Dussel’s Humanismo Helénico – a Summary

A Note on these Posts

In this post, I aim to condense some of the major moves made by Enrique Dussel in his book El humanismo helénico, with a nod toward the section on the Greeks in his later Para una de-strucción de la historia de la ética. I do so for two main reasons. Firstly, I am currently engaged in the process of writing a book on Dussel’s thought in relation to Modern Jewish Thought and questions of historicism and normativity. As such, this long running series of blog posts will help me to aggregate some of the basics of Dussel’s thinking that I will use in the project. I have never been great at taking notes when I read, preferring instead to write as I read and reread until I can almost remember verbatim what a given author has said; this is a version of that.

More constructively, and acutely, I want to offer a blog treatment of Dussel’s work in order to both advocate for a wider spread of his thinking regarding history, and also to demonstrate, perhaps contrary to remarks made by the philosopher and historian himself, that the Urzelle of la filosofía de la liberación was present already from the beginning of Dussel’s main works in the 1960s, beginning with El humanismo helénico, which was published in 1975, but written much earlier.

El humanismo helénico – Toward a Destrucción of the canon of an occidental Lebensform

I will begin with the end, the end that is of course already at the beginning of the thought that inspired Dussel to take up the task of a philosophical interpretation of the ‘ethical-mythical nucleus’ of ancient Greek society and thought.

The text itself is one part of an otherwise larger project to unpack the historical and philosophical foundations of the contemporary world generally, which is to say, more precisely, the world in which Latin American philosophers, social scientists and others found themselves working in the middle of the 20^th century. In order to do this, Dussel notes, we must first lay bare the foundations [los cimientos] of the world, which we may, following latter remarks in Filosofía de la liberación, understand not as kosmos, but as the symbolic and ideological Lebenswelt, i.e. el mundo. In this sense, the project Dussel took up in El humanismo helénico is a first pass, of sorts, in what would become the larger project of undermining a seemingly, intractably presupposed eurocentrismo that conditioned the narrative repetition of the same in the historical recounting of ancient Greek thought as ‘the birth of philosophy’ proper.

Yet, one may ask, why begin with the Greeks if the goal is to both understand Latin America and to undermine the Eurocentric interpretation of modernity? If the goal is to understand the reality of Latin America (at least as it was in the 1960s) in contradistinction to the hegemonic position of the concept (and thus the socio-geo-political reality) of Europe, why repeat the well-worn appeal to Greece as the fount of culture? Is this not a counterproductive move?

Dussel’s response to this question says a lot about the nature of this specific project, and in retrospect of his later work, of the nature of the philosophy of liberation overall. Up front, and also in the epilogue to the text, Dussel notes that this task of a historical Destruktion of the world-system (the concept of a world-system per se does not appear in the text, but given his use of this framework following Wallerstein and others later on, in a way that meshes with the earlier work, it is appropriate to avail myself it here) requires that we unearth certain aspects of our historical consciousness, expose them to the light of critical judgment, or interpretation, so as to set ourselves on the path to ‘see’ who we are today with fresh eyes. It is this sense of de-strucción that Dussel never really abandons, even in the later work.

Insofar as this is how Dussel frames the historical task of his work on Hellenic humanism, he is not far from where he would land in later works with regard to the concept of Destruktion, the concept that Martin Heidegger used in his 1927 Sein und Zeit to describe a critical engagement with ‘the tradition’ of western thought so as to produce anew an interpretation of what remained ‘unthought’ within our received wisdom. Indeed, not long after commencing the trilogy on los humanismos, Dussel was to write two books that would engage in just such a destruction of the canon – i.e. Método para una filosofía de la liberación (1973) and Para una destrucción de historia de la ética, tomo I (1970). Both texts were written on the basis of earlier investigations and courses taught by Dussel at the University of Cuyo in Argentina, and thus, overlap but follow on the tail end of Dussel’s earlier work on the humanismos trilogy.

A telling description of his understanding of the concept of destruction is found in the 1970 book on ethics, wherein he notes that the task of knowing where to go next requires that one understands where one understands oneself to have been, the past being, as a condition of the present, ‘that which is forgotten’ (en busca de lo olvidado),[1] which, we may say, precisely as a Nichts in the constellation of what-is thought, ‘is’ only as ‘un’- thought (remember, of course, that being is correlated with thinking, which is to say, that non-being is that which is not thought). It is this same idea that one encounters in a slightly less Heideggerian register in El humanismo helénico as the hermeneutic motor that drives the investigation into the ethical-mythical-nucleus of ancient Greek thought and life. In response to the question, why ancient Greece and why now?, Dussel writes, “in order to really comprehend the structure of the human that is constructed in history, it is necessary to begin with the foundations, so as to, in the end, decipher the meaning of our present. Somebody is an adult when they attain reflexive consciousness of their own collective and historical existence. In this case, consciousness will [actually, thus] precede history, orienting it [precederá a la historia, orientándola].”[2]

That consciousness would somehow ‘lead’ history within the context of the admission that the attainment of intellectual and ethical maturity is the reflective posture vis-à-vis one’s historical Existenz is, perhaps, a counterintuitive idea; for how are we to say that consciousness leads the construction of a historical Weltbild if history itself is taken to be the context in which we might understand and speak of consciousness at all? On this point, Dussel refers us to Merleau-Ponty’s La structure du comportement (1942), from which Dussel notes that while history might, prima facie, appear as an object to consciousness, i.e. as something preexisting said consciousness (i.e. where history appears as the direct object to the indirect object [dative subject] called consciousness in a mode of a nachträglich reflection), in reality, history is only the result of the auto-constitution of humane consciousness. This is to say that while history refers to something that enframes the singular sense of selves, that refers to the contingent structural make-up of the self (i.e. history precedes and thus makes individuals who they are), in reality, au fond, there is always a sense we have of history as secondary to the perennially humane (i.e. to the species called homo sapiens), and thus, we are able to interpret history anew so as to continually, critically refine our understanding of collective and individual selves.[3]

This idea can be further clarified, I believe, with reference again to Para una de-strucción de la historia de la ética. If history both precedes individuals and is only derivative in relation to the perennial structures of humane consciousness, then the task becomes double-edged, i.e. for us to appropriate history as it is given as an object ‘before’ us with an eye toward unearthing those hitherto obfuscated dimensions of human being itself, a question of, “an ontological ethic [una ética ontológica] (ethica perennis) whose history is forged in the obscure spring of given philosophical ethics, which were only but the determined thought beginning with and about concrete êthos…”[4]

At bottom, then, underneath the particularities of history, underpinning the concrétude of a given êthos, there are certain universal, even perennial (gasp), structures [estructuras intencionales, Verfassungen][5] that remain, precisely because ‘in the ground,’ hidden by way of the concreteness of a given ethos. “Struo in Latin means to join, crowd, accumulate, and lump together. For this reason, de-struir is a disentangling or un-wedding, a clearing, but not simply a ruining.”[6] The negative task of rereading the tradition against itself is also, thus, the creative task of setting loose those unthought, presupposed, elements of human being, of clarifying them through the interrogation of the ideologies founded thereupon, a point Dussel reinforced with the following citation from Sein und Zeit. “The de-struction of history ‘is not a negation of history, but rather an appropriation and transformation of that which has been transmitted by the tradition. The appropriation of history is that to which is alluded with the name of de-strucción.”[7]

More precisely, this appropriation has to do with the unearthing of those core, pre-philosophical, structures of consciousness, where this denotes not merely theory, but what, perhaps, Rahel Jaeggi would call a Lebensform. That is, the appropriation of history Dussel was after was the comprehension of the total thought/life/practice constellation as given in preserved reflections thereupon – i.e. cultural artefacts and texts, which are not limited to philosophy, because culture in some ways reflects more directly this constellation.[8] Likewise, at a somewhat more basic level, Dussel maintains that etymology and concepts –  seen through a the sort of comparative lens that today many (incorrectly, because indefensible logically and historically) would find ‘reductive’ – offer a further window into the operative ‘intentional structures’ that shape this overarching ethica-mythical nucleus of the ancient Greeks, a term drawn from Paul Ricœur’s La symbolique de Mal [1960].

The Ethical-Mythical-Nucleus of the Greeks: Theology as Discourse on the Real

In particular, Dussel draws upon current (at the time) historical, evolutionary-anthropological, and religious studies sources to compile a rough sketch of a generally dualist Indo-European cosmology, anthropology and ontology that is monist au fond, but dualist with regard to its understanding of human life (i.e. experience, finitude) vis-à-vis the infinitely One. This is obviously a large statement, with many intricacies left to the side in order to make explicit the most basic points regarding this particular comportment toward the world by way of the exegesis of anthropological and archeological records.

More precisely, Dussel writes after establishing these basic points, the goal of the text is to locate the ancient Greek ethical-mythical nucleus by focusing on the construction of a concept of the ‘common good’ [el bien común] in ancient Greek art, thought and life. This is, according to Dussel (once we have learned to ‘see’ Hellenism per se), more of a goal that the Greeks sought than something realized, given that the presupposition of such a notion entailed a metaphysics of oneness, which could, at the level of the Greek’s Existenz (ontology), only be ‘sought’ from the perspective of multiplicity, malleability, disunity or ‘becoming.’ It is for these reasons that this idea is a ‘tragic’ idea, for how can one ever escape what Reiner Schürmann, following Hannah Arendt’s language, would call the ‘undertow of mortality?’ “La «mítica», el contenido ético-ritual del pueblo griego, es trágico. Reina la «Necesidad»…La negatividad de la materia y el cuerpo, la eternidad de la «Realidad» y el devenir cíclico de lo contingente, el Monismo divino informa toda la obra de esa comunidad de la península balcánica.” [9]

The goal of the text is, thus, to situate the reader, the reader who is perhaps accustomed to beginning any discussion of Greek philosophy in particular with the Meletian school(s) of thought, in a larger, religious and political context. This will be a context that is both unfamiliar to the 20^th (and now 21^st) century reader, but also eerily familiar; namely, the context of an onto-epistemic crisis, a crisis of identity and faith. Faith in what, though? Faith in the aforementioned belief in what Hegel might call a rational Leitung, or orientation to the world, and thus, belief in one’s ultimate coherence, place, or belonging to some sense of ‘the real.’ Dussel cites Werner Jaeger’s work Humanism and Theology (Dussel cites the French translation) on this point.

“When Plato and Aristotle, following Socrates, reestablished the divine as the supreme principle of the natural and social order, they were not seeking to return to a mythological state, but rather, they sought [entendían así redescubrir] to rediscover the secret and inconceivable reality that the religion, in its primitive (sic.) state, had symbolized under the form of myths. And this reality, which the religion had called theos, they understood and expressed by way of reason, or in Greek, by logos. The result of this effort of thought is called theology.”[10]

Theology does not mean, here, the specific discourse concerning a person called God, but more accurately, according to Jaeger’s (and then Dussel’s) reading, something like a theory of unity that should be recognized as underlaying any particular or singular sense of the self, others, and the world. Theology is thus a discourse on ‘the real’ [existencia «real»],[11] a notion that for Dussel, following one of his philosophy professors at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, means ‘that which founds the correlation between thinking and being,’ that which must be One underneath the dyad/Geltungsbereich of consciousness and objects, subjectivity (i.e. dativity) and objectivity (i.e. givenness, donation).

Where the skeptics are read as an indication of a corruption of this notion of an underlying unity, of an absolutely ‘real’ dimension of what we call ‘reality,’ the advent of philosophy proper is seen by Dussel as a occasioning an attempt to square the circle, so to speak, of a problem not unlike the one that seems to consistently rattle so many allegedly ‘critical’ academics today – i.e. the divide between the sense we have of the contingency of the production of concepts and knowledge and the perhaps ignored sense that contingency is always contingency ‘upon’ some-thing, e.g. a unified (not to say ‘undynamic’) real.

The Hellenic Lebensform: A Set of Intractable Dualisms

Yet no sooner has Dussel said this, than he notes the real problem that was already there from the beginning, at the bottom of this Hellenic ethical-mythical-nucleus. This is the problem of how to actually square the aforementioned circle without dissipating the singular character of our sense of contingent being and life, a problem that manifests metaphysically a as the hard distinction between the Good (and aspects of being-itself) and singular beings, and  politically in the bifurcation between public life and the individualizing conception of knowledge as wisdom or gnosis of that which is transcendent. Adelantando una conclusión, esa trascendencia es alcanzada como felicidad solitaria (solitaria bonitas), fuera y por encima de la sociedad corruptible, política.[12]

In the end, the sophists and the philosophers inhabit this same dilemma; their division is a matter of which side of the divide they choose to privilege. The Sophists represent a negation of the erasure of … In either case, there is ultimately a negation of what we would now call, for better or worse, history. In this sense, Dussel notes that the Hellenic ethical-mythical nucleus is one in which there seemingly is no sense of historicity [historicidad],[13] though more accurately, Dussel notes, it is one in which historicity is seen as a negative element of humane being in the world, an element that ought not be taken as ‘real’ vis-à-vis that which is absolute and eternal.[14]

Again, this is a tragic system of life because dualist at its core. In short, the outworking of Greek philosophy as we know it was always the result of a tarrying with this basic dualism, i.e. the experience of contingency and the desire to dissipate said contingency in some form of the absolute, be this the reconciliation of opposition or the resolution of singularity into the eternal flux of primordial chaos.[15]

Avant la lettre, then, with regard to Reiner Schürmann’s increasingly celebrated critique of hegemonic principles, Dussel anchors our understanding of ancient Greek philosophy in this basically existential-political-religious opposition between the desire for stability and the experience of instability, concluding that the desire for the absolute cannot be had without reference to the singular, whilst the desire to safeguard the singularity of the phenomena of the world can only be had though the destruction of the same in reference to the absolute (Aristotle becomes at the end of the book the exemplary figure of this tragic outcome). The unification in Plato and Aristotle of theoretical and practical reason, where these are distinguished within the unified understanding of the soul’s intellectual connection and proper order in relation to the Good, speaks to this issue. The singularity of each person is salvaged insofar as it is destroyed in the perpetual teleological desire for the origin, for the good itself, the source of givenness and rectitude.

Politically, this tragedy is mirrored in the positing of Greek culture itself as the location of the properly humane, i.e. as a member of the Greek polis. “El bien de la ciudad, que el político promueve por las actividades reguladas por la prudencia, es el mayor bien de la especie humana; bien despótico de los hombres libres.”[16] The ‘common good,’ it turns out, was only common with regard to one particular group, and thus, because requiring the exclusion of the non-Greek, a fractured concept. Where metaphysically the reference to an absolute destroys the singularity of each being in its Existenz, so too are the Greeks caught in the bind of proposing a universal politics that nonetheless requires the exclusion the non-Greek, the barbarian, in order to safeguard the location of the universally true within the concept of Greek culture itself.[17] In this sense, the Greek notion of the common good is what Dussel will simply call a ‘pretense to universality,’ or a ‘absolutization of the relative’ rather than a true universal, which would require the effacement of such a reified identity, and thus, which would entail the breaking of the Hellenic ethical-mythical nucleus itself. Aristotle goes as far as anybody could in thinking a quasi-cosmopolitan notion of this common good without fundamentally altering the Hellenic ethical mythical nucleus; Alexander the Great, in extending citizenship beyond the confines of Greek culture and religion, would break it.

Indeed, in the end, there will only have been tragedy within what is properly, classically, Hellenic. Dussel concludes that the Hellenic ethical-mythical nucleus was never able to successfully render or resolve this dualist understanding of reality and life, which means it was never able to resolve its political need to universalize its own particularity, which is to say its own ethnocentrism. Aristotle comes close with his understanding of the human being as essentially unfinished, with the wedding of ethics and ontology and stratified political categories that seemed to allow for the positing of a sort of cosmopolitan vision. Yet, in the end, Aristotle too relies on the distinctions between slave and citizen, Greek and barbarian, and his cosmopolitan vision is heavily qualified with the locating of true human being, political being, in Greek culture itself.[18]

After working his way through various Greek cultural productions, pre-Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies, Dussel arrives at the breaking point of this nucleus, which is to say that Dussel arrives at the point at which this nucleus actually fulfills its ideals. With Alexander the Great, the universal cosmovision overtakes the particularity of the ethical-mythical nucleus of Greek culture precisely though the true universalization of it, i.e. through the extension of citizenship beyond the confines of the Greek political-theological (ontological) hierarchy. “La pequeña ciudad griega ha crecido hasta dar como fruto la ciudad ecuménica. Esta universalización produce, por una parte, la ruina de la ciudad griega, y por otra, en cambio, permite un profundo individualismo por el debilitamiento de los vínculos exigentes de la comunidad político-religiosa.”[19]

In the end, then, the entire swing of Hellenization can be read as the tragic constitution of the ethical-mythical nucleus that gave rise to this world-historical phenomenon. In extending Hellenic culture to the known world, Alexander breaks the ethical-mythical nucleus upon which Hellenic ‘culture’ as such is founded. This is to say that with the advent of a true cosmopolitanism, then, the religious and metaphysical exclusivity of the ancient Greeks is broken. The triumph of the Greeks is, in fact, their defeat.

El pensamiento griego & Us

What then are we to make of Dussel’s specific remarks concerning ancient Greek thought and life, in light of this operative notion of destruction-as-appropriation [of history]? The operative idea behind the aforementioned notion of destruction is that there is something universal underpinning the particular. Yet, it is clear that the task of appropriation as a means of arriving at that universal is always a matter of tarrying with the particular, which is to say, with what has been given to us [lo político, social y filosófico como lo dado, le donné]. Dussel frames his specific Investigations in El humanismo helénico around just this point and contained therein is an important point that conditions the whole of his later historical writing. This point can be summarized as follows.

We exist today in the wake of the aforementioned, i.e. the intra-Greek fight over particularity and universality, the exclusive priority of the Greek citizen vis-à-vis the claim to universal knowledge. Already, here, we see the problem that Dussel will take up later in his work. The goal of the de-strucción of the Hellenic ethical-mythical nucleus is not to simply shame an entire culture for its ethnocentrism, though to be sure Dussel is not happy about it, but rather to expose how these intentional structures have been sublated, incorporated anew and in changed form, within our lifeworld. Our repetitions of these same tensions are, to be sure, novel repetitions; we are not the ancient Greeks and yet, we would not be who we are, culturally and thus intellectually speaking, without them.

The goal, as always, will be to learn from them, to learn from the tragic constitution of this particular way of navigating the tension between the universal and singular, rather than to simply condemn and retreat into our own versions of the sophist-philosophy divide. What Dussel will later call trans-modernity and the material principle can be seen as the outworking of the ideas first developed in the trilogy on Hellenic, Semitic and Christian humanisms.

---

[1] Enrique Dussel. Para una de-strucción de la historia de la ética. Tomo I. Buenos Aires: Editorial Ser y Tiempo, 1970. p. 5-6.

[2] Enrique Dussel. El humanismo helénico. Buenos Aires: EUBA, 1975. p. 91.  

[3] Ibid. p. 92. “En el primer caso, la historia es mirada como desde fuera, aprendida, tomada como ya construida por otro. En el segundo, la conciencia está en la base de la evolución: la historia es un fruto de la conciencia.”

[4] Enrique Dussel. Para una de-strucción de la historia de la ética. p. 5-6.

[5] Enrique Dussel. El humanismo helénico. p. x.

[6] Para una de-strucción de la historia de la ética. p. 6.

[7] Ibidem. Dussel cites Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. §6.

[8] Ibid. p. 21.

[9] Enrique Dussel. El humanismo helénico. p. 34-36.

[10] Ibid. p. 37.

[11] Ibid. p. 37.

[12] Ibid. p. 43. Cf. p. 59.

[13] Ibid. p. 62.

[14] Ibid. p. 63.

[15] Ibid. p. 65.

[16] Ibid. p. 91.

[17] Ibid. entire last chapter.

[18] Ibid. p. 127-133.

[19] Ibid. p. 134.

Language and Conscience: Schürmann on Luther

I begin this exegetical paper with some general commentary for context. In the chapter entitled “De la conscience qui détermine” of his book Des hégémonies brisées, Reiner Schürmann argues that Martin Luther instantiates a new, transcendental, way of thinking about the soul, God, and human. This new way of thinking is, more precisely, a turn to viewing the self not in relation to a notion of efficient causality. Rather, Schürmann here conceives of a conscience existing before and in language, a conscience as a consciousness before which phenomena, including God, appear through the prism of the dual conditions of damnation and redemptive freedom.

It is this notion of consciousness that will come to form the modern hegemonic phantasm – as the title of the chapter suggests. More precisely, this phantasm will take the form of conscience as the point of indifferent freedom to interpret the call of God. Within this theological-anthropological formulation, the dual, agonal, conditions of natality and mortality are then figured through the prisms of contingency and freedom, the strictures of history and universality, the law and justification. More precisely, consciousness as conscience appears, according to Schürmann’s readings of Luther and Kant, as the coincident fact of being behold to and the freedom engendered by being in the possession of language. Thus, the modern hegemonic phantasm will be not a generic notion of a thinking subject, but of a homo loquens.

The constellation of natality and mortality that constitutes modern thinking will appear through the prism of this possessing and being possessed by speech and the auditory capacity of human being as that which seems to allow for the efficacy of speech,[1] which is the allowing for the estimative activity of conscience itself. For Luther, according to Schürmann, the freedom in language is always restrained though the inability to give oneself the content of what will be heard, while the givenness of language is what founds one’s freedom in language, in response to, the estimation of, the call of God, which is the content of the linguistically given. Contingency and freedom; this tension that constitutes so much of Kant’s own work and the world of the post-Kantian period is here figured by Schürmann as already present, hegemonically and in an unstable manner by Luther. It is found to be posited in a state that is already unstable (il [Luther] l’institue d’emblée brisée) because the subject is declared to be both culpable (pécheur) and justified (justifié).[2] “La conscience de soi accède à l’hégémonie, en position de dépendance.”[3]

In what remains of the present essay, I explicate the first section of this description of Luther’s transcendentalism, the aforementioned section entitled “L’être-pour-la-conscience.” My argument is that Schürmann takes Luther to instantiate a notion of the self as conscience before and in speech (parole). With this notion, Schürmann marks what he sees as a turn in the history of western thought from an entitative notion of God and the self. Where sin and the justification of the sinner, the topics around which Luther’s theology is initially oriented, were previously thought metaphysically in terms of entity (la conception ‘chosiste’ du péché),[4] Luther, Schürmann will argue, conceives of sin and justification as modes of being before and in language, modifications of conscience.

This is only possible, in a sense, because there is a conscience, or consciousness, capable of being before and in language, a notion of the self that will eventually be, as with the Parmenidean and the Plotinian notions of the One, positioned in modernity such that it possesses a certain indifferent freedom. Yet for Luther, Schürmann demonstrates, conscience is not yet indifferent, but moral. The introduction of language, of adolescence and adulthood, is the introduction of culpability and salvation from outside (du dehors, de l’intervention d’un autre). Yet, it is this positioning of conscience or consciousness that Schürmann says anticipates Kant. Schürmann will focus, as he continues this argument, upon how the schematization itself of this notion of consciousness as free conscience is taken up by Kant with the notions of spontaneity and givenness as two sides of the same act of apperception.[5]  

§

Central to the initial argument of Schürmann, which begins in the prefatory section and continues into the section entitled “L’être-pour-la-conscience,” is that the capacity to receive speech – crucially, not the capacity to produce speech – is what orients the notion of the transcendental self as the site in which the content of speech can be interpreted or estimated. Writing of this point, Schürmann notes that where Kant conceived of the unity of apperception in terms of spontaneity or freedom, Luther instead finds a self that is oriented around the capacity for obedience, the auditory capacity to receive the word of God.[6] Schürmann makes this point throughout the first section of the chapter by describing how this capacity comes to constellate the poles that constitute field of phenomenality itself, a move that repeats his treatment of other hegemonic phantasms, such as the aforementioned hen of Parmenides and the One of Plotinus.

Specifically, this capacity orients the field of phenomenality by “de-substantializing” phenomena such as God and sin. Later, this de-substantialization of phenomena will be shown to be the overthrowing of the primacy of vision and entitative thinking, the favouring, instead, of auditory reception and judgment.[7] Here, the argument begins in full with Schürmann citing the following question posed by Luther. “Que signifie: avoir un Dieu, ou: Qu’est-ce qu’est Dieu?”[8] The response is that God names the one to whom one trusts in the midst of distress, that proper faith (la foi droite) produces the phenomenon of God, while improper or false faith produces idolatry.[9]

The main point of the hegemonic phantasm of modernity is thus given therein. Luther, “ne se prononce jamais sur la chose en soi que serait le référent suprême (qui reste ‘cache’). Il s’interroge exclusivement sur le référent dernier qu’est la conscience de soi.”[10] The result of this appeal to conscience as the last or ultimate – not ontotheologically ‘supreme’ – referent is that God can appear phenomenally through two ways of relating to God. The first is the way of the law, in which one is condemned to death, while the second is the way of faith through which one is justified.[11] Both are oriented, or constellated, vis-à-vis the notion, the positing, of conscience, a theological point that Schürmann notes logically prefigures Kant’s identification of the objective and subjective conditions of experience. “Iustificatio dei et credulitas in deum idem est” – justification and the cleaving to God in proper faith are one (c’est tout un).[12]

The way this identity comes to be, Schürmann notes, is decisively different for Luther than from how the knowing and known are said to be one for Aristotle and others in previous epochs of thought. For Aristotle, the identity of thought and being is founded upon intelligibility itself, a framework that Schürmann characterizes as “kinetic,” because a matter of distinct entities producing motion and being set in motion. In contrast, Luther, Schürmann writes, posits the identity of God and the way one may relate to God as founded upon a “metabolic” notion of identity in which there is an absence of any mediation (e.g. intelligibility, motion).[13]

The result of this reorientation of everything in relation to conscience is that the truth and salvation accorded to God metaphysically in terms of verity and justice is now placed within a framework of avowal and confession. Said otherwise, avowal and confession name responses to God conceived de-substantially as a phenomenon that is capable of moving from the principle of life to the principle of death depending on one’s conscience.[14] Schürmann describes this contingency of God as phenomenon in terms of “empirical modifications of conscience,” noting further that the a priori conditions for such thing still have to be sought.[15] Looking ahead in the text, the conditions will turn out to be the way conscience is related to the contingency of being before language and the indifferent freedom of conscience to estimate, or interpret and respond to, language.

So reframed, to return to the immediate point, truth becomes a matter of salvation or damnation, rather than adequation between thought and thing.[16] This is because all of the phenomena in question are contingent upon, and thus derivative in relation to, one’s consciousness of oneself which is equated with conscience.[17] Said again, everything that was once a matter of an Aristotelian physis or a metaphysics of substance is now, on Schürmann’s reading of Luther, reoriented to be-for-conscience.

Yet, on this point, Schürmann asks the following question. “Mais peut-on pour autant parler d’’être-pour-la-conscience?”[18] Schürmann notes that Luther, as has been already intimated herein, was passionately opposed to scholastic metaphysical theories of being, and that this derisiveness would seem to conflict with the statement that everything – i.e. God, sin, justification – only is vis-à-vis conscience. How does Luther get around this seeming contradiction?

The answer that Schürmann gives is that Luther’s notion of being (est) is framed through his rendering of the Greek verb ginésthô in the optative sense of the word. The wish (vœu) tense of the verb, which appears in French in the subjunctive (soit), is important because this is a shift from a kind of proposition that is indifferent to a dative receiver (destinataire). In contrast to a sheer assertion, there is here a notion of being that is wed intimately to the interpretive desire – i.e. to a desire for the world to be a certain way. Thus, Schürmann writes, “La copule de souhait, substituée à la copule d’assertion, opère la révolution dans la façon de penser, tout comme l’opèrent les invectives contre la conception ‘chosiste’ du péché.”[19]

The primacy of conscience as the site of the constellation of what appears is thus maintained by Luther’s theory of being. The question that Schürmann seems to anticipate is what exactly this means beyond the receptive capacity for receiving phenomenon in the dative. The answer to this question is that it is the capacity for estimation, or interpretation, of what is given to conscience that gives this notion its hegemonic power. “Une ontologie à l’optatif sera une ontologie d’estimation. Les phénomènes n’y seront rien tant que je ne les estime pas hauts ou bas.”[20] Yet, one might ask, what is the nature of this capacity for estimation? Of what is this capacity of conscience composed?

The answer to this question is that it is constituted by one’s relation to speech. A propositional assertion that is given without regard to a specific dative receiver is given with its primary triangulation point (that is, the background for the statement and its generic reception) being-as-movement. In contrast, the optative notion of being is oriented around how the conscience is modified by and interprets phenomena precisely as they are given in speech.[21] “Les phénomènes sont ce qu’ils sont par la parole.”[22]

In conclusion, however, Schürmann notes two possible problems emerge at this juncture with regard to his reading of Luther as a kind of proto idealist. The first is the apparently idealist character of Luther’s notion of conscience and language. If language determines how phenomena become phenomena, how is this not a repetition of a kind of idealism rather than the sort of critical idealism that Schürmann has suggested it is to this point in the argument?[23] Second, conscience seems to be totally dependent upon, because heterogeneous to, the giving of an exterior law in speech rather than its own capacity while also needing to be autonomous to determine what appears, [24] the “aporie porte sur la donation.”[25] Having acknowledged these possible problems, Schürmann nonetheless notes that they emerge because Luther rethinks being in relation to conscience. Insofar as this fact holds, Schürmann reads Luther as anticipating, or at least laying the foundation for, Kant.

---

[1] Reiner Schürmann. Des hégémonies brisées. p. 508.

[2] Ibidem.

[3] Ibid. p. 488.

[4] Ibid. p. 478.

[5] Ibid. p. 472-473, 480, 483.

[6] Ibid. p. 473. “À la différence d’une critique de la raison autonome, sa critique du je capable d’écoute découvre un réseau de fonctions organisant des modes, non pas de spontanéité, mais d’obéissance.”

[7] Cf. Ibid. p. 484-485.

[8] Ibid. p. 474.

[9] Ibidem.

[10] Ibid. p. 474-475.

[11] Ibid. p. 475. “Les rapport où Dieu se fait phénomène sont du nombre de deux : par la loi, il voue à la mort ; et par la foi, il sauve.”

[12] Ibidem.

[13] Ibid. p. 475-476.

[14] Ibid. p. 477.

[15] Ibidem.

[16] Ibidem. “Il s’ensuit que le contraire de la vérité en tant que conformité ne peut pas être l’erreur. C’est la damnation.”

[17] Ibidem. “De ces phénomènes-là, Luther affirme avec les accents d’un grand commencement et avec des tournures sans cesse variées qu’ils reçoivent leur être de la conscience que j’ai de moi.”

[18] Ibidem.

[19] Ibid. 478.

[20] Ibidem.

[21] Ibidem. “On hè on veut dire d’abord : être en tant qu’être en mouvement. Mais telle ne sera plus la signification directrice de l’être dès lors que mon rapport à la parole détermine ce qui peut devenir phénomène pour moi, ainsi que, par le métabolisme qu’on a vu, la façon dont cela peut devenir phénomène.”

[22] Ibid. p. 479.  

[23] Ibidem. “Les phénomènes sont ce qu’ils sont par la parole. En cherchant l’être des phénomènes dans leur apparaître à la conscience, ne ramène-t-il pas le réel à l’idéel? ”

[24] Ibidem.

[25] Ibid. p. 479-480.

Protocol – Reiner Schürmann on Plotinus

Das ja ist der Anfang. Das Nein kann nicht Anfang sein; denn es könnte nur ein Nein des Nichts sein; das setzte aber ein Nichts voraus, das verneinbar wäre, also ein Nichts, das sich schon zum Ja entschlossen hätte. Das Ja ist also der Anfang. Und zwar kann es nicht das Ja des Nichts sein; denn es ist der Sinn unsrer Einführung des Nichts, daß es nicht Ergebnis sein soll, sondern im Gegenteil Ausgangspunkt und nur Ausgangspunkt. Es ist noch nicht einmal Anfang. Es ist höchstens Anfang unsres Wissens. Es ist eben wirklich nur Ausgangspunkt, also schlechthin unfähig, selber bejaht zu werden. Ebenso unfähig freilich auch, wie schon gesagt, verneint zu werden. Es liegt vor dem Ja wie vor dem Nein. Es läge vor allem Anfang – wenn es läge. Aber es „liegt“ nicht. Es ist nur der virtuelle Ort für den Anfang unsres Wissens. Es ist nur die Markierung für das Gestelltsein des Problems. Wir vermeiden streng, es zu benennen. Es ist kein „dunkler Grund“ noch sonst ein irgend mit Eckharts, Böhmes oder Schellings Worten Benennbares. Es ist nicht im Anfang.

– Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung

In the last meeting of this seminar, as with the seminar that preceded it, we took up a variety of questions that still, of course, centered around the main, guiding, question of Schürmann’s text. This is, namely, the question of how we are to posit a notion of the One that simultaneously legislates and breaks the law, a one that should be both posited, and yet recognized as phantasmic, if taken beyond the parameters of a kind of event, a coordination of a constellation portending the possibility of coordinating and constellating itself. More precisely, our discussions, and the lecture, centered around aspects of Schürmann’s reading of Plotinus, in relation to his reading of Parmenides, moving toward his engagement with Heidegger’s notion of ontotheology, the question of negative henology, the relation between Ereignis and Enteignis, and a discussion of how the One both founds the law and unsettles any pretense to hegemony.

A question reemerged for us that Schürmann, in his introduction to the chapters on Plotinus, had already implied in his comment that the structure of Plotinian thinking had been “inhabited by squatters – the Christian theologians.”[1] This is the question of how to think the simultaneous law-giving and law-destroying aspect of the One without falling into the negative theological mode of using negative speech to tacitly, negatively, yield a positive. Such a mode of speaking would yield a nothing that might appear to overwhelm the sense of or capacity for particularity and identity, but that in reality is composed precisely as a something par excellence, a unity of both particularity and identity called the One.[2] Indeed, Schürmann notes, this is the way Plotinus is often read with regard to the ordering function of the One.[3]

As Ian noted in the lecture, Schürmann argues for a different reading of the matter in Plotinus. Contra ontotheology or apophatic theology, Schürmann gives us “negative henology,” according to which the difference between the one (l’un) and a founding being (étant fondateur) is thought as a condition and event for being and beings that is produced perpetually and coincidentally with phenomenality itself. This notion, Schürmann writes, prefigures the phenomenological distinction between being as evental (événementiel) and being as substantive, or temporal.

For Plotinus, we were told by both Schürmann and Ian, there is no “ousiology,” no conception of the One as epekeina, or ‘beyond’ in the sense of a spatial vector (‘allant au-delà’ de l’étance).[4] Rather, we were left with a reading of the One, and its equivalence with the verbal sense of being (Être), as a kind of presupposition. The One is a prior that cannot be because it must, by virtue of its occurring, constellate or coordinate the correlation of intelligence and being, the phenomenal field, without thereby being in any way a being who acts.[5]  In short, when read though Plotinus, the ontological difference of which Heidegger spoke overtakes, with regard to philosophical orientation, metaphysical, or ontotheological, difference.[6] The One does not act, but “essentially” ‘is’ the unity of the phenomenal field, the presupposition required for any sense of presence and absence that ‘itself’ is-not.[7]

With this point, however, we returned again, and again, to the basic points made in Brendan’s protocol. Most importantly, Ian walked us through Schürmann’s notion of the One as both the time of pure natality and mortality. The question of time, temporality and narrative experience – related but different concepts – was where we then centered much of our discussion, including our discussion of the concept of sovereignty.

Here, Schürmann reminded us in the reading that there has been a series of ruptures in the philosophical traditions of the west regarding time, a series that can be summarizes as an increased break from a physics of time. This is so where physics means the everyday, general, sense of cause and effect. In contrast, we have now a transition to a consciousness of time as the sense, or topology, of being as the condition of all of the anterior notions of time, including the notion of epochal thinking, this last move having been accomplished more recently by the ‘late’ Heidegger, though Schürmann notes the affinity of this ideas with his earlier “existential analytic.”[8] In the end, Plotinus appears as a thinker who already thought this sort of temporality, in contrast to the metaphysical difference premised upon Aristotelian causality, which Schürmann had already identified earlier in the text as equivalent to the metaphysical difference that constitutes ontotheological thinking.[9]

The notion of a hierarchy of being that is thought in terms of analogic participation, thus, takes on a new sense for Schürmann through his reading of Plotinus. Analogy now has a purely heuristic use in the order of discovery regarding the conditions of the event of thinking itself, as opposed to a genetic, or a genealogical, order of a discovery of a foundation. This is because the One is not a hypostasis, but simply a locative principle for thought, in this case, the orienting principle (Leitungsprinzip < – > Leitungsvoraussetzung) for the coordination of immanence and transcendence, for the physics of motion, and for the sense of eternality as the model of time qua time just as intelligibility is the hypostatic, abstract, model of the soul.[10] The One stands above the field of phenomenality, but it is only above or outside (hors) insofar as it also is produced eventally and singularly in, coincident with but not equivalent to, each moment of phenomenality, above both particularity and universality by being the force of pure natality presupposed in these coordinates.[11]

Yet, the One is, we noted, within framework also the force of mortality, the withdrawal of phenomenality, due to its position as an unessential (inessentielle) presupposition. We discussed how this status of the One is what makes it possible for Schürmann to call it a rebellious act that paradoxically founds the law (un acte insoumis qui fait la loi).[12] The non-essential position of the One entails a radical freedom that can only be described as pure excess, indescribable in terms of that which it exceeds. In the One, or even in-One, there exists at this level both the coordinating force of natality and the destructive freedom of excess, the force of presence (manifestation) and absence (recel), the equiprimordial contingency of every of stable position or positing.[13]

Here there is only the anarchic fluctuation between transcendence and immanence, there is no reconciliation or subsumptive drawing together (Versöhnung) of their apparent opposition, because there is no measure by which they are said to be a contradiction. They are, rather, agonal conditions. The One, in the end, is only a mark that must be thought for these conditions of presence and absence because, “it [the One] institutes the incommensurable.”[14] The pure freedom is the One itself, there is no opposition to, but rather an opposition proper to the perpetual activity we may call ‘the One’ as a “conflictual event”[15] that is inapparently presupposed, the structure of which being thus mirrored, in the dual formulation of each thing as singular and universal.[16]

With this summary in mind, I simply want to ask if Schürmann’s reading, which pits his understanding of Plotinus against negative theologies, is fair. I am unsure that the imagery with which negative theology works is the problem. More problematic, it seems to me, is that negative theology seems, as a result of its basis in Scriptures and traditions, to introduce a kind of narrativity, or chronologic, to the One. My question, then, is what are we to do with narration if we abandon this way of thinking and stick solely to the contingency of the event? Is there room in Schürmann’s thinking here for narrativity? In what way does the question about narrativity imply the question regarding the ethical? I have what I would call an educated guess given the above, but I am unsure.   

---

[1] Reiner Schürmann. Des hégémonies brisées. Mauvezin : Trans-Europ-Press, 1996. p. 183.

[2] Cf. Jean-Luc Marion. Étant donné Paris: PUF, 1998.

[3] Schürmann. Des hégémonies brisées. p. 184.

[4] Ibid. p. 191.

[5] Ibid. p. 191-192. “L’union’ couvre en effet chez Plotin un champ d’incidence plus vaste – et dans l’ensemble plus modeste – que l’extase…au sens phénoménologique, l’union se produit partout où des étants entrent en constellation…Restera la mise en constellation phénoménale…sans porteur de responsabilité.”

[6] Ibid. p. 1

[7] Ibid. p. 192.

[8] Ibid. p. 198-199. Schürmann importantly notes that Heidegger remains, with respect to all of this, within the transcendental tradition whether speaking of ecstatic or epochal time and temporality.

[9] Ibid. p. 189.

[10] Ibid. p. 199-200, 203. “Cet événement – laisser apparaître – est plutôt la condition tant de l’éternité que du temps.”

[11] Ibid. p. 206. “L’un se retire, ce qui veut dire qu’il se retire hors de l’Intelligence. C’est vrai, bien sûr. Mais s’il ‘temporalise’ les phénomènes par leur singulière entrée en présence – s’il est l’événement singulier – alors il se retire surtout hors de l’universel. Il se singularise aussi.”

[12] Ibid. p. 211.

[13] Ibid. p. 212.

[14] Ibid. p. 213.

[15] Ibidem.

[16] Ibid. 237.

Natural History: Individuation in Zubiri contra Heidegger

In this paper, I explicate a key difference between Xavier Zubiri’s metaphysics and Martin Heidegger’s ontology. That difference is how each philosopher conceives the task of philosophy with regard to thinking and conceptually rendering the real. Heidegger’s project, at the least in the period during and immediately following the publication of his most well-known book, Being and Time, is strictly speaking about ontology, whereas the project of Zubiri is about metaphysics. My thesis is that this difference between ontology and metaphysics is visible primarily when one considers how each approaches the topic of individuation. The presupposition of my thesis is that both thinkers do in fact thematize individuation. This presupposition is valid if one considers how Heidegger and Zubiri position their respective notions of ontology and metaphysics. By individuation, I mean what Heidegger calls “the possibility and necessity” of a being,[1] and what Zubiri calls the “essence” of a thing as opposed to another thing.[2] It is here that there is immense immediate agreement when speaking of ontology, and disagreement when speaking to the what and the how of this possible and necessary essence of a thing and the task of philosophy.

For Heidegger, who historically precedes Zubiri and with whom the latter studied during the period in which Heidegger delivered his 1929 lecture What is Metaphysics?, the task of philosophy is to think the real as the being of beings, which is defined in both Being and Time and the aforementioned lecture as the event of individuation, as the unveiling, of beings that is conceived as time.[3] What this means will become clearer in my explication, but the point for the sake of my argument in the beginning is that Heidegger conceived  individuation as an event of disclosure that portends the possibility of ontology, of encountering the being of beings.

Zubiri, Jesús Conill notes following Diego Gracia, acknowledged the veracity of Heidegger’s claims at the level of intellection, specifically with regard to how Heidegger makes the ontological transition from the epistemological problem of knowledge of objects to the event of individuation or unveiling as being.[4] Conill cites from Zubiri’s 1962 book Sobre la Esencia to make the point. Zubiri writes, “in the apprehension of something, this something is not only itself exhibiting (se está mostrando), but rather [is] being (está siendo).[5] Yet, Zubiri himself does not think the real accordingly. The real, in fact, is not a matter of being, or of intellection or phenomenology. What then is the agreement between Zubiri and Heidegger at the level of what Gracia and Conill call intellection?

The answer has to do in part with how Zubiri and Heidegger conceive things. The essence of a being can be described as something undisclosed as such, but only in the sense that it is, as Heidegger notes with regard to the being of beings,[6] not another being. For Zubiri, the essence of a thing is the “totality of notes that a being possesses, turned in (inward, into) its internal unity,”[7] a unity that Zubiri further described as the coherence of a beings constitutive notes, rather than the inherence of a being’s accidental qualities.[8] Here there is, albeit with differences in descriptive language, the agreement in the sense that the being of a being, the suchness of a thing as such, is not thought in terms of entity, but rather in terms of its epiphanic eventfulness.[9] For both Zubiri and Heidegger, a thing is constitutively a happening, the unity of which is only visible as such either through abstraction as a moment (Zubiri) or as the event of unveiling itself, which Heidegger calls the truth of a being (Heidegger). Yet, for Zubiri the coherence of a being’s unity evades thematization in terms of entity is not a matter of ontology, at least not primarily. It is rather a metaphysical statement about the real, where the real refers to the dynamic structures of what epiphanically is unveiled at the level of ontology/ phenomenology.[10] It is this difference that I now proceed to unpack while also explicating my claims about Zubiri’s and Heidegger’s respective projects.

I claim the following so as to orient that explication of Zubiri’s and Heidegger’s projects. First, what is at stake for both, albeit with differences in emphasis, is how philosophy can and ought to render, to narrate, what is called individuation, or the eventfulness of the being of a being. Second, Heidegger’s notion of being as the truth of a being has to do with ontology precisely because he conceives ontology through a definition of phenomenology as transcendental verity.[11] Third, Zubiri’s claim is that the coherence of a being has to do primarily, and I mean only primarily, with what is metaphysically real rather than with what is displayed ontologically/phenomenologically. This is an outworking of how he defines the relationship between things, being, and reality where reality must be thought as the fundament of all subsequent systematic philosophical analyses of a thing.

§

The truth of points one and two is visible upon an examination of those passages I have already cited, all of which are contained in the first two chapters. In addition, I look to Heidegger’s notion of “equiprimordial and unified structures” contained in several immediately subsequent chapters. That notion of structure is a good place to anchor my first point regarding individuation, as it allows me to illustrate what is at stake in Heidegger’s methodological discussions, all of which are in part dependent upon his definition of unified structures.

Heidegger arrives at his formulation of this notion of equiprimordiality and unitary structuration with the goal of analyzing the being for whom an understanding of being is ontologically and ontically constitutive – namely, the being called Dasein.[12] For Heidegger, an equiprimordial structure of Dasein is the expression of the truth of Dasein’s being, the eventful coincident phenomena that constitute Dasein itself.[13] The reasons for this have to do with how Heidegger both conceives phenomenology and ontology as one and the same with regard to the task of philosophy as a whole. This is a point that can be read into how Heidegger narrates the problem of the forgetting of being in chapter 1 of Being and Time.

Heidegger’s concept of phenomenology is rooted primarily in an idea of disclosure and concealment, a departure from what he sees as a certain covering over on the part of what has become the western philosophical tradition of hitherto unexplored possibilities of ancient Greek ontology.[14] That tradition had come to take certain ideas as presuppositions, which is another way of saying that the possibility of the questionability of these ideas was concealed.[15] The reformulation of phenomenology according to disclosure in the way that Heidegger thematized it accounts for both the possibility of breaking from that the tradition, insofar as this reformulation defines reason in relation to the context in which something is allowed to appear and be grasped in its appearing.[16] This is done by drawing out the fact that we are inescapably, ontologically, situated such that we are constituted by the possibility of putting into question what is for and as Dasein, as ourselves.

For Heidegger, phenomenology and ontology are fundamentally about interpretation of what is, which is to say an interpretation of the interplay between the concealment and revelation that conditions, transcendentally/temporally, our being in the world as such.[17] Ontology for Heidegger is the phenomenological interpretation of our own being in the world such that we can allow the underlying fundamental structures of said being in the world to be seen themselves. Those structures are given through what Heidegger calls an opening of being, an opening that is defined again as the allowing to be exhibited of something.[18] It is this opening for the exhibiting of something that is the possibility of questioning as such. He calls such an opening transcendental, ontological, knowledge that he equates with phenomenological truth,[19] and with this statement, the ontological notion of truth supplants the hitherto dominant epistemological notion of truth.

With this, the first two points I set out to establish, that Heidegger is concerned primarily with the question of the being of beings with individuation and that this is a fundamentally ontological matter, are now so established. Further, the recasting of epistemology in ontological terms conditions the whole of the book and is concerned with illustrating that the epistemological questions of knowing are a matter of the temporality of the questioner theirself, the fact and necessity of individuation as the opening of the possibility of posing a question itself. In this sense, Heidegger writes in a loop, proleptically forecasting in the beginning of the text the underlying notion of ontology that will allow him to undertake his analyses of Dasein’s fundamental structures latter on.

To summarize, three points follow from this recasting of epistemology in ontological terms. First, if ontology and philosophy are defined according to the interplay of concealment and revelation such that reason is defined as interpretation or navigation of the dynamic of the coming to be seen and concealment of things, Heidegger is able to both reorient his readers back to fundamental questions regarding the revelation and concealment of being and beings despite what the tradition might say about epistemology and the essence of the human being. This is because we are fundamentally always and already engaged immediately in the world as the being for whom questioning is temporally constitutive. This point is made clear when one read’s Heidegger’s description of phenomenology in tandem with his description earlier in the book of how philosophers are constituted in the asking of questions, and in this case, the asking of the question of being. Secondly, the definition of Dasein within the parameters of the immediately given entails that one has to consequently deal with how history, the tradition in this instance, has conceptually shaped our thinking. Again, this is a point made clear when read back onto earlier portions of the book where Heidegger’s explicitly asserts that we cannot but begin with the fact that any scientific question is a question born out of ourselves as beings who question.[20] Third, Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology as ontology seems to foreclose the possibility of what he will later call “ontotheology” as metaphysics, and I will say of metaphysics tout court following Zubiri’s notion of metaphysics. This is because Heidegger’s starting point, that being is not a being and is accessible only on the basis of individuation as ontology, is taken to be primary before any question of what Zubiri will call reality can be posed. This is so because the validity of being, as a concept and reality, is only given as the opening of truth that is our perpetual and only beginning and end, the epiphanic character of the possibility of questioning that we are.[21]

§

As stated at the beginning and according to Conill’s reading, Zubiri in a sense cedes the question of being as Heidegger framed it, though not without any modification.[22] For example, where Heidegger’s conception of questioning is wed to the opening of being, a notion that allows him to cast the everyday encounter with beings in terms of at hand presence and ready-to-hand possibility primarily,[23] Zubiri will appeal to what he calls the “real notes” of a thing in order to ground the possibility of possibility. With this move, one already can see that Zubiri is concerned with the question of individuation as well but rejects the reduction of that question to ontology, my third main point. What the reader finds is a renewed attempt to ground ontology in metaphysics, to ground possibility itself beyond a phenomenological definition of possibility as the epiphanic temporality of humans. 

This point is made clear upon considering how Zubiri narrates the emerging of reality. In Dynamic Structure of Reality, Zubiri begins by reorienting the question of change away from notions of substance, the subject that changes, and being and non-being and toward an understanding of becoming as part of the dynamisis of reality itself, as a determinate structure that is occurring.[24] The question of dynamisis is a question of reality and not being precisely because to speak of being requires the affirmation of reality prior to the presencing of being.[25] When Zubiri speaks of dynamic structuration, he intends to speak to that prior, the prior at least in thought, real. By structure, Zubiri means the coherent unity of a thing. This unity is physical, which is not to say that it is just the aggregate collection of a number of notes or physical/chemical compounds of a thing, but the moment of the unity of said notes.[26]

It is this basic idea that conditions Zubiri’s subsequent treatment of the evolutionary unfolding of the real, and thus, the emergence of ontology as something real for human beings. The becoming, and thus the being, of beings for whom ontology emerges is a result of this fundamentally physical reality that we call evolution, a result of the specific structure of a things reality.[27] Zubiri describes the emergence of life in this way as an increasing process of interiorization beginning with the emergence of sentient matter. Interiority in this case names the phenomenon of sameness or identity that a sentient matter has with itself.[28] This notion of sameness is a “form of reality,”[29] where form designate the activity of thing such that it structurally it what it is.[30] It is from here that Zubiri can speak of what Heidegger calls equiprimordial, ontological, structures of human being.

Taking up the example mentioned earlier, that of our relations with other beings as possibility, Zubiri describes this being-with other things and beings as formal moment of the reality of our human reality.[31] The dynamisis of our reality itself is this formalization such we are with others and other things such that this dynamisis can be called “meaning.”[32] Meaning is the encounter with both the bare reality of what appears in addition to the subsequent ontological encounter with a thing in the sense of possibility.[33]

What this means for the sake of the present argument is that Zubiri is both accounting for individuation and also accounting for how the hermeneutics of Dasein is even possible. There is, similar to Heidegger, a looping form to Zubiri’s argument, but grounded in the fact that our interpretation rest upon the metaphysical reality of the dynamic physical structure of the real. Similar to how Heidegger recasts the epistemological in ontological terms, we have instead with Zubiri a recasting of ontology so conceived in terms of metaphysics. The epiphanic character of the real, and thus of individuation, just is the structure of the real itself. Reality is not reducible to the opening of being/signification; the opening of being/signification is the opening within the real itself.

§

In conclusion, I want to draw out the significance of this difference between Heidegger and Zubiri regarding their respective framings of individuation for how we might be able to think about what metaphysical and ontological descriptions can do for us, the philosophers who are alive here and now, with regard to how we think about history and ethics. Specifically, I want to draw attention to the role of such descriptions in the construction of ethical and historical statements. Where both Heidegger and Zubiri are concerned with the question of individuation, their importantly different ways of framing the matter lead to distinctly different possibilities for how one may, accepting either way of rendering individuation, then speak about the ethical and history without engaging in the reductionisms called naturalism and historicism.

Jesús Conill captures what is at stake on this point, at least initially for the sake of my own argument. According to Conill, after establishing that Zubiri’s project incorporates Heidegger’s thinking on truth,[34] he then notes how Zubiri breaks with Heidegger’s notion of historicity, one of the most fundamental aspects of Heidegger’s thinking. The break with Heidegger on this point is in part due to how each reads ancient Greek philosophy. Heidegger’s thinking is said to stem from a reading of the Greeks premised upon the distinction between nature and history, where the openness that constitutes human being as being-in-the-truth is set over against the sheerness of the enclosure of nature per se.

Zubiri instead seeks to unify the Greek notions of nature and the historicity of intellection. “Neither naturalism nor historicism. It is certain that Zubiri did not conform to Greek naturalism, nor to their notion (versión) of ontology, as he considered this to be a naturalist reductionism.”[35] Both the rejection of naturalism and of historicism are crucial for understanding why and how Zubiri positions ontology within his notion of metaphysics. What is needed for Zubiri, Conill notes, is a reorientation of Heideggerian thinking such that the openness of the person is not made into a kind of mythological historicism that is opposed to nature. At the same time, the importance of being as the openness of Dasein should not be subsumed under the priority of nature as such. “On this point, Zubiri will seek to offer a “real” fundament for history (historicidad). ‘Possibility, insofar as it is existential, is (…) the most original and ultimate positive ontological determination of Dasein.’ This “modal” conception of “possibility” needs a real ground (fundamento real).[36]

The real grounding that Zubiri has in mind is, then, formulated in contrast to, and thus as a synthesis of, the ancient Greek, medieval Christian, modern idealist, and Heideggerian phenomenological positions regarding the scission between persona and nature. This move is captured in the following formulation. “Thus, “the person does not have, but rather is a nature.”[37] Human being, historical being, is not separate from nature-as-reality. It is, rather, reality as human as historical. The ontological notion of truth to which Heidegger holds, in which the history of being’s unveiling is the history of the openness of Dasein, is still valid, but only once it has been resituated within the frankly saner notion of reality as natural.

The upshot of this formulation of the matter is that Zubiri avoids the reduction of human being to either mechanism or natural fate, while also avoiding the morally disturbing reduction of human and natural life to sheerly human volition. The consequences of this move for how we may speak of history and ethics can be seen, for example, in the work of the Argentine-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, a thinker for whom Heidegger and Zubiri, and also Emmanuel Levinas, are crucially important. Specifically, Dussel’s understanding of Zubiri’s, and also Levinas’, modification of Heidegger’s notion of being and truth, in the way that Conill renders the matter with regard to nature and history, creates the conceptual possibility for a reconnection of ethics as metaphysical itself.

For Dussel, Heidegger’s notion of being and truth, which again I take to be equivalent to his notion of individuation, opens the possibility for a reunification of thinking and praxis, but ultimately suffers from the inheritance of a solipsistic notion of the person and a reduction of the human to the will or power to be (poder-ser).[38] This is, further, a dialectical notion of being that forecloses the possibility of speaking of any normative grounding of the ethical in what is exterior to being.[39] What is needed is a way of speaking of an exteriority in which ethical norms can be grounded, while again avoiding a kind of naturalism.

Dussel weds together Levinas’ and Zubiri’s respective notions of exteriority and reality to arrive at such a formulation. The core of Heidegger’s notion of being and truth is retained, but it is given a context within the exteriority of the real itself. The sensed gap between human being as historical being and the nature of the real in toto, in turn, grounds the ethical substrate of human thinking and life. The fact of an exterior itself, of human being as arising out of something other than said being, is then mirrored within the context of being; it appears as the ethical itself, correlated to what is other than being, “an opening within the opening [of being]” as Levinas writes.[40]

All of this is to say that Zubiri’s revision and departure from Heidegger’s notion of individuation makes this kind of thinking, here in addition to Levinas, possible for Dussel, and thus, possible in general. Zubiri’s notion of individuation, when read against Heidegger, illustrates that metaphysical descriptions can serve to conceptually ground the possibility of the ethical and the historical as discursive objects of study. Situating ontology within metaphysics, the result of Zubiri’s notion of individuation, is not, then, merely a methodological maneuver. It is, rather, a move of the utmost philosophical importance that explains how ethical criticism of the world is possible.  

---

[1] Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. GA 2. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977. p. 51. Heidegger specifically is referring to a concept of the transcendence of being according to his interpretation of the concept and word phenomenology. I address what is happening with the connection between the transcendence of being, phenomenology and individuation in section 2 of this paper.

[2] See footnote 8.

[3] Martin Heidegger. Ibid. p. 51; Was ist Metaphysik? Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1955. p. 17-18. I make sparse reference to the latter text, instead sticking with Being and Time for the sake of displaying the more well-known arguments of Heidegger.

[4] Jesús Conill. “Heidegger y Zubiri.” Revista Portuguesa de Filosofía. Oct.-Dec., 2003, T. 59, Fasc. 4, A Herança de Heidegger. p. 224. Conill cites Diego Gracia. Voluntad de verdad. Barcelona, Labor, 1986. p. 66.

[5] Xavier Zubiri. Sobre la Esencia. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1985. p. 445. Citation originally found in Jesús Conill. “Heidegger y Zubiri.” p. 224.

[6] Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. p. 8.

[7] Xavier Zubiri. Sobre la esencia. p. 97.

[8] Xavier Zubiri. Ibid. p. 98; “In the first place, it is primarily a unity, because within it the diverse notes are not but abstract moments in which that originary unity is displayed.” Translation is mine. See also Xavier Zubiri. Estructura Dinámica de la realidad. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1989. p. 35-37.

[9] Miguel de Beistegui. Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. p. 109.

[10] Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. p. 51. “Ontology and phenomenology are not two distinctly proximate disciplines belonging to philosophy. Both characterize philosophy itself according to object and art. Phenomenology is universal phenomenological ontology, proceeding from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which as the analytic of Existenz, has fixed the end of the guideline of every philosophical question out of which it springs and returns.” Translation is mine. I return to this point in the main text.  

[11] Martin Heidegger. Ibid. p. 51. “Phenomenological truth (openness of being) is veritas transcendentalis.” Translation is mine.

[12] Martin Heidegger. Ibid. p. 16.

[13] Martin Heidegger. Ibid. p. 73.

[14] Martin Heidegger. Ibid. p. 29-30.

[15] Martin Heidegger. Ibid. p. 30, 45.

[16] Martin Heidegger. Ibid. 50.

[17] Martin Heidegger. Ibid. 36-51.

[18] Martin Heidegger. Ibid. 45, 43. “Speech [logos] ‘allows to be seen’ ἀπό…”

[19] Martin Heidegger. Ibid. 51.

[20] Heidegger. Ibid. p. 7-10.

[21] Heidegger. Ibid. p.  219-221; Jesús Conill. “Heidegger y Zubiri.” p. 226-227.

[22] Cf. Jesús Conill. “Heidegger y Zubiri.” p. 225.

[23] Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. p. 93; Xavier Zubiri. Sobre la esencia. p. 105.

[24] Zubiri. Estructura dinámica. p. 12-21; 151.

[25] Zubiri. Ibid. p. 27.

[26] Zubiri. Ibid. p. 36-37.

[27] Zubiri. Ibid. p. 175-176.

[28] Zubiri. Ibid. p. 184.

[29] Zubiri. Ibid. p. 184.

[30] Zubiri. Ibid. p. 185.

[31] Zubiri. Ibid. p. 225.

[32] Zubiri. Ibid. p. 226.

[33] Zubiri. Ibid. p. 227.

[34] Jesús Conill. “Heidegger y Zubiri.” p. 226-227.

[35] Ibid. p. 228.

[36] Ibid. p. 228.

[37] Ibid. p. 229.

[38] Enrique Dussel. Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Argentina Editores S.A., 1973. p. 33-55.

[39] Ibid. p. 97.

[40] Emmanuel Levinas. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris : Libraire Philosophique J.Vrin, 2016. p. 271.

Imagination and Time in the First Critique

In this paper, I focus upon the systematic location and role of the imagination in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. There are two questions I seek to answer. The first is whether the imagination facilitates the creation of objects (not things in-themselves).The second is whether the schemata that Kant introduces are necessary and if they are truly transcendental, i.e. conditions for the possibility of experience. The answer to both questions, is yes, but not to the exclusion of the role of sensation. I argue that the determination of time called the schematism is the condition sine qua non of experience as the unification of sensibility and thinking. Further, this determination is functionally equivalent to the productive, and by extension the reproductive, imagination, and is ultimately attributed to the TUA. Such time determination is what we call temporality.

These points entail that one can read the first Critique, at least from the section on the schemata, in reverse order, a point only latently present in the comments by Schaper, whom I cite below. My thesis is that the deduction and transcendental aesthetic are Kant’s attempt to parse temporality so construed, to render the moments of the epigenetic emergence of consciousness that is attributed at bottom to the spontaneity of the TUA itself.

§

First, the productive imagination names a synthetic activity of self-affection, the affecting of inner-sense, that in turn makes the construction of objects possible as temporal continuities/ figures (Cf. A101-102, 143/ B155, Matherne, p. 57). Second, the schemata are necessary and transcendental because of the way Kant has diametrically opposed the spontaneity of the understanding and passivity of sensibility. For experience to be possible, there must be a regulated and categorized (re)cognition (Erkenntnis) of phenomena. Without any activity on the part of what, for lack of a better word, I will call ‘the subject,’ or ‘the self,’ there would be no sense of differentiation between a given phenomenon and the person perceiving said phenomenon.

The individual schemata and the activity of schematizing appear to address this problem by providing a description of the type of activity that is necessary for a sense of this differentiation – namely, the determination of inner-sense, time. The individual schemata name moments of the otherwise unified activity of the schematization, or determination, of time such that the spontaneity of reason can regulate the sheer passivity of sensibility. This regulation creates the possibility of there being the sense of phenomena and a perceiver (the self) through the figuration of both objects and reflexively of a subject in the moment of the (re)cognition (Cf. Schaper, p. 284). These points are evident when considering the following.

The imagination appears initially as the transition point between the singularity of intuitions and the generality of thinking. It so appears such that the singularity, or contingency, of intuitions can be represented as some-thing, as discrete via regulation of the categories of the understanding, even when a given object is not or no longer is present (Cf. Albisu, 2014, p. 2; Matherne, 2016, p. 55). For ‘anything’ to be present or positioned (vorgestellt), for an ‘it’ to be at all for-thinking (the understanding), it must be thinkable by the categories of the understanding as something that is stably present across moments of time now and through memory even if the object is not present (Cf. Matherne, 2016).

The productive imagination makes this possible by first generating temporality – the momentariness that we presuppose as chronologic itself, and perhaps more paradoxically as a result, the genesis of historical or discursive thinking (Cf. Schaper, 290). This generation of temporality is what is called the apprehension and unification of intuition as such. Insofar as the argument holds, the schemata and the activity of schematizing time are, then, necessary not only for the creation of objects of experience and experience itself, but for the overarching argument of the first Critique, what Kant calls the epigenesis of reason. Epigenesis, here, names the emergence of thinking and cognition, the beginning of the beginning to which I just referred as the genesis of chronological momentariness itself. This point is evident when considering the following summary point.

Said otherwise, the productive imagination unifies intuitions by schematizing time as what we experience as ‘temporality,’ This is the main position of Schaper (Cf. Schaper, p. 281, 284). Further, this is a function of the TUA, the unification of the self-vis-à-vis itself and objects of experience. This unification and specification of intuitions within the context of the unity of apperception yields objects that are then cognized as such. All of this occurs as the determination of time/inner sense which must then logically be attributed to the non-thing called the TUA. Inner-sense may be described as the determination or concretization of the universality of the concepts of the understanding through the schemata. Here, the schemata are synonymous with the conditions for and activities of the application of concepts of the understanding to either empirical objects or the application of pure mathematical concepts to a pure intuition in abstract (pure) spacetime (Albisu, p. 19-20).

 Only the determination of time, rather than space, could yield such specifications, because time is the form of all intuition, and thus, is the foundation for sensibility and representation itself, be this empirical or pure (Cf. B141). Time is thus determinable, and it is the imagination that determines it through the schematization, what I would call myself the conjugation, of time. Such time determinations facilitate the production of image per se. Image, the arrestation of the flow of time and concretization of space, is constitutive of objectivity. Thus, the determination of time can be said to create objects by bridging the gap between the universality of the concepts and the contingency of an intuition (Cf. Albisu, 2014, p. 12-13). Insofar as this occurs, the transcendental schematism appears as necessary for the possibility of objects of experience to be at all because the schemata are synonymous with the condition for and activity of the unity of the understanding and sensibility that simply is experience. That condition is, to follow Schaper, the fact that experience is temporal, the fact of temporality, determined time (Schaper, p. 286). In this sense too, the schemata are transcendental.

§

Kant situates his discussion of the imagination in two key moments within the doctrine of elements. The topic is treated first in the deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, and second in the analytic of principles. I proceed by explicating Kant’s remarks regarding thinking, cognition, the concepts of the understanding and imagination from the second edition’s version of section 2 of chapter 2 of the transcendental analytic. In agreement with Shaper, Albisu, and Matherne, I illustrate how the schematism is meant to explain the claims made earlier in the transcendental deduction with regard to how the determination of inner-sense and the unity of apperception make the interface between intuition and the concepts of the understanding possible. It is worth noting a point made my Shaper, however, before proceeding.

What is shown already, prior to the schematism, is, as Albisu notes (Albisu, 2014, p. 4), the necessity for the imagination to be that by which cognition itself is possible. This is to say, Kant has shown that the imagination must be transcendental. As Kant makes clear, this is because the power of the productive imagination is tied to the synthetic power of the original unity of apperception, “which is a determination of inner-sense.” The imagination is a moment of the transcendental unity of apperception as “that unity through which all of the manifold given in an intuition is united in a concept of the object” (B139-140), what Matherne refers to as the creation of affinity between sensibility and thinking (Matherne, p. 59). This claim must be contextualized with regard to Kant’s remarks concerning how intuitions must be brought “under” concepts so as to understand how the productive activity of the imagination is the activity of the production of the coherence of experience.

            The necessity of the unity of concepts and intuitions, and the relation of such a unity for the notion of consciousness proper to cognition, is given in section 20. Kant’s characterization of concepts and intuitions seems at first glance to place priority upon the concepts when he notes, following his treatment of the logical form of judgments, that “a given intuition also necessarily stands under categories” (B143). This apparent priority of the concept is due to the fact that an object can only be given through a unity of intuition, a unity that ultimately is attributed to the categories of the understanding because the understanding is intimately wed to the unity of apperception (B144).

More precisely, the priority of the concept should be understood within the context of Kant’s remarks regarding the TUA, the determination of inner-sense, and the relation of both to the synthesis of the manifold of intuition. This is because it is somewhat misleading to wrap up the schematization of time as the determination of inner-sense by the imagination as an activity of thinking, rather than as a presupposition bound to the prior synthetic activity of apperception. To so interpret the matter would be, in Schaper’s words, to miss the metaphysical significance of what the schematism adds, to frame the matter in terms of an order of operations rather than as an attempt to render an important transcendental presupposition (Schaper, p. 286).  

On this point, one should be attentive to the constraints placed upon Kant for writing about something so basic to human being itself. The nature of the deductive thinking that Kant deploys in the Critique, and also of his descriptions in the transcendental aesthetic, is such that he can only speculatively triangulate certain synthetic activities. The matter can be said somewhat frustratingly as follows. This activity of triangulation is a way of getting behind the operations that are constitutive of the thoughts he is thinking when trying to get behind the thoughts he is thinking.

Here I want to propose a reversed order of reading that is only incompletely given in Schaper’s treatment. The schematism as the determination of conjugation of time into temporality functions, following Schaper, to indicate one of the more basic presuppositions that undergirds the notion of experience itself. It is the activity of the imagination of schematizing time that is parsed in the transcendental aesthetic and the deduction to yield the sensibility and understanding as the two polar elements that constitute the being of experience as temporality – i.e. as the schematization of time. Kant only reverse engineers the process in his descriptions from the transcendental aesthetic on.

The activity called the schematism must be attributed to the TUA because the TUA would be the necessary subject (in the sense of a subject and verb relationship) of any such activity attributed to a ‘subject’ lying underneath the play of sensibility and understanding that takes place as the schematization of time called experience. It is impossible to cognize anything, including a priori, atemporally (Schaper, p. 281). This is why the TUA is not an object of experience, it is an unconscious, virtual point that must be posited as unifying thinking, as that which is basically equivalent to the activity of time determination.  

Prior to section 20, with his treatment of the logical form of judgments, Kant has already established a connection between the imagination, the presupposition of the necessary unity of apperception, and of judgment. The givenness of a representation, be this subjective or objective, is fundamentally connected to the unity of apperception as a kind of necessary background upon which the activity of the determination of inner-sense (time) through the productive activity of the imagination is posited (B139-140). This activity of the determination of inner-sense, of the unity of apperception, is not ‘prior’ in a chronological sense. Chronological sense presupposes the unity of intuition and the operating of the entire cognitive apparatus in question. Rather, the priority of the determination of inner-sense occurs precisely through the concepts of the understanding as “rules” for “the action of bringing the synthesis of the manifold that is given to it in intuition from elsewhere to the unity of apperception…to bring about the unity of apperception a priori by means of the categories” (B145).

Kant repeatedly insists on the fact that although the concepts facilitate the objectification of intuition, the concepts alone are incapable of doing this activity. This is because the concepts are “mere forms of thought, through which no determinate object is yet cognized” (B150). Kant does say that all of the syntheses that make experience stand under the categories (B161). However, this is just to prove that experience requires concepts as the element of intelligibility brought to bear upon an apprehended manifold of intuition in a synthetic activity. The concepts themselves do not affect this bringing to bear of intelligibility upon intuition. There must be an activity that can do this – i.e. the productive imagination.

This point is evident when one considers how Kant explains the regulation of nature according to the categories just ahead of the transition to the schemata. The problem that Kant introduces here is a specific, and arguably the most important in the context of his project, example of how thinking and intuition coincide in what is called cognition. The specific problem is how the concepts “determine a priori the combination of the manifold of nature,” where nature is conceived “as the sum total of all appearances,” given that the concepts are not derived from nature so conceived (B163). In short, and to name the more general problem, the concepts that are meant to yield the coherence (combination) of the manifold of intuitions called thereby ‘nature’ are heterogeneous with regard to the manifold of intuitions that need to be unified as nature. Something else is needed on the side of the understanding.

Kant has already established that all syntheses required for experience fall under the concepts (B145). So, this must be possible, and it is possible as the determination of sensibility. Kant directly connects the imagination to the determination of sensibility with regard to the concepts earlier in the text (B152). There Kant notes that the imagination so determines sensibility as an effect of the understanding upon sensibility. The imagination is the first spontaneous act of the understanding vis-à-vis sensibility (B152). The spontaneity of imagination that determines sensibility is what Kant then calls the productive imagination, equivalent to the spontaneity that is attributed to the synthetic unity of apperception (B152). What this spontaneous action produces is the determination of sensibility of the passive subject by affecting or determining the subject’s inner-sense. The awareness of this affection is called the figurative synthesis, the basic picture production constitutive of our conscious experiences (B154).    

Thus, Kant positions the productive imagination at an important point in his analysis. He upholds the heterogeneity of the concepts of the understanding and of sensibility, but he illustrates how the understanding through imagination bridges the gap between conceptuality and sensibility such that experience itself is possible and such that intuitions are able to stand under concepts. The concepts do not themselves bridge the gap, but the spontaneity of the understanding (the TUA) to which the concepts belong does. The connection between this imaginative power of the understanding that determines sensibility and the transcendental unity of apperception is one of epigenesis (Cf. B167). All of this occurs at an unconscious level, as the constitutive moments of reason’s being.

The imagination, then, is a crucial moment for how the unity of apperception produces experience as a whole. Without the productive imagination that produces figural synthesis, no concept-intuition unity would be possible as experience. The specific way that the imagination does this is through the affection of inner-sense, or time. This is where Kant introduces the schemata to explain that the affection of inner-sense, which is basically a function of the unity of apperception, creates the possibility for image production, yielding the sense of being and non-being and other attendant schemata (A142/B181). This is the creation of temporality. The schematic act of the imagination that makes image possible as the determination of time is described as “a monogram of pure a priori imagination” (A141-142/B181), what Albisu would perhaps describe as a procedure (Cf. Albisu, 2014). Thus, the schemata appear to explain how the imagination affects time and thus makes experience, cognition and objects, possible.

§

In the preceding exegesis of passages from the Critique, my goal was to describe how the imagination facilitates the creation of objects by illustrating how the imagination is related to the production of experience itself. The imagination was shown to do this through the schematism of time, described as the synthesis of sensibility, a moment within the epigenesis of reason. Objects can be given because time has been determined productively and thus sensibility given through the presupposition (Cf. Rainer Schäfer, 2019, p. ) the act of the understanding called imagination. What Kant is describing is the unconscious constitution of conscious thought and cognition, the emergence of cognition itself.

Insofar as this is true, the imagination and schemata appear as both necessary and transcendental. The imagination is the activity of the schematization of time and unification of sensibility and understanding (Cf. Schaper. p. 280). This activity is so basic to cognition as to be the definition of experience. It must be attributed to the TUA for this reason. The unconscious level at which it takes place means it’s spontaneity is located at the same level as thinking prior to experience. In this sense, the spontaneity productive imagination, as the schematism of time, generates the opening of signification itself. In a future work, I should focus attention on the notion of spontaneity itself.

Bibliography

Martin Arias Albisu. “On Two Different Lines of Argument in Kant’s Theory of Schematism of Empirical and Mathematical Concepts.” Kant Studies Online. 2014.

Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Samantha Matherne. “Kant’s Theory of the Imagination.” The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination. Ed. Amy Kind. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Rainer Schäfer. “Die Zeit der Einbildungskraft – Die Rolle des Schematismus in Kants Erkenntnistheorie.” Kant-Studien. Volume 110. Issue 3. 2019.

Eva Schaper. “Kant’s Schematism Revisited.” The Review of Metaphysics, Dec. 1964, Vol. 18, No. 2.

Theory and Narration: Philosophy of Religion, Supersessionism, and the Status of History – AAR Presentation 2022

As has already been said, this panel attempts to look at something called the afterlives of Christianity. The way we have done this is by looking at how supersessionism has appeared in various forms and ways of thinking. This paper is an attempt only to clarify the philosophical and historical dimensions of the task we have set before ourselves, in part by bringing into this public forum a debate between Tim Snediker and myself. This debate concerns how we are to understand supersessionism in relation to time and history.

The afterlife of Christianity, in this context, is the fact that a supersessionist idea at least apparently constitutes an operative notion of history. What is this idea, though, once taken beyond the confines of the theologically inclusive exclusion to which Tim has pointed us in his paper? To be sure, it must have to do with a kind of will-to-appropriation that is called a ‘universalization.’ The obvious point stands that this universalization is exclusionary, insofar as the Israelite and Jewish religions and cultures are narrated only as necessary moments upon which Christianity is founded. What emerges as Christianity is said to have been there all along in nascent form but now as something universal.

Several questions, however, should follow given this basic sketch. Does this mean that one dispenses with a notion of universality in attempting to get beyond supersessionism? The pretension to universality, is, to be sure, a constitutive problem of the afterlife of Christianity, which appears in the continuation of the ontology of colonialism, the “ego conquiero” that philosopher Enrique Dussel says precedes the “ego cogito” of the modern notion of human being.[1] Yet, I ask, is this the same as the sort of universality that is coincident with a baseline historical consciousness?

These questions are important to think about for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that what makes supersessionism what it is, is not, I posit, the figural interpretation of cultures, states, and people as such. Those acts are roughly equivalent to the necessary literary mechanism for historical reporting. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to separate such thinking from the symbolic reasoning that seems to constitute thought as a synthetic activity rooted in the constitution of the cerebral cortex.[2]

Rather, the position I take is simply that supersessionism, philosophically described, is the specific figuration of time as historia according to a principle of necessity. Whatever afterlife of supersessionism there is in concepts of history, these will carry such an imposition of necessity, as it is for Hegel. Similarly, attempts to push against such afterlives, as, for example, in the historical narrations of Enrique Dussel, jettison this element of necessity without dispensing with a notion of universality necessary for the intelligibility of any philosophical judgment.

A sober mind sees contingency in the ebb and flow of the evolution – not necessarily the moral progress – of the human understanding of the universe and of ourselves. Such a mind might see an element of decision making, of reaction, within the context of the exercising of the passions to achieve immediate and unconsciously universal goals, to borrow Hegel’s description of world-historical action.[3] The overarching concept of history that supersessionist thinking yields seems instead to be the delusion that what has come to be came to be by necessity. Once abstracted, or ‘secularized,’ one is left with a kind of determinism that sanctions what occurs. It is not hard to see how such a logic underpins so much political thinking that directs attention not to the moments of shameful violence in the past, but to the future of a better reality that fulfills the best intentions of the past.  

This is a thinking that is delusional precisely because such thinking finds the sanctioning of rationality hypostatically; rationality is narratively conceived to be behind the apparent happenstance of what occurs, including the actions of so-called “world-historical individuals.”[4] This is the reason that Vincent Descombes describes Kojève’s reading of Hegel as giving us a, “terrorist conception of history” (une conception terroriste de l’histoire).[5] The sanctioning by the real is of certain actions, including immoral actions,[6] by the direction of the universal through instinct.[7] This is not, however, a kind simple determinism that equivocates between all actions on the side of human consciousness. Rather, Hegel notes that when the desire for the universal emerges in ethical frustration, this causes the individual to be in a state of indignation against any perceived ethical lack at a given time.[8] Yet, in the end and in contrast to merely subjective ethical ideals, the truth of morality and religion is still set within the parameters of a kind of necessity by which the world is as it is rationally (Weltleitung).[9]

Hegel reformulates this idea in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, writing, “The only thought that philosophy brings to bear is simply the thought of reason; that reason dominates the world (beherrsche), that it has gone this way rationally in the course of world-history. This conviction and insight is a presupposition in the consideration of history generally.”[10]

With this, we now can see what is really happening with figural interpretation and necessity. It is not enough to figure oneself via the figuration of others. What is needed is a narrative of time as history according to necessity (an act that phenomenologically speaking would be founded upon, as an extension of, a categorial or syntactical perception of time as temporality).[11] Hegel describes this as the development of “the consciousness of freedom.” This development takes place within a sensed gap in our temporality and ethical experience.[12]

For Hegel, then, history seems to be figured as necessity, but where necessity appears through the freedom of humanity, which is to say, as the medium through which the dialectic of freedom and progress moves.[13] This is what I mean by sanctioning. Necessity lends the validity to the world-historical actor’s actions, even where said actor is not conscious of this fact or where a negation of one’s free action occurs.[14] This is a narrative, or eschatological, conception of time married with a sense of teleological causality, a breaking of the “cycle of nature,” of “a quantitative now of nature with a qualitative time” as Oscar Daniel Brauer puts the matter.[15]

This follows from Hegel’s premise that what is at stake for philosophy is not nature, but rather, nature as it is in relation to spirit.[16] This is not to say, however, that Hegel thinks of an onto-theological subject that is pushing history to be what it is. The subject of world-history’s activity is not a unified One that appears in space and time, but that which is emerging to have already been in the becoming of the totality of what is.[17] Rhetorically, though, his notion of Spirit authorizes the motion of history. Thus, it seems to function as if it were hypostatically a subject.

It is only with the disclosure of something that is impossible to realize ‘in time’ that time can be figured as linear history. Such an addition of the impossible is called the eschaton. In Christianity, this concept structures the supersessionist conception of the Hebrew Bible and the figuration of Judaism as its historical past. Such thinking is proscriptive for how we should understand our meaning, not a transcendental name given to our constitutive nature. This tension between the transcendentality of time as a condition for experience and narrative temporality in turn creates a problem to which theologians return repeatedly in the 20^th century.[18] With Hegel’s notion of historical time, we get both aspects.[19]

History has and is occurring as what is, and it could not be otherwise. The supersessionism that obviously appears in Hegel’s narrations of history and religion as the determined movement of Spirit is the result of a hermeneutic principle gleaned from a theological thought pattern and applied to the rational mind – namely, that noēsis entails that one has access to the real in thought but that this real can be conceived in terms of narrative according to the need (Bedürfnis) of a given time.[20]

What is at stake in historical observations is not the past as a static object for cognition. Rather, what is at stake is the ability to figure the unity of our present as historical, as a narrative in which we find ourselves one way or another.[21] History tells us nothing about ahistorical truths. Rather, history is the schematization in language and in our minds of the movement of freedom making the world, discovering itself and thus, the theodicy, the sanction, of what is, may be, and what was.[22]

To conclude, I would like to note how the element of necessity seems to drop out for Dussel. I want to note the way that he seeks to retain a notion of universality in his own anti-Hegelian narration of an ethics of liberation. Such a comparison, even if rushed, will offer an example of one way one might seek to faceoff with the afterlife of supersessionism with regard to its being a dominant philosophy of history.

 In his well-known Philosophy of Liberation, Dussel begins the with a narration of philosophy up to now, a move that recurs throughout his œuvre. The history of philosophy is largely, Dussel notes repeatedly, a repetition of narrations of a will-to-power of the white northern European man.[23] There is, as others have noted, a historical continuity between supersessionism and this will-to-power. Thus, the breaking of this pattern of philosophical thought would seem to also imply a break with the supersessionist notion of history.

Dussel thus attempts to reframe philosophy not only by appealing to a metaphysics of alterity, but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, by drawing our attention to the importance of discovering how to retell the story of philosophy. History will be for Dussel, as it is for Hegel, of primary importance for understanding what concepts like being and alterity mean for us. Linda Martín Alcoff has noted, Dussel also seems close to Hegel in terms of the range of material he treats and the systematic impulse of his thinking.[24] Yet for Dussel, there is no narrative sanctioning by a universal will or desire beyond what can be called universally valid in terms of our constitution as human beings. These points all become clear when Dussel defines what he means by ethics.

In short, Dussel defines ethics as the discourse about “judgments of fact” (juicios de hecho) regarding “the human being as a subject that needs to reproduce its life.”[25] For Dussel, the historical and cultural – and I would add, the narrative –  elements of thinking are necessary but not sufficient for grounding ethics.[26] What is needed is a grounding in the metaphysical constitution of human being itself. Metaphysics is understood in this context within a framework that synthesizes Levinasian and Zubirian ideas and names the way we are constituted as subjects for whom the Other is constitutively at issue.

This is our metaphysical constitution, the way the givenness of signification is (une ouverture dans l’ouverture in the language of Levinas, the reality-structure of una esencia abierta in the language of Zubiri).[27] Ethics as first philosophy means metaphysics, a metaphysics of openness to the Other. History becomes our way of narrating what human beings do and are according to this metaphysical constitution. As such, Dussel’s thinking represents a reversal of the supersessionist way of thinking about the relationship between history and ethics as one of necessity.[28]

The afterlife of supersessionism appears as a figural interpretation of time as history according to necessity. The breaking of this structure is possible such that one does not sacrifice the language of universality. This is an important point to consider. Philosophy of religion, and the study of religion more broadly, seems at times to suffer from an inability to think both universality and the critical consciousness of racism, colonialism, and supersessionism together. Yet, this is not really a dichotomy. It is only a failure to explicate the inner logic of the sort of reductionism that scholars of religion are keen to avoid. By looking at what it means to think historically in relation to supersessionism, we are able to, at least partially, see what that inner logic is. Thank you.

Works Cited

Theodor Adorno. Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003.

Linda Martín Alcoff. “The Hegel Coyoacán.” boundary 2 45:4 (2018).

Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Metaphysik der Weltgeschichte. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag • Günther Holzboog GmbH & Co, 1982.

Terrence W. Deacon. The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Vincent Descombes. Le même et l’autre : quarante-cinq ans de philosophie français (1933-1978). Paris : Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979.

Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. 2018.

Enrique Dussel. Religión. Ciudad de México: Editorial Edicol, 1977.

Enrique Dussel. Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana. Tomo I. Primera reimpresión. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2017.

Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México: Fondo de cultura económica, 2018.

Enrique Dussel. Para una erótica latinoamericana. Caracas: Fundación Editorial el perro y la rana, 2007.

Enrique Dussel. “Meditaciones anti-cartesianas: sobre el origen del anti-discurso filosófico de la modernidad.” Tabula Rasa. Bogotá-Colombia, No. 9: julio -diciembre 2008.

Enrique Dussel. Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y exclusión. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1998.

G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986.

Edmund Husserl. Logical Investigations. Tr. J.N. Findlay. London: Routledge, 1982.

Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. & Ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Alexandre Kojève. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris : Gallimard, 1968.

Silvana Kandel Lamdan. “Longing for Authenticity in the Middle East and the Americas: Martin Buber and Enrique Dussel on Semitic Humanism.” Salzburger theologische Zeitschrift.  22. Jahrgang. Heft 2. 2018.

Emmanuel Levinas. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris : Libraire Philosophique J.Vrin, 2016.

Karl Löwith. Meaning in History: the Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949.

Jürgen Moltmann. Theologie der Hoffnung. München: Kaiser Verlag, 1966.

Geschichte als Offenbarung. Hrsg. Wolfhart Pannenberg. Fünfte Auflage. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982;

Robert Sokolowski. Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being. Washington D.C. The Catholic University of America Press, 2017.

Xavier Zubiri. Estructura dinámica de la realidad. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 1989.

Xavier Zubiri. Inteligencia Sentiente: inteligencia y realidad. Quinta edición. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1998.

---

[1] Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. 2018. p. 19, 32. “This Eurocentric ontology does not arise out of nowhere. It comes from the practical experience of domination of other peoples, from the cultural oppression of other worlds. Before the ego cogito there is an ego conquiero (the “I conquer” is the practical fundament of the “I think”)… Homo homini lupus is the real, which is to say the political, definition of the ego cogito and of modern European philosophy.” Translation is mine.

[2] Cf. Xavier Zubiri. Estructura dinámica de la realidad. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. 1989; Xavier Zubiri. Inteligencia Sentiente: inteligencia y realidad. Quinta edición. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1998; Terrence W. Deacon. The Symbolic Species: the Co-evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

[3] G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986. p. 19-47.

[4] Theodor Adorno. Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003. p. 32; Cf. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. & Ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. p. 590-623.

[5] Vincent Descombes. Le même et l’autre : quarante-cinq ans de philosophie français (1933-1978). Paris : Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979. p. 27; Cf. Alexandre Kojève. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. Paris : Gallimard, 1968. p. 95-96.

[6] G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. p. 46-48.

[7] Ibid. p. 42-44, 50-53. It is clear that Hegel does not thereby mean that people are not culpable. Humans are, in fact, defined by their culpability and Hegel connects this to their divine nature.

[8] Ibid. p. 51-53.

[9] Ibid. p. 53. “The insight, then, to which, in contrast to every ideal, philosophy should strive is that the actual world is as it should be, that the true good, the universal divine reason is also the power to complete itself (sich selbst zu vollbringen). Translation is mine.  

[10] Ibid. p. 20. Translation and italics are mine. Cf. Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Metaphysik der Weltgeschichte. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag • Günther Holzboog GmbH & Co, 1982. p. 175-176.

[11] Cf. Edmund Husserl. Logical Investigations. Tr. J.N. Findlay. London: Routledge, 1982. Investigation VI; Robert Sokolowski. Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being. Washington D.C. The Catholic University of America Press, 2017. p. 3-50.

[12] G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Geschichte. p. 77.

[13] Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit. p. 20-27.

[14] G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesung über die Philosophie der Geschichte. p. 49. “The specific interest of the passions is thus inseparable from the activity (Betätigung) of the universal; because it is from the specific and determined and out of its negation that the universal results.” Translation is mine. Cf.Theodor Adorno. Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik. p. 27-28;

[15] Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit. p. 155, 157.

[16] G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. p. 29.

[17] Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit. p. 156.

[18] Cf. Geschichte als Offenbarung. Hrsg. Wolfhart Pannenberg. Fünfte Auflage. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982; Jürgen Moltmann. Theologie der Hoffnung. München: Kaiser Verlag, 1966. p. 31-84.

[19] Oscar Daniel Brauer. Dialektik der Zeit. p. 171-175.

[20] Ibid. p. 20-21.

[21] Ibid. p. 175.

[22] Ibid. p. 157-160, 174.

[23] Enrique Dussel. Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana. Tomo I. Primera reimpresión. Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno, 2017. p. 97-156; Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. p. 17-45; Enrique Dussel. Para una erótica latinoamericana. Caracas: Fundación Editorial el perro y la rana, 2007. p. 13, 50-53; Enrique Dussel. “Meditaciones anti-cartesianas: sobre el origen del anti-discurso filosófico de la modernidad.” Tabula Rasa. Bogotá-Colombia, No. 9: julio -diciembre 2008. p. 155-159.

[24] Cf. Linda Martín Alcoff. “The Hegel Coyoacán.” boundary 2 45:4 (2018).

[25] Enrique Dussel. Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y exclusión. Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1998. p. 91-135.

[26] Enrique Dussel. Ética de la liberación. p. 114-115. The inverse position is represented by communitarian thinking –  e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. Against the privileging of an alleged incommensurability between cultures in Anglo-Saxon communitarian thinking, Dussel instead directs us to think the universal that appears in our desire to live and the way that this desire coincides with our sense of being with each other. “The communitarians thus occupy a position proper to the contemporary North-American panorama of ethics, which Latin-American, African, and Asian philosophy can study with sympathy – given the necessity of indicating the illegitimate hegemony of the Eurocentric ethos with its pretension to universality – while at the same time needing to go beyond their positions according to a materially universal principle.” Translation is mine. The universality of Dussel’s thinking is brought more practically to bear in the following article on expanding how philosophers read and teach philosophy within a sense of globality without reducing one culture to another or elevating one culture to the universal itself. Cf. Enrique Dussel. “Pour un dialogue mondial entre traditions philosophiques.” Cahiers des Amériques latines. 62|2009. Philosophie de la libération et tournant décolonial.

[27] Emmanuel Levinas. En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger. Paris : Libraire Philosophique J.Vrin, 2016. p. 271; Xavier Zubiri. Estructura dinámica de la realidad. p. 207-208.

[28] This claim should, in a future, work be clarified not only in terms of an expansion of my treatment of the relevant literature, but also with regard to some of the more apparently problematic – for lack of a better word – elements in Dussel’s own thinking, including his own sense that Christianity universalized, even while it also enacted violence, an ethic of the Other. I qualify these elements with ‘apparently’ because Dussel distinguishes between ideological and non-ideological forms of religion generally, and again, because Dussel does not read the emergence of Christianity, as far as I know, as a necessary part of the evolution of human consciousness per se, but rather as an event that did universalize certain aspects of an ethic of the Other. On Dussel and supersessionism as problematic Cf. Silvana Kandel Lamdan. “Longing for Authenticity in the Middle East and the Americas: Martin Buber and Enrique Dussel on Semitic Humanism.” Salzburger theologische Zeitschrift.  22. Jahrgang. Heft 2. 2018. On the aforementioned description of religion by Dussel, Cf. Enrique Dussel. Religión. Ciudad de México: Editorial Edicol, 1977.

Otherwise than History: Rosenzweig’s Critique of Thinking Being with regard to Emmanuel Levinas and Enrique Dussel

In keeping with our theme of Rosenzweig in context, in this presentation I trace what I understand to be an important and common conceptual thread that underpins some of the more well-known ideas of Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas, and Enrique Dussel regarding thinking and history. The conceptual thread to which I refer is the critique by Rosenzweig, Levinas, and Dussel of what Eric Perl, in his 2014 study of Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, has called thinking being, or the idea that thinking and being are phenomenologically synonymous.[1] I understand the critique of this idea to be at the heart of the much discussed break by Rosenzweig with the allegedly totalizing Hegelian ideas of history. My thesis is that where Rosenzweig, Levinas, and Dussel reject the correlation between thinking and being so as to privilege a messianic notion of dialogic relationships, each preserves the basic notion of grounding as such in the construal of said dialogic, and thus, leaves open the question as to whether there can be a real break with the allegedly totalizing systems of philosophy each thinker critiques.

My goal is to draw to our attention what the critique of thinking being tells us about how history, ontology, and metaphysics are thought amongst the three main thinkers I mention throughout. I refer to the consequence of their critiques as a recourse to a theoretical grounding of the ethical and ask what this means for us today vis-à-vis so many debates surrounding the concept of history – e.g., postcoloniality, decoloniality, indigenous studies, Afropessimism – and the rejection of notions of grounding as authoritarian.[2]

§

As Elliot R. Wolfson notes in his 2014 study of Modern Jewish philosophy, Rosenzweig’s thinking has often been interpreted as a precursor to postmodernism due to the denial of the totalizing character of what Rosenzweig called the “philosophy of the All.”[3] Further, as Wolfson writes and as I have agreed elsewhere, this denial of totalization appears in the redescription of the idea of the nothing (das Nichts) as a threefold indexical, virtual, point of thought with regard to the three elements of the real – God, World, and human – that nevertheless is rendered though an apophatic notion of unity given as, to quote Wolfson, “beyond cognition and experience…grasped in the illumination of prayer.”[4] It is this apophasis of the All that in turn chastens the time of the world, the liturgical community of this time, Christianity, and the political body of the state as the instantiation of said time and liturgy, a political and sociological point that corresponds to the onto-epistemic deconstruction of the All in Part I of Der Stern.

The point is visible already in first part of Der Stern where Rosenzweig writes the following with regard to the history of the totalizing tendency of so-called western philosophy, the aforementioned “philosophy of the All.”

On what then does this totality (Allheit) depend? Why precisely totality? A presupposition stands here openly and as ever before: the thinkability of the world. It is the unity of thinking that achieves its right against the multiplicity of knowledge in the proposition of the totality of the world. The unity of the logos founds the unity of the world as a totality. And every unity founds its validity (Wahrheitswert) thereupon, in the founding of this totality. Thus, a successful revolt against the totality of the world means, similarly, a rejection of the unity of thinking.[5]

According to Rosenzweig, the history of philosophy “from Iona to Jena”[6] is constituted by this unity of thinking and being as the totality of the world. Worse, the totality of the world is just one such reduction amidst three possible totalizations that follow from the unity of thinking and being – the reduction of the human being and the being of the world to the being of God, the reduction of God and human being to the parameters of worldliness, and the reduction of God and world to the psychological and anthropological parameters of the human. What is at stake is the possibility of real exteriority that can be given in relation.

Rosenzweig accomplishes the deconstruction of the All  through a formulation that appears to take on Hegel’s description of religion from the Enzyklopädie. There Hegel describes religion as the morality of individuals and of a people as expressed in the state. Here religion is what is called the claim to the absolute truth, or we might say, following the basic onto-epistemic idea, the access to the validity or sanction of the world, a theodicy. Rosenzweig’s critique contextualizes, and thus destroys, the positive meaning of this claim to the absolute . He seems to grant Hegel’s claim that the religion of the world, Christianity, indeed possesses the absolute truth of the world but then situates this world itself, situates the absoluteness of its liturgy and state, as a contingent reality, and thus, as non-absolute.[7]

What this orientation of the previously held absolute status of the world illustrates is that what is at stake in critiquing the correlation between thinking and being is the rejection of a politics of violence that was accepted as absolute, as sanctioned. With the rejection of so-called totalizing philosophies, comes the rejection, then, of historicism as an ontology, as a politics, ontology and politics being now synonymous. This is a rejection of what Roberto Navarrete and Emmanuel Levinas, writing of Rosenzweig’s anti-Hegelianism, have called in their respective treatments of Rosenzweig a Hegelian theodicy of Europe.[8] We can thus define the historicism that Rosenzweig rejects, as the sublimation of hitherto theological notions of time into the narrative progression, the being, of history itself.[9]

The resonances to Rosenzweig’s approach to the world and history, and the alignment of this correlation between thinking and being and a violent politics, on the part of Levinas and Dussel are obvious. [10] Writing in his book Totalité et infini, Levinas, for example, frames his arguments around the distinction between ontology as history and eschatology, where the former is characterized by the self-destructive tendency inherent to a totality that operates according to a dialectical tension constitutive of what is, ultimately, still the same. This is a move that can be read as drawing upon the distinction between history and the realized eschatology that Rosenzweig uses to characterize the calendrical life of Judaism in contrast to the life of the Christian calendar.

For Levinas, ontology is the logic of the history of Europe and ontology names the drive toward the making into a generic always of every unique present,[11] a theme that recurs throughout the book. Similalry, and largely following Levinas, the Argentine-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel writes at the outset of his Filosofía de la liberación that war characterizes the whole of human history to now, that the space of ontology and phenomenology “is the space controlled by the center, by the …dominating state without opposition today.”[12] For both Levinas and Dussel, the alignment of ontology and phenomenology, an alignment already evident in Husserl’s first texts that describe the phenomenological Geltungsbereich as a the space in which to carry out a “Seinswissenschaft,” appears as the description of a space that naturalizes the making generic of what is in reality living heterogeneity, the naturalization of colonial violence by the center against the other in the periphery.[13]

The break with this tradition for Rosenzweig of course occurs with his reorientation of philosophy around the dialogical notion of Speech-Thinking. He writes of the overcoming of the tragic enclosure of the solipsistic All of the totalizing and totalized human, the revelation of the other in dialogue in tandem with the discovery of the uniqueness of each person’s name and the grounding of each person, at least when thought, by a determinate nothing that is actually a something.[14] Taking this idea up, Levinas similarly speaks of the constitutive secrete, or the always to be unfolded desire, that constitutes the ipséité of each person in contradistinction to the genre of human being qua thematization, and the opening up the of each person to the other that in turn grounds the self as a self in the allowing for desire, the desire engendered by the other, as the revelation of relation, that escapes the chronological totalization of history.[15]

Thematization contra the uniqueness of the person with a name, the Unicité or the Einzigkeit as Hermann Cohen had put the matter, that interrupts the generic itself; this is also what is at stake when Enrique Dussel, following Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, writes of the grounding of ethics in the generation of the self as distinct from generality[16] through the proximity of the other that materially makes the person. Inverting what he sees as the Kantian prioritization of time over space, Dussel notes that  the eschatology of the dialogical relation between the self and Other is first given in act of birth and nursing, an event that exemplifies the originary proximity and spatiality that founds one’s sense [of oneself].[17] As with Rosenzweig and Levinas, Dussel critiques the correlation between thinking and being, noting that it is precisely this correlation that has led to the conceptual justification for, the after the fact establishing of the theodicy sanctioning, the colonial and racial violence that white Europeans inflicted upon, and continue to inflict upon, people living in the peripheral spaces of the world.[18] It is, following Levinas and Dussel, only by thinking according to the dialogical reality of our relations to each other, the relación rostro-a-rostro, that we see a way out of said violence as a “transmodern” philosophy that takes seriously the ‘barbaric’ over and against the reification of the world called the ‘center’ or ‘civilized;’[19] transmodern, precisely because the face-to-face is meant to disempower any recourse to the historical grounding of identity in the historical, theodicidic, narrativization of what has traditionally grounded or sanctioned a specific notion of identity over against its barbaric enemy.

§

Having now said all of this, I posit that the problem of totalizing thought, of the correlation between thinking and being, is for Rosenzweig, and by extension for Levinas and Dussel, the problem of history, the question of whether one can escape grounding the sociopolitical and ethical in a notion of history that functions as, but that crucially and in reality is not, a metaphysical account of the real. Contrary to history so thought, history will appear in the critique of thinking being as a reductive ontology rather than a proper metaphysics having to do with exteriority. History is here an ontology born of the equivalence drawn between thought and being with consequences playing out in the various wars that constitute world history.[20]

To think the one, in summary, is to think everything experienced as plural as participating in the one, to-be as thought by the one as the same.[21] This is to concur with Hegel’s statement in the Grundlinien that “what is actual, … is rational,”[22] at least if this idea is taken to mean an abdication of our ethical and rational sense of difference from the sheer and seemingly indifferent functioning of what is.[23] It is, again, against the veneration of the generality that erases the specificity of ourselves founded in our proximity to each other to which Rosenzweig, Levinas, and Dussel respond.

We should, however, question whether this is what Hegel is saying. It is true that Hegel describes cognition, life, and being as a unity at various points including in the Grundlinien.[24] While this could be read as foreclosing an idea of contingency that gives rise to a freedom founded in the unpredictability of dialogue, this is not necessarily so. Rather, in positing the unity of thinking, embodiment, and being,[25] Hegel is, to follow Myriam Bienenstock’s reading, attempting something that perhaps parallels ancient Greek notions of intellection, where the act or event of intellection has to do with the manifestation of being and meaning as teleological causality in nature and intelligibility itself.[26] It is impossible, at least on the first glance within this framework, to speak of a ‘real’ exteriority with regard to thinking, because how could we actually think beyond thinking or beyond [our] nature? Yet, is not the displacement of intellection in favor of a privileging of dialogic revelation on the part of Rosenzweig, Levinas, and Dussel another way of saying the same, insofar as the grounding structure is retained?

Nevertheless, I can see that the critique of this idea with regard to the foreclosure of responsibility, and indeed freedom, can still be maintained vis-à-vis the fact that, as Hermann Cohen writes of the stoics and pagan mythology generally, and as Rosenzweig writes of Kant, and Hegel himself,[27] the generic conception of thinking, precisely as a metaphilosophical narration of everything possible, opens the possibility, though again not the necessity, for the reduction of the alterity necessary for the event of dialogue to be possible to one perspective – there is a risk of simply taking one perspective as the whole. Such a reduction would occur in contrast to a notion of human being as both integral ipseity, in the Levinasian sense, and still conditioned by the mutual relations to God and the world. It is with regard to this danger that we can understand Rosenzweig’s comments on how Hegel unifies philosophy and theology, nature and revelation.[28]

Where Hegel could allegedly admit no disunified phenomenon vis-à-vis the singular Tathandlung of knowing, Rosenzweig instead seeks to preserve the idea of what Levinas, and Dussel following Levinas, will call a real exteriority to thinking and being – namely, revelation. The human being defined as being in the know, as knowing, does not need to entail comprehending All, does not need to mean that thinking and being are one as Hegel thinks.[29] The difference between the two positions in the end is subtle, but important.

If there is no heterogeneity built into our account of what is, our narration of our experience, if all is simply what we intellect, the grounding of ethics precisely as the recognition of and demurring before others – that is, before infinite exteriority itself[30] –  seems to run the risk of falling away, and we might be left only with the Hobbesian idea that being is simply the making to be of the world (esse facere est) developed initially out of a base sensory certainty to what Hegel calls absolute knowing.[31] It is this that would be called the sanctioning of what is without recourse to what could be otherwise beyond the imposition of a specific volition.[32]

To summarize and to repeat the point, to think and live in the way just described is, again, to reduce the plurality of experience to an All (Das All, la totalité, el Todo), to put forward a theory of being in which alterity is reduced to the same (une ontologie: une réduction de l’Autre au Même) by being made generic, a point raised earlier with Hermann Cohen’s attempt to address the insufficiency of certain notions of ethical rationality, of the conception of an indifferent unity of good and bad, vis-à-vis the suffering that individualizes human beings as others vis-à-vis others (das Du) and the desire for suffering to cease.[33]

The generic that is so foisted upon what is in reality a plural and spontaneous reality is perhaps what, at least in the sense of one possible reductive mode of thinking, Sylvia Wynter calls “the overrepresentation of Man” as the plenum of being human, or that to which Dussel refers as “the ego conquiero”that “precedes the ego cogito,” a point made earlier by Levinas when he writes of the violence necessary for the foundation of a totality.[34] What is needed for healthy human understanding,[35] as Rosenzweig wrote throughout the first part of Der Stern, and as Emmanuel Levinas, Silvia Wynter, and Enrique Dussel wrote after, is for us to reject the totalization of reality, be this the denial of finitude and the totalization of human being as (northern European) Man,[36] to live into the fact that the totality of the real can only be recognized partially,[37] that liberation from the oppression of the world must thus be metaphysical, a thinking and living according to the revelation of the Other rather than an ontological deduction according to a logic of similitude.[38]

§

All of the preceding analysis was meant to show how, in brief, Rosenzweig, Levinas, and Dussel accordingly seek to reject an onto-epistemic elision in favor of grounding human experience in the dialogical experience of exteriority itself. The question I want to pose in conclusion, however, is what the philosophical upshot of this thinking is for the political crises that face us today. While all three thinkers argue repeatedly against an allegedly totalizing metaphysics or ontology, with only Levinas and Dussel explicitly making reference to the distinction between metaphysics and ontology, the problem of grounding recurs throughout. It is this recurrence that I want to highlight as a point of discussion in concluding my presentation.

Rosenzweig’s thinking has clearly influenced and found points of contact with no small amount of thinkers across the world, even given the common and true complaint regarding the relatively limited readership of his works that many of us in this room I am sure share. Yet, the anti-totalizing perspective that we attribute to Rosenzweig, and his relatively speaking early reception, has left us in the bind of needing to ground our statements about what politics are. In this sense, we have not really escaped the idealist receptions of dominant strands of European thinking, even with the declaration that these strands of thought are anathema to the vibrancy of our experience qua human beings. In conclusion, I simply want to ask whether this recourse to the language of grounding is unavoidable and whether we can really avoid a kind of historicism when making any kind of ethical claim. To put the matter clearly, the idea of history as the sanctioning of what ought to be seems to appear still in the reservation of the language of grounding as the recourse to the external that engenders, that narratively makes sense of ourselves. Perhaps I have just misunderstood the upshot of the arguments of all three main thinkers I have treated today, and this question of grounding is less of a problem, and the distance alleged between the Hegelian and Rosenzweigian, Levinasian, and Dusselian positions are more pronounced, than I have here stated. I would certainly like to be wrong. Thank you for your time and I look forward to what I hope is a generative discussion.

---

[1] Cf. Eric Perl. Thinking Being: Introduction to Metaphysics in the Classical Tradition. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

[2] Cf. Calvin Warren. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.  

[3] Elliot R. Wolfson. Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. p. 37.

[4] Elliot R. Wolfson. Ibid. p. 37; Cf. Lucas Scott Wright. “Das All ist nur virtuelle: Paganism, Fiction, and the Concepts of Redemption, Truth, and God in Der Stern der Erlösung. Rosenzweig Yearbook. No. 12. 2021.

[5] Franz Rosenzweig. Der Stern der Erlösung. Freiburg im Breisgau: : Universitätsbibliothek, 2002. p. 12-13. Translation is mine.

[6] Franz Rosenzweig. Ibid. p. 13.

[7] Franz Rosenzweig. Der Stern. p. 365-  G.W.F. Hegel. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse 1830. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag,1986.p. 355.

[8] Emmanuel Levinas. “Une pensée juive moderne.” Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie, Troisième série, Vol. 15, No. 4 (1965), p. 209; Roberto Navarrete. “In tyrannos! Teología política y «diferencia mesiánica» en el nuevo pensamiento de Franz Rosenzweig. Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía. Vol. 33 Núm. 1 (2016) p. 208.

[9] Roberto Navarrete. Ibid. p. 208.

[10] Emmanuel Levinas. Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité. Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990. p. 6; Cf. also Enrique Dussel. Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana. Ciudad de México. Siglo xxi editores, 2017. p. 108-118.

[11] Emmanuel Levinas. Ibid. p. 6.

[12] Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México: Fondo cultura económica, 2018. p. 18. Translation is mine.

[13] Enrique Dussel. Ibid. p. 32, 44; Emmanuel Levinas. Totalité et infini. p. 36-37.

[14] Franz Rosenzweig. Der Stern. p. 5, 10, 194-195.

[15] Emmanuel Levinas. Totalité et infini. p. 53-56, 336.

[16] Enrique Dussel. Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana. p. 33-64. See footnote 17.

[17] Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. p. 46-47; Cf. also Emmanuel Levinas. Totalité et infini. p. 100.

[18] Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. p. 17-43.

[19] Enrique Dussel. Ibid. p. 42, 64; Cf. also Santiago Slabodsky. Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.    

[20] Franz Rosenzweig. Der Stern der Erlösung. p. 365-370; Emmanuel Levinas. Totalité et infini. p. 44-45, 49-54; Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. p. 254.

[21] Enrique Dussel. Liberación latinoamericana y Emmanuel Levinas. Buenos Aires: Editorial BONUM, 1975. p.16. “Ya Parménides lo enunció todavía mejor, cuando dice: …lo mismo es ser y pensar.”

[22] G.W.F. Hegel. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. 24-25, 30.

[23] Cf. Theodor Adorno. Vorlesung über negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003. p. 26; Hermann Cohen. Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums. Leipzig: Gustav Fock, G.m.b.H., 1919. p. 25.

[24] G.W.F. Hegel. Grundlinien. p. 30. “Die Einheit des Daseins und des Begriffs, des Körpers und der Seele ist die Idee.” Cf. also for example G.W.F. Hegel. Phänomenologie des Geistes. 15. Auflage. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020. p. 138.

[25] G.W.F. Hegel. ibid. p. 30.

[26] Cf. Eric Perl. Thinking Being. p. 1-10, 13; Myriam Bienenstock. “Hegel et le droit des peuples : qu’est-ce qu’être idéaliste en politique?” Archives de Philosophie, 2002/3 (Tome 65), p. 434-436.

[27] Hermann Cohen. Religion der Vernunft. p. 19.

[28] Franz Rosenzweig. Der Stern. p. 7.

[29] Franz Rosenzweig. Ibid. p. 7.

[30] Cf. Emmanuel Levinas. Totalité et infini. p. 41.

[31] G.W.F. Hegel. Enzyklopädie. p. 353; Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan. New York: Penguin Books, 2017. p. 11-70.

[32] Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklärung: philosophische Fragmente. Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1947. p. 36-37, 39.

[33] Franz Rosenzweig. Der Stern. p. 10-11; Emmanuel Levinas Totalité et infini. p. 33; Hermann Cohen. Religion der Vernunft. p. 17-25; Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. p.?

[34] Franz Rosenzweig. Der Stern. p. 1; Enrique Dussel. Liberación latinoamericana y Emmanuel Levinas. p. 15, 18; Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México: Fondo Cultura Económico. 2018. p.  Emmanuel Levinas Totalité et infini. p. 37; Silvia Wynter. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 3, Fall 2003, pp. 257-264.

[35] Franz Rosenzweig. Zweistromland. p. 149.

[36] Franz Rosenzweig. Der Stern. p. 4-6; Silvia Wynter. “Unsettling.” p. 260; Enrique Dussel. “Meditaciones Anti-Cartesianas: Sobre el Origen del Anti-Discurso Filosófico de la Modernidad.” Tabula Rasa. Bogotá – Colombia, No. 9. Julio-diciembre 2008. p. 157.Dussel posits that European-Hegelian philosophy is not even European philosophy, but rather the philosophy of northern Europe.

[37] Franz Rosenzweig. Ibid. p. 435-436.  

[38] Franz Rosenzweig. Ibid. p. 174-175, 425-426; Emmanuel Levinas. Totalité et infini. p. 234; Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. p. 44-45, 160.

Seminar Presentation on Husserl’s Introduction and Lecture 1 from The Idea of Phenomenology

I now briefly explicate the aims and themes of the introduction and first lecture. Husserl begins his introductory remarks on the lectures by describing a problem – namely, that of what he calls the problem of the possibility of cognition.[1] The possibility of cognition refers to whether cognition accords with reality that is independent of cognition as it really is.[2] Two ways of thinking are possible in relation to this question. According to Husserl, natural thinking, thinking that is not philosophical in quotidian life and in the sciences, does not engage in the question of the possibility of cognition.[3] Philosophical thinking, however, “is circumscribed by one’s position toward the problems concerning the possibility of cognition.”[4] The focus of the book will be to provide a theory of knowledge that “solves the above-mentioned difficulties, and gives us an ultimate, clear, and therefore inherently consistent insight into the essence of cognition and the possibility of its achievements.”[5] Thus, Husserl sets the stage for a methodological discussion that will provide for the achievement of these goals.

That method is called the phenomenological method, and is a method for the critique of cognition, a critique that, Husserl notes, “is the condition of the possibility of a metaphysics.”[6] Anticipating Heidegger’s remarks about the relationship between particular sciences and fundamental ontology,[7] and in language that seems reminiscent structurally of certain German idealist formulations of a systematic ground for knowledge,[8] phenomenology functions as a critique of cognition insofar as it provides access to the ground from which the sciences are possible, insofar as phenomenology examines the essence of cognition itself vis-à-vis what is cognized.[9] By cutting to this fundamental level of human thought, the sciences are made derivative of this more basic mode of knowledge. Yet, as Husserl notes, there is an apparent circularity to the question of a “science of cognition” that takes place within the parameters of the object (of thought) in question – namely, cognition.[10] What kind of method, then, is the phenomenological method? The remaining portions of the introduction are dedicated to answering this question.

            Certain cognitions – cogitationes – are indubitable, and thus, “the first absolute data.”[11] The question again arises as to how and why this is possible, and this leads Husserl to the schematization of immanence and transcendence. What is immanent is immediate, and is characterized in terms of seeing, or schauen, which has connotations of watching or looking.[12] Thus, immanent cognition, or seeing cognition, occurs within the parameters of what is indubitably given without reserve or inadequacy vis-à-vis the totality of what-is and what-appears.[13] The phenomenological method will function according to this sense of the immanent, putting out of question the transcendent, insofar as this would be to broach the indubitable limits of the adequately self-given. The sciences are thus described as “phenomena of science,” which attempt to go beyond the sheer givenness of what-is in the attempt to take an accepted array of facts and elucidate something new, in contrast to science as cognition more basically, which cannot be a matter of elucidating from assumed evidence.[14] Thus, in the second section of the introduction Husserl notes that we cannot even assume the fact of human cognitive activity as an assured basis from which elucidate the fact of cognition as a psychologist might do.[15] Yet, the question seems to arise as to whether an argument can then be made about the possibility of cognition if the scientific modes of calculation are to be abandoned.

            It is through eidetic abstraction and a distinction between immanence and self-givenness that Husserl finds we can retain a sense of intelligible arguments in describing the essence of cognition in terms of the universal, and thus, in terms of the “a priori within absolute self-givenness” rather than strictly something immanent contra real transcendence of the ego.[16] Yet, as was already the case in Husserl’s description of the various sciences in relation to the concepts of immanence and transcendence, we see here the instability of these categories vis-à-vis what is meant by self-givenness. This is so insofar as the indubitable cognitions that occur through/as self-givenness are not strictly speaking immanent. Husserl’s description of the cognition of the duration of sound shows that temporally there are discrete moments in said cognition. Thus, what is occurring, what is given, is not contained in the simultaneity of the now of the appearance.[17] This leads Husserl to describe what is occurring in cognition vis-à-vis cognizing and what is cognized as the constitution of the latter through the various processes of memory, imagination, predication, and perception. Whatever the objects are or are not independent of this activity is not for phenomenology to say. Givenness entails presentation (Vorstellung). Givenness is what phenomenology examines both in terms of the activity of cognition and the fact that objects are given.[18] As a point slight digression and point of interest for those interested in the reception of this idea of givenness, I want to note how, despite the various ways of augmenting the reduction to givenness as described here, this general idea persists today, for example, in the so-called third reduction of French phenomenologist and Christian theologian Jean-Luc Marion, where the idea of phenomenology is a letting-manifest (de laisser l’apparition se montrer) of givenness as such,[19] and earlier in the reception of phenomenology in Theodor Adorno’s 1966 Negative Dialectics, and in Enrique Dussel’s 1977 Philosophy of Liberation, wherein this idea of givenness is rendered socio-politically problematic, because allegedly reifying what-is as first philosophy. [20] Thus, there is no small amount of importance in getting clear about what Husserl himself means by givenness, both for the natural attitude and for the philosophical attitude, for understanding various trajectories of philosophies in the 20^th century.

Lecture 1: A Return to the Critique of Cognition as the Philosophical Attitude

            The direction of the lectures so established, Husserl discusses the distinction between the natural attitude of thinking, philosophical thinking, and what the critique of cognition as approached from the latter in distinction from the natural attitude is in lecture one. Taking up the previous definition of the natural attitude as “unconcerned with the critique of cognition,” Husserl notes that the natural attitude is characterized by a mode of givenness that is constituted by perception and memory.[21] Here, “we are turned to the objects as they are given to us each time and as a matter of course, even though they are given in different ways and in different modes of being, according to the source and level of our cognition.”[22] From this follows a description of the sciences generally as a presentation of the logical relations between the objects of our perception and memory and the falsification of contradictions therein by “assured cognition.[23] Whence this assurance? The answer is again from the things themselves, so qualified through the natural attitude and the sort of givenness one may speak of from that attitude. “In every step of natural cognition pertaining to the sciences of the natural sort, difficulties arise and are resolved, either by pure logic or by appeal to facts, on the basis of motives or reasons which lie in the things themselves…”[24]

            Philosophical thinking, however, focuses upon as an object of inquiry what is taken for granted in the natural attitude – namely, “the possibility of cognition.”[25] This is not to say, however, that cognition is not treated as an object in the course of other objects of scientific inquiry by the natural attitude. “To be sure, as with everything else in the world, cognition, too, will appear as a problem in a certain manner, becoming an object of natural investigation.”[26] Husserl admits that cognition can and is so described because cognition is a part of nature.[27] It is within this paradigm that the natural attitude yields “a pure grammar and at higher stages a pure logic (a whole complex of disciplines owing to its different possible delimitations…”[28]

…cognition is essentially cognition of what objectively is; and it is cognition through the meaning which is intrinsic to it; by virtue of this meaning it is related to what objectively is. Natural thinking is also already active in this relating. It investigates in their formal generality the a priori connections of meanings and postulated meanings and the a priori principles which belong to objectivity as such…[29]

            In contrast, the critique of cognition engages the possibility for the sort of givenness that occurs in the natural attitude, the connection between cognition and what is cognized that makes possible the scientific investigations into the various logical realtions and contradictions between objects and thematizations thereof.[30] Yet, in so doing several difficulties arise from the apparently circular nature of asking after that which enables one to inquire. Taken to an extreme, one runs the risk of collapsing the reality of what is given to the reality of cognizing activity, a solipsistic notion that betrays itself, betrays the allegedly sheerness of its corresponding notion of immanence, by positing connections between appearances that transcend the bounds of immanent recognition.[31] Yet, this contradiction gives way to a more basic problem by which the necessity of logic is in fact a historical accident in the course of evolutionary history,[32] and the further absurdity arises according to which the questioning of the possibility of cognition can only happen by presupposing the law of non-contradiction, thus depriving cognition of its basis for making judgments even as cognition seeks to make a judgment about its own possibility.[33] Thus, “We are in constant danger of becoming sceptics, or still worse, we are in danger of falling into any one of a number of skepticisms all of which have, sad to say, one and the same characteristics, absurdity.”[34]

            Central to phenomenology as a critique of cognition, then, are the identification and resolution of these problems that all go back to the nature of “the correlation between cognition and being an object of cognition,”[35] the aforementioned fact that cognition cognizes itself. “And this naturally applies also to all basic forms of being an object which are predetermined by the nature of cognition (To the ontological, the apophantic as well as the metaphysical forms).”[36] With this, we return to the critique of cognition as a theory of knowledge, the beginning of epistemology, through which the possibility of metaphysics is possible. Whereas the natural sciences function with the assumption of the possibility of cognition, and thus base interpretations of objects thereupon, “Epistemological reflection first brings to light that the sciences of a natural sort are not yet the ultimate science of being. We need a science of being in the absolute sense. This science, which we call metaphysics, grows out of a “critique” of natural cognition and what it is to be an object of cognition…”[37] So framed, Husserl frames phenomenology, at least initially, as “clarifying the essence of cognition and of being an object of cognition…a phenomenology of cognition and of being an object of cognition…the first and principal part of phenomenology as a whole…the specifically philosophical attitude of mind, the specifically philosophical method.”[38]

Conclusion: A New Thinking

            Husserl ends his lecture by speaking to the importance of this method and the distinction between the natural and philosophical attitudes, in the context of a question regarding whence the unity of the sciences is posited. In contrast to the natural sciences, which may build uniformly upon the different discoveries made in distinct spheres of inquiry such that it is possible to speak of “the natural sciences” as a unity despite their diverse principles of inquiry, philosophy “needs an entirely new point of departure and an entirely new method distinguishing it in principle from any “natural” science.”[39] The absurdities that arise in approaching the possibility of cognition from the natural attitude of the natural sciences can only be addressed and answered from a different perspective. “If the meaning and value of natural cognition as such together with all of its methodological presuppositions and all of its exact foundations have become problematic, then this strikes at every proposition which natural cognition presupposes in its starting point…”[40]

Insofar as Husserl posits the necessity of this new beginning for philosophy, he is, retrospectively, continuing the connection between critique and novelty that persists not only in the German idealists who came before him, but so too in his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig[41] and his student Martin Heidegger. Some initial questions for discussion that I pose following this point are: 1. What is the nature of critique for Husserl? 2. How does Husserl describe the continuity and discontinuity between his new method and the natural sciences? 3. Why does Husserl avoid solipsism even as he draws attention to the need to put the certainty of what is cognized into question?

---

[1] Edmund Husserl. The Idea of Phenomenology. Tr. William P. Alston & George Nakhnikian. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1964. p. 1.

[2] Ibid. p. 1.

[3] Ibid. p. 1.

[4] Ibid. p. 1.

[5] Ibid. p. 1.

[6] Ibid. p. 1.

[7] Martin Heidegger. Sein und Zeit. GA. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman, 1977. p. 12-14; Being and Time. Tr. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. p. 29-31.

[8] See for example J.G. Fichte. Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre. Leipzig: Fritz Eckhardt Verlag, 1911. p. 15-20. The similarities between Fichte and Husserl’s problem arises already with the title of Fichte’s book – On the Concept of the Doctrine of Science (the making of Knowledge) – vis-à-vis my remarks regarding Husserl’s introduction to his lectures. For Fichte, the relationship between the sciences and cognition is central to his own explication of what he will call the “foundational principle,” or Grundsatz, of knowledge generally. Husserl’s description of individual sciences as phenomena of science qua science appears similar to the way Fichte describes the coherence and intelligibility of individual scientific principles in relation to a foundational principle that guides the making of knowledge – science – overall. While obviously Fichte and Husserl, and other idealists, are engaged in different approaches, the structure of the problem remains similar.

[9] Husserl. The Idea of Phenomenology. p. 1.

[10] Ibid. p. 1-2.

[11] Ibid. p. 2.

[12] Ibid. p. 2-3.

[13] Ibid. p. 3.

[14] Ibid. p. 4-5.

[15] Ibid. p. 5, 11. What the translators call “mental activity” is Erlebnis in German, which has connotations of embodied experience. I am not suggesting mental activity is wrong in this context, but it may hide the sense in which mental activity at the phenomenological level is an experience rather than something set over against a person in a detached sense. The objectivity of cognition, or the representation of cognition as a given, is rather the posterior description of what is experienced in or as simultaneity. In this sense, Husserl’s remark on page 11 that, “the cogitation, the appearing itself, becomes an object,” is true and can be characterized as activity read to be analyzed.  

[16] Ibid. p. 7.

[17] Ibid. p. 8-9.

[18] Ibid. p. 10-11.

[19] Jean-Luc Marion. Étant donné : essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris : Quadrige/ PUF, 1997. p. 14 ; Being Given : Towards a Phenomenology of Givenness. Tr. Jefferey L. Kosky. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. p. 8.

[20] Theodor Adorno. Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966. p. 19; Negative Dialectics. Tr. E.B. Ashton. London: Continuum, 1973. p. 9; Enrique Dussel. La filosofía de la liberación. Segunda reimpresión FCE. Ciudad de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018. p. 44; The Philosophy of Liberation. Tr. Aquilino Martinez & Christine Morkovsky. Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2003. p. 16.

[21] Husserl. The Idea of Phenomenology. p. 13.

[22] Ibid. p. 13.

[23] Ibid. p. 13-14. See Fichte again for the comparatively similar way the sciences are described.

[24] Ibid. p. 14.

[25] Ibid. p. 15.

[26] Ibid. p. 15.

[27] Ibid. p. 15.

[28] Ibid. p. 15.

[29] Ibid. p. 15.

[30] Ibid. p. 15-16.

[31] Ibid. p. 16.

[32] Ibid. p. 16-17.

[33] Ibid. p. 17.

[34] Ibid. p. 17.

[35] Ibid. p. 17-18.

[36] Ibid. p. 18.

[37] Ibid. p. 18. Here one is presumably struck again by the similarities between Husserl and German idealism generally construed as a movement based in the critique of cognition carried out by Kant, and by the Heideggerian formulation of the question concerning being in Being and Time and his 1929 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Heidegger’s reading of Kant’s first critique is as a work that makes the foundation of metaphysics the critique of pure reason, which is of course a critique of the possibility of cognition. Despite being derivative of Husserl on this point, the connection is important to note. See Martin Heidegger. Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. GA. 3. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1991; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Tr. James S. Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962.  

[38] Ibid. p. 18-19.

[39] Ibid. p. 19.

[40] Ibid. p. 20.

[41] Rosenzweig is an example of somebody thinking through related but different problems in connection to how canons of philosophy and metaphysics have been passed down. Moreover, as Bernhard Casper notes in his introductory essay to the digital edition of the 1921 Der Stern der Erlösung, or The Star of Redemption, by the university library in Freiburg im Breisgau, entitled “Transzendentale Phänomenalität und ereignetes Ereignis,” the method of the first part of The Star is in a qualified sense a phenomenology of the foundational themes that comprise philosophy. See Franz Rosenzweig. Der Stern der Erlösung. Freiburg im Breisgau: Universitätsbibliothek, 2002; The Star of Redemption. Tr. Barbara E. Galli. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2005; Franz Rosenzweig. Das neue Denken. GS III. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1984; Franz Rosenzweig. The New Thinking in Philosophical and Theological Writings. Tr. Paul W. Franks & Michael L. Morgan. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000.

Weekly Thoughts on Emmanuel Levinas and Enrique Dussel 1

I had a professor once who began every lecture by asking, “Do you know why today is a good day?” His answer was, “Because we get to study philosophy!” I have been thinking about this a lot in the last week. I am currently participating in three seminars in the philosophy department at Loyola Marymount University all on phenomenology and continental philosophy. I have a lot of time to read and think as I commute from the San Gabriel Valley to LMU on multiple metro lines. I am grateful. On that note, I have been reading parts of Enrique Dussel’s 1977 La filosofía de la liberación. In this post, I want to draw attention to his description of the cosmos, world, and signification in the second chapter. His description struck me, philosophically and linguistically, as both beautiful, and relevant to my seminars. Toward this end, I want to briefly describe the Levinasian context in which Dussel’s description appears before explicating what he means by the world and the cosmos.

The description in chapter 2 follows Dussel’s narration of the history of philosophy following Emmanuel Levinas’ own description in his 1971 Totalité et infini. For Levinas, the problem that confronts us in thinking the ethical is that the truth of the world seems to be given not in ethical living, but rather in war. Indeed, the truth of being, ontology, can be said to be seen as constant in violence. Levinas writes at the beginning of the book, “On conviendra aisément qu’il importe au plus haut point de savoir si l’on n’est pas dupe de la morale.”[1] Why? Because reason consists in a sobriety about how we find the world and we find it most truthfully in its being at war (as an aside, I love Levinas’ description of lucidity). “La lucidité – ouverture de l’esprit sur le vrai – ne consiste-t-elle pas à entrevoir la possibilité permanente de la guerre?”[2] Ontology precludes ethics insofar as being cannot tell us anything other than what-is and the status quo is violence. The ought of ethics is wed to possibility rather than what already is. How then are we to think what most of us at least would say is our responsibility for each other? The answer is not given vis-à-vis being, but rather more fundamentally in the description of our selves as constituted by the idea of infinity that breaks through determined being – a notion of immediate being and the copula that is shared by a thinker as seemingly at odds with Levinas such as Hegel,[3] and by a thinker such as Peirce.[4] The possibility of our living in peace rather than war means that ethics is eschatological.

Admitting that philosophy commences with an engagement with what is, ontology, rather than subjective opinion, Levinas writes that the infinite, eschatological, dimension of humanity is present such that the subjective attains to a correlation with the objectivity of ontology – objectivity is for Levinas, and it becomes similarly for Dussel, the fact of philosophical thinking beginning with an encounter in ignorance with objects.[5] “Dans l’idée de l’infini se pense ce qui reste toujours extérieur à la pensée.” Infinitude is thought, and so there is a relation, not an equivocation, between ethics and being.[6] My subjectivity may not be yours, but we share the infinite thought that breaks the bounds of subjectivity thought only through the prism of being. That thought instantiates through the revelation of an other.

It is on this point that what is often taken in bad faith as a sort of poetic romanticism on the part of Levinas is shown rather to be an account of how signification works. Levinas is at once providing the ground for thinking both ethics and truth. This is an important point because it is too easy to dismiss the epistemology that Levinas and Dussel are offering due to the theological language and seeming dismissal – of course there is no dismissal but rather a setting into the correct perspective – of ontology in favor of the truth of the revelation of the other. To read Levinas and Dussel is to read a theory of significance that, not unlike Kant and Fichte in a general sense,[7] finds truth to be bound to a limit concept,[8] or in phenomenological terms, to a horizon that yields what Theodor Adorno refers to as the systematic impulse of thinking,[9] and what Emilio Brito, interpreting Schelling’s early Fichtean writings, calls an autoposition.[10]

Dussel picks up on this with his description of an originary proximity that characterizes human existence. Just as Levinas describes transcendence as the radiance of the face of the other,[11]so too does Dussel relate transcendence and proximity to others. Proximity is parsed according to a distinction between proximity to objects and other people. Dussel refers to the former as proxemia and the latter as an approximation toward freedom, “más allá de la esencia (E. Levinas).”[12] To be proximate to others is “anterior al significante y significado.”[13] Interestingly, given the discussion of language and origins in the 2016 publication of Giorgio Agamben’s Che cos’è la filosofia, Dussel anticipates Agamben’s own narration of what is happening in the question regarding the origin of language. For both, to ask of the origin of language is to ask after an origin generally. Dussel writes, “[Aproximarse] es ir en búsqueda del origen del significado-significante, el origen mismo de la significación. Es un avanzarse; es un presentarse anterior a toda presencia; es un significar significándose; es presentarse como el origen de la semiótica.”[14] What is at stake is not the fact that we are social creatures, but rather how approximation is fundamental to how and who we are in every aspect of our lives such that a question about the nature of meaning is a question of how we are vis-à-vis each other. Signification itself functions upon this constitutive proposition regarding human being. Similarly, Agamben describes how the structure of a fundamental presupposition of language that is only comprehensible by the impossibility of rendering it in language structures the entire history of so-called western philosophy.[15] Any question regarding ontology and logic, Agamben tells us, has this structure. According to Dussel, we can read Agamben through the language of proximity and Dussel through the language of the presupposition.

Dussel continues his narration by writing of the various levels of approximation as including originary proximity and historical proximity. The former refers to the contingency of human being in the first instance – namely, through the conception of children by parents and the carrying and care for children by mothers. To this originary proximity belong also erotic and violent phenomena insofar as embodiment is a part of both the parent-child relationship and the relationship between lovers and enemies in violence. It is from this originary proximity that the possibility of love and hate arises, and thus, again this is the origin of signification.[16] Historical proximity follows the originary proximity. Whereas we are born to a mother, we are born to a culture through which the first relation is lived. “La inmediatez madre/hija se vive también siempre como relación cultura-pueblo.”[17] It is following this that Dussel distinguishes between a cosmos and world, the point with which I will conclude.

From these basic moments of human existence as approximation, which are surmisable as ways of being approximation vis-à-vis each other and things, Dussel arrives at his account of what we would perhaps, in a Kantian sense, call the Grenzbegriff of totality.[18] Proximity is experienced as the possibility of distance and closeness. “La proximidad, el cara-a-cara de la persona con persona, deja siempre lugar a lejanía…El rodeo de la lejanía hace posible la proximidad futura.”[19] Of what does this interplay between proximity and distance consist? The answer is that the interplay between proximity and distance occurs within the experience of signification, an experience that presupposes both the cosmos and the world. In making this distinction, Dussel accounts for both the experience of the exteriority of reality as exterior – that is, as autonomous – from human existence, and for the experience of enmeshment between the world and human existence in our experience of meaning.

Basic to this idea is that human beings are always engaged with reality as the experience of each other and of things. “Las cosas-sentido (X. Zubiri), entes, no nos rodean caóticamente. Forman parte de un mundo…Cuando hablamos de mundo nos referimos al horizonte cotidiano dentro del cual vivimos…una totalidad instrumental, de sentido.”[20] From here, Dussel writes of the distinction between this world and what he refers to as cosmos. Cosmos designates the totality of what-is independent of human meaning. “A los fines de este discurso filosófico, designaremos con la palabra del origen griego “cosmos”, a la totalidad de las cosas reales, conocidas o no por el ser humano.”[21] By contrast, the reality of the world as the reality of signification entails a contingency upon human existence. In making this distinction, as I mentioned earlier, Dussel avoids the reduction of the real to either an idealist notion of reality as completely dependent upon human existence and the reduction of reality to a realism that makes the human experience of generating meaning into a non-reality. Summarizing the basic idea, Dussel, in my opinion beautifully writes, “Por ello, diremos que hay cosas en el cosmos; pero los entes son sólo en el mundo.”[22] The difference between haber and ser indexes the distinction between sheer presence, which can still only be rendered somewhat indirectly through language, and propositional identification.

---

[1] Emmanuel Levinas. Totalité et infini : essai sur l’extériorité. Paris : Livre de poche, 1991. p. 5.

[2] Ibid. p. 5.

[3] G.W.F. Hegel. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970. p. 82-84. Immediacy, which one could argue is ontology par excellence if following Levinas’ distinction between ontology as what is and metaphysics as having to do with the infinite dimension of human being, seems to offer the richest truth but in the end as Hegel notes is the emptiest. Indeed, what is to be said in simply noting that we and things are? This is of course Kant’s point when noting of God that existence cannot be a predicate.  

[4] C.S. Peirce. On a New List of Categories. Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Vol. 7. (May 1865-May 1868), pp. 287-298. Similarly, following the preceding note about Hegel’s argument regarding immediacy, Peirce notes that the copula is, strictly speaking, contentless. Reading Peirce through Levinas, we can say that the copula as the junction between a subject and predicate can only yield the fact of existence and that whatever is done under the auspices of ontology is constrained to the proposition. So constrained, ontology is a large area of inquiry, but one cannot render therefrom the totality of human existence which has to do with desires and convictions. Meaning is not reducible to being even if the fact of existence is a fact.

[5] Emmanuel Levinas. Totalité et infini. p. 9. “A moins que le non-savoir où commence le savoir philosophique, coïncide non avec néant tout court, mais seulement avec le néant d’objets.” Insightfully and correctly, Levinas’ description of ontology does not stick to the vague sense of being generally that characterizes still so much, at least Christian, philosophy and phenomenology. Being is always concrete, the being of war in which matter is channeled through design and force, the being of the metal and plastic that constitute the computer on which I am typing. That we speak in the genitive should not confuse us. The “of which” aspect by which we say “being” generally only supports the fact that ontology is, au fond, ontic, and that language, which corresponds to our being neurologically the activity of abstraction and association, and this activity itself, are responsible for the fact that we attempt can think generality. This is not to say that abstraction is not real, and in fact most of the things that make up our lives today would not be possible if the laws of nature, established through abstraction and association. For the description of human being as the activity of abstraction and association, see Terrence Deacon. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997.

[6] Ibid. p. 7-8.

[7] Immanuel Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1956. p. 587; J.G. Fichte. Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftslehre. Leipzig: Fritz Eckardt Verlag, 1911. p. 22-25.

[8] Andrea Gentile. Bewusstsein, Anschauung, und das Unendliche bei Fichte, Schelling und Hegel: Über den unbedingten Grundsatz der Erkenntnis. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2018.

[9] Theodor Adorno. Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003. p. 65.

[10] Emilio Brito. La création selon Schelling. Leuven : Presses Universitaires Louvain. 1989.

[11] Emmanuel Levinas. Totalité et infini. p. 9-10.

[12] Enrique Dussel. La filosofía de la liberación. Segunda Reimpresión de FCE. Ciudad de México: FCE, 2018. p. 44.

[13] Enrique Dussel. Ibid. p. 45.

[14] Enrique Dussel. Ibid. p. 45.

[15] Giorgio Agamben. Che cos’è la filosofia. Macerata: Quodlibet, 2016. p. 13-16.

[16] Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. p. 46-47.

[17] Enrique Dussel. Ibid. p. 47.

[18] Here I have in mind Andrea Gentile’s description Kant’s notion of a limit-concept as equivalent to the term terminus rather than limes. See: Bewusstsein, Anschauung, und das Unendliche bei Fichte, Schelling und Hegel. p. 27.

[19] Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la liberación. p. 51.

[20] Enrique Dussel. Ibid. p. 52-53.

[21] Enrique Dussel. Ibid. p. 54.

[22] Enrique Dussel. Ibid. p. 55.

Die Erzählung in der Philosophie: Thoughts on Schmidt-Biggemann’s Geschichte Wissen: Eine Philosophie der Kontingenz im Anschluss an Schelling (2014)[1] #1

As the title of this post suggests, I am currently working my way through Biggemann’s 2014 book on contingency, philosophy, and Schelling. The book itself draws not only on Schelling, but is fairly wide-ranging, touching upon negative theologies, mystical motifs, and phenomenology. I should say up front, that this is not meant to be a comprehensive review of the book, given that I am still reading the book. Rather, I want to highlight one particular aspect of Biggemann’s argument from the first two chapters – namely, the philosophical-theological function of narrative vis-à-vis the dialectic of concealment and revelation of the Absolute.

Biggemann begins the book, writing, as he has elsewhere,[2] that the basic tension between concealment and revelation, between the One and the Many, characterises neoplatonic thought, and thus, so much of negative theological thinking. “Die Dialektik des Anfänglichen besteht also darin, dass das Erste nur durch das Zweite gedacht werden kann, und dass es als radikal Erstes in diesem Prozess zugleich verdeckt wird” (14). What will be at stake, then, for the theologian, mystic, philosopher, etc., is both how this dialectic of concealment and revelation in-one is to be thought logically, and more precisely, how this dialectic occurs immanent to human being, rather than as an abstract event – an aspect of the problem that perhaps calls to mind Eckhart’s question from his sermon Vom Schweigen, “Wie gebiert Gott Vater seinen Sohn in der Seele?,” and his answer, “ganz in der Weise, wie er in der Ewigkeit gebiert…,”[3] which is to say, ceaselessly.

In the end, the human appears as the middle point between any clear bifurcation between the transcendent and immanent spheres – the da-sein in whom the event of revelation occurs perpetually in its extension and retraction in-the-event, and it is precisely narration that allows one to capture just this process, given that the beginning, the-One, is only ever intelligible after the fact, nur als virtuelle, to make use of Rosenzweig’s language – a point I return to below.

Erzählung and the Problem of Thinking Contingency

Relying largely on Christian theological sources, such as (of course) Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita, “der unbekannte Begründer der christlichen Mystik” (14),[4] Biggemann moves through the various permutations of the aforementioned central tension in apophatic and mystical thinking as the text goes on. The central issue though, again, is how the infinite and finite appear as related – this is to say, as relatively distinct, but in-One in the first and last instances, at the point at which there is no instantiation, and thus, no relation. More precisely, how does one begin to describe in-language such a point? Thus, already the problem of language’s relation to time and space and inability to index this (non)point is apparent, in a classic reiteration of what is, perhaps, the central tension at play in all apophatic theology – namely, that apophatic thinking and mystical experience seems to require that one mark in-language, time, and space, that which exceeds the boundaries of time and space.

The answer to how this is possible (spoiler) is that the human being, being the site at which the divine may appear as such, is capable of intuiting, or more accurately feeling (empfinden) and divining (ahnen), the absolute as absence, and more specifically, as an originary wound of being-here, which is to say, of being particularised and separated from others and God. The state of being in the world, then, is one of being-contingent and of having troubled recourse to that upon which one is – primordial chaos in-One of all temporary stability, the non-identity underpinning all identity (21).  The epistemological response to this state of affairs, in a move not dissimilar to Adorno’s critique of Hegel’s ‘positive’ dialectics[5] and Rosenzweig’s critique of die Philosophie des All,[6] is that human beings relate to the world, au fond, violently, insofar as we attempt to comprehend, and thus master, the not-I – nature, objects, animals, each other – through the effacement of the integrity of the particularity of each thing (die Eigenheit des Objekts) in the service of generic identity.[7] As Biggemann tells his reader, such is the idolatrous character of comprehension.

Die Verschärfung der Transzendentalphilosophie vollzog sich im Schritt vom »Ich denke, das alle meine Vorstellungen muss begleiten können« zum weltkonstituierenden transzendentalen Ich, das sich im spekulativen Satz selbst setzt und begreift. Urteilen ist eine Tätigkeit des transzendentalen Ich, das diese Selbstsetzung voraussetzt. Erkenntnis ist in dem Sinne Bemächtigung, dass das Ich über sich selbst hinausgeht, auf seinen Gegenstand ausgreift und ihn zu seinem macht. Der Gegenstand ist wehrlos, denn er hat kein Ich und keinen Willen, der sich verweigern könnte. Das Objekt kann gar nicht anders, als sich – mindestens, soweit es ergriffen werden kann – als Objekt dem Erkennen preiszugeben (17).

Das ist, theologisch gesprochen, der Sündenfall der Transzendentalphilosophie: Denn hir macht sich das Ich zu dem, was die Realität zu setzen beansprucht. Aber der Herr der Realität ist allein Gott, der die Existenz schafft, und kein Urteil ist in der Lage, die Existenz, die es voraussetzt, zu schaffen…In diesem Sinne ist alle Philosophie tragisch: Wenn sie urteilt und erkennt, versündigt sie sich an der Eigenheit des Objekts (18).

What is required, then, is a discourse capable of breaking out of this idolatrous and tragic relation to the not-I. That is, in order to evade this violent relation to reality, one must learn to think and speak differently in accordance with one’s contingency, according to the answer readily implied in the question ?מי כאל – who is like God?

Und dann ist die Frage »Mi ka El? – Wer ist wie Gott?« evident, die die Anmaßung impliziert, im Vollzug des Geistes mache sich der Mensch zu Gott. Das ist die Ursünde der Selbstermächtigung, und im Prozess der Philosophie verwirklicht sie sich ständig neu. Dieser Prozess ist die Falle der selbstmächtigen subjektiven Erkenntnis; das logische Urteil, das die Bedingung des Wissens ist, ist damit Ausdruck der »vollendeten Sündhaftigkeit«. Gibt es Remedur? Kann man dieser Tragödie von Erkennen und Ermächtigen entkommen? (19)

Stated in the register of the apophatic and mystical concerns, humans must learn to think and speak the Absolute as that which occurs before and after language and cognition, which is to say again, time and space.

“Lässt sich der Status »vor« der Urteilung beschreiben? Man kann vom Willen nur dann vernünftig reden, wenn er sich irgendwohin richtet; und dieses »Wohin« ist dann schon die Intentionalität selbst, die auf ein Objekt zielt. Aber was ist, wenn man den Status »vorher« beschreiben will, den des Willens, der seine Richtung noch nicht gefunden hat, der noch ohne Herrschaftsanmaßung ist? Es ist die angstvolle Unruhe vor dem Anfang, ehe etwas angefangen hat, die angerichtete Unruhe; ein Chaos, ehe es gerichtet wird, vor aller Objektivität, Differenz und Ordnung, vor allem Ziel.”

As this last passage states clearly, and as I wrote above, there is an intrinsic connection here between the Absolute and a notion of an originary chaos that governs stable identity, a chaos only arrested in the emergence and repose of identity in birth and death. Biggemann, in drawing this particular chapter to a close, refers again to this chaotic beginning and process of becoming-as-being as a kind of Urtrennung with which one must reckon for the sake of non-idolatrous relations to the Other. Baptising the theogonic and cosmogonic language of Schelling, Biggemann refers, more precisely, to this process of reckoning as the recollection of and calling-back to the coming to be of this separation – that is, the emergence of relation itself out of the original One.

Es ist die Rück-Erinnerung an die Innerlichkeit, die sich genug war, die sich in dieser Selbstgenügsamkeit aber erst erwies, nachdem die Entäußerung stattgefunden hatte. Es ist die Vergangenheit, die als diese nur gewusst wird, indem man von ihr erzählt, die nur in der Erzählung inszeniert wird und dieser Vergegenwärtigung als Vergangene unerreichbar wird. Hier wird deutlich, dass man sich der Vergangenheit gar nicht bemächtigen kann…In der Erzählung der Vergangenheit verbinden sich Trauer, Sehnsucht, Liebe und die Erfahrung von Zeit. Trauer, auch Liebe und Sehnsucht hängen zusammen: Liebe richtet sich auf ein Anderes, das immer das Andere meiner selbst ist, es ist das Gefühl, das die Trennung voraussetzt und sich in die Einheit zurücksehnt, die aber nur unter der Bedingung der Selbstaufgabe zu haben ist; und es ist diese Be-Ziehung, das Gezogensein zueinander, das das paradoxe Moment der Selbsterhöhung in der Selbstaufgabe als Ziel der unerfüllten und unerfüllbaren Sehnsucht empfindlich macht. Die Paradoxie und Unerfüllbarkeit zeigt sich als Zeit, als die schlechthinnige Vergangenheit des Indifferenten, der unbestimmten Einheit, die durch das Ur-Teilen verging. (21-22)

Narrative, then, is taken by Biggemann as the mode of calculation and expression adequate to the task of thinking contingency and thinking relation without lapsing into the idolatry of mastery. Thus, Biggemann draws together the mystical and theogonic language of the deep desire of the One (Sehnsucht) to give birth to itself, the perception of this perpetual overflowing of the One on the part of human beings, and the critique of the destructive power of human reason and progress in order to position narrative as a counter-measure against the forgetfulness of contingency. Only narration can orient us to a beginning that never was – ‘never was,’ because before and after after and before. In this sense, Biggemann takes up the method of narration vis-à-vis das Nichts in Part I of Der Stern der Erlösung. Contrary to any kind of ontotheological notion of the nothing, upon which one might attempt to “do metaphysics,”[8] there is only das Nichts als virtuelle,[9] or, the-Nothing in narration – real and fictious at-once as a beginning for thinking.

Die Gattung, in der diese Zeitlichkeit zur Darstellung kommt, ist die Erzählung. Nur die Erzählung kann das Vergangene als Vergangenes gegenwärtig machen, die Unwiederbringlichkeit des Geschehenen als der Gegenwart inhärent darstellen und daraus die Erwartung an das Zukünftige gewinnen. So erblüht die Hoffnung, dass sich die Zukunft vollende und an ihr Ziel, die Vereinigung des Geschiedenen gelange – und solange das nicht geschieht, ist die Zukunft eine Tragödie. Das wäre die Tragödie der Weltgeschichte ohne die Wiederkunft des Herrn (22).

[1]Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann. Geschichte Wissen: Eine Philosophie der Kontingenz im Anschluss an Schelling. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2014.)

[2] See Schmidt-Biggemann’s introductory essay entitled Schellings „Weltalter“ in der Tradition abendländischer Spiritualität in F.W.J. Schelling. Weltalter-Fragmente. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 2002.) p. 5-6.

[3] Meister Eckhart. Deutsche Werke. (Berlin: Axel Junckers Buchhandlung, 1903). p. 17.

[4] Biggemann repeats here a description of Dionysius’ relation to the history of Christian mysticism that he also gives in his introductory essay to the Weltalter-Fragmente. While I do not really care about the veracity of describing P-Dionysius as the founder of Christian mysticism, it should probably be noted that Biggemann is certainly glossing over older patristic sources in making this claim – a point that again probably does not matter given Biggemann’s wonderful, if brief, treatment of Origen in the Weltalter essay.

[5] Theodor Adorno. Vorlesung über Negative Dialektik. Nachgelassene Schriften, Abteilung IV: Vorlesungen. Band 16. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003).

[6] Rosenzweig. Der Stern der Erlösung. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Universitätsbibliothek, 2002.) See Part I.

[7] I have in mind here Gilles Deleuze’s distinction between analogy as the rule of generality, and répétition as the constitution of generality by the rule of the particular. See Giles Deleuze. Différence et Répétition. (Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 1968.) p. 56-57.

[8] Lol.

[9] Rosenzweig. Der Stern. p. 28. “Es [das Nichts] ist nur die Markierung für das Gestelltsein des Problems…Es ist kein „dunkler Grund“ noch sonst ein irgend mit Eckharts, Böhmes, oder Schellings Worten Benennbares. Es ist nicht im Anfang.”