slaby’s concern that “When Heidegger introduces Befindlichkeit in division one of Being and Time (§ 29 and 30),1 he does so in the context of his analysis of being-in-the-world as one of the three equiprimordial modes of being-in (In-sein als solches). Given this, one might tentatively gloss it as a ground floor dimension of intentionality, even though Heidegger himself was averse to the idiom of intentionality for systematic reasons (he thought it was hopelessly infested by Cartesianism).” Slaby nevertheless

Is anxiety fundamental?  399 from the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, where the “feeling” of absolute dependence is used to make a place for God.18 Lacoste’s emphasis on moods derives explicitly from Heidegger: we just need to think, for example, of Heidegger’s insistence that “we must not confuse demonstrating the existential-ontological constitution of cognitive determination in the attunement [here, Befindlichkeit] of being-in-the-world with the attempt to surrender science ontically to ‘feeling’ (Gefühl).”19 It is an emphasis that is evidently also connected with the work of Max Scheler. The emphasis on mood rather than feeling will be crucial, in fact, to Lacoste’s thinking of the phenomenality of God, and it requires that we parse very carefully on each occasion the distinction between le savoir and la connaissance on the one hand and le sentiment on the other. As is well known, according to the existential analytic of Being and Time, one of the characteristics of existence is Befindlichkeit, which, in English, is variously translated as “state-of-mind” (Macquarrie and Robinson); “attunement” (Stambaugh); “­affective finding-oneself” (Hofstadter); “disposedness” (Dahlstrom, Blattner); “affective attunement” (Sheehan) and “findingness” (Slaby). Jan Slaby amplifies this list with the addition of “sofindingness” (Haugeland) and “where we’re at ness” (Dreyfus).20 While “affective finding-oneself” is a cumbersome phrase, it has the advantage of maintaining the sense of affection that is lost in “state-of-mind” as well as picking up the crucial Heideggerean understanding of thrownness. To use “attunement,” however, to translate ­Befindlichkeit—which is deemed ontological—risks potential confusion with Stimmung—which can be used as its ontic equivalent. This is particularly problematic in light of Daniel Dahlstrom’s observation that “in 1941, Heidegger acknowledges that his SZ conception of Befindlichkeit coincides with his later account of Stimmung.”21 Such a problem is potentially overcome by Jan Slaby’s suggestion that “the terms ‘Befindlichkeit’ and ‘Stimmung’ … designate one and the same phenomenon, each, however, signifying it in a different way.”22 Slaby is attentive to the resonances of each word in explaining that “[attunement] is apt for speaking of the concrete way in which a particular instance of findingness unfolds, the process of ‘feeling out’ one’s situation, one’s tuning in to one’s surroundings.”23 Lacoste uses the French “affection” for Befindlichkeit and “humeur” for Stimmung. Stimmung is not used to refer to feelings (Gefühl) or emotions related to clearly identifiable causes or having particular intentional objects (for example, feeling disappointed because a desired opportunity did not eventuate, or feeling pleased that my new shoes are comfortable). Instead, it refers to what we might call more profound or enduring moods, which colour life as a whole and often lack such immediate causes or objects. As Michael Inwood observes of fundamental moods, they “[play] a part similar speaks of affection as “directedness-towards.” Jan Slaby, “More Than a Feeling: Affect as Radical Situatedness,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 41, no. 1 (2017): 7–26, here 10. 18 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 77/63–64; Appearing of God, 50/34; Être en danger, 141n1; Recherches, 165. 19 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1926/1967), 138; Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: SUNY, 1996), 130. Henceforth cited as Being and Time [Stam] with page references in the German and English respectively. 20 Slaby, “More Than a Feeling,” 9. 21 Daniel O Dahlstrom, The Heidegger Dictionary (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 63. 22 Andreas Elpidorou and Lauren Freeman, “Affectivity in Heidegger I: Moods and Emotions in Being and Time,” Philosophy Compass 10, no. 10 (2015): 661–671, here 662. 23 Slaby, “More Than a Feeling,” 9.

400  Robyn Horner to Husserl’s Epoche, stripping things of their customary significance.”24 This is all the more important because of the fact that they are frequently unthematized.25 Commentators often discuss the revelatory quality of affections; Heidegger observes that not only are moods primary in disclosing the world (“the possibilities of disclosure belonging to cognition fall far short of the primordial disclosure of moods in which Da-sein is brought before its being as the there”) but all at once, they disclose Dasein as well: “in being in a mood, Da-sein is always already disclosed in accordance with its mood as that being to which Da-sein was delivered over in its being as the being which it, existing, has to be.”26 Yet, despite his admiration for Heidegger’s account of affection, Lacoste will critique Heidegger—as he has already critiqued Husserl—for characterizing affection too cognitively. In a later text, he specifies more directly that Heidegger’s understanding of affection—even where it has no object as such—still depends too much on what affects the self from without.27 2.3  Beings, objects and things

In contemplating Heidegger’s distinctions between the being, the object and the thing, Lacoste notes that objects are partially defined by the fact that they appear to consciousness without appealing to affection. Things, in contrast, are known in more complex ways. Lacoste refers to Heidegger’s understanding that the thing “is the most significant of all beings, the being that appears in making the whole of reality appear” (86). Yet he wonders how it is that the thing shows itself as a thing, given that, as he says, “the same being can bear the characteristics of an object, a thing, and of that which makes itself present without appearing as a thing.” For Heidegger, the how of this manifestation does not seem to be so important, but Lacoste describes what the thing properly manifests for Heidegger as “a certain economy of the sacred” (87), a manifestation of the totality of the real—the Fourfold (104). Lacoste makes a number of further specifications about the distinctiveness of the thing. Its role is to make appear “what our daily sojourn with objects or quasi-objects forbids us to perceive” (88). The thing can remain invisible; for the thing to appear, it must be recognized as such (89), and we can “destroy it or be blind to it” so that it does not appear at all (98). We can, on the one hand, make things appear, yet on the other hand, there is a particular sense in which we actually only allow them to appear (in the sense that we provide the means rather than the initiative) (98). Things appear, Lacoste observes, “charged with a symbolic power that others do not possess” (90). Most importantly, he notes:

24 Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 132. 25 Heidegger, Being and Time [Stam], 134/127. 26 Ibid., 134/127. 27 “We can use here Heidegger’s concept of ‘Befindlichkeit’ and state that we ‘find ourselves’ in affective situations. But we must quickly take leave from Heidegger, who ties Befindlichkeit with understanding in such a way that affection is part of a logic of understanding ‘something’: even if the arch-affection, anxiety, leads to an apt knowledge of no object, but of oneself as a self on its way to death or nothingness, what we are affected by in such an experience comes from outside. A Henryian critique of Heidegger is valid, and a Henryian critique of Scheler is valid as well.” Lacoste, “Marginal Remarks,” s X.

Is anxiety fundamental?  401 wherever things appear to us, and wherever we make them appear, the world is put between parentheses or … we have left the world behind. What things do for us, as soon as there are things, is to allow a horizon to open up that is not the world’s horizon. (89) In the situation where either we make the thing appear (by granting it the horizon against which it can appear) or where the thing offers itself to us (which it does by “exercis[ing] pressure on us in appearing, starting from itself and not starting from a decision that we would take in this regard”), Lacoste argues that we must speak of it in terms of the event. The thing becomes a thing in an event, where it is not at our disposal, and it is encountered by chance (or “grace”). With the thing, it is not simply a question of perception, then, but also, or even more, a question of affection, and affection by an “excess of appearance” (98) or “exorbitant experience” (100) that the thing reveals with the material cooperation of the existent. Lacoste argues that it is possible that the thing actually “possesses a double power of manifestation, … that it gives the proximity of the sacred to be felt as much as the retreat or the absence of it” (104). Moreover, he claims, things “never give themselves to us in a unique mode of manifestation” (106) and what they reveal is fragmentary (107). For example, Lacoste affirms that the Eucharistic elements of bread and wine can appear as things, exceeding their appearance as objects by virtue of their symbolic fields of reference. However, as bread and wine, they need not be interpreted sacramentally; in seeking to differentiate between what might be identified either as a “pagan libation” (for Heidegger) or the sacrament of the Eucharist (for the Christian), there is no visible difference between them as things. Their difference is in the hermeneutic dimension of their appearing.28 It is no surprise, then, that Lacoste next chooses to consider the nature of the existent subject who has—in Heidegger’s text of “The Thing”—become known as “the mortal.” 2.4  Serenity and the mortal

If there is a kehre in Heidegger’s works—and here we make no claim to have investigated or determined that question either way—Lacoste certainly observes a shift in the later writings that place emphasis not on the anticipation of death but on its mastery. Focusing on the texts “The Thing,” “Gelassenheit” and “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Lacoste observes that the mortal, precisely, is such because he or she ‘can die,’ and by this power, it is not necessary to understand the permanent possibility of a fatal illness or of an accident, but an ‘I can’ which connotes a mastery. Death appears as ‘my’ death…. (133) The second important shift that Lacoste notes is from the fundamental affective tonality of anxiety to that of serenity, which is characterized by the ability to let go, detachment or “wanting not to want” (134). In a third and perhaps controversial observation, Lacoste argues that the temporality of anticipation shifts to that of presence.

28 The previous two paragraphs are taken from Robyn Horner, “What does the Gift Reveal?” Louvain Studies 39.3 (2015–2016): 315–336.

402  Robyn Horner In pursuing the limits of Heidegger’s characterizations of Grundbefindlichkeit, Lacoste points out that in serenity, the mortal is still subject to the threat of the nothing in anxiety, which is diametrically opposed both to serenity and thus to a sense of having gained the totality: an attack of anxiety, phenomenon over which we exercise scarcely any power, will always be able to constitute the mortal in Dasein in de-constituting its serene appearance on the earth or, more broadly, in the Fourfold. Around the one hit by anxiety, the world is not necessarily constituted in totality. (138) There is revealed in serenity, then, a fragility that imbues existence (140). In fact, Lacoste argues that serenity cannot actually be a feature of existence as such: “If it is true that existence … is also ek-sistence—constant exit from itself, to be in advance in relation with one-self—the phenomenon of serenity cannot be interpreted as constituted in ek-sistance” (139). Moreover, given the mutually exclusive nature of the fundamental tonalities of anxiety and serenity, we see that neither anxiety nor serenity actually brings to light a complete understanding of existence (165). Further still, death cannot actually deliver a perspective on existence: anticipatory resolututeness is not death itself, which remains unknowable (182). Lacoste argues that it is to the daily experience of the human mode of being, then, that we must look in order to gain a richer understanding of existence, and for this, he turns to the detailed phenomenological descriptions typical of Husserl (168). At the same time, he wants to avoid adopting uncritically the assumptions that inform the Husserlian subject, particularly any notion of metaphysical substantiality (179). Accepting Heidegger’s existentials of understanding and affection and their mutual implication, Lacoste also emphasizes the coming to expression of the self in language—not simply in “idle talk,” but in authentic self-expression (180). Now, the one who communicates him- or herself in language lives in a kind of continuity in discontinuity: “saying oneself,” he observes, “the me does not repeat an I = I empty of content. It says, to the contrary, that ‘I am I’ even when the ‘I’ is no longer now what it was yesterday or will be soon” (181). If we are not to begin thinking the human mode of being from the (anticipated) standpoint of death, we must consider it starting from the present (and here Lacoste distinguishes a kind of “vulgar” presence as persistence from a presence that is always renewed), which involves accepting that it will always be unfinished. One phenomenon in which the self shows itself in this way is being-at-peace (182). 2.5 Being-at-peace

Being-at-peace is, first and foremost, not something that can be forced but is always and only a mood in which we can find ourselves. Lacoste’s definition of being-at-peace is “a happy moment, always renewed” (182). He is quick to point out that this does not involve bracketing an understanding of time according to its Heideggerean dynamic: the one at peace lives with an acceptance of the past and in hope for the future (183). Being-at-peace does not exclude other experiences; solicitude, for example, is enriched by being-at-peace (184). Peace is not a feeling but a mood that “unveils what is played out at the heart of us” (185), even if it is not the only mood to do so. The one at peace lacks nothing (186). Lacoste feels entitled, then, to identify it as a Grundstimmung (185).

Is anxiety fundamental?  403 Being-at-peace can be maintained in the face of death, with an acceptance of finitude (187–189). And to the extent that peace can accept living with experiences that might seem, at first, contradictory to it, peace can actually act to reconcile different moods and affects (191). There remain, however, affective tonalities that are inconsistent with peace, such as anger or fear (192). This does not mean that being-at-peace is less fundamental than anxiety, but Lacoste makes the claim, instead, that neither of these manners of being can actually be determined to be more originary. He resolves that it is less a matter of identifying a single fundamental affection than of identifying several, each of which is potentially vulnerable—while we do not always live in a state of anxiety, neither do we live continuously in a state of peace. Now, while Lacoste has identified being-at-peace as a Grundstimmung, he asks whether being-at-peace can also be named a Grundbefindlichkeit, and this in the sense in which he claims Heidegger understands anxiety to be a unique or highest mood because it makes Dasein stand out from itself and brings to light the difference between being and nothingness. Lacoste acknowledges Heidegger’s view that only anxiety has this existential dimension (193). It is perhaps helpful for our understanding of this question if we turn momentarily to Slaby, where he tries to explain the significance of the slippage from Stimmung to Befindlichkeit for Heidegger: The disclosive depth of findingness lurks right around the corner, ready to burst forth at any moment, as when anxiety suddenly takes hold of us out of the blue, disrupting our comforting absorption in routine activity and leaving us with an eerie sense of being-not-at-home (Unzuhause; cf. SZ, 189). In such rare but decisive moments, existential insights might dawn upon us. This is why Heidegger grants a crucial methodological role to affective predicaments such as anxiety or boredom, as these are capable of an existential disclosure that reaches deeper than what other dimensions of existence might offer to the phenomenologist. (cf. Withy 2012)29 Slaby thus opens a way of understanding what “fundamental” means for Heidegger, at least in 1927. Lacoste, however, is more cautious. He notes that anxiety does not disclose the whole of existence: “it is … the benefit of an interpretation of the phenomenon of peace to manifest aptitudes for experience that disappear or do not appear when a preeminence of anxiety is admitted” (193). There are phenomena that do not appear within the mode of existing, he maintains, but only within that mode of being called “life” (197) and life, he argues elsewhere, is “the sphere of antepredicative evidence.”30 With reference to Michel Henry, Lacoste affirms that “‘life’ (the relationship of the me to itself before the constitution of the world) is to feel, and primordially to feel oneself” (62). 2.6 Counter-existentials

Along with being-at-peace, Lacoste suggests that there are other fundamental moods that are deeply disclosive, such as joy and innocence.31 He calls all these moods counter-existential phenomena and maintains that they “[exceed] the logic of existence,” thus helping to 29 Slaby, “More Than a Feeling,” 12. 30 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 124/102. 31 Lacoste, Être en danger, 7.

404  Robyn Horner put in question the primacy of anxiety or serenity (197). Joy and innocence come to be characterized as en-static rather than ek-static. In this light, it is again important to point out the difference between moods and feelings. Mere feelings of joy or innocence possess objects of intentionality and can be traced back to their causes. By way of contrast, to the extent that moods do not constitute any intentional object as such but modify the way of being of the one experiencing them, Lacoste argues that they are non-intentional. Elsewhere, he explains: Such experiences [in that context, joy and pain], if we pay them the attention they deserve, put no object into play: they put me into play, they disclose me to myself (as a suffering self, as a joyful self, etc.). Referring by way of example to the pain of toothache, Lacoste suggests that this enstatic experience actually “deconstitutes” intentionality: in toothache, he argues, I “feel myself in a non-intentional way.”32 Pre-eminent among counter-existentials, then, there is joy. Lacoste first describes “intentional” joy, which is akin to pleasure, and he exemplifies it as “joy in rediscovering a friend, joy in reading a good book, and so on.” In contrast, “non-intentional” joy is “joy in being,” of which he writes: We find ourselves in joy as (perhaps) we find ourselves in the clutches of anxiety, boredom, or stress. To this joy, we cannot assign a cause, save perhaps occasionally … we find ourselves joyous, and can even be joyous about nothing, save joyful to ‘be’. (197) While others, too, describe joy at two levels (for example, Michael Summa’s evaluative summary of joy distinguishes “ordinary joy” from “deep joy” or “joy about” from “joy in”), one must question whether “intentional joy” is really joy or whether it better describes pleasure (one thinks here of the French jouissance, for example, which connotes sexual pleasure and is often used with an overriding sense of ownership or possession).33 Non-intentional joy would thus be enstatic and pre- or ante-predicative. Second, non-intentional joy is lived utterly in the present. Lacoste writes: “Joy is joy in being now” (198). Nonetheless, non-intentional joy brings in dimensions of the past and the future: But when I find my joy to be, or to exist, then the phenomenon has nothing fragmentary about it. Not only is joy present, yet still its present, if it is invested in a future or a past, can confer on them its proper tonality: the one who lives in the pure and simple phenomenon of joy lives there as an ‘I am,’ an ‘I was’ and an ‘I will be’. (198) In sum, Lacoste observes: if joy can be conceded to all for the simple reason that they are in the world and conceded to all as leading them to the greatest depth of what they are, then the 32 Lacoste, “Marginal Remarks,” s X. 33 Michael Summa, “Joy and Happiness,” in The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Emotion, ed. Thomas Szanto and Hilge Landweer (Milton: Taylor and Francis Group, 2020), 416–425, here 419.

Is anxiety fundamental?  405 question of its existential reality cannot fail to be posed—which does not mean that the response can be furnished henceforth. Joy is possible for us inasmuch as we are. (201) Another example of a counter-existential phenomenon that Lacoste describes is innocence. Again, innocence is lived distinctively from the present, although it opens the possibility of a future (207). Like joy, it can be thought in intentional terms as innocence of some “thing” in particular. However, as a counter-existential, it is a type of innocence within “a horizon from which all culpability is absent” (201). In this sense, innocence has no cause; it bears, as Lacoste describes it, “the language of an absolute beginning” (203). Like peace, innocence is precarious, but its precariousness does not detract from its being absolute for as long as it remains. Innocence lived in the wake of forgiveness, moreover, erupts as an event and contradicts existence with the bracketing of being-at-fault (204). 2.7  A critique of fundamental affection

In Study VI of Être en danger, Lacoste develops a critique of fundamental affection. He asks again what Heidegger means by “fundamental,” observing that it serves to mark a shift from affection as an ontic experience to affection as an existential. Here we see his distinctive approach to the problem with Heidegger’s use of Befindlichkeit. The reasons for which Heidegger concedes a fundamental status to anxiety are clear. That anxiety, in contrast, rules over affective life as Grundbefindlichkeit and not as Grundstimmung gives rise to a surprise and questioning whose cause is simple. If we were to hold—and why not?—to a reading of existence that leaves it to be deployed as care, affection, knowledge and speech, we would have to pose the thesis: because we are beings of affection, all experience implies an affective tonality and manifests equally what we are ‘at heart.’ Phenomenology speaks of no matter whom in so far as no matter whom. And if affection is at the foundation, all affective tonality should not lack being revelatory of the foundation, and, as such, fundamental. (212–213, emphasis added) To name anxiety as Grundbefindlichkeit makes no sense, since it is a concrete instance of Befindlichkeit, that is, a Stimmung (the issue here is that of naming any concrete mood an existential, Heidegger’s recognition of which we have noted above).21 The second issue Lacoste raises is with regard to the fundamental nature of any specific affection (that is, any specific humeur/Stimmung): in his view, no single mood discloses all of what it means to be human (213). Moods can only be felt one at a time; that is, they are a function of the present and, as such, disclose only part of what the human is—this becomes most evident in relation both to the past (the mood of two hours ago) and to the future (the mood of tomorrow) (218). (Slaby argues, in fact, that the temporal dimension of affection is key to what Heidegger is trying to achieve.)34 For Lacoste, then, while anxiety can be seen to be a fundamental tonality, it is not determinative in this 34 “What we have to go on from, at present, is what has come to be, what has happened up to this point so that we ended up where we’re currently at. This facticity (fact—that which has been made) is the temporal mainstay of affectivity, the way affect makes manifest and holds active what has come to pass thus far. This aspect is crucial for understanding what Heidegger is driving at with his approach to affectivity: a radical

406  Robyn Horner regard. Peace, joy and innocence display the capacity to bring Dasein face to face with the meaning of its being, and each demonstrates a different way of approaching death. In peace and joy, we are likely to name that approach “acceptance”; in innocence, Lacoste suggests that death is simply banished from the horizon of concern (202). 2.8  Ekstasis versus enstasis

Lacoste accepts, following Heidegger, that knowing is co-constituted by affection, yet argues that this need not preeminently take place in being according to the mode of existence. There is a knowing—by means of affection—whose domain is that mode of being which is life. The knowledge arising in life is distinguished more clearly in French as la connaissance, “knowledge as acquaintance,” whereas the type of knowledge that is typically the object of intentionality is le savoir or “propositional knowledge”—although we must acknowledge that Lacoste is inconsistent in his usage across his œuvre.35 In “Quand je parle de Dieu,” Lacoste specifies that savoir refers to propositions and that connaissance is “a familiarity with things for which antepredicative instances of evidences are the best case.”36 Recherches sur la parole contrasts “silent” experience with knowledge (savoir) because it is a “becoming acquainted prior to what we know in a propositional and discursive manner” (that is, it is prepredicative knowledge). “There is ‘experience’ which enriches us with a real familiarity with things as they are, before any ‘judgment.’”37 We have already noted, above, that Lacoste refers to such knowledge as “non-intentional,” or as “counter-existential.” He also uses the titles “nonexperience,” “inexperience” and “highest inexperience” to describe what takes place prepredicatively in affection.38 At the same time, these names need not imply a complete lack of meaning. As Lacoste writes more recently: [P]henomenology does not deal only with ‘existing’ experiences, but deals often and inevitably with cases of ‘non-existence’ or ‘more than existence,’ etc. Not only are existence, extasis, intentionality, perpetually possible; they are always lurking in the vicinity. And yet, our experiences of intentionality, etc., can be perpetually ‘deconstituted.’ I need no more than a toothache to feel myself in a non-intentional way.39 “Feeling oneself in a non-intentional way” is what Lacoste means by enstasis: we are led to the conclusion that enstasis—“life,” as opposed to “ek-sistence”—is neither a philosophical dream nor part of a refusal of phenomenology, but—only— a way of being and experiencing oneself that we are perpetually familiar with.40

situatedness within an ongoing, formative history that sets the stage for everything that will unfold from now on.” Slaby, “More Than a Feeling.” 35 See Robyn Horner, “Words That Reveal: Jean-Yves Lacoste and the Experience of God,” Continental Philosophy Review, no. 51 (2018): 169–192, here 175–178. 36 Jean-Yves Lacoste, “Quand je parle de Dieu,” in Dieu en tant que Dieu. La question philosophique, ed. Phillipe Capelle-Dumont (Paris: Cerf, 2012), 215n1. 37 Lacoste, Recherches, 18. 38 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, 67/55, 172/142. 39 Lacoste, “Marginal Remarks,” section X. 40 Ibid., section IX.

Is anxiety fundamental?  407 Lacoste argues that life is actually a more revelatory mode of being than existence (253). At the same time, he acknowledges that life is both enstatic and ekstatic, or better, that enstasis becomes aware of itself in a moment of ekstasis (254). “I cannot perceive myself without feeling myself.” This self-feeling accompanies every act of affection, except in the experience of solitude, which—Lacoste argues—“becomes a unique affect.” Feeling oneself alone, in other words, has nothing of the world about it and reveals (to the extent that this is possible and always allowing that this is partial) the self to itself: “the lone person feels a single presence—his or her own” (255). In this light, Lacoste returns to consider the counter-­existential phenomenon of joy. Given that joy arises as pure self-feeling, has no cause (including no cause prompted by the self) and consists in complete unrestrictedness, joy is revelatory of the self in a way that Lacoste suggests is greater than the self revealed in anxiety. Joy … reduces us to ourselves further still than anxiety and any other affective phenomenon. … What it manifests to us … can pass for the image of the definitive in the provisory. Joy has no need of being surpassed. (256) So, while Lacoste allows that Heidegger is correct to discern that we always and already find ourselves in affection, he argues that existence is but one region or mode of life, even if it is true that it is hard “to trace the limit between lived life and existent life” (259). Nonetheless, what joy reveals will always be partial, in the same way as other non-intentional phenomena such as rest or suffering. 3 Conclusion In our exposition of Lacoste’s use and critique of Heidegger in Être en danger, we have observed his reservation that Heidegger does not allow, in his fragmentary phenomenology of human being, for the possibility of a spiritual life. Yet, we have not stated what Lacoste’s attention to affective tonalities might imply in this regard.41 In Experience and the Absolute, Lacoste maintains that one might know God in affection, and that God might be revealed there as hidden.42 He cautions, however, that one would not be able to attribute certainty to such an experience and that it could only ever be partial. The experience of God in affection would be a kind of “presence felt,” where presence refers to “the link between intelligence and affection,” and when it is acknowledged immediately that “God is not felt more than unfelt.”43 In 2008, he further specifies: “an experience that could not be described without acknowledging the irreducibility of everything to do with it: that is the sort of experience that the advent of God to consciousness would need to be.”44 By 2015, he moves to consider the role of the witness and the affective tonalities associated with hearing the truth, especially joy.45 For Lacoste, in other words, insofar as 41 For a more adequate discussion than is possible in this limited context, see Horner, “Words That Reveal.” 42 Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute, §20. 43 Lacoste, Recherches, 57; Appearing of God, 51/26. 44 Lacoste, Appearing of God, 81/63. Literally, “an experience that we could not describe without being forced to deny the existence of what falls under the blow of this experience, such would be—would be—the coming of God to consciousness.” 45 Lacoste, Recherches, 126, 56, 86. See also my detailed discussion of joy in “The Experience of Joy: Saturation and Non-Experience,” in the Routledge Handbook on Phenomenology and Theology, ed. Joseph Rivera and Joseph O’Leary (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

408  Robyn Horner one is open to God, it is possible that one may discern in the affective moods associated with events, traces of God’s having revealed Godself there. This would preeminently be in the experience of love.46 But the experience of God’s phenomenality would be paradoxical, characterized more by invitation rather than imposition. Lacoste, therefore, warns us that it is unwise to approach such discernment without acknowledging the risk of selfdeception, a risk for which human being is always in danger.47

46 “God appears not exclusively, but first and foremost, through love.” (Lacoste, Appearing of God, 218/189.) 47 Lacoste, Appearing of God, 98/78.

25 Starting from Heidegger, arriving at Augustine Selfhood and Christianity in Michel Foucault’s late work Knox Peden Abstract  This chapter has two convergent agenda. First, it seeks to make sense of Michel Foucault’s debt to Martin Heidegger, his affinities as well as his departure from the latter’s historical ontology in favour of a positivist treatment of history. Second, it seeks to account for Foucault’s late engagement with the Church Fathers, in particular Augustine, and the centrality of this work to the History of Sexuality project broadly conceived. Like Heidegger, Foucault found much to explore in Augustine’s account of selfhood. But unlike Heidegger, for whom Augustine’s reflections were manifestations of a more fundamental ontology that Heidegger sought to disclose, for Foucault the reflections on desire and truth-telling in Augustine’s work pointed towards a matrix of subjectivity that persists in the modern era in several competing ways. Keywords  Michel Foucault; Martin Heidegger; Saint Augustine; Christianity; Hermeneutics; Philosophy of History Michel Foucault’s ambiguous approach to history, especially in his structuralist period, has many sources, but chief among them must be the uneasy coordination between the positivism of his method and the philosophical inspiration behind it.1 Foucault’s positivism can be seen in his commitment to accumulating an array of data about the past in a manner that remains resolutely focused on surfaces. The data are what they are in their sheer positivity and any interpretation modelled on depth is forsworn.2 This is what gives Foucault’s work its taxonomic, not to say encyclopaedic, character. As for the philosophical orientation, Foucault’s filiation for Friedrich Nietzsche is well known.3 But arguably the eminence grise behind Foucault’s thinking, as for many in his generation, was Martin Heidegger. Foucault suggested as much on at least two occasions. During his lectures on The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault was pressed to make clear his views on Jacques Lacan. In

1 Beatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Historical and the Transcendental, trans. Edward Pile (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Cf. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 2 For an assessment of this aspect of Foucault’s work that is really more of a homage, see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986/2004). 3 See “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 76–100.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-27

410  Knox Peden paying due respect to the psychoanalyst for his grasp of the relationship between subjectivity and truth, Foucault nevertheless insisted that his own investigations in this area had been “from the side of Heidegger and starting with Heidegger.”4 Two years later, Foucault was even more emphatic: “My whole philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger.”5 Lest this be construed as a retrospective distortion, in 1961 Foucault’s doctoral committee recognized the role of Heidegger in the appeals to Nietzsche in Foucault’s early treatment of Immanuel Kant.6 Indeed, Foucault’s introduction to his translation of Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View culminates with a provocation. Kant’s question, was ist der Mensch?, finds its answer in time: das Übermensch, a claim that effectively recapitulates Heidegger’s 1930s lectures on Nietzsche, a key resource for Foucault.7 That Foucault recognized a debt to Heidegger is clear; the nature of that debt is less so. Foucault tells us that the relationship between subject and truth was central, but this relationship was not central for Foucault, at least not explicitly, until late in his career. Likewise, it seems significant that Heidegger’s project was grounded initially in an investigation of Christian sources—from Duns Scotus to Augustine and beyond—whereas Foucault’s brought him to the Church Fathers only after his various treatments of modernity. Yet this temporally inverted convergence points towards a site of investigation. If we are looking to determine what distinguishes Foucault from Heidegger—the debt notwithstanding—we could do worse than to consider each thinker’s treatment of Augustine and related figures. As Ryan Coyne has shown, Augustine played a vital role in Heidegger’s attempt to limn an alternative notion of selfhood to that provided by the Cartesian cogito.8 For Foucault as well, an assessment of Augustine was crucial to his effort to trace a genealogy of the subject of rights and the subject of desire.9 We have not begun to take the full measure of Foucault’s treatment of Christianity, but one thing is clear. The research Foucault undertook led to a revision of his views and his more general schema of the history of subjectivity and sexuality. Foucault’s positivist bona fides in his treatment of history account, at least partially, for the divergence of his conclusions from Heidegger’s in this area. For Heidegger, Christianity played a crucial role in the destiny of Being, one that modernity tended to occlude. Denied essence in itself, to say nothing of truth content, Christianity was a historical vector of primordial ontology. For Foucault, too, Christianity plays a crucial role in the ontology of ourselves. But Foucault is not interested in a deconstruction of Christianity for some other end or form of ontological revelation. The result is ironic. In his positivist treatment of Christian practices and discourses of the self, Foucault sidelines any question of their truth content, which leaves open the possibility of an encounter with any truths they might be found to express. 4 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 189. 5 Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault (Paris: Champs, 2011), 57–8, citing an interview from 1984. 6 Ibid., 188. 7 Immanuel. Kant, Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique, précédé par Michel Foucault, Introduction à l’Anthropologie, ed. D. Defert, Fr. Ewald, F. Gros (Paris: Vrin, 2009), 79. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volumes III and IV: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, and Nihilism, ed. David Farrell Krell, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1991). 8 Ryan Coyne, Heidegger’s Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in Being and Time & Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2015). 9 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 4: Les aveux de la chair, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard, 2018), and “The Battle for Chastity,” in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 185–97.

Starting from Heidegger, arriving at Augustine  411 The focus of what follows will be on Foucault’s late treatment of the history of ethics, which complicated his itinerary in myriad ways and also raised questions about the nature and limits of Heidegger’s influence on his thought. An overview of this trajectory will help us get our bearings. 1 The first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will to Know grew out of the same moment of the 1970s as Discipline and Punish. Upon assuming a position at the Collège de France, Foucault announced a movement from the archaeological approach of his early works, culminating in The Order of Things, to a genealogical approach. Archaeology looks at discourses. It seeks to determine the theoretical conditions, what he termed a “historical a priori,” that make them intelligible as discourses. Genealogy is concerned with the systems of power through which such discourses are regulated and implemented. This is why bodies are central to the inquiries of the genealogical period, in both Discipline and Punish and The Will to Know. Bodies are the very sites in which power is inscribed and resistances are fomented.10 As students of Foucault’s work know, his efforts went through a major revision after the publication of the first volume of The History of Sexuality. As his lectures went on to explore biopower and governmentality, his historical interests went deeper into the past, from the Christian pastorate of the late Middle Ages back to late antiquity. The two volumes of The History of Sexuality published shortly before his death in 1984—The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self—were located squarely in the ancient world, concerned with Greek and then Greco-Roman ideas and authors.11 There are two reasons for this shift: one of a theoretical nature and one that turns on the consequences of Foucault’s historical research. The theoretical motivation is one Foucault spelled out often in his lectures of the period but that finds its clearest expression in the introduction to The Use of Pleasure. In that text, Foucault names three “axes” through which one can explore the history of sexuality. The first is “the formation of sciences (savoirs) that refer to it.” The second is “the systems of power that regulate its practice.”12 Note that these two descriptions align with the archaeological and genealogical approaches respectively.13 The third is “the forms within which individuals are able, are obliged, to recognize themselves as subjects of this sexuality.” Building on his past work, Foucault writes, “[i]t appeared that I now had to take a third shift, in order to analyse what is termed ‘the subject’”: It seemed appropriate to look for the forms and modalities of the relation to self by which the individual constitutes and recognizes himself qua subject. After first studying the games of truth [jeux de verité] in their interplay with one another, as exemplified by certain empirical sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 10 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977); Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970). 11 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985); The Care of the Self, Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1986). 12 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 4. 13 Cf. Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979–1980, and Oedipal Knowledge, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2012), 10–11.

412  Knox Peden and then studying their interaction with power relations, as exemplified by punitive practices—I felt obliged to study the games of truth in the relationship of self with self and the forming of oneself as subject, taking as my domain of reference and field of investigation what might be called “the history of desiring man.”14 Foucault then goes on to suggest that this amounts to a history of truth—not a history of what is true or not relative to certain fields of learning, but a history of “the games of truth and error through which being is historically constituted as experience; that is, as something that can and must be thought.”15 Thus to write the history of experience is to write a history of what can be thought, and the distinction between pragmatism and rationalism drops away. The kinship with Heidegger is discernible here, especially in the image of being as “historically constituted as experience.” In “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger remarked: Only if science exists on the basis of metaphysics can it fulfill in ever-renewed ways its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge, but to disclose in ever-renewed fashion the entire expanse of truth and history.16 Such passages account for Jürgen Habermas’s charge that, despite his professed aims, Heidegger remained mired in a form of transcendental philosophy that sought to establish the reality of conditions behind mere appearances.17 Foucault adopts Heidegger’s comportment to a degree, but he is not interested in a project of disclosure, in which a superficial notion of truth is dispensed with in favour of a more fundamental one, nor is science dismissed out of hand as something unable to think. In other words, there is no “jargon of authenticity” in Foucault.18 And yet the linkage between being and thought—with what can or indeed must be thought—retains a distinctly Heideggerian air. “Thought is freedom in relation to what one does,” Foucault says elsewhere, intimating a distinction between being and doing in which a space for freedom is found.19 For Heidegger, distance from action is bound up with a notion of care, albeit more as an ontological than an ethical concern. Coyne, in his treatment of Heidegger’s course on “Augustine and Neoplatonism,”20 traces some of the practical implications of this concern. He writes: The end toward which care tends is a blind spot from within the situation of caring, and it is by ‘worrying’ over this blind spot, Heidegger contends, that for Augustine true selfhood is built up. Thus it is by deepening the sense of life as constant

14 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 6. 15 Ibid., 6–7. 16 Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 95. 17 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 131–60. 18 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). 19 Rabinow, Foucault Reader, 388. 20 Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

Starting from Heidegger, arriving at Augustine  413 temptation and doing so moreover while letting God remain unfound, that Augustine slowly advances toward the status of having-a-self.21 This process is one of endless purification. The emphasis is on endless. Purification in the Augustinian optic is not a process in which a self finally emerges in its unity and solidity. We are a far cry from the cogito as unassailable first evidence. And yet, as Coyne shows, for Heidegger the purifying process leads to an encounter not with the divine grace sought by Augustine or the indwelling Spirit on offer from Paul but instead to Dasein and its own “powers.” In other words, though Dasein is to be an alternative to the cogito as a cipher of subjectivity in Heidegger’s philosophy, it remains a site of affirmation and authentication and, in its way, yet another instance of the empirico-transcendental doublet, exemplified philosophically by Kant, as traced by Foucault in The Order of Things.22 By contrast, Foucault is emphatic in his assessment of the history of Christian spiritual exercises that the aim “was not to establish one’s sovereign mastery over oneself; rather, what was expected was... detachment with regard to oneself and the constitution of a relation to self that strives for the destruction of the self.”23 So this is the puzzle that confronts us. Foucault insists that his inquiries into the relation between subjectivity and truth are conducted under the aegis of Heidegger and yet the contrast between their conclusions in this area is stark. What follows is an assessment of Foucault’s late work on ethics with an eye towards what drew him towards Christian sources and an account of the shifts in his thinking along the way. With this established, we can conclude by considering Foucault’s Augustine alongside Heidegger’s. Coyne deploys a Freudian framework to make sense of the “remains” of Augustine in Heidegger’s thought: repressed, yet all too determinant for being so. With Foucault there is more openness to what Augustine and other Church Fathers had to say. The results are a revision of views on the Christian role in the advent of a hermeneutics of desire that we had come to expect from Foucault and a set of suggestive conclusions that might provide more traction in the present than Heidegger’s destinal conception of Being. 2 The first volume of The History of Sexuality was published not long after Foucault’s 1974–1975 course titled Abnormal, which contains his first tentative treatment of Christian themes. Here Foucault devotes some space to the history of confessional that will serve as a background to much of the discussion in The Will to Know. In this book, Foucault aimed not so much to debunk “the repressive hypothesis” as to provide a genealogy of it, and to show that, far from our sexuality being an object of repression, it was very much something produced in “the incitement to discourse.” The main areas of this study were Victorian cultural codes and medical conceptions of sexuality, linked ultimately to the management of populations and the biopolitical nature of life. But the ancestry and the genealogical roots of the incitement to discourse in the Christian confessional were not hard to detect in the volume. They are more fully fleshed out in the Abnormal lectures, especially the lesson of 19 February 1975.

21 Coyne, Heidegger’s Confessions, 72. 22 Foucault, The Order of Things, 303–43. 23 Foucault, On the Government of the Living, 325.

414  Knox Peden This lesson focuses on the history of penance and uncovers a practice in which subjects are led to give an exhaustive account of themselves that could never possibly be exhaustive to the extent that it is mediated and ratified by priestly power.24 The priest is inoculated against the penitent’s desire in ways that serve to elevate his holiness. What Foucault observes in the history of this idea is a move away from the notion of sin as a behaviour or relational practice, to one in which it is a feature of a body that is to be investigated, decoded, and hence generative of ever more material for disciplinary regulation. Scholastics were worried about the relationship between action and thought, intention and realization. But something changed with the onset of the modern age. The concern is not what you do, but what the body signals, what is desired. “The body and its pleasures... become, as it were, the code of the carnal.”25 But this focus on the body itself gives way to a concern for the flesh. Previously the flesh, the sin of the flesh, was above all breaking the rule of union. Now the sin of the flesh dwells within the body itself.... Placing the body in the forefront introduces an immense domain and the constitution of what could be called a moral physiology of the flesh.26 Reading this lecture, one sees how it plays into the arguments of The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, but also why he left this material out. “Facing the political anatomy of the body,” he writes, “there is a moral physiology of the flesh.”27 What do these metaphors mean? The political anatomy of the body expresses Foucault’s inquiries into the punitive society in these years: the torture, the treatment of the body, the body as site in which the workings of the political are inscribed. Such is its “anatomy.” This notion of the moral physiology of the flesh is a new idea. But what’s that idea? Anatomy is static; physiology is dynamic. The body is an object; the flesh is neither objective nor subjective but both, hence its centrality to so much phenomenology in the twentieth century. But what Foucault has gleaned here is the subjective nature of this physiology, this need to understand how it is that the subject comes to recognize himself as one who interprets his own flesh and his own desire and then reports it. The talk of flesh sounds like Merleau-Ponty, but the interplay of recognition and interpretation—interpretation as a form, ultimately, of self-recognition—bears the stamp of a Heideggerian hermeneutic. Foucault will come back to this material only after the intervening studies of the security state, pastoral government, and economic liberalism. In the Abnormal lectures, the path from the Christian confessional to bourgeois interiority is a straight path of secularization, in which inherited practices disavow or remain blind to their origins, which are in this case theological. In both cases, selves are constituted in such a way as to generate a kind of auto-regulation. At some point the holiness of the priest finds its way into the head as the superego. Therefore, modern confessional practices find something like their truth in the historical reality of the confession. The schema here is Heideggerian, even if Foucault neglects to pursue things further and ground the historical reality of the confession in a more primordial ontological reality. 24 Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–75, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador 2003), 175. 25 Ibid., 186. 26 Ibid., 189. 27 Ibid., 193.

Starting from Heidegger, arriving at Augustine  415 But when Foucault returned to Christianity at the cusp of the 1970s and 1980s, some contingent factors shifted his research in new directions and put paid to the limitations of this perspective. His encounter at Berkeley with Peter Brown, whose biography of Saint Augustine Foucault absorbed, and whose works on late antiquity more or less defined the period, led Foucault to seek to understand “why it is that sexuality became, in Christian cultures, the seismograph of our subjectivity.”28 Likewise, Foucault invoked several times Brown’s suggestion that the “parting of the waters” that distinguished Christianity in late antiquity is very hard to map.29 The point is that Foucault finally surmised that Christianity is no more a unified historical entity than paganism is, and thus that some of his own assumptions about this history were open to revision. The other development seems even more arbitrary. Apparently Foucault was fed up with the slow service at the Bibliothèque Nationale and sought other work space in Paris. He alighted on the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir, a Dominican library in the 13th arrondissement. Here Foucault had immediate access to scores of volumes in patristics. He was assisted by a young Jesuit, James Bernauer, doing a PhD on Foucault’s archaeological period. Bernauer was showing Foucault around the Jesuit library at Centre Sèvres, and the first stop was “dogmatic theology.” Foucault indicated this area was best left to his hosts and rushed towards the sign that said “moral theology.” At any rate, Bernauer orchestrated meetings for Foucault with several in the Jesuit community. They obliged by replying to Foucault’s many questions, but according to Bernauer they could never really find a way of relating to his approach.30 The materials that Foucault discovered in this period are those put to work in the lectures published as On the Government of the Living and the manuscript of the fourth volume of The History of Sexuality that has finally been published due to changes in the management of Foucault’s estate: The Confessions of the Flesh. These sources led to a revision not simply of Foucault’s views about the history of the confession as relayed in the Abnormal lectures but to the entire History of Sexuality project. Because even though Confessions of the Flesh is the fourth volume, it was penned in 1980–1981. And it was drafted after a first attempt to treat sexuality in Christianity was totally discarded by Foucault. The period in question is that of late antiquity, that of the Church Fathers. But in writing this book, Foucault realized that he had to go back further still, to the Greek and Greco-Roman context out of which, and in tension with, Christianity emerged. Originally, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self—volumes 2 and 3 of the series—were to be one volume. In any event, they were conceived as prequels, necessary propaedeutics for the “end” of the History of Sexuality, its final statement, The Confessions of the Flesh, yet they were written after it. So this accounts for the shifts in Foucault’s research plan. What about the content? The Use of Pleasure is an important place to look because it concentrates Foucault’s reflections on how this transformation in his project took place. The book contains many variations on Foucault’s revisionist theme that we have misunderstood Christian morality

28 Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 179. Cf. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1967). 29 Michel Foucault, Subjectivité et Vérité, Cours au Collège de France, 1980–1981, ed. François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Frédéric Gros (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 2014), 40; Michel Foucault, “The Battle for Chastity,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 196. 30 See the “Course Context,” in On the Government of the Living, 326–356. Also see J.R. Carrette, ed., Religion and Culture / Michel Foucault (New York: Routledge, 1999).

416  Knox Peden insofar as we think it invented sexual interdiction. The notion that the exteriority of pagan morality gave way to the interiority of Christian morality misses “essential elements of both.” Instead, [t]he evolution that occurred—quite slowly at that—between paganism and Christianity did not consist in a gradual interiorization of rules, acts, and transgressions; rather, it carried out a restructuration of the forms of self-relationship and a transformation of the practices and techniques on which this relationship was based.31 This is still pretty abstract, but the idea is that the history of ethics acquires its intelligibility as a history of practices and techniques rather than doctrines. And this helps us make sense of the larger discovery, that austerity in sexual relationships is not an invention of Christian morality; in fact, it is a feature of ancient Greek morality as well. What transpires in the move from pagan to Christian morality is a shift of concern for how one fashions oneself an object of pleasure to how one comes to know and experience oneself as a subject of desire. In both cases, the technique is what matters. That is the substance of the history, a practical transformation. What shifts is the goal of techniques, which require discipline and austerity in both cases. In the pagan context, the goal is self-mastery. In the Christian, what is sought is a “mode of ethical fulfillment that tends toward self-renunciation.”32 Foucault organizes his inquiry into such techniques around the concept of “problematization.”33 The question is always, what makes a certain practice “problematic,” a cause for concern. Looking at dietetics, economics, and erotics—the relationship to the body, the home as site of the marital pact, and boys as objects of pleasure— Foucault seeks to track when and in what contexts activity becomes subject to moral reflection. The through line in the ancient Greek context is one of a need for moderation and abstinence, but not out of a concern for the dignity, much less the equality of others. The concern is to maintain an optimal aesthetics of existence. What matters more than anything is to be active and never passive; this is why the relationship to boys was more problematic than that of the relationship to the wife. Activity and passivity were never in question in that fundamentally hierarchical relationship. Whereas in what Foucault terms “the antinomy of the boy” we witness a problem. To be a man is to be always active, and yet to be man is also to have been a boy, and in all likelihood to have been passive. So there was much discussion over the ways in which the ideal boy wilfully submits, actively renders himself passive, in a kind of species of self-control. The greatest moral censure was for boys who made themselves too readily available. Foucault’s point is that you have to look at what generates anxiety in a culture in order to understand its ethical forms. The difference from a Heideggerian, or indeed a Lacanian, view here is slight but significant. For the existentialist and the psychoanalyst, anxiety is ontologically primary even if its forms are historically mutable. But Foucault is not interested in deploying anxiety as a univocal term. He is interested in genuine, practical changes in the reality of what it is to be a subject. And what he finds is that virility 31 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 63. 32 Foucault, The Care of the Self, 239–40. 33 A contested notion, in Foucault’s usage and French philosophy more generally. See the special issue of Angelaki devoted to this theme: Sean Bowden and Mark G. E. Kelly, eds., “Problems in Twentieth-Century French Philosophy,” Angelaki 23:2 (2018).

Starting from Heidegger, arriving at Augustine  417 was the locus of ethics in the ancient world. Virtue was located in the masculine, and active abstinence was a form of virility. Now among the many changes in the advent of the Christian world is the shifting of the locus of virtue to the feminine, in which figures of virginity and chastity abound.34 But these values crosscut the sexes, just as they did in the ancient Greek context; a woman was at her best when she was the most virile, actively running the home. Likewise chastity is a pathway to holiness for men as well as women, even if it is unmistakably coded as a feminine virtue. At any rate, with the advent of Christianity, abstinence is still the goal, but the mode of self-relation has been transformed. So what explains the change? Behind this, Foucault insists, is a changing relationship to truth and, hence, to the nature of truth as it is embedded in, realized in, and implicit in practices. In the Platonic world and in the neo-Platonism with which early Christianity will reckon, the goal of practice is to align oneself with truth. This neo-Platonist element persists in Book X of the Confessions, when Augustine remarks, “for you see that I have become a problem to myself.”35 It also points to a possible alignment with Heidegger’s reading of Augustine, in which orientation to truth and in particular truth about the self is a predominant theme. But ultimately Foucault is more interested in what distinguishes the Augustinian view from the Greek than what ties him to it. This partly explains why Foucault will look to Book XIV of the City of God rather than the Confessions for the innovations in Augustine’s thinking. In any event, for the Platonist actions become problematic when alignment with truth is frustrated. The object of love for Plato is no object at all, but love itself, a relationship to being, to which one adheres: In a way that may be surprising at first, one sees the formation, in Greek culture and in connection with the love of boys, of some of the major elements of a sexual ethics that will renounce that love by appealing to... the requirement of a symmetry and reciprocity in the love relationship; the necessity of a long and arduous struggle with oneself; the gradual purification of a love that is addressed only to being per se, in its truth; and man’s inquiry into himself as a subject of desire.36 These practical elements that tend towards discipline anticipate the Christian context; they also resonate with a Heideggerian injunction to realize oneself in one’s orientation towards Being. But Foucault is clear at the end of The Care of the Self —volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, the last to be published before his death—that we should not take a proleptic view of these developments, or deny the originality of Christianity in this regard. Again, what matters is that in the Greco-Roman context one sees “the development of an art of existence dominated by self-preoccupation.”37 In one context, abstinence and discipline serve to shore up the self; in the other, they serve to turn one away from the self. The ingenuity of Foucault’s work is to locate this transformation in what he terms “the history of truth.” But this aspect of the story does not make it into the volumes of the history of sexuality published in his lifetime. For guidance, we have to look at the extended discussion in the Collège de France course titled On the Government of the Living and the relevant sections of The Confessions of the Flesh. 34 Cf. Joyce E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (London: Verso, 1991). 35 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 239. 36 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 245. 37 Foucault, The Care of the Self, 238.

418  Knox Peden 3 On the Government of the Living followed Foucault’s inquiry into liberalism titled The Birth of Biopolitics, and it begins with his revisiting the text of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, the very subject of his first courses at the Collège de France nearly a decade prior. The first lesson announces that Foucault is moving beyond the power-knowledge nexus that shaped his previous enquiries, and is instead going to investigate “government by truth,” that is, how it is that individuals engage in ritual manifestations of truth as the very form of their conduct.38 Oedipus Rex exemplifies the ancient Greek ideal in that Oedipus only becomes himself fully in the full manifestation of his truth, which happens to be the same truth as how things are. Foucault coins a new term—alethurgy—to describe this practice, the set of possible verbal or non-verbal procedures by which one brings to light what is laid down as true as opposed to false, hidden, inexpressible, unforeseeable, or forgotten... ][T]here is no exercise of power without something like an alethurgy.39 Very quickly, however, Foucault moves on to a new field of investigation in which this set of procedures becomes split. There is no longer one truth to manifest, in which you and being as such are united; there are two truths, two different sets. The truth of being and the truth about you. He tracks the emergence of this split across three key forms of Christian experience: baptism, penance or confession, and spiritual direction. Speaking schematically—but Foucault is nothing if not schematic—baptism is the aspect of Christian ritual in which one professes belief in the truth about being. For Foucault what is crucial is not simply that someone believe the ontological truths disclosed in Christian revelation, but that one pronounce them and affirm them. This is the practical element. This “act of faith” is an instance of exomologesis. It is an avowal, a pronouncement that involves obedience, submission to authority, all ways of affirming truth and affirming oneself as one who recognizes truth. A similar element is in play in the rituals of confession; as one confesses, one recognizes Church authority on the order of things. And as long as one is confessing to a canonical list of sins, one is still performing exomologesis, publicly affirming the truths of the faith. But in the experience of confession, we see the lineaments of another kind of relation to truth arise, one that will be further developed as confession moves from the public to the private space and also in the practice of “spiritual direction.” Spiritual direction is a kind of regularized, ongoing confession in which a penitent submits to the authority of a spiritual director, usually, but not always, a priest. In this kind of confession, the relation to truth is one, not of exomologesis but of exagoreusis, in which one affirms truths not already given, but instead seeks to make an exhaustive inventory of truths that remain hidden. The point is this: exomologesis is the affirming of truths about being; exagoreusis is searching and avowing the truths about yourself. More, it is not about avowing them to yourself, but avowing them to an other endowed with unimpeachable authority, in this case, the spiritual director. And ultimately the virtue that is cultivated in this case is that of obedience as such. When one submits to a spiritual director, one does it willingly, with faith in the movements of grace 38 Foucault, On the Government of the Living, 11. 39 Ibid., 7.

Starting from Heidegger, arriving at Augustine  419 that it putatively expresses; for there is no other way to affirm the truth or non-truth of what is disclosed apart from faith, such is the regime of truth at work in this relationship. But what one is doing in such cases is willing to do it with one’s own will, and that is what so interests Foucault in this development. As he puts it in The Confessions of the Flesh, such individuals show real tenacity [acharnement] in not willing.40 This is fundamentally different from the Greco-Roman conception in which there is one truth and you will orient yourself towards it. To be sure, the Christian orients himself towards the truths of the faith. But what he discovers is that the truth of himself is one that is constantly at odds with the truth of the faith. Such is the nature and meaning of the Fall, and ultimately the doctrine of original sin. The Government of the Living devotes much space to discussing Tertullian, the first Latin theologian, active in the first years of the third century AD, who elaborated the doctrine before it was taken up and effectively canonized years later by Augustine. Key to Tertullian’s thinking was not simply that sin was a stain or a blot on our being—pagan cultures had this idea too—but that it was an essential perversion in our nature.41 Note the conceptual tension here: perversion as essential. Perversion as part of human nature. How can nature be perverse, if nature is perfection, if nature is what is? This is an idea that runs from the Stoics to Spinoza. But if it is in human nature to be perverse, then that means the human is naturally unnatural. If the tendency towards purification was already present in Greco-Roman practices, it takes on new features in the Christian context. Foucault devotes much attention to the preparations required for baptism, and the problems that arise when one considers that, even after baptism, when one is to have been cleansed of original sin, one will still require pastoral care, rites of penance, etc. He writes: This dimorphism of the pure and impure, of the perfect and those who are not perfect, of the chosen and those not chosen, will be one of the most fundamental and problematic points of dogma, organization, and the pastorate throughout Christianity.42 Here again the doctrinal and the practical go together, but Foucault’s overriding concern is to note how practices that retain superficial similarity are transformed in the structures of self-relation they embody. The novelty of Christianity lies not so much in the notion of sin per se. Instead, the novelty lies in the whole framework of mechanisms through which sin is—or is not—remitted. The “hermeneutics of desire” that replace the “aesthetics of existence” are a means of ordering oneself towards an infinite task. Hence, Foucault’s attention to all the ways one is led to say the truth about oneself, irrespective of external criteria that would adjudicate the truth claims of a given discourse or conceptual scheme. “The ‘you have to’ internal to the truth, immanent to the manifestation of the truth,” he says, “is a problem that science in itself cannot justify and account for. I think this ‘you have to’ is a fundamental historical-cultural problem.”43 Again we find Foucault alighting on a Heideggerian theme, viz., that there is an outside to science that science cannot think. But rather than locate this outside in a univocal ontology of Being, Foucault locates it in the historically extant conflicts between practices 40 Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, 127. 41 Foucault, On the Government of the Living, 122ff. 42 Ibid., 121. 43 Ibid., 97.

420  Knox Peden of truth-telling about oneself.44 The premisses are pluralistic; we find Foucault’s Heideggerian comportment subordinated to a positivist stance. The history of Christian rites is an ideal venue in which to investigate the relationship between truth-telling and subjectivity as a historical problem, yet it is the nature of Foucault’s investigations that they can ring true for adherents and non-adherents to Christianity. The doctrinal content is never evaluated. The self-relation is described. And yet, in his very description of these new forms of self-relation, we see the emergence of a set of connections between truth, selfhood, and the other that have resonances with Foucault’s overarching ethical project, one not unrelated to the figures of experience and intensity that occupied his thought in his final years. For example, in ancient Greece, Foucault finds an ethics in which “everything [is] a matter of adjustment, circumstance, and personal position,” which is a long way from a form of austerity that would tend to govern all individuals in the same way, from the proudest to the most humble, under a universal law whose application alone would be subject to modulation by means of casuistry.45 In such a contrast, we cannot but hear an echo of that drawn between Kant’s conception and the one proffered by Foucault in an essay that borrowed Kant’s classic title: “What Is Enlightenment?” [I]f the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge has to renounce transgressing, it seems to me that the critical question today has to be turned back into a positive one: in what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible transgression.46 One typically reads the late Foucault as seeking to rehabilitate an ancient ethic of pleasures and stylization against a Christo-modern ethic of juridical domination and desire. But the point to be stressed is that the division between the universal and the singular is internal to the emergence of Christianity. Foucault regularly rejected the notion that he was engaged in a project of normative recovery, much to the chagrin of his contemporaries in the gay rights movement who looked to him as an ally.47 The first piece

44 This theme, along with the tendency towards the juridification of truth-telling, is predominant in Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling; The Function of Avowal in Justice, ed. Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Stephen W. Sawyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 45 Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 62. 46 Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Rabinow, ed., Foucault Reader, 45. 47 See the discussion in Eribon, Michel Foucault, 509–514. However, n.b. his comments to The Advocate in 1982, which make for several points of contact with his inquiries in the Christian context, not all of which are discrepant: “Sexuality is part of our conduct. It is part of the freedom we enjoy in this world. Sexuality is something we create ourselves – it is our own creation, even more so in that it is not the discovery of some secret aspect of our desire. We must understand that with our desires and through them, new forms of relations, new forms of love, and new forms of creation are established. Sex is not an inevitability; it is a possibility for acceding to a creative life […]. We have not discovered that we are homosexuals… We must instead create a gay way of life” (510).

Starting from Heidegger, arriving at Augustine  421 of disappointing news—which he repeats ad nauseam throughout the later works on sexuality—is that the Christians did not invent sexual interdiction. But the more striking thesis is that it was Christianity that led to an intensification of experience, indeed a new conception of subjectivity as governed by intensity to the extent that such a subject was essentially split: not between body and soul, but within, in its very structure as desire. In the formal summary of the lectures on The Government of the Living, Foucault is emphatic. Confession involved a “continuous externalization of the ‘arcana’ of consciousness through words.” “But,” he concludes, it needs to be stressed that the aim of this manifestation was not to establish one’s sovereign mastery over oneself; rather, what was expected it from it was humility and mortification, detachment with regard to oneself and the constitution of a relation to self that strives for the destruction of the form of the self.48 For Tertullian, the temptations of the flesh were an index of the other within, and a specific other at that: Satan. To make an inventory of the self was thus to make the inventory of an other, and in the very practice to orient oneself to a different other, to God, to Christ. The point is that the exclusion of Satan—the bad thoughts and deeds—was not devoted to shoring up the self, but to orientating one’s desire differently, towards God. This is why the Christian context gave rise to a “battle for chastity,” with the deliberately chosen metaphor evocative of spiritual combat. But there is a contrast here with both the Greek models of ethics that preceded Christianity and the modern forms we still occupy. It is the exclusion of mastery as the goal. Greeks sought self-mastery through the appropriate use of their pleasures. We moderns, captive to a hermeneutics of desire descendent from Christianity, seek such mastery through that hermeneutics via all the therapeutic resources provided by our culture. But for Christianity, mastery was not the goal. Purity was not the goal of purification; there was always more mortification to be done. The contrast with Stoicism is profound. Stoics sought autonomy; fundamentally heteronomous in their orientation, Christians sought humility. Here again is that same paradox of willing away one’s will. The sinner remits his sins by avowing that he is a sinner. So he is only saved as long as he continues to recognize himself as not saved, as a sinner. “Does the act that saves make us perfect, or do we have to be perfect to be saved?” Foucault asks. He answers: “Christianity is a religion of salvation in non-perfection.” Indeed he goes on to suggest that “the great effort and historical singularity of Christianity... is that it succeeded in dissociating salvation and perfection.”49 He links this to the early Christian battles against the Gnostics, who insisted on the privilege of esoteric knowledge as the path to salvation.50 We expect Foucault to look to Nietzsche for the dissolution of the self, and here he is finding it in Christianity. But Foucault’s investigations into the Church Fathers hardly end with Tertullian. Indeed, the first part of The Confessions of the Flesh, titled “The 48 Foucault, On the Government of the Living, 325. 49 Ibid., 259. 50 Perhaps it is not coincidental for making sense of Foucault’s relationship to twentieth-century intellectual history that so much of that history is bound up with gnostic revivals; take Althusserian science for one example among many. Cf. Jacques Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson, trans. Emaliano Battista (London: Continuum, 2011).

422  Knox Peden Formation of a New Experience,” largely recapitulates the lectures on baptism, penance, and spiritual direction from On the Government of the Living.51 The other two large chapters of the fourth volume of The History of Sexuality are given over to the subjects of virginity and marriage, respectively. In his discussion of virginity, Foucault stresses that what matters is not the prohibition—which one would be forgiven for thinking essential to the view—but instead the spiritual orientation to God, the giving of one’s desire to God. This is a classically Foucauldian reading; virginity is to be understood historically in all its positivity, what it yields, not what it denies. But the very elevation of virginity created problems for the understanding of marriage. How not to make the latter lesser than the former? Here the crucial figure is Augustine, and in particular Book XIV of the City of God. In a review of the French edition of The Confessions of the Flesh for H-France, Michael Behrent says that this chapter of the book is “undoubtedly one of the most important statements in Foucault’s oeuvre,” and indeed here we find the nexus of so many of his abiding concerns coalescing around truth and freedom.52 The elevation of marriage as a spiritual form over virginity is grounded in the work the partners do to manage their concupiscence. The virgin goes it alone; the spouse does it in a relationship of equality.53 Greek sexual relationships were essentially hierarchical: active and passive. Christian ones were a matter of neutralization. For Augustine, the work of the married couple was to engage in the conjugal act in a way that never expressed libido. Rather, it was a total giving over to the other, rather than the domination of the other. To indulge libido was to indulge concupiscence, the demand that one’s own needs be met. Foucault follows Augustine, however, in finding such deft management of libido in the conjugal act, a trajectory of intensity, an exquisite—one is tempted to say, stylized—experience in its own right. But it was Augustine’s theological arguments for this state of affairs that were to be of lasting consequence. In Augustine’s view, paradisiacal sex—sex before the Fall—was a matter of pure willing. Adam and Eve’s wills met one another in transparency and agreement with each other and with nature. What happens after the Fall is that sexual will—libido—is no longer one’s own, it is fundamentally perverted. And yet it remains the very form of will itself. Foucault is explicit about this: “Augustine’s analysis makes of concupiscence neither a specific power [puissance], nor a passivity with the power [pouvoir] to limit it, but the very form of will, that is, what makes the soul a subject.”54 And the key evidence of this was the spontaneity, the non-willed nature of erection.55 Such an event was the contrary of freedom as it was unwilled. The fateful question was how such a reality, such a nature was to be managed. Self-mastery was off the table, as incongruent with the spiritual practices Christianity had incubated for decades. Only grace could provide remission from sin; anything that smacked of Stoic autonomy was hubris and pride. 51 Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, 7–145. 52 Michael C. Behrent, “Review of Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 4,” H-France Review, Vol. 20 (January 2020) No. 23, 9. 53 As ever in these discussions, Foucault abstains from normative evaluation, but it is striking that so much of his research in this area plays into recent efforts by intellectual historians to credit early Christianity with the invention of the principle of equality of individuals. See Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (London: Allen Lane, 2014). 54 Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, 344. 55 Ibid., 336ff. Augustine’s conjecture is that, prior to the Fall, use of one’s sexual organs was akin to use of one’s hands, that is, fully responsive to the will.

Starting from Heidegger, arriving at Augustine  423 So the only outlet was the ongoing hermeneutics of desire, the fundamental interrogation of oneself, mediated through the Church. And as the very term “interrogation” suggests, Foucault finds in this new relationship—at once conceptual and practical—the juridical core of the modern subject. It is in this linkage between the subject of desire and the subject of rights that we see most clearly the distance between Foucault’s Augustine and Heidegger’s; or at any rate the distance between what is gathered under that proper name for each thinker and their overarching project. In Augustine, Heidegger finds the form of the self as a form of nothingness, which allows him to repurpose Augustinian themes for his own ends.56 Foucault finds in Augustine the form of the self as the form of will, as a constitutively split entity. To be sure, in Heidegger, the self is split along the lines of ek-static temporality. But Foucault is not seeking a trans-historical ontology based on a philosophy of time. His anthropology is more complex, comprising historically mutable features. However strong the movement of concupiscence might be, and to the extent that it is the very form of will—however fallen the element of being it obtains from God—it cannot become an act without an element of will. There can be no sin there without this supplement—however tiny and invisible that one can imagine it—that makes it so that one wills what concupiscence wills. Here is the consent; this is what makes possible the imputation of an act having its origin in concupiscence that is not, itself, imputable.57 Being is an alibi for Heidegger; the Augustinian subject via Foucault is left to his own devices. But the subject can only be judged because it is endowed with the capacity to discern the truth—either about being or oneself—and to act contrary to it. This is a space of freedom, and the risk, the potential for damnation, that comes with it. 4 Notwithstanding the manifestly theological character of these themes, Foucault remains more concerned with their juridical fate. Foucault’s work on truth-telling in the Christian context stems from his governmentality project and it is important to remain clear on these motivations. These are especially salient in the lectures published as Wrong-Doing and Truth-Telling, which make use of the same material from his historical investigations into Christianity. Insofar as the Church is a worldly institution, its juridical forms laid the ground for modern jurisprudence, a view consistent with Carl Schmitt’s work and many others with views on secularization.58 But it matters to Foucault, or seems to at any rate, that the court of appeal in the early Christian worldview is, as it were, not of this world. Hence his gravitation to the figures of intensity and non-finality that accompany Christian accounts of selfhood, an attraction that seems bound up with ambivalence and ambiguity on Foucault’s own part as an author. In “Sexuality and Solitude,” the product of his New York seminars with Richard Sennett, Foucault contrasts Christianity with Buddhism. Both are concerned to discover the truth about the self, but the truth that 56 See the discussion in Coyne, 74ff. 57 Foucault, Les aveux da la chair, 353. 58 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

424  Knox Peden Buddhism discovers is that the self is an illusion. “I would like to underline,” Foucault writes, “that the Christian discovery of the self does not reveal the self as an illusion. It gives place to a task that cannot be anything else but undefined.”59 It is not a coincidence that this language evokes that used to describe the “event” in The Order of Things, the site of transformation that is itself irreducible to anything else.60 The more we discover the truth about ourselves, the more we must renounce ourselves; and the more we want to renounce ourselves, the more we need to bring to light the reality of ourselves. That is what we would call the spiral of truth formulation and reality renouncement which is at the heart of Christian techniques of the self.61 Foucault cannot stabilize the status of the self in the Christian context, and it is an open question whether or not this is largely the point. Is the ambivalence in the object or the subject here? But what does seem important for what we think about the meaning of Foucault’s work today is that the transition from the ancient to the Christian to the modern is not a straightforward story. In many respects the current cultural dispensation is a kind of worst of both worlds in the optics Foucault provides, with late or postmodernity as a kind of monstrosity in which the hermeneutics of desire from the Christian inheritance is geared towards the techniques of self-affirmation of the pagans. The quest for perfection is being pursued with tools built for the imperfect. Per Augustine, according to Foucault, “libido is the result of one’s will when it goes beyond the limits that God originally set for it.”62 Foucault’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” led us to “the form of a possible transgression.” What is essential here, what is to be valued, is not transgression as such but the possibility of transgression. This is something that Augustine recognized. Management of such possibilities involved an essential heteronomy, an orientation towards and dependence on an other whose nature was as mysterious as it was real for Augustine. But absent any other to relate towards—nothing but autonomous selves, affirming their autonomy—truth is hard to come by. In this regard, the coming to light of Foucault’s writings on Christianity as the very heart of his inquiries into the history of sexuality makes the closing remarks written for his final set of lectures at the Collège de France, The Courage of Truth—which were already moving, given their context—all the more resonant: [W]hat I would like to stress in conclusion is this: there is no establishment of the truth without an essential position of otherness; the truth is never the same; there can be truth only in the form of the other world and the other life (l’autre monde et de la vie autre).63 (CT, 340) Heidegger notoriously concluded that only a God can save us. How ironic that Foucault, in the end, seems comparatively more attuned to that possibility. 59 Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” op. cit., 178. 60 Foucault, The Order of Things, 237. 61 Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude,” 178. 62 Ibid., 182. 63 Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, The Government of Self and Others II, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2011), 340.

26 Captivated by life The life sciences in the heretical tradition of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ruyer Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe

Abstract  Although their work in the philosophy of biology is not well known, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ruyer all offer interesting and heterodox accounts of the life and environmental sciences and the organism in particular. In this chapter, we discuss their respective views, with a focus on their shared criticisms of Neo-Darwinism and the way this tradition grasped the structural coupling between organism and environment. We also outline some significant differences between each of them concerning how to conceive of that holistic relation and the extent of “captivation” of the animal to its environment. Given that there are indications that the twenty-first century might be post-genomic/epigenetic, we argue that it is worth revisiting these neglected organicist trajectories that sought to navigate between mechanism and vitalism. Keywords  Life Sciences; Animal; World; Umwelt; Biology; Heidegger; MerleauPonty; Ruyer It has been said that the twentieth century was the century of the gene.1 To be more specific, however, the century was dominated by the “modern synthesis” of genetics and Darwinian evolutionary theory. As such, it was another Darwinian century. But wherever there is an orthodoxy, there are other voices and trajectories. In this chapter, we consider some of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century—Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Ruyer—who constitute a minor tradition in philosophy of biology. They have not inspired biologists in the way that Henri Bergson did at the start of the twentieth century. Nonetheless, these three philosophers all offer interesting and heterodox accounts of the life and environmental sciences, and the organism in particular, and in doing so they all draw on the work of Jakob von Uexküll, Hans Driesch, Konrad Lorenz, and others. While there is some engagement between them, they do not comprise a tradition in any strong sense, being drawn together mainly by their opposition to Neo-Darwinism and their emphasis on the insufficiency of the way this tradition grasped the structural coupling between organism and environment. Even then, there are some significant differences between them concerning how to conceive of that holistic relation and the extent of “captivation” of the animal to its environment. Their reflections are, of course, conditioned by the biology of their time, which is prior to 1 Eve Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-28

426  Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe Watson and Crick’s discoveries concerning the structure of DNA after 1953, and which only became fully part of French research programmes and university curricula in the 1970s.2 The main books that we are considering are Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics from 1929, Merleau-Ponty’s Structure of Behavior in 1938, and reflections from the 1950s—specifically Ruyer’s diptchy Neofinalism (1952) and The Genesis of Living Forms (1958), and Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous The Visible and the Invisible and his Nature lecture course. Given that there are indications that the twenty-first century might be post-genomic/epigenetic and even Lamarkian in some key respects,3 it is worth thinking again about some of these neglected organicist trajectories that sought to navigate between mechanism and vitalism. 1  Heidegger, the life sciences, and the captivation of the animal Much of Heidegger’s philosophy is very well known, of course. Other parts of his oeuvre are not known about in the same detail, but some have still become central parts of the history and folklore of “continental” philosophy. This applies to his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (hereafter FCM), a lecture course Heidegger gave in 1929–1930, but which was only published as a book in German in 1983, and afterwards translated into English. The lectures are known for their detailed analyses of boredom and (in) famous remarks about animality that have been subject to influential criticisms by Agamben, Derrida, and others. Heidegger repeats some of his conclusions in other texts, but it is only FCM that involves a serious engagement with the question of the animal and the relevant life sciences. Being and Time, by contrast, is largely silent on the question of animality and has no substantial engagement with biological science.4 In FCM, Heidegger explicitly and infamously differentiates between stone, animal, and Dasein, around the question of world-hood. According to Heidegger’s guiding hypothesis, which he confirms through chapters 3 and 4, the stone is world-less; Dasein is necessarily being-in-the-world in terms of Being and Time; and the animal is weltarm (“poor in world”). The manner in which Heidegger unpacks these ideas sheds interesting light on the question of the relationship between philosophy and science, and sets the scene for our subsequent consideration of Merleau-Ponty and Ruyer who engage with similar terrain and some similar biologists, but reach quite different conclusions regarding the nature of the holistic interaction, the extent of “captivation” of the animal, and the significance of tools. Although Heidegger is known for insisting on a methodological and ontological difference between philosophy and science throughout his career, his reflections on animals 2 Laurent Loison and Emily Herring, “Lamarckian Research Programs in French Biology. 1900–1970,” in The Darwinian Tradition in Context: Research Programs in Twentieth-Century Evolutionary Biology, ed. Richard Delisle (Dordrecht: Springer, 2018). Neither Ruyer nor Merleau-Ponty refers to DNA in the works we are examining here. As we will see, Ruyer does later engage with post-synthesis genetics, although entirely in terms of these works of the 1950s, and in a critical vein. 3 Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). Also see Maurizio Meloni, Impressionable Bodies: From the Archaeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics (London: Routledge, 2018). 4 That said, Heidegger’s Being and Time is structured by an “ontological dichotomy of human existentiality and natural categoriality.” For more on this, see David Storey, Naturalizing Heidegger (New York: SUNY Press, 2016), 77; cf. also Claude Romano, At the Heart of Reason, trans. Claude Romano and Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016), 248.

Captivated by life  427 in FCM begin with some statements that are initially difficult to reconcile with that view: i.e. “we cannot separate metaphysics and positive research”; “the inner unity of science and metaphysics is a matter of fate” (FCM 189). These are interesting comments because Heidegger also admits that they have come apart as a matter of ontic fact. The “inner unity” of which Heidegger speaks, then, is not about facts nor ontic ways of proceeding, but something ontological (or fate). In terms of the ontic situation, Heidegger arguably diagnoses the right problem: Between them, the hyper-sophistication of philosophy and the intransigence of the sciences create the hopeless situation in which both parties obstinately persist in talking past one another and foster the spurious freedom in which each eventually leaves the other to its own devices. (FCM 190) But what is Heidegger’s own solution exactly? He doesn’t tell us and says it can’t be taught. Rather, “it is a matter of an inner maturity of existence” (FCM 191). “Fate” or “inner maturity of existence”? Either way, this is rather opaque.5 Heidegger then goes on to grant zoology and other sub-disciplines within the life sciences a certain privilege, as Merleau-Ponty and Ruyer will also do. None of them have a thesis of the unity of science, with physics at the top of the hierarchy of sciences and within which the other sciences must be situated and perhaps reduced. For that reason alone they constitute a heretical tradition in regard to contemporary physicalism, as well as the more mechanistic conceptions of biology of their own times. For them, biology is viewed as rather more philosophical, struggling to ground its conception of “life” as autonomous to chemistry and physics, albeit without embracing vitalism. Despite this, Heidegger offers little sustained engagement with particular experiments or results from the life sciences, other than recounting some interesting experiments (concerning bees) and a discussion of Driesch and Uexküll that we will shortly consider. FCM remains primarily a work in first-philosophy, unlike Ruyer’s work, which is much more saturated in the relevant sciences. It is also important to note that, for Heidegger, it is not dialectical engagement with the results and presuppositions of those sciences that he thinks is required. In fact, he describes the dialectic as a philosophical embarrassment (FCM 187), but Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with science is much more (hyper)dialectical and explicitly named as such in Structure of Behavior and Nature, despite some similar language being employed by both concerning the capacity of philosophy to deepen and/or radicalize scientific analyses.6 On the one hand, Heidegger argues that animals are not well conceived of as having purely functional utility, nor mechanistically, and thus adequately grasped by a decompositional analysis of their component parts. Nonetheless, the animal also does not have equipment available to it à la Dasein in the mode of ready to hand. Heidegger thus buys into a long history conceiving of “man” as uniquely the tool-using animal, with and before Thomas Carlyle. Of course, at this point (in 1929), it wasn’t as obvious that this 5 The rhetoric is also disturbingly reminiscent of his Rectoral address and Nazism from 1933, albeit without the direct socio-political context. 6 In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that Gestalt psychology needs to be interpreted philosophically to see how it “points beyond itself,” and we will shortly see that Heidegger says something similar regarding Uexküll’s work.

428  Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe was either false or a significant simplification since Jane Goodall’s detailed primatological work on wild chimpanzees and their tool use in Tanzania (from 1960) had not yet come out.7 But without considering vertebrates here, and it is telling that Heidegger himself does not do so at any length, let us begin where he does: with bees. Their complex and hierarchically structured activities have long intrigued philosophers and biologists alike. Although they are familiar with their environment, Heidegger argues that bees do not recognize the manifestation of honey. They do not respond to the blossoms as stamen, nor apprehend the number of stamens and leaves (FCM 193). Bees simply respond to stimuli, whereas the world of humans is envisaged as much richer, involving an apprehension of number, and even something like higher order thought or cognition, even if Heidegger would eschew such terms. He admits that such reflections have a suspiciously self-evident appearance to them and that a question arises concerning why the bees inevitably stop after a while and fly away (FCM 241). Does this imply that they recognize the absence of honey from a particular blossom? On Heidegger’s account, related to the ongoing discussion of the Sphex wasp and its repetitive and instinctual behaviour,8 it does not indicate they recognize the absence of honey. He makes this claim on philosophical grounds concerning what it is for something to be manifest and to be recognized as this or that, and the basic conviction that animals are captured by their stimuli, absorbed in it in such a way that its “worlding” is not apparent. For one of the only times in his career he also draws on experimental research to corroborate his views, discussing studies showing that bees will keep going indefinitely if their sac is taken away. Of course, if we never felt satisfied with our basic needs (i.e. hunger, thirst), it is hard to say what humans would do, so precisely what this comparative ethology proves is up for debate. For Heidegger, however, both bees and animals more generally—which is surely a much too quick inference—are characterized as involving a “being taken.” As William McNeill and Nicholas Walker note, these terms are their efforts to translate a series of variations on the German nehmen (FCM xxi), the German for animals being Benehmen and Verhalten for humans. For Heidegger, the key point is that “the behavior of the animal is not a doing and acting, as in human comportment, but a driven performing [Trieben]” (FCM 237). He elaborates on this distinction between comportment and behaviour later in the text too, and they appear to constitute a difference in kind. As Heidegger puts it: “Such a relation to something, which is thoroughly governed by this letting be of something as a being, we are calling comportment [Verhalten], in distinction from the behaviour of captivation” (FCM 274).9 Heidegger hence treats animals in a behaviouristic manner, narrowly construed, as responding to and captivated by certain stimuli, even if they are not mere mechanisms. The animal is absorbed in itself, and behaves within an environment but never a world. As he puts it, “the entirety of its being, the being as a whole in its unity, must be comprehended as behaviour” (FCM 239). And behaviour is not, Heidegger insists, a relation to beings as such, but a captivation by drives. And:

7 For a contemporary overview of animals and tools, see Amanda Seed, and Richard Byrne, “Animal Tooluse,” Current Biology 20, no. 23 (2010): R1032–R1039. 8 See Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Penguin, 1991) and Raymond Ruyer, “Bergson and the Ammophilia Sphex,” trans. Tano Posteraro. Angelaki 24, no. 5 (2019): 134–144. Also see Tano Posteraro and Jon Roffe, “Instinct, Consciousness, Life. Ruyer contra Bergson,” Angelaki 24, no. 5 (2019): 124–134. 9 This discussion of the German is indebted to Andrew Inkpin.

Captivated by life  429 “captivation is the inner possibility of behaviour as such,” rather than a state that accompanies behaviour. The animal is encircled by its ring which it cannot escape from and within which something is open (FCM 249), but nothing else can penetrate it (FCM 254). This captivation is the “condition of possibility” of being poor-in-world. While it is not clear how such a view can accommodate facts regarding the evolution of a species and indeed the evolutionary interaction between species,10 on Heidegger’s account this “encircling” ring and manner of captivation is “eliminativist” (FCM 250). Other things are eliminated from the purview of the animal, restricting its capacity to use tools or to adopt complex strategies over a long period to obtain food, mate with partner(s), or kill one’s prey. There are many potential counter-examples to this view. We might consider the complex feigning behaviour of the plover to distract potential predators from their off-spring, or the elaborate hunting behaviour of the Portia jumping spider.11 Heidegger gives no attention to these sorts of cases which threaten his neat distinction between comportment and behaviour, and we will shortly see that Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of animal behaviour in Structure is not eliminativist in Heidegger’s specific sense. Heidegger summarizes his general position as follows: “An animal can only behave but can never apprehend something as something; which is not to deny that the animal sees or even perceives. Yet in a fundamental sense the animal does not have perception” (FCM 259). Again, then, we arrive at a paradox concerning whether the animals perceives or not. The animal appears to have a world in one sense, in that it has capacities and is driven towards something in the environment, perhaps chiefly evolutionary biology’s so-called “4Fs”—feeding, fighting, fleeing, fornicating—but it does not have a world in another stronger sense. He notes in passing that this is partly about language, but also contends that naming presupposes a prior pre-linguistic understanding of being, which is characteristic of Dasein alone (FCM 259), even if that understanding is infamously “shrouded in darkness” and concealed as he says in Being and Time. Heidegger then engages with Driesch and von Uexküll, arguing that they are responsible for “two decisive steps” that he endorses: The first step concerns the recognition of the holistic character of the organism… Wholeness means that the organism is not an aggregate, composed of elements or parts, but that the growth and the construction of the organism is governed by this wholeness in each and every stage… The second step is the insight into … how the animal is bound to its environment. (FCM 261) To what extent these insights challenge Darwin or the modern evolutionary synthesis is a complex issue, rendered more difficult to assess by Heidegger’s own reluctance to seriously engage with either. Nonetheless, his implicit reasoning here seems to be that while adaptation is important to Darwinians, the environment is still a strictly external condition, at most a selector rather than inducer of change. In addition, he suggests that neo-Darwinians conceive of the animal as present-at-hand, and hence cannot comprehend the depth of its relational structure and cohabitation with the environment, albeit

10 James Williams, A Process Philosophy of Signs (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 11 Mark Okrent, Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality (Athens: Ohio University Press 2007); Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2011).

430  Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe noting again that the nature of that relation—captivation—remains radically different from Dasein. Uexküll, of course, challenges the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy by theorizing a very tight connection between organism and environment. Heidegger comments that Uexküll’s “investigations are very highly valued today, but they have not yet acquired the fundamental significance they could have if a more radical interpretation of the organism were developed on their basis” (FCM 263). In his slightly idiosyncratic presentation of Uexküll, Heidegger contends that Uexküll’s reflections on the Umwelt really mean “nothing other than what we have characterized as the disinhibiting ring,” an approach which Heidegger thinks is manifestly insufficient in regard to the human world and from which it is separated by an “abyss” (FCM 264). While “belonging, intimacy and dwelling” are all central to Uexküll’s famous talk of the “worlds” of the tic—and this harmonious picture might be criticized—these “worlds” and behaviour are not analysed as a lack or absence in the way that pervades Heidegger’s discourse. For Heidegger, by contrast, it is a series of paradoxical formulations that capture the poverty of the animal: “being open in captivation is the essential possession of the animal” (FCM 269); “a not-having of world in the having of openness for whatever disinhibits” (FCM 270). Heidegger considers the objection that such formulations presuppose an anthropomorphic standard or comparison, rather than capturing any sort of essence of animality. Somewhat tentatively, however, he concludes that we do not have the right to drop the hypothesis of animal as poor-in-world, which has as its condition of possibility the idea of the “captivation” of the animal by its environment, and a distinction between comportment and behaviour that broadly recapitulates the ontological dichotomy of human existentiality and natural categoriality that framed Being and Time. 2  Merleau-Ponty: nature, animality, and the structure of behaviour There is little doubt that Merleau-Ponty was significantly influenced by Heidegger, even if not by his writings on animality in FCM that he did not have access to.12 Although Merleau-Ponty was more knowledgeable about Husserl’s oeuvre, some of his transformations to the Husserlian phenomenological project resonate closely with Heideggerian reflections on key methodological issues at the heart of phenomenology, including how to understand the phenomenological reduction and eidetic analysis. In his “Preface” to Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty hence seeks to reconcile these twin directions of phenomenology—Heideggerian and Husserlian—embracing a certain kind of pluralism about phenomenology in the process. But his pluralism also involved him in long reflections on, and interactions with, nonphenomenological forms of philosophy and science, sometimes in the process challenging the boundaries of phenomenology. Unlike both Husserl and Heidegger, for example, he systematically engaged with the life sciences throughout his career, perhaps more than any other classical phenomenologist.13 This gives his thinking a more naturalist orientation than his phenomenological predecessors. In addition, he is less Kantian than either when 12 So argues Robert Vallier, the translator of Merleau-Ponty’s Nature: Course Notes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 286, fn. 21. 13 Darian Meacham, “Sense and life: Merleau Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature and Evolutionary Biology,” Discipline Filosofiche. 24, no. 2 (2015): 137–163.

Captivated by life  431 it comes to assigning a strict methodological and epistemic division of labour to philosophy and science.14 His early work arguably evinces a weak sort of methodological naturalism,15 aiming to be consistent with findings of sciences over the long haul, even if sometimes also seeking to go beyond or reveal the “unthought” of certain scientific developments or orthodoxy (often Gestalt psychology). His later work is more expressly ontological, involving a rethinking of nature, and it is perhaps less methodologically naturalist because of this: after all, most methodological naturalists rule out any philosophy of nature as rather too speculative and metaphysical to evince continuity with the various sciences and their diverse methods and ontological commitments. Although plausible as a starting position, this way of framing Merleau-Ponty’s “early” and “late” work is perhaps too starkly put. Even in his later work, exemplified by texts like The Visible and The Invisible and his Nature: Course Notes, his “indirect ontology” did not delineate any strict differences between philosophy and science and he always took himself to differ from Heidegger in this respect. In Nature (hereafter N), the point is expressed as follows: the radical opposition, traced by Heidegger, between ontic science and ontological philosophy is valid only in the case of Cartesian science, which posits nature as an object spread out in front of us, and not in the case of modern science, which places its own object and its relation to this object in question. (N 85) Moreover, throughout much of his career, including his first book, Structure of Behavior (hereafter SB), there is a general critique of objectivist views of nature, understood as partes extra partes, wherein nature is conceived of exclusively as a multiplicity of external events bound together causally. In Structure, his analyses and descriptions of animal behaviour and ethology are oriented around the French term comportement, translated in English as “behaviour.” As this translation decision itself indicates, his work is not committed to a difference in kind between comportment and mere behaviour of the sort we have seen endorsed by Heidegger in FCM. Indeed, it is not just behaviour but also other key terms from Structure that are expressly not restricted to the human: notably, “form,” “structure,” “Gestalt,” all of which are presented as structures or forms that emerge from, but are not reducible to, their component parts. As he puts it: Form, in the sense in which we have defined it, possesses original properties with regard to those of the parts which can be detached from it. Each moment in it is determined by the grouping of the other moments, and their respective value depends on a state of total equilibrium the formula of which is an intrinsic character of “form.” (SB 91, our italics) It is not clear to what extent Merleau-Ponty is indebted to British Emergentism, but these ideas resonate with many of those expressed by Samuel Alexander, C. D. Broad, 14 Samantha Matherne, “Toward a New Transcendental Aesthetic: Merleau-Ponty’s Appraisal of Kant’s Philosophical Method,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (2019): 378–401. 15 Jack Reynolds, Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science (London: Routledge, 2018).

432  Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe and others, at a similar time on the other side of the channel.16 This connection is perhaps not as surprising as it initially appears, even if there is no historical or causal link between Merleau-Ponty and British emergentism. After all, emergentism purports to offer a middle way between reductive naturalism and non-naturalism and between determinism and freedom,17 and these were also the aims of Merleau-Ponty. There has been a relative lack of recognition of this emergentist strain in Merleau-Ponty’s thought,18 presumably due to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological inheritance and thus some sort of commitment to the idea of bracketing the natural (and scientific) attitude. Still, no such overt phenomenological commitments frame Structure, and his reception of the “reduction” in Phenomenology of Perception is itself very complex, given his famous understanding of it as “incompleteable.”19 In Structure, in any case, these emergent structures are the outcome of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic engagement of the organism with its environment, and a process of reciprocal co-determination that engenders novelty and cannot be predicted in advance or understood through either term in isolation. Merleau-Ponty begins by pointing out what is wrong with Pavlov and Watson’s behaviourist treatment of animals, as well as C.S. Sherrington’s influential work on reflexes and the integration of the muscles and nervous system. His main aims here are to criticize psychological and physiological atomism, with Pavlov/Watson and Sherrington presented as exemplars of each. As we have already suggested, Merleau-Ponty contends that the reciprocal determination (or causality) between the organism and its environment, and between whole and part, is only available to dialectical thinking. Atomistic thinkers, by contrast, cannot properly grasp this “structural coupling” between organism and environment: Since all the movements of the organism are always conditioned by external influences, one can, if one wishes, readily treat behavior as an effect of the milieu. But in the same way, since all the stimulations which the organism receives have in turn been possible only by its preceding movements which have culminated in exposing the receptor organ to the external influences, one could also say that the behavior is the first cause of all the stimulations. (SB 13) Focusing on either aspect of this dialectic, alone, is ultimately insufficient. As he puts the point: The adequate stimulus cannot be defined in itself and independently of the organism; it is not a physical reality, it is a physiological or biological reality. That which 16 While the unity of science and questions to do with the reducibility of biology and chemistry to physics provide the immediate context for British emergentism, Merleau-Ponty himself grapples with these questions in Part 3 of The Structure of Behaviour, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 137–145: “Structure in Physics.” 17 See Mario DeCaro, “Emergence and Naturalism,” in Emergence in Science and Philosophy, ed. A. Corradini and T. O’Connor (Routledge: London, 2010), 190–211; and J. Ganeri, “Emergentisms, Ancient and Modern,” Mind 120, no. 479 (2011): 671–703. 18 A notable exception is Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 19 This emergentist structure arguably plays a role in Phenomenology too: see Jack Reynolds, “Embodiment and Emergence: Navigating an Epistemic and Metaphysical Dilemma,” Journal of Transcendental Philosophy 1, no. 1 (2020): 135–159.

Captivated by life  433 necessarily releases a certain reflex response is not a physico-chemical agent; it is a certain form of excitation of which the physico-chemical agent is the occasion rather than the cause. (SB 31) In regard to Sherrington, Merleau-Ponty contends that his categories and concepts surrounding reflexes don’t adequately fit the behaviour he is trying to explain (SB 33). For Merleau-Ponty reflexes are special cases of behaviour, not the means through which the remainder of animal behaviour is to be understood. Rather, we need to begin with structures of behaviour that are non-atomistic (SB 46). On such a view, the animal’s behaviour is not to be construed as strictly passive or captivated by the environmental stimuli. And unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty considers a large variety of different animals, including vertebrates with a variety of different ecological and cognitive capacities. In more or less detail, he addresses scientific research on frogs, mammals, cats, dogs, children, monkeys, rats, chickens, earthworms, sea urchins, and others. He also criticizes Pavlov’s behaviourism, which treats behaviour as a thing. MerleauPonty’s basic retort is that geographical and behavioural environments cannot be identified; thus, no reduction to the strictly physical will be tenable (SB 129). Watson and Pavlov’s behaviourism is also charged with an impoverished conception of both the stimulus and the response (i.e. a mechanistic or law-like conception) that does not pay sufficient attention to bodily habits, learning, and the activity of the organism. Again, it is important to see that the animal behaviour in question is not well characterized as a captivation. Consider some behaviourist experiments concerning cats that Merleau-Ponty cites as indicating how behaviourism pushes beyond some of its own precepts and limits. If the cats manage to get access to some food through trial and error, say by eventually activating a lever with their paw, the next time they undergo the same experiment they might just as readily use their teeth. Merleau-Ponty takes this to indicate that there is learning and integration here pertaining to the whole organism, and some flexibility: it is not just rote conditioning (SB 96). For classical behaviourism, however, there is a direct captivation of the animal to stimuli. Some behaviourists think that more complex forms of this “captivation” also explain human behaviour, whereas for Heidegger this reflects the basic difference between humans and animals. But for Merleau-Ponty, in contrast with both classical behaviourism and Heidegger, the animal experiments that present the animal as poor-in-world do so either by forcing their behaviour into a rather reductive form (deprived of a meaningful milieu in the laboratory, presented with too much or too little food outside of characteristic environmental niches), or by downplaying the flexibility of the behaviour that is apparent (as with the cats who can activate the lever in various ways that differ from the action that first produced the reward or punishment). Despite this, behaviourism remains prima facie promising for Merleau-Ponty, even if too positivistic in its usual guises. Why potentially promising? It treats the organism as closely tied to its environment, and it potentially allows a holistic explanatory priority to be given to the whole organism in interacting with its milieu rather than seeking to explain behaviour through an atomistic, decompositional method. Although he criticizes Edward Tolman’s “purposive behaviorism” as still being too materialist in Structure (SB 182), Merleau-Ponty came to have a more positive attitude to Tolman’s behaviourism, explicitly recognizing that the Watson/Pavlovian promise may even have been fulfilled in Tolman’s version of behaviourism issuing from the late 1940s. Briefly, Tolman

434  Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe distinguishes between molar and molecular behaviourism: roughly, non-reductive and reductive, with the former admitting of a complex interplay between proximate and distal causes.20 In lectures presented in Child Psychology and Pedagogy, Merleau-Ponty hence says: “in admitting the legitimacy of the behaviorist enterprise, in reexamining the notion of behavior and defining it as a dialectical notion, we can fulfill the initial project proposed by Watsonian behaviorism.”21 In Child Psychology and Pedagogy he accepts that this version of behaviourism is able to be aligned with his own thinking. In regard to Structure, it is also clear that Tolman’s hybrid version of behaviourism and Gestalt psychology is much more readily reconcilable with sentiments like the following from Merleau-Ponty: physical stimuli act upon the organism only by eliciting a global response which will vary qualitatively when the stimuli vary quantitatively; with respect to the organism they play the role of occasions rather of cause; the reaction depends on their vital significance rather than on the material properties of the stimuli. (SB 161) This idea of vital significance is not meant to involve any sort of recourse to vitalism. Rather, it is to argue that there are meanings and norms involved in the interaction between organisms and their milieu, “optimal conditions of activity and its proper manner of realising equilibrium,” neither of which are given much attention by Heidegger, despite his indebtedness to Uexkull. As Merleau-Ponty goes on to elaborate: Here, between the variables upon which conduct actually depends and this conduct itself there appears a relation of meaning, an intrinsic relation. One cannot assign a moment in which the world acts on the organism, since the very effect of this ‘action’ expresses the internal law of the organism. The mutual exteriority of the organism and the milieu is surmounted along with the mutual exteriority of the stimuli. Thus, two correlatives must be substituted for these two terms defined in isolation: the milieu and the aptitude, which are like two poles of behavior and participate in the same structure. (SB 161) For Merleau-Ponty, there is emergence and “structural causality” across all three orders of the physical, vital, and human. But we should take note of his remark that “matter, life, and mind should not be defined as three orders of reality or three sorts of beings, but as three planes of signification or three forms of unity” (SB 201). And unlike Heidegger’s severe distinction between comportment and behaviour, “these three categories do not correspond to three groups of animals: there is no species of animal whose behavior never goes beyond the syncretic level nor any whose behavior never descends below the symbolic forms” (SB 104).

20 Nikolai Alksnis and Jack Reynolds, “Revaluing the Behaviorist Ghost in Embodied Cognition and Enactivism,” Synthese. 198 (2021): 5785–5807. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02432-1. 21 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–52, trans. T. Welsh (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 343.

Captivated by life  435 Indeed, it is important to recognize that “consciousness” and “knowledge,” for Merleau-Ponty, are not distinctive of the human order, but present to varying degrees in the vital order. He argues that: the true organism, the one which science considers, is the concrete totality of the perceived organism, that which supports all the correlations which analysis discovers in it but which is not decomposable into them. It is true that the convergent efforts of intellectualism and mechanism withdraw any original determination from the perception of the organism. But, both in psychology and biology, the apprehension of structures should be recognized as a kind of knowing which is irreducible to the comprehension of laws. (SB 156) Animals hence have a kind of knowing which includes a sense of bodily orientation and goal-directedness, as well as pain or sentience and some interiority concerning each. At the same time, however, it would be a mistake to think that Structure affirms any ­levelling—ontological or otherwise—between the human being and the animal. The classical phenomenological significance of intentionality marks his analysis of both knowledge and behaviour in humans, such that he will write: “Man can never be an animal; his life is always more or less integrated than that of an animal” (SB 181). A few pages later, we have one of the only citations from Uexküll in Structure and a brief commentary on it by Merleau-Ponty, albeit one that concerns Ruyer (and Barbaras) regarding consciousness and knowledge and Merleau-Ponty’s alleged idealism. But as Merleau-Ponty puts it a little later on: In speaking here of knowledge and consequently of consciousness, we are not constructing a metaphysics of nature; we are limiting ourselves to denominating the relations of the milieu and the organism as science itself defines them as they should be denominated. (SB 161) As such, this looks like a dialectical engagement with science, and a weak methodological naturalism. What is distinctive about the human order, for Merleau-Ponty? The milieu is described as “perceived situation-work” (SB 162), which is different from the perception-action connection that is characteristic of both humans and animals (hence our intertwining with the animal as he puts it in Nature). And the structure of perceived situation-work is also necessarily intersubjective and historical, referring to “activities (ensembles of intentional actions) that transform physical and living nature and thereby modify the milieu and produce a new one.”22 We have seen that animals have norms and meanings. They also have signs. They do not have symbols, however, according to Merleau-Ponty. Unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty discussed chimpanzees and their use of tools at some length, recognizing a difference between monkeys and human tool use. A paradigmatic example of human tool use might be a knife fashioned for an immediate given context, but also for

22 Thompson, Mind in Life, 2007, 77.

436  Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe repetitive use thereafter, or the complex construction of a village over multiple generations, unlike the beaver’s dam. Merleau-Ponty contends that this kind of situation-work is quite different from the use of tools that chimpanzees are capable of, whether in the laboratory or in the “wild” (SB 175). We might take issue with this, of course, but in terms of theorising the structures of behaviour characteristic of humans and animals, and doing justice to the nature of their intertwining, Merleau-Ponty’s work appears to constitute an improvement on Heidegger’s, especially in the admittedly anachronistic light of what we now know about contemporary biology. But the question of the human-animal interrelation also brings with it a series of more metaphysical questions that the notion of “form” began to grapple with in Structure, but to which he gave greater consideration in his later work. 3  Intertwining life and matter, animality and culture While the account presented in Structure is our main concern here, it is important to note the shifts marked in The Visible and the Invisible and the Nature lecture notes, not least because it is this later approach that provides the resources to respond to some of the criticisms mounted by Ruyer. Two points in particular seem important. The first concerns the status of causation. While Structure rejects the Newtonian model of cause-effect relations, Merleau-Ponty’s later work embraces a much more far-reaching transformation of this paradigm. Like Ruyer, and following the work of the ethologist Tinbergen, he comes to see cause in terms of an evocation of “a sense or a meaning” (N 277). More broadly, the category of instinct is subject to a profound revaluation. As he memorably puts it, instinct “does not obey the law of all or nothing” (N 195). There is instead an interplay between evocative encounters with the environment and the ongoing, oblique construction of meaningful behaviour: instinct is a complex institutional process rather than a set of discrete (animal) locks and (environmental) keys.23 The second correlative point concerns the status of the environment. As the Nature notes put it, each action of the milieu is conditioned by the action of the animal: the animal’s behavior arouses responses from the milieu… In brief, the exterior and the interior, the situation and the movement are not in a simple relationship of causality. (N 175) While this seems to repeat the claim already made in Structure, Merleau-Ponty will follow this conclusion much further. On the one hand, he will enrich the notion of milieu by attributing to it many of the features of human existence: “we can speak in a valid way of an animal culture” (N 198). Instead of seeing intentional consciousness as marking an irreducibly human relationship to the environment, he will argue for a shared mode of intertwining between life and world, for both human and animal. On the other, the kind of dialectical relationship that holds between animal and milieu is also found to be in play in a large number of other registers, most notably between life and the inanimate physical and chemical (N 214). Both the sciences and the scientists that Merleau-Ponty 23 In this regard, he is very close to early work by Gilles Deleuze. See, e.g., “Instincts et institutions,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger, 144 (1954): 280–281; and Empiricism and Subjectivity. An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. C. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).

Captivated by life  437 is interested in also shift. In particular, he gives more attention to anatomy, embryology, dynamic morphology, and morphogenesis, and key scientists include not only Uexküll but also George Coghill and Arnold Gesell, among others.24 3.1  Raymond Ruyer

As the tradition of phenomenology was being transformed by Heidegger and MerleauPonty, another quite anti-phenomenological thinker was taking up the relationship between philosophy and the life sciences: Ruyer (1902–1987). At the present moment, Ruyer remains an obscure figure in twentieth-century philosophy. But even a cursory examination of the Nature lectures shows that this was not at all the case for Merleau-Ponty. Indeed, Ruyer appears to be the most significant philosopher with whom Merleau-Ponty engaged in the process of formulating a non-Cartesian thought of the physis-logos relationship. It is difficult to assess in turn the impact that the completion and publication of this work might have had on Ruyer’s fortunes. We might even say that Merleau-Ponty’s death deprived us of the work of two philosophers as a result. The latter oversight, at least, can be corrected. Ruyer’s work is characterized by an attentiveness to science whose rigour is of a particularly high level. His sources are only rarely philosophical—and then are only marginal figures, like Samuel Butler and Antoine August Cournot—instead consisting in a battery of scientific and technical studies. With Merleau-Ponty and against Heidegger, Ruyer insists on an intimate relationship between philosophy and science. Indeed, a stronger form of the relationship would be hard to formulate: It is my profound conviction that philosophers, like theologians, have been wrong to try to claim for themselves either a domain or a specific method, whether it be intuitive, critical, dialectical, or phenomenological. The truth is one. Knowledge is scientific or false. The aim is only to collaborate on the progress of knowledge by working towards an indivisible Science-Philosophy, capable of critiquing and generalizing itself—with or without ‘specialists in generalities’—to the extent that the real reveals itself in all of its inexhaustible subtlety. Against a dogmatic mechanist science of the kind that appeared in the 19th century, and with the goal of reducing human being to the functioning of a system of particles, philosophy was justified in calling for a better informed science, provisionally relying on the irrefutable intuitions of living human beings, who have the experience of being reasonable, and of working towards meaningful ends.25 If we quote at length, it is because this passage contains references to two of Ruyer’s major methodological commitments: his commitment to experimental science as the source of all knowledge; his rejection of classical physics, from Newton to the nineteenth-century mechanists. Much of Ruyer’s work functions to play twentieth-century science—in particular, quantum physics, embryology, and animal ethology—off against classical physics, errant philosophical conceptions of science (often themselves involved in a confusion of science 24 For more on this, see David Morris, Merleau-Ponty’s Developmental Ontology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018). 25 Ruyer, “Raymond Ruyer par lui-même,” Les Études philosophiques 1 (2007): 13.

438  Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe with Newtonian physics), and something akin to what Althusser called “the spontaneous philosophy of the scientist.”26 The positive correlate of this critical movement is a neo-Leibnizian account of nature as composed of vital and yet immaterial individual subjectivities: self-organizing absolute forms whose relationships with each other are to be understood not in terms of brute physical interactions, partes extra partes, but as discrete agents engaged in complex, non-deterministic signalling interactions. From the point of view of this positive project, science appears not only as the source of knowledge but also as a prominent source of the misrecognition of its own results. Because science conceives of living beings as the structured objects of perception (or instrumental measurement), it tends to identify things as static, composite mechanisms. In other words, the very appearance that these “living forms” enter into extrinsic relationships and form structures is the result of the scientific method. This is not incorrect, according to Ruyer, but it is necessarily partial: Science describes things correctly but backwards… The operation that passes from the most rigorously scientific of sciences to gnosis is demanded by science itself. It is a reversal on the model of the reversal which led from the ‘material’ atom to the quantum of action of a new thing. In thus passing from what is observed as a thing to the ‘acting’ which really is, we admit that this ‘acting’ can be seen in itself, as subject, for an acting cannot be a thing but a subject which does what it does, and what it knows how to do.27 Problems arise only at the point where this particular inert, structural perspective is taken to be definitive, and indeed exhaustive. 3.2  Gestalttheorie and thematic activity

Without space to elaborate Ruyer’s position in detail, we will restrict ourselves to three summary points that relate to the Heidegger-Merleau-Ponty trajectory sketched above. Given his attentiveness to the life sciences in the twentieth century, it is perhaps ironic to note that, of the three philosophers, it is Ruyer who engages with Uexküll the least. He appears in passing in most of Ruyer’s key works, but often as a thinker whose insights have been digested and worked into other more recent approaches.28 When he is explicitly addressed, it is in notably critical terms. However, he suspects the absolute character of Uexküll’s distinctions, beginning with the opposition between Umwelt and Umbegung, but encompassing a sequence of others in turn. He writes, for instance, that It is quite pointless to follow in von Uexküll’s footsteps and to distinguish a plane of formation (embryogenesis), a plane of functioning (physiology), and a plane of repair (regeneration) for the organism. Everything is imbricated: a plant continues

26 Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, and Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2003). 27 Raymond Ruyer, La gnose de Princeton (Paris: Fayard, 1974), 13–14. Or as he puts it in an early presentation of his method, “Metaphysics adds nothing to science but the affirmation of a verso, but a verso that corresponds exactly to the recto.” (Ruyer, “Une métaphysique présente-t-elle de l’interêt?” Revue philosophique de la France et l’Étranger 119, no. 1–2 (1935): 85.) 28 See, for instance, Ruyer Éléments de psychobiologie (Paris: PUF, 1946), 38.

Captivated by life  439 to grow while functioning, and this is true of the majority of animals and of human beings.29 Ruyer will provide a series of examples that indeed seem to violate this division of labour. For instance it is clear that in embryogenesis, “the pulmonary artery, the lungs and many other organs are formed before they function. But even more frequently, functioning is closely implicated in formation: the umbilical artery and the heart are formed and function at the same time.”30 He also points out that any living body is perpetually repairing itself, regardless of the active projects it is engaged in: “An adult hand… imperceptibly repairs itself, for example, in the growth of fingernails and more generally in the incessant flux of molecules which circulate throughout its form.”31 A living being is not like a candle whose wick, burnt down, is spent.32 More generally, his point is that the very division of labour itself is superficial, imposing an abstract, structural misunderstanding of the nature of life. There is no difference between morphogenesis, behaviour, and regeneration at all, except on the basis of the—misleading, if not entirely incorrect—postulate that life is mechanistic functioning partes extra partes. But what is more interesting for us here is the fact that in the passages that these criticisms of Uexküll are presented, Merleau-Ponty is often also invoked. In the following illuminating passage from Neofinalism, Ruyer asks us to consider three levels that correspond to Merleau-Ponty’s three orders described in Structure. For Ruyer, they are “the physical [A], the vital [B], and psychological consciousness [C]”: Gestalttheorie, just like mechanism, seeks the unity of the three levels by starting from A. Merleau-Ponty, along with the idealists, seeks this unity by starting from interpretations based on C. We seek it by starting from B, or from C as living, because B as a living organism is the normal, in fact the universal, type of being: it is an autosubjective form, an absolute, self-surveying domain, synonymous with “self-perceiving.”33 The problem with Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, for Ruyer, concerns the way in which it separates out consciousness and purposive behaviour. Shortly after this previous passage, he cites Merleau-Ponty himself to this effect, before directly criticizing him: Von Uexküll’s statement is perfectly on point: ‘Every organism is a melody that sings itself.’ But Merleau-Ponty’s commentary, that ‘this is not to say that it knows

29 Raymond Ruyer, Neofinalism, trans. Alyosha Edlebi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 229, translation modified. 30 Raymond Ruyer, The Genesis of Living Forms, trans. Jon Roffe and Nicholas Barthel de Weydenthal (London: Rowman Littlefield International, 2019), 9. 31 Ibid., 10. 32 Ibid., 48. 33 Ruyer, Neofinalism, 200, translation modified. In Structure, Merleau-Ponty presents a similar division of kind, but his way of relating each to the other has a Gestaltist character absent from Ruyer’s account. For instance: “neither the psychological with respect to the vital nor the spiritual with respect to the psychological can be treated as substances or as new worlds. The relation of each order to the higher order is that of the partial to the total…. The advent of higher orders, to the extent that they are accomplished, eliminate the autonomy of the lower orders and give a new signification to the steps which constitute them” (Structure, 180).

440  Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe this melody and attempts to realize it; it is only to say that it is a whole which is significant for a consciousness which knows it, not a thing which rests in-itself,’ distorts the truth completely.34 Ted Toadvine makes the same point in more familiar terms: In The Structure of Behavior, the concept of structure attempted to hold together two incompatible approaches to nature: on the one hand, Merleau-Ponty saw in vital behavior an immanent and self-organizing intelligibility. But on the other hand, his commitment to phenomenological principles required him to treat this immanent intelligibility as an object for human consciousness.35 Of course, much here turns around the characteristics of consciousness itself, though, as we will see in what follows. What is the nature of this melody for Ruyer? It is, and must be, mnemic in character, such that “In all organisms proper, organic memory constitutes specific potentials that can be reincarnated in innumerable individuals.”36 In turn, these memories are presupposed by the living being in question, such that they are memories that do not correspond to a prior experience of that being, but are ideal, latent traces of the activities of previous living beings. He thus writes of the egg that this unique cell which constructs by itself an organism possessing a nervous system and an extraordinarily complex brain, cannot contain in advance this complexity in the form of a trace or an architectural plan. If the egg constructs ‘by habit’, this habit is an act and not the functioning of traces, nor of any sort of micro-structure.37 Ruyer is close here to the Plato of the Meno (81d:4–5), for whom “seeking and learning are nothing but recollection,” except that the process of anamnesis is not oriented by epistemological concerns but by the self-formation of the living being as such. This Platonism is nowhere more apparent in his insistence that these themes are ideal: “a true, thematic memory, invoked by a signal, is necessarily non-material or super-material. It is necessarily of the order of consciousness.”38 It is worth pointing out that these mnemic themes can in no way be characterized in terms of DNA for Ruyer. He presents a whole host of arguments on this point, of which

34 Ruyer Neofinalism, 201, translation modified. The notion of “self-perception” might appear to constitute a critical departure from the kind of analysis of perception we saw above in Heidegger. This appearance is, though, somewhat misleading. For Ruyer, “self-perception” is equivalent to “self-formation,” lacking any of the features of intentional consciousness relative to an exteriority. As we will see below, this ends up presenting Ruyer with a new set of problems. 35 Ted Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 28. 36 Ruyer Neofinalism, 149. That these melodies are mnemic in character is an important trait for distinguishing Ruyer’s account from those of Uexküll and Merleau-Ponty on the same point. For the former, the melody comes from the past; for the latter, it essentially belongs to an ongoing, enacted present, still in the Nature lectures: “We think naturally that the past secretes the future ahead of it. But this notion of time is refuted by the melody. At the moment when the melody begins, the last note is there, in its own manner” (Nature, 173). 37 Ruyer, “Raymond Ruyer par lui-même,” 8. 38 Raymond Ruyer, L’embryogenèse du monde et le Dieu silencieux (Paris: Klincksieck, 2013), 88.

Captivated by life  441 the following four are emblematic. The first is logical in character. If we go looking for the location of the structure of life in matter, we are quickly led into an infinite regress. Ruyer makes this point, for instance, in attacking Dawkins’s infamous selfish gene argument: At the very limit, we could agree that the cells of a higher organism have an interest in organizing a digestive system or a system of oxygenation, which led, along with natural selection, to the manufacture of a digestive tube, lungs and a heart. But what interest do the molecules have in organizing a complicated system of cells and multicellular organisms?39 Why, in other words, should we uniquely locate “selfishness” at the level of the gene and not some other register of organization? The second argument anticipates Ruyer’s analysis of the signaletic character of stimulus we will discuss below. At best, he argues, the expression of genes can hamper certain biological processes, but it cannot be used to explain the advent of these processes themselves. It is clear, on experimental grounds, that the absence or mutation of a gene can trouble development, just as the absence of a material component or the modification of a tool can trouble the construction of a house. But it is impossible to conclude from this that the presence of this component or tool explains construction. We cannot maintain that the progress of morphogenesis, from the virus-molecule to the human being, is explained by the accumulation of errors in the duplication of the “instructions” for the automated manufacturing of an automatic machine by an automatic machine.40 He adds a third argument on a related point, this time concerning the incapacity for genetic material to explain the specificity of morphogenesis. Even if we admit that the specific characteristics of a given organ (that is it a cat’s liver, and not that of a human being) result from the expression of particular genes, what these genes cannot explain is “the fact that these particular embryonic cells will become a liver, or a tail, rather than a paw. This is particularly clear for the two, four or eight cells that first result from the division of the egg.”41 Correlatively, as famous grafting experiments have shown, “the destination of a group of cells can be changed practically at will. What would have become a paw becomes a tail, and vice versa.”42 The fourth argument points to the more fundamental inadequacy of totalizing genetic explanations: “even the most dogmatic geneticist would not affirm that a “one-to-one” structural correspondence exists between the genes and the adult organism.”43 Embryogenesis provides the most obvious case here. If the development of the embryo was frozen at any particular moment, it would perhaps be possible to invoke this kind of structural correspondence, but any such static perspective is a pure fiction that bears no relation to the dynamic genesis of a living form. So, unlike mechanist accounts of morphogenesis and behaviour, Ruyer argues that it is an ongoing self-formation of the living being through the actualization of these ideal mnemic themes or melodies that accounts for the characteristic features of any living

39 Ibid., 76. 40 Ruyer, “Bergson and the Ammophilia Sphex,” 25. 41 Ruyer, Genesis of Living Forms, 157. 42 Ibid., 158. 43 Ruyer Neofinalism, 160.

442  Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe being.44 But Ruyer also notes another significant consequence of this divorce of activity and consciousness, this time concerning the meaning of animal behaviour. In order to account for this, he contends, Merleau-Ponty ends up having to posit something akin to the Kantian doctrine of Zweckmässigkeit (a finalist notion of goal or end). But without positing this end as a constant, immanent feature of formation and behaviour, MerleauPonty is left without any means to resolve the problem of the dynamic relation between overall behavior and physiochemical processes in the organism, and has a tendency to believe that the category of interpretation or description are categories that explain organic life in itself and as such, as if living beings belonged to a universe of thought and not to a universe of realities.45 In other words, at least on Ruyer’s view, Merleau-Ponty’s attribution of meaningfulness to consciousness remains too phenomenological: that is, too caught up with the trope of intentionality. As a result, he cannot explain how consciousness names self-forming activity itself. By contrast, Ruyer will insist (with a caveat we will return to later) on the strict identity of the regime of consciousness and that of behaviour: Consciousness is not a passive knowledge, but the active unity of behaviour or perception. It is always a dynamic effort of unification, without which ‘behaviour’ would be a pure collection of movements and perceptions a pure juxtaposition of physico-chemical effects able to be imitated by machines.46 This is why the passage critical of Merleau-Ponty cited above continues as follows: before the listener, there is the singer or the song that sings itself, that has masters its own notes itself. A bird sings because it desires to sing, because it has a tendency to sing, in the same way that it had a tendency as an embryo to form its larynx. The bird’s melody is, in the strict sense of the word, the continuation of the ‘organic melody,’ of the bird forming itself without witness or listener.47 As Ruyer indicates in this passage, his approach consists in starting with the category of the self-forming living being, and recasting Uexküll’s notion of melody in order to account for both this self-formation and meaningful behaviour. The organism thus “forms itself with risks and perils; it is not formed… The living being forms itself directly according to the theme, without the theme having first to become idea-image and represented model.”48 Now, Merleau-Ponty was certainly trying to resolve precisely this kind of problem, both by introducing the body into phenomenology and by elaborating on the later concept 44 That all genuine individualities—including atoms and viruses—are alive in this sense for Ruyer is an issue we put to one side here. 45 Ruyer Neofinalism, 198–199, translation modified. 46 Ruyer, Genesis of Living Forms, 160. 47 Ruyer, Neofinalism, 201. 48 Ruyer, “Bergson and the Ammophilia Sphex,” 175.

Captivated by life  443 of the Flesh. But to the degree that consciousness remains neutral with respect to biological formation in any direct fashion—that is, it remains a knowledge-consciousness, an intentional consciousness—explaining how it actually comes to bear in the formation of purposive behaviour is unclear. What remains unresolved is, as Barbaras points out, the problem of “the specificity of the living subject”: “Merleau-Ponty does not renounce the transcendental subject, and this is why he runs into the insoluble problem of a consciousness which remains the origin of the world, while being at the same time immersed in it.”49 This is certainly borne out by the closing moments of Structure itself, where he poses the following obviously central questions: “What are the relations of this naturized consciousness and the pure consciousness of self? Can one conceptualize perceptual consciousness without eliminating it as an original mode; can one maintain its specificity without rendering inconceivable its relation to intellectual consciousness?” (SB 224). It should also be clear that, from Ruyer’s point of view, Heidegger’s famous discussion of the Weltlarmut of animals in FCM loses the force of scandal, appearing instead as the inevitable consequence of the theoretical presuppositions brought to bear on the living. It is nevertheless a failed attempt to account for the living being, from Ruyer’s perspective. It is not enough to recognize, as Heidegger does, the irreducibly holistic nature of the organism, if this whole remains passive in relation to captivating environmental stimuli. On the one hand, this approach is unable to explain the formation of the living being itself: a strange oversight on Heidegger’s part, given his familiarity with Driesch. On the other, by deploying an account of stimulus that remains, for all of its sophistication, a relic of Newtonian physics, he robs himself of the means to grasp the genuine form of immersion in meaningful interactions that characterizes animal existence. 3.3  Signal stimuli

If, as Ruyer contends, the unfolding life of any being consists in the conscious expression of virtual or ideal mnemic themes, then what role is played by the environment? Ruyer rejects in its entirety the classical response that adverts to the idea of extrinsic stimuli. His approach, though, does not consist in retreating entirely to the level of the ideal (as Leibniz does, for instance) but instead involves a renovation of the definition of stimulus itself. In The Genesis of Living Forms, Ruyer presents a summary list of six “forms of efficacity,” which run from the brute action of physical causes involved in the pumping of a bicycle tire to the deliberate deployment of signs characteristic of human language use.50 The key difference lies between the fourth and fifth forms: between the idea of the stimulus as a trigger and the idea of the stimulus as a signal, an evocative “calling forth” in place of necessitation, a tergo. Both behaviour and formation unfold not as a complex mechanical system of causes or triggers but as something much closer to an ambient field of birdsong, where changes in morphogenesis are elicited or called for rather than caused. In positive terms, as Fabrice Colonna puts it, this is to say that “Chemical substance is a mnemotechnical means made use of by organic memory to accomplish its work.”51

49 Renaud Barbaras, “Vie et extériorité. La problème de la perception chez Ruyer,” Les études philosophiques 80 (2007), 17. 50 For a critical consideration of Ruyer’s theory of signs, see Williams, A Process Philosophy of Signs. 51 Fabrice Colonna, Ruyer (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007), 146.

444  Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe Ruyer invokes the example of the signalling activity of bees: if the bee finds a source of food less than fifty metres from the hive, it will dance in a circle, indicating no direction. As J. B. S. Haldane notes, this dance is an Auslöser in Lorenz’s sense, that is, a signal stimulus and not a sign. When this distance is exceeded, the bee will make use of true signs, or, if you like, its ‘message’* possesses informational content: the ‘waggle dance’ describes a direction, and the number of dances per minute, the remoteness of the food.52 Arguably the same point is made both by Merleau-Ponty and by later enactivist thinkers, but Ruyer wishes to conclude something much stronger from these results. It is not just that a stimulus is always a signal, but that stimulus is only explicable in terms of a prior behavioural nexus, and indeed that there is, finally, nothing about stimulus qua signal that belongs to the exteriority of a milieu: In the structuration of a territory, behaviour in its totality dominates the perceptual indexes that guide it. It is not composed by the sum of automatic acts of obedience to perceived stimuli… And the proof is in the fact that the animal itself manufactures the sensory points of reference of which it makes use. The markings made by mammals through the medium of the products of glands, or by urine, clearly have the characteristic of being ‘voluntary’ signals. Urine above all plays the role of a veritable hormone-odour or an inductor for the extra-organic form of the territory, thus confirming the interpretation of embryological inductors as ‘organic signals’ subordinated to a total plan.53 For Ruyer, then, the Heideggerian claim that “the behavior of the animal is not a doing and acting, as in human comportment, but a driven performing” (FCM 237) is simply false; “the confusion of signal and cause must be avoided at every level.”54 Because Heidegger situates captivating causes in the pure exteriority of an environment, he robs himself of any means to explain how it can be any more than a brute push a tergo with respect to animal behaviour. 3.4  Ruyer and Merleau-Ponty on exteriority

It is notable that Ruyer’s criticisms of Merleau-Ponty are essentially responses to the early Structure and only implicitly to the Phenomenology. But we know that his later engagement with the life sciences outstrips this perspective. Not only is he clearly familiar with the work that Ruyer himself is doing, but he engages with precisely the same suite of references in embryology and animal ethology we have just seen. Merleau-Ponty was, we can say, moving in the direction of something akin to a phenomenology of life or of the living being.55 Conversely, from the point of view of Merleau-Ponty’s later texts, an issue that potentially troubles Ruyer’s own project appears. These texts are

52 Ruyer, Genesis of Living Forms, 76. 53 Ibid., 156. 54 Fabrice Louis and Jean-Pierre Louis, La philosophie de Raymond Ruyer (Paris: Vrin, 2014), 38. 55 On this point, see Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature.

Captivated by life  445 underwritten by the well-known figure of the chiasm, intertwining, or what he sometimes calls complicity. This thematic is absent from Ruyer’s work. On the one hand—on the side of “inputs,” as it were—he denies any role for immediate causality between living being and environment. On the other, by identifying consciousness with formation and behaviour, he appears to also rob himself of any way of accounting for reflective action on the side of “outputs.” Strangely, then, it would seem that Ruyer and Heidegger end up in close proximity. In both cases, the intertwining of animal being and environment is dissolved in favour of one side of the pair: the living being for Ruyer and the environment for Heidegger. Neither the fact that Ruyer considers the conscious life of the living to be immensely richer than Heidegger’s crypto-mechanist account nor the fact that the absence of mechanical causal effects on this life is outstripped by the role of mnemic themes discounts the fact that he too considers the animal to be poor in the world. Ruyer partly ameliorates this problem by introducing a distinction between primary and secondary consciousness. As he puts it in Neofinalism, At root, there is only a single mode of consciousness: primary consciousness, the form-in-itself of every organism which is nothing other than life itself. Secondary, sensory consciousness is the primary consciousness of the cerebral areas. As the cortex is modulated by external stimuli, sensory consciousness presents us with the form of objects external to the organism. But this particular content represents in no way an essential character of consciousness and life.56 The critique of the idealist thought he associates with Merleau-Ponty proceeds in terms of primary consciousness, while secondary consciousness is identified with what phenomenology itself, among other traditions, identifies with the experiential layer, grounded in the functioning of the brain. It is not clear that this distinction can carry the weight that Ruyer assigns to it. We need to ask, as Barbaras puts it, whether we are capable of accounting for the specific traits of secondary consciousness on the basis of primary consciousness that it fundamentally is?… More precisely, is it indeed possible to restore the intentionality proper to sensory consciousness (which is not only organization but actually consciousness of something) on the basis of57 primary consciousness, as Ruyer conceives it? It would appear that by inverting MerleauPonty’s emphasis on the primacy of perception, Ruyer manages to avoid the threat of mechanism, but what he has replaced it with is a form of consciousness and its reflexive and intentional modification that makes the world towards which secondary consciousness would be oriented disappear.

56 Ruyer, Neofinalism, 98, translation modified. 57 Barbaras, “Vie et extériorité,” 29.

446  Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe 4  Concluding remarks In summary terms, we can say that the positions on the life sciences sketched here converge around two issues. The first concerns granting the living being a robust sense of agency with respect to environmental “inputs.” The second concerns maintaining the meaningfulness of the transformations that the living being makes in the environment itself (“outputs,” crudely put). Whether in fact any of these three philosophers are capable of resolving both problems at the same time is of course an open matter. Here, our concern was only to describe a certain partly obscured heretical tradition in the philosophy of life that runs from Heidegger into the French philosophy of the twentieth century. But it is one that is potentially worth rethinking today. From the point of view of the gene-dominated latter half of the twentieth century, all three thinkers look decidedly out of step with the times, but these times themselves have changed. With the prominence of questions concerning morphogenesis, autopoiesis, emergence, and epigenetics, it increasingly appears that they were less old-fashioned than that they were untimely. While only relatively few philosophers have returned to this terrain to think through developments in contemporary biology, there are rich resources here that can continue to be mined. In these unsettled and post-genomic times, philosophers and theoretical biologists may be of significant help to one another in grappling with life, the animal, and the nature of their intertwining.

Part III

Celebrating Husserl’s Jahrbuch one-hundred years later

27 Three Caesars Jean Hering and Edith Stein on the core of the essence, individuality, and the a priori (and early phenomenology) (with a coda on Ernst Kantorowicz)1 Daniele De Santis Abstract  The present contribution will provide a systematic analysis of one of Edith Stein’s most important philosophical concepts—that of the “core of the essence” or “core of the person”—as it is used in her early works. Contrary to those interpretations that tend to understand it as a genetic principle of the person’s own development, we will make the case for regarding it as an essential principle of “intelligibility”: the core of the essence designates that most intimate component of the essence’s structure, the only component that can grant us the possibility of understanding the essence itself as a whole. As we will further argue, the introduction of the notion of the core of the essence can be appreciated only if it is regarded from the standpoint of early phenomenology’s concern about the problem of how to justify ontologically the existence of sciences that investigate “individual” objects (such as historiography). Toward the end of the chapter, a hypothesis will also be proposed to the effect that the work of the German literary critic Friedrich Gundolf represented one of the possible sources of Stein’s understanding of the core of the essence. Keywords  Edith Stein; Friedrich Gundolf; Theodor Mommsen; Early Phenomenology; Core of the Essence; Philosophy of the Person; Geisteswissenschaften; Julius Caesar Caesar should be a beast without a heart If he should stay at home to-day for fear. No, Caesar shall not W. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 2, II

1 This work was supported by the project “Intentionality and Person in Medieval Philosophy and Phenomenology” (GAČR 21-08256S) and by the European Regional Development Fund-Project “Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World” (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_ 019/0000734). I am very grateful to H. Taieb for his comments and to G. Frank for our phenomenological conversations; a previous version of this chapter was presented at a conference on intentionality and person in medieval philosophy and phenomenology organized in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of Charles University (June 2022). I am grateful to the participants for their comments and questions (A. Tropia, D. Perler, G. Pini, F. V. Tommasi, I. Vandrell Ferran, T. Cory, M. Summa).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-30

450  Daniele De Santis 1  Positio quaestionis If there is any major ambition that Stein’s (personalistic) “ontology” ultimately pursues, it is that of determining a concept of qualitative individuality irreducible to that of numerical individuality. But such a broad claim implies at least two sub-claims—both of which bear upon the development of Stein’s thought. First, Stein’s conceptuality undergoes a transformation as she slowly comes closer to Aquinas: it is a translatio studiorum et terminorum in which we are not simply confronted with a one-to-one translation of phenomenological philosophemes into philosophemes and themes proper to Aquinas. Rather, we have an actual inclusion: phenomenology is translated into a new language to the extent that it is also included—and thereby displaced—within a wider metaphysical context. But such an inclusion—and here comes the second sub-claim—goes hand in hand with an internal displacement of Stein’s own position vis-à-vis Aquinas. Stein is motivated to combine Aquinas and Scotus2 due to some of her originally phenomenological concerns. Better framed: Stein is pushed toward embracing a Scotus-sounding view—which is combined with her originally Thomistic transformation of phenomenology—during the assessment of an issue with which she had been grappling since her first phenomenological apprenticeship. In this respect—and assuming I am right in pinpointing the double displacement above (= from phenomenology to Aquinas; from Aquinas to Scotus via phenomenology)—it can be also remarked that Finite and Eternal Being bears direct witness to both of them. A confrontation with the early phenomenological conceptuality is presented in Chapter III, §§3–5, 7. It is here that Stein proposes a discussion of a former colleague from Göttingen—Jean Hering—revolving around the concepts of “essence” (Wesen) and “core of the essence” (Wesenskern) (both of which Stein introduced in her dissertation). But such phenomenological conceptuality undergoes a systematic transformation over the course of Chapter IV, §3. Not only is the concept of essence as Wesen translated into the “form-matter” dichotomy, but the necessity arises to account for Socrates’ “individual essence” (individuelles Wesen) (or being-Socrates),3 which will soon lead to the second displacement. This will take place in Chapter VIII, §2: “It seems to us that the essence of Socrates is found in his being-Socrates, and we hold that this essence differs not only numerically but by virtue of a special particularity from the essence of any other human being.”4 And Stein will associate her solution with Scotus’s only a few pages later: “Scotus does likewise—if I understand him correctly. He regards the principium individuationis as something that sets the individual form of the essence apart from the universal form of the essence.”5

2 See F. Alfieri, “Il principio di individuazione nelle analisi fenomenologiche di Edith Stein e Hedwig ConradMartius. Il recupero della filosofia medievale,” in A. Ales Bello, F. Alfieri, M. Shahid (eds.), Edith Stein— Hedwig Conrad-Martius. Fenomenologia, metafisica, scienze (Roma, Bari: Laterza, 2010), 143–197; Id., The Presence of Duns Scotus in the Thought of Edith Stein: The Question of Individuality (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015); F. Bottini, “Tommaso D’Aquino, Duns Scoto e Edith Stein sulla individuazione,” Il Santo, 49, 2009, 121–129. 3 E. Stein, Endliches und ewiges Sein. Versuch eines Aufstieges zum Sinn des Seins (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 1962), 150; English trans. by K. F. Reinhardt, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt at an Ascent to the Sense of Being (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002), 156. 4 E. Stein, Endliches und ewiges, 439; English trans., 478. 5 Ibid., 446; English trans., 610.

Three Caesars  451 The argument relies on the distinction between two concepts of essence: IW  (individuelles Wesen): “individual essence” EW  (Einzelwesen): “individualized essence” At the end of Chapter VIII, §2 (sub-paragraph 4), Stein makes the following remark, which will shed some light on the IW-EW distinction: It is important however to note what is meant here by individualized essence: the “species-giving part” of the individual thing, e.g., the humanity of this human being. Accordingly, each individual thing has its essence, but this essence is like (gleiche) that of all the other members of the same species. But it has already become clear that we cannot accept this conception: it seems to us that the essence of Socrates is found in his being-Socrates (which includes his being-human), and I hold that this essence differs not only numerically but by virtue of a special particularity from the essence of any other human being.6 It should be evident why I proposed to construe EW as “individualized essence”: EW designates a specific essence (specifically universal essence or artgebende) as it is individualized in an X. And one can speak of a multiplicity of Xs: each X has its essence, which, however, is like that of all possible Xs. They are the (numerically different) individualizations of the same (gleiche) essence. Moreover, Stein points out that this line of thought applies to things (Dinge), yet is deemed inadequate when it comes to “Socrates.” Socrates has an individual essence or IW—which is not like that of Caesar and his being-Caesar. Even better: since Stein acknowledges that Socrates’ “being-Socrates” includes his beinghuman, IW always includes the specific essence (EW)—both Socrates and Caesar are human beings. But neither the being-Socrates of Socrates nor the being-Caesar of Caesar (IW) is the result of the individualization of their being-human (≠ EW). Here Stein confines herself to stressing that IW possesses a “special particularity”—namely, that by which it differs from the IW of any other human being, not merely numerically and due to the individualization of a specific essence (common to all of them). If in the case of IW the “difference” (Verschiedenheit) is between the essences themselves (being-Socrates is different from being-Caesar), the case is different when we consider “individual things”: “We can distinguish them from each other only by their different position in space, which is due to their material nature.”7 It is at this point that Stein spells out “the Thomistic view” as the conception according to which “matter” is “the ontological reason” for the individualization of things.8 Let us stop here—for this is when two different problems are fused together, so to speak. One thing is the problem of the nature of individualization; the other is the problem bearing upon the classification of the different kinds of essences, therefore upon the idea that there are “individual essences” (IW) with a structure of their own. The two are intimately connected, and yet are not to be too hastily identified. In the following I will discuss the latter problem and leave the former aside. The “special particularity”—which later on, in the footnote on Scotus, Stein will label “individual form”—is what, in the phenomenological jargon of Chapter III, is called the “essential core” or “core of the essence” as the 6 Ibid., 438; English trans., 478, trans. modified. 7 Ibid., 439; English trans., 479. 8 Ibid., 439; English trans., 479.

452  Daniele De Santis “essential particularity of the human being.”9 In short, the core of the essence (hereafter CoE) is the phenomenological notion that—from within the first displacement—will push Stein toward the second displacement. Now the goal of the present paper is to clarify the source of Stein’s talk of CoE within the context of early phenomenology, with a special focus on Jean Hering and his groundbreaking essay on the essence. For this reason, I will be dealing only with Stein’s early texts (1916–1919/21). As I will try to explain, Stein introduces CoE in relation to the problem of the “ontological” clarification of the possibility of the (scientific) knowledge of “individuals” (see §§5, 6 for concrete examples).10 To this end I will first briefly present the context of Hering’s discussion of the essence. Then, toward the end of the text, I will venture to identify a possible non-philosophical source of Stein’s view of the essence, and in particular, of CoE (which will confirm my reading hypothesis). In short, I am convinced that some of the objections usually mustered against CoE as Stein uses it could be addressed by adjusting the context within which she works. 2  Recent doxography on CoE: an overview Recent works on CoE have already ascertained that Stein resorts to it in the following ways: (CoE.1): It designates the set of a person’s “original dispositions” (Anlage) that are not acquired by our interaction with the environment.11 (CoE.2): This is why CoE can be said to have an “a priori nature.”12 (CoE.3): It is also used to guarantee or establish the person’s “identity.”13 (CoE.4): It further guarantees her (strong or essential) individuality (as irreducible to merely numerical individuality).14 (CoE.5): And it refers to the principle of the person’s character’s unfolding or development, although it itself does not develop.15   9 Ibid., 84; English trans., 86; Id., Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person, ESGA 14 (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 2015), 96. 10 In this case, the problem of individuation does not arise because there is only scientific knowledge of the universal, but on the contrary precisely to explain the possibility of scientific knowledge of what is (qualitatively) individual; see T. Hoffmann, “Individuation bei Duns Scotus und bei dem jungen Leibniz,” Medioevo. Rivista di storia della filosofofia medievale, 24, 1998, 31–88, for a systematic discussion of the former case. 11 See C. Betschart, “Kern der Person. (Meta-)Phänomenologische Begründungen der menschlichen Person nach Edith Steins Frühwerk,” in H.-B. Gerl-Falkowitz, R. Kaufamnn, H.-R. Sepp (eds.), Europa und seine Anderen. Emmanuel Levinas, Edith Stein, Jósef Tischner (Dresden: Thelem, 2010), 61–72, here: 62; Id., “The Individuality of the Human Person in the Phenomenological Works of Edith Stein,” in A. Calcagno (ed.), Edith Stein: Women, Social-Political Philosophy, Theology, Metaphysics, and Public History (Springer: Cham, 2016), 73–86, here: 76. 12 S. Borden Sharkey, Thine Own Self: Individuality in Edith Stein’s Later Writings (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 191. 13 Betschart, “Kern der Person,” 65, uses Kripke’s concept of “rigid designator.” 14 Betschart, “Kern der Person,” 66–67; R. De Monticelli, “Essential Individuality: On the Nature of a Person,” in A.-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana 89 (Springer: Dordrecht, 2006), 171–184. 15 See, for example, Betschart, “Kern der Person,” 69–70; D. De Santis, “Core of the Essence and Core of the Person: Jean Hering and a Hidden Source of Edith Stein’s Early Ontology,” Horizon: Studies in Phenomenology, 10, 2021, 441–462, here: 455–456; N. V. Préfontaine, Metaphysik der Innerlichkeit (St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 2008).

Three Caesars  453 From a more critical angle, CoE has been questioned by scholars as: (¬ CoE.A): Either dispensable (and replaceable by a different account); (¬ CoE.B): Or as a “postulate” that cannot be justified phenomenologically.16 But a further point needs to be made. CoE—which is what allows Stein to speak of IW—is her own manner of addressing a problem typical for the early generations of phenomenologists. In line with the Aristotelian principle that the determination and search for the “method of a science” (ζητει̑ν … τρόπον ἐπιστήμης) follows and is based upon that of the being (or the genus of being) that such a science studies (περὶ ὀ ν́ τι καὶ γένος τι) (Met., E, 1025b 8), the question arises as to the ontological ground for sciences that investigate also and for the most part (albeit not exclusively) individuals. This problem was presented—as an actual philosophical program to be carried out—by one of Edith Stein’s own phenomenological masters, Adolf Reinach, in a lecture given in Marburg in 1914. After he emphasizes the role played by “essences” (and the so-called “intuition of essence”) in the field of psychology or the sciences of nature, Reinach adds the following: Essence intuition is also required in other disciplines. Not only the essence of that which can be realized as many times as we like, but also the essence of what is by nature singular and unique requires clarification and analysis. We see that the historian endeavors, not only to bring the unknown to light, but also to bring the known closer to us, to bring it to adequate intuition in its very nature. Here we have different goals and different methods. But we also see here great difficulties, and the dangers of evasion and construction. We see how, again and again, development is spoken of, and the question about the what of that which develops is neglected. We see how the environment of a thing is anxiously inquired into, only in order not to have to analyze it itself; how the question about the essence of a thing is believed resolved by answers to questions about its origin or its effect.17 The task of the historian (history or historiography) is an example of a scientist investigating essences that in principle can be realized only once and as something unique. In a way that is also peculiar to early phenomenology, the question of the essence of a “materially determined object” is opposed to—or at least kept distinct from—genetic questions concerning the “factual” interactions with the environment, the object’s development, its origin, and its effects.18 This is, in my opinion, the specific background against which Stein’s view on CoE can and should be correctly understood.

16 Betschart, “Kern der Person,” 63, 70. 17 A. Reinach, Sämtliche Werke. 2 Bande, ed. K. Schuhmann, B. Smith (München, Hamden, Wien: Philosophia, 1989), 535; English trans. by J. F Crosby, “Concerning Phenomenology,” in The A Priori Foundations of Civil Law (Heusenstamm: Ontos Verlag, 2013), 143–165, here: 148 (trans. modified). 18 Reinach had already discussed the example of the historian the year before in his lectures Introduction to Philosophy, which Stein quite likely attended: “Also in the sciences are the theories delimited by what the a priori (= possibility) signifies. The direction of the historian’s search for sources and possible motives in history […] is prescribed in a fully determined fashion. […] The hero as such and such a person (Der Held als solche und solche Person) is to behave under such and such circumstances in a manner that follows from her essence” (Reinach, Sämtliche Werke, 438–439).

454  Daniele De Santis 3  CoE: a brief early phenomenological cartography The notion of “essence,” and in particular that of the “core of the essence” (Wesenskern), could actually be used as a criterion to read and interpret the history of early phenomenology, or, better, to map out the different ontological positions respectively adopted by its different protagonists. The expression seems to make its first public appearance in the second part of Scheler’s Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values of 191619—as well as, in that very same year, in Stein’s dissertation On the Problem of Empathy.20 But it will receive its first public systematization only in a 1921 text published by Jean Hering, an Alsatian former student of Husserl in Göttingen: “Remarks on Essence, Essentiality, and the Idea.”21 That said, five different positions could be identified concerning CoE. In the first place, there are those whose ontology includes no reference to CoE. A prime example of this is Husserl himself, who also seems to display a little bit of skepticism about the very idea of CoE.22 There are then those who employ the expression, yet without giving it any particular or technical meaning—as is the case with Scheler, who speaks of CoE to refer to the self-transcending character of human life in general.23 The third group includes those who resort to it to designate the peculiarity proper to the internal structure of certain essences (in the plural). As we shall see, this is the case with Jean Hering. A fourth group could, however, be singled out: in this case, CoE is used to identify one specific type of essence, with the explicit ambition of setting it aside from all the other species of essences. Stein is a chief representative of this group. Finally, there are those who would claim that all essences (without exception) include an essential core. This is the case with the so-called Munich phenomenologists, notably Herbert Spiegelberg and Wilhelm Pöll. Pöll points out that CoE was first introduced by Hering to make sense of the phenomenon of alteration—since it designates what remains “unchanged” over time (although Pöll never clarifies its level of generality or specificity).24 But Pöll also writes that such a generalized stance on CoE is due to Spiegelberg, for whom CoE is the essence “in the most proper sense” of the expression because it refers to “a group of elements” determining the essence (any essence) as a unity.25 Spiegelberg explicitly identifies Hering’s notion of essence (being-so) with the core; for example, in being-animal, the core is represented by the group: “being-alive, being-bodily, beingmobile, etc.”

19 M. Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1921), 299. 20 E. Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung, ESGA 5 (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 2016), 126; English trans. by W. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989), 108. 21 J. Hering, “Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee,” Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Forschung, 4, 1921, 497–543. I translate the title of the essay in a way that differs from the recent English translation: J. Hering, “Remarks Concerning Essence, Ideal Quality, and Idea,” English trans. by A. Szylewic, Phenomenological Investigations, 1, 2021, 51–108. Henceforth Hering’s essay will be directly quoted in text as BEM followed by the English pagination. 22 E. Husserl, “Hering. Anhang seiner Examensarbeit. Freie Exzerpte,” Studia Phaenomenologica, 15, 2015, 27–34. 23 Scheler, Der Formalismus, 298–299. 24 See W. Pöll, Wesen und Wesenserkenntnis. Untersuchungen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Phänomenologie Husserls und Schelers (München: Verlag von Ernst Reinhardt, 1936), 61–62. 25 H. Spiegelberg, “Über das Wesen der Idee. Eine ontologische Untersuchung,” Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Forschung, 11, 1930, 1–238, here: 218, 221.

Three Caesars  455 If, according to the last group (Spiegelberg and Pöll), there seems to be no ontological distinction between the essence of a person—its “internal structure”—and that of non-personal essences, the second group (Scheler) does not seem to assign to any specific function to CoE. If, according to the third position (Hering), one can speak both of species (in the plural) of essences with a core and of types (in the plural) of essences without a core, according to the fourth position (Stein), only a certain species of essence is imbued with a core: the essence of persons. In the latter two cases, CoE represents the criterion on whose basis alone an ontological classification among essences is actually possible. Since Pöll too acknowledges that Jean Hering is the first to use CoE in a technical sense, let us consider what Hering argues in his famous essay of 1921. 4  Jean Hering, the essence, and Julius Caesar Jean Hering—an early student of Husserl in Göttingen—published his essay “Remarks on Essence, Essentiality, and the Idea” in 1921 in the journal of the phenomenological movement, the Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Forschung. The essay is divided into three chapters, respectively addressing the concepts of essence, essentiality or εἶδος, and idea.26 Right at the outset of the text, Hering spells out the principle of the essence as follows: Every object […] has one and only one essence, which, as its essence, makes up the fullness of the specific character constituting it. It holds, conversely—and this says something new: Every essence, in accordance with its sense, is the essence of something, and indeed the essence of this something, and of no other. (BEM, 497/57) Accordingly, in this context, “essence” is not illud quod per diffinitionem rei significatur (De ente et essentia, 2). The essence is something individual (individuum) in the sense of being “the essence of this determinate object” (BEM, 498/57). The essence of an object α consists of a group of traits (Züge) determined by the individualization of a group of universals of the “lowest level” (“ultimate differences” or infimae differentiae), and could hence be represented as follows: α (Au1 + Bu1 + Cu1…)

Here Au1, Bu1, and Cu1 stand for the ultimate differences (u1) of a group of species (A + B + C…) as they are individualized in α—or better, as α. For example, one could consider an object (α) having a determinate shade of color (Au1 = “pearl white”) + a determinate

26 Let us remark that here I will focus only on the first chapter of Hering’s text, intentionally disregarding the remaining two (on the concepts of essentiality and idea). What interests me is not how essences are possible (which would require a discussion of the relation/difference between essentialities and morphai), but only what their structure looks like. For an introduction to Hering, see D. De Santis, “L’idea della fenomenologia come fenomenologia delle Idee. Su di un peri ideon tra Gottinga e Monaco,” in Id. (ed.), Die Idee ed essenze. Un dibattito su ontologia e fenomenologia (1921–1930) (Milan: Mimesis, 2014), 7–136, here: 35–67; Id., “Wesen, Eidos, Idea: Remarks on the ‘Platonism’ of Jean Hering and Roman Ingarden,” Studia Phaenomenologica, 15, 2015, 155–180, here: 162–171.

456  Daniele De Santis shape (Bu1) with a determinate size (Cu1), and so forth. This is why Hering also uses the expressions ποῖον εἶναι as well as Sosein (being-thus or being-so) to mean the “essence”: “The single features of being-so (ποῖον εἶναι) are features of its essence” (BEM, 496/55). The Sosein of the object designates its essence in the sense of the object’s being (-sein) in such and such a way or mode (So-): α (being-Au1 + being-Bu1 + being-Cu1.…)

As Hering writes, “Two completely alike (gleiche) (individual) objects have two completely alike (gleiche) essences, but not identically the same (dasselbe)” (BEM, 498/58). α (being-Au1 + being-Bu1 + being-Cu1…) β (being-Au1 + being-Bu1 + being-Cu1…) γ (being-Au1 + being-Bu1 + being-Cu1…)

The essence of α, β, and γ is alike (gleiche), but not the same (dasselbe), the latter distinction being established by the numerical difference between the three individual objects. What must be excluded from the essence as contingent are the Aristotelian-sounding ποῦ and πότε εἶναι categories, being in a place and at a certain time (BEM, 499/59). However—and here comes one of Hering’s important distinctions—the distinction between essential and contingent does not coincide with the distinction between belonging to the essence and not belonging to the essence: “there are also elements that are related to [the essence] in such a way that their occurrence can be understood (verständlich) upon the basis of that essence” (BEM, 500/60, trans. modified). There are thus elements that follow from the essence or (as phenomenologists also say) are grounded in the essence, yet without being part of it: they are neither part of the essence (zum Wesen gehörig) nor something accidental (zufällig) and external to it.27 It is now that CoE is first introduced: Let us recall at this point some structural peculiarities of certain essences that are familiar to all scientific thinking […]. When searching for the essence of an object, we are quite often dissatisfied with even the most exhaustive and clear intuition of the collective stock of its ποῖον εἶναι—and the essence itself becomes a problem for us. We readily see the traits of which it is composed, but their inner connection has not become comprehensible (verständlich) for us, has not “dawned” on us; we are missing the key that unlocks for us the fullness of the essence as a cohesive structure. Thus we are always left dissatisfied with a description of the character of a historical personality (einer historischen Persönlichkeit) that consists exclusively of an inventory of the individual traits of the essence—be it ever so exhaustive. We need to make a priori comprehensible why precisely these traits can occur as so intertwined, and […] why these traits had to occur as combined into a whole in accordance with an internally regulated mutual belongingness. We need, above all, to draw the result from the description in such a way that a more or less simple core of fundamental 27 To clarify this point, Stein will write: “it did not pertain to the essence of Napoleon that he embarked on the Russian campaign, but it was grounded in his essence. […] The Russian campaign of Napoleon appears delineated in his essence as a possibility. We can thus understand it as following from his essence, but we cannot designate it as deriving from it necessarily. It is conceivable that he might have decided upon a different course of action” (Stein, Endliches und ewiges, 71; English trans., 72).

Three Caesars  457 traits (Kern von Grundzügen) is disclosed, the presence of which makes comprehensible the presence of the other fibers of the essence—in accordance with a priori laws clearly grasped in intuition, or ones that guide us rather more instinctively. Likewise, we believe that out of all the characteristics belonging to the essence of a geometric figure we have to pick out a limited number that constitute its basic essence, from which the presence of the other features follows self-evidently. (BEM, 502–530/62, trans. modified) A few lines later, Hering mentions “the complex essence of Julius Caesar or the essence of a conic section” as two examples of essences with a core. On the basis of the quotation, the following points can be made. Contrary to Pöll’s claim, CoE is introduced to make sense of the peculiarity of certain essences that is already familiar to “scientific thinking” and is connected to their intelligibility (Verständlichkeit). Within the essence (essence > CoE), CoE designates a group of fundamental traits that makes us understand the essence itself of the object as an interconnected whole according to a priori laws.28 The fact that Hering mentions “Julius Caesar” and “a conic section” means that CoE is not to be limited to the essences of persons. Moreover, the talk of “historical personality” might imply that not all persons’ essences have a core. Now the difference between essences with and without a core could be illustrated as follows. Let α be a chair with a certain color (Au1), a certain shape (Bu1), and a certain size (Cu1), made of a certain material (Du1). None of the “traits” of the chair’s So-Sein prescribes the presence of the others as necessary or as following some a priori laws. None of them (neither Au1 nor Bu1 nor Cu1 nor Du1) would make the presence of the remaining ones intelligible and understandable: the chair’s “being-pearl-white” (Au1) does not necessarily require its “being-of-a-certain-size” (Cu1) or its “being-of-a-certain-material” (Du1). The essence is a contingent “conglomerate” (BEM, 522/81): it could just as well be canary yellow (Au-2) without the remaining “traits” of the essence (Bu1 + Cu1 + Du1) being altered in any way whatsoever.29 But the case is different if we consider an essence that does have a core. K [CoE(being-Au1 + being-Bu1 + being-Cu1)  being-Du1 + being-Eu1 + being-Fu1] Let “K” (ΚΑΙΣΑΡ) be “the complex essence of Julius Caesar.” The essence as a unitary whole [] is determined by the presence of a core of fundamental traits CoE(Au1 + Bu1 +

28 G. Fréchette, “Essential Laws: On Ideal Objects and their Properties in Early Phenomenology,” in B. Leclercq, S. Richard, D. Seron (eds.), Objects and Pseudo-Objects: Ontological Deserts and Jungles from Brentano to Carnap (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 143–166, here: 160, identifies “what belongs to the essence of something” and the core. 29 This is the moment to clarify the distinction between two concepts of essence: the Wesen of an individual object is different from the essence as Essenz. The latter is a universal essence and includes the generic determination of the object (BEM, 529/88). To stick with the chair example, the Essenz includes the generic determinations of the chair as a “material object.” As a material object, the chair necessarily has a color-determination (in general), an extension-determination (in general), and a materiality-determination (in general). Of course, the elements of the Essenz require one another in a necessary way: there cannot be any material object in general whose Essenz does not include all of the above moments together. But in the case of a (core-less) individual essence (= the chair), the presence of the relevant moments of the essence (as individualizing a group of ultimate differences) is not necessary.

458  Daniele De Santis Cu1) that necessarily () prescribes the presence of the remaining fibers of the essence (Du1 + Eu1 + Fu1). In this case, none of the elements of CoE can be changed without the remaining ones being altered. By the same token, the presence of Du1 + Eu1 + Fu1 can be understood based upon CoE. Of course, this does not mean that CoE does not and cannot change. Hering mentions the case of the “‘character changes’ of a human being” in which “the changes can be quite drastic without nonetheless touching, as we put it, their innermost essence.” Nevertheless, he also hastens to add the following footnote: To be sure, we must observe in this context the law of essence that features of the essence cannot vary entirely arbitrarily if the cores of the essences remain the same. Since the presence of these features can be made intelligible on the basis of the core of the essence, the range of their variability is prescribed a priori. Conversely, alterations of the core will as a rule imply alterations of the shell. (BEM, 505/64, trans. modified) The passage is important for two reasons: first, because it admits the general possibility for CoE to change; and second, because it contributes to shedding some light on the relations between CoE and the rest of the essence—what CoE prescribes a priori is a range of “possibilities.” Hence it is not correct to suggest, as I did above, that given a CoE (Au1 + Bu1 + Cu1), then a given number of other traits necessarily derives from it (Du1 + Eu1 + Fu1). It would be probably better to put it as follows: K [(Au1 + Bu1 + Cu1)  Du(1v2v3…n) + Eu(1v2v3…n) + Fu(1v2v3…n)] with (1vel2vel3…n) standing for a range of corresponding possibilities prescribed by CoE (Figure 27.1). The structure of the essence could be roughly presented as follows: It is then crucial not to misunderstand the talk of a priori when Hering affirms that A a priori prescribes B as a range of possibilities or when he writes that C follows necessarily

A = CoE B = prescribed by A C = what follows from A + B A

B

Internal Unity of the Essence

C

External to the Essence, yet Derived from It

Figure 27.1  Hering on the Structure of the Essence.

Three Caesars  459 from A + B. Hering does not mean to say that were we to know A, we could derive B; nor does he claim that on the basis of A + B one could determine C prior to its occurrence. A priori does not mean “independence from all experience,” but only “independence from any particular experience.” As Hering puts it, it is only after “direct verification” of a certain p (= C) that one can “ascertain” that the essence is “structured in such a way that the being-p is grounded in it” (BEM, 501/60). One could clarify such a seemingly obscure position on the a priori as follows: • A certain p having occurred (= C), being-p is “understood” a priori, i.e., as grounded in the essence or derived from it (= A + B) under certain conditions or absolutely. • B (Du1 + Eu1 + Fu1) having obtained, being-Du1, being-Eu1, and being-Fu1 are “understood” a priori, i.e., as grounded in CoE or prescribed by it (= A) according to a relation of one-sided variability (B can vary to different degrees depending on A). That Hering’s original concern is of scientific nature (in the sense of ontologically clarifying what is already “familiar to all scientific thinking”) is confirmed by a passage from the dissertation version30 of the “Remarks” (a passage unfortunately not present in the published version). During the discussion of the difference between the essence of this piece of paper and Caesar’s, he writes: We do not see the possibility for the complexity of the essence of this blotting paper to be more than a mere random contingency and to exhibit itself as something the being of which would be understandable thanks to the being of certain fundamental characteristics in a way that is similar to the essence of Julius Caesar. [For Caesar’s essence can be understood] based upon a more or less complex essential core. Probably only a further thorough examination of the essence of the essence will answer the question whether the fact that the essence of Julius Caesar (unlike that of this blotting paper) is an object of science depends on this.31 Hering’s words betray all his doubts. It is not only that he is not sure about the relation between CoE and Caesar’s “uniqueness,” and whether the latter aspect derives from the former; the fact that this passage was removed and that the 1921 official version includes the example of a conic section to illustrate CoE (which is nowhere to be found in the dissertation version) means that Hering is not interested in, or would not even be able to address, the question of Caesar’s own “individuality.” 30 Originally the text was the final “Appendix” to Hering’s dissertation on Lotze—H. Hering, Lotzes Lehre vom Apriori. Eine Philosophische Studie (Strasbourg: Fondation du Chapitre de Saint-Thomas, Hering Archive, 1914), 162–264—and its title was “Fragments for Laying Out a Future Doctrine of the A Priori.” See D. De Santis, “‘An Ocean of Difficult Problems’: Husserl and Jean Hering’s Dissertation on the A Priori in R. H. Lotze,” Husserl Studies, 37, 2021, 19–38. 31 Hering, Lotzes Lehre vom Apriori, 168–169: “Denn wir sehen nicht die Möglichkeit, wie die Kompliziertheit des Wesens von diesem Löschblatt sich als eine nicht bloss zusammengewürfelte Zufälligkeit, sondern als etwas erweisen könnte, dessen Sein in analoger Weise verstehbar wäre, mit Rücksicht auf das Sein gewisser Grundcharaktere, wie das komplizierte Wesen Julius Caesars aus einem mehr oder minder komplizierten Wesenskerne. Ob es vielleicht damit zusammenhängt, dass das Wesen Julius Caesars Gegenstand einer Wissenschaft ist, nicht aber das Wesen dieses Löschblattes, diese Frage liesse sich natürlich ernst entscheiden auf Grund eines sehr sorgfältigen weitern Eindringens in das Wesen des Wesens.”

460  Daniele De Santis

Figure 27.2  Hering’s Dissertation, 169.

5  Theodor Mommsen’s Julius Caesar Although Hering’s “Caesar” example seems to be one of those cases in which a philosopher steps over the boundaries of his/her own field in order to clarify another science’s mode of proceeding (in this case, that of the historian who would be interested in studying “Caesar”), a close reading of the dissertation reveals something different. An early remark by Hering himself next to the passage above on Caesar as “an object of science” reveals the (possible) source of his discourse: Mommsen (Figure 27.2). The reference can only be to the historian Theodor Mommsen, the author of a monumental Roman History in three volumes. Now Chapter XI (The Old Republic and the New Monarchy) of the third volume opens up with an eight-page discussion of “Caesar’s Character.”32 As one can easily assume from reading these pages, Mommsen was probably the source of Hering’s own talk of Caesar as an “object of science” and—more generally—of the very concept of CoE. One can also go so far as to affirm that Hering’s talk of CoE (as something “familiar to all scientific thinking”) is an attempt at an ontological systematization of Mommsen’s scientific treatment of Caesar. Mommsen’s description of Caesar employs a series of expressions and terms that can be found in Hering (and Stein). Not only does Caesar have a nature or “essence” (Wesen) consisting of essential traits (wesentliche Züge—the same expression used by Hering), but Mommsen speaks of the “core of the essence” (Kern seines Wesens, kernige Eigentümlichkeit) and the “personality” of Caesar.33 If in a nature in general so harmoniously organized there is any one aspect to be singled out as characteristic, it is this: that he stood aloof from all ideology and everything fanciful. As a matter of course, Caesar was a man of passion, for without passion there is no genius; but this passion was never stronger than he could 32 See T. Mommsen, Römische Geschichte. Dritter Band. Von Sullas Tode bis zur Schlacht von Thapsus (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1862), 445–453. 33 Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, 445, 446, 452.

Three Caesars  461 A = realist, man of intellect, cool sobriety, passion, and geniality

A

B

C

B = “a born ruler”; he lives energetically in the present, undisturbed by recollection or expectation; capacity of acting with vigor, “complete independence that admitted of no control” C = “Only a statesman could result from such a disposition”; “Caesar was a monarch”; “he did nothing isolated”

Figure 27.3  Mommsen’s Julius Caesar.

control. He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had taken joyous possession of his mind; but with him they did not penetrate to the inmost core of his essence (in den innerlichen Kern seines Wesens). Caesar was a thorough realist and a man of intellect, and whatever he undertook and achieved was penetrated and guided by the cool sobriety that constitutes his most intimate particularity (innerste Eigentümlichkeit). To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present, undisturbed either by recollection or by expectation; to this he owed the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigor, and applying his whole genius even to the smallest and most incidental enterprise.34 Given the description of the core of Caesar’s essence, Mommsen is also able to identify the law (Gesetz or Regel) ruling over his nature as a whole, “the law of reason or intellect” (das verständige Gesetz):35 “He [Caesar] grasped and mastered whatever the intellect can comprehend and the will could compel.”36 Mommsen’s description of Caesar’s character could be easily framed in light of Hering’s distinction between A, B, and C presented in Figure 27.3. As will also be the case with Stein (see §6), Mommsen speaks of Anlage (“disposition”): “Only a statesman could result from such a disposition” (Aus einer solchen Anlage konnte nur ein Staatsmann hervorgehen).37 But one should refrain from interpreting such expressions as Anlage, Hervorgehen, and Hervorbringen in a manner that would suggest that Mommsen is trying to derive the factual development of “Caesar’s personality” (B) from an original source (A) and upon the basis of a rule. Quite the contrary, Mommsen wants first to fix the nature, the what of “Caesar’s  character” in order to understand “the works created by this great nature” as well.38

34 Ibid., 446, 447. 35 Ibid., 450. 36 Ibid., 447. 37 Ibid., 448. 38 Ibid., 452.

462  Daniele De Santis 6  Edith Stein and Caesar in a village On the basis of a systematic reading of Stein’s letters, it could be assumed with certainty that she was familiar with the dissertation version of Hering’s essay and his original scientific concerns.39 In fact, CoE appears early on in Stein’s works. Already in the dissertation On the Problem of Empathy from 1916 (five years before the publication of Hering’s booklet but only two years after he had finished the dissertation), Stein speaks of Wesenkern, 40 uses the very same example of Caesar, and also paraphrases Hering’s passage concerning the limits of the variability of the essence.41 Moreover, in a way that corresponds to the dissertation version of Hering’s essay rather than to the 1921 published version (in which the case of a “conic section” is also introduced alongside that of Julius Caesar’s essence), Stein applies CoE solely to “persons” and goes so far as to establish the equivalence: “Core: the personal structure” (Kern: die personale Struktur).42 In other words, only the essences of persons have a core, and it is only in relation to persons that one can speak of CoE (with the notion of Wesenskern meaning the same as the expression Kern der Person).43 Last but not least, in 1918–19, Stein will start employing the phrase personality-core (Persönlichkeitskern)44 as a synonym for “core of the person,” replacing once and for all the formal-ontological concept of essential core, 45 which will slowly tend to disappear from her ontological toolbox. It is around this period that the notion of Anlage (to be translated as “asset” or “disposition”) makes its systematic appearances in relation to the core of the person; in 1919 Stein speaks of the “original disposition”46 as that which “undergirds the development [of the person], yet does not itself develop.”47 For the sake of our problems here, the most crucial work is by far the “Conclusion” to the long 1919 essay Individual and Community (which would later be included in the volume Contributions to the Philosophical Foundation of Psychology and the Sciences of Spirit).48 It is here that all the problems we have been touching on so far are tied together: the existence of sciences studying for the most part, albeit not exclusively, individuals (with history as a most paradigmatic example), and the existence of “individual structures” and “individuals ideas” (individuelle Gestalten, Ideen).49

39 De Santis, “Core of the Essence and Core of the Person.” This does not mean that Stein and Hering would agree on how to understand the material essence of a person. Following Scheler, Stein develops an “axiological” concept of the person, according to which its essence consists of a specific system of values motivating the person’s actions. See, for example, E. García Rojo, “La constitución de la persona en Edith Stein,” Revista de espiritualidad, 50, 1991, 333–357, here: 335ff.; A. Calcagno, The Philosophy of Edith Stein (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007), 81–98; N. Ghigi, L’orizzonte del sentire in Edith Stein (Milan: Mimesis, 2011), 129–145. 40 Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung, 126; English trans., 108. 41 Ibid., 128; English trans., 110. 42 Ibid., 128; English trans., 110. 43 Ibid., 127; English trans., 109. 44 E. Stein, Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften, ESGA 6 (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 2010), 80, 82. 45 Ibid., 189; Id., Einführung in die Philosophie, ESGA 8 (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 2010), 134, 136ff. 46 Stein, Beiträge, 194; Id., Einführung in die Philosophie, 133. 47 Stein, Beiträge, 194. 48 See M. Lebech, “Study Guide to Edith Stein’s Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities,” Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society, 4, 2004, 40–76. 49 Stein, Beiträge, 253.

Three Caesars  463 These individual ideas are of a unity and consistency of inner structure, as we find them in no other domain of being with the lowest concretions. With the material thing, what is “necessary” is only the categorial thing-structure, not the connection of thingly qualities that is realized in the discrete empirical things. Analogously, it is possible to construct spiritual types that suffice for the categorial structure of spiritual reality without needing to possess the necessity of the inner structure. But here “individual ideas” in the rigorous sense are possible in principle: types of structures of the spirit (Geistesgestaltungen) in which each trait necessarily requires the others. And in this unity and consistency they are carriers of a qualitative individuality, which is proper to spiritual realities alone.50 This passage is crucial for different reasons. In the first place, even if Stein does not use the term “essence” as Wesen and does not speak of CoE, her descriptions of “individual ideas” perfectly match the terminology originally introduced by Hering. As was already the case with CoE, individual ideas are such that each of their “traits” necessarily requires the presence of the others. It is worth emphasizing that the continuity between the talk of CoE (in the 1916 dissertation) and the concept of “individual idea” as it is now used is confirmed by the term “structure” or Gestalt: if here the expressions Geistesgestaltungen and individuelle Gestalten mean the same as individuelle Ideen, in the dissertation Stein explicitly affirmed that the “core” (“the personal structure”) is to be found within an “individual Gestalt.”51 And in the second place, this is when that the problem of the scientific knowledge of individuals explicitly flows into that of “qualitative individuality.” If this preliminary reconstruction is on the right track, the introduction of CoE in the dissertation could be understood on the basis of Stein’s own arguments in the “Conclusion,” and vice versa. Let us then start with the latter text and its classification of the sciences. The first distinction is between (a) “sciences of spirit” (Geisteswissenschaften) and (b) “natural sciences” (including “psychology” as the investigation of the mind as a “natural” entity). Within the former, Stein distinguishes (a.1) “cultural sciences” (Kulturwissenschaften) from (a.2) “historical sciences” (historische Wissenschaften).52 Cultural sciences investigate the structure of objective human formations and creations such as law, economy, art, and language. In contrast, historical sciences deal with human life and the development of its creations and formations (a parte subiecti). In this respect, a.1 always points back to a.2 insofar as cultural objective formations have their sources in the subjective spirit or persons. But the a.1–a.2 relation should not be misunderstood as a form of genetic explanation (as a sort of causal explanation), but rather as a genetic understanding:53 objective, cultural formations are understood as a creation or “production” of (individual and collective) persons or spiritual subjects. However, just like natural sciences, the sciences of spirit—be they cultural or historical sciences—must also be divided into (c) a priori sciences and (d) empirical or a posteriori sciences. Thus we have a priori sciences of objective formations (c.1) and a priori and historical sciences of the spirit (c.2); empirical sciences of objective formations (d.1) and 50 Ibid., 253. 51 Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung, 128; English trans., 110. 52 Stein, Beiträge, 249. 53 Ibid., 250.

464  Daniele De Santis empirical-historical sciences of persons (d.2). The empirical sciences study and investigate the structures of factual spiritual formations (e.g., Roman law, or dolce stil novo poetry) (d.1) or the factual structure and development of the life of the spirit (e.g., the Roman people) (d.2). Similarly, the a priori sciences of spirit investigate the a priori structures of objective formations (c.1.1) or those of the person (c.2.1). In the former case, we have the a priori sciences of law, literature, language in general, and so forth; in the latter, we have the investigation of the a priori structures of the person in general, on the basis of which alone the general possibility of (c.1) can be understood. What is crucial for Stein is the recognition that a priori and historical sciences of the spirit (c.2.1) do not only concern themselves with a priori and general structures (e.g., the structure of the person and its general modes of being and experiencing): “Here the a priori analysis extends in principle to the individual structures (individuelle Gestalten) as well.”54 The opposition between a priori and empirical sciences does not coincide with the general-individual distinction. In line with Reinach, and with what Hering was hinting at in his dissertation, there can also be a priori sciences of individuals, i.e., of individual persons or spiritual subjects (e.g., Julius Caesar) (c.2.2) (Figure 27.4). As is evident, the crucial point for us is the difference between c.2.2 (the a priori investigation of a given individuality) and d.2 (the a posteriori or empirical investigation of a given individuality). Stein herself summarizes the situation as follows: The biography of a human being, which follows the factual course of her life, differs from the working out (Herausarbeitung) of her spiritual structure (for example, the Gestalt of Goethe in Gundolf’s sense). These individual ideas are of a unity and uniformity of inner structure as we find them in no other region of being.55 As far as I know—despite some important texts on the concept of Gestalt in Stein56—the reference to Gundolf has never been considered. Friedrich Gundolf—a member of the so-called George-Kreis, a direct disciple of Stefan George, and a close friend of the historian Ernst Kantorowicz—was one of the most prominent literary scholars of the Weimer Republic. In 1916 he published his groundbreaking Goethe, a monumental text of more than 700 pages dedicated to “a presentation of Goethe’s total Gestalt.”57 This book, and more generally Gundolf’s conception of Gestalt, inspired generations of scholars and works coming from the same circle, from Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (1927) to H. Friedemann’s Platon: seine Gestalt (1914/1931) and K. Hildebrandt’s Platon (1933). Stein’s reference to Gundolf acquires crucial importance for us due to the following two reasons: • Gundolf’s Goethe epitomizes (c.2.2): it does not propose a “biography” of Goethe’s life (d.2), but rather “works out” his individual spiritual structure or Gestalt; • Stein seems to identify Gundolf’s Gestalt with her own “individual ideas.”58 54 Ibid., 253. 55 Ibid., 253. 56 See C. Betschart, “Menschliche Gestalt und Gestaltung. Zur Vielschichtung des steinschen Gestaltsbegriffs,” in M. Knaup, H. Seubert (eds.), Grundbegriffe und -phänomene Edith Steins (Freiburg, Basel, Wien: Herder, 2018), 51–69. 57 F. Gundolf, Goethe (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1920), 1. 58 Gundolf himself writes that a biography of Goethe would have to do only with the “course” of his life as a “mere succession of individual facts” (Gundolf, Goethe, 1).

Three Caesars  465 (a) Sciences of Spirit (c) A Priori

(b) Sciences of Nature (d) A Posteriori

(c.1)

(c.2)

(d.1)

(d.2)

(b.1)

(b.2)

A Priori Science of

A Priori Historical

A Posteriori

A Posteriori

A Priori

A Posteriori

Culture

Sciences

Science of

Historical

(Ontology of

(Empirical

Culture

Sciences

Nature)

Sciences of

(c.1.1)

(c.2.1)

Nature)

A Priori

A Priori

Investigations of

Investigations of

Cultural Objective

the Person in

Empirical

Empirical Investigation of

Formations

General

Investigation of

(Individual and

Cultural

Persons

Collective)

Formations

(Individual and Collective)

(c.2.2) A Priori Investigations of the Structures of Individual (or Collective) Persons (= Individual Ideas, Essences with a Core)

Figure 27.4  Stein’s System of the Sciences.

If this is the case, we are entitled to conclude that Stein thinks of “individual ideas” (which is what she would also call essences with a core) in the same way in which Gundolf thinks of Gestalten.59 While one is accustomed to oppose “form” (Form) and “development” (Entwicklung), “the human Gestalt is at once becoming and being, structured form and living development.”60 Already in his successful Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist of 1911, Gundolf had used the expression “symbol” to designate “the Gestalt of an essence,” thereby also proposing a distinction between “symbol” and “sign” (Zeichen): The symbol expresses, embodies—it is lived body (Leib). The allegory signifies, represents—it is a sign. The symbol is the Gestalt of an essence—it coincides with it and presents what it is. The allegory points at what it is not. In the symbol the reception of form and content takes place at once: a content is conceived as form.

59 Stein’s expression “the working out (Herausarbeitung) of her spiritual structure” is almost a direct quotation from Gundolf, Goethe, 8, who speaks in fact of Herausarbeitung seiner Gestalt. 60 Gundolf, Goethe, 1.

466  Daniele De Santis In the allegory a sign is related to a thought, or a sign is created for the sake of a thought. Here there is before and after. The symbol belongs to the total life.61 Of course, when he speaks of Gestalt, Gundolf does not have in mind the average “human being” (gewöhnlicher Mensch), but “great individuals” and “great personalities” (großes Individuum, große Persönlichkeit).62 In this case, their work (Werke) is a most direct expression of their existence, of the form of their life,63 which always “expresses itself as forming (formendes).”64 Accordingly, Gundolf goes so far as to remark that each work by Goethe has a law of its own that is “independent of temporal existence,” and yet they all express “the structured fullness of [Goethe’s] essence, which forms itself according to an internal law.” This is why Gundolf can affirm that here the idea of “temporal development” is not to be understood in terms of a “line” running from a fixed source-point (von einem Punkte) but rather as “spherical emanations from a center” (kugelförmige Ausstrahlungen von einer Mitte).65 It is just such a notion of temporal development that allows Gundolf to understand Goethe’s works as “the embodiment of his proper, eternal Gestalt.”66 Just as Mommsen wanted to reconstruct the “works” produced by Caesar’s “great nature” by first understanding the essence of his character as a whole, so does Gundolf want to understand Goethe’s “works” upon the basis of his essence as a Gestalt, i.e., as the “unity” of form and development. The Gestalt does not stand in any opposition to “development”; rather, it means development as a self-expression in a multiplicity of works (its spherical “emanations”). For a Gestalt to develop means for it to express itself symbolically (to be present to a different degree) in all its “emanations.” With all this in mind, we can finally approach Stein’s 1916 dissertation and try to understand what she argues there about Caesar and his “spiritual” or “personal structure” (= the “core”). The passage in question is in Chapter IV (“Empathy as the Understanding of Spiritual Persons”), §5 (“Psyche and Person”), and Stein is here investing all her energy into dismissing the thesis that the nature of a human being is nothing else but the result of the given factual environment: this human being is structured in this way because she was under such and such influences; she would have developed differently, had she existed under different circumstances. Her “nature” is something empirically contingent and one can conceive of it as modified in many ways. But this variability is not unlimited; there are limits here. We find not only that the categorial structure of the psyche as such must be retained but also that within its individual Gestalt we strike an unchangeable core: the personal structure. I can think of Caesar in a village instead of Rome, and can think of him transferred into the twentieth century. Certainly, his historically settled individuality would then go through some changes, but just as surely he would remain Caesar.

61 F. Gundolf, Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1922), 1. See also 68, where Gundolf speaks of Shakespeare’s heroes as “symbols”: “All Greek characters and all of Shakespeare’s characters are symbols.” 62 Gundolf, Goethe, 17. 63 Ibid., 4. 64 Ibid., 5. 65 Ibid., 14. 66 Ibid., 15.

Three Caesars  467 The personal structure marks off a range of possibilities of variation within which the person’s real distinctiveness can be developed “even according to circumstances.”67 Although Stein does not explicitly disclose her source, the passage partially builds on the work of an ancient Greek historian, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. In Chapter 11, §3 of his account of Caesar’s life, Plutarch relates the following quite famous anecdote: We are told that, as he was crossing the Alps and passing by a barbarian village which had very few inhabitants and was a sorry sight, his companions asked with mirth and laughter, “Can it be that here too there are ambitious strifes for office, struggles for primacy, and mutual jealousies of powerful men?” Whereupon Caesar said to them in all seriousness, “I would rather be first here than second at Rome” (ἐγὼ μὲν ἐβουλόμην παρὰ τούτοις εἶναι μᾶλλον πρῶτος ἢ παρὰ Ῥωμαίοις δεύτερος).68

Stein’s excerpt is usually read as containing in nuce all the problematic elements of her theory of the person already listed in §2: the core would stand for some original dispositions that are a priori, not empirically acquired (CoE.1, CoE.2), and that do not and cannot develop (CoE.5). The question is whether this text could be better interpreted against the background of our discussions of Reinach, Hering, Mommsen, and Gundolf’s Gestalt as the direct sources of Stein’s line of thought. The thought experiment of imagining Caesar in a village or “transferred into the 20th century” is in line with Reinach’s claim that “the question about the essence” is to be kept distinct from that of its origin as well as with Hering’s exclusion of the ποῦ and πότε εἶναι categories from the essence. Of course, this does not mean that the essence that goes by the name of Caesar could exist or have existed at no matter what time and in no matter what place. For instance, Mommsen points out that “Caesar was a perfect human being” because he possessed “the essential peculiarity of the Roman nation,”69 and such perfection would never have been possible elsewhere. But as soon as Caesar, or any other person, has de facto appeared in a certain place and at a certain time (e.g., in the year 100 BC in the Subura in Rome or in a twentieth century small town south of Rome), the structure of his or her essence can be investigated regardless of its origin, ποῦ, and πότε εἶναι.70 And if I was right in establishing the equivalence Gestalt = individual idea = essence with a core, we can see here how Stein affirms that the core is to be found within an individual Gestalt. In sum, Caesar’s individual Gestalt means an essence whose unitary nature is determined by the presence of a core. In line with Hering, the core is described as unchangeable because it is what allows us to “understand” 67 Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung, 127–128; English trans., 109–110. 68 Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Alexander and Caesar, English trans. by. B. Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), Ch. 11, §2. 69 Mommsen, Römische Geschichte, 452. 70 For the sake of space, the problem of the knowability of CoE has been intentionally left aside in order to focus more systematically on the ontological problem concerning the structure of the essence itself. It is also worth pointing out that in the Introduction to Philosophy lectures, Stein will make a (new and) crucial distinction between the determination of one’s personality as a Gestalt detached from all historical connections (thus as a “closed unity of sense”), which does correspond to what we have been discussing here, and the study of the personality in its “becoming” (Stein, Einführung in die Philosophie, 229). However, it is a pity that such a distinction has not received more systematic attention.

468  Daniele De Santis the presence of the remaining “fibers” of the essence—hence the essence as a whole, including what follows from the essence without belonging to it. But if this is correct, one should refrain from interpreting the adjective unchangeable as meaning that, factually, the core could neither change nor undergo any transformation. Stein is not even asking such a question: she is not interested in the question about the core’s factual alterability or inalterability, just as Gundolf is not interested in the factual course of Goethe’s “life.” From the angle of the “intelligibility” of Caesar’s essence and individual Gestalt, the core is “unchangeable” to the extent that it is what allows us to understand the essence or Gestalt as a whole in a way that is in line with Hering’s talk of the a priori. If Hering was still unsure as to whether it is CoE that makes it possible for Caesar’s essence to be an object of science, Stein would have no doubts: it is the core that makes it possible for the Gestalt to become a unique object of scientific investigation (c.2.2). One more consequence follows from our reading. Stein’s claim that the core does not develop, or that its development (Entwicklung) is to be understood as a form of self-disclosure (Enthüllung) or unfolding (Entfaltung),71 is to be read on the basis of Gundolf’s account of the Gestalt’s “temporal development.” Stein is not hinting at an original or innate disposition (a factual source-point) from which the essence of the person would actually derive; rather, she is hinting at what for the sake of brevity could be labeled a principle of intelligibility: the essence as a whole is “understood” as the emanation of the same personal structure (always present to different degrees in all its expressions). 7 Conclusion If I am right, and if I have been able to identify the sources of her line of thought, Stein introduced and used CoE (later to be replaced by the expression “core of the person”) primarily and in the first place to make sense of the possibility of the (scientific) knowledge of individuals as such.72 This is confirmed by the lectures on Introduction to Philosophy (originally held in 1918). Here, in a way that refers back to the 1916 dissertation and accords with the “Conclusion” of the text of 1919, Stein speaks of “Caesar’s individuality” during the discussion of the “sciences of spirit” as sciences of subjectivity73 in sharp opposition to the sciences of nature. And it is also in these lectures that Stein introduces— quite likely for the first time—the problem of the principium individuationis, or better, the principia individuationis, is proper to things and persons respectively and upon the basis of their ontological constitutions.74 Since Stein (just like Reinach) admits and accepts the existence of a priori (scientific) investigations and knowledge of “individuals,” the structure of the essences of these individuals must be such that it can ground such investigations. It is only at this point—that is to say, once the existence of IW has been

71 Stein, Zum Problem der Einfühlung, 129; English trans., 111; Id., Einführung in die Philosophie, 134–135. 72 Primarily or in the first place does not mean exclusively: Stein’s ambition is that of developing a full-fledged theory of the person, and not simply of historical personalities. But the point for me is to recognize that the question about the structure of the person arises primarily from the need to clarify the ontological foundation of the Geisteswissenschaften. A confirmation of our thesis can be found in Stein, Endliches und ewiges, 84; English trans., 86. 73 Stein, Einführung in die Philosophie, 200–202. 74 Ibid., 201.

Three Caesars  469 acknowledged—that the question arises concerning its principle of individuation.75 And this is the topic to which she will increasingly devote her energy over the years, pushing her toward accomplishing the second displacement. 8  Coda on Ernst Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite At the outset of his famous 1963 essay “The Phenomenological Movement,” Hans-Georg Gadamer recognizes the affinity (im Geistigen eng verband) between the early stage of the phenomenological tradition and the historical-biographical studies (die biographische Einzelforschung) of the beginning of the twentieth century. Quite surprisingly, Gadamer mentions the book Goethe by Friedrich Gundolf and the equally—if not even more— famous Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite by Ernst Kantorowicz as two very paradigmatic examples of works in which “not the contingency of the conditions,” but rather “what is essential (das Wesenhafte) of such great spiritual Gestalten” is investigated.76 Although Gadamer does not and would not assert apertis verbis that Gundolf and Kantorowicz were influenced by the early phenomenological tradition, the use of the technical-sounding term das Wesenhafte to mean their proper object of investigation somehow seems to suggest a phenomenologically inspired approach upon the part of these two disciples of Stefan George. Now as far as Gundolf is concerned, our discussions of Stein presented in the previous section should already have convinced us that the influence (if we could use such an expression) went the other way around: it is Stein—namely, a phenomenologist—who seems to have resorted to Gundolf’s Gestalt in order better to present her conception of CoE. On the contrary, when it comes to Ernst Kantorowicz, the situation seems to be a little bit more complicated and less linear. Although a recent biography does not even mention “phenomenology” (no matter how loosely one might want to understand such a term),77 the debate surrounding Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite that erupted in German academia immediately after its release also revolved around the idea of phenomenology. The first edition of the book was published in 1927 by the same publisher (Georg Bondi in Berlin) and in the same book series (Blätter für die Kunst), founded by Stefan George, in which Gundolf’s works had also already appeared. The debate was initiated by Albert Brackmann’s critical review of the book published in 1929 in Historische Zeitschrift and came to a partial conclusion with the presentation Kantorowicz gave in Halle at a 1930 conference of German historians.78 And it was part of a larger debate on the allegedly presuppositionless nature of all scientific investigation (with a focus on the “humanities” or Geisteswissenschaften).79

75 We are about to complete a text on Stein on the principle of individuation in early phenomenology, Aquinas, and Scotus. It will be published in a book on Stein and medieval philosophy. 76 See H.-G. Gadamer, Die phänomenologische Bewegung, in Id., Neuere Philosophie I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1987), 106. 77 R. E. Lerner, Ernst Kantorowicz. Eine Biographie (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2020). 78 E. Kantorowicz, “Über Grenzen, Möglichkeiten und Aufgaben der Darstellung mittelalterlicher Geschichte,” Tumult. Schriften. zur Verkehrwissenschaft, 16, 1930, 5–10. In the following I will be quoting from the Italian edition: “Limiti, possibilità e compiti della storiografia medievale,” now published in E. Kantorowicz, Germania segreta, Italian trans. by G. Solla (Milano: Marietti, 2012), 93–100. 79 See E. Spranger, Der Sinn der Voraussetzungslosigkeit in den Geisteswissenschaften (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1929), 9.

470  Daniele De Santis In his 1930 reply to his critics, and in particular to those historians who were refusing to ascribe any “scientific” value and significance to the works produced by the George circle, Kantorowicz says that if there is any “dogma” here, it is “neither an aesthetic nor a phenomenological dogma”; rather, it is the dogma that truth can exist if and only if it is the expression of the fullness of life (Fiat veritas in vita).80 Why does Kantorowicz refuse to understand phenomenologically the dogma underlying his scientific investigation? What might phenomenology mean in such a context? The discussion around Kantorowicz’s book runs along two parallel lines, so to speak. On the one hand, it addresses the fundamental methodological assumptions and nature of his scientific mode of proceeding; on the other hand, its readers critically attacked the way in which Kantorowicz actually interpreted such and such an event of Friedrich’s life. Here we are interested in the former alone. While in his work Der Sinn der Voraussetzungslosigkeit in den Geisteswissenschaften the historian Eduard Spranger recognizes that what is at stake in recent German historiography is not simply the applications of certain “aesthetic dispositions” or the methodological assumption of the “mythical intuition” (eine mythische Schau), but rather the identification of the “living subject” (das Lebende) with the “knowing” one (das Erkennende),81 Albert Brackmann’s critical book review tackles Kantorowicz’s decision to reconstruct Friedrich’s life employing “the mythical vision of essence” (mythische Wesensschau).82 Friedrich’s life is reconstructed and presented by Kantorowicz in the way in which a poet would do it: The book’s fundamental mistake certainly lies in the fact that Kantorowicz has in the first place ‘intuited, sensed, and internally lived’ (zuerst geschaut, gefühlt, erlebt hat) the Kaiser, and he has then approached the sources based upon such a previously formed conception. The result is a work of imagination (imagination créatrice), and it has nothing to do with the “scientific” endeavor to ascertain the truth.83 Kantorowicz would directly reply to Brackmann in 1930 with a text entitled: “‘Mythenschau.’ Eine Erwiderung,”84 to which Brackmann would in turn respond with a Nachwort. In the latter, the author denounces the confusion between “historical facts” and “symbolic interpretation” as the main flaw affecting Kantorowicz’s method.85 Unlike Brackmann, the historian Friedrich Baethgen published a highly appreciative review of the book in 1930 in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung für Kritik der internationalen Wissenschaft. If in the debate between Kantorowicz himself and Brackmann the focus had been on the distinction (or lack thereof) between science and poetry, Baethgen admits that Kantorowicz employs a “unique” or also “peculiar historical mode of consideration (Betrachtungsweise)” that consists in “determining” a “spiritual type” (gestiger

80 Kantorowicz, Germania segreta, 99. 81 Spranger, Der Sinn der Voraussetzungslosigkeit, 7, 12. 82 A. Brackmann, “Kaiser Friedrich II in ‘mythischer Schau,’” Historische Zeitschrift, 140, 1929, 534–549, here: 534. 83 Ibid. 548. 84 E. Kantorowicz, “‘Mythenschau.’ Eine Erwiderung,” Historische Zeitschrift, 141, 1930, 457–471. 85 A. Brackmann, “Nachwort,” Historische Zeitschrift, 141, 1930, 472–478, here: 475.

Three Caesars  471 Typus). He does not deny the scientific character of Kantorowicz’s own methodology, the problem being instead to understand its peculiar nature (which in turn derives from the peculiar, that is to say, spiritual character of its subject matter). In a way that is very reminiscent of both Gundolf and Stein, Baethgen points out that Kantorowicz’s goal is not that of presenting “a historical biography in the usual sense”; rather, he wants “to grasp the Gestalt of the personality in its totality”: “The overall interpretation of the figure then rests upon a great fundamental conception whose structure is historicalphilosophical and has the general character of a worldview.” Then he also adds: “What is at stake is the application of a phenomenological mode of consideration—which is here for the first time applied to a subject matter (Thema) from medieval history.” Such a mode of consideration consists in “bringing to intuition” and “bringing to light” not only the “individual traits” of the personality but “the internal unity of the person.”87 As he further explains: “The Gestalt of the great personality is to be disclosed by returning to the essential traits (wesentliche Züge).”88 It is not possible to ascertain whether Baethgen is right in pinpointing the phenomenological origins of Kantorowicz’s method. Yet it is also undeniable that Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite does contain terms and expressions that would confirm—at least terminologically—Baethgen’s reading, for Kantorowicz speaks of Friedrich’s “essence and being” (Wesen und Sein).89 We do nevertheless know that in the end, the author of Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite would reject this interpretation. But what matters for us is that in a time in which the Grundlagenkrisis was shaking not only the Naturwissenschaften, but also, and no less dramatically, the Geisteswissenschaften,90 the possibility of determining and circumscribing the proper subject matter of “historiography” was sought not in what one would regard as the historical dimension of our human existence (whatever this might be), but rather in the peculiar character of certain essences (the unitary nature of personal essences). And phenomenology was regarded as the actual method expected to bring them to intuition, thereby also securing the very possibility for historiography to be a science investigating individual beings. 86

86 F. Baethgen, “Besprechung von Ernst Kantorowicz ‘Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite,’” Deutsche Literaturzeitung für Kritik der internationalen Wissenschaft, 51, 1930, 75–85; here: 76. 87 Baethgen, “Besprechung,” 78. 88 Ibid., 79. 89 E. Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (Berlin: Bondi, 1927), 96. 90 Spranger, Der Sinn der Voraussetzungslosigkeit, 9–10ff.

28 Continuity and infinity Koyré’s “Bemerkungen zu den Zenonischen Paradoxen” against the background of Aristotle’s critical reflections – Koyré’s contribution to a phenomenological hermeneutics Irene Breuer Abstract  Alexander Koyré’s “Bemerkungen zu den Zenonischen Paradoxen” was published in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in 1922. This chapter reveals Koyré’s original contribution to a phenomenological hermeneutics, which enables him both to develop a new methodology of historical enquiry and to introduce an innovative approach to Zeno’s paradoxes by taking up Descartes’ conception of motion. In view of the ongoing debate on Zeno’s paradoxes, this chapter provides a critical analysis of Koyré’s arguments by contrasting them and complementing them with both the accounts in the original sources Koyré refers to and a selection of modern interpretations. It claims that even though Koyré disregarded Zeno’s argument against plurality, this is nonetheless essential to the conception and treatment of the other four paradoxes of motion. Contra Koyré, these primarily concern the problem of continuity and only secondarily the problem of infinity and its relationship to the finite. To this end, this study first introduces Koyré’s approach in relation to phenomenology and discusses Koyré’s main contribution to this field. The central part deals with Zeno’s paradoxes and Koyré’s conception of motion. The final part examines Aristotle’s conception of continuity and infinity so as to shed light on Zeno’s paradoxes and it summarizes the main results of the inquiry. In summary, this chapter aims at disclosing Koyré’s original contribution to hermeneutics insofar as it bears on this topic and concludes that Zeno’s paradoxes are still open to further discussions. Keywords  Aristotle; Continuity; Infinity; Koyré; Motion; Plurality; Zeno 1 Introduction Alexander Koyré’s “Bemerkungen zu den Zenonischen Paradoxen” was published in the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung in 1922.1 While he 1 Koyré, Alexander 1922, “Bemerkungen zu den Zenonischen Paradoxen”, in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, fünfter Band, pp. 603–628. Reprinted in 2009, Anthologie der Realistischen Phänomenologie, Band I (Frankfurt/Ontos), J. Seifert, Ch. M. Gueye (Hrsg.), pp. 707–736. French transl. in Koyré, Alexandre 1971 [1961] Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris/Gallimard), pp. 9–35. Karl Schuhmann emphasizes that this is “the only Yearbook article ever to be dedicated not to Husserl but instead to someone else, namely to Reinach”. See Schuhmann, Karl 1990, “Husserl’s Yearbook” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50, Supplement, pp. 1–25, here, p. 13.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-31

Continuity and infinity  473 mainly adheres to Victor Brochard’s interpretation of Zeno,2 he also deals with the views of François Evellin,3 Georges Noël4 (all of which were first published in the first issue of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale in 1893), Henri Bergson,5 Bernard Bolzano6 and finally Georg Cantor.7 Given that the significance of Zeno’s paradoxes has been recognized by a multitude of scholars since Koyré’s study, this chapter aims to provide a critical commentary on his analyses by contrasting and complementing them both through making reference to the original sources Koyré draws upon and through considering a (by no means complete) selection of significant modern interpretations. This chapter will accordingly also deal with Zeno’s argument against plurality, Aristotle’s conception of the relationship between continuum and infinity, and his treatment of Zeno’s paradoxes. While both Brochard and Noël and, following in their wake, Koyré himself disregard the arguments about plurality or simply mention that “because Zeno denies plurality, he denies motion”8 and thus limit their analysis to the four paradoxes, I think that these arguments are closely related. For, contra Koyré, they primarily concern the problem of continuity and secondarily the problem of the infinite and its relationship to the finite. I further claim that Zeno’s argument concerning plurality is essential to the conception and treatment of the other four paradoxes on motion because the problem of the continuum is dealt with in this argument in its simplest and clearest way, such that it can be applied without alteration to the four other paradoxes. Since Zeno’s four arguments against motion are known to us from Aristotle’s discussion in Physics Z and Zeno’s argument against plurality in a fragment from Simplicius known to us as B3 (Diels) or No. 11 (Lee),9 I will contrast Koyré’s interpretation with those of Aristotle, Simplicius and some relevant modern scholars. This will shed further light on Koyré’s analysis and allow us to check whether his conclusions still hold when Zeno’s arguments on

2 Brochard, Victor 1893, “Les prétendues sophismes de Zénon d’Élée”, in Revue de métaphysique et de morale I, pp. 209–215. 3 Evellin, François 1893, “Le mouvement et les partisans des indivisibles”, in Revue de métaphysique et de morale I, pp. 382–395. 4 Noël, Georges 1893, “Le mouvement et les arguments de Zénon d’Élée”, in Revue de métaphysique et de morale I, pp. 108–125. 5 Bergson, Henri 1962, L’évolution créatrice, 102e. édition (Paris/PUF) and 1888, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris/PUF). 6 Bolzano, Bernard 1851, Paradoxien des Unendlichen, hrsg. aus dem Schriftlichen Nachlasse des Verfassers von Fr. Prihonsky (Leipzig/Reclam); Engl. transl. 1950, Paradoxes of the Infinite, ed. W. Stark, transl. Fr. Prihonsky, historical introd. D.A. Steele (London/Routledge). 7 Cantor, Georg 1962, Gesammelte Abhandlungen (reprographischer Nachdruck der Erstausgabe von 1932), E. Zermelo (Hrsg.) (Darmstadt/Hildesheim: Olms). 8 Brochard 1893, p. 219. Brochard does not treat Zenon’s arguments against plurality in any detail, though he claims that even though he establishes a logical link between plurality and non-being, he does not intend to unify them. Concerning plurality, he does not argue for an abstract plurality of the continuous, that is, the possible and infinite decomposition of the continuous in parts, since “if being as act is composed of parts (which the Eleatics deny), these parts must exist actually, whatever their nature is” (Brochard 1893, p. 211). 9 See Diels, Hermann, Kranz, Walther 1960, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Vol. 1, 12.ed. (Berlin/Wiedmannsche) and Lee, Henri D. 1967, Zeno of Elea (Cambridge 1936, repr. 1967 Amsterdam/A.M. Hakkert).

474  Irene Breuer plurality and Aristotle’s on the continuum are taken into consideration.10 I will show that Zeno’s arguments lose ground, even though this does not necessarily entail that Zeno’s initial hypothesis is thereby refuted. Zeno’s paradoxes are thus still open to further discussions. However, because of the significance of the innovations in philosophical theory Koyré introduces and because of the role they play in his “Bemerkungen”, this chapter will first introduce Koyré’s scholarly approach, his philosophical background at the time of the publication of his “Bemerkungen” and his commitment to phenomenology and will then briefly consider his later reflections on motion insofar as they help us to grasp the innovative potential of those contained in the “Bemerkungen”. This chapter reveals Koyré’s original contribution to a phenomenological hermeneutics, which enables him both to develop a new methodology of historical enquiry and to introduce an innovative approach to Zeno’s paradoxes by taking up Descartes’ conception of motion. We will see that Koyré can be considered a true innovator in phenomenology, who, in his inquiry into the consciousness-independent structures of reality and in his new articulation of past and modern theories, developed a particular hermeneutical-phenomenological methodology that, thanks to a change of perspective and the retrospective application of modern theories to past ones, allows for a renewed interpretation of the past and conversely for a recovery of past theories as relevant to present concerns. As will become clear, Koyré first applied this innovative methodology in his “Bemerkungen”, a procedure that enabled him not only to bring out the significance of an inquiry into paradoxes but to provide new insights. 1.1 Koyré’s scholarly approach, his philosophical background and the influence of phenomenology

Koyré’s scholarly approach has been well documented: He was born in Odessa in 1882 and died in Paris in 1964. As a young prisoner of war he read Husserl’s Logical Investigations, published in 1900–1901, in a 1909 Russian translation.11 This reading may have led him to study Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic, which had been sharply criticized by Gottlob Frege.12 Attracted by these readings,13 he came to Göttingen in 190814 to study philosophy and became a student of Husserl’s as well as of the Privatdozenten Adolf Reinach and Max Scheler. He was a fellow student of Dietrich von Hildebrand, Hedwig 10 See Breuer, Irene 2020, Ort, Raum, Unendlichkeit. Aristoteles und Husserl auf dem Weg zu einer lebensweltlichen Raumerfahrung (Orbis/Königshausen & Neumann), chapter 3: “Weisen der Unendlichkeit“, pp. 193–245. 11 Zambelli, Paola 1999a, “Alexandre Koyré. Alla scuola di Husserl a Gottinga”, in Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, Vol XIX, anno LXXVIII (LXXX), pp. 323–354, here p. 304. 12 Zambelli, 1999b, “Alexandre Koyré im ‘Mekka der Mathematik’”, in NTM International Journal of History and Ethics of Natural Sciences, Technology and Medicine 7, pp. 208–230; here p. 210; Zambelli 1999b, p. 304. 13 Zambelli (1999b, p. 209) quotes a letter dated 10 December 1953 in which Koyré recognizes the deep influence of Husserl and his positive approach to history, his interest in the objectivism of Greek and Medieval Thinking, the perceptual contents of an apparently pure conceptual dialectic and the historical – and ideal – constitution of ontological systems. “I have inherited from him the Platonic realism, which he rejected, the anti-psychologism and anti-relativism”. 14 He arrived in Paris in 1912 and not in 1910 as Jean Hering writes in his “In Memoriam”. See Hering, Jean 1965. “In Memoriam – Alexander Koyré”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 25/3, pp. 453–454, here p. 453.

Continuity and infinity  475 Martius (later Conrad-Martius), Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Hans Lipps, Winthrop Bell and others.15 Göttingen represented something of a Mecca for interdisciplinary work on mathematics and philosophy, following a model developed by Felix Klein, David Hilbert, Ernst Zermelo and Leonard Nelson.16 Koyré assisted in these courses. Koyré remained Husserl’s faithful disciple: He took his courses on logic in the winter semester 1908–09 and participated in Husserl’s other courses until 1912. Early in 1913, he departed for Paris and returned in the summer semester of 1913 to Göttingen. During the years 1910–1911, he prepared his dissertation on the “task of a logical theory of thinking”17 and participated in the discussions of the Philosophische Gesellschaft. It was during this period that Husserl launched the so-called transcendental turn of phenomenology that culminated in his Ideas I, published in April 1913 in the first volume of the Yearbook for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Neither Koyré nor other of Husserl’s disciples followed him in making this turn, which caused a “rift in the phenomenological movement”.18 Koyré’s first publication “Remarques sur les nombres de Bertrand Russell” in 1912 dealt with Russell’s Principles of Mathematics, which was published in 1903 and was a work closely related to his dissertation. Russell himself honored it by giving a response.19 In 1922 Koyré returned to this topic and published the extensive paper “Bemerkungen”. Adolf Reinach and Edmund Husserl alike shared an interested in these issues. Husserl himself had dealt with the problem of paradoxes in a manuscript that concluded with an essay on Russell’s logic.20 In order to understand the close relationship between mathematics and the history of science, one must consider the influence of Husserl, Reinach,21 David Hilbert (who suggested the topic of the paradoxes to Koyré22), Émile Meyerson and especially León Brunschvicg, his teacher at the École normale supérieure de Paris, whose book Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique was published in 1912 and which Koyré held in high esteem.23 15 Hering 1965, p. 453. 16 Zambelli 1999b, p. 210. 17 Zambelli 1999a, p. 306. 18 Schuhmann 1990, p. 7. Hering makes clear that they neither denied “the epistemological value of the second phenomenological reduction nor the importance of the analyses of consciousness (including the problems of constitution) as prima philosophia. That what they rejected was only the metaphysical thesis of the primacy of consciousness”, which claims that transcendence is dependent on consciousness. See Hering, J., 1959, “Edmund Husserl. Souvenirs et Reflexions”, in Edmund Husserl 1859–1959. Recueil commémoratif publié à l’occasion du centenaire de la naissance du philosophe (La Haye/Nijhoff), pp. 26–28, here p. 27. 19 Koyré, A. 1912, “Remarques sur les nombres de Bertrand Russell”, in Revue de métaphysique et de morale XX, pp. 722–724, Russell, Bertrand, 1912, “Réponse a M. Koyré”, in ibid., pp. 725–726. 20 Husserl, Edmund, Ms. A I 35 entitled “Menge: die Paradoxien, die Insolubilia (insbesondere auch die Paradoxien der Mengenlehre)”, dated 7.3.1912 (see Zambelli 1999a, p. 312), of which only pages 31–34 out of the 75 pages in total were published in Hua XXXII, Natur und Geist Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1927, M. Weiler (Hrsg.) (Dordrecht/Kluwer), 2002, see Beilage XII, pp. 210–216. 21 On Reinach’s “phenomenologial ontology” and its influence on the Göttinger circle see Jorland, Gérald 1994, “Koyré Phénoménologue?”, in L’avventura inttelletuale, ed. C. Vinti (Napoli/Ed. Scient. Italiane), pp. 105–126. 22 Zambelli 1999b, p. 211. 23 Ferrari, Massimo 2016, “Alexandre Koyré et Thomas Kuhn: L’histoire des sciences et les révolutions scientifiques”, in Verité sicentifique et vérité philosophique dans l’œuvre d’Alexandre Koyré. Suivi d’un inédit sur Galilée, ed. J. Seidengart (Paris/Les belles lettres), pp. 221–244; Parker, Rodney K.B. 2018, “The History between Koyré and Husserl”, in Hypotheses and Perspectives in the History and Philosophy of Science. Homage to Alexandre Koyré 1892–1964, ed. R. Pisano, J. Agassi, D. Drozdova (Cham/Springer),

476  Irene Breuer In March 1912 the 20-year-old Koyré presented his doctoral thesis entitled “Insolubilia. Eine logische Studie über die Grundlagen der Mengenlehre”24 to Husserl. Husserl rejected it. Even though, as both Paola Zambelli and Karl Schuhmann suggest,25 “internal tensions” at Göttingen may have motivated this rejection and brought about his departure for Paris, many scholars, including Jean Hering, Gérald Jorland, Rodney K.B. Parker and Zambelli herself,26 agree in emphasizing not only the deep impact that phenomenology and the members of the Göttingen Circle had on Koyré’s thinking but also that “he remained loyal to his master and his problematic”, which he dealt with in his logic courses given during Descartes’ centennial and at the New School for Social Research,27 where in 1941 he co-founded the French École Libre.28 Koyré remained an ongoing presence in the German philosophical milieu even during his stay in Paris, as Zambelli29 remarks. Three of his essays had been translated into German or published in German (“Bemerkungen zu den Zenonischen Paradoxen”, “Die Gotteslehre Jakob Boehmes”, which appeared in Husserl’s Jahrbuch,30 and one chapter of his doctoral thesis on Bohme, which was translated by Conrad-Martius), while his first monography on Descartes, Descartes und die Scholastik, was translated by ConradMartius and Edith Stein and published in Bonn in 1923,31 a year in which he also published an essay on the idea of God in St. Anselm’s philosophy.32 Moreover, from 1920 to 1925, he participated in many of the meetings of the Berzabern Circle, whose members were Theodor Conrad, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Alfred von Sybel, Hans Lipps, Edith

pp. 243–276; Zambelli 1999a, 1999b. See also Zambelli, P. 1995, “Alexandre Koyré versus Lucien LévyBruhl: From Collective Representations to Paradigms of Scientific Thought”, in Science in Context 8(2), pp. 531–555. 24 Koyré, A. 1999, “Insolubilia. Eine logische Studie über die Grundlage der Mengenlehre”, P. Zambelli (ed.) (original manuscript in Koyré’s archives in Paris), in Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana, Vol XIX, anno LXXVII (LXXX), pp. 323–354, published as annex to Zambelli 2009b; Schuhmann, K. 1997, “Alexandre Koyré”, in Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. L. Embree et al. Contributions to Phenomenology, Vol. 18, ed. J. Drummond (Dordrecht/Kluwer), pp. 391–393, here p. 392. 25 Zambelli, 1999b, p. 220; 1995, p. 534; Schuhmann 1997, p. 392. 26 Jorland, Gérald 1981, La science dans la philosophie : les recherches épistémologiques d’Alexandre Koyré (Paris/Gallimard), pp. 105–126. 27 Zambelli, P. 2016, “Entre-deux-guerres: Koyré en France, en Allemagne et dans d’autres contextes”, in Verité scientifique, op. cit., pp. 17–60, here p. 23. 28 Schuhmann 1997, p. 393. 29 Zambelli 2016, p. 55. 30 Koyré 1929a. “Die Gotteslehre Jakob Boehmes“, in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. E. Husserl zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet. Festschrift 7, pp. 225–281. 31 As Zambelli (2016, p. 55) rightly remarks, the authors of the translation were not mentioned in the original publication of 1923 (Koyré 1923a, Descartes und die Scholastik (Bonn/Cohen, Zambelli, 2016, p. 55). This omission was rectified in the new edition of this work in the Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe, vol. 25 published in 2005 and edited by Hanna-Barbara Gerl Falkovitz, who in her introduction recognizes this omission. Gerl-Falkovitz refers to Eberhard Avé-Lallemant, who suggests that Conrad-Martius might have been the anonymous author of the German translation of Koyré’s “Bemerkungen”, and reports that in her MunichNachlass there is an unfinished translation of Koyré’s book on Boehme (see Gerl-Falkovitz 2005, pp. vii–viii and Avé Lallement 2003, “Edith Stein und Hedwig Conrad-Martius – Begegnung in Leben und Werk”, in Edith Stein. Themen – Bezüge – Dokumente, ed. B. Beckmann, H.-B. Gerl-Falkovitz (Würzburg/Orbis), pp. 55–78, here p. 67). See Edith Stein mit Hedwig Conrad-Martius, 2005, Übersetzung von Alexandre Koyré. Descartes und die Scholastik. Einführung, Bearbeitung und Anmerkungen von H.-B. Gerl-Falkovitz, Edith Stein Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 25 (Freiburg/Herder). 32 Koyré, 1923b. L’idée de Dieu dans la philosophie de saint Anselme (Paris/Leroux).

Continuity and infinity  477 Stein, Jean Hering and Koyré himself. Koyré paid frequent visits to Husserl in Göttingen in 1913 and after the war in 1921, 1928, 1932 and 1934.34 In February 1929, he met Husserl when he came to Paris to lecture. At the end his presentation, Husserl publicly praised Étienne Gilson and Koyré for having made clear the presence of Scholastic thought in Descartes’ philosophy.35 After the Paris Lectures, Husserl attended Koyré’s defense of his dissertation, where Koyré presented two theses:36 “The Philosophy of Jacob Boehme” – the original French edition was published in 192337 and a part of it was translated by Conrad-Martius and appeared in the above-mentioned volume of Husserl’s Jahrbuch – and “Philosophy and the National Problem in Russia at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century”, published in 1929.38 There is certainly a wide gap between his essays on the paradoxes of “Epimenides”,39 Russell’s and Zeno’s, which Koyré had studied at Göttingen, and the religious and mystic themes (Boehme, St. Anselm), characteristic of his work at the École Practique des Hautes Études in Paris, where he taught from 1922 to 1940.40 Thanks to Zambelli, we know of Lucien Lévi-Bruhl’s influence on Koyré, who followed both his interpretation of Descartes, which claims that Cartesian physics is free of scholasticism, and his tending toward a sociological-anthropological standpoint, which was the object of lively debates in Paris at that time.41 After a short stay in Montpellier, where he took up a position in 1930, Koyré contributed to the introduction of phenomenology in France upon returning to Paris in 1931. He founded the journal Recherches Philosophiques, which, although it devoted a section to phenomenology, also aimed at widening its scope, following to a large degree the interests of the Bergzabern Circle.42 He also gave a talk at the first French conference on phenomenology held in 1932 in Juvisy and revised Levinas’ and Pfeiffer’s translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations.43 As early as 1935, Koyré began writing articles on Galileo and published “Galilée et l’expérience de Pise” in 1937, “La loi de la chute des corps. Galilée et Descartes” in 1937 and his Études galiléennes in 1939. After this he delved into Newton, publishing his Newtonian Studies in 1965. In 1957 he published his well-known From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, where he emphasized the twofold character – philosophical and scientific – of the historical “revolution”44 – a term that he had coined in his article “Galilée et Platon” of 1943 and 33

33 Parker 2018, p. 260. He refers to p. 110, n.4. in Zambelli, P. 2007, “Segreti di Gioventú. Koyré da SR a S.R.: Da Mikhailovsky a Rakovsky?”, in Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana 3(1), pp. 109–151. 34 Zambelli 1999a, p. 315. 35 Schuhmann 1997, p. 392. 36 See Parker 2018, p. 263. 37 Koyré, A. 1929b. La philosophie de Jacob Boehme. Étude sur les origines de la métaphysique allemande (Paris/Vrin). 38 Koyré, A. 1929c. La philosophie et le problème national en Russie au début du XIXe. Siècle (Paris/ Champion). 39 Koyré, A. 1947. Epimènide le menteur. Ensemble et catégories (Paris/Hermann). 40 Schuhmann 1997, p. 393, Zambelli 1995, p. 534. 41 Zambelli 1995, pp. 534–548. 42 Parker 2018, p. 263. 43 Zambelli 2016; p. 32, Parker 2018, p. 263; Yampolskaya, Anna 2018, “Koyré as a Historian of Religion and the New French Phenomenology”, in Hypotheses and Perspectives, op. cit., pp. 453–471, here p. 455. 44 Ferrari observes that Koyré employs the term “scientific revolution” in his Études galiléennes of 1939 where he stresses the philosophical import of an enquiry into the revolution of “scientific ideas”, and later again in 1943, in his article “Galileo and Plato” published in the Journal of the History of Ideas IV(4), pp. 400–428 (later translated into French and published in his Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique of 1966, pp.

478  Irene Breuer which was later taken up by Kuhn – and dealt with the problem of the geometrization of nature by Galileo, a topic that had also been dear to Husserl. 1.2 

Koyré’s hermeneutical-phenomenological methodology

Phenomenology was ever present in Koyré’s reflections: Even though Koyré rejected Husserl’s transcendental reduction, modern scholars argue that Koyré’s historical-­ epistemological works can be considered as a continuation of or response to Husserl.45 Hering even claims that Koyré’s work “follows Husserl in the study of consciousness and the critique of knowledge”, insofar as they concern both the “evolution of scientific thought” and the “ontological frameworks” we utilize to interpret the former. Hence, his writings can be understood as an “investigation into the ‘historical a priori’ […], which would help to illuminate the connections between the Greek world and the modern world”,46 as his study of the Greek paradoxes shows. Koyré broke with a presupposition of historical thinking, namely, that a philosophical system should be understood in the light of the historical influences and the influences of then prevalent paradigms on a thinker. Contrary to this, Koyré did not only inquire into the fundamental intuitions of the author, as Hering argues, but rather articulated “in a new way […] the actual (actuel) and non-actual (inactuel)”, showing in this way that the scientific past could not be indifferent to the “radical epistemological transformations in course”.47 In fact, I would instead claim that Koyré applied a retrospective-hermeneutical method that allows for the interpretation of past theories from a contemporary standpoint – in phenomenological terms, this implied a change of perspective. As Koyré argues in his paper “Perspectives sur l’histoire des sciences”, delivered at the Oxford conference48 in July 1961, [i]t is the historian who projects the interests and the scale of values of his time into history: and it is according to the ideas of his time – and his own – that he endeavors its reconstruction. It is precisely thanks to this that history renews itself and that nothing changes faster than the immutable past. Koyré thus shows the relevance of past theories for present concerns, not by “a rewriting process”49 that would run the risk of blurring their respective achievements, but by clearly distinguishing between the original statements50 and their new interpretation, as his writings and in particular his article on the paradoxes show. 166–195). Ferrari remarks that it was thanks to this publication that the term was taken up by the scientific community in the United States and became a “canonical expression for historians of science” (in particular, for Thomas S. Kuhn in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962). See Ferrari, M. 2018, “Koyré, Cassirer and the History of Science”, in Hypotheses and Perspectives, op. cit., pp. 157–176, here p. 160. 45 Parker 2018, p. 261; Hering, J. 1968 [1950], “Phenomenology in France”, in Philosophical thought in France and the United States, M. Farber (ed.) (Albany/The Research Foundation of State Univ. of New York), pp. 67–86, here p. 71. 46 Hering, 1968 [1950], p. 71. 47 Salomon, Marlon 2018, “Alexandre Koyré: History and Actuality”, in Hypotheses and Perspectives, op. cit., pp. 367–390, here p. 369–370. 48 Koyré, A. 1973a [1966], Études d’histoire de la pensée scientifique (Paris/Gallimard), here p. 392. 49 Salomon 2018, p. 371. 50 Koyré stresses the significance of the original sources: “For a history of scientific thought, provided, of course, that it is not treated as a catalogue of errors or of achievements, but as the entrancing, instructive history of the efforts of the human mind in its search for truth, nothing can take the place of original sources and texts. They alone enable us to catch the spiritual and intellectual atmosphere of the period under study,

Continuity and infinity  479 In my view, the articulation of past and present concerns and not just, as Koyré explicitly claims, of the realms of theology, metaphysics and physics is to be found in “the realm of ideas, the axiomatic evidences” that Koyré speaks of in a 1950 article entitled “Philosophie et théories scientifiques”51, i.e., in the “ontological” principles that are “apriori but not pure, insofar as they have to be validated by experience”.52 This means that although “the science of our time, like that of the Greeks, is essentially theoria”,53 which “precedes experience”54 and “has an immanent history”55 – for insofar as theories are independent of social contexts, they have to be analyzed by their own intrinsic conceptual instruments56 – they also have to be both testified to by empirical evidence and grasped through an “ontological intuition”.57 It is theory and in particular mathematical theory58 that guides and rules experience, the “world of more or less”.59 This belief in the foundational role of mathematics resided in mathematical realism: [T]he philosophical attitude that, ultimately, proves to be right, is not that of the positivist or pragmatic empiricism, but on the contrary, that of mathematical realism. In short, it is not the attitude of Bacon or Comte, but of Descartes, Galileo and Plato.60 From a purely epistemological standpoint, “mathematics means Platonism (mathématique signifie platonisme)”,61 since for Koyré the conception of mathematical physics is based on Plato: “It is all about knowing what role mathematics plays in the constitution of the sciences of the real”, says Koyré in his Études Galiléennes.62 This implies a new

they alone enable us to appreciate at their true value the motives and incentives which guided and impelled the authors of them”. See Koyré, A., 1973b, The Astronomical Revolution. Copernicus – Kepler – Borelli, transl. R.E.W. Madison (London/Meuthen), p. 10. 51 Koyré, A. 1971 [1961], Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris/Gallimard), here p. 256. 52 Jorland, G. 2016, “Unité de la pensée et intuition ontologique” in Verité scientifique, op. cit., pp. 61–73, here p. 63. 53 Koyré 1973a [1966], p. 399. 54 Koyré, A. 1966 [1939], Études galiléennes (Paris/Hermann), here p. 283. 55 Koyré 1973a [1966], p. 399. 56 Ferrari 2018, p. 172, Condé, Mauro L. 2018, “‘The Philosophers and the Machine’: Philosophy of Mathematics and History of Science in Alexandre Koyré”, in Hypotheses and Perspectives, op. cit., pp. 43–62, here p. 47. 57 Jorland 2016, p. 63. 58 Thomas Kuhn (1970b, 67) deplores that Koyré failed to consider the role played by observation and experiment in Galileo’s arguments. Koyré also disregarded arguments based on social issues. This, Kuhn concludes, might have been a “prerequisite to the historiographical transformation that Koyré’s work induced, but it is a limitation nonetheless” (1970b, 69). Nevertheless, in the enlarged second edition of his The Structure of Scientific Revolution (1970a, 3), Kuhn recognizes Koyré’s “attempt to display the historical integrity of that science in its own time”, an attempt that transforms science, such that it “does not seem altogether the same enterprise as the one discussed by writers in the older historiographical tradition”. See Kuhn, Thomas S. 1970b, “Alexandre Koyré & the History of Science. On an Intellectual Revolution” in Encounter 34. XXXIV, pp. 67–69 and 1970a [1962], The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago/The Univ. of Chicago). 59 Koyré 1971 [1961], pp. 341–362. 60 Ibid., p. 267, see Condé 2018, p. 50; Ferrari 2018, p. 161 and Tomašič, who considers Koyré’s position as “structuralist”, as he “asserted the real status of the mathematical structures and the autonomy of the mathematical language”. See Tomašič, Samo 2018, “Das unmögliche Reale der Mathematik: Koyré und Lacan”, in Die Wirklichkeit des Realismus, hrsg. V. Thanner, J. Vogl, D. Walzer (Leiden/Brill), pp. 277–292, here p. 278. 61 Koyré 1973a [1966], p. 191, 1939, see 1966 [1939], p. 279. 62 Koyré 1966 [1939], p. 279.

480  Irene Breuer conception of matter, which is no longer seen as that which bears becoming and quality in the Aristotelian sense but as an unchangeable and eternal being.63 Koyré emphasized the “idealism”64 behind his position and stressed that “it is necessary to find the true foundations of a real science, a science of the real”, a science that does not depend on the real existence in nature of the objects it studies.65 As early as 1937, when he published “Galilée et l’expérience de Pise” and “Galilée et Descartes”,66 which were subsequently included in his Études Galiléennes of 1939, Koyré argued that Descartes and Galileo had introduced a new view of and meaning for nature and science. This was not only a technical shift but “an epistemological one”, as Massimo Ferrari claims,67 which required an abandonment of the natural attitude and the assumption, in Husserl’s terms, of the theoretical attitude, in other words, “the divorce between the world of life and the world of science”.68 He retains this stance later on, as shown by his 1950 “The Significance of the Newtonian Synthesis”, reprinted in his Newtonian Studies of 1965. The substitution of the “world of qualities and sense perception” and its replacement by the “universe of precision, of exact measures, of strict determination” are thus the deepest “meaning of scientific inquiry”.69 Far from denouncing, like Husserl in the Crisis, the process of idealization70 that science carries out, Koyré holds that Platonic realism is necessary to find the laws of thought that allow us to conceptualize the real and arrive at “a purely formal truth, the intrinsic truth of reasoning and the mathematical deduction”.71 Hence, central to this framework is the mathematization of nature.72 Koyré seems here to agree with Conrad-Martius, who made inquiry into the “real reality”73 of the world one of her main research topics.74 63 Ibid., p. 283. 64 Koyré 1973a [1966], p. 399. 65 Ibid., p. 193. 66 See an index of Koyré’s main publications in Mélanges Alexandre Koyré, publiés à l’occasion de son ­soixante-dixième anniversaire, 1964: vol. I, L’aventure de la science, introduction de I.B. Cohen, R. Taton, vol. II, L’aventure de l’esprit, introduction de F. Braudel, Histoire de la Pensée, Sorbonne, Vol. XII and XIII (Paris/Hermann). 67 Ferrari 2018, p. 267. 68 Stoffel, Jean-François 2018, “Alexandre Koyré and the Traditional Interpretation of the Anthropological Consequences of the Copernican Revolution”, in Hypotheses and Perspectives, op. cit., pp. 421–452, here p. 431. 69 Koyré 1965, pp. 4–5. 70 See Breuer, I. 2019b, “Ideation und Idealisierung: Die mathematische Exaktheit der Idealbegriffe und ihre Rolle im Konstitutionsprozess bei Husserl”, in META: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy XI(2), pp. 547–568. 71 Koyré 1973a [1966], p. 193. 72 Ferrari (2018, p. 266) claims that even though Koyré agreed to Husserl’s interpretation of Galileo in the Crisis, he was not influenced by him. On the contrary, Reinhold N. Schmid has shown that Koyré’s last visit to Husserl was in July of 1932, that is, three years before Koyré’s work on Galileo would appear. To this, we may add, as Walter Biemel explains in his introduction to the Crisis, that Husserl wrote the main manuscript between 1935 and 1936, such that an interchange between Husserl and Koyré may well have taken place. See Biemel, Walter 1954, “Einleitung des Herausgebers” in Husserl, E., Hua VI, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, W. Biemel (Hrsg.) (Den Haag/Nijhoff), pp. xiii–xxii, here p. xiii. 73 See Breuer, I. 2022, “Conrad-Martius: The ‘Real-Reality’ of the World”, in Journal of the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists I, Band/Ausgabe: Band 1: Ausgabe 2 (Leiden/Brill), pp. 203–223. https://doi. org/10.1163/2666318X-bja00008 74 It is important to remark that both of Koyré’s main claims, that is, the apriori character of science and its non-experimental character, have been questioned by yet another historiographic turn, which is twofold: the experimental turn in the 1970s and the sociological turn in the 1990s, as Jorland rightly observes. See

Continuity and infinity  481 This shift required a “mutation” in human thought that involved a “deep intellectual transformation”75 encompassing two interrelated phenomena: the “dissolution of the cosmos” – or its “destruction”, as he later claims76 – and “the geometrization of space”,77 i.e., the substitution for the conception of the world as a finite and well-ordered whole, […] by that of an indefinite or even infinite universe […] unified by the identity of its ultimate and basic components and laws, and the replacement of the Aristotelian conception of space [as topos] by […] that of Euclidean geometry – an essentially infinite and homogeneous extension, which is now considered as “real”.78 This in turn implies that all considerations based upon “value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim” disappear from scientific thought, that is, “the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts”. Because those former concepts are henceforth regarded as merely subjective, they cannot have a place in the new ontology as inaugurated by Descartes.79 But it was More “who succeeded in grasping the fundamental principle of the new ontology, the infinitization of space”,80 while Descartes is credited with having asserted the “infinitization of the material world”,81 which process culminated in the “infinitization of the universe”.82 These expressions recall not only those of Husserl’s Crisis when he writes of the geometrization of nature and the process of idealization carried out by science but also Husserl’s characterization of a “regional ontology” as a “regional eidetic science” that concerns the “eidetic science of any physical Nature in general”, i.e., an “ontology of Nature”.83 As we will later see, this is a recurrent theme in Koyré’s writings and it can be found as early as his dissertation entitled “Insolubilia. Eine logische Studie über die Grundlagen der Mengenlehre”, published in the original German by Zambelli in the Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana in 199984 together with a detailed analysis of Koyré’s philosophical development, to which we have already referred. In his dissertation, Koyré first emphasizes the relevance of Cantor’s Mannigfaltigkeitslehre for modern logic, since it concerns a logical problem that recalls the “Insolubilia Jorland, G. 2018, “The Posterity of Alexandre Koyré’s Galileo Studies”, in Hypotheses and Perspectives, op. cit., pp. 205–222, here p. 207. 75 Koyré 1966 [1939], pp. 11–12. 76 Koyré 1957, p. vii. 77 Koyré 1966 [1939], p. 15. 78 Koyré 1957, vii, see Drozdova, Daria 2018, “Alexandre Koyré’s Essential Features of the Scientific Revolution”, in Hypotheses and Perspectives, op. cit., pp. 142–156. 79 Koyré 1957, p. 146, p. 275. 80 Ibid., p. 126. 81 Ibid., p. 126. 82 Ibid., p. 2. Antonino Drago asserts that Koyré “was the first to suggest exploiting the notion of infinity as a basic interpretative category of science history”. See Drago, Antonino 2018, “Koyré’s Revolutionary Role in the Historiography of Science”, in Hypotheses and Perspectives, op. cit., pp. 123–142, here p. 125. 83 Husserl, E., Hua III/1, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Buch I (Den Haag/Nijhoff) 1976, pp. 23–24, Engl. transl.: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, F. Kersten (transl.) (The Hague/Nijhoff) 1982, pp. 18–19; see Breuer, I. 2019a, “Husserl und die kritische Rehabilitierung der aristotelischen Ontologie”, in Husserl Studies 35, pp. 203–224. 84 Koyré 1999, Insolubilia. “Eine logische Studie über die Grundlage der Mengenlehre”, P. Zambelli (ed.) (original manuscript in Koyré’s archives in Paris), in Giornale Critico della Filosofia Italiana XIX, anno LXXVIII (LXXX), pp. 323–354.

482  Irene Breuer of scholasticism, to the paradoxes of Anthistenes and his school” and to “those of Epimenides”,85 and in general to the paradoxes posited by the “Greek logic“,86 a topic Koyré does not further develop here. What is at stake in the paradoxes is that from true, or at least not-impossible, premises, one deduces consequences that are contradictory of the former and of each other and that moreover lead to a regressus ad infinitum.87 “Hence, it is logic itself that is contradictory” such that we are forced into a radical skepticism.88 Koyré observes that this problem was recognized not only by the Greeks but also by Savonarola, Occam, and later Poincaré, Russell and Cantor. He concludes after a detailed analysis that no satisfying solution has yet been found despite the great achievements in logic by Cantor, Peano and Russell on the one hand and by Leibniz’ “mathesis universalis” on the other – here Koyré makes reference to Husserl’s lecture “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” – thus engendering a crisis of logic.89 In this connection, Koyré also delves into the paradoxes put forward by the Sophist Ewathlus, the medieval paradox of the crocodile and that of Epimenides the liar. After examining their logical implications and structures he concludes that they share a common feature, namely the differentiation between contradictory sense and non-sense. He remarks that he employs the word “nonsense” in the same sense as Husserl, namely as a “meaning complex which is no complex meaning”, a topic Husserl dealt with in his Logical Investigations.90 Koyré also analyzes Cantor’s and Zermelo’s set theories and concludes that contrary to Cantor’s, Zermelo’s set theory can neither be “a general set theory, nor a formal ontology as counterpart of formal logic, that is, Mathesis Universalis”. As such, it cannot ground mathematics if “mathematics should be [...]. an analytical science essentially related to logic”.91 Further developments aside, what is relevant to our present topic here – Zeno’s paradoxes – is that Koyré treats the problem of plurality here. In general terms, Koyré departs

85 Koyré 1999, p. 324. 86 Ibid., p. 324. 87 Ibid., p. 325. 88 Ibid., p. 325. 89 Ibid., pp. 325–326. As Zambelli (1999b, p. 326) remarks, this expression is found in Husserl’s “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft”, which was first published in Logos I in 1911 and later in Hua XXV, Aufsätze und Vorträge (1911–1921), ed. Th. Nenon, H.R. Sepp (Dordrecht/Nijhoff) 1987, pp. 3–62. In p. 13 Husserl distinguishes between “epistemic theory and pure logic in the sense of a pure mathesis universalis”. See Husserl 2002, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”, in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 2, transl. M. Brainard, pp. 249–295. 90 Koyré 1999b, p. 330, p. 338, see Husserl, Hua XVIII, Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band. Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, H. Holenstein (Hrsg.) (den Haag/Nijhoff) 1975, p. 120 (A/B 112); see Logical Investigations. Prolegomena to Pure Logic, D. Moran (ed.), transl. J.N. Finlay (London/Routledge) 2001, chapter 32, “The ideal conditions for the possibility of a theory as such. The strict concept of skepticism”, where Husserl distinguishes between “false, nonsensical, logically and noetically absurd, and finally skeptical theories” and adds that “the last cover all theories whose theses either plainly say, or analytically imply, that the logical or noetic conditions for the possibility of any theory are false”. See also Husserl, Hua XIX/1, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Erster Teil. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, U. Panzer (Hrsg.) (The Hague/Nijhoff) 1984, chapter IV: “Der Unterschied der selbständigen und unselbständigen Bedeutung und die Idee der reinen Grammatik”, pp. 301–351. Engl. transl.: Logical Investigations Vol. II, ed. D. Moran, transl. J.N. Findlay (London/Routledge) 2001, chapter IV: “The Distinction between Independent and Non-Independent Meanings and the Idea of Pure Grammar”, pp. 47–76. 91 Koyré 1999b, p. 343. Here again, there is an explicit reference to Husserl’s enquiries into “Reine Grammatik” and to his Logik-Kolleg of 1910–11. See Husserl, Hua XIX/1, pp. 301–351.

Continuity and infinity  483 from the “simple form ARA” (“A relation A”, for example, “Socrates and Socrates”) in order to prove that it is nonsensical. “ARA claims to be a plural form”, but, Koyré adds, no plurality is possible where identity prevails, since every plurality presupposes a multiplicity of different elements. Hence, we cannot imply that where there is nothing separate, there is a multiplicity. It is obvious that unity and plurality are incompatible and that we can conceive of an object one time and again, but we cannot conceive of the same object twice in one act. Something and something different – that is a plural form; something and the same should be simultaneously singular and plural, and therefore it is no unity of meaning at all. A and A is not possible neither as objectivity nor as meaning – which is equivalent in our case. Koyré finds it surprising that although this feature is obvious, it has remained unnoticed. “Even more curious” is the fact that despite “having long been recognized that every general concept presupposes the multiplicity of elements”, this multiplicity was applied “to the relation of the objects to themselves, when it is obvious that these imply such a general concept”.92 In his last concluding remarks, Koyré refers to Savonarola, who Bolzano had already been mentioned in his Wissenschaftslehre. “He says: ‘Insolubilia non possunt verum aut falsum esse – ergo non sunt propositiones’. No, reversely: ‘Insolubilia non sunt propositiones, ergo non posunt verum aut falsum esse’!”93 It is not widely known that Koyré concerned himself with questions of logic and paradoxes, perhaps due to the shadow that his later extraordinary contributions to the history of scientific thought may have cast on the former. In fact, Koyré retained a lively interest in these topics. According to Zambelli, he returned to them not only in his “Bemerkungen” but also in his aforementioned Epimènide le menteur, which he worked on from 1940 to 1942, and in his “La Philosophie”, a conversation with J. Cavaillés, both of which were published in 1947. Moreover, as director of Recherches philosophiques, Koyré published an article on Paul Lévy’s essay on paradoxes and dealt with Chaïm Perelman’s lecture at the Congrès Descartes “Les Paradoxes de la logique”, thus sparking renewed discussion of these topics.94 However, he does not pursue the topics dealt with in his doctoral thesis in his “Bemerkungen”, except for a brief chapter on Cantor’s set theory. In view of his brief incursion into the topics of plurality and unity, we might have expected him to also inquire into Zeno’s arguments on plurality, which in my view are indispensable to illuminating Zeno’s paradoxes on motion. However, despite this short-

92 Koyré 1999b, p. 336. 93 Ibid., p. 337. To Koyré’s reflections we may add that Plato in his Parmenides, as Cornford explains, clearly distinguished between an internal difference and an external one: While internal difference is “in” things and comprises both a numerical difference and a conceptual one – “any one thing is the same with itself and this is true both numerically and conceptually: any one thing is one and the same thing” – external difference concerns the difference between one thing and another, such that there are many senses in which we can talk about “differences” and “sameness” and their mutual relationship, without this necessarily implying a contradiction or nonsense. See Cornford, Francis M.D. 1939, Plato and Parmenides (London/ Kegan Paul), here p. 161. 94 Zambelli 1999a, p. 216. See Koyré, A. 1947, “La Philosophie” (a conversation with J. Cavaillés, Sur la logique et la théorie de la science) (Paris/PUF) and 1947, Transfini et continu (Paris/Hermann), published in Europe XXV(21), pp. 122–128; as quoted in Zambelli. As regards Lévi, Zambelli might be referring to an article contained in Théorie de l’addition des variables aléatoires (Paris/Gauthier-Villars), which was published in 1937.

484  Irene Breuer coming, Koyré’s “Bemerkungen” deserve significant credit for having introduced a new way of interpreting the history of science where philosophy plays an “essential role”.95 As such, his method is certainly phenomenological-hermeneutical and an undeniable innovation in the history of science, as his work on Zeno’s paradoxes shows for the first time. 1.3  Zeno’s Paradoxes

Let us begin our reflections by providing a brief introduction to the history of the interpretation of Zeno. As William K.C. Guthrie explains, most of Zeno’s arguments are directed against the ideas of plurality and motion. It seems that he, as a faithful disciple of Parmenides, thought that reality was one, indivisible and motionless. This interpretation was commonly accepted until Paul Tannery in the nineteenth century asserted that his real aim was to refute a Pythagorean thesis that claims that solid bodies, surfaces and lines are pluralities of points and to do so by arguing that the possibility of motion was incompatible with plurality.96 In England, Francis M.D. Cornford97 and Henri D.P. Lee98 endorsed Tannery’s view, arguing that the four arguments on motion make use of a contradiction inherent in the Pythagorean idea of extension (extension is both continuous and infinitely divisible and discontinuous and composed of indivisibles) so as to prove the impossibility of motion. Cornford in particular credits the Pythagoreans with failing to distinguish physical bodies from geometrical solids and with holding that these solids are both infinitely divisible and divisible into atomic parts.99 According to Guthrie, Tannery was followed by Brochard and Noël,100 by the Germans Helmut Hasse and Heinrich Scholz,101 and, as we may add, by Koyré himself with respect to the interpretation of the paradoxes and not the Pythagorean thesis itself. Gwilym E.L. Owen definitively refutes the anti-Pythagorean interpretation by making clear that Zeno deals with them separately, distinguishing between the addition of numbers and the addition of magnitudes.102 However, the matter is by no means settled: In recent decades many scholars have stressed the serious importance of Zeno’s paradoxes. A non-exhaustive list of relevant studies on particular issues includes those of Hermann Fränkel,103 G.E.L. Owen,104 Gregory Vlastos105 (now compiled in a volume edited by R.E. Allen & D.J. Furley), William D. Ross  95 Ferrari 2018, p. 158, quotes from Cohen, Hermann 1994, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago/The Univ. of Chicago Press), p. 84.  96 Guthrie, William C. 1965, A History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. VI (Cambridge/Cambridge Univ. Press), pp. 81–84; see Tannery, Paul 1885, “Le concept scientifique du continu. Zénon d’Élée et Georg Cantor”, in Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, T. 20, pp. 385–410.  97 See Cornford 1939, p. 56; Owen, Gwilym E.L. 1975, “Zeno and the Mathematicians”, in Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, Vol. II, Eleatics and Pluralists, R.E. Allen, D. J. Furley (eds.) (London/Routledge), pp. 143–165.  98 Lee 1967, p. 105.  99 Cornford 1939, p. 59. 100 Guthrie 1965, p. 85. 101 Hasse, Hermann, Scholz, Heinrich 1928, “Die Grundlagenkrisis der griechischen Mathematik”, in Kant Studien 33 (1–2), pp. 4–34. 102 Owen 1975, p. 154. 103 Fränkel, Hermann 1975, “Zeno of Elea’s Attacks on Plurality”, in Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, Vol. II, Eleatics and Pluralists, R.E. Allen, D. J. Furley (eds.) (London/Routledge), pp. 102–142, first published in 1936. 104 Owen 1975. 105 Vlastos, Gregory 1975a, “A Note on Zeno’s Arrow”, in Studies in Presocratic Philosophy, Vol. II, Eleatics and Pluralists, R.E. Allen, D. J. Furley (eds.) (London/Routledge 1975), pp. 184–200; and 1975b, “Zeno’s Race Course”, in the same volume, pp. 201–220.

Continuity and infinity  485 on Aristotle’s Physics, Eduard Zeller, David J. Furley, Jaakko Hintikka109 and recently Gerhard Köhler,110 while comprehensive studies include those of Geoffrey S. Kirk and John R. Raven,111 William K. Guthrie,112 Jonathan Barnes,113 N. Booth114 and Eugen Fink,115 whose work has the merit of providing a phenomenological/Heideggerian interpretation of Zeno’s paradoxes. While the “classical” compilation of fragments and quotations can be found in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz and Henri D.P. Lee,116 who also provides an extensive commentary,117 the mathematical aspects of the problems involved – whose detailed follow-up is left here to specialists in the area – are dealt with by Bertrand Russell,118 Thomas Heath,119 Oskar Becker120 and Árpád Szabó.121 These modern scholars agree concerning the continuing relevance of Zeno’s paradoxes. Their investigations and the multiplicity of interpretations testify to the difficulty in arriving at an ultimate and definitive solution to these paradoxes. 106

107

108

2  A Critical Commentary on Koyré’s “Bemerkungen”122 As was already mentioned, scholars since Greek antiquity have constantly revisited these paradoxes. However, Koyré employs a particular hermeneutical methodology that aims at shedding new light on ancient concerns. In contrast to his doctoral thesis, he does not address these issues from the perspective of mathematical logic, but instead inquires into the way modern thinkers have conceived of these paradoxes.123 Koyré discusses, together

106 Aristotle’s Physics 1939, a rev. text with introd. and comm. by William D. Ross (Oxford/Clarendon). 107 Zeller, Eduard 1963, Die Philosophie der Griechen Bd. II, 2 (Darmstadt/WBD). 108 Furley, David J. 1982, “The Greek Commentators’ Treatment of Aristotle’s Theory of the Continuous”, in Infinity and Continuity in Ancient and Medieval Thought, N. Kretzman (ed.) (Ithaca/Cornell), pp. 17–36; and 1974, “Zeno and Indivisible Magnitudes”, in The Pre-Socratics. A Collection of Critical Essays, A.P.D. Mourelatos (ed.) (New York/Anchor), pp. 353–367. 109 Hintikka, Jaakko 1966, “Aristotelian Infinity”, in The Philosophical Review LXXV, pp. 197–218. 110 Köhler, Gerhard 2014, Zenon Von Elea. Studien zu den ‘Argumenten gegen die Vielheit’ und zum sogenannten ‘Arguments des Orts’ (Berlin/Gruyter). 111 Kirk, Geoffrey St., Raven, John R. 1957, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge/Cambridge). 112 Guthrie 1965. 113 Barnes, Jonathan 1982, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd rev. ed. (London/Routledge). 114 Booth, N. 1957, “Zeno’s Paradoxes”, in The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 77(2), pp. 187–201. 115 Fink, Eugen 1957, Nachdenkliches zur Ontologischen Frühgeschichte von Raum – Zeit – Bewegung (Den Haag/Nijhoff), see chapters 9–11, pp. 104–142. Fink claims that “Zenon finds the way to the true thinking of being (den Weg zum wahren Denken des Seins) in the demise of doxic conceptions of being (im Untergang der Seinsvorstellungen der Doxa)” (1957, p. 112). Zeno tried to show that movements “are not existent (nicht seiend)” through the “sheer power of pure thinking” (1957, p. 116). 116 Diels and Kranz 1966; Lee 1967. 117 See Lee 1967, pp. 65–105. 118 Russel, Bertrand 1903, Principles of Mathematics (London/Allen & Unwin). 119 Heath, Thomas 1981, A History of Greek Mathematics, Vol. I (Clarendon 1921, repr. 1981 Mineola/ Dover). 120 Becker, Oskar 1927, “Mathematische Existenz”, in Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, Bd. 8 (Halle/Niemeyer), pp. 439–809. 121 Szabó, Árpád 1969, Anfänge der griechischen Mathematik (Wien/Oldenbourg). 122 I will follow the structure of Koyré’s “Bemerkungen” here and complement his analyses whenever necessary. The section is my addition wherever there is no encompassing indication of the section corresponding to Koyré’s analyses. 123 Condé 2018, p. 47.

486  Irene Breuer with the text, his methodological and philosophical theses, which can be summarized in five points. He claims: 1 that the paradoxes concern a “formal” problem insofar as they contain “a formal error in the argumentation” and not a “material” one that could be solved by an “immanent analysis of motion”,124 2 that Descartes ingeniously “not only established the technical legitimacy of ‘infinity’ and demonstrated the impossibility of substituting it for the merely indeterminate, but also made it the fundamental basis of the doctrine of the finite”,125 3 that the paradoxes can be solved on the grounds of the hypothesis of finitude or of infinitude, rather by an analysis of continuity,126 4 that the paradoxes involve fundamental conceptions of geometry and arithmetic that belong to the realm of mathematics, which represents “the very foundation” of infinity, the core issue of the paradoxes, 5 that “motion is a ‘state’ of the body analogous to the state of rest”, such that a “body in motion must necessarily remain in this state and move on into infinity as long as it is not stopped by some positive cause”.127 The above-mentioned features allow for the articulation of a formal system that is not based on the existence or experience of motion but rather on the structural “correlation between motion and rest”,128 a structure inherent to a bodily state. In the wake of Descartes, he conceives of these states as ontological correlates, such that the “real problems and difficulties are ontological in nature, they result from the constitution of being itself”.129 This means that the epistemological standpoint grounds the ontological one: It is mathematical theory that determines the formal structures that on their turn precede and determine the ontological structures of natural reality. As Koyré’s later enquiries into Galileo and Newton show, reality is explained by what is considered as possible or impossible, such that being conceivable is synonymous with being realizable. Koyré saw the core of the problem raised by Zeno in its relation to “time, space and motion only insofar as the moments of infinity and continuity are implied in them”, such that “it is by no means peculiar to motion alone”.130 The conception of motion and rest as “states” entails the claim that motion is unlimited in space and has no telos to be attained in time but has merely a direction that it follows such that, if unimpeded by obstacles, it would continue infinitely. Hence Koyré conceives of unhindered motion as the particular progression of the body within itself and toward itself. This is one of the main pillars that underlie his interpretation of the paradoxes and, as we shall see, of his later reflections on Galileo and Newton. In conclusion, Koyré claims that the problem of the paradoxes does not have a “merely phoronomic meaning and a merely phoronomic value” but rather has a “far greater applicability”131 – in geometry and arithmetic – and

124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131

Koyré 1922, p. 608. Ibid., p. 619. Ibid., p. 605. Ibid., p. 612. Ibid., p. 626. Ibid., p. 624. Ibid., p. 603. Ibid., p. 615.

Continuity and infinity  487 belongs “to a far deeper layer, namely that of pure mathematics”. Koyré concludes: “For the dimensions in which motion comes into question at all, the Zenonian problem no longer exists”.132 Here, we find the application of Platonic realism to a concrete case: It is not experience that engenders theory; rather it is theory that rules experience. In summary, Koyré’s conception of motion as a state can be regarded as one of his main contributions to the ongoing debate on the paradoxes. 2.1  “The Zenonian Arguments” (§ 2, pp. 604–605)

I will here present Zeno’s four arguments against motion in Aristotle’s words. Koyré refers to them following Brochard’s interpretation. 2.1.1  The dichotomy

There are four arguments of Zeno about motion, which give trouble to those who try to solve the problems they involve. The first says that motion is impossible because an object in motion must reach the half-way point before it gets to the end. […] Hence Zeno’s argument makes a false assumption when it asserts that it is impossible to traverse an infinite number of positions or to make an infinite number of contacts one by one in a finite time. For there are two senses in which length and time and, generally, any continuum are called infinite, namely either in respect of divisibility or of extension. So, while it is impossible to make an infinite number of contacts in a finite time where the infinite is a quantitative infinite, yet it is possible where the infinite is an infinite in respect of division; for the time itself is also infinite in this respect. And so we find that it is possible to traverse an infinite number of positions in a time in this sense infinite, not finite; and to make an infinite number of contacts because its moments are in this sense infinite, not finite.133 This argument holds that a moving body must traverse the half of the half before it reaches the middle, and so on ad infinitum.134 Aristotle seems to imply that Zeno’s argument falsely assumes that it is not possible to traverse an infinite number of lines or points in a finite time.135 An essential stipulation of rectilinear motion, which Zeno shares with Aristotle, is that it is neither “single” nor “continuous”, since in this kind of motion we have a beginning and an end, that is, two “states of rest” where the motion comes to a standstill,136 and in so doing, the motion ceases. The argument thus turns on the impossibility of making an infinite number of contacts or covering the infinite number of distances contained in any finite distance in a finite time.137 For Koyré, this means, in modern terms, that “motion presupposes the sum or synthesis of an infinite number of elements”.

132 133 134 135 136 137

Ibid., p. 622. Physics V, 9, 239 b11; Diels = A25; Lee = 19. Heath 1981, p. 275. Physics VI, 2, 233 a16–23, see Heath 1981, p. 279. Physics VIII, 8, 264 a21-b.1 Lee 1967, pp. 67–68; Barnes 1982, p. 262.

488  Irene Breuer 2.1.2  Achilles and the tortoise

The second is the so-called Achilles. This is that the slower runner will never be overtaken by the swiftest, since the pursuer must first reach the point from which the pursued started, and so the slower must always be ahead. This argument is essentially the same as that depending on dichotomy, but differs in that the successively given lengths are not divided into halves. The conclusion of the argument is that the slowest runner is not overtaken, but it proceeds on the same lines as the dichotomy argument […] and so the solution of it must be the same.138 For Koyré, this means that “every body must pass through an infinity of points” and since each point on the tortoise’s path corresponds to one on Achilles’ path, “their number must necessarily be equal”. Hence, the distance covered by Achilles in the same period of time cannot be greater than that covered by the tortoise, which implies that Achilles will never catch the tortoise,139 which is absurd, and therefore, motion is an impossibility. Koyré’s interpretation here rests on Aristotle’s argument, which entails that time and space are continuous and potentially divisible ad infinitum, a presupposition that applies to both arguments, the dichotomy and the Achilles. This leads to the conclusion that motion is impossible by arguing that the premises Zeno uses amount to claiming that magnitudes are infinitely divisible and at the same time are made up of indivisible elements. In fact, as Vlastos claims, by conceiving of the traversal of a certain extension as a discrete physical act and hence by thinking of the traversal as entailing “the completion of an infinite sequence of acts”, Zeno might have thought that reaching the goal “would involve a logical contradiction”:140 that of reaching “the end of something that has no end”,141 as Ross points out. Both claims aim at proving the impossibility of motion.142 2.1.3  The arrow

Zeno’s argument is fallacious. For if, he says, everything is either at rest or in motion, but nothing is in motion when it occupies a space equal to itself, and what is in flight is always at any given instant occupying a space equal to itself, then the flying arrow is motionless. But this is false, for time is not composed of indivisible instants any more than any other magnitude is composed of indivisibles.143 The third is that just given above, that the flying arrow is at rest. This conclusion follows from the assumption that time is composed of instants; for if this is not granted the conclusion cannot be inferred.144

Physics V 9, 239 b14/Diels = A26; Lee = 27. See Simplicius, 1013.31 in Lee 1967, p. 51. Vlastos 1975b, p. 204. Ross 1936, p. 74. Lee 1967, p. 105. Physics V 9, 239 b30/Lee = 28. Here, Brochard and Lee follow Cornford who, recurring to Simplicius, reconstructs the argument adding the words “when it occupies a space equal to itself”, which he supposes have dropped out after the preceding passage (see Lee 1967, pp. 79–81 for a detailed reconstruction of the argument). 144 Physics V 9, 239 b30/Lee = 28.

138 139 140 141 142 143

Continuity and infinity  489 Koyré asserts that “according to the finitist hypothesis […] every extension is composed of indivisible elements (points)”, such that “the arrow must necessarily always be at rest. For in these indivisible moments and points no motion is possible”. Lee follows Cornford’s reading and proposes that we depart first from the premises Aristotle points out, that time is made up of instants, atomic “nows”, and, second, that we assume that at any given instant the moving thing occupies a moment that corresponds to a given position in space, and so at rest, such that “time is made up of a row of successive positions corresponding one to one with the row of successive positions of the body”.145 As Owen concludes, Zeno treated moments as “stiflingly small periods”. But Aristotle’s failure to accept Zeno’s claim that in each moment of its flight the arrow must be stationary since it has no time to move means he struggles to deal with Zeno’s “wholly respectable premise” that what is true of it at each moment is true of it throughout the whole period. Aristotle’s arguments tacitly imply that Zeno treats moments in a way that is only appropriate to periods of time, since moments are only the limits of the periods that make up the overall period.146 But the “crucial tacit premise of the puzzle” is the hypothesis that “if the arrow is not moving when it is at a place equal to itself” – the topos of a substance being the outer envelope of a thing within which it stands or moves, a common conception in Zeno’s time and also one developed by Aristotle147 – “it must be at rest at that place”, as Vlastos148 rightly infers. Hence Aristotle can be said to surrender to Zeno by conceding that the body must always be at rest since it is at rest at every instant and time is composed of such moments149 if and only if the period of time were composed of moments, a premise that Aristotle repeatedly in fact rejects. 2.1.4  The stadium

The fourth is the one about the two rows of equal bodies which move past each other in a stadium with equal velocities in opposite directions, the one row originally stretching from the goal of the stadium, the other from the middle-point . This, he thinks, involves the conclusion that half a given time is equal to its double . The fallacy lies in assuming that a body takes an equal time to pass with equal velocity a body that is in motion and a body of equal size at rest, an assumption which is false.150 Aristotle dismisses Zeno’s argument. Zeno, he says, wrongly assumes that element B of the second row will take as long to pass a moving element A of the first row as they will to pass a stationary element C belonging to the inner borderline of the stadium.151 However, some scholars have inferred that on the one hand Aristotle missed the point and that the fallacious assumption rests on the underlying assumption that both time and space are discontinuous and composed of indivisible elements152 and that on the other

145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152

Lee 1967, p. 78, p. 81. Owen 1975, pp. 159–161. See Breuer 2020, chapter 4: “Die Topos-Auslegung in der Physik”, pp. 46–102. Vlastos 1975a, p. 190. Owen 1975, pp. 159–161. Physics V, 9, 239 b33/Lee = 35. Barnes 1982, p. 290. See Lee 1967, p. 89, who recurs to Noël 1893, p. 107 and Brochard 1893, p. 210.

490  Irene Breuer Zeno’s argument in fact assumed that space, bodies and time consists of “minimal” or “atomic” units of extension (positions and instants). This implies that it assumes motion is “cinematographic”, that is, discontinuous, such that “it consists in the occupation of a series of different positions at different instants”.153 Hence, if motion has hypothetically taken place in an indivisible instant, then either the elements have not crossed (in which case there is no motion) or in the particular indivisible instant two positions have been occupied by the two moving objects, that is to say, the instant is no longer indivisible. Consequently, Heath argues, if the instant is divided into two equal parts, this, on the hypothesis of indivisibles, is equivalent to saying that an instant is double of itself.154 Koyré follows the same line of interpretation and asserts that “according to the finitist hypothesis, ‘the half must be equal to the whole’”, since at a certain point in time “one and the same spatial element must pass through one as well as two spatial elements and consequently must be equal to one as well as two of such elements”. Hence Zeno did not endorse the conclusion of his argument; on the contrary, he considered it as “selfcontradictory”.155 That the half time must be equal to its double revealed, in his view, the inconceivability or inconsistency of motion, space and time. Barnes and Vlastos both oppose to the “atomistic” view since there is no evidence that the temporal continuum was replaced by an “atomic conception of temporal passage”.156 Nevertheless, Barnes deplores the insufficiency of Aristotle’s criticism which implies that Zeno ignores the fact that the elements of one row are stationary and the elements of the second row are moving. Barnes suggests that to avoid Zeno’s inference about the inconsistency of motion, space and time should be viewed as two continua in Aristotle’s sense and motion as “relative”, such that to conceive motion, we must assume “some two-place predication of the form ‘A changes position relative to B’”, that is, motion is conceived of as relative, not as absolute. Barnes recognizes that although this interpretation does not fully answer Zeno’s arguments, it helps to both clarify our conception of motion and overcome the shortcomings in Aristotle’s criticism.157 2.2  Summary of the four arguments on motion

The first two arguments assume that space and time are continuous and infinitely divisible. According to Brochard, the third clearly assumes that time and space are discontinuous and composed of indivisible units.158 Though most scholars disagree on the reading of the fourth, the most widespread interpretation assumes that it asserts the discontinuity of place and time, perhaps to safeguard the symmetry of the paradoxes. In this sense, Brochard concludes that the four arguments “form a system curiously symmetrical”. The four arguments establish the impossibility of motion: The first two, by the nature of space, supposed to be continuous without any implication that time is otherwise than continuous; the last two by the nature of time considered as made up of indivisible instants without any implication that space is not likewise made up of indivisible elements. The first and the fourth consider the continuous and motion over lengths that are deter153 154 155 156 157 158

See Lee 1967, pp. 101–102 and Bergson in what follows. Heath 1981, p. 283. Szabó 1969, p. 406. Vlastos 1975a, p. 190; Barnes 1982, p. 291. Barnes 1982, p. 293. Brochard 1907, pp. 4–5.

Continuity and infinity  491 minate, the second and the third consider them over lengths that are indeterminate. The second argument is only another form of the first, and the fourth – here scholars disagree – rests on the same principle as the third. The first pair rests on the hypothesis that continuous magnitudes are divisible ad infinitum, the second opposes the assumption that continuous magnitudes are made up of indivisible elements, a conception that would scarcely suggest itself to thought until the difficulties connected with the other were fully realized.159 Koyré emphasizes the hypothesis of the infinite divisibility of time and space on the one hand and on the other the finitude hypothesis, which sees space and time as composed of indivisible ultimate elements. This sums up very clearly the connection between the arguments and their general purpose. It also gives rise to a dilemma in which the possibility of motion is denied both by alternatively affirming and denying the infinite divisibility of time and space, that is, by dealing – contra Koyré –primarily with the continuity or discontinuity of time and space. 2.3  “Equivalence of the possible interpretations” (§ 3, pp. 605–607)

While Koyré states he has followed Brochard’s reading up to this point, he now emphasizes that he does “not want to commit […] to the same interpretation”. In his opinion, all four arguments can be interpreted “on the grounds of the hypothesis of finitude or of infinitude”. He thus takes the third and the fourth argument as illustrative of the hypothesis of infinitude: In the case of the flying arrow, each moment of time corresponds to a point in space. And since both moments are only “geometrical points” the arrow cannot move either in a non-extended point of space or in a present instant as the “limit-point (Grenzpunkt)” between past and future. We thus obtain “an infinity of correlative temporal moments, but no motion and even – as long as we have not completed the synthesis of this infinity of individual moments – no traversed path”. When Koyré considers the stadium, he assumes that the infinite divisibility of time and space implies that we can isolate points from the continuum, such that a correspondence between the points of different paths emerges. Here we must remark that Koyré assumes without providing any justification that a continuous motion results from the synthesis of individual instants and that these instants compose the continuum, an interpretation that openly conflicts with Aristotle’s, for whom a continuum is never composed of points but is potentially divisible ad infinitum such that any point that is actually set in the continuum limits it and divides it into parts, thus destroying the continuity of the whole, as will be explained later. Koyré then proceeds to deal with the first and the second paradoxes which in his eyes illustrate the finitist conception. The Achilles argument shows that here it is no less true that space and time are composed of ultimate elements, but now these are finite in number and there is a correspondence between the points on the respective paths. The same objection as in the previous case can be raised here. Finally, Koyré understands the dichotomy as giving rise to difficulties similar to those of the stadium paradox. Since nothing can move in the un-extended, it will be necessary to divide the last minimal extension into two so as to enable motion and, accordingly, the last supposedly indivisible instant needs to be divided into two. Hence, Koyré concludes that Zeno’s argumentation is “absolutely stringent. Motion presupposes an infinite divisibility of space and time and thus implies the sum of a current

159 Ibid., pp. 4–5, followed by Heath 1981, p. 278 and Lee 1965, p. 103.

492  Irene Breuer infinity of elements and moments”. On the one hand, a body in motion passes an infinite number of points in a finite space and time; on the other, two bodies moving at different speeds cover paths that are composed of an equal number of elements at the same time. He now proceeds to examine the arguments fellow scholars had raised to avoid Zeno’s conclusion, that is, the impossibility of motion. 2.4  Koyré’s critique of the finitist hypothesis 2.4.1  “The finitist hypothesis of Evellin” (§ 4, pp. 607–614)

Koyré first criticism concerns the finitist hypothesis argued for in Evellin’s article “Le mouvement et les partisans des indivisibles”.160 Koyré claims that Noël’s interpretation of the stadium, which he follows in §2, presents an irrefutable argument against the finitist theory. It therefore provoked a reply from Evellin, the principal exponent of this theory,161 who attempted to solve the problems involved therein. According to Koyré, Evellin argues that the change of place must happen momentarily and “with a leap”, which does not include any real passing and thus does not lead to the Zenonian paradoxes. It would follow from Evellin’s proposal, Koyré adds, that any element could move in a single indivisible instant between two points in space, covering this distance by jumping over it. But a careful reading of Evellin162 makes clear that he does not propose “jumping” over the intervals, but rather claims that the supposed intervals are merely imaginary, that the movements are both “instantaneous” and “simultaneous”, i.e., “without any division in such an indivisible durée”. Instead of viewing motion as a series of successive and individual advances, he conceives of it as a single “becoming (devenir)”.163 Evellin adds: “To move is not to leave the place where one is […] but that where one was at the preceding instant”.164 Therefore, the point of departure does not belong to any of the stages. Hence “to leave from here to arrive there and be there is a unitary passage from one place to another and without intervals”.165 Evellin thus holds that motion is a “sliding without division” and its “divisibility is a potentiality of multiple divisions”166 – in summary, he proposes a return to the Aristotelian conception of the continuum. This might be the reason why Koyré does not consider Evellin’s conception of motion as becoming and restricts his criticism to objecting that if the object of motion neither moves at the moment and place of arrival nor at those of departure, then it does not move in between since, according to the hypothesis, there is no space between the two last spatial elements, hence it cannot move at all. Koyré therefore concludes that “the finitist hypothesis avoids all difficulties” and that the Zenonian objections are well founded. Koyré regards thus the finitist hypothesis as decisively refuted.

160 161 162 163 164 165 166

Noël 1893. Evellin 1893. Ibid., p. 386. Ibid., p. 384. Ibid., p. 388. Ibid., p. 391. Ibid., p. 394.

Continuity and infinity  493 2.4.2 “Noël’s material criticism” (§ 5, pp. 608–610), “Analysis of Noël’s arguments” (§ 8, 613–614)

Koyré’s next criticism addresses Noël’s arguments in “Le mouvement et les arguments de Zénon d’Elée”.167 Contrary to Evellin’s reflections, which attempt to demonstrate a formal error in Zeno’s argumentation, Noël and Bergson do not engage with Zeno’s arguments but, in Koyré’s view, rather “try to avoid the difficulty […] by an immanent analysis of motion”. By recurring to Aristotle, Noël shows that the infinite or finite divisibility that Zeno wants to apply to motion can be applied to space and even here, as potential, not actual divisibility. Motion itself must be regarded as one, but, contrary to Aristotle’s view, the path is composed of points through which the object passes, such that it is in motion at every point. Motion cannot be identified with the series of successive positions168 because the moving object “is” in each of them in a different way from an object that “is” at rest in one of them. Nor can it be said that the moving body “is” really and completely at the instant, which thus presupposes that the “instant constitutes the total reality of the durée”, as the hypothesis of discontinuity implies.169 Noël distinguishes explicitly between the continuity of motion as potentially given “becoming (devenir)” and the discontinuity of space as actually given quantity.170 Time is also composed of instants, but Noël reduces the instant to “an ideal limit which divides a continuous durée in two”, such that the object “does not move at the instant, but along the durée”.171 Noël thus asserts a categorial distinction that determines the moving object between space and time as “quantities” and motion itself as the “becoming of those quantities”.172 Based on this distinction, Noël asserts that Zeno’s argument is refuted, since the continuity of motion, which is a “state” of the moving body, excludes any actual division, which he views as “a subjective and arbitrary view of mind (esprit)”.173 In connection with this, Koyré remarks that if motion is not divisible, then the Zenonian arguments are not applicable to it since the difficulties would arise if the moving object were to “count off” the points or positions of its path. Koyré concedes that motion is not a mere change of place but a continuing passage, but precisely for this reason and contra Noël, if the moving object “passes” them one by one it also “counts” them, an interpretation that Aristotle himself opposes.174 That the points are infinite in number Noël concedes to Zeno – but only as regards space and time, we may add – and Koyré concludes that we face the paradoxes again. In summary, although Koyré’s exposition does not do full justice to the subtlety of Noël’s reflections – they are limited to the aforementioned argument – it is clear that Zeno is by no means refuted. Even taken in their full complexity, Noël’s strategy amounts to an annulment of the Aristotelian/Zenonian 167 Noël 1893. 168 Ibid., p. 123. 169 Ibid., p. 115. 170 Ibid., p. 122. 171 Ibid., p. 115. 172 Ibid., p. 122. 173 Ibid., p. 124. This conception of motion as a “state” is opposed to Zeno’s, as Russell clearly points out (Russell 1903, p. 351). 174 As Barnes explains, Aristotle explicitly distinguishes between Zeno’s paradox and the argument which requires the traveler to stop and count the halfway points in his journey (Physics VIII, 8, 263a6–11); the counting version is therefore a “vulgarization” of Zeno’s argument: “‘Touching’ (hapthesthai)” in Zeno means “physical contact”, that is, the surface or plane of the moving body merely touches the plane of the straight path (Barnes 1982, p. 263).

494  Irene Breuer strict parallelism between the continuity or discontinuity of time, place and motion such that, far from refuting Zeno, he rather changes his initial hypothesis. 2.4.3 “Bergson” (§ 6, pp. 610–611), “Analysis of the Bergsonian arguments” (§ 7, pp. 611–613)

With respect to Bergson’s analyses in Essay sur les données immédiates de la conscience of 1888 and L’évolution créatrice of 1907, Koyré stresses that despite their value, they can hardly serve as an argument against Zeno, for the core of the problem is not motion itself, but how it is realized in time and space. According to Bergson, the difficulty is only an apparent one, since it arises from the unjustified attempt to substitute the purely conceptual or “cinematographic”175 view for an immediate and direct view.176 The former view understands motion using concepts that belong to the sphere of the immobile.177 For Noël and Bergson alike, “motion is one and indivisible”, a durée.178 Zeno, claims Bergson, erroneously assumes that what is true of the line is also true of motion179 and thus brings about their unjustified identification as spatialized time. In contrast to the line traversed by the mobile object that can be divided in any way since it lacks any internal organization, motion is internally articulated. It is articulated in varying “degrees” of intensity, such that we find “the image of a present contraction and consequently of a future expansion, the image of a virtual extension” in “the idea of intensity”.180 The idea of intensity articulates “the idea of an extensive magnitude” with “the image of an internal multiplicity”;181 that is, it articulates a “qualitative description” of the indivisible periods of duration with “quantitative variations” of the “phenomenon itself or its elemental parts”.182 This means that the intensity of the durée as quality becomes quantity when measured in space, such that “from the moment the durée is measured, it is replaced by space”.183 Hence, motion is continuous, a unity of intensity, but not one of extension. Zeno erroneously distinguished two successive acts, one by dividing the trajectory in two and the other by determining the point on the line, whereas in fact there is only one indivisible act, according to Bergson.184 Koyré rightly points out that for Bergson, “motion is an inner state of energy of the moving” that has a “change of place as a usual consequence” but it should not be identified with this. Yet according to Koyré, these analyses hardly serve as an argument against Zeno, because for him it is not a question of motion itself but of its realization in time and space. Nor is motion necessarily an indivisible act since it can be regarded as an eternal “state” in Noël’s sense. Even under these assumptions, Zeno is not refuted since the motion of two bodies – as in the case of the tortoise and Achilles – results in an infinite progression where the points of both paths stand in a reciprocal correlation. Besides, even under the assumption of indivisible acts of motion, nothing prevents us from either 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184

Bergson 1962, p. 306. Ibid., p. 310. Ibid., p. 307. Ibid., p. 309. Ibid., p. 309. Bergson 1888, p. 9. Ibid., p. 37. Bergson 1962, p. 332. Bergson 1888, p. 50. Bergson 1962, pp. 309–311.

Continuity and infinity  495 identifying the moment at which the moving body passes a particular point of the path or assuming an infinity of points in it without this necessarily implying a halting of motion – an assertion that conflicts openly with Aristotle’s, we may add. Here, Koyré concludes, Zeno’s objection returns – “the objection concerning the necessity of assuming an actual infinity” – which Zeno does not assert – “and presupposing the division continuing into infinity as accomplished”. 2.5  “The sense of the Zenonian arguments” (§ 9, pp. 615–617)

Koyré emphasizes that the difficulties do not concern “motion qua moment”, but they are connected to it insofar as it “takes place in time and space”. He proposes abstracting from time and space and retaining only the “continuous quantum or the continuum par excellence” so as to single out Zeno’s two main objections: 1 The distance, not the path traversed, but the path to be traversed, is infinitely divisible and contains an actual infinity of points. In both cases we are dealing with an actual infinity. Here, we may remark that a potential infinity of divisions does not imply an actual infinity of points since, as Aristotle has shown, the points are actualized one after the other by the moving object, that is, progressively, such that the path to be traversed remains potentially divisible ad infinitum, as we shall later explain in detail. 2 In principle, it is possible to establish a clear and mutual correlation between all points of the path of two line segments of different lengths. Just as in the first case, we are dealing with relationships between geometric units and between mathematical quantities. In the wake of Russell, Koyré recurs to Cartesian coordinates to show that every point on the straight line necessarily has a corresponding point on the line of abscissas and vice versa, even though OXn < OXn Yn. To illustrate the cases of the “Achilles” and the “stadium”, Koyré takes the example of two parallel straight lines A and B which are intersected by a perpendicular C, which he rotates around a point O outside the parallels. This diagram shows that many A’s points are placed in a clear and mutual correlation with the B’s points, which is nevertheless only equal to one part of A. In the second diagram, Koyré argues that by turning the straight line C, we have reintroduced motion, for the turning straight line represents a bundle of rays emanating from point O.185 Koyré then takes the example of a curved line and places a tangent on it. As the circle is not “curved” at any of its points, we can ask where it does curve. This means that, when confronted with the problem of the arrow, we see that it cannot move at all since there is no such immediately adjacent or adjoining point at all. In my view, Koyré’s argumentation is not entirely clear. Let us return to Barnes’s analyses of Russell’s argument, which argument Russell himself described as “static”.186 He reconstructs it as follows: 185 For an alternative interpretation that connects the concept of motion with the two continua of space and time, see Barnes 1982, pp. 291–292. 186 Russell (1903, pp. 351–352) claims that “in the case of motion, [the argument] denies that there is such a thing as a state of motion. In the general case of a continuous variable, it may be taken as denying actual infinitesimals. For infinitesimals are an attempt to extend to the values of a variable the variability which belongs to it alone. When once it is firmly realized that all the values of a variable are constants, it becomes

496  Irene Breuer

Given a – an object – t – an instant – and T – time, Zeno’s argument runs as follows: 1 (∀t) (if t is in T, a is not moving at t). 2 a does not move during T. Barnes formulates Russell’s argument187 as follows: a a moves during T if and only if for every pair of distinct instants t1 and t2 in T there is an instant t3 between t1 and t2 and a pair of distinct places p1 and p3 such as a is at p1 at t1 and a is at p3 at t3. Motion at an instant is defined as follows: b a is moving at t if and only if for some T t is within T and a moves during T. If (a) and (b) offer a correct account of motion, they do not refute the Zenonian inference. If we deny Zeno’s inference, we must accept that “motion is made of immobilities”, as Bergson puts it,188 i.e., that every period of motion consists of an infinite sequence of motionless states. Barnes suggests that Zeno might have assumed that if an object occupies a space no greater than itself, then the object has no room in which to move and hence to occupy more than one place.189 But at that moment the object occupies just easy to see, by taking any two such values, that their difference is always finite, and hence that there are no infinitesimal differences. If x be a variable which may take all real values from 0 to 1, then, taking any two of these values, we see that their difference is finite, although x is a continuous variable. It is true the difference might have been less than the one we chose; but if it had been, it would still have been finite. The lower limit to possible differences is zero, but all possible differences are finite; and in this there is no shadow of contradiction. This static theory of the variable is due to the mathematicians, and its absence in Zeno’s day led him to suppose that continuous change was impossible without a state of change, which involves infinitesimals and the contradiction of a body’s being where it is not”. 187 See Russell 1903, pp. 347–350. 188 Bergson 1962, p. 307. 189 According to Aristotle’s theory of topos, a conception that was of common usage in Zeno’s time, the topos of a body is the immediate limit of the substance in which the body is “in”. However, motion implies

Continuity and infinity  497 one place, the place is delimited by its own boundary. This possible reconstruction does not take into account that motion requires “duration and extension”, that “motion ‘at an instant’ requires durational motion” and “motion through space”, although motion “does not require instantaneous motion” nor “instantaneous transition”.191 Hence, Barnes concludes Zeno’s arguments are valid, even though they rely on false premises.192 In summary, even if we do not accuse Zeno of treating time as being “composed of instants”, as Aristotle does, nor ascribe to him the views that time is made up of “atomic minimal parts”193 or that motion proceeds “cinematographically”,194 we have to admit that it only presupposes that there are instants as well as periods of time and that things move, if at all, at instants, as Barnes claims.195 190

2.6  Criticism of arguments on infinity 2.6.1 “The infinite – Descartes” (§ 10, pp. 617–619), “The paradoxes of the infinite – Bolzano” (§ 11, pp. 619–620)

Koyré remarks that while Russell and Couturat have treated and clarified confusions arising from the attempt to grasp infinity, which can be traced back to the false identification of the merely indefinite with the infinite,196 his main concern “is to show that the concept of actual infinity cannot be derived or reconstructed from any other concepts”. He asserts that “only in actual infinity and on its basis is potential infinity possible” and that actual infinity should be regarded as “complete”.197 He takes recourse to Aristotle leaving one topos for another, that is, it implies a change of place, so that this conception would be contrary to Zeno’s, if we concur with Barnes’ view. For further detail see Breuer 2020, pp. 20–102. 190 Barnes 1982, p. 283. Barnes may be alluding to Zeno’s argument against the existence of place. See Breuer 2020, pp. 88–90. 191 After detailed analyses, Barnes asserts that “one thing (is) to reject instantaneous motion, another to reject motion ‘at the instant’”. To accept the possibility of motion at the instant is to assert that given a – an object – and t – an instant – “‘a moves at t’ is consistent”; to accept the impossibility of motion is to assert that “‘a moves at t and for no T (time) does a move during T’ is inconsistent”. Barnes concludes that those two assertions are compatible: If we “uphold motion ‘at an instant’”, we can also assert “that if a moves then for some T a moves during T”, and thus we can “reject instantaneous motion” (Barnes 1982, p. 281). 192 Barnes 1982, p. 284. 193 See above, Lee 1967, p. 78, p. 81. 194 See above, Bergson 1962, p. 306. 195 Barnes 1982, p. 285. 196 In his later Newtonian Studies Koyré (1965, p. 192) returns to Descartes to assert that “the concept of the infinite not only is accessible but is even the first one that is given to the human mind, which can conceive finitude only by the negation of it”. In a letter to Clerselier, dated 23 April 1649, Descartes distinguishes between the concepts of “indefinite”, which “signifies only not having an end”, and “infinite”, which signifies “a real thing which is incomparably greater than all those that have an end”, that is, the idea of God as the absolutely, that is, infinitely, perfect being (Koyré 1965, pp. 192–193). 197 In his Essay sur l’idée de Dieu et les preuves de son existence chez Descartes of 1922, Koyré shows, according to Emmanuel Faye, that it is Descartes’ mathematical praxis rather than the influences of theology that allows Descartes to “de-theologize the idea of the infinite” and to “deduce the philosophical consequences of the positive idea of the actual infinite”. To back up this assertion, Faye refers to a letter to Clerselier of 1646 (Correspondance, AT IV, pp. 445–446) where Descartes mentions Zeno’s Achilles paradox and observes that the parts of the path taken together, even though they are supposed to be really infinite in number, nevertheless make up a finite quantity. See Faye, Emmanuel 2016, “Pensée et infini: la lecture philosophique de Descartes par Alexandre Koyré, son évolution, sa réception et ses enjeux”, in Vérité scientifique, op. cit., pp. 260–284, here pp. 269–270.

498  Irene Breuer to support the claim that “a thing cannot be in the state of potency and in the state of actus at the same time” and that potency is based on actuality. He further adds that if we can “discover an infinite number of points on a straight line, it is only because they are there”, an argument that is later taken up by Ross,198 and if one can count to infinity, it is because the number of the finite numbers is an infinite one. This applies also to the concept of the limit: That a value represents the limits of a series means precisely that no matter how close to the limit it is, “one still finds an infinity of elements of this series”. Hence the concept of infinity appears twice in the definition of the limit: “1. In the factor of the infinite number of points, 2. In that of the infinite approximation to the limit”. Koyré infers from this that “we must and can posit the infinite purely for itself – as a primordial phenomenon” in the wake of Cantor, Bolzano and particularly Descartes, who made “infinity” “the fundamental basis of the doctrine of the finite”. This implies that no matter how close to the limit one is, one can still find an infinity of points or elements of a series. In these arguments Koyré, while presupposing the continuity of the line, seems to be alluding to an arithmetical concept of the continuum as developed by Cantor in the wake of Bolzano, and which can be understood as consisting of points. We must object to Koyré here that his argument contradicts Aristotle: First, Aristotle repeatedly and for many reasons rejects actual infinity; he only accepts a potential infinity of division, thus rejecting the infinity of addition in the case of magnitudes, as will be explained in more detail below. Second, the actuality of a given being – m ­ eaning that it is fully developed, and as such, can procreate another being whose being is only potential – cannot be equated with the supposed actuality of points on a line. In the case of time and living creatures, the infinite is so in virtue of its endlessly changing into something else. Whereas in the case of time, the preceding phase passes or fades away but the succession remains unbroken, in the case of beings, the actually developed “parts” coexist with the newly arriving “parts”. In the case of magnitudes, the case of addition is in a sense the same as that of division: The finite magnitude is potentially divisible ad infinitum, whereby every finite magnitude is reduced to a minimum by continually taking a finite fraction thereof. Conversely, the finite magnitude is potentially infinite with regard to addition, since the addition of those same fractions makes a sum tend toward a definite limit. Hence, in the case of magnitudes the only infinite of addition is the converse operation of an infinite division. The infinite, therefore, cannot exist, even potentially, in the sense of exceeding every finite magnitude.199 Hence the temporal non-coincidence of actuality and potentiality and the precedence of the former over the latter cannot be generalized, as Koyré wants to do. This point merits further analysis. According to Koyré, Bolzano deserves credit for having recognized the legitimacy and necessity of the concept of actual infinity. In his 1837 book Paradoxien des Unendlichen, he coins the concept of equivalence, which in the field of the infinite corresponds to equality in finite numbers and sums. Bolzano demonstrated that an infinite whole is equivalent to a part of this same whole. Thus, for example, the number of finite numbers is necessarily infinite. Insofar as we must regard the numbers as given before the act of counting, they are actually infinite; nevertheless, this number is not superior to that of all 198 See Ross 1936, pp. 714–715; see section “3.3. Aristotle’s Treatment of Zeno’s Paradoxes”, further on in this paper. 199 See Heath 1981, pp. 342–343.

Continuity and infinity  499 even or all prime numbers, which can be proved if we place the totality of all numbers in an unequivocal and mutual relationship with the even or prime numbers. All these sets are equivalent. In Bolzano’s words: We now pass on to consider a very remarkable peculiarity which can occur in the relations between two sets when both are infinite […] My assertion runs as follows: When two sets are both infinite, they can stand in such a relation to one another that: a It is possible to couple each member of the first set with some member of the second […]. b One of the two sets can comprise the other as a mere part of itself […].200 The mere fact, therefore, that two sets A and B are so related that every member a of A corresponds by a fixed rule to some member b of B in such wise that the set of these couples (a+b) contains every member of A or B once and only once, never justifies us […] in inferring the equality of the two sets in the event of their being infinite, with respect to the multiplicity of their members [see b]. [However, in the case of] the above […] relation between two sets […] really does suffice, in the case of finite sets, to establish their perfect equimultiplicity in member. [Bolzano draws the following conclusions:] When two quantities are sums of infinite sets of addends equal in corresponding pairs, we are not entitled for that sole reason to equate them [einander gleichsetzen]; but only if we can first convince ourselves that the infinite multitude of those addends is identical in the two sums. […] This holds not only for finite but also for infinite sets of summands. […] The conclusion will be unsafe unless the two sets have identical terms of specification (gleiche Be stimmungsgründe). […] I now proceed to the assertion that there exists an infinite even in the realm of the actual […].201 Hence, what can be added to Koyré’s exposition of the argument is that we can determine whether two infinite sets are equivalent only if they both have identical terms of specification. As this is the case with Achilles and the Stadium, we can now agree with Koyré that the possibility of assigning all the points on the two sections of the paths that have unequal lengths to each other without restriction in no way implies the equality of these two sets, but their equivalence, whereby “equivalence does not imply equality; the former is a relation in the infinite, the latter one in the finite”.202 200 As the author of the introduction to the English translation, D. Steele, explains, Bolzano’s Paradoxien are quoted for their recognition of a phenomenon which he calls “holomerism”. It consists in this: that a set S of entities contains a proper subset s such that, by means of a fixed relation, each member of S corresponds to just one of sʹ and conversely. This means that “the main set is in biunivocal correspondence with one of its proper subsets”. In Steele’s view, Bolzano does not exploit holomerism enough to be regarded as a precursor of Cantor (Steele 1950, p. 23). 201 Bolzano 1950, pp. 98–101; 1851, pp. 20–35. 202 The above passages make clear that while “holomerism is recognized as liable to occur […] within individual infinite sets, biunivocal correspondence between two sets is not being erected into a criterion of their equinumerosity. It is only contended […] that biunivocal correspondence does not preclude the case where one aggregate is identical or equipotent with some main set, and the other aggregate identical or equipotent with a proper subset of that main set. Still less are we to look for the conception of biunivocal

500  Irene Breuer 2.6.2  “Georg Cantor” (§ 12, pp. 620–622)

In the wake of Bolzano, Cantor started his investigations with the concept of the infinite set and the infinite number and thus founded an “arithmetic of the infinite”. By applying the concept of order to the “infinite”, he created the concept of “transfinite ordinal numbers”, a theory that Koyré does not discuss in detail. In his view, it suffices to emphasize the following: First, Cantor defines the infinite set through its property of being equivalent to a part of itself, or, as he says, of equal power. It turns out that a finite set is defined by the negative property of not being of equal power (Mächtigkeit) with a part of itself. This in turn means that it is not infinite. Hence, since the series of finite numbers necessarily continues to infinity, the concept of the infinite must obviously already be contained in the definition of the finite number. Second, the continuum is not of the same power as the countable infinite but of an infinitely greater power in relation to it. Concerning the limit, Cantor defines an “accumulation point (Häufungspunkt)” through the fact that at whatever distance from this point at least one point that belongs to the series is encountered, there exists an infinite number of “most proximate (angenäherten)” points, which form a cluster. This leads to a “definition” of the continuum, according to which it is a unity or whole made up of an infinity of cluster points, such that the continuum is a unit of perfect cohesion or density. Since between two points on a continuum there is necessarily a continuous infinity of others, there are no two points that border each other, such that they are separated by an “abyss (Abgrund)” of an infinity of points. The paradox involved in the Dichotomy can no longer hold here. Koyré’s analysis, though concise and precise, must be complemented by the following reflections, in order to take proper account of the complexity of the issue. In his 1887 essay “Mitteilungen zur Lehre vom Transfiniten”,203 Cantor distinguishes between two kinds of actual infinite,204 namely the “transfinite”205 and the “absolute” (or absolutely infinite). In his 1883 essay “Über unendliche lineare Punktmannigfaltigkeiten”,206 he further distinguishes between an “authentic (Eigentlich-Unendliches)” or proper infinity and the “inauthentic (Uneigentlich-Unendliches)” or improper infinity. Whereas potential infinity is considered to be an inauthentic infinity insofar as it is only a variable “finite quantity”,207 correspondence as an isoid relation partitioning multitudes into classes […] For these things we must wait till Cantor and Frege” (Steele, introduction to Bolzano 1950, pp. 2–26). 203 Cantor 1962, pp. 178–440. 204 Cantor defines the actual infinity as a quantum, which, on the one hand, is not changeable, but is rather a fixed and definite proper constant in all its parts, but at the same time, on the other hand, surpasses in magnitude every finite magnitude of the same kind. In the original: “Unter einem A.-U. (in fn: aktuale Unendliche) ist dagegen ein Quantum zu verstehen, das einerseits nicht veränderlich, sondern vielmehr in allen seinen Teilen fest und bestimmt, eine richtige Konstante ist, zugleich aber andererseits jede endliche Größe derselben Art und Größe übertrifft” (Cantor 1962, p. 401). 205 Cantor defines the transfinite as an unlimited ladder of certain modes, which by their nature are not finite but infinite, but which, like the finite, can be determined by certain well-defined numbers that are distinguishable from one another. In the original (Cantor 1962, p. 176): “Was ich behaupte […] ist, daß es nach dem Endlichen ein Transfinitum […], d.i. eine unbegrenzte Stufenleiter von bestimmten Modis gibt, die ihrer Natur nach nicht endlich, sondern unendlich sind, welche aber ebenso wie das Endliche durch bestimmte, wohldefinierte und voneinander unterscheidbare Zahlen determiniert werden können”. For Becker this means essentially that “every single number, no matter how large, is in itself constant, fixedly determined, being, not becoming, but that is it multipliable, say by 1, and that therefore the transition n→n+1 is possible” (Becker, 1927, p. 86). 206 Cantor 1962, pp. 139–247. 207 Ibid., p. 165.

Continuity and infinity  501 actual infinity seems to be identified with authentic infinity insofar as at any point, either located in the infinite or in the finite, the comportment of the function remains the same. While the potentially infinite turns out to be a “changeable finite (veränderliches Endliches)”, the actual infinite is a “determined infinity (bestimmtes Unendliches)”.208 We find here the reason for his rejection of the Aristotelian infinite potential divisibility. Cantor opposes the actual infinite as transfinite to this conception. The transfinite is characterized by three main features: The first is that the transfinite is internally articulated and capable of being precisely determined;209 the second is that the transfinite is capable of being “increased (vermehrbar)”210 and the third corresponds to what he calls “a principle of difference in the transfinite (Prinzip des Unterschiedes)”, which leads to “different transfinite numbers and to different powers or cardinal numbers (Mächtigkeiten)”.211 From this it follows that the transfinite encompasses a multiplicity of different numbers, which insert themselves in an incomplete series that can be indefinitely increased,212 thus making up an actual and indefinitely progressing series, that is, an open infinity. With the aid of his theory of transfinite numbers, he could prove that it is always possible to find a smallest number contained in such a series or “well-ordered sets”, which are defined in the 1883 “Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeitslehre”213 as a well-defined set in which the elements are arranged in a definite, given succession such that there is a first element of the set, and for every other element there is a definite successor, unless it is the last element of the succession.214 Having clarified the concept of the transfinite, it now becomes clear that his theory of transfinite numbers and the definition of well-ordered sets help “to typify the structure of the continuum”,215 a structure that is essentially arithmetical. Continua are characterized by being both perfect – perfect sets are defined as those identical with their first derived sets216 – and connected – every point is an accumulation point, a concept that replaced Bolzano’s conception of connectedness as denseness.217

208 209 210 211

212 213 214 215 216 217

Ibid., pp. 165–166. Ibid., p. 166. Ibid., p. 405. Cantor defines the concept of power as the general concept or genus which we gain when, given a set M, we abstract from all elements and relationships between elements or between them and things, and even from the order in which these elements are, and reflect on what all sets, which are equivalent to M, have in common with M. Hence, two sets have the same power if they have a one-to-one correspondence, which means that they are equivalent. In the original: “Unter Mächtigkeit oder Kardinalzahl einer Menge M […] verstehe ich den Allgemeinbegriff oder Gattungsbegriff (universale), welchen man erhält, indem man bei der Menge sowohl von der Beschaffenheit ihrer Elemente, wie auch von allen Beziehungen, welche die Elemente, sei es unter einander, sei es zu anderen Dingen haben, also im besondern auch von der Ordnung, welche unter den Elementen herrschen mag, abstrahiert und nur auf das reflektiert, was allen Mengen gemeinsam ist, die mit M äquivalent sind. Ich nenne aber zwei Mengen M und N äquivalent, wenn sie sich gegenseitig eindeutig Element für Element einander zuordnen lassen” (Cantor 1962, p. 387, see p. 280, p. 380). Cantor 1962, p. 148. Ibid., pp. 165–246. Ibid., p. 168. See Dauben Joseph W. 1979, Georg Cantor. His Mathematics and philosophy of the Infinite (Cambridge/Harvard), p. 101. Dauben 1979, p. 111. Cantor 1962, p. 216. Ibid., p. 194; see Dauben 1979, p. 110.

502  Irene Breuer It is in the light of these conceptions that we can interpret Zeno’s paradoxes. Let us recall that Zeno dissolved the time of motion – and Aristotle reproached him for doing this – into a series of fixed points of time and, accordingly, the path into dimensionless points of space, and concluded that “half-time/space is equal to its double”. From the aforementioned conception, we can see that Zeno was “equating two infinite sets”,218 that is, two perfect and connected sets of the same power. A similar interpretation applies to the case of Achilles catching up with the tortoise: The path covered by the former, which is many times longer, can be unambiguously assigned to the much shorter distance of the latter. For Becker, this case exemplifies the principle of equivalence, for here it is demonstrated that two actual transfinite infinite sets “can be equally powerful, although one is a real part of the other, just as here the path of the tortoise is a real part of the path of Achilles”.219 Szabó adds that the paradox “half time is equal to its double” becomes interesting when connected to the other paradox of “part and whole”. He asserts that if Zeno claimed the former, he was obviously equating a part of a certain period of time with the whole of it;220 that is, in Cantor’s terms, he was equating two infinite sets with the same power or cardinality.221 Zeno did not of course endorse this conclusion but thought that motion was impossible. To sum up, Cantor posits an arithmetical concept of the continuum, which, in contrast to Aristotle, he understands as consisting of points. Accordingly, the possibility of the divisibility of a line includes pre-existent division points, which in turn presupposes the totality of real numbers; that is, the infinite divisibility of the line presupposes an infinite actual manifold of points and an infinite manifold of numbers. The continuum of transfinite numbers is thus, for Cantor, more primal than space and time themselves.222 Cantor’s analysis of the transfinite series proves that certain parts of an infinite series have as many constituents as the whole series itself, which in turn can yield a finite collective value; that is, the infinite number of parts yields a finite distance that – contrary to Zenon’s assumptions – can be traversed. 2.7  “The infinite and the continuum” (§ 13, pp. 622–624)

Koyré asserts that Cantor’s definition of the continuous quantum is not a “constructive” definition, but a development of the simple idea of a “continuous magnitude”. Therefore, the definition of continuity “is circular”: The determination of a whole as perfect implies that all points of accumulation, including those points “between” and those “outside” the whole, belong to the series, which in turn is nothing other than the 218 Szabó 1969, p. 404. 219 Becker 1927, p. 144. 220 Szabó 1969, p. 379f. The paradox thus states precisely the opposite of what the 8th axiom in Euclid formulates, that is, that the whole is greater than the part. He puts forward the interesting thesis that Euclid’s 8th axiom was established in response to Zeno’s paradoxes. But it can be objected that the Zenonian paradoxes refer to time, whereas Euclid’s 8th axiom is a geometrical principle. “But do not forget”, concludes A. Szabó, “that Zenon illustrated his paradox – according to Simplicius’ explanation (Simplicius on Aristotle’s Physics 1016f., also 1019,27) – with bodies in motion or with distances they have covered during a certain period of time. According to this illustration, therefore, the infinitely many instants as points in time correspond to points of distance without propagation in space” (Szabó 1969, p. 379f.). For a discussion of the problem of “the whole and its parts” and its history, see its detailed treatment in Sambursky, Samuel 1982, Das physikalische Welt-Bild der Antike (Zürich/Artemis), pp. 281–317. 221 See Tengelyi, László 2014, Welt und Unendlichkeit. Zum Problem phänomenologischer Metaphysik (Freiburg/Alber), pp. 435–506. 222 Cantor 1962, p. 192.

Continuity and infinity  503 idea of a continuous “middle”. In fact, Koyré adds, the idea of limit presupposes that of the continuum. Accordingly, he argues for a distinction between the continuum and continuous quantity. Only with the continuum itself does the true philosophical problem arise, the “eternal ontological problem of the ‘µη ον’”. For the continuum avoids any determinability according to size, number and the like. It is, so to speak, “the otherness in itself, it is the ‘ετερον’, as Plato would say”. It is neither a unity nor a multiplicity for these two ideas are correlative to each other – “it is the true µη ον, the chaos without limit and without number”. It is this property of the continuous extension that makes it possible for infinite space as a whole to be assigned to some part of itself and represented by a geometrical straight line. It is in the transition from pure continuum space to the continuous size or a limited part of space that, for Koyré, “the abyss lies”. Therefore, the right question to ask is: How is it possible for the continuum to become a straight line, a body or a distance, how is it possible to “measure the indivisible and immeasurable”. It is the “idea of the continuum” and the infinitely divisible space, rather than motion itself, which Koyré finds difficult to grasp. Koyré even asserts that the problem of motion illustrates “the impossibility of dividing and limiting the one, the continuum”. These assertions need clarification, if not rectification. What Koyré terms “the One” seems to allude to Plato’s apeiron. In a well-known note attached to the “Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeitslehre”, Cantor appeals to Plato’s Philebus in order to explain what he means by a set and insists that sets be taken as whole unities. Cantor thus assimilated them to Plato’s eidos or idea or to what he also termed m(e)ikton in the Philebus. As László Tengelyi explains, Plato’s m(e)ikton is a mixture of Limit and the Unlimited, of peras and apeiron. The Unlimited is nothing other than the specifically Greek notion of infinity,223 which Cantor224 took to refer to an improper or merely potential but never completed infinity.225 What Plato means by apeiron is a sphere characterized by a lack of boundaries and delimitation that is capable of engendering determinate formations, such as the sound system of the Greek language, by adding a Limit to the Unlimited. These formations are internally articulated by constantly changing elements that belong to the sphere of Becoming. What is important to note here is that in the Philebus “the two ontological realms of […] Being and Becoming, are, as it were, intertwined with one another”, using the image of mixture as m(e)iktis. It is this internal articulation which prevents a multitude from dissolving in the Unlimited.226 It now becomes clear that Cantor’s emphasis on the articulation and unitary or completed character of infinite sets is ensured by transfinite numbers, whereby the transfinite is obtained precisely by introducing determinations and limits to the absolute. In Cantor, the transfinite thus derives from the absolutely infinite, in which the characteristics of the apeiron, that is, its lack of definition and determination, are preserved. In a famous footnote to the “Grundlagen einer allgemeinen Mannigfaltigkeistlehre”, Cantor characterizes a series which could just as well be defined as potentially infinite as “absolutely infinite”. Here, Cantor claims, “we shall […] never achieve even an approximate conception of the absolute. The absolute can only be acknowledged [anerkannt] but 223 Tengelyi, László 2010, “On Absolute Infinity in Cantor”, in Phenomenology Vol.4: Selected Essays from Northern Europe: Traditions, Transitions and Challenges, D. Moran, H.-R. Sepp (eds.) (Bucharest/Zeta), pp. 529–550, here p. 535. 224 Cantor 1962, p. 204. 225 Dauben 1979, p. 170. 226 Tengelyi 2010, pp. 537–538.

504  Irene Breuer never known [erkannt] – and not even approximately known”.227 Here, Cantor adds that the “absolutely infinite sequence of numbers thus seems to me to be an appropriate symbol of the absolute”.228 In these passages, what the epithet “absolute infinite” indicates is the “open totality of the transfinite”, which exhibits a “striking analogy with the potentially infinite” and has, therefore, to be distinguished from the absolute itself, of which it is only “an appropriate symbol”.229 The absolutely infinite does not admit of any determination230 and is later defined as “the supreme One without any difference, the absolute Maximum, which obviously cannot be determined and therefore does not submit to Mathematics”.231 The infinite, or Absolute, in his view, applied solely to God. As Joseph Dauben puts it, “uniquely predicated, it was also beyond determination, since once determined, the Absolute could no longer be regarded as infinite, but was necessarily finite by definition”.232 From the aforementioned passages it becomes clear that for Cantor the continuum, being structured by transfinite numbers, is well defined, well ordered and internally articulated. Even if it is conceived of as a quantum, this does not imply that it is merely arithmetical. On the contrary, transfinite numbers possess an “objective reality”, such that their existence is reflected both in the matter and space of the physical world and in the infinities of concrete objects.233 Cantor even distinguishes between the “intersubjective or immanent reality (intrasubjektive oder immanente Realität)” and the “transsubjective or transient reality (transsubjektive oder auch transiente Realität)” of whole numbers.234 While the former concerns the reality the whole numbers possess for our reason, the latter involves their capacity to represent the powers which are factually present in nature235 – and here we find the connection between transient numbers and reality. In conclusion, Koyré clearly distances himself not only from Cantor’s conception of the continuum but also from Plato himself because of the lack of precision in Koyré’s own analysis. It becomes clear from the preceding considerations that the presumed “gap” that Koyré alludes to can be bridged by setting limits and determinations to what he terms the “pure continuum”, thus engendering an internally articulated unity or “continuous extension”. Such limits do not belong to the sphere of the former but admittedly must be externally imposed upon it. The concept of “limit”, which is here understood both as external and internal boundary or delimitation, allows measurement and articulation of the indeterminate absolute or apeiron or, in Koyré’s terms, the “pure continuum”. 2.8  “Motion” (§ 14, pp. 624–625), “Motion and rest” (§ 15, pp. 624–627)

Koyré’s last remarks aim at supplementing the analyses of Noël and Bergson on some “essential points”, as he puts it. And in this lies his main contribution to the debate: Koyré wants to “understand ‘motion’ in its essential purity” and characterize it from different perspectives. Koyré emphasizes that motion is no “mere translation” if by “translation” 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235

Cantor 1962, p. 205 fn. 2. Ibid., p. 205 fn. 2. Tengelyi 2010, p. 533. Cantor 1962, p. 175. Ibid., p. 391. Dauben 1979, p. 123. Ibid., p. 126. Cantor 1962, p. 181. Ibid., p. 181.

Continuity and infinity  505 we mean a mere change of place: Motion, when realized, brings about a change of place but is not identical with it. Nor is motion an impulse, a tendency or a force: These might be given, but motion may nonetheless not occur, as is the case when we try to raise a paralyzed arm. A force is indeed necessary to set a body in motion, but once the motion is realized, it mostly acts by removing obstacles that could hinder motion or by prescribing a goal immanent to it. Koyré claims we must draw a “strict distinction” between “motion as an act and motion as a state”, a difference which can be traced back to the contrast between Aristotle’s physics and the physics of both Descartes and Galileo. While motion as an act is necessarily limited in space and time and forms a “teleological unity” as a succession of phases, motion as a state is unlimited in space and time and has no goal which it pursues, but merely has a direction that it follows such that if all obstacles were removed, it would continue to infinity. Hence, Koyré defines motion as “that particular progression of the body within itself and towards itself” – that which remains after the elimination of “heterogeneous elements” that might hinder it. As such, it is not extended and not divisible, not something physical, although it is a physical phenomenon. While “motion is correlative to rest”, these are also “mutually exclusive”. They are both situated in time and have a “certain extension”, that is, they last. Finally, while motion realizes and constitutes itself in space, rest is not spatial, since it is the resting body that is in space. Motion is also necessarily continuous, such that while on the one hand the object of motion moves and is in motion at every point and every moment of its path, on the other hand, it moves neither at the place where it “is” nor at the place where it is no longer and consequently neither at the moment of its departure nor of its arrival. Departure and arrival are momentary events without duration, such that the moving body passes through all points on its path, but not its points of departure and arrival. Hence the points of departure and arrival are compatible neither with motion nor with rest, but with immobility. Koyré concludes his reflections on motion as follows: Neither motion nor rest begin and end as such, although they have a beginning and an end, because there is neither a first nor a last moment of motion or rest in itself; nor is there a moment that immediately follows or precedes any moment of motion or rest taken of it! Accordingly, this paradox – and we may add, the Zenonian paradoxes – is no longer “frightening”, for it is taken as “the other face of continuity, of the perfect ‘cohesion’ of motion itself – of the lack of absolute resolvability”. In summary, even if Zeno’s paradoxes are still open to varied interpretations and attempts at refutation, Koyré’s conception of motion as a state may be viewed as an important contribution to hermeneutics and epistemology, a conception that is further developed in his studies on Galileo and Newton. 2.8.1 Koyré’s later enquiries into motion: Descartes, Galileo, Newton. The relevance of “Bemerkungen”

As already mentioned, Koyré believed that philosophical and, in general, theoretical assumptions play a decisive role in enabling a scientist to explain reality through its conceivability. In his Études galiléennes, Koyré stresses that “Galilean physics explains that which is through that which it is not. Descartes and Newton go farther: Their physics explain that which is through that which cannot be; they explain the real through the

506  Irene Breuer impossible”. The impossibility that concerns motion “is not of the same kind, does not have the same structure”. While for Galileo the conception of rectilinear inertial motion is impossible, since the weight of the object makes it go down, for Descartes and Newton it is “by far less impossible”. For Newton, the rectilinear motion of an object is hindered by the action of other objects on the former, while for Descartes, the impossibility of inertial motion is “deeper”, insofar as he cannot conceive of isolated objects in space. Whereas for Newton and Descartes the impossibility is an “exterior” one insofar as it concerns reality, for Galileo it is an impossibility that is “ex hypothesi” insofar as it concerns the very conceivability of rectilinear motion.236 For Koyré, the constitution of physical science presupposes philosophical inquiries about what structure the former has, which means it all depends on “the role played by mathematics in the constitution of the science of the real”.237 Koyré accordingly believed that conceivability plays a decisive role in the explanation of consciousness-independent reality. He was convinced that reality was ruled by a priori principles, that is, physics is a priori physics, such that mathematical theory precedes experience, even though it cannot always be confirmed by experience. It is in the context of such considerations that in his Newtonian Studies Koyré further develops the topic of inertial motion. Newton uses the expression “status of motion” to assert that motion is not “a process of change, in contradiction to rest”, as had been believed up to then, but also a “state” just like rest. This means motion and rest are placed “on the same level of being”. Now, it is precisely because motion is a state that rectilinear motion perseveres and proceeds uniformly without requiring any cause or mover. Hence “the law of inertia implies an infinite world”. It is in Descartes that Koyré finds a clear assertion of “the uniformity and rectilinearity of ‘inertial’ motion” and the explicit mentioning of “motion as a status”. “It is” – Koyré adds – “precisely the institution of the concept of the status of motion for actual motion that enables Descartes – and will enable Newton – to assert the validity of his first law or rule of motion” 238 that claims that any object in and of itself always persists in the same state and thus that what is moved once will always continue to be moved. For Descartes, as we have seen, rectilinear, uniform inertial motion is utterly impossible, since, for him, actual motion is essentially temporal, i.e., it can vary according to the forces acting on the object. The concept of status proves to be a key-concept insofar as it enables Descartes to assert “the ontological equivalence or equiperfection of motion and rest” as “the very center of the new conception of motion”, as Newton will tacitly acknowledge by also employing this term.239 These later reflections make clear that a deeper examination of the historical sources allows Koyré to draw a fine distinction between the terms “status” and “state”: While “status” is now applied to inertial motion – and in the “Bemerkungen” it was identified with a “state” – “state” is now reserved for motion conceived of as change in the Aristotelian and scholastic senses of the word. Viewed from this perspective, his “Bemerkungen”, which were written very early on in his career, can be seen to contain Koyré’s further developments in nuce. His “Bermerkungen” can therefore be considered a key achievement not only in his academic/philosophical context but also in the general history of the hermeneutics of science. Now, it is time to test their applicability to Zeno’s argument against plurality. 236 237 238 239

Koyré 1966 [1939], pp. 275–276. Ibid., p. 277. Koyré 1965, pp. 66–69. Ibid., p. 76.

Continuity and infinity  507 3  Zeno’s arguments and Aristotle’s criticism 3.1  Zeno’s argument against plurality

At the beginning of this chapter, I argued that Zeno’s paradoxes should be considered in the light of his argument against plurality. These arguments are closely related since – contra Koyré –they primarily concern the problem of continuity and only secondarily the cognate problem of the nature of the infinite in its relationship with the finite. We shall now inquire first whether the argument concerning plurality can be refuted on the basis of Aristotle’s reflections on continuity, second, whether the latter might help in resolving the paradoxes and, finally, to what extent Koyré’s reflections on motion may contribute to their clarification. According to Simplicius, Zeno addresses the problem of an infinitely divisible finite continuum in his own book. And it is through Simplicius that we know this argument, contained in what is called fragment B3: If things are a plurality, they must be just as many as they are, and neither more nor less. But, if they are as many as they are, they will be finite in number. If things are a plurality, they will be infinite in number. For there will always be others between any of them, and again between these yet others. And so things are infinite in number.240 Zeno argues that if there is a multiplicity, it must be both finite and infinite in number. In the first part of the argument, he says that a multiplicity of things consists of a certain number of things and must therefore be finite in number. In the second part, according to Lee, the “things” are to be understood as points on a line. The argument simply asserts that it is always possible to assume there are other points between two points a and a’. As already mentioned, Zeno presupposes that an extension that is infinitely divisible is also by definition actually infinitely divided. A closer look at the text makes us realize that for “limited” and “unlimited”, that is, in number, we could almost substitute “exhausted” and “inexhaustible”,241 such that the question would be “how can the series of divisions, which are by definition inexhaustible, be exhausted?” – and it must be exhausted if motion is to be possible.242

240 Diels = B3, Lee = 11. Parmenides dogma that what is one cannot also be many is contradicted by Plato in Parmenides 144e-145 (see Cornford 1923, p. 143): Anything that is one must be at least two, as having two parts or elements, since parts are contained by the whole: “a ‘One which is’ is both one and many, whole and parts, limited as well as indefinitely numerous”. Köhler (2014, pp. 297–298) argues that Zeno employs precisely these assumptions, which were commonplace in ancient Greece, in his argument to show, by means of a reductio ad absurdum, the rightness of Parmenides’ conception. Köhler (2014, p. 92; pp. 300–301) claims that the arguments against plurality contained in fragments B1–3 are directed against three arts of plurality: Against a numerical plurality of units, against a mereological plurality of units (a singular unit having a plurality of parts) and, finally, against a qualitative plurality (a singular unit having a variety of qualities). Hence each thing would be “a mereological plurality of pluralities”. 241 See Brochard 1926, p. 9; Fränkel 1975, p. 103; Heath 1981, p. 279. 242 In the words of Brochard (1926, p. 9): “Zeno knows, his demonstration demands it, that the comportment of space and time is the same, that they are always bound together in parallel and are infinitely divisible. The question is knowing how that series of divisions, inexhaustible by definition, can be exhausted in both cases – space and time – given that it is necessary that it be exhausted for motion to take place. To say that they are exhausted simultaneously is no answer”.

508  Irene Breuer Ross does not interpret this passage from a geometrical, but rather from an arithmetical point of view: Multiplicity must be both limited and unlimited in number. The basic idea in this fragment is that if we assume multiplicity and divisibility, the parts will altogether make up the universe. Their number, if it completely includes all things, must be finite. If we approach this the other way round and go from the whole to its parts, we find that the summation can never be exhaustive and that the number of parts is infinite.243 Hence “the premise of plurality and divisibility does not admit the assumption of an ultimate indivisible unit”.244 For between two parts a third can be squeezed in, such that while in the Dichotomy, one will never reach the limit, in the Achilles the distance, however small, never vanishes. And if one introduces the notion of limit to a numerical calculation for the discontinuous, Zeno is well aware that his arguments are no longer valid.245 For if we think of the distance as divided into equal parts, then no difficulty arises. As will be explained later in more detail, Aristotle recognizes the existence of infinite sequences converging toward a limit. If a finite distance is divided infinitely and a finite part of it is added continuously – as is the case when a distance is traversed – then this sequence converges toward a determinate limit. This means that regardless of the length of the parts into which the distance is divided, the addition of the corresponding lengths results in unity: Both Achilles and the tortoise traverse the same distance. The problem only arises with a distance consisting of parts that become smaller in a constant ratio. Zeno proves that Achilles always remains behind the tortoise. It is true that Achilles must first cover the distance that the tortoise has already covered and so he allows the tortoise to cover another distance in the meantime, meaning that he can never catch up with it. What Zeno tries to prove is that the extended world and, in general, the finite are a continuum and are radically one and indivisible, which is an argument found in Parmenides.246 The fragment is significant because here the problem of an infinitely divisible finite continuum is set forth in its simplest form, without being complicated by an interplay of space and time, as in the paradoxes. Insofar as this argument can be applied without alteration to any other continuum, it proves to be essential for the conception of the four paradoxes on motion. 3.2  Aristotle’s conception of continuity and infinity

Aristotle rejects Zeno’s argument by claiming that the infinite divisibility is only potential, merely a possibility. This assumption is based on the character of continua. Two things are continuous “if their extremities are one”,247 meaning that they are a whole or

243 Ross 1936, p. 479. 244 Fränkel 1975, p. 105. 245 Heath 1981, p. 279. 246 See Cornford 1923, pp. 134–135; Kirk & Raven 1957, pp. 289–291; Booth 1957a, pp. 198–199 and 1957b “Were Zeno’s Arguments a Reply to Attacks upon Parmenides?”, in Phronesis 2(1), 1–9; Furley 1974, pp. 353–376. Guthrie 1965, p. 98f. claims that the origin of this argument can be traced back to Parmenides 8.22.-5: “Parmenides’ procedure has been to deny the divisibility of being by saying that, if it were divided, what separates its parts must be either what is or what is not. It cannot be what is not (i.e. emptiness), for that by definition does not exist nor can it be what is, for nothing exists besides what is […]. Reality being one is continuous, and this depends on its being always in contact with itself. Hence the Eleatic argues that if reality is many, it is not continuous, and its components are not in contact. There must be something between them”. 247 Physics VI, 1, 231 a22.

Continuity and infinity  509 complete. Whereas the infinite with respect to quantity is that of which “we can always take something outside”, that is, something that is increasable, a whole is necessarily limited for “what has nothing outside […] is complete and whole”. Whole and complete are two concepts that are closely akin, since something is complete when it has an end or limit.248 Aristotle adds a second qualification to this definition, which is decisive in his dispute with Zeno: “Nothing that is continuous can be composed of indivisibles”.249 This means that a continuum can never be resolved into indivisible elements like points or “nows”, which, for Aristotle, constitute the limits of a continuum but not its parts. For the same reason, a continuum can be composed neither of points nor of nows.250 This is the core of Aristotle’s rebuttal of the Zenonian arguments against the possibility of motion: It is because every “point” is taken to be one of the indivisible elements that prevents motion and this means that the distance cannot be traversed.251 Having a continuum of “distinct parts” rather than one composed of them – since this would imply the existence of points delimiting each part – entails that a continuum “is divisible into divisibles that are always divisible”252 and so on ad infinitum. The continuous is thus not composed of parts but is rather infinitely divisible: “the infinite presents itself first in the continuous […]; for what is infinitely divisible is continuous”.253 Therefore, according to Aristotle, the parts do not precede the division, but they result from division and thus an infinite series of parts is engendered through the infinite division of a continuum. As Ross puts it, “its infinity consists only in the fact that into however many parts it has been divided, it can be divided into more”.254 However, these parts are not actually, but only potentially contained in the continuum. Infinite divisibility means that there is no limit to the division of a spatial magnitude, such that “a spatial magnitude is unlimited in its potentiality of being successively divided”255 into other extensive parts. This infinity applies to the acts of possible divisions, meaning that it concerns the potentiality of the repetition of an activity: But in the direction of largeness it is always possible to think of a larger number; for the number of times a magnitude can be bisected is infinite. Hence, this infinite is potential, never actual: the number of parts that can be taken always surpasses any definite amount. But this number is not separable, and its infinity does not persist but consists in a process of coming to be, like time and the number of time.256 Hence, in Aristotle, infinity applies to the number of possible acts of division of continua and never implies the possibility of infinite repetition of acts of addition of a new series to an accomplished one. It is well known that Aristotle rejects not only the actual infinity 248 Physics III, 7, 207 a8–13. 249 Physics VI 1, 231 a24f. 250 As Szabó explains, early Greek mathematics and Euclid in his third definition conceived of the one as an indivisible unit. Were it not indivisible, it would be a plurality, which would imply a contradiction (Szabó 1969, p. 351). Euclid conceived of the points as only the limits or “extremities” of a line, but not as its parts. 251 Physics VIII, 8, 263 b25f. 252 Physics VI, 1, 231 b16f. 253 Physics III, 1, 200 b16. 254 Ross 1936, p. 50. 255 Ibid., p. 50. 256 Physics III, 7, 207 b10–15.

510  Irene Breuer of extension, for there cannot be any actual existing magnitude greater than the cosmos itself,257 but also the potential infinity of extension, for that would mean that arbitrary large extensions are possible and consequently they would be actual at some moment in time. As Aristotle puts it: “For the size which it can potentially be, it can actually be”.258 Hence, there can be no infinite in respect of addition, that is, that which cannot be exhausted by any adding of part to part. He thus distinguishes the infinite of division (dihairesis) from the infinite of addition (prosthesis). As regards extensions, the only potential infinity that he retains is the potential infinite division of finite continua. Infinite successive acts of division are possible, provided that each partial realization has ceased to be when its successor has come into being, and this applies to time and its quantification, as was already noted.259 Therefore, the acts of division cannot coexist in time, that is, they cannot be simultaneous and must be successive. This conception concerns a mere operation carried out by mind or reason: For Aristotle, the “separateness” of the infinite “is only in knowledge”, i.e., it exists potentially and therefore actually only in thinking, which is the way in which he claims all mathematical objects exist.260 “Infinite” is thus a predicate of an activity of reason. In fact, Aristotle asserts the infinite potentiality for division of a continuum on the basis of a logical argument, that is, to avoid a contradiction involved in the necessity of the “divisibility of the indivisible”. This follows from the assumption that “anything continuous can be indivisible”.261 Incidentally, the infinite potentiality for division involves an infinite potentiality for addition in a very special sense: By dividing a line into successive parts diminishing in a constant ratio, we will never exhaust the whole and this implies that the number can be increased without limit.262 As already mentioned, Aristotle recognized the existence of an infinite series converging to a finite sum. “But”, Aristotle says, our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science, by disproving the actual existence of the infinite in the direction of increase, in the sense of untraversable. In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it. They postulate only that a finite straight line may be produced as far as they wish. It is possible to have divided into the same ratio as the largest quantity another magnitude of any size you like. Hence, for the purposes of proof, it will make no difference to them whether the infinite is found among existent magnitudes.263 Aristotle’s asserts that the existence of an infinite series whose terms are magnitudes is impossible unless it is “convergent” in modern terms.264 This is the case for magnitudes which differ from a unit of extension by a quantity that diminishes infinitely as the divider becomes increasingly large.265 Number (on the basis of a unit as a limit) has a minimum but no maximum, and space has a maximum but no minimum, since it can be infinitely divided. Infinite extension can accordingly exist only as the converse of 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265

Ibid., 7, 207 b19–21. Physics II, 7, 207 b17–18. Physics III, 6, 206 a17. Metaphysics IX, 6, 1048 b13–15. Physics V, 2, 233 b16–18. Physics III, 6, 206 a18–21. Ibid., 7, 207 b27–34. Heath 1981, p. 343. See Dauben 1979, p. 7.

Continuity and infinity  511 infinite divisibility. Therefore, the geometer does not need arbitrarily large potential extensions; all that he needs is that there be arbitrarily small potential magnitudes: Given a determinate figure, there is always a sufficiently small figure for which the proof can be carried out.267 The mathematician, however, operates with the infinity of the number series, which amounts to the fact that however far he has counted, he can count still farther: It is a potential infinity, only capable of successive and partial realization, like that of time.268 It is in this sense that we can speak of an actualization of the infinite.269 266

3.3  Aristotle’s treatment of Zeno’s paradoxes

In view of the above considerations, a decisive factor emerges upon analyzing Zeno’s argument: The infinite divisibility of continuity is only possible in the mode of a dynamis – not only because the activity of dividing is always possible but because the continuity of the continuum is destroyed when one really divides. While in Physics VI Aristotle argues against the theory that magnitudes are composed of indivisible units, in Physics VIII he realizes that this answer “is inadequate”. The right argument is that although lines are infinitely divisible, this infinite division is merely potential.270 Aristotle explains that the division of an extension that is really carried out brings the continuous motion to a halt: In the act of dividing the continuous distance into two halves one point is treated as two, since we make it a beginning and an end; and this same result is produced by the act of counting halves as well as by the act of dividing into halves. But if divisions are made in this way, neither the distance nor the motion will be continuous, […]; and though what is continuous contains an infinite number of halves, they are not actual but potential halves. If he makes the halves actual, he will get not a continuous but an intermittent motion. In the case of counting the halves, it is clear that this result follows, for then one point must be reckoned as two; it will be the end of the one half and the beginning of the other […].271 The true nature of the line is to be continuous and undivided; to claim that it is actually made up of infinite parts would mean that continuity is discontinuous.272 Whether we actually divide a line or count its partitions, we are bringing motion to a halt and destroying the continuity of the whole. Hence, Aristotle concludes: Therefore, to the question whether it is possible to pass through an infinite number of units either of time or of distance we must reply that in a sense it is and in a sense 266 See Physics III, 6, 206 b3–10. 267 Hintikka, Jaakko 1966, “Aristotelian Infinity”, in The Philosophical Review LXXV, pp. 197–218; Ross, David W. 1996, Aristotle (London/Kegan), p. 86. 268 Physics III, 7, 207 b1–15. 269 For a detailed analysis see Breuer 2020, pp. 193–244. 270 Booth (1957, pp. 197–198) suggests that Zeno’s argument simply assumed that Achilles always has to keep coming to the point where the tortoise was, and since this can go indefinitely, Achilles never overtakes the tortoise. Zeno may not have taken account of the infinite divisibility of time but of distance. Hence, Aristotle may have been “the first to put infinitely divisible time into anything like a satisfactory relationship with infinitely divisible distance”. 271 Physics VIII, 8, 263 a23-b2, my italics. 272 Ross 1936, pp. 714–715.

512  Irene Breuer it is not. If the units are actual, it is not possible; if they are potential, it is possible. For in the course of a continuous motion the traveller has traversed an infinite number of units in an accidental sense but not in an unqualified sense; for though it is an accidental characteristic of the distance to be an infinite number of half-distances, it is different in essence and being.273 The reason is that both the parts and the boundaries between the parts of a line or time exist only potentially until they are actualized and neither of them is actualized in a motion that is continuous.274 For he who makes a “continuous motion has only incidentally passed through the infinite”275 and not in the actual sense, for the line is not essentially but accidentally infinite, inasmuch as the infinite division is predicated on it. A line, then, happens to be infinitely divisible, but its true nature consists in being continuous and undivided. Points can only be actualized when the moving body stops and then continues its motion. It thus actualizes the two parts of distance or time and the boundary or point in time and space that divides them both, since for Aristotle, space, time and motion are correlative: “For motion if it is continuous must relate to what is continuous”.276 Ross contends that Aristotle’s arguments do not solve the paradoxes; for the points do not only become actual when motion is brought to a halt, but vice versa: A moving body can only stop at a pre-existent point, that is, the existence of the points “is pre-supposed by its passage through them”. And the moving body “can come to rest only at a point to be rested at”.277 To this, Aristotle would reply that even if you presupposed the existence of points in thought or, as he says, even if you counted them, you would actualize them by a mental act, that is, the act of dividing a line or a time imaginatively into parts, such that the continuity would be broken. Hence, for Aristotle, continuous things can only be divided into similar things, that is, into coherent things, and the point of division is not one of them. This is a fundamental ontological principle of Aristotle’s, namely, that what is infinitely divisible and continuous cannot consist of something discrete.278 But how is it possible to assert that the point or the now can “be” a boundary or a division of a continuum, but not as a constituent? In his arguments against the principle of addition, be it of parts or of points of a line, Aristotle draws the following distinctions: Things are “continuous if their extremities are one, in contact if their extremities are together, and in succession if there is nothing of their own kind intermediate between them”.279 From this, it follows: a In the case of composition: (a.1) Nothing that is continuous can be composed of indivisibles. For the extremities of two points can neither be one (since an indivisible has no extremity as its part) nor together (since that which has no parts can have no extremities). 273 Physics VIII, 8, 263 b5–10. 274 Ross 1936, p. 74. 275 Wieland, Wolfgang 1992, Die aristotelische Physik. Untersuchungen übe die Grundlegung der Naturwissenschaft und die sprachlichen Bedingungen der Prinzipienforschung bei Aristoteles (Göttingen/Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht), p. 302. 276 Physics VIII, 8, 263 a26. 277 Ibid., 8, 263 a26; Ross 1936, p. 75. 278 Szabó 1969, p. 6. 279 Physics V, 1, 231a17.

Continuity and infinity  513 (a.2) If that which is continuous is composed of points, these points must be either continuous or in contact with one another. For the reason given above, they cannot be continuous. If they are in contact as whole with whole, they are spatially separate, such that they are not continuous. (a.3) Nor can a point be in succession to a point, for things are in succession if there is nothing of their own kind intermediate between them, whereas there is always a line or a period of time between points or nows. b In the case of division: (b.1) Nothing that is continuous can be divided into indivisibles. For no continuous thing is divisible into things without parts. (b.2) Nor can there be anything of any other kind between, for if it is divisible, it would be into indivisibles or divisibles into further divisions, in which case it is continuous. (b.3) Everything continuous is divisible into divisibles that are always divisible; for if it were divisible into indivisibles, being these in mutual contact they would not be one. In conclusion, “the same reasoning applies equally to magnitude, to time, and to motion”.280 In On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle presents a similar argument in connection with perceptible bodies, arguing against the constitution of continua from points.281 Michael J. White has discussed this argument in detail. In brief, as regards the divisibility of a quantity, it shows the following: a Aristotle establishes a sense of “complete divisibility” according to which there is no position into which a quantity cannot potentially be divided. b He rejects the possibility of complete division at any “place” because no point or “position” is contiguous to another. c What is presupposed here is that the absence of contiguity or successive placement of points precludes actual complete division (division everywhere).282 It follows from the above that a line neither consist of nor can be divided into extensionless points. A line can only be divided into other extended parts, that is, into other continuous magnitudes, at the cost of the continuity of the whole. A point on a line divides the line into two halves, which are then discontinuous with respect to each other. A point is thus the boundary of a straight line, the end of one line and the beginning of another, or the beginning and end of a single line. The same function is performed by the now in time. It separates past time from future time. But there is a difference between the two cases: The point of division on a line is used as “two”. Since the point is immobile and has a definite position, Aristotle “divides” it into two to fix the end of a part and the beginning of the other; thus, the continuity of a line as a whole is interrupted. In an analogous way, the point divides time, it distinguishes the “before” and “after” of continuous time. Insofar as it is a boundary, it is not time, “but an attribute of it, insofar 280 Ibid., 1, 231 a17-b19. 281 On Generation and Corruption, I, 2, 317 a2–11. 282 White, Michael J. 1992, The Continuous and the Discrete. Ancient Physical Theories from a Contemporary Perspective (Oxford/Clarendon), p. 15.

514  Irene Breuer as it numbers, it is number”.283 It does not “rest”; however, since motion is continuous, the “now” is always the same “as substratum”, while “its being is different”, for it is another in the case of the “before” and “after”.284 Hence, two “nows” can only be taken as boundaries (a boundary is not a part, as Alexander, quoted in Simplicius, explains) of a stretch of time; they are time only as they allow counting to be performed, just as points are the boundary and measure of the stretch. As is well known, Aristotle defines time as “number of movement in respect of the before and after, and is continuous since it is an attribute of what is continuous”.285 Therefore, Aristotle interprets the “now” as a number and thereby motion as being counted according to the now-points.286 What is important to remark here is that the infinite consists in something new being continually taken, such that the past “now” disappears at the present “now” and the succession never ends. 4  Concluding remarks In summary, in Aristotle’s view, a line does not consist of points. Because the point is indivisible, no sum of points – no matter how many are added – can result in anything divisible, whereas a line is a divisible magnitude. Points are neither continuous nor contiguous nor do they succeed one another, since to assume this would entail that the continuous is discontinuous. A point is like a now in time; the now is indivisible and is not a part of time; it is only the beginning or the end, or a division of time, likewise with the line in relation to a magnitude. Hence Zeno is apparently refuted: Every stopping entails an interruption of the continuity of the line as well as of time and motion, since points can only be considered as limits. If we follow Aristotle, and even if we distinguished acts from states as Koyré proposes, motion as a continuous state does not refute Zeno’s paradoxes because we neither pass infinite points along the paths nor do we count them, as doing so would entail bringing motion to a halt. Neither would it help to “disengage” motion from space, as Koyré does, such that motion is regarded as a continuous state even though the path is discontinuous, that is, made up of points, since both for Aristotle and for Zeno time, motion and space are correlative. The distinction between points of arrival and departure, which are taken to be motionless points, and the continuity of motion along the line as a state would neither be admissible in Aristotle’s view since motion, as with any other continuum, is necessarily finite, such that its starting and finishing points are its boundaries or limits, belonging thus to it. The moving body neither actually passes through an infinite number of points nor actually counts them, even though we might think we are actually passing them – that is, we are actualizing them in thought by imaginatively dividing the path. For it belongs to the essence of the line to be neither actually composed by points nor divided by them. The same conclusion applies to Cantor’s view. Only on the grounds of his concept of a transfinite continuum can the paradoxes be resolved, as Koyré shows. While Aristotle denies the possibility of a continuum composed of points and the possibility of a continuous motion alongside it – assuming this would entail a continuous motion alongside a 283 Physics IV, 11, 220 a22–23. 284 Ibid., 11, 219 b30–32. 285 Ibid., 11, 230 a25–26. 286 Simplicius 1992, On Aristotle’s Physics 4.1–5, 10–14, transl. J. O. Urmson (London/Duckworth), pp. 135–137.

Continuity and infinity  515 discontinuous extension – Cantor, on the contrary, would sustain both and rather claim that motion continues indefinitely, never coming to a stop. Hence, both Aristotle’s and Cantor’s reflections depart from the assumption that Zeno’s initial hypothesis is false. This line of reasoning shows that Zeno’s paradoxes can lose ground only by assuming Aristotle’s or Cantor’s conception of the continuum. But this does not necessarily entail that they are refuted on the basis of Zeno’s own arguments as such, which still await a definitive answer. In short, I have endeavored to show that Zeno’s paradoxes are grounded in his argument against plurality, insofar as this deals with the problem of the continuum in its simplest and clearest way and thus can be applied without alteration to the four other paradoxes on motion. The preceding reflections have also made clear the close connection between these paradoxes, since, in my view and contra Koyré, they all primarily concern the problem of continuity. However, the above critical comments are not intended to cast a shadow on Koyré’s conception of motion, which rather represents an important contribution to the ongoing discussion on Zeno’s paradoxes. On the contrary, the “Bemerkungen” shows the fruitfulness of his original approach. By applying modern theories to ancient problems, Koyré succeeded in accounting for both phenomena and theory in a new way, which allows a different interpretation of ancient problems and lets them be made applicable to modern concerns. Moreover, his Platonic realism has proved to be the key to inquiring in the self-standing “real reality”, that is, a reality whose access requires no transcendental reduction, although it is dependent on experience. As Koyré ceaselessly repeats, theory precedes experience. Taken together, these changes in perspective, as Koyré asserts, presuppose a transformation of metaphysical and epistemic frameworks, a transformation he himself helped to introduce into the hermeneutics of science. Within this context, the conception of a new articulation of the relation between philosophy and science on the one hand and between past and present theories on the other can be regarded as a methodological innovation in the history of hermeneutics and phenomenology alike. Hence, Koyré deserves credit for having introduced a new phenomenological-hermeneutical methodology into the history of science. In short, his “Bemerkungen” can be considered a turning point in the hermeneutics of scientific history.

Part IV

Varia

29 Desiderativity and temporality Contribution to the naturalization of intentionality Panos Theodorou, Costas Pagondiotis, Anna Irene Baka, and Constantinos Picolas Abstract  Neurophenomenology maintains that the intelligent behavior we recognize in living beings is based on the fact that they are intentionally directed toward and are embodied and embedded in a world, which they actively constitute. This is the way in which it understands the intentionality of the mind and its meaning-making essence. Meaning-making, however, presupposes organization and synthesis of sensed reality elements within a horizon of temporality. But whence is the opening-up of this horizon given to the living? Attempts have been made to “transplant” Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological analysis of temporality (“internal timeconsciousness”) into the neural infrastructure of living organisms. We critique the main available relevant views and proposals put forward, focusing on the problematic way in which they assimilate Husserl’s analysis of intentionality and temporality. After distinguishing the desiderative (ephetic) phenomena on different levels of organization of the living being, we develop the argument that temporality, in the sense of the temporal horizon of lived time, is rooted in the deepest desiderative phenomenon, that of primordial orexis. Primordial orexis is directed not toward concrete or specific objects or sensory contents, but toward evolutionarily/survivally significant values. Then, we interpret Panksepp’s psychological and behavioral neuro-ethological findings regarding a SEEKING system in dopaminergic circuits in the subcortical frontal brain as an orectic value-seeking neural system and show that Panksepp’s results underpin our idea that such a system makes possible the opening-up of the primordial temporal horizon. As an application of the idea, we claim that primordial orexis (also) relates to truth or evidence as value and, in perception, conditions the meaning-giving process leading to the evident appearing of the perceptual object as a constitution that unfolds in the context of the orectically opened-up temporal horizon. Keywords  Phenomenology; Neurophenomenology; Desire; Orexis; Values; Intentionality; Meaning; Temporality; Perception; SEEKING System 1  Introduction: naturalized epistemology and the issue of temporality During the passing from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, a strong wave of views was raised in favor of naturalization in research topics belonging until that time to philosophy and traditional psychology. Reactions to this, which tried to safeguard the autonomy of philosophy and a significant role for it, were informed by two different

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-33

520  Panos Theodorou, et al. strategies. Frege and the current of philosophy as linguistic analysis thought that philosophy should radically narrow down its traditional aspirations to provide an a priori royal path to knowledge concerning being, truth, and the good. Knowledge of what is knowable is attainable only by the means of the well-established natural sciences and their methods. Philosophy, however, could survive by limiting its a priori research method to the logical analysis of the language of science and of any language that supposedly treasures knowledge, as well as to the logical foundation of such edifices of propositions. Brentano, Husserl, and the current of phenomenological philosophy suggested that, with a new rigorous research method, which would overcome mere speculation, philosophy could carry on discovering a priori truths in all the fields of research and also offer metaphysical foundations to all the sciences.1 For a long time, Logical Empiricism and Analytic Philosophy on the one side and, to a lesser extent, Phenomenology on the other side prevailed and developed their efforts in various fields of problems. By the time of the publication of Quine’s “Epistemology Naturalized” (1969), the second strong wave for the naturalization of all research for knowledge emerged. Quine declared the bankruptcy of philosophy as analytic a priori theory of knowledge and cognition and called for a naturalization of the research on cognition, which found many devotees. Cognitive Science was formed as an interdisciplinary, empirical scientific endeavor to uncover the natural basis of intelligence and cognition in general. Computer theory, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, etc., as well as the traditional representational and computational theory of mind formed at that time the core of the new research endeavor. The shortcomings of this version of naturalized research on cognition were progressively understood.2 Challenges in the theory of content (mental representation) and in the computational simulation of the human cognition and comportment brought to the surface the latter’s lack of adequate understanding in aspects like intentionality, coping with tools, embodiedness and embeddedness of cognition, contextuality and meaningfulness, being in the world, phenomenality of experience, self-consciousness, emotive intelligence, etc. Alternative lines of research were developed, which soon gained a considerable audience and dedicated practitioners. From the camps of Analytic Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Mind arose such fields as teleosemantics/biosemantics as well as enactivism. In this juncture, there has been an increasing interest in ideas that had been developed in the phenomenological tradition. Thus, different lines of inquiry were elaborated, such as Eco-cognition, Autopoiesis, and Neurophenomenology. Our approach here situates itself broadly within the Neurophenomenological project and aims both at its partial renewal and at its reinforcement by following a specific positive direction.

1 Neokantianism was also another line of reaction to that call for naturalization of all the topics of interest for philosophy and traditional psychology. Their discovery of the thematic of value and of the normativity characterizing it and all a priori transcendental conditions of possibility was their reply to the growing appetite of the natural-scientific worldview. For a first aid informative account of this part of the story, see Frederick C. Beiser, “Normativity in Neo-Kantianism: Its Rise and Fall,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (2009), 9–27. See also below for Husserl’s anti-naturalistic sensitivity to normativity. 2 See, e.g., Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do – A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992); John Haugeland, “The Nature and Plausibility of Cognitivism,” in J. Haugeland (ed.), Having Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9–45; John Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980), 417–424.

Desiderativity and temporality  521 Of course, this would be in due for some justification. For, how is it possible that we follow a line of approach like Neurophenomenology, which aspires to be a naturalized version of Phenomenology? Wasn’t Husserl himself and the whole phenomenological movement the ones that most strongly opposed the very idea of universal naturalization, claiming that phenomenological and natural-scientific research are incompatible?3 This is not the place to develop a full-scale examination of Husserl’s arguments against the naturalizability of phenomenological research and of intentionality or/and a possible critique against them. For the present purposes, we only note that, in the latter direction, there has been a growing series of arguments, which, perhaps, although not fully persuasive in their current form, show that the antinaturalism of Husserlian and traditional Phenomenology does not any longer stand as an incontestable holy creed.4 Notable exception to this rule is Merleau-Ponty’s efforts in The Structure of Behavior (1949) and the Phenomenology of Perception (1945) to enrich the a priori phenomenological research with the newly, then, accumulated data from the empirical psychological and neurological research in phenomena related to cognition as well as to adjust phenomenological data to neurological states.5 To avoid any possible misunderstanding, nonetheless, let it be as explicit as possible that Merleau-Ponty and we here do not move in the direction of a reductive physicalism. Moreover, if we were forced to determine our metaphysical position more specifically at this point, we would say that we side with the program of emergentism. Now, the special character of Neurophenomenology’s research program, in particular, consists of the following two broad moves. (1) It turned from the electromechanical systems as suitable natural basis for understanding mental/cognitive phenomena to living beings. (2) It paid serious attention to the non-representational and lived character of experience and existence, which were emphasized and elaborated in the circles of the phenomenological and existential philosophy. Neurophenomenology aspires to show that the intelligent comportment we recognize in living beings is grounded in the fact that they are autopoietic and enactive beings that, in a feedback process, project meaningfulness to their environing realities and a world of beings appears around them. This is how Neurophenomenology suggests that we understand the intentionality of mental/cognitive phenomena and intelligent comportment. However, for this to be established, an account must be given as to how exactly enactive meaning-giving and meaningfulness are possible. From the phenomenological perspective, meaningfulness refers to situations in which received elements (e.g., sensory material) are integrated within an organizing order and that they all undergo a synthesis

3 Interestingly, the main thrust of Husserl’s first attack to the naturalization project, especially in his—foundational for Phenomenology—Prolegomena (1900), was centered around the idea of the unaturalizability of the normativity of the normative matheses and, first and foremost, of Logic. This is known as his critique of psychologism in Logic, the project for the psychologization of the foundations of Logic. 4 For example, see Liliana Albertazzi, “Naturalizing Phenomenology: A Must Have?” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018), Article 1933, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01933; Shaun Gallagher, “On the Possibility of Naturalizing Phenomenology,” in Dan Zahavi (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 70–93; Jean Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud, and Jean-Michel Roy (eds.), Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also what follows. 5 Very useful on this is Ted Toadvine, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Lifeworldly Naturalism,” in Lester Embree, Thomas Nenon (eds.), Husserl’s Ideen II (Springer Science & Business Media, 2013), 365–380, here 369–372.

522  Panos Theodorou, et al. within a horizon of temporality. To establish a naturalistic account of this fundamental process, some attempts have been made within Neurophenomenology (and in related research areas) that aim at “transplanting” Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological account of inner time-consciousness into the neural make-up and workings of living beings. We deem those attempts to be bold and useful. However, it is our contention that they are burdened with serious flaws which condemn them not to serve the purpose they intended. In our present proposal, we mean to reevaluate the available, proposed solutions to the problem we just discussed and pinpoint the reasons for their failure with a view to presenting our own innovative position. In this chapter, on the one hand, we will first show that Husserl’s phenomenological analysis of “inner time-consciousness” and, more generally, the phenomenological conception of temporality are poorly received by the available approaches. On the other hand, granted that we concur that intentionality and meaningfulness presuppose the horizon of a lived temporality, we will formulate and develop in detail our post-phenomenological proposal according to which temporality opens-up/unfolds in and through the desiderative or, better, ephetic6 phenomena of organismic life. More specifically, we go on with the following steps. First, we recapitulate and criticize the most relevant and elaborated approaches to the problem of temporality from the perspective of naturalizing intentionality (§2). Ultimately, we distance ourselves from the so-called “Jonasian turn” in Neurophenomenology (taken by Varela, Thompson, and their associates) as well as, consequently, from the framework of recognizing intentionality in the chemotaxic metabolic comportment of the simplest organisms. Second, we turn to the ephetic phenomena and suggest a differentiation of them in kinds and levels of formation corresponding to the organization of the living-being (§4). We consider them on levels above the merely chemical; i.e., on levels that can be recognized and designated as the threshold of the mental states of the living organism. Third, we focus on the most fundamental level of ephetic states, i.e., the one of primordial orexis, and we describe its values-related function for the organism (§5). Fourth, we study recent findings from the relevant literature on neuroscience, neuro-ethology, and behavioral neuro-psychology, which involve the dopaminergic neuronal functioning of the brain in relation to orectic phenomena, and we interpret them as offering evidence in favor of our proposal (§7). Finally, we attempt to explain how this orexis opens up for the first time the temporal horizon as the living or pre-objective time context of the organism’s mental functions (§6) and we see an application of this idea in the case of perception (§8). 2  The conceptual framework Neurophenomenology’s fundamental ideas are the “reflexivity of the agent,” the “co-determination of agent and environment,” and the corresponding “enaction of the world,”

6 The term “desiderative” is widely used in a generic, undifferentiated way. Here, however, we will strongly differentiate desire from other similar, but different, mental or organismic states. Thus, we introduce here the new generic term “ephetic” (not to be confused with “ephectic). The term comes from the Greek word ἔφεσις (éphesis), which is produced from the verb ἐφίημι (ephíēmi) that, among other things, means to set on, being incited to, direct oneself after something, aim at, target something, being inclined to(ward), throw or hurl oneself or something at, appeal to, long for, desire, having appetite for. See https://lsj.gr/wiki/%E1%BC%94 %CF%86%CE%B5%CF%83%CE%B9%CF%82 and https://lsj.gr/wiki/%E1%BC%90%CF%86%CE% AF%CE%B7%CE%BC%CE%B9

Desiderativity and temporality  523 as they were first set forth in The Embodied Mind (1991).7 These ideas are further complemented by the crucial thesis that enaction is a multifaceted, engaged meaning-giving process. In this, the environing elements of the sensorially confronted reality acquire meaning, in a self-regulated and feedback-based process, and are comprehended in what they are and what they do as denizens of a transcendently appearing world. Enactivist approaches share a commitment to the view that experiencing, e.g., seeing, does not take place due to the employment of internal representations on the part of the perceiver, but due to her active engagement with the ecological surroundings. “Cognition is best characterized as belonging to embodied, situated agents—agents who are in-the-world.”8 This is the way, it is suggested, that we understand the intentionality of conscious experience and intelligent comportment. However, for this to be established, an account must be given as to how exactly enactive meaning-giving and meaningfulness are possible. Put differently, we need an analysis of what makes possible the very unfolding of meaninggiving in the constitution of experience and planning or execution of action. The relevant neurophenomenological analyses do not put forward any distinction regarding the meaning-giving phenomena. At this point and for the purposes of the discussion that will follow (§§5–7), we consider it necessary that we distinguish between two levels of meaning bestowal: a cognitive one that refers to meanings in the usual sense involved in ontic constitution, and an evaluative one involved in the constitution of the bio-existential significance of sensory contents and beings. The second sense of meaninggiving is specifically a value-giving or a bestowal of value.9 Now, as the available relevant theory goes, meaning-giving in general takes place in the context of a primordially established lived temporality. In the general naturalization-of-intentionality movement, phenomenologically inspired enactivists, neurophenomenologists,

7 See, e.g., S., Vörös,T. Froese, and A. Riegler, “Epistemological Odyssey: Introduction to Special Issue on the Diversity of Enactivism and Neurophenomenology,” Constructivist Foundations 11 (2016), 189–204, here 191; Francisco J. Varela and Jonathan Shear, “First-Person Accounts: Why, What, and How,” in F. Varela and J. Shear (eds), The View from Within: First-Person Methodologies in the Study of Consciousness, Special Issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999), 1–14; David Rudrauf, et al. “From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela’s Exploration of the Biophysics of Being,” Biological Research 36 (2003): 27–65, here 42–43. The neurophenomenological transmutation of Varela and Thompson’s autopoietic enactivism should be kept distinct from the sensory-motor enactivism of O’Regan and Noë, if not for anything else at least on the ground that the first places special emphasis on the systematized methods of descriptions of givens from the first-person perspective. See also Evan Thompson, Antoine Lutz, Diego Cosmelli, Andy Brook, and Kathleen Akins, “Neurophenomenology: An Introduction for Neurophilosophers,” in Andy Brook and Kathleen Akins (eds), Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–66, here 32. 8 Shaun Gallagher and Francisco J. Varela, “Redrawing the Map and Resetting the Time: Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 33 (supl.) (2003), 93–132, here 96. 9 See Panos Theodorou, Husserl and Heidegger on Reduction, Primordiality, and the Categorial: Phenomenology Beyond Its Original Divide (Springer International Publishing Switzerland, 2015), chs 4–6; Panos Theodorou, “Review of Federico Lauria and Julien Deonna (eds), The Nature of Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017),” Philosophical Psychology 34 (2021), 448–452. Below, in §§4.c and 5, we will see that the second does not necessarily presuppose the first. Let be noted that for the purposes of the presentation and development of our claims, hypotheses, and arguments in this chapter, no special analysis of values is necessary. The reader who is interested in more detail regarding our approach, though, is referred to Panos Theodorou, “Husserl’s and Cassirer’s Naïve Historico-Cultural Progressivism as Viewed Through a Radical Reworking of Kӧhler’s Value Theory,” in Marco Cavallaro, Thiemo Breyer, and Elio Antonucci (eds), Husserl and Cassirer. Perspectives on the Philosophy of Culture (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, forthcoming), here §§3–4.

524  Panos Theodorou, et al. and some cognitive scientists understand this pre-objective temporality in direct reference to Husserl’s theory of “inner time-consciousness.” Models have been proposed that elaborate an internal complexity involved in primordial temporality, a complexity that takes into account that our experience of the present is surrounded, so to speak, by the open semi-horizons of the recent past and imminent future. Take for example the view of Husserl’s analysis about perception. The foundational block of our perceptual capacity is what Husserl calls the “living present.”10 On the most abstract level, this is composed of three intertwined temporal functions of intentionality: a function that retains the sensory phases that have just receded into the past (perceptual short-term memory or retention), an impressional function that is directed on the nowpresent sensory phase (primary impression), and a function that anticipates the forthcoming sensory phases (protention). For Husserl, the perceptual present is not the sharp momentary present of the stopwatch, but has some temporal width involving also what has just passed and what is imminently anticipated to appear. It is a “specious present.”11 So, for example, Husserl writes, “in accordance with what is given to consciousness retentionally, there is ‘to be expected’ something new on its way having a uniform style” (Hua XI, 186/236). This tendency for the continuation of the same style of perceptual content constitutes “a necessary motivation” (ibid.) in the sense that “every past constituted in a unified manner, that is, every succession flowing-off in a unitary manner, is projected into the future as an expectation” (ibid., 186/237).12 According to this account, when for instance I listen to a melody, it is the whole temporal structure of the perceptual present that is involved in my experience of the melody. It belongs to this fundamental structure to be open to an imminent future horizon, the content of which, the idea says, is prefigured (voregezeichnet) by what has already elapsed in the horizon of the past. Within the structure of the concrete living present, an ensouling (beseelend) or meaning-giving (sinngebend) process integrates just past, actually present, and anticipated sensory hyle into the experienced melody as experienced object-like whole. This is what “glues,” so to speak, the phases of the singular object of perception together into the experience of the melody as unitary object. This is an engaged, self-regulating perceptual core structure. Thus, perception is seen as a striving for contents that are expected to fulfill what it, in its flow, constitutively projects as its object. Traditional phenomenology places all this in a transcendental subjectivity. But if we work from the perspective of naturalizing intentionality or phenomenology, as it is usually said, how can one search for the natural basis of such a phenomenon, of the opening-up of the horizon of temporality, in the context of which all meaning-giving takes place and all constitution happens? In fact, there have been some quite bold attempts to “transplant” the discussed notion of temporality into a naturalized ground of the mind attributed to the extremely low-level neuronal and biological operations of the organism. 10 Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, Transl., ed. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer 2001), here 125/170 (German followed by English pagination). Henceforth cited as “Hua XI” with page reference. 11 William James, The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1890), 608–609. 12 For condensed and accurate reconstructions of the basic idea in Husserl’s analysis of inner time-consciousness and primordial temporality, see also, e.g., Shaun Gallagher, “The Past, Present and Future of Timeconsciousness: From Husserl to Varela and Beyond,” Constructivist Foundations 13 (2017), 91–97, here 92–93; Rick Grush, “How to, and How Not to, Bridge Computational Cognitive Neuroscience and Husserlian Phenomenology of Time Consciousness,” Synthese 153 (2006), 417–450, here 418–422.

Desiderativity and temporality  525 As we will show in §3, the available attempts to solve the problem of the natural basis of temporality presupposed for mental meaning-giving acts (intentionality) suffer from certain drawbacks that call for a new approach. In the present chapter we will attempt to show that a promising research hypothesis is that the basis of the temporal opening-up, as prerequisite for every mental operation and intentionality, should be sought after in the deepest ephetic states of the living organisms.13 In §§4.3–7, we will present further relevant analyses and neuroscientific evidence in favor of this idea. 3  The naturalistic basis of temporality. A critique of the current situation For our present purposes and drawing from both the enactivist camp and some relevant work done in the general cognitive scientific paradigm, we place the relevant available attempts along two axes. Along the first one, we meet the approaches of van Gelder (1999), Lloyd (2002), Varela (1999), and Grush (2006). (See sub-section 3.1–3.2.) Along the second one, we place the combined attempts of Varela and Thompson. (See subsection 3.3.) 3.1  The approaches of van Gelder, Lloyd, and Varela

Van Gelder proposed an approach based on connectionist networks and their “learning” behavior in terms of dynamical systems. Lloyd turned to the way in which the observed temporal sequences in fMRI data regarding cerebral blood flow are formed. Varela turned to the neuronal phase couplings in their dynamical system behavior on the 1-sec scale. Grush has already criticized all these attempts convincingly, showing how all these approaches fail to accomplish the task of achieving a valuable coherent narrative/ explanation of how basic temporality enters the scene of an organism’s life or a dynamical system’s workings as the ground of its intentionality.14 On our part, we consider these approaches as moving on the very low (to be relevant) level of the biochemistry of neuronal operations. Especially as concerns van Gelder’s and Lloyd’s proposals, we would also like to add the following: one may indeed wonder why we do not establish a connection between the problem of the physical basis of temporality and the biological cycles themselves, such as cardiac rhythm. A more general reply to this consists in stating that we do not search for a physical phenomenon that unfolds periodically within time, something like a biological clock, but a physical phenomenon that opens up temporality itself or renders possible the unitary horizon within which one can meaningfully speak of a “before” and an “after” from the perspective of an actual “now.” As for Varela’s (1999) approach, we would add that his attempt is misguided in two respects. First, his case study of perception (multistable perceptions) does not fall squarely within the understanding of this intentional act from the scope of Phenomenology, since, as he presents it, separate and totally developed perceptual acts (e.g., perception of hallway or perception of pyramid) are treated as mere phases of a complete perceptual act.15 Second, the objects that are presented to the subjects of the experiments are not clearly

13 There are approaches that consider desire to be an intentional act. See note 23. We do not commit our understanding of it to such views. For the purpose of this chapter, we will become more specific in §5. 14 We refer the reader to Grush, “How to …,” §3. 15 See Francisco J. Varela, “The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness,” in Petitot et al., Naturalizing…, 269–272. See also Panos Theodorou, “Of the Same in the Different. What Is Wrong with Kuhn’s Use of ‘Seeing’ and ‘Seeing as’,” Journal for General Philosophy of Science 35 (2004), 175–200.

526  Panos Theodorou, et al. delineated in their narrowly conceived perceivedness since his experimental protocol does not screen off the straightforwardly co-experienced value layers of the simply perceptual objects. 3.2  Beyond Grush’s trajectory estimation model

On his part, Grush proposes another road for mediating our analysis. His proposal, though, on how to trace the Husserlian phenomenological “inner time-consciousness” in some capacity or structure of the living, does not improve on the approaches he criticizes. His idea is to mediate this time-consciousness through a neuro-computational “internal modeling approach” in the specific form of a “trajectory estimation model” for internal representation contents (Grush, “How to…,” 441ff). However, the very possibility of a sentient being to “estimate” the imminent state of a “represented” content on the basis of “natural laws” and “former states” presupposes (a) not only the openness of the temporal horizon as such, within which only former, present, and imminent states can be arranged, but also (b) a well-developed memory and habituation with what is observed and its comportment. It is of high importance here to elaborate on these remarks. Grush’s idea essentially refers to the content side of the expected and not to that of expectancy itself. Thus, if there is some truth in Grush’s idea, it is to be sought into its tacit connection to our suggested approach, i.e., via the ephetic phenomena. It is on them that trajectory estimation is also founded. As we will see, an additional merit of this approach is that it has, in fact, the ability to turn trajectory anticipation from its quasi-theoretical interpretation into one that pays due attention to its evolutionary and—in the case of humans, also— praxio-existential significance. The question in the search for the naturalistic ground of the temporality of consciousness is not how, for a living being, a moving being or changing system can get from one place/state to the next on the basis of former places/states and in accordance with laws of nature about such place/state changes. It is rather a more primordial one, namely what makes possible that such consecutive states be “merged” together as phases of a continuous phenomenal experience of the same being (quality, thing, place, state of affairs, etc.) in its changing. Another point here should be that this model is based on a kind of relatedness to futurity that is neither that of protention nor, as we will see below, that of desire in any of its levels of function (if not also levels of formation). More precisely, the relatedness under discussion is that of expectation. Expectation is functionable only within an already opened-up temporality and a given and familiar world. It does not concern the fundamental movedness of an organism in its surrounding reality, which is set in action by virtue of the values pertaining to the organism’s conditions for fulfilling its teleologies, e.g., safety, reproduction, well-being. Expectation can be directed both toward objects or states of affairs and toward values and value-affairs. But in all cases, it presupposes an already established experience of the world and its style of “behavior.” This means that objects and experience of how the latter “behave” are given and, above all, temporality is established. 3.3  Beyond Thompson’s chemotaxic directionality

Varela tried to go beyond his first approach, drafted above. Having launched his first efforts with Maturana and the autopoietic research program, Varela developed the idea of

Desiderativity and temporality  527 the enactive constitution of our experience as well as the Neurophenomenological project and tried to delve deeper in his search for the biological basis of temporality, temporal ordering, and temporal wrapping, as it were, of the contents of experience into a unified objective experience. At some point, though, and in cooperation with Thompson, he eventually took the so-called “Jonasian turn.”16 Varela and Thompson hoped that, by making use of Jonas’ understanding of the living being and of its behavior in terms of intentionality and existence, they could reach a deeper understanding of the link between meaningfulness and time in the living beings. More specifically, selfness and meaningful relatedness to and action in the world were then recognized as reducible to the metabolic cycles of even unicellular organisms. More narrowly, the spatial and temporal horizons of intentional existentiality are understood as established on the level of chemotaxic metabolism from the side of the organism toward the environment.17 Metabolism propels life outward and forward, beyond its present condition in space and time. Life must be oriented in this way because its primary condition is one of concern and want, a condition that in animal life manifests itself as appetition or desire. Concern, want, need, appetition, desire, […] these are essentially affective and protentional or forward looking.18 Metabolism brings forth the living form of time because its rhythms establish a living present, a virtual horizon of conserved conditions and projected needs—the vital analogues of retentions and protentions [of Husserl’s temporal analysis] in the living present of time-consciousness. [Chemotaxic M]etabolism propels the organism outward and forward, beyond its present condition in space and time. On the one hand, space founds time because the topological boundary of the organism makes possible the metabolic rhythms; on the other hand, time founds space because these rhythms create the boundary and orient the organism toward its world.19 No further effort is made in that discussion, however, to discover the relevant grounding meaning of this metabolic “need” and chemotaxic “coordinated or directed movedness” toward “attractants and repellents,” with the “valence” they have, so as to (purposefully) reach/avoid favorable/hostile worldly loci of “improving or worsening conditions” (Thompson, “Living…,” 34–5). Our effort here focuses precisely on these crucial points, i.e., need, attraction/repulsion, favorable/hostile, and especially from the point of view

16 See Jonathan Webber, “Knowing one’s Own Desires,” in Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Andreas Elpidorou, and Walter Hopp (eds), Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches (London: Routledge 2016), 165–179; Mario Villalobos and Dave Ward, “Lived Experience and Cognitive Science: Reappraising Enactivism’s Jonasian Turn,” Constructivist Foundations 11 (2016), 204–233. In 1966, Jonas tried to extend the phenomenological analysis of the intentionality of consciousness as well as of experiencing and acting, especially Heidegger’s intentional-existential analysis of Dasein’s Being-in-the-world, to the whole range of the living beings; see Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). 17 The idea was further developed in Evan Thompson, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 18 Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 156. 19 Evan Thompson, “Living Ways of Sense Making,” in Oliver Müller and Thiemo Breyer (eds.), Funktionen des Lebendigen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016) 25–42, here 32.

528  Panos Theodorou, et al. of what makes them possible. This will be done under the thematics of orexis and values in §§4.3, 5. 4  Disentangling the ephetic phenomena and tracing their levels The exposition of §1 states that meaning-bestowing is something that presupposes a process of temporalization. That is, it presupposes a horizon of temporality. But what is that that makes possible such a fundamental temporal opening-up in the first place? This is precisely the direction we want to turn our inquiry to in the next sections. The guiding idea is that the fundamental temporal opening-up, within which all meaning an agent bestows on its external and internal sensory contents, i.e., all intentional apprehension and constitution, happens in the ephetic make-up of an organism. We will make this clearer and more precise in what follows (§§4a-c, 5–6). It has been noticed that syntheses in the intentional acts of experience, e.g., in perception, have a teleological form.20 In simple terms, registered sensory hyle is transcendently interpreted in a rule- or meaning-guided synthesis that leaves the agent with the experience of the correlative appearing object. Thus, in order to describe the mental capacity and cognitive functioning and comportment in terms of meaningfulness and meaning-giving, we need to have an agent capable of functioning in such a manner, i.e., able to achieve goals (not necessarily already in a morally relevant meaning) and to realize ends.21 We have already assumed, here, that the beings that are certainly capable of this are the living organisms. Meaning-giving, however, happens on different levels of organismal functions, from perceiving to making and narrating history, corresponding to the different levels of the building of the living beings. Here, we are interested in the most elementary levels of the organismal constitution, where the corresponding meaninggiving functions happen. Now, in order to proceed further, we need to distinguish among different kinds and levels of ephetic phenomena as formed in the different levels of the living and show the relevant ephetic formations that give rise to the temporal basis, within which meaninggiving is possible at all. To be sure, here we do not aspire to cover the whole range of such phenomena. Having focused our interest on the simplest levels of meaning-giving, we would like to propose the kind of ephetic phenomenon that gives rise to the most primordial temporal opening-up. Thus, in what follows immediately, we will try to clarify our terminology.22 Again, without pretending that we develop here an exhaustive analysis of them, we suggest only some distinctions that are necessary for establishing an initial order in the overall discussion.

20 See, e.g., Rudolf Bernet, “Perception as a Teleological Process of Cognition,” in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.), The Teleologies in Husserlian Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana 9 (1979), 119–132); Theodorou, Husserl…, ch. 4. 21 To avoid possible misunderstanding, let it be clear, also for the rest of the chapter, that neither rule-following nor goal-achieving is meant here in terms of deliberate conscious agency. We primarily mean it in accordance with the contexts of, correspondingly, passive synthesis in Husserl and biological or organismal functions. 22 The problematic situation regarding a satisfactory understanding of desire can be seen in the very good collection of papers in Lauria and Deonna, The Nature…, and is thematized in a review of it (see Theodorou, “Review…”).

Desiderativity and temporality  529 4.1  Desire as conscious, deliberative, and voluntary mental state

A traditional phenomenological analysis shows that, when we are aware of it, desire proper is a felt mental phenomenon, a conscious mental state, in which we feel as we feel toward something that attracts us or makes us lean toward the prospect of acquiring it or doing something with it, in a prospect that satisfies, benefits, etc., us. We really cannot say much about how it is to desire something, since it is a felt mental state with its own peculiar, indescribable “phenomenology” or “how it is like…” A very rough idea about it could be given by saying that desiring is what we feel when we would like to acquire and have or connect or be one with something.23 Without actually engaging in the current debate around desire, though, we will only state that we resist considering the former as independent, full-fledged intentional act that has the desired as its own intentional object. As all mere feelings, desire as affective feeling does not have any correlative intentional objects of its own. When we feel or say that we desire something, this “something” is an object or a state of affairs or an action, of which we normally have some independent conscious experience (e.g., perception, imagination). Thus, we may have a desire to have and eat an ice cream, buy a house or a car, but we may also have a desire to be happy or to discover/comprehend the meaning of life, to become architects or heads of state, to enjoy the experience of beautiful things or of beauty itself, etc. Of course, as the standard discussion has it, we may speak here about a desire in its occurrent or its dispositional or standing version. In addition to these, however, we may feel attraction toward a potential mate, hunger for food, thirst for water, etc. We distinguish these latter phenomena from proper desire.24 We distinguish them on the grounds that desire proper is normally the result of even a transient or elementary deliberation. Feeling lust, thirst, hunger, etc., is something different from having a desire to do something about it, e.g., a desire to go to the fridge and get some food or the bottle with the water, a desire to engage in a specific strategy of courting toward a potential mate, etc. However, the phenomena of thirst, lust, hunger, etc., on the one hand, and desire, on the other hand, are so closely connected that we tend to fuse them into one single experience, e.g., thirst-and-desire to drink, lust-and-desire to court the potential mate, etc. Nonetheless, they are different. Moreover, even though this goes much further than our present purposes, our take is that desires proper as well as affective feelings like the latter should be analyzed in distinction to preferences, decisions for action, and the actually undertaken actions themselves. Finally, as we will see in a moment, desires properly so called are different not only from the affective feelings of lust, thirst, hunger, etc. but also from the relevant instinctive impulses—to put it tentatively for the moment—to satiate hunger or to quench my thirst or to unfold courting behavior as such, etc.

23 This is not the place to analytically counter-posit this simple conceptualization of desire to the available alternatives, i.e., theories of desire that equate “to desire p” with (a) action or disposition to action that brings about p, (b) disposition of pleasure-taking in p, (c) belief/judgment that or appearance/representation of p as good, (d) attentive thought/consideration of p under a favorable light, (e) use of representations of p to drive reward-based learning, (f) combinations of all the above. Standard distinctions made in the relevant bibliography, e.g., between occurrent and standing desires, instrumental and realizer desires, stronger and weaker desires, etc., are here accepted as valid and useful. See, for instance, a concise but thorough presentation of these matters in Tim Schroeder, “Desire,” in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/desire. 24 In the bibliography the situation is different. See, for one, Webber, “Knowing…” and the references therein.

530  Panos Theodorou, et al. 4.2 Craving as conscious, pre-deliberative, and involuntary desideration inherent in instincts

At the end of the nineteenth century and during the first half of the twentieth century, there was a growing discussion about instincts, mainly in psychology, psychoanalysis, and ethology. For various reasons added to the difficulties to persuasively frame and analyze the purported phenomenon, this discussion ended ingloriously. The notion of instinct has indeed become notorious for the confusion accompanying all attempts at its comprehension. It seems, however, that we can agree on at least two constituents essential to them: (a) an innate “conative” or “craving” element or “impulse” or “uneasy sense of wanting” or “appetite” (the confused terminology that was used reflexes the genuine difficulty to tackle this element) and (b) a pattern-based behavior for attaining, acquiring, or realizing what is targeted by the “conative” element.25 The instinct that these two folds form is, then, a capacity for an ephetic targeting of an end or goal and a striving for the realization of this end/goal by means of a patterned activity or behavior that has to do with the handling of contents or objects in a way that will bring about this realization. It is our contention that this “conative” or “craving” dimension in instincts can be traced as a separate kind of what is broadly considered as family of ephetic phenomena, which deserves separate treatment and a dedicated name. We chose to call it craving.26 We see this as a feeling that, while conscious, it is pre-deliberative and involuntary. “Involuntary” in the minimal sense: that it does not have its origin in the conscious self (where it applies) but is triggered outside of it. Here too, albeit more difficult to distinguish, the ephetic element, i.e., craving proper, is different from the conjugate affective feeling. For instance, in the nutritive instinct, the (instinctive) craving for food is something different from hunger as such. At least analytically, we can distinguish, for instance, between one’s feeling hunger and her feeling craving for getting some food to eat (and, in addition, of course, from her desire proper to go and get some food). All the aforementioned affective feelings are much alike feelings of pain, itch, fatigue, etc. This is so at least to the extent that in connection to them there is also usually or normally a distinct entrenched desire to avoid pain as well as craving to do so (both as distinct from the reflex to recoil from the cause of pain), desire and craving to scratch an itching part of the body (both as distinct from the reflex to scratch it), or desire and craving to find some proper place to lie on and get some rest (both as distinct from the reflex of getting faint). Finally, we suggest that also different is here the craving element and the affective feelings from the strivings themselves. Striving (German: Streben) seems to be the translation 25 For these terms and for a richer analysis of what seems that can be agreed upon regarding instincts, see the excellent and useful Ronald Fletcher, Instinct in Man: In Light of Recent Work in Comparative Psychology (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), 52, 284, 292–293. This is not the place to go into details concerning instincts. We only want to refer the reader to the aforementioned source. For Husserl’s occasional and unfortunate attempts to trace this phenomenon and incorporate into his analyses, especially those concerning “inner time consciousness,” see James R. Mensch, “Instincts — a Husserlian Account,” Husserl Studies 14 (1998), 219–237; James R. Mensch, Husserl’s Account of Our Consciousness of Time (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2010), ch. 6. Our main criticism here will focus on what we believe is flawed in Husserl’s metaphysical background regarding his approach to instincts, particularly his later egocentric, transcendental idealistic monadology (refer to Hua 42, Part II). We will comment and criticize them further on another occasion. 26 A very short explanation for this is given in note 27.

Desiderativity and temporality  531 of the Greek and basically Aristotle’s dioxis (δίωξις/pursuit), in contradistinction to phygé (φυγή/avoidance); the two having been suggested, by the same, simply as modalities of orexis (ὄρεξις). Thus, more often than not striving is considered as another term for orexis or desire. However, “striving” has a strong connotation of active engagement in an effort to bring about or to achieve what orexis or desire are for.27 As such, then, it is indeed distinct from craving—and desire. (We will return to this in §5.) 4.3 Orexis as subliminal, pre-deliberative, and involuntary predisposition toward what is positive

When instinct is not already, or not yet, activated but characterizes the organism as a dormant capacity, there is neither any such felt craving element nor, of course, desire. There is only a potentiality for such a felt craving, which becomes actuality once the instinct is awakened in the presence of suitable internal or external triggers. So, the question arises: is this intrinsic craving in the dormant instinct, before the actualization of the instinct, the lowest-order ephetic phenomenon or there is also some more primordial one? We suggest that there is one such primordial level, which also predetermines the orientation of the awakened instinct’s craving and behavior. For example, an examination of the nutrition instinct and its intrinsic craving for satiating hunger (as something different than hunger itself) shows us that we can also distinguish a deeper, more original ephetic order, which, from now on, we recognize as orexis for nutrition. (The implied, at this point, distinction between craving for satiating hunger and orexis for nutrition will become clearer in §5.) Similarly, the same seems to be the case with the craving in the mating instinct or in the pleasure-seeking instinct in connection to an original orexis for, correspondingly, species reproduction and agreeableness.28 This means that, as we see it, the potentiality for a felt craving in the instincts is not the very orexis of the organism for what is survivally valuable.29 Orexis for the latter is separate from the aforementioned felt instinctive craving. More specifically, orexis too can be seen as working on two levels: one dormant and one awakened. In its dormant state, it is the directively organized way in which the organism acts or reacts on the ­occasion of given stimuli or situations. In its awakened state it is mentally at work or felt (where this applies), even though not in any trivial sense. That is, the awakened orexis is a background, subliminal feeling that keeps the organism active or “encourages” it to remain active in the unfolding of the instinct or even in the formation of desire and pursuance of the desired. Under the appropriate circumstances, we can see the formation of felt desire or craving as being genetically connected to primordial orexis. Conscious desire and 27 With this, we abstain from Scheler’s analysis of striving (Streben), which inextricably fuses the desiderative dimension and the corresponding effort. See Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, transl. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), ch. 1 and esp. pp. 32–35. The same reason lies behind our choice to use “craving” instead of “conation,” since this term too, from its original Latin meaning, bears the nuance of “trying,” of “engaging in an effort.” 28 With this, we do not mean that these things are consciously given to the organism. It is from the thirdperson interpretation of the building and behavior of the organism, given the function of its subsystems, that we can develop such a description. Especially in the case of humans, it may be possible to trace a subliminally felt such phenomenological quality. We will return to this below. 29 For the moment, we will not analyze this any further. We will be more analytic in §5.

532  Panos Theodorou, et al. craving seem to presuppose a kind of primordial orectic directiveness of the organism toward what has survival gravity for it. We can speak, then, of an orectic disposition of the organism toward safeguarding or acquiring what is good for it. That is, primordial orexis can be traced as a non-conscious, evolutionarily selected, deep state of directiveness in the organism, which, when triggered by the appropriate inner or outer conditions, becomes minimally felt in its active operating and gives rise to pertinent cravings or desires. The cravings and desires come to target what is relevant for the satisfaction of the orexis and motivate the organism or agent toward realizing orexis’ end or goal. For example, under the appropriate environmental cues or circumstances, an organism gets orectically, positively disposed toward caring about getting nutrition, toward a readiness for safeguarding species’ subsistence, toward providing safety to family and offsprings, toward truth or evidence,30 toward enjoying agreeableness, toward beautiful things, etc. These are things that are good for the organism. As a first approximation, i.e., at least on a pre-reflective level, “good” here means “whatever is of a survivally positive value for the organism.” (On this, see also next section.) It is for this inherent deep organismal state and its awakened modification that we will be using the term orexis. These two appear to be the condition for (or what gives rise to) the instincts and desires that are set in action “in order to” realize what the orexes stand for or target as survivally valuable. Further, on this level of organismic functions, it is not necessary that the organisms have conscious experience of full-fledged objects and states of affairs. This means orexis can be specifically determined—and give rise to conscious cravings or desires—even by pre-objective inner or outer sensory elements or environmental cues, simple or organized in relevant patterns, that pre-perceptually stimulate the organism. 5  Orexes are for values, not objects or sensory contents As we said, there is a level in an organism’s construction that makes it capable of a functioning that ensures that it will be positively directed toward what is good for it and toward achieving that good. This is what can be traced as orectic subsystem of the organism. The organism seems to have a subsystem that is built in a way that makes the organism to have orexis for what is good for it and for pursuing it. This function can be found in either a dormant or an awakened state. Its awakening and awakened phase are marked by the appearance of a corresponding feeling, that of the peculiar feeling that one has an orexis for what is in each case good. In its most general form, then, the idea says that orexis is for positive values. This, however, may create the impression that orexis is “about” values in the sense in which we say that an intentional act is “about” its intentional object. This needs further and careful explication. First, we ask about the kind of relation that an organism or its subsystem with a function like the one described just above has to a value. Second, we ask about the relation that a felt orexis has to some value. Neither of the two can be said to have these values either as, phenomenologically conceived, transcendent, correlative intentional objects or as, analytically conceived, mental 30 We refer here to Husserl’s pathbreaking, fundamental understanding of truth in terms of evident appearing, which, thus, explicitly applies also to the prelinguistic sensory experience (and therefore not only in humans).

Desiderativity and temporality  533 content (in the sense of a “representation” “containing” them as objects). Dormant and awakened orexis is the way through which an organism is, correspondingly, prepared to respond and responds to its surrounding in manners that bring about (or at least are “supposed” to do so) what is of positive value, i.e., beneficial to it. This does not mean that beneficiality is already part of the content of an orexis as a mental or conscious intentional act or state of the organism or its subsystem. Of course, beneficiality or positive value can, in some organisms, also become content in conscious mental acts or states that are carried out by other (higher cognitive) subsystems. But this is not our issue here. Nonetheless, albeit not being a full-fledged intentional act, i.e., not having an intentional object or a mental content (the aforementioned values), the awakened orexis stands as the most elementary mental or simply proto-mental state. By this we refer to neuronal states or processes in the organism that make possible functions working above the merely causal level, which allow for a description that involves appeal to either unconscious or quasi-conscious meaning relations. By the latter, we mean the general organismal function of taking something as something (and not as something else) and proceeding to the next steps accordingly. In other words, as indicated above, orecticity is capable of conditioning the organism to be proto-mentally interpreting available stimuli in ways that enable the organism to experience or just subliminally sense, estimate, and act accordingly.31 For example, a newborn mammal proto-mentally interprets olfactory stimuli from its mother’s breast milk as nutritious, i.e., as something falling under the bio-praxial—and not logical/conceptual—“categories” of edibility and of nutritiousness. As a result, the corresponding instinct, with its craving and behavioral aspects, immediately kicks in and undertakes the engagement and the in concreto pursuance to act and realize the relevant value.32 Let us insist on this point a bit more. As the aforementioned already indicate, on the level of orecticity, the organism does not exhibit an orexis toward, e.g., nourishment in the sense of some chemical composition or of some perceptible being.33 Such nonconscious and then conscious mentally implemented orexes are inscribed to the economy of the functioning of the organism vis-à-vis, e.g., nutrition. That is, vis-à-vis what the organism needs qua nutrition, albeit not qua mere chemical composition or perceptual identity, but qua nutritiousness as such, as whatever is evaluated as “nutritious,” or as what is positively valued from the point of view of nutrition. To put it in other terms, the organism is orectically oriented (as above described) toward nutrition as value, not after nutrition as object-like (chemical or perceptual) bearer of this value.34 This means that, for an orexis to be definable for the organism, there is no need for the mediation 31 Since we do not pretend to possess any secret knowledge of the detailed whereabouts of the emergence of the mental in the material formation of the organism’s neuronal subsystem, we will not pursue this any further in this chapter. It is one of these limit cases where Kant’s saying about schematism finds fitting application: it “is a secret art residing in the depths of the human soul, an art whose true stratagems we shall hardly ever divine from nature and lay bare before ourselves.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Transl. Werner S. Pluhar, Introduction Patrichia Kitcher (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996), here 214. 32 In §8, we will give an example of this process, based on perception. 33 Understandably, this goes against, or rather corrects, Varela’s and Thompson’s Jonasian analysis that we discussed in §3.c. 34 We will return to this below at the sections where we interpret Panksepp’s idea about what he calls “SEEKING system.”

534  Panos Theodorou, et al. of a “representation” of some physical object35 nor for a previous experience of objects that constitute the bearing basis of the values toward which the orexes are directed or are orexes for. As understood here, then, orexes are not the specific inbuilt orectic formation or the subliminal feelings they are with reference to specific objects or ontically determined kinds of objects. They are, rather, what they are as directed toward (or are for) the expected outcomes gained by their corresponding satisfaction. That is, orexes are for what the suitable objects can provide to the organism with or contribute to its well-being, i.e., for the values, which such objects are the bearers of.36 By this analysis, we see in what way we can have the notion of an orexis tending toward “something,” even though this cannot have been given in advance as object or chemical composition or perceptual identity. This notion is possible because orexes are directed toward values, which can be independently defined on the basis of the relevant evolutionarily selected functions and the overall economy of the organism. Our argument suggests that organisms or human infants can exhibit directed behavior without prior knowledge or imagination of specific objects and substances. After all, from the evolutionary point of view, it seems more possible that organisms seek and find edible objects and substances that conform to prior, inbuilt survival-value standards or specifications rather than the other way around. Now, if this analysis is on a right path, this relation of the organism or its orectic subsystem to values can even be considered to be “a priori”—of course not in a Platonic or a transcendental way but in an evolutionary, neurobiological sense of the term. This does not, and indeed could not, mean that the organism has a priori thematic knowledge of what is good for it or that there are such and such beneficial beings or situations out there. It only means that, in the overall make-up of the successfully adapted organism, there is within it at least a subsystem that, either dormantly or awakenedly, is orectically related to values that are positive for it. 6  The orectic opening-up of the temporal horizon Now we have reached the point at which we are ready to develop the third core part of our proposal. We disambiguated the terminology regarding the ephetic phenomena and the separate kinds and levels of them, which were until before taken indiscriminately together, and tentatively projected a primordial ephetic level of constitution in 35 We draw some inspiration for this thesis from Scheler’s delicate and, in our view, ingenious analysis of striving and values. In addition to our concerns expressed in note 27, however, we think that his analysis of our relatedness to values as well as their ontological status is misguided. See Panos Theodorou, “Scheler’s Phenomenology of Emotive Life in the Context of His Ethical Program: Achievements and Abeyances,” in Rodney Parker and Ignacio Quepons (guest eds.), Phenomenology of Emotions: Systematic and Historical Perspectives, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 16 (2016), 121– 156. We thus also abstain from Husserl’s relevant view, who, even in his most radical understanding of the structure of temporality behind experience, in the so-called Bernau Manuscripts, considers protention as an instinctive drive toward contents. See also, e.g., Mensch “Instincts…”; Mensch, Husserl’s Account…, ch. 6; Gallagher, “The Past…,” 93. 36 It is still very premature, but let us notice that this line of approach, with its roots in Aristotle’s analyses of the good-directed orexis as well as in Scheler’s analysis of the value-directed striving, is—despite appearances, i.e., the reference to values—much closer to Heidegger’s approach, regarding the temporalization of experience/being and its emphasis on the non-ontic Being, than to Husserl’s, especially as regards the latter’s theory of perceptual constitution, with its emphasis on an anticipation toward the accumulation of further sensory contents, hyletic data (instead of what stands as value in perceptual constitution; see §8).

Desiderativity and temporality  535 the organism. We called this level orexis proper. Then, we made clear that, primordially, orectic phenomena proper are not directed (in the sense described above) toward objects or situations but toward values that are to be realized for the benefit of the organism. From what has been said, we understand that the orectic state is not exhausted in the (subliminally) felt quality upon the effectuation and self-manifestation of this state. Apart from this, the organism is always found in a dispositional or standing orectic state. Thus, what is rather the case is that this occurrence and self-manifestation presuppose a specific, always already formed, in-built neuronal order in the organism with the specific above-described function. On specific occasions, this gives rise to an—at-the-limit—felt orexis for the realization of an appropriate value. To be sure, it may reasonably be the case that the organism always finds itself in conditions that keep somehow the orexis awakened. Thus, the living being is organized in its inner subsystems in such a way as to be tending toward and seeking the realization of values that are positive for its evolutionarily determined purposes. What we have here is an orexis for the realization of what is good for the organism or for the avoidance of what is not good for it. All this gives us the right to talk here about orexis in terms of the organism’s preparedness and readiness for a change that will transfer it from what is now the case for it (with respect to its inner and outer standing in the surroundings) to what, evolutionarily, will and indeed should be the case for it.37 As already mentioned, at least in higher order organisms, there seems to be an unattended—at-the-limit—awareness of this orectic directedness toward what is positively valued for the organism. This functions as the basis of the organism’s opening-up of the lived temporality and, most primordially, in respect of futurity. It is this lived state-“distance,” which separates the organism’s current standing from the value-determined standing to be arrived at, that occurs as the openingup of the temporal horizon for whatever happens to the organism in its relation to the surrounding. In its orectic value-determined transition from its departure lived state to the arrival lived state, a horizon of temporal texture opens up for the organism and for what meanwhile happens within itself and to itself. Against this background of meanwhileness, the organism’s sensory and mental subsystems undertake their normal proto-mental functions. More specifically, the organism and its subsystems will register and accordingly handle, in interpretative handlings or, phenomenologically speaking, meaning syntheses that unfold in the flow from one state to the other, what is inductive or counter-inductive to the realization of a corresponding value. In each case, along the orectic movedness of the organism from an initial value state to the targeted value state, the organism or its relevant subsystems will intake what happens inside the organism or the impact of the surrounding on it qua entries in a record of instances and handle them interpretatively or synthesingly as to their inductive or counter-inductive relevance or relatedness to the targeted value state for the organism. However, orexis for, or toward, a value, in the sense of both the dormant and the awakened orexis as such, can only be considered as (a type of) preparedness for the transition from the departure state to the arrival one. Would, then, this preparedness for 37 This normativity here is not understood in any moral or other praxially relevant sense, and, of course, not in any traditional teleological sense. We only have in mind the normativity regarding the evolutionarily defined, proper function of the organism and the functions of it and its subsystems. See, e.g., Justin Garson, A Critical Overview of Biological Functions (Dordrecht: Springer, 2016), ch. 3; Michael Okrent, Nature and Normativity: Biology, Teleology, and Meaning (New York: Routledge, 2017), chs 1 and 2.

536  Panos Theodorou, et al. the move along the meanwhile be enough for the opening-up of the temporal horizon? We think not. This temporal horizonality, which has, always, already been preparedly opened-up by the pure orexis, remains a potentiality as long as it stays uncoupled with the very striving that will set in action the steps toward the realization of the relevant value. Aristotle has described orexis as a kind of motion and so much more so a motion toward the agathon (ἀγαθόν), i.e., something very close to what we recognized as good: καὶ ἡ ὄρεξις κίνησίς τίς ἐστιν, ἡ ἐνεργείᾳ [and orexis in its actuality is some kind of motion] (De Anima, 433b19–20; our transl.).38 If by actual orexis we understand the awakened orexis, it seems that the idea would be in need of an additional point. It would be a potence for the motion under discussion, a movability, but not yet a motion proper. That is, this idea connecting orectic movedness of the organism and the opening-up of lived temporality cannot attain full sense until, within a general “orexis,” we distinguish, in addition to dormant and awakened orexis, also a separate orectic striving, as we did above. This orectic striving is what actually stretches, as it were, the temporal horizonality in its openness or, better, what first makes actual the “traversing” of it. This fully establishes the opening-up of a temporal horizon. In this stretching and traversing, temporality acquires its horizonal openness in its actuality.39 7  Neuroscientific support from Panksepp’s SEEKING system analysis All these claims, however, would remain just some—interesting we hope—pure phenomenological-psychological theorizing and analysis should we also not try to connect them with actual empirical research data. It is on the basis of this possibility of bringing together, in a mutually constraining fashion, a renewed phenomenological analysis and some concrete third- and first-person laboratory evidence that we consider our proposal a case of neuro-phenomenological discussion. In this juncture, our hypothesis is that the above-mentioned orectic phenomena are “functionalized” in specific dopaminergic neuronal circuits of the brain and that their workings are responsible for the opening-up of the temporal horizon. We will check this hypothesis by considering the work and findings of the neuro-psychologist and neuroethologist Jaak Panksepp. Within it, we expect to discover evidence in favor of our hypothesis that there is a primordial orectic system that is regulated to be after values (not after specific sensory contents, substances, or objects) and that, in its primal function as well as its expression in the instincts, this orectic system makes possible the opening-up of the temporal horizon for the organism’s mental and conscious phenomena. 7.1  The SEEKING system in the brain and anticipatory states

In the traditional—still behavioristically minded—neuro-psychology, ephetic phenomena were scrutinized in theoretical and clinical research as related to the “Dopaminergic 38 Cf. the passage a few lines earlier: ἀεὶ κινεῖ μὲν τὸ ὀρεκτόν, ἀλλὰ τοῦτ’ ἐστὶν ἢ τὸ ἀγαθὸν ἢ τὸ φαινόμενον ἀγαθόν [always, what moves is that about which the orexis is; which means either the agathon/good or what is considered such] (ibid., 433a31–32; our transl.). Naturally, in the present context, we do not really mean to develop a full interpretation of Aristotle’s ideas in the spirit of our proposal. We only offer some parallels, which are—we believe—very promising for future discussion. 39 Understandably, this analysis requires at least one further step that would explain how in this actual temporal horizon the polarity of past and future is formed. Given the limited present context, we omit this analysis for another occasion.

Desiderativity and temporality  537 Reward System.” The general working hypothesis here is that organisms are motivationally directed to desired40 objects in the sense that they (conditionally) expect to feel the dopamine-related pleasure/euphoria (reward) that is caused by these objects. This primal motivational tendency, then, is thought to constitute the driving force of organisms’ goal/ object-directed behavior.41 More analytically, data show that first, and thus unpredicted, encounters of desired objects are accompanied by a strong phasic dopamine response. This neuronal activity is gradually transferred to the prediction of the expected encounter (of the orectic object or type of object) when the animal is in the same environmental situation as the unconditioned one, i.e., when it first encountered the object. When this phasic dopamine activation is transferred to the (now conditioned) environmental situation related to the expected reward, then the learning of the motor actions necessary to acquire the expected reward is also accomplished. This learning fixes motor routines to specific desired goals in the presence of conditioned situations (as in the classical behaviorist experimental cases). While we do not wish to diminish the importance of these findings, we choose to focus on Panksepp’s counter-behavioristic and neurophenomenological42 model about the DM network, which seems to have developed powerful evidence and argumentation against the behavioristic model and, in any case, is better suited to our theoretical and methodological background as well as to our hypothesis above. According to Pankseep, the mammalian brain contains a ‘foraging/exploration/investigation/curiosity/interest/expectancy/SEEKING’ system that leads organisms to eagerly pursue the fruits of their environment—from nuts to knowledge, so to speak. Like other emotional systems, arousal of the SEEKING system has a characteristic feeling tone—a psychic energization that is difficult to describe but is akin to that invigorated feeling of anticipation we experience when we actively seek thrills and other rewards.43 The system that Panksepp has in mind is not one merely responsible in an animal’s conditioned engagement in pressing a lever to acquire a reward or when actually devouring it (see ibid., 145). It is one that “resembles the energization organisms apparently feel when they are anticipating rewards” (ibid., 146).44 As we read this, this basic appetite/ desire/seeking has a wide application in behavior and is identified as pursuance or avoidance, not by virtue of some specific object or kind of objects, but by virtue of the value

40 In this section (§7), we will not insist on the terminology that we developed above. Instead, we will try to follow the terminology Panksepp and his research discipline generally use. Only at crucial junctures, we will remind the reader the correspondence to our terminology and especially to orexis. 41 See Wolfram Schultz, “Getting Formal with Dopamine and Reward,” Neuron 36 (2002), 241–263. 42 Panksepp himself uses the term, not in a full-developed strategic alliance to the neurophenomenological project in the naturalization of intentionality, which was mentioned above here, but certainly in the clear sense that in his research equal gravity and bonding relevance is given to both the third- and the first-person evidence in the examined phenomena. See, however, also Shaun Gallagher, “How to Undress the Affective Mind: An Interview with Jaak Panksepp,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 15 (2016), 89–119, here 96–98. 43 Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 145. 44 “SEEKING system is much more devoted to anticipatory-appetitive arousal rather than simply to consummatory reward processes, which are even more ancient functions of the brain.” Panksepp, Affective…, 147.

538  Panos Theodorou, et al. anticipated by the organism and (discovered to be) matching with this or that object the organism comes across.45 The SEEKING system is responsible for the capacity of having an urge toward something, toward wanting it rather than liking it when consuming it, contrary to the traditional-behavioristic account (see ibid., 145). In our jargon, it mediates anticipatory eagerness toward positive organismal values (and their potential bearers) rather than actually enjoying them. Consequently, it seems to be responsible for the disposition of anticipatory motivation that animals have toward their ecological whereabouts.46 For example, subjects who undergo stimulation of the Lateral Hypothalamic (LH) area, an area of the brain recognized by Panksepp as a neuronal substate of his model, “report a feeling that something very interesting and exciting is going on” (ibid., 149). (Notice the difficulty in identifying this feeling with anything already known and familiar.) This peculiar affective response in these experimental settings of direct LH stimulation appears to be a difficult-todescribe feeling of anticipatory euphoria, so to speak, which is not about a specific perceptual object, but rather concerns a horizon of anticipation determined by a relevant value. Following the above, it seems that there is one unique orectic brain system and function, which is expressed variously in accordance with the levels of the functions of the organism. 7.2  Time relevance of the SEEKING system

So, according to the above brief exposition, the SEEKING system constitutes, in phylogenetic terms, a deep-seated brain system that enables the subjective state of anticipatory eagerness in animals for what is survivally significant to them (values). The question now is whether, and possibly how, this ephetic—for us orectic—system and phenomenon connects to the temporality that underlies our mental phenomena, e.g., our perceptual experience. In Panksepp’s work we do find some remarks that relate to the making-possible of temporality in the function of the SEEKING system; they are few but very telling. Here we cite two of them. The standard stable dopaminergic “type of bursting may help speed up the internally sensed passage of time, thereby leading to the elevation of anticipatory behaviors, as is seen in the scalloped response patterns animals exhibit when working for rewards on fixed-interval schedules. (Panksep, Affective…, 156; emphases added) [T]he brain spontaneously mediates anticipatory states […] [p]resumably […] through the ability of LH circuits to generate theta rhythms that sensitize both the associative abilities of the hippocampus and DA-mediated timing functions of the striatum. A neurophysiological understanding of these brain systems can explain

45 This line of interpretation that distinguishes between the value and the object as its bearer is not to be found as such in Panksepp. We believe, however, that he was moving toward such a direction, which we here make explicit. 46 “[A] remarkable general-purpose emotional–motivational SEEKING system has been revealed during the past half century. It is one that appears to have been evolutionarily derived to mediate the appetitive desire to search for, to find, and to harvest the diverse fruits of the world needed for survival.” Panksepp and Moskal (2008), 67–68.

Desiderativity and temporality  539 how animals spontaneously generate solutions to the various environmental contingencies they encounter in their lives. (ibid., 161; emphases added) For the time being, however, we can draw many additional remarks from another source related to the neuropsychological study of the same dopaminergic circuits in the brain: Oliver Sack’s Awakenings (1973)47 and his therein reports of his Parkinsonian patients. We pick some that we consider most relevant and can be connected with our above analysis. Parkinsonism, catatonia, melancholia, trance, passivity, immobility, frigidity, apathy: this was the quality of the decades-long ‘sleep’ which closed over their heads in the 1930s and thereafter. Some patients, indeed, passed into a timeless state, an eventless stasis, which deprived them of all sense of history and happening. Isolated circumstances—fire alarms, dinner-gongs, the unexpected arrival of friends or news—might set them suddenly and startlingly alive for a minute, wonderfully active and agog with excitement [but, then, they fall back again to the previous state]. (ibid., 23; emphasis added) It is evident, from questioning Mrs Y., that her perceptions of herself and the world have a very ‘weird’ quality in these standstills. Thus, everything seems sharp-edged, flat, and geometric, with a quality like a mosaic or a stained-glass window; there is no sense of space or time at such times. Sometimes these ‘stills’ form a flickering vision, like a movie-film which is running too slow [like a succession of uninterrelated frames] (ibid., 111–2; emphases added) At times of great excitement, Mrs Y. may experience a kinematic ‘delirium, ‘ in which a variety of perceptions or hallucinations or hallucinatory patterns may succeed one another with vertiginous speed. […] [S]uch deliria last, but they are, fortunately, quite rare. Such deliria go with a fragmentation of time and space itself. (ibid., 113; emphases added) Mrs C. […] stressed that her sense of time and duration had become profoundly altered during the previous two decades; that although she was aware of what was happening and what the date was, she herself had no feeling of happening, but rather the feeling that time itself had come to a stop, and that every moment of her existence was a repetition of itself. (ibid., 166–7; emphases added) Interestingly, what we see in all these passages is something that we should have expected. Namely, that dysfunction of the dopaminergic circuits in the brain does not distort only the sense of time and its passing but also the articulation of the perceptual experience. In our analysis, it is the primordial orexis for values and the perceptual craving for object constitution that accomplishes this. Retention and protention can

47 Oliver W. Sacks, Awakenings (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).

540  Panos Theodorou, et al. only be the special handlings of sensory hyle within this opened-up temporal horizon. They are only functions that accidentally come across contents of this sort; but develop their roles only within the context that the orexis for evidence has accomplished. Thus, the tendency toward the value for perceptual evidence would be considered presupposed-for/constitutive-of the holding and anticipation of sensory contents relevant to the concrete object in the process of its being crystallized in the striving of ongoing perception. 8  Orexis for truth as evidence and the temporality of perception as instinct Let us now see in what sense such orexis and what it makes possible find their way toward perception, which is the privileged locus in the context of which the phenomenological, enactivist, and neurophenomenological analysis of temporalization as a condition for meaning-giving is discussed. The questions that need to be posed here are: at what point is this orectic element involved in perception and what could be its original targeted value? The shortest answer to the first question is that we can trace an orexis that is presupposed in the workings of perception as intentional act, if we consider perception in terms of instinct. The latter may indeed sound far-fetched, but it is not. We will not expand too much on this here. Only two points suffice to keep us on track at this point. On the one hand, a quick look at what we reconstructed as basic structure of an instinct immediately shows that perception, as thematized in phenomenology and associated approaches, squarely complies with it. On the other hand, Husserl himself flirted with the idea as numerous references to instincts and their components indicate in his later thematization of perception.48 We turn to the second question. Αs has been argued elsewhere (Theodorou, Husserl…, ch. 4), perception is a meaning-constituting and truth-seeking phenomenon. Husserl himself has guided us toward this understanding, even though he did not develop the analysis that we would like him to have developed. In a rather unfortunate circumstance, we see him talking about an instinctive drive (instinktiver Trieb) at work within perception, connected, however, with the retentional and protentional moments in perception; the latter seen as intentional acts that correspondingly tend toward their accumulated actual and their to-become-actual hyletic contents. However, in our view, drafted in §§4.2–4.3, this vague “instinctive drive” amounts rather to a perceptual craving or “attractedness to…” targeting the clear and distinct, or evident, appearing of the perceptual object being constituted on the basis of the available and the anticipated hyletic data. In this approach, the craving is not for past or forthcoming contents, but for an evident appearing of the object under constitution, given the available data. Recall, now, that, in accordance with what we said earlier in §§4.3–6, the orexis conditioning these workings in the syntheses in perception as instinct is directed neither to hyletic contents nor to concrete objects that are to appear, but rather to (truth or) evidence as value! 48 See, e.g., Mensch’s, “Instincts…,” reconstruction of these later developments; also, Kristian Laasik, “Phenomenological Reflections on Instincts,” Studia Phaenomenologica 18 (2018), 109–128. See, however, also note 35.

Desiderativity and temporality  541 Thus, we revisit the retentional-protentional micro-temporality of the perceptual sensory-mental subsystem. In perception as instinct, we trace a craving, which, being conditioned by the primordial orexis for truth or evidence as value, seeks, as its now concrete end or goal, the realization of the evident appearance of this or that object. And in this somatosensory and enactive striving involved in this stretching-out-toward, which goes from the current state of non-truth to the to-be-arrived-at state of the realization of truth as evidence, the perceptual temporal opening takes full shape and gets available for the relevant syntheses. More specifically, we can say that the orexis in action or striving at work (see §6) and the stretching of the potential temporal horizonality are achieved in the corresponding instinctive expression of the primordial orexis. It is in their—primordially orectically conditioned—corresponding “craving” and, especially, “behavioral”/striving dimensions that the—by-construction and static—relatedness of the organism to its values transforms into, or gives birth to, the dynamic temporal horizon in perception. Within this, anything sensorial that happens to the organism gets basically its retentional and, with some further complexity (which goes beyond our present concerns), the protentional time stamp and is taken into interpretative, meaning-giving syntheses or, on another scale, is archived in the usual memory or becomes something expected in the future. In sum, on the basis of the primordial orectic opening-up of the temporal horizon, the concrete perceptual such horizon is formed in the striving after the constitution of a specific object, allowing for a synthesis of the accordingly ordered, available, and anticipated sensory contents, thus accomplishing the transcendent appearing of the correlative intentional perceptual object. 9  Summary and conclusion We dealt with the issue concerning the possible natural basis of the temporalization of meaning-giving in experience and comportment. After an exposition of this issue, we offered a classification of the ephetic phenomena in correspondence to different levels of the articulation of the living organisms and we distinguished desires proper from instinctive craving and primordial orexes. Then we maintained that especially the primordial orectic states and phenomena are not directed toward concrete or specific objects or sensory contents, but toward evolutionarily/survivally significant values. It is in this orectic directedness toward, and striving after, values that the opening-up of the temporal horizon occurs. For the deepening of the naturalized understanding of this occurrence, though, we need to trace relevant neuronal circuits. We appealed to Panksepp’s psychological and behavioral neuro-ethological findings regarding the presence of a SEEKING system in collaborating dopaminergic circuits in the subcortical frontal brain. Finally, we interpreted this system as an orectic value-seeking one and showed that Panksepp’s results underpin the idea that this system makes possible the opening-up of the primordial temporal horizon. As an application of all these, we saw that primordial orexis (also) relates to truth or evidence as value, and, in each case, conditions in perception as instinct the craving toward the evident appearing of the object under constitution. This constitution, we

542  Panos Theodorou, et al. remind, is a meaning-giving process, which unfolds in the context of the opened-up temporal horizon.49* Acknowledgments This research is co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social FundESF) through the Operational Program “Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning 2014–2020” in the context of the project “Desire and Temporality” (MIS 5048982).

49 * We would like to express our deep thanks for the valuable comments we received privately from James Mensch on the penultimate draft of this chapter as well as from the two referees of the New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: one self-disclosed, Robert Hanna, and the other anonymous.

30 Thinking and the danger of insanity Two ways of reaching into the abyss Erik Kuravsky

Abstract  In the middle-late 1930s and the 1940s, Heidegger uses occasionally the same term “Verrückung” for both insanity and human transformation into Dasein. Translated as either dis-lodgement, de-rangement, or dis-placing, the term is sometimes used to speak of a radical shift in human essence, taking us b ­ eyond the metaphysical forgetfulness of Beyng and into the truth of Beyng. This u ­ sage is seen especially in Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event). In other places, however, it is evident that Heidegger speaks about madness, or insanity, ­either pertaining to philosophy as such or to concrete thinkers and poets. For ­example, both Nietzsche and Hölderlin are mentioned as representatives of a unique kind of insanity, which allowed them to play their part in the history of Beyng on the path of overcoming metaphysics. In this chapter I offer an analysis of the c ­ o-belonginess of human transformation and madness by looking into ­Heidegger’s works in which he explicitly speaks about the philosophical significance of madness. I show that in both cases one departs from the rule of metaphysical reason and reaches into the abyss. The transitional thinker, however, still relies on some version of metaphysical ground in the form of will to power and cannot experience the grounding essence of the abyss. The thinker’s madness is then explicated in terms of a subtle, reason-based rebellion against the abyss. Keywords  Heidegger; Nietzsche; Hölderlin; History of Beyng; Will to Power; Insanity, Overcoming of Metaphysics 1 Introduction The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. (Joseph Campbell, Psychology of the Future) In the middle-late 1930s and the 1940s, Heidegger uses occasionally the same term ‘Verrückung’ for both insanity and human transformation into Dasein. Translated as either dis-lodgement, de-rangement, or dis-placing, the term is sometimes used to speak of a radical shift in human essence, taking us beyond the metaphysical forgetfulness of Beyng and into the truth of Beyng. This usage is seen especially in Contributions to ­Philosophy (of the Event). In other places, however, it is evident that Heidegger speaks about ­madness, or insanity, either pertaining to philosophy as such or to concrete thinkers and poets. For example, both Nietzsche and Hölderlin are mentioned as representatives of a unique kind of insanity, which allowed them to play their part in the history of Beyng on the path of overcoming metaphysics. In this chapter I offer an analysis of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-34

544  Erik Kuravsky co-belonginess of human transformation and madness by looking into Heidegger’s works in which he explicitly speaks about the philosophical significance of madness.1 The main aim of the chapter is to shed a new light on the meaning of human transformation in Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger stresses time and again that the nature of this transformation does not imply a mere change of a worldview, an ethical or spiritual fulfillment, or even self-transcendence. Yet it is hard to understand what it does imply. By addressing the relation between transformation and madness, I shall try to illuminate the sort of shift that happens in human essence when it is dis-lodged from a metaphysical mode of existence. My secondary aim is to free the very phenomenon of madness and its relation to ­reason from a metaphysically psychological interpretation. In particular, I shall argue that both cases of Verrückung (transformation and insanity) indicate a leap beyond reason by reaching into the abyss, yet in the case of insanity the leap is not radical enough so that rather than overcoming reason, one is crushed by reason. Accordingly, I shall show that the difference between Verrückung and insanity is instructive regarding the peculiar danger that pertains to transitional thinking in its leap beyond metaphysical reason. This danger of insanity will be shown to belong to the very essence of Beyng as ­complementing another danger, that of reason, which Heidegger discusses in the 1953 essay on the ­essence of technology. 2  Introducing madness Heidegger opens the winter semester of 1935–1936 and the following summer semester of 1936 with seemingly rhetorical comments pertaining to madness. In the winter semester we hear: If you take everyday presentation as the only standard of all things, then philosophy is always something deranged (Verrücktes). This shifting (Verrückung) of the posture of thinking can only be retraced with a spurt (Ruck).2 Philosophy, Heidegger says, occupies a peculiar posture that is removed from the ­everyday, normal standard of the way things are; it is abnormal in a way that cannot be connected through some medium to the normal and is dis-lodged by a sudden and sharp movement represented by the German word Ruck. While the second sentence can indeed be understood without an allusion to madness since it plays on the relation between Ruck and Verrückung, the first sentence clearly says that philosophy is something mad from the view of the everydayness. Philosophy, Heidegger continues, enacts a constant dislodging (Verrückung) of the positions and the levels (of thought), so that “you often don’t know where your head is for a long time with it.”3 That is, one loses one’s head

1 I address the usage of the term Verrückung in Contributions in Kuravsky, Erik. “Dislodged Experience as an Overcoming of Reason: Towards a Phenomenology of Beyng.” Research in Phenomenology, 52:3, 2022, pp. 375–398. 2 “Nimmt man das alltägliche Vorstellen zum einzigen Maßstab aller Dinge, dann ist die Philosophie immer etwas Verrücktes. Diese Verrückung der denkerischen Haltung läßt sich nur in einem Ruck nachvollziehen.” GA 41: 1. 3 “Dagegen vollzieht die Philosophie eine ständige Verrückung des Standortes und der Ebenen. Man weiß deshalb bei ihr oft lange nicht, wo einem der Kopf steht.” Ibid.

Thinking and the danger of insanity  545 in philosophy – at least temporarily – precisely because philosophy breaks the order of thought in a peculiar way which Heidegger chooses to present with the madness-related term Verrückung. Philosophy – we may say – ‘in-sanes’ the normative order of the ‘sane’ positions and levels of thinking. In the opening lecture of the next semester, dedicated to an interpretation of ­Schelling’s On the Essence of Human Freedom, Heidegger speaks about the limitations of ­Schelling’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies in the following manner: But, if one may say so, Schelling had to get stranded in his work because his manner of questioning didn’t allow an inner center in the standpoint of philosophy at that time. The only essential thinker after Schelling, Nietzsche, broke down in the middle of his real work, The Will to Power, for the same reason. But this double, great breakdown of great thinkers is not a failure and nothing negative at all – on the contrary. It is the sign of the advent of something completely different, the heat lightning of a new beginning. Whoever really knew the reason for this breakdown and could conquer it intelligently would have to become the founder of the new beginning of Western philosophy.4 It may sound at first as if Heidegger merely speaks about the similar ground of ­Nietzsche’s and Schelling’s philosophical failure, yet since it would be very awkward to say that ­Nietzsche ‘failed philosophically’ in the middle of composing a book, and since H ­ eidegger uses the term ‘zerbrochen’ for what happens to Nietzsche during this time, it is clear that he relates Nietzsche’s philosophical failure to his personal breakdown.5 What is particularly interesting in this passage is that Nietzsche’s breakdown, which is normally understood as a mental breakdown and a case of madness, is said to be neither failure nor something negative at all, but a sign of something completely different. Moreover, not just anything different but the lightning of a new beginning. Most striking, however, is the last sentence as it gives us a unique hint into the task of those ‘rare ones,’ of whom Heidegger will speak soon in Contributions of Philosophy (of the Event), that will become the founders of the new beginning of Western philosophy. Indeed, Heidegger clearly says that to understand the reason for the madness of a great thinker is to understand what is ‘new’ in the new beginning of philosophy. ­Accordingly, to understand the thinker’s madness leads to understand what is essential in philosophy as such. This idea is more radical than the one we have heard in the previous semester, as it does not allow us to think the Verrückung of philosophy as an innocuous strangeness of thinking but relates it directly to the danger of a breakdown. In this light, the very nature of the breakdown must be questioned in relation to the danger of philosophy. By saying that Nietzsche’s breakdown is ‘nothing negative’ Heidegger points out that there is a peculiar truth to madness, one that gives us a hint into the very spurt (Ruck) which separates philosophy from the ‘normal’ presentation of the sane order of beings. Naturally, this does not mean that every case of what is accepted today as mental disorder can 4 Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise: On the Essence of Human Freedom, 3. 5 This can be seen in contrast to the way Heidegger retrospectively sees Being and Time as “scheiterndes Denken” (GA 97: 22) which can be translated as simply “failed thinking” but I think it is better understood as a thinking that “breaks down as it goes,” namely as a thinking that enacts a breakdown of its own metaphysical language.

546  Erik Kuravsky point to such a truth. It only means that a relation to such truth must not be anticipated in terms of a better representation of the world or a more accurate knowledge of what we normally experience but must rather be placed on different axis altogether, the axis which separates normal experience from madness. The key to understanding the Verrückung of philosophy lies in some sense in the secret of madness as such.6 The relation between madness and the way the more original truth of philosophy ­differs from ‘regular’ representational thinking is also stressed by Heidegger in the 1940s. In the 1941–1942 semester on Hölderlin’s ‘Remembrance,’ Heidegger addresses the fact of Hölderlin’s insanity in a way that fits his earlier comments on madness: The poet was indeed dislodged (verrückt), in the sense of a dis-lodgment (Verrückung) of his essence, which was removed from the night of his era. This essential dislodgment (Verrückung) then had as its consequence a “dislodgedness” (“Verrücktheit”) that was certainly also unique in kind. Yet from this consequence, the ground can never be grasped. We must free ourselves step by step from our addiction from ­psychological-biographical explanation. Step by step, because it cannot be achieved by a mere change of “views”.7 The known fact that Hölderlin was quite insane during his last years is not a merely ­psychological condition but points toward a positive fact of his removal from the negative situation of his era. That is, Hölderlin underwent a transformation (a dis-lodgement) of his essence. It is this shift that allowed him to come close to a sort of truth that r­ emained concealed for the ‘normal’ everyday people of his era. Here again, we should not think that in order to compose great poems one must simply become insane. Rather, Heidegger points to a necessary shift, a transformation of one’s essence – one that was earlier related to the foundation of a new beginning of Western philosophy – as a shift that has essential relation to becoming-mad. Heidegger surely doesn’t mean that mental illness is the source of philosophical or poetic truth. Instead, the very shift toward such truth must be understood in a way that frees madness from its interpretation as ‘mental illness.’ What is required is a spurt in the heart of one’s very existence, a movement from what is normally taken to be the very form of ‘sanity.’ Heidegger’s usage of the term ­Verrückung illuminates that this movement does not occur in the space of knowledge, ideas, or worldviews, but is familiar to us in its concealed form as that space wherein one ‘falls’ as one becomes ‘mad.’ Accordingly, I believe that we can learn from ­Heidegger that both madness and a breakdown of thinking are not flaws in a single ‘correct’ mold of experience but indicate a shift into a different configuration of what ‘experience’ means at all. Heidegger gives us another hint into his understanding of the truth of madness when he insists that only a madman was able to cry out: “God is dead.” In the 1943 essay “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God Is Dead’” Heidegger asks: in what way is this man mad? The

6 In fact, we find clues to this relation between madness and truth also in early Foucault, who speaks in his “Madness and Civilization” about the silent transcendence of madness (101) constituting a peculiar “truth of madness” which, prior to its de-interpretation into mere “illness” of the mind, was conceived as a forbidden knowledge (21) of the world and as a truth about man’s condition in general. Of course, before Foucault, already in Plato’s Phaedrus, we read that there is a madness which is “a divine gift,” and recently Daniel Strassberg has offered an overview of the way madness accompanies Western philosophy during its entire history. See Daniel Strassberg, Der Wahnsinn der Philosophie 7 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “Remembrance,” 38 (translation modified).

Thinking and the danger of insanity  547 answer is that he is de-ranged (or dis-lodged), i.e., Ver-rückt, moved out of the level of the erstwhile man, and has nothing in common with those common men who “don’t’ believe in God.”8 In fact the madman is the only one who is able to seek God, not ­because he has a different worldview but because he is the only one who can think.9 ­Heidegger stresses that the normal thinking, which he calls here “reason that has ­extolled for centuries,” is the “most stubborn adversary of thinking.” As regarding the madman, he asks: “Perhaps a thinking man has here really cried out de profundis?” Once again, the truth here comes from different depths than the ‘normal’ reason. In this light we may say that Heidegger relates madness to a dislodgement out of representational reason into thinking. Having said that, it is important to mention that Heidegger’s explicit ideas of the 1940s connecting the madman, the seer, and the poet must not be taken in the sense of promoting some sort of detachment from reality but should be read in the context of Heidegger’s non-public works, of which Contributions is the first one. Though I cannot address these works here, many of the metaphors and indeed the very Beyng-historical language of what appears in the lectures and the texts of the 1940s originate in these non-public texts. Indeed, the very idea of the impossibility to appropriate the abyssal nature of Beyng by means of personal will and of the need for releasement – motives that will be central in my further analysis of thinker’s madness – originates in the poietic, or the so-called esoteric texts of the late 1930s and the early 1940s. These texts contextualize the dislodgement (a term used already in Contributions) as being radically different from the psychologically understood ‘mental illness.’ A dislodgement out of reason is rather shown to be an overcoming of the very metaphysically psychological interpretation of the essence of human psyche. Still, not any dis-lodgment out of reason is a shift beyond reason. That is, not every departure is an overcoming. Though human transformation needs to be thought as Verrückung in a sense of moving out of the mode of existence as representational consciousness, the fact of the breakdown of great thinkers points toward a peculiar danger inherent to all attempts of overcoming reason. Hölderlin and Nietzsche did not end up as merely awkward or strange but literally insane. Still their case is unique since they were great thinkers, a fact which Heidegger ties explicitly to their final breakdown. 3  Madness and the abyss I have shown in the previous section that Heidegger had paid a special attention to the phenomenon of thinker’s madness and even said that philosophy is something insane if seen from the position of reason and representational consciousness. The madman somehow goes beyond the metaphysical essence of reason and is able to testify a deeper kind of truth. In this section I want to focus on the madness of a thinker by reading the cry ‘God is dead’ as expressing a ‘mad,’ or rather a verrückt experience of the seer. I shall argue that a poetic madness consists in reaching into the abyss and affording the poet and the seer to be dis-lodged from the ‘normal’ reason-based experience of beings. As we have seen, in “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God is Dead,’” Heidegger links madness to an ability to seek God preceded by an ability to cry out “God is dead!” What is central is that this saying does not mean ‘there is no God.’ As I understand it, what is mad about this

8 Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word: ‘God Is Dead,’” Off the Beaten Track, 199. 9 Ibid.

548  Erik Kuravsky saying is that it proclaims the death of God as a ‘positive’ characterization of our historical situation. The death of God is not an absence of God but an ongoing ontological event. Such an event already transgresses what can be represented by reason since the only possible negation that reason understands is a negation of an objective presence; reason cannot think the death of God as something that is. The madman, however, dwells in a conflictual essence of verrückt experience10 and does not say that God is present or absent but that his death is as having been occurred. Namely, I suggest thinking the death of God not as an event that happened in the past and is no more, but as something that, in a sense, always is. The death of God belongs to a temporal dimension inaccessible by reason but central to the non-representable root of human existence. It is comparable to what Pascal says about Christ’s agony, which never ends. As Mamardashvili explains, such events pertain to the still ungrounded essence of being-human. That is to say, it is only if one is able to stand within the ‘ongoing’ occurrence of the death of God (but also of Christ’s agony, of the forgetfulness of Beyng, etc.) that one shelters the common Origin of human essence.11 Indeed, Heidegger’s famous notion of ‘having-been’ acquires here a verrückt meaning – it does not merely indicate something that happened in the past but still effects the present, but rather something that, independently of an actual ontic-historiological happening, determines what, from the perspective of the history of the West, has always been and still is.12 The death of God thus belongs to the destiny that derives from the first beginning,13 and is ­experienced only by someone who, as Heidegger stresses, can think. Such a thinking – also named mindfulness (Besinnung) – is, according to Heidegger, an overcoming of reason.14 What sounds absurd to reason and its interpretation of time as a locale of what is present is available to the madman who does not assume that everything he experiences must be present. The madman, by saying that God is dead, expresses the fulfillment of metaphysics as ontotheology.15 He thus formulates what he sees as the hidden essence of

10 In Contributions we hear that the dislodgement from the domain of representation happens only if the “the conflictual in its intimacy reigns throughout the ‘there’” (276). One of the dimensions of this conflictual is, as I explain here, the temporal dimension of what has been even though it never took place. Indeed, it never could “take place” precisely since it determines a peculiar nature of a dislodged “place,” i.e., of the “there.” 11 Mamardashvili, Psichologicheskaya Topologiya Puti, 165. 12 The madman is able to seek God since, as Heidegger says about the poet in “Der Fehl heiliger Namen,” he experiences the distress of the “lack of holy names,” i.e., of the staying away of the presence of the godly. While Paola-Ludovika Coriando sees the language of Hölderlin as attuned to this emptiness (of the godly), Parvis Emad wonders what “about the ownmost of language that enables Hölderlin to obtain a language capable of rendering ‘sayable,’ and ‘bearable’ the emptiness ensuing from the staying away of the presence of the godly.” See Coriando, “Sprachen des Heiligen: Heidegger und Hölderlin,” in Heidegger und die christliche Tradition: Annäherung an ein schwieriges Thema; and Emad, Translation and Interpretation: Learning from Beiträge. As I see it, to answer this question, we should try seeing how language can be dis-lodged in a way that ­allows saying the absence of the godly. That is, this innate dislodgedness of language can become clearer as we look into its relation to the dis-lodgment of the thinker and her ability to say. I expand on this in the final section. 13 Heidegger expresses the transition from the first to the other beginning in terms of the dialog between “the first having-been of the beyng of truth and the extreme to-come of the truth of beyng” (Heidegger, Contributions, 7). Namely, the “having-been” here is meant in a Being-historical sense, it pertains not to beings in the past but to Beyng in its history. The death of God belongs to this as well as the inevitable destiny of the prior gods, who, as Heidegger stresses, are the gods “of the have-been” (Heidegger, Nietzsche. Vol3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, 182). 14 Heidegger, Mindfulness, 39. 15 Heidegger, Nietzsche. Vol4: Nihilism, 210.

Thinking and the danger of insanity  549 reason. The madman is thus a seer, not because he is more conscious of what is present but because his sight is verrückt away from conscious presentation. As Heidegger writes in the “Anaximander’s Saying”: 16

The seer, ο μάντης, is the μαινόμενος, the madman. But what is it that constitutes the essence of this madness? The madman is beside, outside, himself. He is away. We ask: away to where? And from where? Away from the mere crush of what lies before us, of the merely presently present, and away to the absent; away to, at the same time, the presently absent, inasmuch as this is always only the arrival of something that departs. The seer is outside himself in the single breadth of the presence of that which is in every way present. Therefore, within this breadth, he is able to find his way back from the “away, “ back to what is present here and now, namely, the raging plague. The madness of the seer’s being-away does not consist in raving, rolling the eyes or contorting the limbs. The madness of seeing is compatible with the unprepossessing quietness of bodily composure.17 The seer is away from what merely lies before us, be it something present or the ‘­present absence’ (e.g., of God). The seer gathers together everything present and absent.18 The seer is thus dis-lodged from representational experience; her experience is verrückt. While before Verrückung one is away in a sense of denying the exposure of the truth of Beyng,19 the seer is mad in an entirely different sense of being-away. Heidegger means this sense of ‘away’ when he says that Hölderlin approaches the future ones from the farthest away. As we have seen in the previous section, Hölderlin was verrückt, i.e., d ­ islodged away ‘from the night of his era.’ We can now see that the night of his (and also our) era is precisely the metaphysical usurpation of reason as allowing ‘the merely ­presently present.’ Moreover, now we hear that this ‘away’ brings the seer to the absent and to the ‘presently absent.’ The presently absent expresses the conflictual essence of what I called verrückt experience. For example, the death of God is neither present nor simply absent but belongs to a particular mode in which every being is arriving for a while into the unconcealment ‘in order’ to depart back to concealment. To ‘see’ such an ontological configuration of everything that is, is to ‘foreknow the future.’ It is to be disposed in/by a presentiment, a disposition which Heidegger associates with thinking the other ­beginning.20 Such a foreboding seer does not calculate the future but sees that which, in its having-been, always is; she ‘traverses and measures up the whole of temporality.’ To see, Heidegger says, is to have seen.21 It is by having seen already that she sees in advance. We may say that the seer has seen the flight of gods and so, by declaring the death of God, sees the future devastation of our world. To be sure, the mad seeing of the seer is not a hallucinatory vision of something ­quasi-present, is not a strange permutation of the unconcealed reality, but is a glance 16 As Elliot R. Wolfson stresses, “the epoch of the last god is the time when the gods will be over and done.” Namely, the death of God is not the end of all godliness but a paradoxical godliness of a (metaphysical) godlessness. (See Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis.) The madman thus announces the need for the last god. 17 Heidegger, “Anaximander’s Saying,” Off the Beaten Track, 262. 18 Ibid. 19 Heidegger, Contributions, 240–241. 20 Ibid., 14. 21 Heidegger, “Anaximander’s Saying,” Off the Beaten Track, 260.

550  Erik Kuravsky “outside the region of unconcealment.”22 Indeed the Ruck of Verrückung is a spurt away not just from what is present but from beings as such; it brings forth the ontological difference not as a philosophical differentiation to speak about but as an experience. As Heidegger stresses, we can ask the decisive question (regarding the meaning of Being) correctly only “if [we] have first experienced in a more meaningful way what we have termed the ‘differentiation of Being and beings.’”23 The experience of the ontological difference can first occur as an experience of the plight of the abandonment by Beyng. Such an experience is said by Heidegger to be the first Verrückung.24 Accordingly, both the experience of the abandonment by Beyng and the experience of the death of God are ontological experiences allowing the state of having-seen25 that which is outside the r­ egion of unconcealment. Yet what lies outside the region of the unconcealed? There is no ‘what’ outside this region, but only the abyss. What Heidegger has earlier named ‘­ transcendence’ as the beholdedness of the nothing is called in Contributions ‘adherence to the abyss’ as a non-definite knowledge of the essence of Beyng characterizing the essence of Da-sein.26 The sight of the seer is nothing other but a case of this non-definite knowledge. ‘God is dead’ is not an inference made by reason but a word that names a knowing experience of the essence of Beyng as it ‘traverses and measures up the whole of temporality.’ The madman is pulled “away from the light of reason and transparency in order to dwell in this newly emerging realm and to hear what self-shows and is being said.”27 The seer, in her madness, experiences the death of God as a tonality of everything that is present, indeed as a tonality that attunes all beings in the history of Western ­metaphysics. The madman thus experiences that everything that is hangs in the abyss. The raging plague to which, as said in the cited passage, the seer returns is only seen as such because of the seer’s being-away. Her madness does not dictate some strange behavior but rather lets the strangeness of Beyng appear in beings, even if in the form of the abandonment by Beyng (i.e., the plague). In other words, the madness which, as we have seen in the previous section, Heidegger associates with the essence of philosophy and the truth of Beyng is a reaching into the abyss. In “Why Poets?” we read about the historical necessity of such a mad venture: In the age of the world’s night, the abyss of the world must be experienced and must be endured. However, for this it is necessary that there are those who reach into the abyss.28 In the first pages of Contributions, Heidegger stresses that the question of the truth of Beyng “belongs uniquely to the abyss of that dispensation to which even gods are subjects.”29 A penetration into the abyss is a penetration into “something ­well-guarded.”30 We may assume that something that is well guarded is not merely a place that is hard to enter but is also dangerous. Indeed, we hear that the grounding of the domain of 22 Ibid., 261. 23 Heidegger, Nietzsche. Vol4: Nihilism, 187. 24 Heidegger, Contributions, 23. 25 Comparable to the “having-become” of the early Christians described in Heidegger’s 1920 lectures. 26 Heidegger, Contributions, 362. 27 Maly, The Five Groundbreaking Moments in Heidegger’s Thinking, 143. 28 Heidegger, “Why Poets?” Off the Beaten Track, 201. 29 Heidegger, Contributions, 8. 30 Ibid.

Thinking and the danger of insanity  551 ­ istoricality is carried out by courageously facing the abyss.31 The abyss is an ab-ground, h a non-ground, which nevertheless is still a sort of ground.32 Yet, unlike the a priori ground of ­metaphysics, it is not universally available and seemingly safe, but requires a dis-lodgement of one’s essence in order for her to be grounded ‘within’ the abyss. Remembering Heidegger’s words that Hölderlin was dis-lodged away from the night of his era, we understand that his dislodgement, his madness, consisted precisely in reaching into the abyss. Indeed, Heidegger writes that poets are those who first reach into the abyss. Therefore, the madness of the ones who reach into the abyss and experience the ontological difference in the form of the abandonment by Beyng is a poetic madness of the seer. We may thus already say something essential regarding the madness of a thinker. Namely, both Nietzsche and Hölderlin have pioneered a reach into the abyss. Both had a glance of that which lies beyond the region of the unconcealed. Both have experienced the non-definite knowledge of the essence of Beyng. Both seen the world as hanging in the abyss. Yet both have also failed to come back safely to the raging plague of what is present. The question is – why? We get a hint of an answer in Contributions: At times, those who ground the abyss must be consumed in the fire of that which is well guarded, so that Da-sein might be possible for humans and constancy within ­beings might thus be saved, and also so that beings themselves might undergo restoration in the open realm of the strife between earth and world.33 This passage seems to justify that some of those who reach into the abyss and so participate in the most dignified task of grounding it are consumed in the well-guarded fire. It sounds thus that those great thinkers sacrifice themselves – perhaps unwillingly – in order for Verrückung, as a poetic madness, to be available for future human beings. I suggest that we can grasp the nature of this necessity on the basis of the fact that it appears in Contributions to Philosophy, a work which Heidegger explicitly characterizes as transitional, i.e., as a preparation for thinking out of the truth of Beyng. The thinker’s insanity results, as I shall further show, from an inability to experience the grounding quality of the abyss, thus still clinging to its metaphysically negative non-essence.34 That is, my idea is that the sacrifice of great thinkers is needed only because their thinking pertains to a particular stage of the transition into the other beginning. To be sure, it is ‘needed’ not because otherwise the transition could not take place, but because there is a peculiar ­danger in the transition and because someone must risk oneself by being the pioneer of the transition. The most important thing for understanding the difference between the poetic madness of the seer and sheer insanity is to clarify the danger that lies in the transition as the danger of insanity. Moreover, I think that only by understanding this danger, can we truly comprehend the nature of Verrückung in both of its senses.

31 Ibid., 24–25 32 Ibid., 300. 33 Ibid., 8. 34 As John W.M. Krummel writes: “It is this abyssal element, the excess of Being as such, that the d ­ ominant metaphysics of modernity and global technology had concealed in their focus on rationality, utility, and ­objectification.” Krummel, “The Holy in Heidegger: The Open Clearing as Excess and Abyss,” in H ­ eidegger and the Holy, 1–26, 7. Indeed, it is this “excess” of Being that cannot be thought positively as “more beingness” but is neither a nihil.

552  Erik Kuravsky 4  Thinking and the danger of insanity We have seen in the previous section that the poet’s and the thinker’s madness rest on reaching into the abyss of Beyng. Such an adherence to the abyss allows the seer to ­understand the essence of Beyng and to forebode the destiny of the world. This positive sense of poetic madness is tightly related to the notion of Verrückung as it appears in Contributions – one is dis-lodged out of what is merely present. Yet, as Heidegger insinuates in the 1936 lectures on Schelling, the deepest secret of the new beginning of philosophy lies in the fact that a great thinker can undergo a breakdown, to become dislodged in a way that tears him off from reality. The greatest saving power grows indeed where the greatest danger is.35 This danger is very concrete and visible in the cases of Nietzsche and Hölderlin – it is the danger of insanity. If Heidegger is right and those who will ­understand the thinker’s madness will pave the way to the new beginning, then a prominent aspect of the core difference between our metaphysical era and the new beginning lies in that danger which pertains to the dis-lodgment of human essence.36 In this section I suggest that the difference between human transformation into Dasein and madness is that, while both go beyond reason in its metaphysical sense, madness still relies on subjectivity as a measure of its leap and oversteps the measure of what is. My idea here is that if a required Ruck away from reason still somehow clings to an understanding of experience as subjective, thus secretly relying on the security of one’s will and keeping its right to set the measure of the ‘beyond’ (e.g., in form of values or goals), we get a Verrückung in a sense of a disastrous breakdown (such as Nietzsche’s and ­Hölderlin’s) which does point toward something entirely new but fails to achieve it. The reason for this is simple enough: if one still leans on the ground of metaphysical beingness in the form of subjectivity, in a leap beyond metaphysics, one will not experience the grounding essence of the abyss and will thus lose one’s previous ground without gaining a new one to stand on.37 Though such a ‘failure’ still ‘serves’ the history of Beyng and belongs to the demise of metaphysics, it is devastating for the concrete human beings who thus sacrifice themselves. We can understand why the possibility of human transformation into Dasein grows ‘where the greatest danger is’ by listening to Heidegger’s words regarding the ­non-metaphysical character of Beyng. Indeed, if the danger of insanity pertains to a transition into the other beginning, Beyng itself must be characterized by danger – not, however, by some or other particular danger but by danger as such. Heidegger does indeed present both Beyng and ­human transition into its truth in terms of danger and risk. We read already in Contributions that the leap into the abyss is a risky venture (wagen).38 There Heidegger plays on 35 My version of the relation between danger and saving is different from the one discussed by Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology. The danger of insanity, as I show further, complements the one that Heidegger discusses in the lecture. While the danger discussed by Heidegger is a danger of a devastation of human nature which holds withing itself a saving power of the other beginning, the danger of insanity is a danger which one must face if one decides to leap into this very saving power. 36 A full difference would require contextualizing human transformation in terms of the fourfold of earth-skymortals-divinities. Though this idea appears later in Heidegger’s path, we can see already in Contributions the importance of the humans-gods axis in general and of the last god in particular. Indeed, the assignment of Da-sein to Being occurs from the divinization of the god of gods (Contributions, 6). 37 To be sure, the “new ground” is not a ground in a sense of some new highest principle in terms of which one can make sense of reality but a non-ground, i.e., an abyssal ground. Such a non-ground however is still a non-ground, namely an enigmatic non-principle of Beyng which nevertheless is able to sustain the world in ever new ways determined by one’s individual (though not personal) sheltering of its inceptuality in beings. 38 GA 65: 380.

Thinking and the danger of insanity  553 the contrast between wägen (ponder, think about, weigh) and wagen (dare, risk).39 To leap into the abyss is to dare, to risk oneself, rather than to weigh reasonably one’s steps. Therefore, the leap appears as utter recklessness.40 It is a reckless and dangerous attempt to overcome reason and thus withstand in Da-sein. The relation between the dangerousness of a leap and the essence of Beyng itself is then further explained as follows: What is possible, and indeed the possible as such, opens itself only to an attempt. The attempt must be ruled by a willing that grasps ahead. Willing, as placing oneself beyond oneself, stands within a being-beyond-oneself. This standing is the original spatializing of the temporal-spatial playing field into which beyng protrudes: Dasein. Beyng essentially occurs as venture. And only in the venture does the human being attain the realm of de-cision. And only in the venture [Wagnis] is the human being capable of pondering [Wägen].41 A venture of being-beyond-oneself as the original spatializing of the temporal-spatial playing field is what we addressed earlier in terms of the seer who in her being-away ‘traverses and measures up the whole of temporality.’ The seer can forebode the future precisely because the possible as such opens itself to her attempt. While the seer’s attempt is evidently successful, the transitional thinker still ‘only’ attempts to be-beyond-oneself. The thinker thus must risk because Beyng itself is a venture, or, perhaps more correctly, Beyng ventures. We meet here the basic difference between the metaphysical interpretation of Being and an essential occurrence of Beyng: Beyng is not something abstract to think about but is a venture to ‘take part’ in. As a venture, Beyng entails a risk. Indeed, Heidegger is very clear in saying that Beyng occurs essentially as venture/risk42 (this is its ontological ‘structure’) and that the Being of beings is venture/risk.43 Moreover, in Contributions we see a direct relation between venture and Verrückung – the Verrückung of human beings into Dasein is prepared by venturing the essential projection of truth as clearing concealment,44 which in relation to human experience means that rather than taking human essence as pre-given, it must be cast loose, that is, ventured into the open.45 These statements should be understood in terms of a peculiar ontological risk belonging to Beyng itself – venture/risk is the way Beyng happens as long as we do not misconceive it in terms of the security of ιδέα. Now we can investigate a more direct treatment of venture/risk which Heidegger ­offers in “Why Poets?” There Heidegger makes clear that, since Being is venture/risk, all ­beings are risked into Being.46 Namely, beings exist as historically unconcealed rather than merely present (the way consciousness and reason take them to be). Accordingly, beings are unsheltered47 in a sense of not being ‘plighted’; beings are not promised to be secured as what they are ‘in all circumstances.’ Such a promise can be assumed only 39 Ibid., 448. 40 Heidegger, Contributions, 179. 41 Ibid., 374. Importantly, Heidegger means a verrückt sense of possibility here, not a calculable metaphysical sense of what can be enabled and produced. 42 Ibid. 43 Heidegger, “Why Poets?” Off the Beaten Track, 209. 44 Heidegger, Contributions, 281. 45 Ibid., 357. 46 Heidegger, “Why Poets?” Off the Beaten Track, 209. 47 Ibid., 209–210.

554  Erik Kuravsky in metaphysics where Being does not venture but becomes merely abstract beingness; Plato’s ideas, for example, are forever safe and sheltered. In the venture of Beyng, however, b ­ eings can undergo a dis-lodgement and exist in a different way than the one we are familiar with. The unshelteredness of beings is a consequence of the fact that Beyng ventures. Yet, every kind of being, Heidegger says, is unsheltered in a different manner according to its way of existence. Thus, human beings are unsheltered in a peculiar way appropriate to them. To understand the uniqueness of human unshelteredness, we must first pay attention to Heidegger’s words regarding the relation between risk and safety: To risk [wagen] is to set the play into motion, to lay something on the balance [Wage], to let it loose into danger. Thereby what is risked is indeed unsheltered, but since it lies on the balance, it is retained by the risk. It is sustained. It continues to be saved by its ground in its ground.48 Although in verrückt experience, beings manifest themselves not as self-sufficient objects but as a temporal achievement in the venture of Beyng, i.e., as finitely unconcealed and ready to return to concealment, beings do not become something vague, indeterminate, and ungraspable. The abyssal motion of concealment-unconcealment is a risk but also a peculiar determinateness, a sustained balance. Indeed, the balance must be sustained since Beyng is not a categorial structure but a venture. We may say that the composure of the mad seer implies that despite her experience of the abyssal character of Beyng, beings still appear in their concreteness; the seer is able to sustain the determinability of beings. The seer, as we heard, finds her way from the ‘away,’ she is balanced. As I understand it, this means that beings find their ground and are thus saved not by eluding the risk – as if the seer stopped being mad – but as sustained by the risk. The successful sustainment of the balance of beings is made possible by the risk of the seer herself. Moreover, since human beings must risk, the different ways of sustaining beings in a balance are based on the different ways humans exist in a risk. As we have seen, Heidegger stresses already in Contributions that an attempt must be ruled by a willing. Here we approach the uniqueness of a peculiarly human risk. Beings, Heidegger says, are retained in the will. For beings, to be risked is to be willed; retained in the will, they themselves remain in the mode of willing, and risk themselves.49 When will is taken in its metaphysical sense as will to power, we get the retainment of beings as representations, objects, and finally ideas. To be sure, it is not a subjective sustainment of objects in terms of one’ subjective will, but beings themselves are as will to power.50 According to Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, will to power is not a ­psychological phenomenon but a way Being sways in the epoch of metaphysics. Indeed the moment Being is interpreted as ιδέα and read-off from represented beings, beings become self-sufficient entities forcing their presence and ‘willing’ to remain what they

48 Ibid., 210. 49 Ibid. 50 “The expression ‘will to power’ designates the basic character of beings; any being which is, insofar as it is, is will to power. The expression stipulates the character that beings have as beings.” Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art, 17.

Thinking and the danger of insanity  555 are (sustain their power). In other words, when Beyng as a venture is dismissed and ­forgotten, the sole venture that remains is the venture of beings in a sense of their effective power and, more importantly, the venture of the willing subject deciding upon the value of beings’ effectivity. Yet what would happen to a thinker who attempts to reach into the abyss in this mode of will? Furthermore, why even attempt such an insane move? To be sure, the metaphysical version of will does not normally aim at the abyss. ­Indeed, the main danger that lies in will to power is the danger of fleeing the abyss by ­empowering reason as a measure of beings. Heidegger stresses that reason in the form of representational consciousness twists human relationship to the open (i.e., with Being).52 The relationship becomes twisted, and humans are excluded from the world.53 This ­danger – belonging to the avoidance of the abyss – is the danger of reason; it is a danger of lived experience and machination, a danger that human beings themselves will become mere materials for production,54 i.e., become what is merely present but has no part in the venture of Beyng. This is not yet a danger of insanity we are looking for, but so to say, a ‘danger of rational sanity.’ The danger of rational sanity is the opposite of the poet’s danger to reach into the abyss. Namely, it is a danger of avoiding the abyss, of willing against it. In “Why Poets?” Heidegger points out that the self-asserting will twists the open and sets human beings against it. As Oudemans argues, the very inception of metaphysics was a decision of the Greeks against the open.55 The security of reason is thus constituted in terms of the against between the subject and the abyssal open. It is this self-securing willing-against that a­ llows reason to flee anxiety and claim the status of a measure-setting subjectivity. The fist Verrückung, as we read in Contributions, is the experience of the abandonment by Beyng. We may now add – of the danger of rational sanity; it is an experience of a d ­ istressful becoming-aware of the ongoing dissolution of human essence sustained by reason. Hence, the first Verrückung already discloses a need for an attempt to overcome reason by reaching into the abyss. The first Verrückung ­illuminates the danger in which one exists and motivates to take a leap. Yet, to leap one must risk even more. Why is reaching into the abyss a bigger risk than the risk of reason? This question can also be asked differently: why the overcoming of metaphysics is more dangerous than metaphysics itself? I believe the answer to be as follows: while the metaphysical understanding of will is tightly related to the twist of our relationship to the open, this twist still allows beings to manifest in an orderly fashion as objects standing against s­ubjectivity. Those who risk more, however, participate in an ‘un-twisting’ of the relationship to the open. The Überwindung (overcoming) of metaphysics, Heidegger says, is a Windung der Winde,56 a twist of a winch. The crucial point is that this (un)twist is able to ‘undo’ the original metaphysical twist because both twists are dictated by Beyng. That is, neither the twist 51

51 Heidegger notices few crucial points in the unfolding of the metaphysical interpretation of beings. Leibniz’s idea that beings’ substantiality consists of a “force” is an intermediate stage between the initial Greek ­understanding of ούσία and Nietzsche’s illumination of its true essence as will to power. See Heidegger, The History of Beyng, 25. 52 Heidegger, “Why Poets?” Off the Beaten Track, 213. 53 Ibid., 214. 54 Ibid., 220. Heidegger explicates this danger in later lectures “The Question Concerning Technology” and “The Turning.” 55 Oudemans, “Echoes from the Abyss? Philosophy and ‘Geopolitics’ in Heidegger’s Beiträgeand Besinnung.” 56 GA 67: 14.

556  Erik Kuravsky of the Greek Verrückung of the essence of truth in metaphysics57 nor the twist of the first Verrückung of overcoming metaphysics happens out of human resources. As ­Heidegger stresses in Contributions, the presumptuousness of thinking that Verrückung can be carried out by relying on human resources is even greater than the presumptuousness of the measure-setting metaphysical subjectivity.58 The metaphysical twist is something that is in principle inevitable. If it were merely a subjective invention, it would have also required some sort of a subjective solution. Yet, since subjectivity in a sense of representational consciousness only arose out of the twist, the reverse twist cannot succeed if one still holds to some residue of representational attitude. The overcoming of metaphysics, Heidegger writes, is the essencing of Beyng.59 In a 1949 lecture “The Turning” H ­ eidegger reformulates what he called ‘the leap’ in Contributions in terms of “the turning of the oblivion of Being into the safekeeping belonging to the coming to presence of Being.”60 The dislodgement of thinking happens out of the turn of Being itself rather than being initiated by a metaphysical will to power. Thus, those who risk more (i.e., those who reach into the abyss) put themselves in an additional risk of failing following the trajectory of the twist (or the turn) and become twisted themselves. Rather than becoming verrückt in a positive sense used in Contributions, one then becomes verrückt as ‘verdreht,’ which is a good German word for someone confused and ‘twisted (literally ) in the head.’ The risk of Verrückung stems from the fact that the one who undergoes it is still in a transitional stage between the metaphysical, self-asserting will to power and the ­ontological safety of the open. The untwisting of metaphysics requires a shift from an ­objectives-positing will to what Heidegger calls ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit) into the open – one must a­ ttempt “to remain purely released over to [ überlassen ] the ­open-region.”61 Such a releasement, Heidegger says, is something like rest.62 And f­urther: “Releasement comes from the ­ ­open-region, because releasement properly consists in the human remaining released to the open-region, and doing so by means of the open-region.”63 If one’s attempt at such a releasement is successful, then the safety of the open is achieved. Yet, to let go of all defenses belonging to reason, empowered by the will to power, is not a simple task. One must, however, risk in order to achieve safe being. As Heidegger explains in “Why Poets?” The risk that risks more does not produce a defense. However, it fashions us a safe ­being. Safe, securus, sine cura means: without care. Care has here the nature of deliberate ­self-assertion along the ways and by the means of absolute production. We are without this care only when we do not set up our essence exclusively in the precinct of production and command, of utilization and defense. We are safe only where we are neither taking the defenseless into account nor counting on a defense erected in the will.64 57 In “Nietzsches Metaphysik” Heidegger says that the conception of modern consciousness is already a result of a Verrückung in the essence of truth in relation to the previous pre-metaphysical Greek conception (GA 50: 67). In a sense then, any shift in the essence of truth, i.e., in the way Being occurs and is understood by human beings, is a Verrückung, a dislodgement of human essence in a way that is in-sane in terms of the prevailing measures of sanity. 58 Heidegger, Contributions, 22. 59 Heidegger, The History of Beyng, 145. 60 Heidegger, “The Turning,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 41. 61 Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, 76. 62 Ibid., 77. 63 Ibid., 79. 64 Heidegger, “Why Poets?” Off the Beaten Track, 223.

Thinking and the danger of insanity  557 Verrückung is the risk that risks more; it risks by renouncing self-assertion (will in a ­regular sense) and the security of an ‘a priori.’ The verrückt will is said in Mindfulness to be the “grounding-attunement of persevering in the destiny of acquiescing to the distress of ab-ground.”65 Indeed, it is ‘care-free’ since it acquiesces rather than defends itself. That is, the Verrückung of will renounces the defense erected in the self-asserting will of the subject. Even though this defense against the abyss drained humanity of its essence, for the ‘normal’ everyday cognition it succeeded in creating a ‘safe place,’ a place where one can postpone one’s abyssal self-renunciation until it is forced by physical death. Indeed, only an unconditional renouncement of the security of reason allows existence that is truly safe.66 As Heidegger argues, the safety of those who risk more does not require defense because ‘defense’ makes no sense anymore. Such safety is outside of every relation to d ­ efense.67 Those who have thus risked and underwent Verrückung are not metaphysical subjects as they do not assert measures but receive and give what they have received.68 In other words, it is a safety of fully belonging to the venture of Beyng, of receiving one’s determination and the measure of one’s existence from Beyng.69 Still, the reception of the measure is not a passive being-overwhelmed but is paradoxically ‘met’ as our own ability for a defenseless hovering in the open.70 The ‘normal’ reason, however, is submerged in creating defenses. In contrast to what modern psychology thinks, to be a subject is only possible by creating defenses – hence, there is no such thing as a healthy subjectivity.71 Ontological safety as defenselessness is only possible as a turn toward the open, which is a turn away from subjectivity72 and an overcoming of reason (or of representational consciousness). To be defenseless, Heidegger says, is to be free as being open for being claimed.73 The only thing against which power shatters is the unconditional lack of resistance.74 But what if one fails to release one’s defenses and attempts to carry out Verrückung leaning on one’s own resources? I suggested earlier that one then becomes ‘twisted.’ We may say that one’s relation to the open becomes pathological – it can neither lean on the defenses which reason has set against the abyss nor fully surrender to the open. Such a pathological relation to the open cannot sustain the balance of beings. The open, Heidegger writes, lets in in a sense of “[drawing] into and fit into the unlit entirety of the tuggings of the pure attraction.”75 In other words, the open lets one fit into what is;

65 Heidegger, Mindfulness, 52. 66 We may see that, by renouncing the securing of reason, one faces death as “the highest testimony to beyng” (Contributions, 181), thus embracing one’s mortality not as a merely objective finiteness but as a uniqueness of one’s relation to Beyng. 67 Heidegger, “Why Poets?” Off the Beaten Track, 224. 68 Ibid. 69 Beistegui, “The Transformation of the sense of Dasein in Heidegger’s ‘Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis).’” 70 Polt, The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger’s “Contributions to Philosophy,” 116. 71 As Heidegger stresses in the Zollikon seminars: “Psychoanalysis glimpses from Dasein only the mode of fallenness and its urge. It posits this constitution as authentically human and objectifies the human being with his ‘drives.’” Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, 174. 72 “But in this look God looked at man, and in looking, elevated his essence to the light. However, as the purest essence of all will, this look is a consuming fire for every particular will. The sundered self-will of man is threatened by this fire.” Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise: On the Essence of Human Freedom, 152. 73 Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, 217. 74 Heidegger, The History of Beyng, 71. 75 Heidegger, “Why Poets?” Off the Beaten Track, 213.

558  Erik Kuravsky it releases beings to be what they are and ‘does’ it in a way that one may dwell among them. Heidegger associates this ‘ability’ of Beyng to set the measure of what is with ­language. Already in Contributions we hear that language is the positing of measures “as the ­originating essential occurrence of what is fitting and of its joining (the event).”76 ­Language releases the essence of beings; it lets a thing be a thing. In Krzysztof Ziarek’s words, it lets be by “holding open the space-time proper and fitting to things’ way of ­being, which allows them to exist in their characteristic staying a while.”77 Or, in ­Heidegger’s own words, “[l]language is the primal dimension within which man’s essence is first able to correspond at all to Being and its claim.”78 In this light, it makes good sense to say – as Heidegger does in “Why Poets?” – that those who risk more, risk language. Namely, they risk to not fit anymore into the way beings are. It is a danger of a breakdown of one’s correspondence with Being. We may say that this danger is different from the danger of reason (i.e., of rational sanity), yet both are dangers of language. The two kinds of dangers – the danger of reason and the danger of insanity – correspond to the double danger of language of which Heidegger speaks in the Germania lectures: On the one hand, there is the danger of supreme proximity to the gods and thereby to being annihilated by their excessive character; at the same time, however, there is the danger of the most shallow turning away and of becoming entangled in wornout idle talk and the semblance that goes with it.79 To be annihilated by the excessive character of the gods is the meaning of a t­ransitional thinker’s insanity which cannot withstand the supreme proximity of the abyss and creates barriers and defenses. It is to “be consumed in the fire of that which is well guarded.”80 The essence of such insanity cannot be grasped in terms of psychology81 or any c­ onsciousness-based philosophy but requires a totally new approach which will consider madness as an ontological twist.82 It is an insanity of those who dare, and e­ specially of a thinker and the poet; it is a breakdown of those who have reached into the abyss yet rather than completing the twist of overcoming metaphysics, became twisted. The ­reason

76 Heidegger, Contributions, 401. 77 Ziarek, Language after Heidegger, 101. 78 Heidegger, “The Turning,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 41. 79 Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” 59. 80 Heidegger, Contributions, 8. 81 Psychology, Heidegger says, is the final word of metaphysics – “psychology and technology belong together like right and left. (Heidegger, Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking, 99). 82 Though this subject cannot be addressed here, I think that, since language holds open the time-space, to understand the twist of language requires a deeper understanding of the differences between the occurrence of a metaphysical time-space and its re-configuration in Verrückung. To be sure, there are certain attempts in modern phenomenology to connect psychopathology with temporality, these attempts speak about one’s experience of time and are clearly subjective. Heidegger, however, offers a dynamic picture of the way t­ime-space occurs. Notably the occurrence of time-space is described in movement-related terms ­Entrückung and Berückung. Verrückung thus can be analyzed in relation to time-space as a twist of this happening. Rather than being a shift from a static point, it is a re-configuration of an already occurring “movement” of Entrückung and Berückung. Perhaps the sanity of reason and the composure of a seer are based on a particular harmony between the drawing in, captivating character of space, and the drawing out, dispersing character of time. Namely, there may be one or several configurations of time-space within which beings can appear “concrete enough” to be taken in an orderly fashion, yet “open enough” to not “over-enchant” one’s mind. This direction of re-thinking madness requires a separate investigation.

Thinking and the danger of insanity  559 for this failure is that they have approached the abyss while still holding on to some barriers, i.e., defenses that have served them before the Verrückung. Thus, they were dis-lodged from the appropriating sway of language and were unable to “find their way from the ‘away.’” Accordingly, the insane is the a-logical not in a sense of being unable to calculate according to the rules of logic, but in a sense in which her belonging to the λόγος is dis-lodged, neither freely letting language speak nor having enough defenses to keep its word reduced to the mechanisms of rationality. 5  Reason and insanity In this final section I would like to briefly address the subject of the how of a transitional thinker’s possible insanity. Namely, I want to suggest an answer to the question – why a failed overcoming of reason, i.e., a failed overcoming of representational subjectivity, results precisely in insanity? Or, in other words, what is the relation between the metaphysical essence of subjectivity/reason and psychopathology? In general, my idea is that insanity is a triumph of subjectivity over Being – the insane is unmoved by logic or ­empirical evidence not because there are some flaws in her cognitive mechanism, but because she celebrates her subjectivity and its ‘right’ to set the measure of what is.83 In other words, it is a triumph of will to power in its final self-positing against any ontological restriction. While the relation of reason to the open is twisted, it still fulfills a possible configuration of Being itself (as an abandonment by Beyng). The insane relation to the open, however, violates the balance of beings and is thus privative.84 When Foucault wrote that anxiety lies at the basis of all psychopathologies he was on the right track.85 To carry some sort of a shield into the open is to try defending oneself against the defenselessness of the abyss; it is to bring negation to the open, thus still attempting to prescribe a measure, the ‘not,’ to Being. Yet such self-prescribing, as a German term ‘sich verschreiben’ tells, is a move beyond the boundaries of what is, a delusion, a mocking (de-ludere) of the gravity of the open which alone can direct Verrückung into the safety of defenselessness. Being unable to let what is not present be, delusion forces it into a sensible form of a hallucination.86 Such a delusion is indeed a detachment from the a priori order of reason, however, not because reason is the absolute 83 To be sure, this “celebration of subjectivity” is an agony of the self and precisely because the ontological origin of the self is not subjectivity as representational consciousness. 84 Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, 74. Importantly, I do not think that any case of what is today called schizophrenia is a result of “risking more.” On the contrary, it is most probable, as Medgar Boss argues, that most cases of a schizophrenia correspond to an infantile relation to Being. That is, most patients are touched by the abyss of madness not as a result of risking more and attempting to go beyond reason but because the “natural” construction of their defenses against the abyss was breached (e.g., by a trauma). (See Boss, Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, 246.) 85 See Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, University of California Press; 2nd edition (July 1, 2008). 86 Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols – Conversations – Letters, 151. Medgar Boss also emphasizes this point. According to Boss, the patient is addressed by something beyond her inwardness. (Boss, Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, 12.) Remembering that for Heidegger pathology corresponds to a lack of openness for a claim, we can see clearly that reducing one’s experience to what can be represented and located within the subject sabotages one’s ability to respond to a claim since the very reality of such a claim beyond one’s consciousness and beyond what is present is a priori insane. In this light, Boss rejects emphatically the too hasty assumption regarding the “’unrealistic”’ nature of so-called psychotic hallucinations” (Boss, Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, 85).

560  Erik Kuravsky measure of Being but because reason is still a measure originated from/as the occurrence of Beyng. Namely, metaphysics – as the origin of both reason and subjectivity – is still a truth of beings, even if ungrounded and transformed from αλήθεια to the safeguarding of ­constancy.87 Accordingly, the truth of reason is a ‘shadow’ of a more original truth of Beyng, yet as such it still ‘respects’ the untouchability of the abyss of ground. Indeed, reason is only possible if, by exclusively having beings in its view, it stays away from the abyss; the ontological essence of reason as a safeguarding of constancy occurs as an ‘active disregard’ of the abyss through a metaphysical interpretation of the ontological difference. We may say that reason is a ‘censo’ of the abyss;88 thus it ‘stays in touch’ with truth, even if in an extremely limited, almost ‘negative’ way.89 Furthermore, the very possibility of delusion is dependent on the ontological essence of reason as will to power. Namely, as power, reason is antagonistic to any ‘other’; it exempts nothing of its assumption of power. Yet, as Heidegger stresses in The History of Beyng, such an omnipotence is only possible with the aid of illusion.90 The illusion that belongs to the essence of power – and thus of reason – is that it ‘frees’ those who are overpowered, giving them a feeling of their own legitimacy. After all, the self-assurance of a deluded person is only an echo of a self-assurance of reason, which has always ­already interpreted one’s self in a way that requires ‘liberation’ through reason itself. The illusionary nature of this power of reason is essential as it comes with the very ability of reason for explaining. That is, the ability for explaining – when exercised without limitation by reason as will to power – is always also an ability for explaining away. That is why there can be no ‘other’ to reason – the ‘other’ is always explained away by reason itself.91 The so-called ‘unreasonable’ mind of a schizophrenic that finds a suitable ‘explanation’ for everything that doesn’t fit into her illusion is in fact a radical expression of the

87 GA 67: 33. 88 Perhaps the psychoanalytical notion of a censor has its ground here. 89 Also, according to the verb ‘censeo,’ reason ‘assesses,’ ‘estimates’ or ‘measures,’ and ‘keeps an eye on’ the abyss. 90 Heidegger, The History of Beyng, 58. 91 The idea of “explaining away” is based on Mamardashvili’s lectures on Proust. In the second lecture, Mamardashvili points out that Proust presents regular everyday situations as if through a telescope in order to see the hidden laws behind human experiences. The central principle of these laws is that one rarely ­experiences what really is since one is rarely able to gather (which Mamardashvili ties to the Greek Logos) a “text” which would illuminate the situation by putting everything in its place. The ability to gather is an ­ontological one and it is contrasted to a psychological state of man in which the event of meaning is veiled by a reasonable description of experience. Such a conceptual/objective description can in principle be explained in infinite possible ways, depending on one’s motivation. The problem is that one’s motivation is determined by fears, expectations, and ideals which form certain patterns, or ideas, in terms of which alone one sees the reality. Anything else is being explained away. Thus, Mamardashvili brings the example of a communist party official who is unable to see the suffering of a poor child since he has already explained away this suffering by putting the poor child and his existence in a particular hierarchy of social order – the poverty was thus explained and there was nothing more to say or feel about it (Mamardashvili, Psychologichiskaya Topologiya Puti, 55). I think that Mamardashvili’s idea emphasizes the relation between a priori and reason by showing that reason always leans on something that already makes sense for it. The empirically acquired ideas thus play the role of an a priori in a way that was shown by Quine. Important difference between Mamardashvili and Quine lies in that Mamardashvili stresses that our everyday reason operates like the mechanism of a sleep, it “does” everything it can in order for us not to “wake up” (e.g., the sound of an alarm clock turns into another content of a dream). As I see it, what Mamardashvili understands as reason’s self-protective power by which it keeps us “asleep” is grounded in the essence of reason as will to power.

Thinking and the danger of insanity  561 very (non)essence of reason as explaining-away.92 As will to power, reason is essentially ‘idiotic,’ from the Greek ίδιον (same, personal) – it “refers to the priority of that which is addicted to itself, which initially gives itself the stamp of subjectivity.”93 Indeed, it is in the very nature of reason to present itself as ‘pure’ and to banish whatever it cannot grasp as non-experienceable, irrational, or, ironically, an illusion. As power, reason is an illusory sovereignty and “for this reason it is also incapable of bearing any ‘opposite’ that is in any way essentially inceptual.”94 Having said that, reason – as preceding both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ kinds of Verrückung (i.e., transformation into Dasein and insanity) – is not a contingent mode of existence but belongs to the very essence of Beyng. To clarify this point we must further comprehend the relation between reason and the abyss of Being by returning to ­Heidegger’s idea that Being is venture/risk. Since Being “is” venture/risk, it requires a shadow of safety (i.e., of safeguarding) as an indecisiveness regarding the risk. A venture is a venture (requiring courage and decisiveness) only if it can also be avoided. Thus, taking the ‘immediately present’ as the measure of Being, reason co-fulfills the structure of venture as a possibility of not taking the risk, i.e., of hesitating and putting the risk on hold. In this way the ontological essence of reason affords existence in a mode of fleeing from the abyss/death.95 As Heidegger stressed already in Being and Time, such a mode of existence is not contingent. Now we can say that it is required by Beyng itself as the ­non-essence of risk. Yet, as we have seen, Heidegger understands the ultimate risk as the risk of saying more, i.e., as a risk of language. This means that reason’s claim for absoluteness is a bluff since to become absolute it must say ‘no’ to the abyss, i.e., to ­explicitly reject it. Further to reason’s inability to introduce ‘no’ into Being, it refrains from any original saying. To say ‘no’ to the abyss is to not only negate it but also to usurp it and

92 Other forms of psychopathology can be tied to the essence of reason as will to power. For example, depression in its inability to experience possibilities (see Ratcliffe, Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology) is nothing but an emphasized characteristic of the nihilistic nature of reason. Namely, since all values are determined by the subject (individual or communal), the depressed person sees correctly that there is “really” no value to anything. Moreover, the experienced lack of a possibility for a change expresses the essential decisionlessness of machination. That is, there is no point to decide on anything since there is really no possibility for a genuine decision – it has been always already decided by reason who one is. In this light, pace Ratcliffe, the depressed does have a clearer vision on her (and other people’s) existential situation. Moreover, Ratcliffe’s interpretation of depression as an experience of reduced worldly possibilities does not catch the central issue with depression. Namely, in depression one does not merely experience that the world does not offer as many possibilities as before – such a reduction sounds more like a dementia – but that this lack of possibilities is not what should be. The very suffocating feeling of depression, its heavy pressure which can literally chain one to a bed, is irreducible to any lack, but is a “positive” force that colors everything with a tone of “it is not how it is supposed to be.” It is this awareness of inappropriateness that is so different from a mere indifference of a world lack of possibilities. It is perhaps possible to see here the ontological origin of the “not” of this inappropriateness in the “not” of an experience of abandonment by Beyng, i.e., of the fact that one is indeed not who one can and should be as a human being. 93 Heidegger, History of Beyng, 63. We can witness the ‘idiocy’ of reason when, for example, it tries to convince us through the words of one of its most devoted adepts that lying is immoral in all circumstances. 94 Heidegger, History of Beyng, 59. 95 Foucault has stressed the relation between death and madness in his analysis of the history of the ways madness were understood in the West. As he writes: “The substitution of the theme of madness for that of death does not mark a break, but rather a torsion within the same anxiety. What is in question is still the nothingness of existence, but this nothingness is no longer considered an external, final term, both threat and conclusion; it is experienced from within as the continuous and constant form of existence.” Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 16.

562  Erik Kuravsky preempt it, to claim the measure of Being as one’s own will to power; it is, in other words, to become in-sane.96 Accordingly, both Verrückung into Dasein and Verrückung as insanity are detached from the sphere of reason and dare to say. Both are ab-surd as departed from the soundlessness of surdus. Any reach into the abyss is an ab-surd venture of ­saying; that is why we need poets.97 Delusion is a mode of Verrückung that is unable to say yes to the abyss as it brings a capricious no into the sphere of defenselessness.98 After all, Nietzsche was not a genuine ‘yes sayer’ since he only said yes to what is present or absent but not to the abyssal nature of Beyng. After all, Nietzsche’s greatest mistake and the reason for his madness was that will to power does not overcome reason but is the essence of reason. To turn defenselessness into the open means: “to say yes” to defenselessness within the widest compass. Such an affirmation is possible only where the entirety of the compass in every respect is not only in full measure but also of equal measure, and so already lies before us and accordingly is the positum. Only position and never negation can correspond to it. Even the sides of life that are turned away from us are to be taken positively, provided they are in being.99 6  Conclusion While all metaphysics is an anxious turning away from the abyss, Verrückung is a leap into the abyss. Such a leap, however, is an entrance into the sphere of saying more, not in a sense of some verbal activity but foremost in a sense of saying yes to the abyss and one’s Beyng-historical belonginess to it. Whether one becomes verrückt into Dasein or simply insane depends on what one ‘says to the abyss.’ A successful leap leaves all its subjective pretensions behind and lets the drawing gravity of the open direct it into the sheer defenselessness of abyssal ground. Though such a letting-go requires one to be ­active in order to stay away from ground and withstand the ‘natural’ tendency of creating 96 “Affirmation is not just a simple yes as the affirmation of something objectively present, but is the affirmation of the harmony of what is in tune with itself, in the order of being. Thus, in the ‘positive’ lies the affirmation of the essential unity of a being as a whole. Correspondingly, negation is not just rejection of what is objectively present, but no-saying places itself in the position of the yes. What replaces the place of harmony and attunement is disharmony, the wrong tone which enters the whole.” Heidegger, ­Schelling’s Treatise: On the Essence of Human Freedom, 144. 97 As Holger Zaborowski points out, Hölderlin allows Heidegger the very horizon of experience, that is, of receiving something on the way of thinking and poetizing (Zaborowski, “Heidegger on the Questioon and the Need of the Holy,” in Heidegger and the Holy, 105–116, 110). Indeed, such horizon requires reaching into the abyss. That is, it is a horizon that opens up only when one puts himself at the risk of saying more, standing – as Hölderlin wrote – under God’s thunderstorms with naked heads. 98 In this light, I think that to think of the event as a suspension of the principle of reason as Van der ­Heiden does is still a negative conception of the abyss. Namely, Van der Heiden seems to still think within ­metaphysical dichotomies such as necessity-contingency. The non-metaphysical necessity of the truth of Beyng eludes this dichotomy, it is a verrückt necessity; it is beyng-historical necessity to overcome the sphere of differentiation, of Differenz, and enter the sphere of Untershied as Abshied – departing from ­metaphysical necessity is not moving into contingency. Contingency is a metaphysical notion as it is still related (even if only negatively) to reason. To free ontology from all possible assumptions is not to overcome metaphysics but to participate in its completion. Though this is indeed an important task, it cannot replace a genuine leap, a Verrückung beyond the notion of contingency. See Van der Heiden, Ontology after Ontotheology. 99 Heidegger, “Why Poets?” Off the Beaten Track, 227.

Thinking and the danger of insanity  563 defenses, it is a peculiar form of activity, which Heidegger tries to formulate in terms of Gelassenheit. The leap thus achieves a verrückt experience, which is not an experience of something just different but an entirely new sense of experience: the owner (the ‘who’) of the experience and the ‘how’ of what it means to experience change drastically by reaching into the abyss. The new form of verrückt experiencing is not a representation of something but an erfahrung as being carried away by experience, i.e., not producing (lived) experience but participating in it as it already constitutes the openness of Being in the ‘form’ of language. Insanity also entails a transformation beyond representational consciousness, yet since in its reaching into the abyss it still holds to will to power (or/and any of its metaphysical companions), it rejects the measure-giving, grounding essence of the abyss and usurps it. Resistance to the abyss of Beyng is a human form of ontological dis-jointure of which Heidegger speaks in the “Saying of Anaximander.” Namely, to assert oneself as a subject by means of the will to power is to “[extend] itself in a stubborn pose of persistence,”100 to be concerned “with the permanence of [one’s] continued existence.”101 It is a ­rebellion against the abyssal nature of existence. Indeed, a relation between rebellion and madness is not at all contingent.102 We meet great literary examples of such a rebellion in ­Dostoyevsky’s heroes. Ivan Karamazov rejects the ontotheological a priory order of the universe, but can’t really accept the sheer measurelessness of existence (as if everything were permittable). This conflict drives him mad, yet he cannot find the way out of the metaphysics of subjectivity. Thus, when he sees the Devil during his mental breakdown, that is, he sees the very religious manifestation of the abyss in the basis of the forgetfulness of Being, his reaction is to deny it and to say: “It is I, I myself who am talking and not you …”103 Another Dostoyevsky’s hero – the protagonist of Notes from the Underground – prefers madness over a slavish acceptance of the rule of reason. His understanding of madness is more genuine than Nietzsche’s, who takes all madness to be an excuse for a weak will unable to assert itself and looking for some sort of illumination to fall from the skies. The difference here lies in the fact that Nietzsche still secretly holds to reason, unable to recognize its true nature as will to power. Moreover, Nietzsche is too suspicious of suffering; he challenges suffering from a position of the strength of his own will. Yet madness is the highest form of suffering (one does not suffer ‘from’ madness), it is the suffering of the self whose asylum, i.e., the house of reason and subjectivity, has crushed down and can no longer protect from the abyss, squeezing the self and suffocating it. 100 Heidegger, “Anaximander’s Saying,” Off the Beaten Track, 268. 101 Ibid. 102 We may think that Heidegger’s Gelassenheit is the “other” of the will to power. To let be is not just the opposite of a rebellion but is entirely beyond the very volitional framework to which a rebellion essentially belongs. In this light Andrew J. Mitchell’s idea that Heidegger nervous breakdown allowed him to put his intuitions to practice and thus facilitated a sort of a “broke-down thinking,” i.e., what I called here a dislodged thinking, is very interesting. However, since in Heidegger’s case this was only an episode rather than a final breakdown of a kind I spoke here, I preferred not to address it. Still, it might be that even though Heidegger’s own breakdown was caused by pretty banal fears in front of the “de-nazification committee,” the fact that he was a thinker did allow him to experience a dis-lodgement beyond will to power and help him realize the healing power of Beyng as it is expressed in Country Path Conversations. See Mitchell, “Heidegger’s Breakdown: Health and Healing Under the Care of Dr. V.E. von Gebsattel,” Research in Phenomenology, 46 (2016), 70–97. 103 Another intriguing case of the denial of the devil happens in Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. The poet Ivan Bezdomni tries to convince the actual devil that he does not exist. Shortly after, he ends up in a psychiatric clinic with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

564  Erik Kuravsky Nietzsche was too proud to accept that his spiritual path was his rout of relief from suffering; such a path would have probably been still ‘too human’ for him. Still, ­Nietzsche’s sacrifice is proportional to the importance of rescuing human essence from its devastation by metaphysics. His metaphysical arrogance is evident in his aggrandizement of human will. His mental breakdown should become a lesson for us all. Still, Nietzsche was a great sufferer who has carried the cross of paving our way into the abyss. This way, however, had to be a way against – a way of anti-Christ. Subjectivity as will to power is not just a pole against which an object can present itself but is essentially the against. After all, Nietzsche was not a genuine ‘yes sayer.’ Hence the insanity.104 In the case of Hölderlin, it is more difficult to see how his dis-lodgement turned into insanity by forcing a subjective measure on Being. In his Hyperion we read that “[f]rom mere understanding comes no philosophy, for philosophy is more than only the limited perception of what is.”105 It sounds that Hölderlin acknowledged the limits of understanding and did not dare to conquer the abyss by his own will. Still, it seems to me that Hölderlin was not patient enough to prepare himself and to strengthen those strings of his soul which are being played on by the winds of Beyng in the defenselessness of the open. For example, Hölderlin denies that the “struggle” with its “noble wine of joy” abodes in the future and dares to say that he has come the shorter way.106 Indeed, the shorter way was available for Hölderlin due to his unique sensitivity; we may say that he had ‘one eye too many.’ Yet, to have one eye too many is simply not enough – it is once again the arrogance of will to power, of one’s inability to let be, to wait. Accordingly, it is a disrespect for the enigma of Beyng and a usurpation of its truth. Unfortunately for Hölderlin, even such a subtle usurpation fails to follow the (un)twist of overcoming ­reason and must end up in insanity.107

104 My conclusion on the ego-related nature of madness is in accord with the work of Caroline Brett who has compared the phenomenology of Buddhist mystical experiences with psychotic experiences and found that one’s clinging to the ego is a major factor which distinguishes the transformative spiritual e­ xperience from a psychotic one. Namely, the psychotic experience does not let of the ego and is essentially tied to it, while the spiritual experience – despite many structural similarities with psychosis – liberates one from the dependency on the ego. Caroline Brett, “Psychotic and Mystical States of Being: Connections and Distinctions,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, 9:4 (2002), 321–342. 105 Hölderlin, Hyperion, 71. 106 “They say the struggle abates above the stars, and it’s only in the future, so they promise us, once our yeast has sunk, that fermenting life will turn into the noble wine of joy; otherwise the blessed’s peace of heart is now nowhere to be sought upon this earth. I know different. I’ve come the shorter way. I stood before her and heard and saw the peace of heaven, and in the midst of groaning chaos there appeared to me Urania.” Hölderlin, Hyperion, 51. 107 Perhaps then Hölderlin does not only leave a political legacy that the poet hands over to thought, as ­Giorgio Agamben writes in La follia di Hölderlin, but foremost a warning and a hint that still needs to be read.

31 Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude Dimitris Apostolopoulos

Abstract  This chapter reconstructs Dufrenne’s phenomenological interpretation of the aesthetic attitude. I argue that Dufrenne develops a fecund alternative to ­competing formulations, advances an innovative proposal for how artworks are perceived on their own terms, and undercuts the claim that a reliance on the subject-object framework in aesthetics entails a commitment to ­‘subjectivism.’ On Dufrenne’s view, the aesthetic attitude is an intentional stance toward a special category of perceived object, which is defined by a ‘purposive’ mode of appearance. Whereas aesthetic attitude theorists argue that a subjective ability to attend disinterestedly to objects is a sufficient condition for aesthetic ­experience, Dufrenne locates decisive conditions for aesthetic experience in the object-term. This innovative approach develops a novel take on the aesthetic attitude, blunts the edge of aesthetic anti-subjectivist arguments, advances an original interpretation of Kant’s relevance for phenomenological aesthetics, and offers a ­plausible philosophical account of art’s objectivity and world-disclosive power. Keywords  Aesthetics; Aesthetic Attitude; Intentionality; Perception; Phenomenology; Dufrenne; Kant 1 Introduction Since Shaftesbury and Kant, aesthetic attitude theorists have argued that a ­psychological ability to attend in a disinterested or reflective manner to an artwork’s properties is a sufficient condition for the possibility of aesthetic experience.1 This capacity, they maintain, explains its comparative intensity, richness, and qualitative distinctness from other object-directed stances. In the post-Kantian tradition, this line of argument encounters a recurring c­ riticism. Thinkers like Hegel, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and Adorno charge Kant with offering too ‘subjectivist’ an account of art.2 The view that judgments of taste require a ­disinterested or reflective attitude, they contend, restricts the scope of art to its significance for

1 Gary Kemp, “The Aesthetic Attitude,” British Journal of Aesthetics 39.4 (1999), 392–399. 2 For more on the reception of Kant’s “subjectivization of aesthetic experience” see Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 41.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-35

566  Dimitris Apostolopoulos consciousness, and ignores its metaphysical, social, or historical import.3 Adorno’s view that “[t]he relation of subjectivity to art is not, as Kant has it, that of a form of reaction to artworks…[but] the element of art’s own objectivity” captures a basic motivation behind these criticisms: the aesthetic attitude fails to do justice to art’s objectivity, or to art on its own terms.4 Many influential post-Kantian theories of art, including those developed by the thinkers identified above, subscribe to some version of aesthetic anti-subjectivism: the view that art’s significance lies chiefly in its ability to disclose truth, rather than its ability to elicit intense or rare subjective experiences. These arguments even find support among thinkers associated with the phenomenological tradition. Most notably, Heidegger contends that Kant’s reliance on the subject-object framework, and his appeal to feeling, reduces the meaning of art to its significance for our “lived experience.”5 Amid this reception history, Dufrenne’s interpretation of the aesthetic attitude stands apart. Following Kant and later aesthetic attitude theorists, Dufrenne maintains that aesthetic experience presupposes special cognitive and perceptual commitments. However, unlike standard approaches, he locates decisive conditions for the constitution of aesthetic experience in artworks. His revisionary approach underscores a key feature of Husserl’s phenomenological theory of intentionality: the view that intentional acts are governed by intuitive evidence.6 On a phenomenological view, our capacity to modify objects’ appearance is not unconditional: it answers to the kind of object we intend. For Dufrenne, this condition also constrains aesthetic intentional modalities: qua perceived objects, artworks evidence a distinctive aesthetic mode of appearance. Through an unorthodox realistic interpretation of Kant’s concept of ‘internal purposiveness,’ Dufrenne argues that aesthetic (or ‘sensible’) objects appear as internally meaningful, purposive wholes. The perceptual structure characteristic of a special region of ­reality—art—justifies the adoption of a ­distinctive intentional attitude. The autonomy, normativity, and objectivity of art obtains for an intentional attitude sufficiently receptive to the structure of aesthetic appearance. I first outline the basic contours of the aesthetic attitude, with special attention to a  recent phenomenological interpretation (§2). While canonical definitions show that the aesthetic a­ ttitude is a basic condition of aesthetic experience, they remain vulnerable to a­ nti-subjectivist arguments. By reinterpreting the relations of priority between subject and object in aesthetic experience, Dufrenne blocks the anti-subjectivist critique (§3). Through innovative phenomenological readings of Kant’s accounts of reflection (§4.1) 3 See indicatively Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1960); English ­translation: Truth and Method, 2nd Edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2006), 84, and Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970); English translation: Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2002), 365–367. 4 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 355. 5 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Erster Band (Pfullingen: Verlag Gunther Neske, 1961); English translation: ­Nietzsche Volume 1: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1975), 78. Henceforth cited as N1 followed by page numbers from the English translation. 6 See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie.Erstes Buch. Husserliana, Band III (den Haag: Nijhoff, 1976), 44–45; English translation: Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014). Henceforth abbreviated as Hua III followed by German pagination. See also Hua III, 288–289, and Edmund ­Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik, ed. Petra Janssen (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 143–144; English translation: Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969). Henceforth abbreviated as Hua XVII followed by German pagination.

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  567 and purposiveness (§4.2), Dufrenne forges an interpretation of the aesthetic attitude that reserves a role for subjective intentional activity without compromising art’s objectivity. Among other features, his account is distinguished by the view that the aesthetic attitude discloses an atmosphere or world internal to an artwork. While this position has been read as an extension of a Heideggerian thesis, I argue that it advances a rather ­different conception of the art-world relation, which emphasizes the importance of the first-­personal standpoint (§5). In sum, Dufrenne’s early engagement with Kant leads him to formulate a more holistic account of the aesthetic attitude, which preserves art’s objectivity and world-disclosive import, and reveals the limits of the anti-subjectivist critique. This offers a strategy for appropriating Kant’s relevance for phenomenological aesthetics that challenges Heidegger’s and rehabilitates the prospects of a broadly humanistic phenomenology of art that takes aesthetic experience as a guiding theme (§6). These outcomes do not justify the relatively meager scholarly attention that this revisionary interpretation of aesthetic intentionality has received.7 2  Phenomenology and the aesthetic attitude Kant’s view that aesthetic experience presupposes a disinterested stance is a common ­reference point in discussions of the aesthetic attitude.8 For Kant, judgments of taste make normative claims about an object’s beauty that any other well-placed perceiver could in principle agree with. Aesthetic evaluation is grounded on a subjectively ­universal, or ­“reflective” form of judgment, which excludes narrowly subjective (or ‘interested’) grounds like desire, approval, preference, or satisfaction (20:220). The enjoyment ­experienced when taking in the beautiful is not mere satisfaction or approval (‘I like x’), but a refined delight that others could also feel. The conditions enabling these judgments depend on a disinterested stance that we adopt. In analytic aesthetics, Kant’s account of disinterested judgment is typically ­understood as a form of disinterested attention.9 Like Kant, aesthetic attitude theorists hold that when we are aesthetically engaged with a work of art…this fact is not to be explained in terms of the special nature of the qualities perceived, but in terms of a special ­attitude which we take up, the aesthetic attitude.10   7 Although Dufrenne composed the most expansive phenomenological treatise on art to date, scholarly interest in his aesthetics pales in comparison to work on figures like Heidegger, Sartre, Ingarden, Merleau-Ponty, and even Husserl. Some recent studies suggest a reversal of this tendency: see indicatively Maryvonne Saison, La nature artiste. Mikel Dufrenne de l’esthétique au politique (Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2018); Jean-Baptiste Dussert and Adnen Jdey, eds., Mikel Dufrenne et l’esthétique. Entre phénoménologie et philosophie de la nature (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016); Claude Thérien, “«L’idée d’un a priori affectif» et la perception esthétique chez Mikel Dufrenne,” Nouvelle revue d’esthétique 17.1 (2016): 61–75; Frédéric Jacquet, Naître au monde: Essai sur la philosophie de Mikel Dufrenne (Milan: Mimésis, 2014); and Paul Crowther, “Dimensions in Time: Dufrenne’s Phenomenology of Pictorial Art,” in Phenomenologies of Art and Vision: A Post-Analytic Turn (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 137–160.   8 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Kants gesammelte Schriften, Volume 5 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1905); English translation: Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 5:204–210. Henceforth abbreviated and cited in-text as 5/20 with page references to the Akademie edition.   9 Jerome Stolnitz, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Criticism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1960). 10 Kemp, “The Aesthetic Attitude,” 392.

568  Dimitris Apostolopoulos I might play what I think is a moving piece of music, but unless you adopt the right kind of stance, the piece will not do much for you. Sound itself does not trigger aesthetic ­experience. Object-level facts are incidental to explanations of the expressive or aesthetic character of perceptual properties. Their special phenomenal character derives from an attitude we adopt toward them: “properly aesthetic description should be explained in terms of the mental propensities awakened by disinterested attention, not in terms of features literally possessed by the objects.”11 Recent accounts of the aesthetic attitude revive and reinterpret Kant’s conception of disinterestedness.12 Challenging Dickie’s influential argument that attention cannot be ­disinterested, Nanay defends the view that there are different ways to attend to objects.13 His account of distributed attention, he argues, shows that aesthetic experience features a distinctive attentional pattern, on which “attention is distributed with regards to properties but focused with regards to objects.”14 This form of perceptual activity features distributed interest, whereby subjects attend to the multiplicity and variety of an object’s properties. Unlike standard attentional practices, which typically focus on a single property, aesthetic attention takes in a wide range of object-level properties, attempting to fit them together. As Westerman observes, while Nanay’s proposal helpfully develops Kant’s original insight that aesthetic experience requires a special mental stance, it is arguably not fine-grained enough.15 A perceiver could plausibly attend to an object in the way ­Nanay describes without having an aesthetic experience. To use Westerman’s example, we might attend in an object-focused and property-distributed way to a charming old map. Someone who views the map as a use-object might do the same, for example, when using it for navigational purposes. While the first experience is aesthetic, the ­second is not. Since Nanay’s account does not itself explain the qualitative differences between aesthetic and non-aesthetic distributed attention, a principled explanation must be located elsewhere. To find it, Westerman turns to the phenomenological theory of intentionality. ­Intentionality is a subjective capacity to direct oneself to objects of thought, perception, belief, or imagination. Following Brentano, Husserl argues that intentional objects ­appear variously to the mind and enjoy different modes of givenness or appearance. For example, we can assert but also doubt that ‘there are intelligent beings on Mars.’16 The same intentional content (or ‘matter’) is presented differently in each case: the first 11 Ibid., 396. 12 See Bence Nanay, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and Richard Westerman, “Intentionality and the Aesthetic Attitude.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 58.3 (2018): 287–302. 13 Nanay, Aesthetics, 20. For Dickies’s view see George Dickie, “The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude,” American Philosophical Quarterly 1.1 (1964): 56–65. Dickie’s challenge is motivated by the view that attention to perceptual properties is uniform. While there may be different reasons that lead us to listen to a piece of music, when we listen to it, we do so in the same way, for there is only one way to listen. So-called disinterested attention, Dickie argues, is really distraction or inattention (Dickie, “The Myth,” 60). For another reply to Dickie see Paul Crowther, Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), here 28–30. 14 Nanay, Aesthetics, 24. 15 Westerman, “Intentionality and the Aesthetic,” 291. 16 Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der ­Erkenntnis. II/1 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980); English translation: Logical Investigations, Volume II, ed. Dermot Moran, trans. J.N. Findlay (New York: Routledge, 2001), Investigation V §10, 96.

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  569 a­ ttitude casts its content as factual while the second shrouds it in uncertainty. The same object can appear under different intentional guises. Varieties in intentional presentation are partly parasitic on differences in how content is intended by consciousness, or, in Husserlian terms, on differences in act-quality.17 In this vein, Westerman suggests that a disinterested or aesthetic attitude is an ­ability to intend objects as internally meaningful wholes. Aesthetic wholeness depends on how an object’s properties are grasped. Adopting the aesthetic attitude “entails intending ­objects as…internally coherent.”18 To engage an object’s aesthetically relevant properties, we must first grasp it as an aesthetically relevant object, or “as a self-enclosed whole, its meaning determined within itself.”19 A map appears under an aesthetic guise, for ­example, when its lines or colors are intended as significant in themselves, and not with a view to their geographical reference or practical applications. This attitude supports an aesthetic mode of presentation on which the map appears as internally unified, and also features distributed interest. Qualitative differences between aesthetic and non-aesthetic attention, then, must be located in a more fundamental intentional act. The “aesthetic attitude is disinterested because it treats objects as formally unified wholes in which the significance of any property is determined in relation to its other properties.”20 This timely argument makes a persuasive case for the fundamentally intentional ­character of the aesthetic attitude. Its interpretation of disinterestedness is especially ­compelling: it suggests that aesthetic intentionality discloses a special kind of perceived unity characteristic of artworks. But this phenomenological reconstruction of aesthetic intentionality emphasizes only one of its relata. For Westerman, if “our attitude to ­[aesthetic] experiences…constitutes them as particular kinds of thing, it is in principle possible that any set of sensations (or hyle) could provide the stuff out of which intentionality constructs aesthetic objects.”21 This is partly right: a potentially unlimited range of objects could be appreciated aesthetically. However, in the map case, as in most other cases of aesthetic experience, we assume that a given object either is or could count as art. We intend the maps (which are curated in an artbook) under this guise, and in the context of practices, institutions, and traditions that individuate artworks. While we are open to seeing the map aesthetically, or with a view to its historical or practical dimensions, in either case we shift our intentional attitudes in response to some facts about the object and its broader context of significance. Phenomenologists accept that there are different ways of intending an object. But they also argue that there are different ways of being an object. In addition to a theory of acts, Husserl complements his theory of intentionality with a theory of evidence, on which acts respond to an object’s possible mode of appearance.22 Objects’ intended (or noematic) structure is not analyzable solely by appeal to variations in subjective acts (or  noeses). For acts are constrained by the region or category an object belongs to.23 An extended t­ hree-dimensional object’s mode of appearance is unlike that of an imagined mythical creature or a counterfactual state of affairs. A perceived object, for example,

17 Husserl, Logical Investigations, Volume II, Investigation V, §20. 18 Westerman, “Intentionality and the Aesthetic,” 297. 19 Ibid., 297. 20 Ibid., 294. 21 Ibid., 294. 22 See Hua III, 283; Hua III, 300–301. 23 Hua XVII, 144/161.

570  Dimitris Apostolopoulos orients intentional acts around what is presently given. An imagined object, however, gives intentional acts free reign, allowing us to significantly expand the possible scope of intuition. These differences determine how each object is intended. While we must invoke a subject’s capacity to vary the intentional appearance of an object to explain the possibility of seeing it as x or y (or non-aesthetically), to explain the type and degree of attention we pay to it, we must also appeal to object-level facts that motivate variations in intentional acts. These qualifications extend to aesthetic intentionality. We relish or recoil from a novel, film, or painting in response to these objects’ respective properties. While we inevitably appeal to qualitative or internal states to explain our responses, these are necessarily correlated with the concrete object-level structures we encounter: subjective reports f­ollow object-level facts. When formulating his version of the claim that the aesthetic attitude intends “a set of properties as if they form a whole,” Westerman follows earlier aesthetic attitude ­theorists ­ bject is inin holding that our perception of completeness derives “from the way the o tended; it is not a property of the object that we perceive directly.”24 But this is only one half of the i­ ntentional story. Emphasizing it to the detriment of the other places an unnecessary explanatory burden on consciousness. This leaves a phenomenological approach vulnerable to the anti-subjectivist critique: by identifying the subject’s capacity to vary appearances as the sufficient condition for aesthetic experience, Westerman undercuts the promising holism about aesthetic objects that his account also brings to the fore. While we might shift between perceiving the maps aesthetically and ­non-aesthetically, in each case, our perceptual stance responds to the object’s real structure: that the maps are organized thus and so makes some intentional stances possible while excluding others.25 Without a sufficiently robust account of artwork-level unity, an act-focused or internalist account of the aesthetic attitude remains vulnerable to the charge that it reduces the meaning of art to subjects’ intentional attitudes. In the most ambitious formulation of a systematic phenomenological aesthetics to date, Dufrenne develops an interpretation of the aesthetic attitude that weakens the i­nternalism characteristic of most treatments of the aesthetic attitude. He concedes that a subject’s ­capacity to shift intentional stance is a precondition for aesthetic experience. But he argues on phenomenological grounds that the sense of aesthetic objects is irreducible to the attitude that intends them: evidence from aesthetic perception compels us to revise the classical phenomenological theory of intentionality and to accord greater autonomy to the aesthetic object. Despite extending lines of argument from his phenomenological predecessors, ­Dufrenne supplements Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts with revisionary readings of Kant’s concepts of reflection and purposiveness. This affords him the resources to secure the objectivity and autonomy of art without overlooking the role of aesthetic consciousness. 3  The sensible core of aesthetic perception Dufrenne’s Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience aims to explain how art—in his terms: the sensible [le sensible]—is perceived for its own sake. The sui generis structure of aesthetic experience sharpens the explanatory challenge. The sensible becomes 24 Westerman, “Intentionality and the Aesthetic,” 297, 295. See also Kemp, “The Aesthetic Attitude.” 25 On the importance of object-level conditions for subjective evaluations see John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 145.

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  571 perceptually accessible following the adoption of the aesthetic attitude. But its meaning and mode of appearance is irreducible to the attitude that intends it; the sensible even exercises a “dominion [d’empire] over perception.”26 In this section, I unpack Dufrenne’s motivations for thinking that the classical phenomenological approach to intentionality must be modified to countenance the basic data of aesthetic experience. To begin, we must first consider Dufrenne’s distinction between the ‘aesthetic ­object’ and the ‘work of art.’ This distinction separates non-aesthetic from aesthetic intentional attitudes and individuates their respective objects. A ‘work of art’ is physically indistinguishable from an ‘aesthetic object’: the “object qua aesthetically perceived is no different from the thing objectively known or created that solicits this perception” (P 6/xlix). A work of art, in Dufrenne’s terms, typically refers to some material ­object and its properties. While we can certainly make sense of an object in terms of its ­material properties (or, for example, with reference to its monetary value), this mode of analysis does not take our first-personal experience of the object into account. From a phenomenological perspective, however, experience is the primary and fundamental ground of our encounter with art. For Dufrenne, aesthetic experience is a species of perception.27 Aesthetic p ­ erception intends the ‘sensible,’ or “[t]he aesthetic object,” which “is essentially perceived” (P  286/223).28 Dufrenne’s account of the sensible partly follows Merleau-Ponty.29 ­Merleau-Ponty argues that perceptual objects are meaningful wholes, whose parts and relations are not organized by the intellect but grasped through an embodied mode of pre-conceptual understanding: “to perceive in the full sense of the word…is not to judge, but rather to grasp, prior to all judgment, a sense immanent in the sensible.”30 While Dufrenne accepts that perceived form is inherently meaningful, he reserves the term ‘sensible’ for aesthetic objects, that is, artworks as they appear under a distinctively aesthetic mode of perception. While all sensible objects are perceptual, not all perceptual objects are sensible. A sensible object is distinguished by the structure of its appearance and by the kinds of experiences it can support. The sensible has an autonomous and selforganizing intentional structure, which comes to our notice when we intend an aesthetic object on its own terms. Unlike standard perceptual objects (and ‘works of art’ in the sense referred to above), the sensible reveals an object’s expressive character, and opens up the possibility of relating to an object (and ultimately to the world) through feeling. For Dufrenne, this is a distinctive possibility of aesthetic experience. 26 Mikel Dufrenne, Phénoménologie de l’expérience esthétique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 289; English translation: The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey, Albert A. Anderson, Willis Domingo, and Leon Jacobson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 225. Henceforth abbreviated and cited in-text as P, followed by French and English pagination. All translations of Dufrenne’s Phénoménologie are my own. 27 Mikel Dufrene, “Intentionnalité et Esthétique,” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger 144 (1954): 75–84, here 75–78. 28 While Dufrenne does not always observe the distinction (see, e.g., P 195/145, 487–488/393), in more ­perspicuous moments, he maintains that an aesthetic object appears under a special intentional guise. Beardsley, who reserves high praise for Dufrenne’s Phenomenology, adopts a similar distinction in his ­Aesthetics, and also emphasizes the primacy of artworks’ perceived structure (Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt and Brace & World, 1958), 45 and 59). 29 For an account of Dufrenne’s relation to Merleau-Ponty see Annabelle Dufourcq, “Dufrenne et MerleauPonty. L’ontologie diplopique de l’art,” in Mikel Dufrenne et l’esthétique, ed. Jean-Baptiste Dussert and Adnen Jdey (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2016), 161–180. 30 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 60. See also P 41/11.

572  Dimitris Apostolopoulos The distinction between aesthetic object and work of art is clearer in practical contexts. Imagine that, late for a meeting, you run to catch the bus, looking for its c­ haracteristic green hue. Driven by practical concerns, you do not care much for what might be a ­beautiful or ugly shade of green. Color is a mere sign indicating the quickest means of ­making your meeting on time. Your perceptual attitude is non-aesthetic: it is “interested” in ­features extrinsic to an object’s or property’s mode of appearance (P 127/86). In ­everyday perception, properties like color do not become “autonomous” objects. Color is not ­typically perceived “for itself” (P 359/286). We pass over appearances and go straight to the things, places, or persons they refer to. Aesthetic perception, however, intends appearances as such. It attends to a property’s or object’s mode of presentation, suspending all interest in conditions external to its perceived structure.31 Aesthetic perception explores an object’s perceptual “form” or “style,” for example, the distinctive hue of this particular shade of green, on its own terms (P  147/97). The sensible is the “irreplaceable” intentional object of aesthetic ­perception; its appearance supervenes on lower-level physical properties or on “the very matter [matière] of the work” (P 69/11). To grasp Dufrenne’s point, consider his description of watching a ballet. In the theater, you focus on the dancers, studying their movements, while also hearing the music in the background. The sorrowful music lends the dancers’ movements a melancholic quality. You experience this by attending to how bodily gesture matches music, and by situating the present scene in light of the ballet’s plot. To grasp an expressive property like melancholy, you need a view of how a part of the performance, like a dancer’s gestures and movements, fits within the whole. By isolating relevant appearances, and attending to their connections with other parts of the work, perceivers intend the ballet’s sensible dimension or “a certain atmosphere in which subject, music, and choreography cooperate, and which forms the soul of the ballet; the dancers aim [visent] for this, and this is the aesthetic object itself that they realize” (P 116/76). On this description, the sensible is a meaningful, higher-order mode of intentional “unity,” or “a new aspect [visage]” of an object, which supervenes on the elements that individuate an artwork (in the theater: on dancers’ positions, bodily movement and gesture, musical notes, lighting, and so on) (P 193/143). To perceive an object’s sensible dimension, then, we must adopt an aesthetic a­ ttitude, which intends properties like color, sound, or shape as meaningful in themselves: “the aesthetic object distinguishes itself from the ordinary object that has colours, but is not colour, and which makes noise, but is not sound” (P 127–128/86). The shift from ­non-aesthetic to aesthetic intentionality requires that we attend to an object’s intentional form, to how form emerges from lower-level properties, and to the distinctive meanings it expresses. To grasp an aesthetic object “for its own sake” is to intend its sensible character (P 47/16).32

31 For relevant discussion of similar themes see Westerman, “Intentionality and the Aesthetic,” 298. 32 Levinson offers a similar formulation: “To appreciate something aesthetically is to attend to its forms, qualities, and meanings for their own sakes, and to their interrelations, but also to attend to the way all such things emerge from…low level perceptual features” (Jerrold Levinson, The Pleasures of Aesthetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 6. Dufrenne’s account of sensible properties is also consistent with Levinson’s view that aesthetic properties are “anchored” in the “specific structure that constitutes [an artwork] on a primary perceptual (or cognitive) level.”

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  573 Like other descriptions in Phenomenology, the ballet case shows that sensible properties become intentionally salient following an attitudinal shift. Sensible properties, then, are relational or response-dependent. Their “instantiation in an object…consists in the ­object having a ready disposition to bring about a certain reaction in human beings.”33 The ballet becomes melancholic by expressing values, meanings, or properties that ­induce a feeling of melancholy in spectators. But Dufrenne’s account is not distinguished by its appeal to relational properties as such, but by its view of what conditions must be satisfied for them to become effective. While we must attend to the ballet’s perceived form (whole, parts, and relations) to experience its sensible character, within the aesthetic attitude, sensible properties are real and immanent features of the object. They are not projected by us (P 555/451). The sensible is a perceptual modality of an object that could also appear under a non-aesthetic guise; in aesthetic intentionality, however, sensible properties enjoy an “autonomy” and “sovereignty” over consciousness (P 258/199). The aesthetic object “overflows” [déborde] the gaze that provisionally “assigns the limits of its influence” (P 206/154).34 To perceive artworks aesthetically, we must first carefully attend to them. In doing so, we soon discover that their perceived form (re-)calibrates and orients subjective acts according to a logic internal to the object. Aesthetic objects make normative claims on perceivers: “we do not decide on the beautiful; the object itself decides and does so by manifesting itself [décide de lui-même en se manifestant]” (P 22/lxii). The challenge for phenomenology is to account for two special features of aesthetic perception. First, while perceptual intentionality is standardly analyzed into independent relata (consciousness or object), its aesthetic version features an internal relation of “reciprocal possession” between perceiver and perceived (P 92/56). Second, aesthetic ­intentionality upsets the traditional relations of priority between subject-and ­object-terms: sensible appearances presuppose but are irreducible to the perceiver who grasps them. In aesthetic experience, “intentionality is no longer intention toward [visée de], but participation with [participation à]” (P 503/406). Dufrenne’s attempt to meet this challenge is indebted to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. In his eyes, however, both fail to appreciate the degree to which aesthetic perception depends on conditions “common to perceiver [sentant] and perceived [senti],” and the extent to which perceivers are normatively motivated by aesthetic objects.35 To account for the co-dependent status of its basic poles, a less imperialistic view of consciousness than that developed in classical phenomenology is needed.

33 Robert Stecker, Intersections of Value: Art, Nature, and the Everyday (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 37. 34 A sensible property “ends at the point where the look ends, because the aesthetic object, with its dependencies, is one with the look [est solidaire du regard]” (P 206/154). Nevertheless, the aesthetic attitude never “exhaust[s]” an object’s sensible dimension (P 285/222), which is “spontaneously and directly signifying” (P 488/393). 35 Dufrenne, “Intentionnalité et Esthétique,” 78; see also P 5/xlviii, 286/223–224. For Dufrenne’s critique of constitution in Husserl see P 281–2/219. Despite its comparative advantages, Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodied constitution fails to escape an “idealism” on which “the transcendental, instead of being a constitutive consciousness, would be the lived body” (P 283/220).

574  Dimitris Apostolopoulos Defenders of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, of course, might find features of Dufrenne’s interpretations of the classical phenomenological theory of consciousness tenuous.36 I want to leave issues of interpretive fidelity aside and focus on what the claims above reveal about his wider motivations. His own proposal, he contends, “corrects [corrige] the usual view of intentionality” by formulating a view that secures both the autonomy of the aesthetic object and the ineliminable contributions of the aesthetic attitude (P 296/232). In §4, I show how a revisionary reading of Kant exercises a decisive influence on this project. 4  Kant’s relevance for a phenomenology of aesthetic experience To meet the challenge above and overcome the anti-subjectivist critique, Dufrenne must show that the aesthetic attitude lays the groundwork for perceiving the sensible on its own terms without sacrificing the autonomy and normativity of the aesthetic object. To do so, he repurposes a set of conceptual resources at the intersection of Kant’s accounts of reflective judgment, purposiveness, and art (20:234; P 563–564/457–458).37 Reflective judgment anticipates the open-ended attitude needed to intend the sensible (§4.1). The self-organizing structure of internal purposiveness, in turn, offers a model for the ­autonomy of sensible form (§4.2). Crucially, Kant’s view that purposiveness is the principle of reflective judgment helps Dufrenne model the internal or bi-directional relation between aesthetic attitude and object. His realistic interpretation of aesthetic purposiveness marks a clear divergence from the letter of Kant’s account. But he argues that it is justified by our experience of aesthetic objects, which appear as self-organizing, autonomously meaningful wholes. A realistic interpretation of aesthetic purposiveness, he contends, offers a bulwark against aesthetic subjectivism. As I will show in §5, it also lays the foundation for the claim that the aesthetic attitude discloses a world internal to an artwork. 4.1  Reflective judgment and the aesthetic attitude

Recall that on Kant’s view, judgments of taste unfold in the nexus of sensibility, imagination, and understanding (5:217). We encounter artworks through representations given to the senses. The imagination orders empirical representations and suggests ways that they might be further unified and conceptually translated by the understanding. However, the understanding fails to find a concept under which it can group the products of the imagination’s unificatory activity. No concept adequately subsumes the content of aesthetic experience.

36 See Lories’s argument that on a Husserlian view of aesthetic experience, we intend “the object only ‘for the sake of the appearance’” (Danielle Lories, “Remarks on Aesthetic Intentionality: Husserl or Kant,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 14.1 (2016): 31–49, here 41. Lories argues that Husserl extends Kant on this point: “Disinterestedness is not to be confused with lack of interest; on the contrary, it takes into consideration what the usual interests normally overlook: the way the thing appears, its own way of giving itself. The Husserlian way of saying this is an invitation to interpret in this sense the Kantian thesis that binds the beautiful with the form, to the exclusion of matter.” As I argue below, Dufrenne offers a similar reading. This suggests that a more charitable interpretation would have led Dufrenne to see more continuities between his own approach and Husserl’s. 37 For discussion of Dufrenne’s relation to Kant see Thérien, “L’idée d’un a priori affectif,” 64–67.

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  575 The non-conceptual character of aesthetic experience entails that, unlike standard c­ognitive or perceptual judgments, judgments of taste are (largely) unconstrained by the understanding’s rules. Since no objective concept of the beautiful subsumes its appearance, the imagination’s search for unity produces a form of perceptual intelligibility that falls short of conceptual unity. When “no determinate concept restricts them to a particular rule of cognition,” the search for a principle of unity in artworks leads the faculties into a harmony and “free play” that produces a “reflective” kind of pleasure (5:217–218). The to-and-fro between imagination and understanding, Kant claims, is inherently pleasurable; the beautiful “pleases universally without a concept” (5:219). The experience of the beautiful is sensible rather than conceptual, since “beauty is not a concept of the object” (5:290; 5:212). To ascribe purpose, meaning, or intention to an object, we must first adopt a ­mental attitude that Kant calls ‘reflective judgment’: “we perceive purposiveness insofar as [judgment] merely reflects upon a given object…” (20:220). Unlike determining judgments, which apply unity-giving molds (concepts) to empirical particulars (intuitions), reflective judgment showcases a non-conceptual mode of objects’ unity. While determining judgment groups particulars under general concepts, reflective judgment works bottom-up: it generates order from particulars and forges a unity not already given in intuition. This extra-conceptual form of unity figures prominently in aesthetic e­ xperience and produces a mode of intelligibility unlike that of the categories. As Fiona Hughes argues, “reflective judgement is ‘intentional’ in the p ­ henomenological sense” because “it is directed toward something other than itself.”38 As she observes, despite its subjective origins, reflective judgment “arises in response to a given phenomenon” and is “oriented towards something beyond the subject.”39 In the Phenomenology, Dufrenne arrives at a similar conclusion, but stresses the idiosyncrasy of the reflective stance. Reflective judgment is an object-directed form of attention. But unlike other modes of intentional activity (e.g., perception, imagination), which give meaning to their objects, reflective judgment actively maintains an open-ended attitude that aims to allow an object to fully manifest itself. The activity of reflective judgment is best understood as a mode of receptivity. This makes reflective judgment a promising model for a nonsubjectivist formulation of the aesthetic attitude. In a discussion of reflective judgment, Dufrenne likens Kant’s talk of ‘free play’ to the attitudinal shift inaugurated by the phenomenological reduction: The reduction creates nothing; it suspends the thesis of the natural attitude. It does not constitute a new object, or subtract something from the real object [l’objet réel]. ‘Bracketing’ is not subtraction. All the reduction demands of us is to not ‘operate the thesis’ (of reality or unreality), that is, not to participate [in it] and to give ourselves free play [nous laisser prendre au jeu]. (P 270/209)40 The reduction motivates the study of experience in a non-theory-laden manner. By suspending or bracketing assumptions about mind, nature, or reality, we gain the ­ 38 Fiona Hughes, “On Aesthetic Judgement and our Relation to Nature: Kant’s Concept of Purposiveness,” Inquiry 49.6 (2006): 547–572, here 556. 39 Ibid., 556–557. 40 See also Dufrenne, “Intentionnalité et Esthétique,” 77.

576  Dimitris Apostolopoulos possibility of generating accounts of consciousness, world, and meaning grounded on intuitive data immediately revealed to phenomenological reflection. While the ­importance of the reduction for Dufrenne’s philosophy of art has been noted, it has yet to be ­appreciated that in his eyes, a perceptual version of reflective judgment performs a similar function in aesthetic experience.41 Saison rightly observes that Dufrenne borrows core insights from Kant’s associated account of disinterestedness, but does not explore the details of his appropriation of Kant’s account of reflective judgment.42 As the allusion above to play suggests, Dufrenne sees Kant’s account of reflection as a precursor to the open-ended attitude that intends the sensible. In the aesthetic attitude, “everything that does not participate in [n’est pas complice de] the aesthetic object, [and is] not in service of the experience it offers me, is bracketed [est mise entre parenthèses]” (P 206/154). Like the reduction, a reflective, open-ended, and receptive mode of perceptual intentionality allows perceivers to grasp the sensible: it “exiles and uproots us from those habits that embody the superficial self” and “bring[s] us before a new world that needs a new outlook” (P 506/408). A central virtue of reflective judgment is its ability to inaugurate an intentional stance that does not get ahead of the phenomena or restrict objects’ modes of appearance: in reflective judgment, I maintain a more intimate relation to the object than in determining judgment: I am not content to order appearances or record meanings proposed to me by the imagination; [here] I observe the “adaptation of nature to our faculty of judgment” that Kant describes with the principle of purposiveness [finalité]. (P 468/375) Concept application constrains the possible range of an object’s meaning. But aesthetic perception requires that we cultivate a disposition toward encountering objects in ways that could outstrip our assumptions or conceptual schemes.43 Due to its non-conceptual character, reflective judgment motivates just such an open-ended attitude. By refraining from ordering appearances from the inside, and by attempting to generate order from within intuition, reflective judgment illustrates how perceivers can prime themselves to intend art on its own terms. They must surrender their claim to adequately grasp objects’ sense using internal resources alone, and must instead take direction from the object. As the passage above hints, the purposiveness of the aesthetic object is a key precondition for this; I return to this below. As this brief review suggests, Dufrenne’s reading of Kant’s account of reflective judgment is complex, and his use of Kantian resources eclectic. He is drawn to Kant’s account of reflection in part because he aims to infuse his own account of aesthetic perception with similar kinds of proto-cognitive attitudes. The concept of reflection also helps Dufrenne further refine the differences between aesthetic and non-aesthetic perception. In everyday perception, reflection typically establishes distance from an object, because it inaugurates a detached and analytical attitude. In the aesthetic sphere, 41 Bernhard Waldenfels, Phänomenologie in Frankreich (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1987), 357. 42 Saison, La nature artiste, 71–73. For a helpful account of Dufrenne’s reading of Kant between La notion de l’apriori and L’inventaire des apriori see Saison, La nature artiste, 147–167. 43 Developing a line of argument from Kant, the “new attitude toward the object” inaugurated by the aesthetic stance is defined chiefly by feeling rather than cognition (P 487/392).

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  577 however, reflection brings subjects into closer proximity with an object (P 515/416). Unlike in non-aesthetic contexts, our experience of art establishes a “dialectical” relation between feeling, reflection, and perception (P 524/423). This offers Dufrenne the resources to explain why aesthetic objects manifest qualities like depth, expression, and feeling, and why objects perceived in non-aesthetic contexts exercise comparatively less power over perceivers. And as this suggests, Dufrenne’s Kantian-inspired account of reflection makes a claim about reality that goes beyond what we find in Kant. For Kant, reflective judgment begins from particulars and attempts to find a rule for a given empirical case. While this implies that consciousness already stands in some relationship to objects, Dufrenne goes further, and claims that aesthetic reflection takes us beyond merely formal conditions for the possibility of subject-object relations, or for the correspondence between empirical laws of nature and transcendental laws of mind. Reflection reveals unseen dimensions of reality, which suggests that art has a distinctive metaphysical significance (P 655/537). The attitude described above is evident in the ballet case. Before the performance ­ egins, perception must institute [instituer] a background [fond] appropriate to it, b a zone of space or time, of emptiness or silence, which attention circumscribes like a nimbus. This silence precedes an audition, and it is also how we prepare ourselves to read, sheltered from every distraction. (P 203/151) By adopting a receptive openness to encountering objects without prejudice, ­perceivers ­ usic, satisfy a basic precondition needed to subsequently attend to dancers’ movements, m or choreography in the ways that these features issue from the performance. In this ­attitude, “I submit myself to the work instead of submitting it to my jurisdiction, and I allow the work to deposit its meaning within me” (P 487–488/393). Dufrenne identifies two stages to reflection in Kant. The first is “committed” by its ­objects, or oriented chiefly by intuitive evidence. The second focuses “on ourselves,” or on internal dispositions. As the description above suggests, neither is sufficient on its own. To intend the sensible, subjective projections onto the structure of appearances must be curtailed: “If reflection…implies self-consciousness, this is because I put myself into question” (P 467/374). The internally focused stage of reflection, that akin to the ­phenomenological reduction, is complemented by an open-ended object-directed attitude, in which we “involve ourselves more deeply [with art] than when determining judgment is in effect” (P 467/374). So understood, the aesthetic attitude is a mode of intentionality that steers clear of a view of constitution qua meaning-construction. Aesthetic ­perception realizes a “communion” with the object “more profound than that of the activity of ­constitution” (P 467/374). 4.2  Internal purposiveness and aesthetic form

We just saw that Kant’s account of reflective judgment exercises an important influence on Dufrenne’s description of the aesthetic attitude. Recall, however, that a receptive and open-ended perceptual stance is justified by the kind of object encountered in aesthetic perception. For Dufrenne, sensible objects’ normativity or purposiveness for consciousness distinguishes them from other kinds of perceptual objects. The region of sensible reality is defined by a mode of intentional presentation structurally akin to what Kant

578  Dimitris Apostolopoulos calls ‘internal’ purposiveness. Unlike Kant, Dufrenne argues that purposiveness is a real feature of aesthetic objects. For Kant, an “end” or purpose is “the concept of an object insofar as it at the same time contains the ground of the reality of this object” (5:180). Kant’s likening of ­‘concept’ to ‘purpose’ suggests that purposive objects appear to be designed according to plan, or for a reason. Purposiveness can thereby be understood as an explanation of an ­object’s organization or structure. An object counts as purposive when its parts appear ­systematically designed with a view to some end (5:220).44 Kant distinguishes ‘external’ from ‘internal’ purposiveness. Both fall under ­‘objective’ material purposiveness, which pertains to organisms; ‘subjective’ purposiveness, by contrast, is formal and pertains to aesthetic objects. External purposiveness, for example, corresponds to the kind of utility afforded by a bridge, which serves extrinsic ends. “[I] nternal” purposiveness originates within a living being (5:367). Internally purposive ­entities are self-determining and serve their own goals. Nature offers many examples of internal purposiveness. An “organized and self-organizing being” like an animal, plant, or tree, appears to be structured by relations of reciprocal causation between parts and whole, which serve its own ends (5:374). In organisms, “each part is conceived as if it exists only through all the others, thus as if existing for the sake of the others and on account of the whole.” Organic life appears to be structured by a “self-propagating” or self-regulating principle inexplicable in terms of mechanistic or efficient-causal models. For Kant, attributions of natural purposiveness are regulative. Purposiveness is a ­transcendental principle that aids the study of nature. We do not intuit purposiveness: “insofar as it is represented in perception, [purposiveness] is…not a property of the object itself” (5:189). In scientific enquiry, purposiveness encourages us to investigate nature as if it were a “supersensible” systematically ordered whole, which motivates more complete accounts of the physical world (5:175). (Similarly, while the objective meaning (or concept) of an artwork is indemonstrable, we still seek order in its contingent elements, and grasp it as purposive to attain a more thorough view of the work.) Despite recognizing the benefits of ascribing meaning or systematicity to nature (or art), Kant defends the “idealism of…purposiveness”: purposiveness grounds reflective judgment without being a demonstrable property of objects (5:351; 20:213–214, 20:218). The degree to which the cross-cutting distinctions in Kant’s account of purposiveness are unified is contested and cannot be addressed here. The key point for our purposes is that Dufrenne blurs Kant’s distinction between subjective (formal-aesthetic) and objective (natural) purposiveness, and models his account of aesthetic form around internal natural purposiveness. Unlike Kant, he argues that aesthetic perception offers good grounds to affirm the objective import of purposiveness in art.45 This revisionary claim exploits a connection Kant draws (but does not develop) between purposiveness and the “form” [Gestalt] of objects’ appearance (5:181; 5:192–194, 5:279). While ­representations of

44 See Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 294, 312 for more on this point. 45 Kant stops short of drawing this conclusion, but Hughes argues that he offers indirect support for it, insofar as purposiveness is a possible candidate explanation for the fit between reflective judgment and nature: “aesthetic judgements may be seen as providing indirect encouragement for our expectation of empirical systematicity. This is because aesthetic judgements entail a reflection on the principle on which empirical systematicity is based” (Hughes, “On Aesthetic Judgment,” 566).

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  579 purposiveness are ideal products of reflective judgment, Kant concedes that “we can at least observe a purposiveness concerning form…and notice it in objects” (5:220). This hints at the possibility that objects’ structure motivates subjective ascriptions of purposiveness. It also suggests that a special attitude is needed to grasp purposive forms.46 Aesthetic objects, Dufrenne maintains, are perceptually grasped as internally ­purposive meaningful wholes, in which parts and whole cohere. Consider again the ballet case. In the theater, we encounter a meaningful unity of music and movement unfolding on stage. The meanings expressed in the ballet emerge as we attend to its parts and trace their connections. Aesthetic appreciation inclines toward an awareness of the suite of perceived qualities that constitute the ballet’s form, which Dufrenne describes as “movement.” Aesthetic form is not an “external principle of unity,” a mere “contour” or “outline,” but an “internal” principle that reveals a coherence between an object’s parts (P 294/229). The sense of the performance takes shapes before us as we grasp an “action in the ballet that expresses the way its movements are organized [s’articulent].” This mode of perceptual organization, one encountered within the aesthetic attitude, “is nothing other than the way the sensible announces and opens itself [se livre] to perception.” The meaning immanent in the ballet, or “the interiority or intentionality of the work,” derives from relations of “coherence, totality, limitation, [and] autonomous formality” that organically emerge from part-whole relations (P 195/145). The claim that sensible form expresses “a principle immanent and developing in [the object]” makes a descriptive claim about aesthetic experience (P 555/451). An aesthetic object “represents something” when a set of properties “constitutes itself as an object” and conveys a sense (P 294/229).47 While a self-expressive object’s properties are relational and dispositional, Dufrenne’s realistic reading of aesthetic purposiveness aims to secure the sensible’s subject-referentiality without reducing its meaning to that of a mere intentional object, significant only for consciousness. The aesthetic attitude helps us grasp the aesthetic object’s “principle of purposiveness,” or the internally meaningful structure of an “empirical object that lends itself to [se prête à] unification” (P 564/458). This latter feature marks a fundamental difference between aesthetic and non-aesthetic objects. While our skill at perceiving pens, trains, computers, or motorways typically allows us to fix their meaning, aesthetic objects’ sense often confronts us in ways that elude transparent apprehension. Sensible objects exhibit their own internal logic and are organized on their terms, not ours. While this feature is often most pronounced in our initial encounters with a work, and might progressively weaken, it resurfaces when we realize that a familiar work supports an alternative interpretation. As evidence above shows, Dufrenne describes this feature of aesthetic perception by appropriating and transforming Kantian resources. Sensible form reflects a logic of autonomous self-organization, akin “to that illustrated by the internal purposiveness ­[finalité interne] of a living being, in which the harmony of parts to whole constitutes a totality” (P 513/414). Like organisms, aesthetic objects appear as internally organized and bear their sense within themselves. The immanent unity organizing an 46 Kant allows that “the representation through which an object is given to us” contains “the mere form of purposiveness” but does not go as far as to locate purposiveness in intuition (5:221). 47 While I cannot explore this here, Dufrenne’s account of intentional self-constitution and part-whole ­relations is also influenced by Gestalt-psychological research. For Gestaltists, form is an organically emergent relation governing an object’s properties or parts.

580  Dimitris Apostolopoulos aesthetic o ­ bject’s elements secures its meaningfulness: “it is through the very unity of [its] form that the aesthetic object is…nature” (P 195/145). While organisms are nature and artworks artifact, their respective modes of intentional presentation converge on a basic point: like self-directed or teleologically organized beings, aesthetic objects’ parts are governed by intelligible relations that constitute them as meaningful wholes. ­Dufrenne’s descriptions of the sensible converge on the idea that sensible appearance “is the principle of its own becoming [devenir], whereby the movement animating it is a ­self-movement [auto-mouvement]” (P 333/256).48 In aesthetic perception, the “forms which take shape in the object and which together compose [its] form are…the organs of an organism and are recognized as such by our intelligence” (P 520/420).49 Kant’s importance for Dufrenne’s attempt to formulate an account of aesthetic ­intentionality that preserves art’s intentional autonomy should now be clear. Realistically interpreted, purposiveness brings art’s objective or subject-independent meaning to the fore. Transformed into a thesis about objects’ constitutive logic, it helps Dufrenne explain how art becomes normative for aesthetically inclined perceivers. Crucially, this approach highlights the ineliminable role of the aesthetic attitude: without adopting an open-ended and receptive mode of perceptual intentionality, the preconditions for appreciating art’s autonomy and normativity fail to obtain. As the ballet case (among others) suggests, attention to our lived encounter with art shows that “the aesthetic object…has the initiative” (P 296/231). This corrects the mistaken (for Dufrenne) assumption that subjective attitudes alone are sufficient “for the sensible to realize itself and find its meaning.” Aesthetic intentionality demonstrates that “I am the mere instrument of this realization” and that “it is the object that commands.” On this interpretation, the aesthetic attitude is a response to a region of reality essentially defined by an expressive, ­self-structuring, and internally meaningful mode of appearance. To perceive art for its own sake, the aesthetic attitude “must be reoriented in order to regain the object—[which] must be accorded anew the essential privilege of sufficing by itself and of bearing its meaning within itself” (P 487/392). 5  Aesthetic attitude and world Recall that anti-subjectivists reject the aesthetic attitude because they maintain that a core function of art is to reveal facts about truth, reality, or world. This function, they argue, is suppressed in Kant-inspired aesthetic theory. In this section, I show that Dufrenne’s view of the aesthetic attitude weakens the plausibility of this inference. His conception of the aesthetic attitude is distinguished by the claim that aesthetic intentionality discloses a ‘world’ internal to an artwork. An aesthetic object’s purposiveness and normativity stems in large part from its ability to reveal a world, which Dufrenne defines as an internally ordered affective atmosphere. While a comprehensive overview is not possible here, I will sketch the basic contours of Dufrenne’s conception of aesthetic worlds by contrasting it with Heidegger’s. Three basic reasons inform this decision. First, since both accounts of the art-world relation are informed by readings of Kant, the contrast sheds greater light on the originality of 48 Dufrenne denies that the aesthetic object is a living being [un vivant] but maintains that it expresses ‘life,’ understood (following Kant) in terms of self-organization. 49 Nothing requires that we perceive artworks as internally purposive. Of course, we need not perceive objects aesthetically at all. For Dufrenne, however, properly aesthetic perception intends objects under the guise of an aesthetic mode of “internal purposiveness” (finalité interne) (P 307/243; 513/413–414).

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  581 Dufrenne’s Kant-interpretation, while also demonstrating its importance for his formulation of the relation between aesthetic attitude and world. Second, it serves to correct the misconception that Dufrenne’s account of aesthetic worlds is, in effect, an extension of Heidegger’s. Third, it helps to show that Dufrenne’s account of the relation between aesthetic attitude and world supports an original and attractive phenomenological conception of art’s objectivity. Recall that for Kant, the beautiful “pleases universally without a concept” (5:219). The affective character of aesthetic experience motivates Kant to circumscribe the scope of claims about the beautiful to the subjective sphere: In order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of understanding to the object for cognition, but rather relate it by means of the imagination (perhaps combined with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. (5:203–204) Judgments of the form ‘x is beautiful’ inform us about the subject evaluating x, not about the object of her appraisal. Criteria for judgments of taste are subjectively grounded: “beauty is nothing by itself, without relation to the feeling of the subject” (5:217). ­Judgments of taste exhibit “merely a relation of the representation of the object to the ­subject” (5:211). They enjoy a “subjectively universal validity” that falls below the ­degree of truth or objectivity characteristic of cognitive or perceptual judgments (5:215). The “universal voice” we seek when judging the beautiful is “only an idea” (5:216). Heidegger concedes that Nietzsche’s and Schopenhauer’s readings of Kant are partly responsible for his reception as an aesthetic subjectivist (NI 107–114). Still, he ­identifies two features internal to Kant’s account of the beautiful that have subjectivist implications: Now, since in the aesthetic consideration of art the artwork is defined as the ­ eautiful which has been brought forth in art, the work is represented as the bearer b ­ rovoker of the beautiful with relation to our state of feeling. The artwork is and p posited as the “object” for a “subject”; definitive for aesthetic consideration is the subject-object relation, indeed as a relation of feeling. The work becomes an object in terms of that surface which is accessible to ‘lived experience.’ (N1 78) Kant’s commitment to the subject-object framework, coupled with his stress on f­eeling, pleasure, and other consciousness-centric categories, circumscribes the scope of our ­experience of art and its meaning. By stressing its affective dimensions, Kant’s account of beauty forecloses on the possibility that the beautiful might contain truth-apt content, or, at the very least, that its content might not be exhausted by the subject’s internal states. Correlatively, Kant’s focus on taste restricts the scope of art to its significance for us. His encouragement to “seek the standard for [beauty] in ourselves a priori” circumscribes art’s reach to its affective imprint on consciousness (5:350).50

50 According to Cassirer, the “new cosmos” revealed by the beautiful “is not the system of objectivity but the whole of subjectivity” (Cassirer, Kant’s Life, 319).

582  Dimitris Apostolopoulos These claims lead Heidegger to conclude that beauty for Kant is indexed to how a subject “finds and feels things” (N1 83).51 In a charge repeated by Adorno, he claims that “taste” in Kant becomes “the court of judicature of all beings.” The ‘aesthetic’ approach is subjectivist because it cashes out art’s significance in terms of first-personal, affective, or perceptual categories. 52 If the meaning of art becomes the purview of subjectivity, art loses its world-disclosive power. Nothing can be said about art on its own terms. As Torsen has demonstrated, despite his criticisms, Heidegger maintains that Kantian disinterestedness anticipates the attitude of “letting be” that Heidegger thinks we should adopt toward artworks and reality as such.53 She argues that “the interplay between ­purposiveness and disinterest in the reflective judgement is highly suggestive of Heidegger’s own way of thinking about the relationship between Dasein and truth.”54 For Heidegger, “both work and audience are necessary components of art as a happening of truth.”55 Insofar as Dufrenne’s Kant-interpretation also emphasizes receptivity or openness, it might seem like little more than a perceptual translation of the attitude of S­ einlassen. ­Appreciating a relevant point of interpretive disagreement about which faculty in Kant takes precedence will highlight subtle but significant differences between the two a­ ccounts. These reveal diverging estimations of the extent of Kant’s subjectivism and contrasting approaches to the art-world relation. Famously, Heidegger identifies the productive imagination in Kant as the unacknowledged “root” of the harmony of the faculties.56 Dufrenne concedes that Heidegger ­“justifiably” emphasizes the imagination’s significance but concludes that he ultimately overestimates its broader role (P 563/457).57 The imagination “stabilizes” [donner consistence] representations, but its work “remains discreet” (P 450/360). For “the transcendental faculty of imagination, which operates on the basis of a sensible and nonintellectual intuition and to which the object is given,” must first “find a link with the given of intuition [le donné de l’intuition]” (P 563/457–458). To unify its ­objects, the imagination depends on robust identity conditions first given in intuition.58 51 On Heidegger’s anti-subjectivism see Ingvild Torsen, “Disinterest and Truth. On Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant’s Aesthetics,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 56.1 (2016): 15–32; Alberto Siani, “Antisubjectivism and the End of Art: Heidegger on Hegel,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 60.3 (2020): 335–349; and Iain D. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 52 For Thomson, “Heidegger’s fundamental objection to the aesthetic approach to art…is that this approach follows from and feeds back into subjectivism, contemporary humanity’s ongoing effort to establish ‘our unlimited power for calculating, planning, and moulding…all things’” (Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, 52–53). By tying art to subjectivity, Heidegger contends, the aesthetic approach succumbs to and prolongs Modern humanistic prejudices. 53 Torsen, “Disinterest and Truth,” 24–25. 54 Ibid., 26. 55 Ibid., 25–26. 56 Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, Fünfte, vermehrte Auflage (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1973); English translation: Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th Edition, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 112. See Daniel Dahlstrom, “Heidegger’s Kantian Turn: Notes to his Commentary on the Kritik der reinen Vernunft,” The Review of Metaphysics 45.2 (1991), 329–361, for discussion of Heidegger’s reading of Kant. 57 For Kant’s account of the imagination’s role in aesthetic experience see 5:190. 58 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV (1781 edition) and III (1787 edition), ed. Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1911); English translation: Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Henceforth cited as ‘A’/‘B’ followed by corresponding page numbers. Here, A 100–101.

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  583 As Kant’s ­example of cinnabar shows, the imagination’s unificatory work is constrained by ­ intuition and “presupposes that…appearances themselves are subject to such a rule.” The view that perception serves a foundational, knowledge-grounding role leads ­Dufrenne to conclude that “the progress of perception…proceeds through disciplining the imagination” (P 464/372).59 Even if Heidegger does not explicitly situate his later reflections on art in the transcendental terms of Being and Time, as Torsen shows, earlier arguments continue to influence his view that “the proper encounter with a work of art occasions a new ­relationship to the world as deeply meaningful and grounded, although this is based on what we could call a subjective projection.”60 Heidegger’s interpretation of Dasein’s being-in-the-world or pre-theoretical structures of pragmatic understanding breaks from Kant’s conceptualism but retains his transcendental orientation. Interpretations of this account’s relation to ­post-Being and Time writings inevitably prove contentious. However, as far as Heidegger’s take on the third Critique is concerned, remnants of the earlier approach remain. Against Nietzsche, he claims to have identified an overlooked (positive) sense of the beautiful in Kant, tied to “what we take ourselves to be” and dependent on the “transcendental procedure” of reflective judgment (N1 112). This more sympathetic take links the positive import of disinterested pleasure to Dasein’s “anticipatory” projective activity.61 While Heidegger’s later reflections on art begin from different points of departure, his estimation of the positive import of Kant’s aesthetics is consistent with a transcendental interpretation of Dasein’s existentialia and supporting accounts of temporality and imagination. In a reading no less speculative than what we find in Heidegger, Dufrenne avers that “Kant is anxious to avoid subjectivism” (P 463 note 3/458 note 28). Consistent with his privileging of perception over imagination, Dufrenne even contends that Kant “locates the necessity of the a priori in the object.” This captures a core claim behind Dufrenne’s account of the affective a priori.62 While its interpretive fidelity to Kant is debatable, for our purposes it shows that despite his emphasis on intentionality, consciousness, or perception, Dufrenne’s appropriation of Kant departs from Heidegger’s transcendentalizing strategy: “We need not follow the path reflection takes in Kant, when it takes the transcendental turn” (P 466/374). As descriptions of the sensible show (§3), aesthetic intentionality is a bi-directional relation whose decisive constitutive conditions lie outside consciousness (creator or audience). They are located in a higher-order unity constituted in the exchange between subject and object. Dufrenne’s account of aesthetic worlds develops this line of thought. In an important exposition of the purposiveness of sensible form (§4.2), Dufrenne ­observes that aesthetic perception discloses “a world…internal to the object” (P 513/414). Johnson contends that with the “notion of ‘world,’ Dufrenne extends the Heideggerian

59 Dufrenne’s privileging of intuition over imagination follows Merleau-Ponty, and especially his conception of the real (cf. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, 380 with P 446/357). It is also consistent with the critique leveled against Sartre’s account of image-consciousness, which denies that a new, “irreal” object is the term of aesthetic engagement (P 263/203). 60 Torsen, “Disinterest and Truth,” 24. 61 See Rachel Zuckert, “Projection and Purposiveness: Heidegger’s Kant and the Temporalization of Judgment,” in Transcendental Heidegger, ed. Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 215–235, here 228. 62 For the discussion of this concept see Thérien, “L’idée d’un a priori affectif,” and Saison, La nature artiste.

584  Dimitris Apostolopoulos understanding of the essence of the artwork.”63 While he does not offer a defense of this interpretation, Dufrenne’s suggestion that Heidegger’s claim that the world ‘worlds’ is also “true of the world of the aesthetic object” offers ostensible support (P 221/166; 253–254/194–195). The comparison holds on a basic point: like Heidegger, Dufrenne accepts that a world is no object like any other. But it is otherwise deceptive: in its details, Dufrenne view of world is unlike that developed in Heidegger’s “Origin” essay, even if it borrows some claims from Being and Time’s account of worldhood [Weltlichkeit]. For Dufrenne, “every relation to an object is only ever a relation to an object in a world” (P 660/541). This holds a fortiori for aesthetic perception: “the aesthetic object… is a relation to a world. […] its appearance is the appearance of a world” (P 512/413). These claims are consistent with Being and Time’s claim that a world necessarily mediates subject-object relations.64 But two important tenets of Dufrennian aesthetic worlds suggest significant distance from Heidegger’s later account of the art-world relation. (1) As the ballet description hints, Dufrenne defines an aesthetic world as an affective atmosphere.65 An atmosphere is a certain quality that speech cannot translate, but which communicates itself in a­ rousing [éveillant] a feeling. This quality proper to the work, or to works of a single creator, or a single style, is a world atmosphere [une atmosphère de monde]. (P 235/178) We encounter an atmosphere when visiting a city for the first time. While walking its streets or spending time in it, we grasp something of its pace and rhythm, getting a glimpse of what it might be like to live there. A city’s atmosphere is a distinctive qualitative feeling that frames our experience of place, time, and space.   An affective atmosphere is central to aesthetic objects’ expressive character. For ­example, when attending a Molière play, we are caught up in a certain atmosphere that orients our understanding [compréhension], [and] orders [qui commande] the sense [sens] of all we will see or hear… To speak of the comic in Molière is thus to specify a singular world, by giving it a name and contrasting it with other worlds that do not arise from a perfectly similar atmosphere. (P 554–555/450) Molière’s comic style engenders distinctive feelings in an audience that take hold when reading or viewing his plays. The meanings expressed by his affective schemata individuate a world, or a certain style of representing things, persons, and events, which

63 Galen Johnson, “Continental Aesthetics: Phenomenology and Antiphenomenology,” in The History of Continental Philosophy Volume 4, ed. Leonard Lawlor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 87–110, here 98. But cf. Saison, La nature artise, 71–72 and Thérien, “L’idée d’un a priori affectif.” 64 Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 8th ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1957), §§14–16, §§30–31; English translation: Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962). 65 See Thomas Fuchs, “The Phenomenology of Affectivity,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry, ed. KWM Fulford, Martin Davies, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 612–629, here 616–620, for a recent account of the relation between affectivity and atmosphere.

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  585 calibrates our moods, perceptual habits, and cognitive attitudes. A creator’s or object’s ability to build a unique qualitative atmosphere is the central perceptual a­ venue through which art’s autonomy, purposiveness, and normativity for c­ onsciousness is experienced: like a city, an aesthetic world is organized according to its own logic, which orients us toward specific meanings.   While diverse sources influence Dufrenne’s theory of aesthetic worlds, a reading of Kant helps him describe how aesthetic worlds regulate subjects’ intentional acts.66 The organizing principle of a complex whole like a world or an aesthetic object, which Dufrenne likens to the unconditioned in Kant, is difficult to access through thought alone. However, it is perceptually accessible through feeling [le sentiment]. For Dufrenne, feeling is a pre-theoretical, proto-cognitive, and affective embodied process, which takes hold following the shift detailed in §4.2. In the aesthetic context, feeling is a subjective response to the meanings expressed by an aesthetic object and, ultimately, by the world it constitutes: In aesthetic experience, the unconditioned is the atmosphere of a world revealed by the expression through which the transcendence of a subject shows itself. (P 256/196) the unconditioned [in the world of the aesthetic object] is not the inaccessible totality of the series of conditions; it is that perhaps indefinable but [altogether] sensible unity of a singular feeling. (P 646/529) Following Kant’s suggestion that feeling secures an extra-conceptual relation to art, Dufrenne contends that the governing conditions of aesthetic worlds are accessed through affective intentional stances. The immediacy and affective character of feeling establishes a direct link with an aesthetic object and lays the groundwork for the sensible to appear. While meaningful in itself, feeling also informs higher-order sense-making activities like representation, which bring the object’s world into view (P 640–641/524–525) Filmic experience offers a tangible example of aesthetic worlds’ affective presence and their regulative and transformative import.67 A film makes attitudinal demands on viewers consistent with its director’s style, cuts, pace, plot, or actors’ presence. Compare the persisting deferred climax in Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us with the non-linear progression of Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad. Last Year at ­Marienbad trains viewers to grasp events on screen as potentially bearing multiple time signatures. Its reorganizing of temporal relations of succession transforms viewers’ perceptual attitudes: we gradually learn to check and compare each new scene against preceding ones. The repetitive, documentary style of The Wind Will Carry Us instead stretches and dilates our experience of time. Its capacity to draw out the lived present cultivates an anticipation for something still outstanding, motivating us to 66 Two additional noteworthy influences on this account include Ingarden’s account of aesthetic worlds’ representative power and Jaspers’s discussion of Weltanschauungen (P 266–273/206–212; 597–598/487–488). 67 For an account of cinematic worlds inspired by Dufrenne see Daniel Yacavone, Film Worlds: A ­Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

586  Dimitris Apostolopoulos see events on screen as perpetually on the way to a possible resolution or twist. Here time is experienced as indefinitely suspended or as ‘in between.’ Both films teach us something about the experience of time, but do so differently, by cultivating different perceptual ­habits. These basic perceptual attitudes, in turn, support higher-order representations. A film’s global affective framework, or its world, teaches us to see otherwise by first getting us to feel things anew.   Dufrenne’s emphasis on the affective character of aesthetic worlds marks a clear break from Heidegger’s approach to the art-world relation. By developing an argument for the transformative and disclosive power of feeling in aesthetic experience, Dufrenne undercuts the force of Heidegger’s argument that affective categories cement the tendency to confine artworks’ significance to the boundaries of finite consciousness, or to the “state and condition of man” (N1 83). And by showing that the aesthetic attitude concomitantly discloses a world, he makes a persuasive case that the adoption of a reflective and receptive aesthetic intentional stance is a condition for the manifestation of art’s objectivity and normativity. (2) As the cases above suggest, for Dufrenne, the transformative power of aestheticworlds is tied to their (inter-)subjective character. This marks a second and related difference from Heidegger. Art’s expressiveness resembles that of a “quasi-subject [un quasi-sujet]” or “a spontaneously and directly signifying thing, even if [one] cannot figure out [cerner] its meaning” (P 488/393). Art is inanimate, but qua perceived object, it addresses us as if it were a self-directed organism or a purposive whole. Its subject-like character stems from an ability to articulate something of the lived experience of beings like us: “the world of the work expresses the ­absolute position of a creative subjectivity” (P 607/496). In its self-organizing ­intentional structure, “I recognize in the object an interiority and an affinity with me” (P 296/231). The intentional style, or way of seeing, revealed by an aesthetic world originates in its ­creator’s lived experience. In the aesthetic domain, “the notion of the world… has its root in the singular disclosure effected by subjectivity” (P 256/197). Following Jaspers, Dufrenne maintains that all subjects are situated within some worldview ­ eltanschauung), which is reflected in their style and personality. Artists are (or W historical beings, bounded by traditions, technical developments, and social conditions. The affective states and ways of seeing that aesthetic objects support originate in wider networks of significance and practices of meaning-making operative in historical time. To grasp a Gothic or ­Baroque style, for example, is to understand “a consciousness inhabiting and giving life to [animant] a Gothic or Baroque world that we are invited to enter” (P 156/109–110). By concretizing an intentional style and its associated interpretation of ideas and things, the aesthetic object offers a (partial) window into different ways of ­inhabiting a world: “an affective quality can be pregnant with a world, because a world…is precisely a response to a certain attitude, the correlate of the subjectivity that manifests itself in an affective quality” (P 557/452). Crucially, while intentional styles and their affective atmospheres are human inventions, their scope is not confined to or conditioned by the intentional horizons of their creators. Artists lay the groundwork for certain kinds of experiences, but in Dufrenne’s eyes, great art establishes intentional schemata that reorient audiences’ attitudes in open-ended and unpredictable ways. His earlier appeal to

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  587 Kant’s conception of the unconditioned should be read together with descriptions of the sensible (and the affective a priori) that emphasize the organic or autoconstitutive character of aesthetic experience. By contrast, world in Heidegger’s writings on art does not refer to a “specific world and a specific earth,” that is, to work, genre, or artist-relative conditions.68 Insofar as a “‘world’ is the background, and usually unnoticed understanding which determines for the members of an historical culture what, for them, fundamentally, there is,” it counts as extra-subjective and belongs to no one in particular.69 Heidegger’s view of artistic invention entails that art and its worlds are ways that being articulates itself.70 Consistent with polemics against feeling and first-personal categories, he denies that art articulates lived experience. As Siani observes, for Heidegger, art “is not a product of the artist’s individual creativity, but the place of truth’s unconcealment.”71 Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s A Pair of Shoes (1885) reflects this approach. For Heidegger, Van Gogh’s depiction of peasant shoes is no mere representation of an ordinary use-object. By presenting a pair of shoes against an indeterminate context, Van Gogh invites us to re-evaluate the assumptions underlying our everyday interpretive ­security and to reflect on what it is to be an object at all. A truth-disclosive work like A Pair of Shoes ultimately makes an ontological point about the recalcitrant character of things and their inability to be fully exhausted by our conceptual schemes. This insight is experienced as an ‘event’ that reorients sense-making practices. Art discloses truth by unmasking governing assumptions about the metaphysics of objects, nature, mind, technology, etc., operative in a particular historical period (UK 33–35). Great art transcends subjectivity at the termini of creation and appreciation and discloses extra-subjective world-forming or intelligibility-making conditions. Accordingly, aesthetic categories like the beautiful must be purged of their subject-relative content: “Beauty is one way in which truth occurs as unconcealedness” (UK 54). Dufrenne agrees with Heidegger that aesthetic worlds are not subjective in the ­narrow sense: they do not transmit private data, like their creator’s psychological states (P 255/195). However, he maintains that they are inextricably linked to the intentional lives of others: an “artist does not need to renounce his singularity, because it is through this singularity that a world is expressed…” (P 675/554). As the ballet or film cases show, subjective experience is not incidental to art’s world-disclosive power; it is a ­precondition for it. Whereas Heidegger defines art’s historicity with reference to the epochs of being, Dufrenne links it to human experience: an aesthetic world “is always a ­human world” (P 156/110). The normativity immanent to the aesthetic object originates in a concrete mode of intentional life and becomes effective in an audience’s conscious ­experience of artworks. While Heidegger offers 68 R. Raj Singh, “Heidegger and the World in an Artwork,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48.3 (1990): 215–222, here 216. 69 Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 23. 70 See the observation that “Modern subjectivism…misinterprets creation, taking it as the self-sovereign subject’s performance of genius” (Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950); English translation: “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans. Alfred Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 2001), 73. Henceforth abbreviated UK followed by English pagination. 71 Siani, “Antisubjectivism,” 4.

588  Dimitris Apostolopoulos a somewhat more abstract description of how art acquires truth-disclosive power, Dufrenne argues that this takes hold c­oncretely through perceptual and affective experience, whereby subjects are ­addressed by an ­intention-structuring object. As this suggests, Dufrenne’s account of the transformative power of aesthetic worlds is modeled around intersubjective meaning-constitution, especially as it unfolds in activities like dialogue or communication. Successful linguistic communication requires that we see things from another perspective. To do so, we must seriously entertain the possibility that our own outlook could be inadequate. Similarly, profound aesthetic experiences reveal the limits of our intentional horizons, and teach us something new about sense-making, by acquainting us with intentional styles that we can make our own. Art acquaints us with the “existential attitude on the basis of which [an artist’s] world can appear” (P 555/451). “Art,” Dufrenne concludes, “presupposes and realizes intersubjectivity: it invites the other to be himself” (P 675/554). Great art reveals hitherto occluded views of the real, and “constitutes” us anew “as a subject” capable of organizing our attitudes around novel intentional schemata (P 555/451). The suggestion that the aesthetic object and its world disclose an artist’s subjectivity might seem to conflict with Dufrenne’s arguments for the priority of aesthetic objectivity. Moreover, the features above could also be read as covert attempts to smuggle ­subjectivist tendencies back into the account. Much like more traditional subjectivist aesthetic theories, Dufrenne apparently situates the objectivity of art within the boundaries of subjective experience. Dufrenne’s reply to these worries should already be clear. As a phenomenologist, he maintains that any plausible account of objectivity and reality will necessarily make reference to human consciousness: any world is a world for some subject. This fact does not, however, imply a deleterious form of subjectivism. As the structure of aesthetic experience demonstrates, the meaning of an aesthetic object is always negotiated by multiple perspectives. An aesthetic object is born from within a world of (subjective) experience and articulates some of its characteristics. It gives voice to some region of reality, as it is lived by a subject (P 603–604/493). One can only grasp ­ ialogue with and approximates the distinctive ways of enits sense if one enters into d countering the world that are immanent to the aesthetic object. Aesthetic objectivity, then, necessarily implicates a form of subjectivity that remains open to interrogation and modification. Accordingly, The aesthetic object is a point of departure not so much for objective knowledge but for a reading of the expression of the real, and this is why the artist’s subjectivity is eminently required. The world of this object is that of an affective category, and only through this category [is it also] a world of real objects: the work leads us to the real, but does so through the affective… (P 631/516) Contact with another’s subjective experience is a precondition for grasping the real anew. ­ lural If the only relevant sense of reality includes subjects, and if aesthetic worlds offer p modes of representing reality, then the real “needs…subjective worlds to appear…” (P 655/537). The world of the aesthetic object finds a correlate in its audience’s experience, which it promises to enrich and enlarge.

Dufrenne, Kant, and the aesthetic attitude  589 While this interpretation of the art-world relation is not Kantian in the strict sense, it develops Kant’s claim that a world is an ordered, appearance-structuring “whole,” or a “sum total of all appearances,” which conditions experience in ways that outstrip the boundaries of finite subjectivity (B 446–467). If Dufrenne’s estimation of the transformative import of perceptual and affective experience is on the right track, then it offers an alternative conception of art’s objectivity and its ability to reveal the partiality and incompleteness of the first-personal stance. Aesthetic experience orients us beyond ourselves by acquainting us with novel ways of encountering the real that transcend our existing intentional attitudes. 6 Conclusion I have argued that Dufrenne’s attempt to formulate a novel phenomenological conception of the aesthetic attitude relies on a revisionary interpretation of Kant’s accounts of reflection and purposiveness. This innovative take on aesthetic intentionality is systematically and historically significant. First, while Dufrenne’s debts to Kant are frequently invoked, the account above offers the first (to my knowledge) detailed treatment of his appropriation of the concepts of reflection and purposiveness. While Kant’s influence on Dufrenne’s later account of the material a priori is widely recognized, the evidence above shows that this influence is already central to arguments in the Phenomenology, many of which inform later positions. Despite some inevitable points of contact, the scope and substance of Dufrenne’s Kant-interpretation should be seen as a competitor to Heidegger’s. Unlike in Heidegger’s treatment, Dufrenne’s reading motivates a strategy for appropriating Kant’s relevance for phenomenological aesthetics that deliberately extends arguments, methods, and assumptions internal to the phenomenological tradition. Second, Dufrenne develops a fertile framework for reconceiving the aesthetic ­attitude along phenomenological lines. While phenomenologically inspired readings of the ­aesthetic attitude typically stress the subject’s role in securing basic conditions for ­aesthetic perception, Dufrenne enriches existing accounts by highlighting the degree to which intentional attitudes are guided by the sui generis self-constituting structure of the aesthetic object. The claim that aesthetic appearances acquaint perceivers with the constitutive logic of a world balances out the overwhelming focus on subjective acts that often defines accounts of the aesthetic attitude. This opens up new interpretive space within which to pursue links between aesthetic consciousness, aesthetic objectivity, and the lifeworld. Third, Dufrenne’s interpretation offers good reasons to resist anti-subjectivist ­arguments that an aesthetic approach to art—one centered on intentionality and e­xperience—is necessarily subjectivist. His strategy for substantiating the priority of the object is undoubtedly unlike what we find in Hegel, Schelling, Heidegger, or Adorno. The Phenomenology’s account of art’s normativity prioritizes perceptual experience and presupposes a broadly humanistic metaphysics, which Dufrenne would later defend (against the grain of 1960s French anti-humanism) in Pour l’homme. Nevertheless, by making a case for the autonomous, expressive, purposive, and self-constituting structure of sensible appearances, Dufrenne’s account of aesthetic consciousness accords constitutive priority to art’s objectivity. While he grounds it in a broader account of intersubjective constitution, his version of aesthetic humanism overcomes the limitations of aesthetic subjectivism

590  Dimitris Apostolopoulos as typically articulated by post-Kantian thinkers.72 By showcasing the centrality of the aesthetic ­attitude, Dufrenne demonstrates that strong anti-humanist premises (like those defended by the later Heidegger) fail to address a core feature of our lived encounter with art. He shows that any attempt to do full justice to art is only possible via an account of aesthetic experience: art’s objectivity is really a sui generis form of the appearance of subjectivity, and its world-disclosive modalities only appear under a special intentional guise. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jack Reynolds and Andrew Inkpin for conversation and comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Special thanks are due to Aaron Wells for his very helpful comments on a draft of this chapter. I thank two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their constructive comments and suggestions, which improved the final version of this chapter.

72 Le Poétique develops the Phenomenology’s suggestion that sensible form originates in a more fundamental natural ground (a claim formulated, in Kantian terms, as an ‘affinity’ between nature and subjectivity: P 468/375). Dufrenne’s later philosophy of nature aims to show how the creation and appreciation of art derives from a more fundamental (non-human) form of natural creativity, which is expressed in human artifacts.

Part V

In review

32 Review of J. Kates, A New Philosophy of Discourse Language Unbound (Bloomsbury Academic 2021) Brian O’Connor From the title alone, Joshua Kates’s A New Philosophy of Discourse: Language ­Unbound signals a reversal of the metaphor made famous by Fredric Jameson (who, of course, adopted the metaphor from a translation of Nietzsche). Language, as the title suggests, should not be understood as a prison-house constraining humanistic thought—that would elevate language’s autonomy and authority well beyond the degree Kates’s model of discourse permits. Instead, it is language as such which proves to be constrained by theory and philosophy that continue to conceive of language as an objective, ­already-meaningful, free-standing system. In A New Philosophy of Discourse, language does not enable interpretation or supply meaning. To the contrary, Kates argues, all instances of interpretation occur in “events of discourse” (xi). Importantly, Kates’s discourse sits in radical opposition to the more prevalent construals of discourse found in such work as that of John Searle or Michel Foucault. For Kates, discourse can be understood “simply and entirely as language in use” (xii), and, moreover, so Kates contends, there is no such thing as language waiting, tool-like, ready to be used, independent of and prior to events of discourse. Discourse, Kates argues, operates free of any rules and “fixed structures” and no component of language, conventionally understood, such as words and their purported pre-use meanings, can determine “what can be said, meant, or shown, on any occasion.” In these ways, Kates’s compelling study envisions “the untethering of discourse from [language]... and ultimately of language from itself” (xi). Significantly, such disarticulations, for Kates, effectively “[rule] out any constituting differences between literature, literary criticism, the sciences, philosophy, or everyday discussion.” Moreover, as the text powerfully models, the priority of discourse over language entails that meaning cannot come from outside the event of discourse, a contention with far-reaching implications for literary studies and humanistic inquiry, generally, because, as Kates shows, recourse to language and other rule-bound systems routinely results in an impoverishment of interpretive potential at the expense of truth and insight into the subject at hand. If A New Philosophy of Discourse reverses the view of language as prison-house, it does so by revealing the many ways contemporary literary critics and philosophers alike remain subject to language’s constraints, despite efforts to the contrary, and the effects such constraints have on their purported projects. All of Kates’s interlocutors are d ­ iscourse-minded, such as literary critics Mary Poovey, Derrek Attridge, and Charles ­Altieri; theorists such as Walter Benn Michaels; and philosophers Stanley Cavell, H ­ ans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson, and Martin Heidegger. With the exception of Davidson and Heidegger, however, all, so Kates shows, return to language, rather than discourse, at key points in their arguments, thus undermining their projects’ power and potential r­ adicality. To be clear, though, A New Philosophy of Discourse never turns polemical. Much to the contrary, the DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-37

594  Brian O’Connor study’s interpretive force comes from Kates’s unflinching commitment to think with the various texts and authors he assembles. In this way, A New Philosophy of Discourse models the view of discourse it simultaneously seeks to delimit. Using the neologism talk! interchangeably with discourse—which ­illuminates not only the model of discourse the text develops but Kates’s own methodology as well—Kates construes discourse as an engaged conversation rooted in time and drawing on past conversations, broadly speaking, what Kates refers to as discourse’s historicity and traditionality. Accordingly, all discourse implicitly or explicitly engages not only with its subject—because all discourse “is worlded...is concerned with some sort of understanding or insight into some aspect of the world” (26)—but with other instances of discourse as well, whether those contributing to any “stretch of talk’s” historicity and traditionality, or those with which discourse explicitly engages. All contribute to the contexts through which discourse unfolds and on which, as Kates demonstrates, interpretation and understanding hinge. Thus, methodologically, Kates can be seen in deep conversation with both his wide-ranging interlocutors and his imagined reader alike, closely attending not only to those ideas relevant for his purposes but to the contexts in which those ideas initially arose, as well. And this triangulation between author, text, and reader also proves crucial to his project and the model of discourse developed therein—more on this, soon. Such commitments help reveal some of Kates’s implicit secondary purposes, such as offering critique of and corrective to current trends in contemporary literary studies. The model of discourse for which Kates advocates, which levels distinctions between ­historically divided and hierarchized types of texts, invites “a greater back and forth b ­ etween reader and text” than other models can afford, such as those premised on ­literature as otherness or as acts of genius (31). Moreover, disagreement proves essential to the back and forth of interpretation and to the understanding of the subjects of discourse. For instance, at the end of an analysis of Charles Bernstein’s L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, Kates emphasizes the fact that Berstein’s construal of language and Kates’s own differ, perhaps irreconcilably so, but it’s precisely such discontinuities when registered in discourse that allow the subject of discourse, “the worlded topic at issue” (34), to come into view “in distinction from the discourse about it” (35). As Kates states, “In interpretation, as construed on ­discourse’s basis, divergences and agreements together, like a one-time living lattice, ­permit glimpsing the item or matter being talked about” (35). Organized into two parts, A New Philosophy of Discourse has two primary o ­ bjectives. Part I, “Discourse and Literary Studies,” seeks to delimit discourse as Kates defines it and demonstrate the interpretive possibilities opened up by approaching literature as discourse. Part II, “Discourse and Text,” attends to the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the work begun in Part I, attempting to understand how texts, understood as discourse and, thus, events, can remain retrievable, accessible, and legible over time. To summarize the sections’ central concerns, I will briefly lay out key tensions Kates works through therein. Before doing so, however, a brief disclaimer: I have worked with Josh Kates as a close collaborator, in the past, though this by no means prevents me from providing a fair assessment of the work under review, to which I now return. As noted, Part I concerns itself with defining talk! and supporting the rather controversial claim that literature be understood primarily as talk! The interpretive work, herein, seeks to follow this discourse-minded approach to literature through to its l­ogical end, avoiding the final recourse to language Kates identifies in the work of Poovey, Attridge, Altieri, and Cavell. Chapter 2, “Discourse as Literary Innovation (Charles Bernstein),” offers a ­ powerful interpretation of Charles Bernstein’s L=A=N=G-U-A-G-E poetry,

Review of A New Philosophy of Discourse: Language Unbound  595 demonstrating the capaciousness of a discourse-minded approach to interpretation. This is then set in ­opposition to Chapter 3’s rigorous treatment of Cavell and how the ­latter’s commitment to words, as opposed to discourse, renders Cavell’s thought conspicuously deaf to the other and detached from the world with which Kates sees all discourse ­concerned and engaged. Kates’s treatment of Bernstein focuses on a single line on an otherwise empty page in the collection, With Strings. The line reads, “this poem intentionally left blank,” and Kates takes it up to provocatively ask, “Where exactly is language in all this?” (32). Kates’s point is that the words themselves, as language’s avatars, provide no real access to meaning—the page, after all, is not blank because on it is printed the line, and if the line is to be understood as a poem, then it too cannot be accounted for by words alone. Language as such cannot explain the line because, as Kates argues, whatever it is the line says/means “resides entirely in use” and “depends on the context the expression as a whole provides (rather than on any feature of its individual words), as well as on the broader worldly one in which the expression operates” (32). The line is in explicit dialogue with that common feature of many print texts, “This page intentionally left blank,” and any meaning interpretable in Bernstein’s version can only unfold from this reference and not from the language comprising the line as such. It’s through such reference that Bernstein’s poem, if it is a poem, can be read as discourse and be seen as rooted in and developing a greater understanding of some world-bound subject as it “combines a refusal to speak poetically (as customarily understood) with a vector toward the social conditions of literary production, thereby tracing a transgressive arc across both” (32). As Kates points out several times throughout A New Philosophy of Discourse, viewing literature as discourse does not upend literature as such or literary studies—formal ­experimentation and the close-reading/interpretation thereof are alive and well, and to be sure, the discipline has long sought meaning in the contexts in which literature operates. Viewing literature as discourse, however, better explains what literature and literary criticism have always done. Experimentations with form only matter due to the historicity and traditionality in which a formal excursion participates, and, for the critic, discourse is what makes contexts matter and is what makes literature “worlded,” not language. Yet, as Part I repeatedly demonstrates, it’s to language that most authors, critics, and philosophers grant final authority. Compared to the interpretation of Bernstein performed on discourse’s grounds, the implications for language-based interpretations are brought into high relief through Kates’s engagement with Cavell in Chapter 3, “From Persons to Words: ‘I am Stanley Cavell.’” To reiterate, A New Philosophy of Discourse never takes a polemical stance toward its interlocutors and, as noted above, commits to the position that the subjects of discourse only come into view through talk!, through the back and forth of agreement and disagreement. Accordingly, while Kates does point to the ways in which Cavell’s thinking falls back on and is limited by a privileging of language, this develops as a necessary step toward better understanding the subject at hand—discourse and the hermeneutics made possible by such. And to be sure, Kate’s own indebtedness to Cavell’s work is acknowledged throughout the study, such as in the role interpretation as philosophical praxis plays in Kates’s own methodology. Nonetheless, the effects of what Kates reveals to be Cavell’s recourse to language are quite significant, effectively undoing the priority Cavell places on persons. On the surface, so Kates shows, Cavell’s philosophy is person-oriented and discourseminded but as Cavell’s privileging of words comes into view, his philosophy ends up

596  Brian O’Connor prioritizing the individual and rejecting the recognition of the other that talk! ­inherently entails. For Cavell, by Kates’s read, interpretation driven by words as words “is thus not, in truth, unfolding and explicating another’s text and discourse” (67); instead, for Cavell, interpretation entails the self-creation of the interpreter over and above the ­author of the text at hand: “‘Mastering [a] text,’ by way of mastering its words, and thereby simultaneously authoring oneself, is the overarching task of reading or commentary, as Cavell’s hermeneutics explicitly envisions it” (69). Discussing Cavell’s “Being Odd, Getting Even,” Kates reaches these conclusions through Cavell’s self-admittedly less-than-rigorous interpretation of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance.” Cavell sees Emerson as both referencing and revising Descartes’ cogito, but this interpretation is based entirely on the presence of certain words in Emerson’s text (“I think, I am” and “author”) and their similarity to words that appear in Meditation II and III, “Without commenting on the remark’s context,” as Kates is clear to note. In other words, for Kates, Cavell stakes his claim that interpretation is an act of self-authorship on trivial similarities between Emerson and Descartes, a move enabled entirely by words and not through the engaged back-and-forth of discourse within certain contexts. Indeed, no talk! is intended (or desired) by Cavell at all, Kates shows, only the reader’s construction of a “father tongue” from the “mother tongue” of the text being interpreted (67). In this way, readers don’t enter into discourse with authors and texts and “All interpretation is, then, a mastery, and a listening and obedience, aimed at a text’s words, organized around the reader’s ­self-authoring in the face of uncreated others” (69). According to Kates, Cavell’s construal of interpretation presents a “freezing of talk!’s temporality” and represents what he calls a “species of Unbecoming” (70) that takes no account of others as others or the discourse of others as discourse. We can see how this would be problematic and troubling for a project in pursuit of discourse’s worldedness as Cavell’s model of interpretation only leads one further into oneself. An implication of Kates’s analysis of Cavell, especially when viewed in light of Bernstein’s treatment, is that if discourse is worlded, language alone causes a radical un- or de-worlding at the expense of other persons (who remain “uncreated”) and insight into the world itself. The competing views of interpretation presented in Part I speak to the ethics underlying Kates’s study. Implicitly called for in A New Philosophy of Discourse is a critical and philosophical practice that unfolds through dialog, talk!, with others while respecting and attending to the discourse of those others without seeking to reject or subsume said discourses to one’s own, all in service of reaching better-tuned understandings of the subjects at hand. Part II, “Discourse and Text,” continues this work and seeks to explain how texts, understood as discourse, operate through the various participants of discourse: author/speaker, interpreter/hearer, world, and worldly subjects. Part II’s ultimate contention is that texts themselves, despite their seemingly stable form, are events and “never assume any final fixed shape” (226). To get here, Kates works through and pieces together aspects of Gadamer’s, Davidson’s, and Heidegger’s respective views on discourse, using each to account for gaps in the other, in order to provide a coherent model that can account for the ways texts—as discourse, as events—function over time. The capacity for a text to appear both the same and different is first explored in Chapter 6, “Can the Text Be ‘Saved’ in Discourse?” which arrives at this ­same-yet-different problematic through a reading of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s, “Against Theory.” Showing how Knapp and Michaels posit a “static model of the text’s constitution” (152), which would strip texts of their status as events, Kates turns to Gadamer in Chapter 7, whose philosophical hermeneutics, the question and answer of discourse, grant to the

Review of A New Philosophy of Discourse: Language Unbound  597 text the necessary dynamism. Kates pulls from Gadamer the latter’s de-objectification of the text, but ultimately finds Gadamer’s reconceptualization of language incommensurate with discourse’s ability to access and illuminate aspects of the world—the subject of discourse cannot genuinely reveal itself in discourse if there’s no guarantee that the disparate languages and worldviews of which Gadamer conceives refer to the same world. To overcome such obstacles, Kates takes up Heidegger and Davidson in Chapters 8 and 9, “Discourse” and “Discourse and Text,” respectively. Despite their differences, such as Davidson’s privileging of assertions and Heidegger’s rejection of the priority of such, Kates brings Heidegger and Davidson together to finally account for his model of discourse. Kates’s treatment of Heidegger and Davidson situates both in stark opposition to Cavell. Where Cavell, via Emerson, privileged the reader/interpreter over and above the author (as well as the text and the world), Heidegger privileges the subject of discourse, the things which discourse seeks to understand, while Davidson’s externalism allows for  the otherness of the author and the reader alike to both remain intact and factor into the interpretive process. As Kates, discussing Heidegger, writes, “Put most simply, interpreting understanding lets things be seen as something, but what is seen, and as what it is seen, again, recurs to the something, not to the interpretation” (199). Through Heidegger, Kates accounts for the subjects taken up by discourse and weds this to D ­ avidson’s externalism, which accounts for the kinds of authority retained by both author and reader, and Kates does this through the concept of historicity prevalent throughout A New Philosophy of Discourse: Davidson himself stresses the necessity of there being such prior encounters with the subject matters that enter discourse, and such an active priority or past, what I call historicity, allows for his approach to externalism to intersect with Heidegger’s ­practically oriented account of discourse. (221) Moreover, Kates contends, Heidegger is necessary to flesh out the implications of ­Davidson’s externalism because “Heidegger alone provides the pre-history of that historicity of understanding that Davidson’s account implies” (225). It is through Heidegger, Kates demonstrates, that we can recognize “a partially shared externalism” in all discourse, and it’s the conditions of this externalism, provided by Davidson, that accounts for the text’s ability to be both the same and different over time: the historicity the author brings to the text ensures the texts’ foreignness to/from the reader, while The double immersion in history (of both author and interpreter) that Davidson’s e­ xternalism lets be envisioned underpins a repeated resurgence of different cuts into the text, as Heidegger might put it, all of which are at least potentially cuts into the text and unfoldings of what it says, the historicity and history in question (related to the author) nevertheless ruling out nothing in advance concerning these events themselves. (226) In this way, a text comprises events always involving and triangulating “author/speaker, reader/hearer, and the things/truths they are about.” A New Philosophy of Discourse: Language Unbound covers tremendous ­intellectual ground and has implications for literary studies, theory, and philosophy alike. As important

598  Brian O’Connor as the talk! it performs, Kates positions the study as a worthwhile interlocutor in future talk! Not only does Kates offer sharp interventions into the existing commentary and scholarship on Cavell, Gadamer, Heidegger, and Davidson, but the treatment of d ­ iscourse, here, begs to be taken up by current trends in literary theory and criticism. For instance, Kates’s emphasis on use and context over words, structures, and language as such dovetails with developments in narrative theory, particularly the interest in fictionality recently spearheaded by James Phelan, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Richard Walsh. Similarly, work begun by Kates, here, could be built upon to further consider the implications of literature as discourse for the concept of genre as such. If, as Kates suggests, “any given instance of discourse or talk!...stands within a sequence of previous such productions, participating in what is called a historicity or traditionality bearing expectations as to how it operates and the uses to which it may be put,” then how discourse differs from genre could be further elaborated. After all, work within a genre inherently and self-consciously operates under similar conditions as discourse does in the quoted passage, and while works of a genre can be assumed to share certain features, the borders delimiting genres as such, especially in fiction, are rather porous and not meaningfully rule-bound. Finally, it would be productive to consider the work that discourse performs or allows for that such concepts as intertextuality might not. I have the treatment of Bernstein in mind, here, and his quoting/revision of the common, “This page intentionally left blank.” Kates’s foregrounding of discourse in the interpretation of Bernstein’s poem could provide provocative means for rethinking many of the interpretive problems that arise in the scholarship on literary postmodernism. Rich questions and future applications aside, A New Philosophy of Discourse offers a compelling model for how literary criticism can (and should) be performed. Kates ends the text stating, “all that remains to do is what really we have all always been doing all along, since it is all criticism can achieve: namely to interpret, to understand, and to talk!” (226), yet, by my view, it’s tempting to read this less as a collegial acknowledgment of shared disciplinary commitments and more as a much-needed challenge and call to action. Literary criticism is often all too eager to bend texts to the critic’s purposes, to decontextualize texts, and to import meanings wholesale from outside frameworks with little regard for the particularities of the text at hand. Kates’s work is both rewarding and refreshing for its thorough attentiveness to the authors with whose ideas it engages, the texts it seeks to interpret, the subjects it endeavors to understand, and the reader with whom such understanding unfolds.

33 Review of M. Hartimo, Husserl and Mathematics (Cambridge University Press 2021) Gabriele Baratelli

1 Overview Mirja Hartimo’s most recent book represents a further successful step in her study and critical engagement with phenomenology applied to the philosophy of mathematics. The text is composed of eight relatively independent chapters and a brief conclusion. ­Chapters from 2 to 6 follow a rather definite chronological sequence since each is ­devoted to one specific stage in Husserl’ philosophical trajectory, from the Philosophy of Arithmetic up to the Crisis of European Sciences. This research does not only show that the problem of the “mathematical” is a recurring concern for him but also that the different ways in which he has addressed it have always shaped the general framework of his philosophy. Chapters 1, 7, and 8 are dedicated to more general themes that embrace Husserl’s ­philosophy of mathematics in its entirety, as they regard, respectively, the characterization of his reflective method in opposition to the limited “scientific attitude” typical of mathematicians, an assessment of Husserl’s positions in the light of the main theories available today concerning the nature of mathematics and mathematical objects, and the clarification of his transcendental point of view in relation, and in contrast, to Kant. Hartimo’s approach is not a merely historical reconstruction that fights to find a privileged place for Husserl’s phenomenology in the gallery of past philosophies. Her theoretical and exegetical analyses have instead the merit of making Husserl’s ­contribution vivid and valuable for today’s debated questions in various fields. This is of course ­specifically true for the phenomenological research, which has to a certain extent forgotten the ­importance of a priori sciences for the determination of its ultimate goals, and for the philosophy of mathematics, which has so far neglected the potential benefit that Husserl’s methods and investigations could bring into play. Hartimo’s effort has the ambition to improve the fruitful dialogue between these two, in truth intimately affine, worlds. Inasmuch as phenomenology is concerned, Hartimo provides a detailed reading of Husserl’s published books as well as of the archipelago of materials coming from lectures, personal notes, etc. belonging to his immense Nachlass. By taking into account also the technical logical results of his time and the most prominent mathematical-philosophical works that were flourishing around them especially during the 1920s, she furnishes a new and more complex view of Husserl’s cultural background. The addition of an accurate and interesting study of Husserl’s hand-written marks and notes in his personal copies of those works (the authors considered are Becker, Hilbert, Weyl, among others) completes the picture and supports some speculations about the hidden reasons behind the transformations of his transcendental idealism in his more mature period.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003434801-38

600  Gabriele Baratelli In the philosophy of mathematics, Hartimo compares Husserl’s claims with a few ­ ell-assessed contemporary positions. The analysis demonstrates how profitable it would w be to have Husserl as a reference point in the discussion. Because he has anticipated many theses and ideas that are current money in the debate, his philosophy shows that it lives up to the challenges that the philosophy of mathematics has faced after his death. At the same time, Hartimo’s arguments indicate how Husserl’s philosophy cannot be reduced to one position, as it is rather a “combination view of mathematics,” that is, a syncretistic account capable of combining “constructivism, various kinds of structuralism, and ­platonism” (p. 173). She makes it clear that this does not need to be interpreted as a sign of conceptual confusion that has been dispelled by successive philosophical progress. Rather, it reveals that Husserl transcends the current philosophical framework since his analyses are much richer than what the current scholarly distinctions are able to capture. But it is precisely because his philosophy marks a difference by crossing the field from one point to the other that it is interesting. 2  The phenomenological difference In a certain sense, the entire text is an attempt to characterize this difference. The first chapter suggests that Husserl’s exceptional position with respect to today’s philosophical landscape is not due to a dogmatic difference, that is, to a different “theory” that is supposed to be a better account of what numbers are and what mathematics is all about. Phenomenology is at first metaphysically neutral: “Husserl does not take it as his task to defend any particular metaphysical view about the existence of mathematical entities. Instead, his focus is on mathematicians’ practices and their genuineness ­[Echtheit]” (p.  22). We see that the difference is methodical, it concerns the “philosophical attitude” more than the actual doctrine. The shift from objects to subjects underlines the fact that the focus is on the way of being of numbers and other mathematical entities within determinate and continuously evolving (theoretical) practices, and on how we originally (i.e., with evidence) encounter them. Disputing about their alleged “existence” or ­“inexistence” without having accomplished this preliminary clarification on the modality of their specific objectivity (for example, in contrast to the objectivity the external objects of sensuous experience) is, from a Husserlian standpoint, useless. Husserl’s challenge consists in constructing a rigorous philosophical method that investigates first of all how we speak about ideal objectualities and the limits of their givenness. This attitude can be then labeled as “transcendental” (since it takes into account the subjective conditions for the “constitution” of objects) and “critical” (since it does not take for granted the results of science). Yet, this Kantian demand is not fulfilled by a rationalistic a priori “philosophy-first” account but rather through the exercise of what Husserl calls “radical Besinnung.” It is defined as the “understanding of the purpose of the activity or theory in question” (p. 21). As Hartimo explains, “instead of focusing on ‘nature,’ Besinnung is a human scientific theoretical attitude, involving as it does an effort to understand others’ activities by way of identifying their goals correctly, through empathetic engagement with them” (p. 35). The target is not a specific doctrine, nor certain mathematical practices in themselves, but rather some spurious pseudo-philosophical interpretations that are superimposed on it without any methodical awareness. Husserl starts examining evidences that are sought for in the formal sciences, and then moves on to examine the various presuppositions assumed in these sciences. This

Review of Husserl and Mathematics  601 means, for example, uncovering mathematicians’ metaphysical commitments, which often are ­realist about mathematical entities. (p. 22) In fact, the chief mistake is that of “objectivism,” understood as a gross “realism” which splits altogether the object from any practice whatsoever and transforms it into an a­ bstract object. It is at this point that the epistemological enigmas and ­pseudo-problems occur. Insofar as much of the philosophy of mathematics presupposes this tendency, arguably inherited by the natural objectivism of mathematicians themselves, the “phenomenological difference” might help in changing the entire perspective without adding a new -ism to the collection. By focusing on the subjective side of the subject-object correlation, that is, before the unwarranted separation of objects has taken place, p ­ henomenology promises to disclose a series of new problems that are usually neglected, and to dissolve the traditional ones. This theoretical step is not of course immune to ambiguities but it has a few advantages, as Hartimo highlights. It allows us to make sense of the pluralities of mathematical manifestations in different theories and epochs since it admits that there can be several kinds of evidence, each having its own proper sense and legitimization. In fact, nothing in Husserl’s approach precludes new evidences and new goals, and hence new methods, from surfacing in mathematics. Consideration of all of them and how they relate to each other and the transcendental subjectivity gives a unified picture of a pluralistically given mathematics and should help in understanding its place in our life. (p. 174) A corollary is that it is pointless to look after an a-subjective, definitive, “essence” of numbers: they can manifest themselves as determinate groups of items in o ­ rdinary experience or as symbolically represented positions in “abstract” (Husserl would say “formal”) structures. The critical phenomenological method invites us to describe those forms of manifestation, avoiding any unnecessary objectification of those ­objects or any preference of one manifestation over the other. Husserl’s great teaching is to seek “to ensure that the methods and concepts used agree with the goals, that is, the evidences sought in the theory” (p. 186). Accordingly, one cannot take for granted the results of modern mathematics while ignoring the past experiences by pretending that they do not bring along philosophical problems. Husserl’s “historical-intentional” research is not to be understood as a factual investigation. The interest on correct purposes makes it necessary for him to go back to see “how individuals’ goal-directed actions, in a historical situation, have shaped the subsequent development” (p. 17), and how the subsequent development has threatened the distortion of these original purposes. The critical ­investigation must emend the shifts of meaning that occur within history in the passage from one generation to the other – shifts which are also responsible for the foundational paradoxes – by ­recollecting the series of mathematical manifestations in one synthetic movement that ­exceeds even the limits of exact science. As Hartimo nicely puts it: “It is an ­all-encompassing transcendental phenomenology where all aimings, attainments, and failures are related to the transcendental subjectivity, and hence ultimately relative points of view find their place in the unity of life” (p. 185).

602  Gabriele Baratelli In conclusion, Hartimo’s presentation places the phenomenological difference in the attitude toward the subjective constitutive origins of mathematical objects, whereas the usual approach starts from the end, that is, from ready-made mathematical entities and theories, and tries to apply to them an accessory, ultimately posthumous, questioning. 3  Husserl and Skolem’s theorem Regarding Husserl’s scholarship, I would like to focus on Hartimo’s most challenging historical thesis, which is developed in Chapter 6, tellingly entitled “Gödel, Skolem, and the Crisis of the 1930s.” Her contribution concerns the much-debated effects of the metamathematical results (most of which achieved when Husserl was old or even after his death) on Husserl’s conception of mathematics. So far, the discussion has been centered on the impact that Gödel’s incompleteness theorems would have on the Husserlian notion of definite multiplicity, whose definition (already developed in the late 1890s) has certainly many similarities with Hilbert’s concept of complete formal system. Against a tradition that traces back to Jean Cavaillès, Hartimo argues that these technical results do not affect the general conception since Husserl “already had some such view of the inexhaustibility or incompletability of the formal characterization of the world.” Furthermore, “he held the axiomatic ideal as an ideal, as something that regulates the course of thinking, not something necessarily reachable” (p. 148). On the contrary, she claims that the so-called Löwenheim-Skolem theorem on ­categoricity was “devastating to many of Husserl’s basic beliefs” (p. 148). The theorem states that if a (first-order) system has an infinite model, then it has a model for every infinite cardinality. Its importance lies in the fact that it puts into question the capacity of formal systems to univocally capture a determinate domain (for example, that of natural numbers) up to isomorphism. Hartimo’s interesting hypothesis is that this result is not only relevant for Husserl’s specific notion of definite multiplicity but has great consequences for his philosophy overall. This new thesis is based on two argumentative steps: (1) she claims that Husserl’s philosophy undergoes to a radical change in the last period of his life, a change that is particularly visible in the Galileo-section of the Crisis, written in 1936. She interprets the famous statement in §9h, according to which “we take for true being what is actually a method,” as addressing a merely instrumental account of the mathematical method, which is no longer considered capable of giving us any substantial truth about the real world. Thus, “whereas earlier Husserl viewed definite manifolds as the guiding ideal for mathematics and for physics, he now seems to regard such a view as an unjustified presupposition of modern science” (p.147). This is clearly a destructive judgment because if the “axiomatic ideal is now a mere method,” the criticism “extends to the whole normative framework [of science], and the lenses through which Husserl, too, had seen the world” (p. 156); (2) she accounts for this radical change by referring to Skolem’s result, as it challenges many of Husserl’s fundamental ideas. In fact, (a) “it shows that there no unique characterization of natural numbers or real numbers, that is, no axiomatically determined ‘essences of numbers,’” (b) it “repudiates Husserl’s argument against psychologism by showing that categorical theories do not demarcate ideal structures that are independent of any acts by human beings,” (c) “it shatters Husserl’s view about the ideal structures guiding mathematics, and his idea of mathematics as ­providing then normative ideal that guides physics” (p. 148). Now, despite the fascinating account, I find both steps rather problematic for a few reasons. First of all, it is unlikely that Husserl has not explicitly talked about this a­ lleged

Review of Husserl and Mathematics  603 transformation, despite the huge impact on his entire philosophical research after the Philosophy of Arithmetic up to the early 1930s. In contrast with what he did in the Logical Investigations, where he harshly criticized himself for having embraced psychologism in his previous work, Husserl apparently does not mention such a new dramatic shift in his conception even though, as Hartimo notes, Husserl would have rejected in this way a view “that he held in Formal and Transcendental Logic, published only seven years earlier” (p. 147). Textual evidence shows on the contrary that when Husserl refers to his previous books in relation to mathematical topics, he does so to stress the continuity of his account (for example, when he refers to Ideas and Formal and Transcendental Logic to complete the sketchy characterization of the concept of definite manifold in the §9f of the Crisis). Moreover, Hartimo neglects to consider in her analysis what is arguably the most natural way of interpreting that passage, which does not ask for the introduction of such a strong assumption. The critical point does not seem to involve the method of axiomatization itself, but rather its misunderstanding. In accordance with Hartimo’s own characterization of Husserl’s methodology, the misunderstanding arises once the authentic goals of a determinate theoretical practice are somehow betrayed, so that, for example, the results of the mathematical technique applied to nature are objectified, whereas ordinary subjective experience is undervalued as pre-scientific, and thus alien to any objective value. If Husserl’s critical target is this unjustified objectification, then one is not forced to deduce that, for the late Husserl, “there is no objective actual and true nature, or true being, to be disclosed by the Euclidean method” (p. 147), but rather that the authentic sense of what is disclosed is threatened by concealment and confusion. Husserl’s ­philosophy is meant to provide a solution to reveal and correct this type of tacit conceptual shifts without denying ipso facto the normative status of axiomatization for natural and formal sciences. Husserl is equally silent with respect to an alleged influence of Skolem’s theorem on his thought. By looking at his personal library, Hartimo has shown that he was certainly aware of this result from Waismann’s book Einführung in das mathematische Denken published in 1936. While it is highly possible that Husserl could have found some significant reasons to reinforce his traditional distrust toward the outcomes of an excessive formalization of thought, it is nonetheless rather unplausible that this reading had convinced him in “giving up” formalization (or, as Hartimo says, “Dedekind abstraction”) as an authentic source of knowledge altogether. Since Husserl is now “instrumentalist about the ‘Dedekind’ abstracted structures” (p. 165), Hartimo argues, he “comes to view eidetic variation as the only legitimate access to abstract concepts” (p. 137). This would imply, it seems to me, the collapse of his entire philosophical framework, including both his decades-long battle against psychologism to give to formal ontology an objective status and, quite paradoxically, the possibility of the overcoming of the crisis of sciences itself, since the project of a “transcendental logic,” which is supposed to clarify the authentic sense of the operations of the scientists, presupposes the recognition of such objectivity. Be as it may, Hartimo’s remarks do not lose their cogency and deserve attention ­independently of the influence that certain technical results might have had on Husserl himself. That is, even if Husserl never changed his views in such a radical way at the end of his life, it still remains undecided the question of whether he should have changed his philosophy of mathematics in the way Hartimo has described it. In Chapter 7 she also provides a negative answer to this question by saying that Husserl’s instrumentalism

604  Gabriele Baratelli probably resulted “from a mistaken view of the importance of the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem” (p. 165). This is clearly an open problem that is not limited to Husserl – and which implies the discernment of what kind of logical notions he employed in his writings before the conceptual and terminological regimentation that occurred after his death – but that can have a relevance on the current discussion. 4  Concluding remarks I hope to have shown why Hartimo’s book is an original and thought-provoking ­engagement with Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics whose scope is never restricted to historical or philological theses, as it always finds in the theoretical consequences its deeper sense. That means that the study of Husserl’s philosophy becomes an occasion for us to find a new orientation for our questions and possibly to pave the way for a new philosophical exploration. This is precisely what Hartimo suggests in the end by asking: “what would phenomenological philosophy of mathematics look like in the twenty-first century?” (p. 189). As she characterizes it, it seems that the “phenomenological difference” brings in two great innovations with respect to the more traditional approaches. Because “its task is to describe how, through their practices, mathematicians constitute an open-ended and possibly pluralistic mathematical reality” (p. 190), it is flexible, as it can “capture the values guiding different mathematical practices” (p.  189) not only in the current situation but even in the past. This is the condition to make sense of the difficult problem of the historicity of a priori disciplines, that is, of the radical transformations to which they undergo through the ages and that c­ annot be easily inserted into the comfortable scheme of linear progression. Second, it is not prone to the unconditional authority of mathematical results, even if it does not oppose an equally dogmatic rationalistic “philosophy-first” account: “Husserl’s transcendentally clarified logic is ‘first philosophy’; it is ‘first’ but not on the basis of some a priori philosophical principles but on the basis of reflection on scientific practices” (p. 188). Philosophical freedom is here achieved by means of the “division of labor” between philosophers and mathematicians that precludes philosophy’s seduction by the call of the sirens of mathematical formal exactness. Their goals are complementary but essentially distinct. Thus, instead of embracing a blind “faith in formulas” by trying to give an illusionary foundation to mathematics using the mathematical method, the philosopher has to understand the goal as one of reconciling its objectivity with the plurality of subjective evidences. In this way the philosopher takes mathematics to be “an autonomous discipline, which has to be complemented by, not built upon, descriptive, psychological, or phenomenological clarification” (pp. 51–52).

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote footnotes. absolute subjectivity 206, 228–229, 231 Absolute Unity of Dancer and Dance 257–269 abstract painting, image seeing simulation 178 Achilles 488, 491, 494, 495, 502, 508 Acocella, Joan 265, 266 acosmism 389 Adams, Anselm 243 Adorno, Theodor W. 565, 582 aesthetic see individual entries aesthetic dilettantism 19 aesthetic distance 258 aesthetic evaluation 5, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 32, 75, 567 aesthetic mind 278 aesthetic normativity and deviation: delicacy and imagination 25–31; inner concentration 19, 20; outer concentration 19, 20; philosophical aesthetics 16–17; relationality and responsiveness 20–25; Romanticism 32; subjectivity and objectivity 17–20 aesthetic perception 570–574; beauty (or ugliness) 182; consequences for 187–191; depicting surface 171; iconic function 178–179; image consciousness 170, 172; image object 173; image seeing simulation (see image seeing simulation); indexical function 179; multiply depicting design 182–187; physical image 171–172; printed paper/painted canvas 172; style 181–182; transparency reduction 181; twofoldness 171, 173–174, 189 aesthetic realism 21 aesthetic theory 3, 4, 6, 9, 32, 62, 130, 580; weather 125, 129–130 aesthetic transcendence 268, 271 aesthetic uniqueness, dance: Absolute Unity of Dancer and Dance 257–269; kinesthesia 269–278; qualitative dynamics of movement 269–278

Agamben, Giorgio 426 Albers, Josef 59 Albertazzi, Liliana 6, 7, 71 Alexander, Samuel 431–432 Allen, Grant 7 alternative mirror theory 9, 149–152 Althusser, Louis 437–438 Altieri, Charles 593 ambivalence 94–95, 100–103 Anaximander 549, 563 Anschütz, Ottomar 280 antinomic emotional dynamics 95 antinomy 8, 21, 94–95, 104, 416 anxiety 83, 93, 110, 114, 122, 157, 313, 314, 359, 382; Befindlichkeit 398–400; being, object and thing 400–401; being-at-peace 402–403; counterexistentials 403–405; in danger 397–398; ekstasis vs. enstasis 406–407; to eternity 383–384; fundamental affection 405–406; liturgical reduction 396–397; porous boundaries 395–396; serenity and mortal 401–402 Aquinas, Thomas 395, 450 Arendt, Hannah 366 Aristotle 36, 37, 40, 41, 263, 342, 379, 473–474, 483, 487–493, 495, 497–498, 502, 505, 536; continuity and infinity 508–511; Zeno’s argument against plurality 507–508; Zeno’s paradoxes 511–514 Arnheim, Rudolf 61–64, 74 art see art, surprise model; dance, aesthetic uniqueness art, surprise model: ambivalence 94–95, 100–103; antinomic emotional figures 106–107; antinomy 94–95; crystallization 90–91; emotional extremeness 91–92; emotional polarity 91; interior opening 103–105; MitleidMitfreude 95–99; pleasure-displeasure,

606 Index sensory and emotional process 95–99; sober drunkenness 105–106; surprise and extreme emotional dynamics 92–94; univalence 94–95 artist’s gesture, visual art 141, 145–148 atmospherology 133 Attridge, Derrek 593, 594 Augenblick 300–301, 301 auto-affection 388, 391–392 axiomatic supposition 224 Badiou, Alain 312, 347, 349–351, 349n18; claims and procedures 341–343; poem 352–354; polemos 354–356; truth 341, 344–346 Baethgen, Friedrich 470 Balanchine, George 266 Ballerini, Arnaldo 156 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 394 Barnes, Hazel E. 490, 495–497 Barnes, Jonathan 485 Barth, Karl 376 Barthes, Roland 233, 238–239, 251 Bates, Norman 289–290 Baudelaire, Charles 124 Baumgartner, Alexander Gottlieb 54 Bausch, Pina 13, 262, 263, 269 Beaufret, Jean 308, 309 beauty (or ugliness), aesthetic perception 182 Becker, Oskar 485, 502 Beckett, Samuel 51 Befindlichkeit 398–400, 405 behaviourism 433–434 Behrent, Michael 422 being see individual entries being, object and thing 400–401 being-at-peace 314, 402–403 Being and Time (Heidegger) 426, 561; affect and eternity 376–393; Geschichtlichkeit and Mitsein 357–375 Bell, Winthrop 474–475 Benjamin, Walter 111–112 Bennett, Andrew 119 Bergson, Henri 6, 34–53, 388, 425, 473, 494–496, 504; Matter and Memory 35, 43–44; reader of Of Habit 36, 42–43 Berleant, Arnold 86, 88, 130–131, 134–136, 138 Berlyne, Daniel 7 Bernau Manuscripts 534n35 Bernstein, Charles 594–595, 598 Berson, Nancy 240, 251n75 Beuys, Joseph 137 Biemel, Walter 80–84, 86, 88 Bigwood, Carol 355 Blamey, Kathleen 328 Blanchot, Maurice 393

Blankenburg, Wolfgang 154–155 Bleuler, Eugen 154–155 Boehme, Jacob 477 Böhme, Gernot 132–135, 137 Bollnow, Otto Friedrich 132 Bolzano, Bernard 473, 498–500 Bonnard, Pierre 184–185, 185 Booth, N. 485 boredom atmospheres: and attunement 113–117; fragility and vulnerability 109; moods 109–112; object-directed emotions 108; peripheral awareness 117–124 Borromini, Francesco 63 Brackmann, Albert 469, 470 Brandt, Bill 243, 246, 249, 249 Brentano, Franz 58, 61–62 Brochard, Victor 472–473, 484, 490, 491 Brough, John 13, 193, 196n24 Brown, Carolyn 13, 261 Brown, Peter 415 Brunschvicg, León 475 Bullough, Edward 258 Bundgaard, Peer F. 10–11 Burchett, Kenneth 73 Burke, Edmund 7 Butler, Samuel 437 Calder, Alexander 65 Cantor, Georg 473, 481–482, 498, 500–504, 514–515 Capucci, Roberto 76 Carlson, Allen 134 Carlyle, Thomas 427–428 Casey, Edward S. 87 Cassara, Bruno 107 Cavaillès, Jean 483, 602 Cavell, Stanley 33, 593–596, 598 celestial ecology 131 celestial ecosystem 131 Celibidache, Sergiu 12; ethics, musical time 206–231 Cézanne, Paul 49–50, 52 Chessboard (Klee) 178, 179, 185n34, 187, 191 De Chirico, Giorgio 94 Chrétien, Jean-Louis 92, 102–103 cinematography see movie Clavel, Maurice 394–395 Clemens, Justin 312 Cochrane review 155, 162, 168 Coghill, George 437 cognitive neuroscience 66–67; visual art 140 cognitive process model 93 cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) 155, 159, 160, 169 Cohen, Ted 81 collective memory 293, 297–298, 302 Colledge, Richard 312–313

Index  607 Color Character 75 Color Element 75, 76 Color Gestalt 75–76 communicative musicality 163–164 communist hypothesis 341–342 consciousness 522, 524, 526; image consciousness 170, 172, 195–199, 232–236, 235; non-thetic activity 51; sensory self-consciousness 156; timeconsciousness 224, 225 concrete walls, memory topographies 298–300 The Confessions of the Flesh (Foucault) 415, 417, 419, 421–422 Conrad, Theodor 58, 476–477 Conrad-Martius, Hedwig 476–, 480 Constable, John 176, 177 Contour Line Network 75 Cooke, Bryan 313 core of the essence (CoE) 450–452; cultural sciences 463; distinctions 456; doxography 452–453; Gestalt 464–467; historical sciences 463–464; individuals ideas 462–463; individual structures 462; natural sciences 463; phenomenological cartography 454–455; possibilities 458; principle of 455; sciences of spirit 463; scientific thinking 457, 459; structure of 458, 458; uniqueness 459 Cornford, Francis M.D. 484 corporeal 5, 14, 133, 280n2, 282 corporeality 127, 279, 280n2, 284 Cournot, Antoine August 437 Coyne, Ryan 410 Creative Evolution (Bergson) 34, 35, 47 Crewdson, Gregory 241, 242 Croce, Arlene 258–259 cultural estrangement 126 cultural sciences 463 Cunningham, Merce 13, 257, 260, 263–265, 269, 273–274, 278 Curley, E. M. 376–377 da Vinci, Leonardo 41–43, 262 dance, aesthetic uniqueness: Absolute Unity of Dancer and Dance 257–269; kinesthesia 269–278; qualitative dynamics of movement 269–278 Daniélou, Jean 394 Danto, Arthur C. 79–80 das Atmospharische 134 Dasein 113–117, 269, 270, 313, 314, 321, 329, 332–335, 380–387, 400, 413, 427, 429, 430, 550–553, 582, 583; Geschichtlichkeit 370–373; radicalising Mitdasein 364–368; see also Daseinsanalytik

Daseinsanalytik: Being and Time 358–359; Geschichtlichkeit 362–363; Mitsein 360–361; Schuld 359–360 Dastur, Françoise 309–311, 383 Dauben, Joseph 504 Daubert, Johannes 58 David, Jacques-Louis 174 Davidson, Donald 593 Davidson, Scott 593, 596–598 Davies, Stephen 145n25 Delany, Paul 243 Delaunay, Robert 64 Deleuze, Gilles 6, 34–53, 307, 316, 326, 388; decentering subjectivity 50–52 delicacy: emotional responsiveness 25; hypersensitivity 27; and imagination 27–28; implications 26; norminstituting function 28–31 Depraz, Natalie 7–8 Derrida, Jacques 307, 310–311, 316, 317, 323, 354–355, 426; differance 325–327 Descartes 48, 92, 308, 311, 329–331, 342, 384–385, 476, 480, 481, 483, 486, 497–499, 505–506, 596 Di Paolo, Ezequiel 164 Diaconu, Madalina 9 dialogical prosthesis 161 Dickie, George 568 Diels, Hermann 485 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze) 36, 50 discontinuous continuity 288n16 discriminative perception 136 documentary photography 244–246 Doğançay, Burhan 14, 15, 292–294, 300, 304; artistic production 300–302 dogmatic theology 415 Dostoevskian model 121–122 Dreyer, Carl Theodor 289 Driesch, Hans 425, 427, 429, 443 Duchamp, Marcel 57 Dufrenne, Mikel 5, 127–130; aesthetic attitude 565–590 Dyer, Geoffrey 246, 249 Ebbinghaus illusion 56 eco-phenomenology 9 ego-activity 162 ego-consistency 162 El Greco 63 Eldridge, Patrick 204–205 Elliot, Ray K. 87 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 596 emotional dynamics 92, 94–95 emotional extremeness 91–92, 94 emotional mediation hypothesis 65, 70–71 emotional responsiveness 25 emotional valence 93, 94–95

608 Index empathy 60, 142–144 empirical aesthetics 6–7; Aesthetics of Space (Lipps) 56; art and perception 56–57; elements 56; Klee’s theory 59–60; visual effect 57 Engstrøm, David 266 environmental aesthetics 126, 131 environmental ethics 136 environmental para-aesthetics 137 equiprimordiality 383 Ernout, Alfred 337 Eros 101 Erwiderung, Eine 470 Essence of Manifestation (Hegel) 384–385, 389, 390 essential core 451 estrangement effect 288 ethics, musical time: absolute subjectivity 228–229; duration 217–219; empty constitution 227; ethical awareness 231; human transcendence 207–208; identical instant 230; immanent time 225; implications 219–224; perception 226–227; Phenomenology of Music 209–210; physical now 229–230; primal impressions 225–228, 229n77; retentions 226; simultaneity 210–213; tempo 213–217; temporal phenomena 228; time-consciousness 224, 225 Evans, Walker 246, 249 Evellin, François 473, 492 existential analytics 358–359, 385, 399 experimental aesthetics: cognitive neuroscience 66–67; collaboration 64–65; critique of taste 54–55; cross-modality 70; emotional mediation hypothesis 65, 70–71; expressive qualities (see expressive qualities); Fechnerian design 65–66; golden ratio 55; harmony and balance 73–76; independent and dependent variables 69–70; neurophysiology 67; Osgood semantic differential 69; phenomenologicalexperimental approach 67–68, 77; psychometric measurements 69; psychophysics 72–73; see also empirical aesthetics expressive qualities: empathy 60–61; Fechnerian psychophysics 62; of paintings 63–64; properties 61; structural skeleton concept 63; visual forces 62–63 external depiction 193, 194, 203–205 Faurer, Louis 235, 246–247 Fechner, Gustav 7, 56; legacy 65–66

Fellini, Federico 289, 290 feminist theory 307 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 330, 392 fictional emotion 28 Fink, Eugen 262, 485 Fogassi, Leonardo 142 Form Character 75 forward model 151 Foucault, Michel 312, 314, 340–341, 559; selfhood and Christianity 409–424 4Fs(feeding, fighting, fleeing, fornicating) 429 Francesca, Piero della 191 Freedberg, David 141, 151, 174n12 Frege, Gottlob 474, 520 Freud, Sigmund 92 Freyd, Jennifer 149–150 Fried, Gregory 355 Friedemann, H. 464 Frith, Chris 151 Fritsche, Johannes 358n3 Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (FCM) (Heidegger) 426–427 Fundamental Ontology 4 Furley, David J. 485 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 469, 565, 593, 596–598 Galileo 478, 486, 505–506 Gallagher, Shaun 13, 151, 274–275 Gallese, Vittorio 141, 151, 174n12 Garner, Stanton 277–278 Geiger, Moritz 5–6, 17–24, 32, 58, 61, 92, 110–111 The Genesis of Living Forms (Ruyer) 426, 443 De Gennaro, Ivo 12 George, Stefan 464, 469 Geschichtlichkeit 362–363, 369–373 Gesell, Arnold 437 Gestalt 58, 60, 63, 64, 68, 70, 73–75, 157 Gilson, Étienne 477 goal-directed gestures 144 Goethe 133, 134, 464, 466, 468, 469 golden rectangle 55 Goodall, Jane 428 Göttingen 475–477 Graham, Martha 257, 258, 261 Grierson, John 242 Griffero, Tonino 133 groove, social isolation 163–164, 166–168 Grünbaum, A. A. 272 Grundbefindlichkeit 403, 405 Grundstimmung 402–403, 405 Grush, Rick 525, 526 Gschwandtner, Crina 107 Gundolf, Friedrich 464, 466–469, 471 Gurvitch, Georges 309 Guthrie, William K.C. 484, 485

Index  609 Haapala, Arto 7 Habermas, Jürgen 412 habit and creativity: Creative Evolution (Bergson) 34, 35, 47; identity/ personality 34, 39; motor contrivances 34, 42; obscure activity 39 Haldane, J. B. S. 444 Hanson, Duane 236 happiness and unhappiness 81 harmony and balance, experimental aesthetics: color harmony 73–76; granularity 75; laws of 74 Hartimo, Mirja 599–604 Hasse, Helmut 484 Haydn, Joseph 90 Heath, Thomas 485 Hegel, G.W.F. 298–299, 342, 356, 387, 389–391, 565 Heidegger, Martin 4, 5, 8, 13, 80, 82–88, 91, 103, 108–124, 126, 263, 269, 270, 271, 298–299, 307–315, 316–318, 341–344, 347–351, 349, 409–424, 433–435, 437, 438, 443, 445, 580, 582–589, 593, 596, 598; animal captivation 426–430; anxiety 394–408; attunement and boredom 113–117; Befindlichkeit 398–400; being, object and thing 400–401; being-at-peace 402–403; Being and Time, affect and eternity 376–393; Being and Time, Geschichtlichkeit and Mitsein 357–375; counter-existentials 403–405; in danger 397–398; ekstasis vs. enstasis 406–407; fundamental affection 405–406; Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics 426; on ipseity 328–339; life sciences 426–430; liturgical reduction 396–397; madness 543–551; onticoontological difference 320–323; poem 351–354; polemos 354–356; porous boundaries 395–396; serenity and mortal 401–402; thinking and danger, insanity 552–558; time dispositions 380–383; truth 340–341, 344–346 Henry, Michel 313, 378, 403; acosmism 389; auto-affection 388, 391–392; biopolitics 393; The Essence of Manifestation 384–385; ontological monism 387; transcendence 385, 386, 388 Hepburn, Ronald W. 129n17 Hering, Jean 71, 75, 476–478; core of the essence 450, 452, 454–459, 458, 460 Hewson, Mark 343 Hilbert, David 475 Hildebrandt, K. 464 Hine, Louis 244

Hintikka, Jaakko 485 historical sciences 463–464 The History of Beyng (Heidegger) 560 Hitchcock, Alfred 289, 290 Hölderlin, Friedrich 352, 353, 355, 543, 546, 552, 564 Hopkins, Robert 197 Hopper, Edward 124 Horner, Robyn 313–314 Howard, Luke 133 Hue Circle 71, 76 Hughes, Fiona 575 Hume, David 5–6, 16–33, 50, 380 Humean theory 6 Humphrey, Doris 273 Husserl, Edmund 3–5, 11–14, 58, 92, 96, 98, 104, 109, 110, 131, 232–238, 241–245, 247, 251, 252, 254–255, 262, 274, 276, 290, 316–317, 323, 330, 380, 383, 395, 398–400, 402, 430, 454, 455, 474–478, 480, 521, 566, 569, 570, 574; depiction revisited 192–205; depiction theory 170–191; empathy and artefacts 142–144; ethics, musical time 206–231; immanence vs. transcendence 317–320; inner time-consciousness 522, 524, 526; Mathematics 599–604; memory 292–304 Hyman, John 186n35 hyperrealist 252–253 hyperreflexivity 158 hypersensitivity, delicacy 27 idealistic art 245 identity: contemplation 51–52; definition 38 “illusion of immanence”87 image consciousness: aesthetic perception 170, 172; photograph 232–236, 235 image seeing simulation: abstract painting 178; image object design 175, 176, 178, 180–181; The Leaping Horse (Constable) 176, 177; quasi-perceptual experience 174 imagination, definition of 87 imagination emotion 28, 28n43 Implicit Association Test (IAT) 72 Impressionism 58, 60 Ingarden, Roman 3–5, 17n2, 184n32, 474–475 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 63 insanity: human essence 543; and reason 559–562; thinking and danger 552–559 intentionality 5, 10, 108–109, 212, 221–223, 229–231, 272, 404, 406; artist’s gesture 145–148; see also neurophenomenology

610 Index internal depiction 193; impure 201; pure 199–200 internal purposiveness 577–580 intimate attitude 18 Inwood, Michael 399–400 ipseity 155, 311, 313, 328; characteristics of 336; conceptuality 333–336; and disruptions 156–159; thematization 336–339 Irarrázaval, Lenor 161 De Jaegher, Hanne 164 Jameson, Fredric 593 Jaspers, Karl 91 Jonasian turn 522, 527 Joyce, James 122 Kafka, Franz 392 Kandinsky, Wassily 60, 64, 68, 71–73, 75, 392 Kanizsa, Gaetano 61 Kant, Immanuel 3, 20, 21n16, 31, 36, 54–55, 95, 100, 102, 103, 109, 316–317, 320, 330, 342, 377, 410, 413, 420; aesthetic attitude 565–590 Kantorowicz, Ernst, core of the essence 464, 469–471 Karamazov, Ivan 563 Kates, Joshua 593–598 Kazan, Elia 241 Kehre 321 Kelly, Adam 117, 121–122 Kértész, Andre 248, 248 Kiarostami, Abbas 585–586 Kierkegaard, S. 280–281 kinesthesia 275–277 kinesthetic resonance 277 kinetic-affective phenomenon 257–258 Kircher, Tilo 155 Kirk, Geoffrey S. 485 Kivy, Peter 24–25 Klee, Paul 59–60, 63, 64, 178, 178n17, 179, 185n34, 187, 191, 209n8 Klein, Felix 475 Knapp, Steven 596 Knoblich, Günther 150 Kockelman, Joseph 84 Köhler, Gerhard 485 de Kooning, Willem 145 Koyré, Alexander: arguments on infinity  497–502; Bemerkungen zu den Zenonischen Paradoxen 472–476, 483–515; continuous quantum 502–504; hermeneuticalphenomenological methodology 478–484; initist hypothesis 492–495; interpretation 491–492; motion 504–506; motion and rest 504–506;

philosophy and phenomenology 474–478; Zenonian Arguments 487–491, 495–497 Kraepelin, Emil 154–155 Kranz, Walther 485 Krueger, Felix 163, 165, 168 Lacan, Jacques 148, 307, 346–351, 349, 356, 409–410; truth 341 Lacoste, Jean-Yves 313–314; anxiety 394–408; Befindlichkeit 398–400; being, object and thing 400–401; being-at-peace 402–403; counter-existentials 403–405; in danger 397–398; ekstasis vs. enstasis 406–407; fundamental affection 405–406; liturgical reduction 396–397; porous boundaries 395–396; serenity and mortal 401–402 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 372 Lamarque, Peter 81–82 Lamentation (Graham) 258 Landes, Donald 6 Landscape with Trees and Figures (van Gogh) 181–183, 183 Lange, Dorothea 244 Lawrence, D. H. 278 Lecoq, Jacques 277, 278 Lee, Henri D.P. 484, 485, 489 The Leaping Horse (Constable) 176, 177 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von 342 Levinas, Emmanuel 309 Levy, Bernard-Henri 394 lifeworld 244 linear simultaneity 211 Lipps, Hans 474–477 Lipps, Theodor 56, 58, 60–62, 76, 92, 98, 99; legacy 58–59 Lloyd, Chris 525–526 Locke, John 293, 311, 329–332, 380 Logical Investigations 3 Lorenz, Konrad 425 Lotz, Christian 195n16 Löwenheim-Skolem theorem 602 Löwith, Karl 370 de Lubac, Henri 394 Magri, Elisa 8 Maiese, Michelle 10 Malabou, Catherine 36 Maldiney, Henry 106 Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich 63, 68 Mallarmé, Stéphane 352–353 Mamardashvili, Merab 548, 560n92 Marcel, Gabriel 276 Marey, Étienne-Jules 280 Marion, Jean-Luc 313–314, 394–396 Marshall, H. R. 7

Index  611 Martius, Hedwig 474–475 Marx, Karl 392 “master/slave” dialectic 356 materiality 214n24 Matisse, Henri 63, 175 Matter and Memory (Bergson) 35, 43–44 Mazo, Joseph 258 McNeill, William 428 memory topographies: artistic production 300–302; concrete walls 298–300; multiplicity source 294–296; recollection and repetition 296–298; spatial things 293; temporal things 293; transparent walls 298–300 The Merchant of Four Seasons (Bonnard) 184–185, 185 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4–6, 9, 13, 29–30, 34–53, 126–127, 130, 135, 147, 152, 269, 271–274, 309–311, 315, 317, 319, 414, 427, 436–440, 442, 444, 521, 570, 571, 574; animality and behaviour structure 430–436; artistic style 49–50; creative repetition and subjectivity 44–45; on exteriority 444–445; habit formation 45–47; intention and expressiveness 142, 144–145; intertwining life and matter 436–437; life sciences 436–437; memory 47; motivation 45; sedimentation 45–46, 49–50; Structure of Behavior 426; tacit cogito 47–49; The Visible and the Invisible 323–325, 426 Metaphysics (Aristotle) 40, 41 Michaels, Walter Benn 593, 596 Michelangelo 63 Michotte, Albert 61 Minkowski, Eugene 154–155 Mion, Regina-Nino 11, 12 mirror neuron theory 10, 141–143, 141n12, 145, 146, 150 Mitleid-Mitfreude 95–99 Mitsein 360–361, 369; as being-in-common 368–369 Møller, Paul 155 Mommsen, Theodor 460–461, 461, 466, 467 Mona Lisa 65 Mondrian, Piet 64 mood empathy 110 moods, boredom atmospheres 109–114, 113n17, 121–123 Moore, Henry 63–64 Mossler, Karin 162 movie: motion profiles 284–291; movement 283–284; narrative structure 279; photography 282–283; pure resistance 282; reproduction 281; running pictures 280 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 91, 100, 209

Mueller, Edgar 57 Müller-Lyer, Franz C. 56–58 multiply depicting design, image object: brushwork 182–184; properties 182; shapes 184–187 Munich phenomenologists 454 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 285 music therapy, schizophrenia 154–169 Muybridge, Eadweard 280 Myron 59 Nanay, Bence 188n38, 190, 568 Nancy, Jean-Luc 312–313, 342; Being and Time, Geschichtlichkeit and Mitsein 357–375; Geschichtlichkeit 369–373; radicalising Mitdasein 364–368; radicalising Mitsein, being-in-common 368–369; via media 373–374 Natural Color System (NCS) 75–76 natural sciences 126, 128–134, 225, 319, 463 Nelson, Leonard 475 Neo-Darwinism 425 Neofinalism (Ruyer) 426, 439, 445 Neoplatonism 412 Neuenhausen, Siegfried 80–84, 86, 88 neuroaesthetics, visual art 7, 140 neurophenomenology: ephetic phenomena 528–532; involuntary desideration 530–531; involuntary predisposition 531–532; naturalized epistemology 519–522; orexes 532–534, 540–541; SEEKING system analysis 536–540; temporal horizon, orectic opening-up 534–536; temporality 519–522, 525–528; transient/elementary deliberation 529 Newman, Barnett 209n8, 219n38 A New Philosophy of Discourse: Language Unbound (Kates) 593–598 Newton 486, 505–506 Nielsen, Henrik Skov 598 Nietzsche, Friedrich 79, 106, 109, 307, 325–326, 392, 410, 543, 545, 552, 554, 562–564, 565, 581, 583 nihilism 126 Nixon, Nicholas 250 Noël, Georges 473, 484, 493–494, 504 normative claim 22 Nouveaux Philosophes 394 object-directed emotions 108 Of Habit (Ravaisson) 36, 40, 42–43 Olsen, Stein Haugom 81–82 ontological continuity 4–5 ontological monism 387, 388 ontology 4, 36–40, 128, 133, 312–314, 342–344, 346, 348, 379, 410, 450

612 Index optical illusions 56 Orozco, Gabriel 250, 250 Owen, Gwilym E.L. 484 oxymoronic emotions 92–93, 105 Panksepp, Jaak 536–541 Parmenides 316, 342, 352, 484 Parnas, Josef 154–155 pathic aesthetics 135–136 Pavlov’s behaviourism 433 Peden, Knox 314 person 21, 27, 72, 84, 91, 112, 157, 161, 167–169, 200, 234, 331–334, 337, 338 see also core of the essence (CoE) Pfänder, Alexander 58 Phelan, James 598 phenomenological aesthetics, Und dennoch 5; argumentative power 78; Belles lettres 79; community and communal ethos 81–82; empathy 85; imagination 87; painting 83–84, 86; thought experiments 82 phenomenological ecology 127 phenomenology see individual entries Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Dufrenne) 570–571 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 45, 47 phenomenology: gesture 316–317; immanence vs. transcendence 317–320; onticoontological difference 320–323; The Visible and the Invisible 323–325 phenomenon 3, 10, 12, 74, 75, 93, 141, 223, 257–258, 320, 382, 402–404, 524, 525 Philo 105 photography: aesthetic experience 251–255; documentary photography 244–246; image-consciousness 232–236, 235; image features 246–251; movie 282–283; reality 241–244; time mastery 236–241 Photorealist 252–253 physical atmospheres: aesthetic theory, weather 125, 129–130; antinaturalism to eco-phenomenology 126–129; commons, community and commitment 137–138; discriminative perception 136; engagement vs. atmospheres 130–134; environmental aesthetics 126; implications 137; improper aestheticism 136; language, history and culture 137; pathic aesthetics 135–136; phenomenographies and sources 135; revitalisation 134–135 Picasso, Pablo 63 Plato 79, 79n1, 88, 100–106, 342, 503, 554 pleasure-displeasure, sensory and emotional process 95–99

Plutarch 467 polarized affective dynamic model 93 polarizing valence 94 Pöll, Wilhelm 454, 455 Pollock, Jackson 63 Poovey, Mary 593, 594 positive empathy 98 Pozzo, Andrea 56–57 De Preester, Helena 9–10 primal impression 225–228, 229n77; memory topographies 294–296 primary emotions 92 primary memory 294–296 psychotic hallucinations 559n87 pure creation 36–37 pure photography 248 pure repetition 36–37 pure resistance, movie 282 qualitative dynamics, movement 258, 269–278 qualitative identity 338 Radhoff, Bernhard 346, 354 radicalising Mitdasein 364–368 Rahner, Karl 394 Ratcliffe, Matthew 109 Rausch, Edwin 61 Ravaisson, Félix 6, 34–53; habit 36–40; material utility 43; philosophical style 40–42 Raven, John R. 485 reflective judgment 574–577 Reinach, Adolf 58, 453, 464, 467, 474, 475 relational emotions 97 repressive hypothesis 413 Resnais, Alain 585–586 Reynaud, Charles-Émile 280n4 Reynolds, Jack 315 Ribbons on Gray 303 Richter, Gerhard 253n80 Ricœur, Paul 307, 311; on ipseity 328–339 Riis, Jacob 244 Rimbaud, Arthur 352–353 Rockmore, Tom 307–308 Rodin, Auguste 80 Roffe, Jon 315 Röhricht, Frank 161 Romano, Claude 311 Rosand, David 140, 148 Ross, Denman W. 488, 498, 508, 509, 512 Ross, William D. 484–485 Russell, Bertrand 475, 477, 482, 485, 495–497 Ruyer, Raymond 315, 427, 435, 436; on exteriority 444–445; The Genesis of Living Forms 426; Gestalttheorie and thematic activity 438–443; life sciences 437–438; Neofinalism 426; signal stimuli 443–444

Index  613 Sack, Oliver 539 Saint Augustine 409–424 Saito, Yuriko 137 Saks, Elyn 158–159 Sancho 25–26, 30 Sartre, Jean-Paul 4, 5, 85–88, 308, 309 Sass, Louis 154–155 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 184n33 Scheler, Max 96, 98, 99, 399, 454, 474 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 545 schizophrenia 559n84; getting into “groove” 166–168; ipseity and disruptions 156–159; music therapy 161–166; negative symptoms 154; phenomenological psychopathology 154; positive symptoms 154; social desynchronization 155; treatments 159–161 Schlegel, Friedrich 280–281 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 398–399 Schlick, Moritz 62 Schmitt, Carl 354, 423 Schmitz, Hermann 111, 132, 133, 135, 137 Scholz, Heinrich 484 Schönberg, Arnold 74 Schopenhauer, Arthur 119, 581 Schuld 359–360 Schulze, Otto 18 Scott Kelso, J. A. 266 Scotus, Duns 450 secret science 5 seeing-in and seeing-out, depiction revisited: empty intuition 205n78; external depiction 193, 194, 203–205; Hua XXIII 192; image consciousness 195–199; image presentation 194; internal depiction 193, 199–201 SEEKING system analysis: brain and anticipatory states 536–538; functionalized orectic phenomena 536; time relevance of 538–540 Seel, Martin 129, 129n20 Sennett, Richard 423 sensory self-consciousness 156 Sepp, Hans Reiner 14 Sessions, Roger 277–278 Seurat, Georges 145–146 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper 565 Shapiro, Meyer 83 Sharma, K. N. 264 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 13 Sherrington, C.S. 275, 276, 432–433 Siani, Alberto 587 Škodlar, B. 160 Skolem, Albert Thoralf 602–604 Sobchack, Vivian 280n3 sober drunkenness 92, 105–106

social desynchronization 156, 157 social re-synchronization 164 Socrates 450, 451 Sokolowski, Robert 198–199, 275–276 Solger, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand 280–281 Solli, Hans Petter 156, 166–167 Sonesson, Gören 193n3, 201 Sontag, Susan 13, 259–260 soul, contemplation 51–52 space 5, 14, 46, 111, 132, 163, 207, 208, 211–223; empirical aesthetics 56–57; visual 67 spatio-temporal continuum 221 Spiegelberg, Herbert 454 Spinoza, Benedictus de 342, 376–378, 419 Spranger, Eduard 470 Stanghellini, Giovanni 156 Stein, Edith 87–88, 474–477; core of the essence 450–469, 465, 471 Stimmung 399, 403, 405 Storr, Robert 253n80 Straus, Erwin 276 Structure of Behavior (Merleau-Ponty) 426 style, aesthetic perception 181–182 subject 8–14, 49, 50, 127–129, 159–164; aesthetic perception 170–191; see also individual entries subjectively universal validity, cognitive/ perceptual judgments 581 Summa, Michela 5–6 Szabó, Árpád 485 talking cure 160 Tannery, Paul 484 Taylor, Paul 263 Tellenbach, Hubert 132, 135 tempo 221n45; musical time 213–217 temporal and dynamic structure, surprise model 93 temporal feelings 218 Tengelyi, László 503 Tesnière, Lucien 334 Texture Element 75 Thomas, François 337 Thompson, Evan 525–528 time see individual entries time-consciousness 224, 225 Toadvine, Ted 127, 128, 130, 131, 440 Tolman, Edward 433–434 Tolstoy, Leo 81, 82 topographies of memory 14 Torsen, Ingvild 582 traditional artistic images 152 transcendence 385, 386, 388; vs. immanence 317–320 transcendentalism 318 transcends sound 212n16, 218–219

614 Index transparency discourses 299 transparency reduction 11 transparent walls, memory topographies 298–300 Truffaut, François 290 truth 340, 341, 344–346 Tsung, Hui 63 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 252 Uexküll, Jakob von 425, 427, 429–430, 434, 435, 437–439, 442 Valéry, Paul 263 van Gelder, Tim 525–526 van Gogh, Vincent 4, 82–84, 86, 87, 181–183, 183, 186, 587 Varela, Francisco J. 525–526 vertical simultaneity 211 verrückt experience 549 Vicario, Giovanni B. 61 The Visible and The Invisible and his Nature: Course Notes (Merleau-Ponty) 426, 431, 436 visual art: alternative mirror theory 149–152; artist’s gesture 141, 145–148; cognitive neuroscience 140; goal-directedness 142; kinesthetic circuit 140; mirror neuron theory 141, 141n12; neuroaesthetics 140; sensory-motor process 141 Visual Environment 75–76 Vlastos, Gregory 484, 490 von Hildebrand, Dietrich 474–475 von Laban, Rudolph 267 von Sybel, Alfred 476–477 Waismann, Friedrich 603 Walker, Nicholas 428 Wall, Jeff 241–242

A Wall in New York 303 Wallace, David Foster 8, 108–124; boredom and peripheral awareness 117–124 Walsh, Richard 598 De Warren, `Nicolas 200 Watson’s behaviourism 433 Wentworth, Nigel 140, 145, 145n25, 146, 147 Westerman, Richard 568–570 Weston, Edward 237, 246, 247–248 White, Michael J. 513 Wiesing, Lambert 180, 181, 181n30, 193 Williams, Bernard 339 Winogrand, Gary 242 Witmer, Lightner 61 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 29–30 Wollheim, Richard 11, 171, 188–190, 190n45, 197 Wood, David 126–127, 129 world 5–7, 12–14, 80–83, 109–117, 127–129, 157–159, 191, 207–209, 223, 286–291; affect and eternity 376–393; documentary photography 244–246; luminous 378–384; memory topographies 292–304; object 272, 275 Yazicioğlu, Sanem 14–15 Yeats, William Butler 264, 278 Zahavi, Dan 13, 274–275 Zeller, Eduard 485 Zeno’s paradoxes 473–474, 484–485, 511–514 Zenonian arguments 473–474, 495–497; arrow 488–489; dichotomy 487–488; on motion 490–491; stadium 489–490 Zermelo, Ernst 475 Zermelo-Fraenkel with Choice (ZFC) 350 Ziarek, Krzysztof 558 Zwaan, Rolf 174n11