A new film entitled Fitna, the Arabic word for ‘dissension’, by Geert Wilders, a rightwing Dutch parliamentarian, shouldn't be suppressed and should be made widely available for all to see. Not because it has anything valuable or insightful to offer in the debates and discussions surrounding Islam, modernity or the convulsions wracking much of the Middle East. Quite the contrary, it must be seen so that it can be openly criticized and shown up for the insipid propaganda video it is. [1]
To suppress the film in the name of political correctness has been a gross miscalculation, which has only gone to underscore the seductive mystery its creators have cleverly cultivated. Wilders & Co decided to release snippets of info here and there, as part of an orchestrated strategy to scintillate and tantalize all those individuals and organizations of a sensationalist persuasion, and thereby whip up a torrent of anticipation for a film that can only be described as banal. Fitna is a propaganda video whose ‘aesthetic’ is comparable to those made by radical Islamists and their sympathizers, and whose prime objective is to polarize public opinion by evoking the twin feelings of fear, hatred and suspicion.
The burning of effigies, extremist placards and threats to website staff undertaken by Muslim vigilantes can only be framed as myopic, stupid and morally bankrupt. When ‘Muslim indignation’ takes a violent turn it merely confirms in the eyes of provocateurs like Wilders that Muslims are essentially incapable of participating in rational and civilized debate.
Having seen the film its intent is abundantly clear. It is not, as its apologists claim, a critique of Islamic fundamentalism or even the tribal vestiges of malign practices such as stoning, female circumcision and various other manifestations of gender discrimination and abuse, which have been sanctioned under the banner of ‘Islam’. Wilders enterprise is rather the pathetic and entirely nostalgic (in fact anti-progressive) attempt to salvage an ‘authentic’ and ‘nativist’ conception of Dutch and more generally European identity and ‘indigenous values’. In order to fashion a ‘pristine’ and ‘untarnished’ representation of his narrative he is forced to place it in contradistinction to a determinate and clearly defined enemy, represented by the looming threat of a monolithic and omnipresent ‘Islam’. Fitna on one level is therefore yet another variant of the discursively manufactured ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis first argued for by Samuel P. Huntington in the American journal Foreign Affairs over a decade ago.
Fitna is little more than a desperate attempt of an utterly unremarkable individual trying to make a name for himself by means of insulting and slandering some 1.3 billion people. Wilders’ strategy is simple and unnervingly crude. He endeavors to convince us of his thesis by arbitrarily picking out a few decontextualized lines from the Quran, only to then juxtapose them with footage of obscene violence committed by Muslim extremists in recent history; 9/11, the Madrid Bombings and the London bombings of the 7th of July 2005 are all paraded across the screen in an orgy of violence and mayhem.
The propaganda videos of al-Qaeda and those inspired by their message of violent jihad, rely equally on publicizing a filmic orgy of violence in order to attract recruits to their cause. The latter’s films often splice a myriad of clips documenting violence committed against Muslim civilians in order to wage their own propaganda campaign and in so doing vilify and dehumanize entirely their self-proclaimed enemies. Wilders’ favored strategy is entirely in keeping with such an ‘aesthetic’. He aims to dehumanize Muslim peoples so they emerge as little more than disfigured and cryptic monsters, as solely objects of fear and hatred.
Implicit in Fitna’s narrative is the contention that the Muslim holy book is inherently violent and the sole and determining reason why violence in the contemporary world is committed by members of the Islamic faith. To Wilders' lights it’s the essentially 'fascistic kernel' of the Quran, that when transmitted to the Muslim faithful, necessitates their unforgiving and abhorrent violence. The traces of textual violence within the Quran, much like the laws of natural science, necessarily compel the unchanging and immutable ‘Muslim’ essence to commit unspeakable acts of terror and violence.
Like much Orientalist scholarship, Wilders concludes that Muslims have no free will or ability to denounce, decry or eschew violence, because it is intrinsic to their very ontological constitution, which itself arises from out of the Quran. Their violence emanates from textual violence and this in turn confirms their essential character as intrinsically violent beings. This is the vicious circle perpetuated by Wilders and his supporters. The only solution, according to this narrative, is to do away once and for all with the ‘heinous book’, since it’s subject to only one totalizing and all-encompassing interpretation.
Interestingly, Wilders rambled on quite a bit about having uncovered the ‘pure Islam’ when interviewed on the BBC’s Hardtalk. The ‘pure Islam’ of which he then spoke and continues to refer is a hidden grail also sought after by Islamic fundamentalists. The fact of the matter is that it is Wilders’ very own puritanical Weltanschauung and predilection for purity i.e. his desire for a pure and entirely indigenous Dutch polity that seeks out and constructs its phantasmagoric mirror image, ‘pure Islam’. On this point we can guess both Wilders and Osama bin Laden agree – there is such a thing as a ‘pure Islam’ and both claim they are able to access it, thereby defining and delimiting its scope and contents.
This all happens in a vacuum according to Wilders and his precocious and ill-educated ally, Ehsan Jami. Apparently, geopolitics and the vicissitudes of history have little or no purchase in the attempt to grasp the presence of extremism within the Muslim world. According to Wilders & Co, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the legacy of colonialism, the open and unabashed support and grooming of the so-called ‘Arab Afghans’ by Charlie Wilson and the Reagan Administration throughout the 1980s against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the various discontents and backlash against globalization and cultural homogenization, the Iraq War, European racism and fear over the dramatic increase in migration, and finally decades upon decades of support for autocratic tyrants in the Middle East, all have very little if anything to do with the modern incarnation of Islamic fundamentalism.
In this way the ‘filmmaker’ is attempting to make an essentialist claim predicated on a perverse, monistic and distorted reading of the Quran. One can do this with pretty much any of the so-called holy books, it's hardly a chore if one merely wants to arbitrarily pluck quotes and adduce hadiths without rhyme or reason, merely with the objective of vindicating one’s prejudicial point of view.
It is necessary to point out that Fitna doesn’t even succeed on its own terms. The film endlessly returns to footage of extremist imams and laymen spouting off their toxic and warped litany in the hope of vindicating the film's guiding premise: that it is the Quran that is at issue here and that this book is the reason why Muslims are innately prone and inclined to violence. The vast majority of the film however is fleshed out by non-Quranic sources and the perpetual bombardment of one extremist imam after another ranting and raving of their hatred for the ‘nonbelievers’ and ‘infidels’. These clips in conjunction with emotive and heart-wrenching footage of 9/11, the Madrid and London bombings are manipulatively exploited in order to set aflame viewers’ legitimate anger and fear, and thereby forge in many people minds a poisonous association of ‘Islam’ with some of the most brutal crimes committed against innocent civilians over the last decade.
By reading peoples’ comments on the web it seems that many of the less discerning and skeptical of viewers have bought into the film’s prognosis: ‘Islam’ is essentially and for all time a dangerous monolith, hell-bent on planetary conquest. There is no place for dialogue and discussion, only battle waged on the world stage, and ‘we’ have the bigger guns. The film’s creators furthermore assert the kinship of ‘Islam’ tout court with the modern ideologies of Nazism and Stalinism. No nuance or differentiation is deemed necessary.[2] Even the Bush Administration had the sense to separate ‘Islam’ qua religion from the bastardized postmodern ideology advocated by the likes of al-Qaeda.
The Netherlands and Europe more generally in recent decades have undergone a marked increase in the number of Muslim immigrants reaching their shores, and Fitna is a near perfect example of the reactionary manufacture of an ‘indigenous and native’ European identity in a world where identity politics has increasingly come to rule the roost. Wilders’ efforts are far less concerned with freedom of expression than with the desire to vilify a section of Holland’s immigrant population who represent a nebulous, eerie and dangerous Other transfixed within the grand narrative of a ‘clash of civilizations’.
Wilders has repeatedly emphasized in interviews with Fox News, the BBC’s Hardtalk and elsewhere that if ‘they’ want to come to ‘our’ country ‘they’ have to ‘live’ by ‘our values’. What of second generation Dutch Muslims? The term ‘Dutch Muslim’ is an oxymoron as far as Wilders is concerned, and he has openly advocated the mass deportation of dual-nationals and various others he brands a threat to Holland’s ‘indigenous values’. Let’s quote the man directly himself:
Take a walk down the street and see where this is going. You no longer feel like you are living in your own country. There is a battle going on and we have to defend ourselves. Before you know it there will be more mosques than churches![3]
Dutch Muslims are to be a priori excluded from Wilders’ vision of what the Netherlands ought to be, as he presents them with what is tantamount to a single uncompromising choice, ‘abandon your Muslim identity or go back to where you came from!’ Such an ultimatum hardly sits well with the long-established image of tolerance hitherto associated with Holland.
If you are left in any doubt as to his flagrant bigotry, during Fitna a graph depicting the precipitous increase of Muslim immigrants entering the Netherlands. The subtext of this visual display not only casts the influx of immigrants as an insidious development, but as an ongoing process of contamination and pollution of the Netherlands’ ‘native purity’. Muslims are effectively microbes and bacteria sowing the seeds of disease and malaise and consequently inducing the equivalent of a ‘cultural epidemic’. In the throes of phantasmagoria Wilders forecasts by dint of a ‘passive revolution’ the Muslim ‘fifth column’ will provoke the ruination of Europe from within. It is in this respect that Wilders’ discourse can feasibly be shown as aligning itself with various tropes reminiscent of European anti-Semitism.
According to this line of argument, Muslims are near-congenitally incapable of assimilation and their fidelity to the European nation-states in which they might have been born and continue to live is always potentially compromised because their allegiance in the final analysis is only to Allah. The obvious point is that this can potentially be alleged against any believer of any faith. English Catholics during the seventeenth century were similarly subject to suspicion and all manner of terrible abuse because it was claimed their allegiance to the Papacy superseded their loyalty to the English crown, which made them, almost in spite of themselves, prone to betray the nation-state in the name of a divine sovereignty. Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is in large part an exposition and proffered solution to just such a ‘dilemma’. According to the proponents of this not so subtle bigotry, the Muslim is never completely trusty worthy, deserving of suspicion and his or her loyalties remain ultimately inscrutable and clouded in mystery. The campaign to vilify the Swiss born Islamic Studies professor, Tariq Ramadan, is just one example of this. Ramadan in an interview with the German publication Der Spiegel offers the appropriate retort to an increasingly pervasive accusation alleging the irreconcilable ‘dual-loyalties’ of Muslims:
Oh yes, I am one of the most maligned Muslim intellectuals. Tariq Ramadan, the slippery trickster. They talk about people like me the way they used to talk about the Jews: He is Swiss and European, but his loyalties also lie elsewhere. He says one thing and thinks something else. He is a member of an international organization -- in the past, it was world Jewry, today it's world Islam. I am disparaged as if I were a Muslim Jew. [4]
It is true also true however that resentment felt towards immigrants and the changing composition of European civil societies is also based upon some legitimate grievances. The issue of community integration and a refusal to participate in civic life on the part of some segments of immigrant communities living in Europe certainly exists and should be addressed. It is Wilders’ representation of the issue which is objectionable and must be protested, exactly because it depicts the problem as insoluble as long as Muslims are Muslims. In this way it is a clear assault on the very fact of being a Muslim – at least as far as the believer is concerned.[5]
No single individual, group or nation can claim to define the truth as relayed in the Quran, Bible, Torah, Bhagavad Gita or any other holy book. Apparent calls for unremitting violence are evident in all the holy scriptures of the great world religions and there are extremists and intolerant elements amongst their respective followers. Even a significant constituency of Sri Lanka’s Buddhist monks has in recent years been engaging in violence in the hope of realizing its political aims, itself a product of the still unresolved ethnic strife between the country’s majority Singhalese and minority Tamil populations.
Some of the interpreters of these texts are able to provide us with a reasonable and informed reading and so perhaps offer some persuasive arguments for such a reading, but never a definitive and unassailable exegesis for all time. The sheer number of disparate and often irreconcilable interpretations of the Quran and Sunnah more than aptly demonstrates the limitations and fallibility of any particular exegesis made in a specific time and place. In the postmodern world within which we have all come to live, love and forced to coexist, the Islamic concept of ijtihad has expanded its domain of application and the parameters of its traditional meaning, and has become almost compulsively employed by nearly all those who choose to turn to the Quran for spiritual guidance. It is exactly the pervasiveness of this new ijtihad, or individualized method of reading, as the Pakistani-American lawyer and activist, Ali Eteraz, has pointed out, which permits one to read the Quran as either a literalist or in terms of allegory and metaphor. This is something which has in a roundabout way been even noted by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Putting that to one side for the moment, there’s the added fact that the cultural, linguistic and historical diversity of the Islamic world itself has produced thinkers, poets and philosophers as variegated as Rumi, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Abdolkarim Soroush, Laleh Bakhtiar and Tariq Ramadan. ‘Islam’ as we know it is indissociable from the myriad of socio-historical and cultural renderings to which is has been subject since its inception.
Amongst the vast swathe of Muslims it is never an issue of 'Islamic values Vs Western values', only extremists on both sides view the obstacles to communal integration in these terms, which are more often than not, rooted in the afflictions of poverty, illiteracy and the institutionalized racism. It was at one time routinely argued that African-Americans were biologically incapable of democratic practice, while the ghettoization, alienation and disenfranchisement of peoples along racial lines was completely ignored as the determining reason for the absence of widespread civic participation. The riots of October and November 2005 in Paris largely by first and second generation North African immigrants can be seen as a further illustration of how discontent and revolt are sown by socio-economic disenfranchisement and alienation, rather than a product of ‘Islam’ and an endemic ‘clash of cultures’.
Right-wing politicians and pundits have resorted to ‘Islamicizing’ social and economic issues, exactly because they either refuse to consider, are simply indifferent to or wish to distract out attention from the underlying socio-economic factors, which more often than not induce segregation along ethnic and thus often along religious lines. The various Muslim communities however, cannot divest themselves of all responsibility and must themselves engage in more concerted efforts in order to reach out and nurture relations within civil society.
The preachers featured in the film are of course hate-mongers and live only to propagate their vile message. Their vitriol is of course pathological and emanates from a plurality of disparate maladies; from sexual repression to the nihilistic urge to negate the mundane and phenomenal world. Extremists such as these of course need to be confronted by the moderate elements within their communities; they of course need be undermined from within by individuals willing to speak out against their vituperative drivel. That is obvious and justified, but at the same time it needs to be recognized that the process of criticism and self-reflection is both gradual and intricate and cannot happen over night, and is only stultified by the inarticulate celluloid slander and obfuscation of bigots such as Wilders. Both extremes of the ideological spectrum believe a ‘clash of civilizations’ is in the offing and each hopes to spark the final countdown to confrontation and conflagration they espy on the horizon. This discourse has reached mythic proportions and its adherents rather than acknowledge this fact prefer to will it into becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is up to moderates of all persuasions to inject reason and a modicum of responsibility into this debate, as it has and will continue to affect and impact us all in the years to come.
[1] This is not a scholarly essay but a piece of journalism written out of necessity.
[2] Even the comparison with al-Qaeda is more than a stretch. For starters you would need to forget the fact that Stalin and Hitler oversaw two of the strongest and most heavily militarized states in the history of the world.
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geert_Wilders, Accessed March 31, 2008
[4] http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/11/16/Ramadan/index1.html
[5] This would hold for the pious adherent of any faith.
© Sadegh Kabeer
Monday, March 31, 2008
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Obituary: Shusha (Shamsi) Guppy, Iranian Singer, Writer and Composer, December 24 1935 - March 21 2008
The world has lost a compassionate, insightful and unique voice with the passing of Shusha (Shamsi) Guppy, December 24 1935-March 21 2008. Philosophical differences aside, Roger Scruton's obituary in the Guardian is a nice little read.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/24/iran/
Below is a short clip of Shusha Guppy from the documentary film about the great Persian sage-poet Omar Khayyam, Intoxicating Rhymes & Sobering Wine:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/24/iran/
Below is a short clip of Shusha Guppy from the documentary film about the great Persian sage-poet Omar Khayyam, Intoxicating Rhymes & Sobering Wine:
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Trita Parsi: Tour de Force Analysis of Iranian-Israeli Relations from the Shah to the Present
Israel and Iran under the Shah were formerly allies through their adherence to the periphery doctrine along with the other most significant non-Arab state in the region, Turkey. Conventional wisdom dictates that the periphery doctrine was an attempt to curb and assuage the perceived threat of radical Arab nationalism by means of a strategic alliance of non-Arab states in the Middle East against Arab nationalist forces coming out of Egypt in the form of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Baath Party in Syria and later Iraq.
Parsi even points to the continuity of something approximating to the periphery doctrine after the Islamic Revolution, whereby he details a number of attempts by Israel to push the US to sit down at the table with the Islamic Republic and broach the issue of a rapprochement. After the first Gulf War the Israeli approach was to change markedly as Iran's position as a formidable state or even hegemon in the region had been consolidated, and some ten years later with the removal of the Taliban from power and the ousting of Saddam Hussein by US forces, entrenched even further. In the aftermath of these developments Israel and Iran have since emerged as bitter rivals in their quest for regional dominance, which has arguably been inflamed and exacerbated by the unthinking and anti-Semitic comments made by the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regarding both Israel and the Holocaust.
It seems there ain't enough room for two regional superpowers in this town! I know some of you aren't a fan of Trita Parsi, I absolutely adore him however, even if I don't agree with everything he says. Enjoy this tour de force run through of Iranian-Israeli relations from the time of the Shah to the present!
Parsi even points to the continuity of something approximating to the periphery doctrine after the Islamic Revolution, whereby he details a number of attempts by Israel to push the US to sit down at the table with the Islamic Republic and broach the issue of a rapprochement. After the first Gulf War the Israeli approach was to change markedly as Iran's position as a formidable state or even hegemon in the region had been consolidated, and some ten years later with the removal of the Taliban from power and the ousting of Saddam Hussein by US forces, entrenched even further. In the aftermath of these developments Israel and Iran have since emerged as bitter rivals in their quest for regional dominance, which has arguably been inflamed and exacerbated by the unthinking and anti-Semitic comments made by the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regarding both Israel and the Holocaust.
It seems there ain't enough room for two regional superpowers in this town! I know some of you aren't a fan of Trita Parsi, I absolutely adore him however, even if I don't agree with everything he says. Enjoy this tour de force run through of Iranian-Israeli relations from the time of the Shah to the present!
Friday, March 21, 2008
McCain Draws Specious and Baseless Link Between al-Qaeda and Iran: Medacity, Deceit and Ignorance in Full-Effect
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Qalibaf on the Rise: Possible Future Presidential Rival to Ahmadi-Nejad Interviewed by Time
It is presently fashionable amongst commentators to place Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the current mayor of Tehran, as part of a 'moderate conservative' faction gathering momentum with support from the conservative establishment based in Qom and from individuals largely indifferent to the competing trends of reformism and populism, whom instead only desire their real disposable income to have greater spending power and inflationary pressures to be alleviated. His preference for economic liberalization and opposition to the populist economic policies of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, whose economic policies have been blamed for the precipitous increase in inflation, and whose incendiary rhetoric has been deemed partially responsible for the rapid deterioration of Iranian relations with the West, above all the EU-3, has transformed Qalibaf into a darling, along with Ali Larijani, of the conservative establishment.
Although for Iranian reformists this can hardly be called a heartening development, it seems that with the consolidation of the 'conservative pragmatists' the Islamic Republic is caught in a double-bind of sorts. On the one hand, with the deregulation of markets, the privatization of state-run industries, and the liberalization of Iran's economic relations with the region, China, Russia and the West, political and cultural hegemony ceases to reside with any one source. Such fiat has steadily been under subtle attack for some time and there is simply no way of reversing this dominant trend, no matter how much those on the right such as the Mesbah-Yazdi's of this world may continue to kick and scream.
The Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously said that 'I reach for my pistol whenever I hear the world 'culture''. It seems that the deflation of Qom's cultural hegemony (not that it ever possessed such an all-encompassing hegemony) in tandem with the ongoing process of economic liberalization will continue the gradual creep that is undermining the establishment's supremacy, even though the whole situation often seems extremely bleak and devoid of hope.
The other part of the double-bind is that if the Islamic Republic refuses to provide economic prosperity and a better standard of living for the Iranian people its fate is equally sealed. This is exactly why an American attack against Iran would be disastrous, because the erosion of the unquestioned power of the regime has been underway for some time and will continue unabated and in the same graduated fashion as long as Iran and its markets remain open and in a relation of reciprocity to the outside world.
A policy of containment built to ensure the preponderance of Iran's international isolation as a pariah state prevents any such prospect and in fact allows the reactionary elements within Iran to shore up power as they can foist blame for the economic downturn on Iran's enemies, stir up nationalist sentiment, and entrench a sense of victimhood and the 'us versus them' mentality, which demagogues, whether they be in Iran or the US know so ably how to exploit. The gross failure of American policy with respect to Cuba, North Korea and Iraq clarifies the the issue perfectly. The more regimes reckoned reprehensible have been shunted out and excluded from the international community, the more they have closed in on themselves and meandered away from the path of reform.
To read the interview click below:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1723250-2,00.html
Although for Iranian reformists this can hardly be called a heartening development, it seems that with the consolidation of the 'conservative pragmatists' the Islamic Republic is caught in a double-bind of sorts. On the one hand, with the deregulation of markets, the privatization of state-run industries, and the liberalization of Iran's economic relations with the region, China, Russia and the West, political and cultural hegemony ceases to reside with any one source. Such fiat has steadily been under subtle attack for some time and there is simply no way of reversing this dominant trend, no matter how much those on the right such as the Mesbah-Yazdi's of this world may continue to kick and scream.
The Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously said that 'I reach for my pistol whenever I hear the world 'culture''. It seems that the deflation of Qom's cultural hegemony (not that it ever possessed such an all-encompassing hegemony) in tandem with the ongoing process of economic liberalization will continue the gradual creep that is undermining the establishment's supremacy, even though the whole situation often seems extremely bleak and devoid of hope.
The other part of the double-bind is that if the Islamic Republic refuses to provide economic prosperity and a better standard of living for the Iranian people its fate is equally sealed. This is exactly why an American attack against Iran would be disastrous, because the erosion of the unquestioned power of the regime has been underway for some time and will continue unabated and in the same graduated fashion as long as Iran and its markets remain open and in a relation of reciprocity to the outside world.
A policy of containment built to ensure the preponderance of Iran's international isolation as a pariah state prevents any such prospect and in fact allows the reactionary elements within Iran to shore up power as they can foist blame for the economic downturn on Iran's enemies, stir up nationalist sentiment, and entrench a sense of victimhood and the 'us versus them' mentality, which demagogues, whether they be in Iran or the US know so ably how to exploit. The gross failure of American policy with respect to Cuba, North Korea and Iraq clarifies the the issue perfectly. The more regimes reckoned reprehensible have been shunted out and excluded from the international community, the more they have closed in on themselves and meandered away from the path of reform.
To read the interview click below:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1723250-2,00.html
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Zahra Eshraghi, granddaughter of Ayatollah Khomeini: 'The government suffers from delusions.'
Zahra Eshraghi, granddaughter of Ayatollah Khomeini, has once more spoken out against the small clerical cabal who presently governs and continues to perpetuate the status quo of a half-baked democracy and the continued suppression of the most rudimentary of civil rights and personal freedoms. Ayatollah Khomeini's two grandsons, Hossein Khomeini, who is now under house arrest, and Ali Eshraghi, who was only recently disqualified and then reinstated as a candidate in this month's parliamentary elections, have also voiced many protestations and criticisms of the clerical elite surrounding Ayatollah Khamenei.
This is all well-known, but must be seen as an important development, as even the Islamic Republic's traditional mainstay and grassroots
support, who provided the original impetus that swept the clergy to power, the ulema-bazaari 'coalition' if you will, continues to disintegrate under the dual affliction of a stagnant economy and the systematic curtailment of the most basic of personal freedoms.
I myself was taken aback after having several meetings with a lady working for a government institution, which I won't name, finally confessed to me as we casually chatted that she couldn't wait for the present government to be thrown aboard. This lady was clearly pious and not merely putting up a false front of religiosity in order to guarantee her continued employment, as so many in Iran are unfortunately compelled to do each and everyday. She only said this after she was comfortable with me and felt that I posed no threat, but a similar feeling can be found bubbling underneath the surface of a deeply religious class, who have mistakenly been branded a monolithic and unswerving ally of the theocracy and the principle of velayat-e-faqih. Amongst the disillusioned and alienated are not only those in the diaspora, or residing in the affluent neighbourhoods of northern Tehran, but its most traditional of allies. The Islamic Republic's crisis of legitimacy had deepened precipitously with the ascendancy of Ahmadi-Nejad, and will only continue to be exacerbated unless serious efforts in the direction of reform and change are soon made.
If you want to read the story which motivated this blog entry see:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41624
This is all well-known, but must be seen as an important development, as even the Islamic Republic's traditional mainstay and grassroots
support, who provided the original impetus that swept the clergy to power, the ulema-bazaari 'coalition' if you will, continues to disintegrate under the dual affliction of a stagnant economy and the systematic curtailment of the most basic of personal freedoms.I myself was taken aback after having several meetings with a lady working for a government institution, which I won't name, finally confessed to me as we casually chatted that she couldn't wait for the present government to be thrown aboard. This lady was clearly pious and not merely putting up a false front of religiosity in order to guarantee her continued employment, as so many in Iran are unfortunately compelled to do each and everyday. She only said this after she was comfortable with me and felt that I posed no threat, but a similar feeling can be found bubbling underneath the surface of a deeply religious class, who have mistakenly been branded a monolithic and unswerving ally of the theocracy and the principle of velayat-e-faqih. Amongst the disillusioned and alienated are not only those in the diaspora, or residing in the affluent neighbourhoods of northern Tehran, but its most traditional of allies. The Islamic Republic's crisis of legitimacy had deepened precipitously with the ascendancy of Ahmadi-Nejad, and will only continue to be exacerbated unless serious efforts in the direction of reform and change are soon made.
If you want to read the story which motivated this blog entry see:
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41624
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Welcome to the Wiki World!
The years when you would have to trawl through seemingly infinite pages of books, manuscripts and newspapers in order to find a date, name or event have been relegated to the archives of a bygone era. The Googles of this world have revolutionized the way we search for and access information, rendering one’s weekly visits to the public library an archaic and outdated practice. Volumes have been written about the new dawn inaugurated by the information superhighway whereby one can access anything and everything instantaneously with the mere click of a button. The radicalism of this development is still being assessed and the birth pangs of this greatest of experiments will undoubtedly continue to shape and affect us all.
A plethora of virtual nomads, tribes and a number of other unconventional and highly variegated communities dispersed across vast distances have sprouted up, interacting and exchanging ideas in real-time, both shaping and reacting to the outside world only to go on and reproduce its cybernetic facsimile online. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed one hundred years ago in one of his final texts, Twilight of the Idols, that the real world, as we have known it, had at last descended into myth. His prescient genius, it seems, has been vindicated, even if not quite in the way he might have anticipated. In a world where the assertion, ‘if it’s not on Google it doesn’t exist,’ as co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is so fond of professing, we find a sort of revamped and cybernetic rewriting of the Bishop Berkeley’s famous dictum, ‘esse est percipi,’ ‘to be is to be perceived’. The only difference is that now cybernetic reality takes precedence over its three-dimensional and extended counterpart. Whatever your metaphysical predilections, it’s simply undeniable that our universe has been irrevocably transformed by the technological gargantuan that is the Internet. Some may consider such a statement flippant, but for many the contention that reality and Google are now one and the same, is a viable one.
As we all know, the Internet is a fickle place that takes a mistress only to toss her aside in the next moment without as much as a second glance. Fame and recognition are quickly swept away and are almost invariably fleeting and ephemeral tokens bestowed by web-users. Today’s beloved is tomorrow’s jilted and despised. Miraculously, Wikipedia appears to have eluded the fundamentally Darwinian culture by which we web-surfers live by. Despite the occasional controversy here and there, Wikipedia has withstood the test of time and the caprice afflicting virtually all websites.
Of all things, the encyclopedia - traditionally the province of sober experts dryly recapitulating the facts and findings of previous research - seemed like it would be impervious to online collaboration by a horde of strangers and amateurs. The skeptics have however, been proven massively wrong with Wikipedia counted amongst the greatest success stories the Internet has to offer. Nobody envisioned such sweeping success, not even its founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Competing with the likes of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and eBay, the site continues to grow at an exponential rate and occupy a much-coveted spot in the top ten most visited sites on the World Wide Web. What many find even more incredible is that the site is run on a non-profit basis and would be worth a staggering market value of $580 million if it ran ads.[1]
Everything from the little-known French philosopher-phenomenologist Michel Henry, to cabbage and the quark can be searched and an informative, if sometimes hodgepodge of an answer, can be found. Pretty much everyone has needed to look up an historical event, place or (in)famous individual and the Wikipedia entry has come to their rescue in the first two or so results churned out by a search engine. One report found that nearly one in 20 results on the Internet was in fact a Wikipedia entry! Wikipedia, all too perfectly fits into a culture where only instant gratification will do. The rapid pace of modern life leaves us all with little time; only the scholar in his or her ivory tower has the luxury of pouring through the archives. We all constantly hunger for what the theorist of post-modernity Jean-Francois Lyotard called a petit frisson, a cheap thrill or fix in information; those superficial developments that leave us with the semblance of novelty and innovation in a world that ceaselessly rehashes only that which has come before it. ‘Knowledge is power’ is the mantra by which so many of us abide, and which underwrites so many of the various career, political, spiritual and ethical decisions we make each and every day.
Exactly because Wikipedia, unlike its more traditional predecessor, isn’t dependent upon printing heavy and formidable tomes, peer review, and scholarly fastidiousness, it has been able to grow and expand at an unprecedented rate. As we all know, anyone who has the time is able to write or edit an entry on any topic they deem sufficiently notable. The only overriding criterion is that the entry be written from a neutral point of view and avoids the ideological entanglements that regularly dog editorial and scholarship. Even the CIA was caught out on this count and discovered to be editing the entry of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.
Thus far, the site boasts well over nine million articles in over 253 languages, leaving its predecessors in the dust with absolutely no hope of ever reclaiming the mantle. But a question of quality has repeatedly stolen the Wiki-revolution’s thunder; entries have often proven false, subject to ideological dispute and replete with expletives and numerous other imaginative acts of vandalism.
Its tremendous allure lies, at least in its more utopian flashes of brilliance, in that it has successfully decentralized the decision of who and what is to be included within the annals of human knowledge. Finally, all those self-taught experts and autodidacts with an intimate knowledge of everything from Star Trek to Angel, Halo, goblins, fluff and Thomas Hardy have been provided the opportunity to add their five cents to the fountain of knowledge. The myriad of factoids amassed over the years while toiling away at their hobbies and weekend distractions, thought inane by friends and trivialized by spouses, have been granted a legitimate place and vindicated as anything but trivial in virtue of their incorporation and place alongside ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis’, ‘Leonardo de Vinci’ and ‘Sigmund Freud’. For many, seeing their life’s work ‘made real’ is a very liberating experience, redeeming a life-long passion for something that perhaps only a small band of devotees truly care about, such as the history of the Swedish pop group Atomic Swing.
At times, an almost religious zeal overtakes Wikipedians in what can only be called the pious belief they are contributing to something that transcends their more mundane preoccupations, even if that knowledge pertains to the various powers and character traits of the five hundred odd Pokémon that live a digital existence.
[1] Wikipedia.org, Wikipedia, Accessed 3/10/2008
A plethora of virtual nomads, tribes and a number of other unconventional and highly variegated communities dispersed across vast distances have sprouted up, interacting and exchanging ideas in real-time, both shaping and reacting to the outside world only to go on and reproduce its cybernetic facsimile online. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed one hundred years ago in one of his final texts, Twilight of the Idols, that the real world, as we have known it, had at last descended into myth. His prescient genius, it seems, has been vindicated, even if not quite in the way he might have anticipated. In a world where the assertion, ‘if it’s not on Google it doesn’t exist,’ as co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is so fond of professing, we find a sort of revamped and cybernetic rewriting of the Bishop Berkeley’s famous dictum, ‘esse est percipi,’ ‘to be is to be perceived’. The only difference is that now cybernetic reality takes precedence over its three-dimensional and extended counterpart. Whatever your metaphysical predilections, it’s simply undeniable that our universe has been irrevocably transformed by the technological gargantuan that is the Internet. Some may consider such a statement flippant, but for many the contention that reality and Google are now one and the same, is a viable one.
As we all know, the Internet is a fickle place that takes a mistress only to toss her aside in the next moment without as much as a second glance. Fame and recognition are quickly swept away and are almost invariably fleeting and ephemeral tokens bestowed by web-users. Today’s beloved is tomorrow’s jilted and despised. Miraculously, Wikipedia appears to have eluded the fundamentally Darwinian culture by which we web-surfers live by. Despite the occasional controversy here and there, Wikipedia has withstood the test of time and the caprice afflicting virtually all websites.
Of all things, the encyclopedia - traditionally the province of sober experts dryly recapitulating the facts and findings of previous research - seemed like it would be impervious to online collaboration by a horde of strangers and amateurs. The skeptics have however, been proven massively wrong with Wikipedia counted amongst the greatest success stories the Internet has to offer. Nobody envisioned such sweeping success, not even its founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Competing with the likes of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and eBay, the site continues to grow at an exponential rate and occupy a much-coveted spot in the top ten most visited sites on the World Wide Web. What many find even more incredible is that the site is run on a non-profit basis and would be worth a staggering market value of $580 million if it ran ads.[1]
Everything from the little-known French philosopher-phenomenologist Michel Henry, to cabbage and the quark can be searched and an informative, if sometimes hodgepodge of an answer, can be found. Pretty much everyone has needed to look up an historical event, place or (in)famous individual and the Wikipedia entry has come to their rescue in the first two or so results churned out by a search engine. One report found that nearly one in 20 results on the Internet was in fact a Wikipedia entry! Wikipedia, all too perfectly fits into a culture where only instant gratification will do. The rapid pace of modern life leaves us all with little time; only the scholar in his or her ivory tower has the luxury of pouring through the archives. We all constantly hunger for what the theorist of post-modernity Jean-Francois Lyotard called a petit frisson, a cheap thrill or fix in information; those superficial developments that leave us with the semblance of novelty and innovation in a world that ceaselessly rehashes only that which has come before it. ‘Knowledge is power’ is the mantra by which so many of us abide, and which underwrites so many of the various career, political, spiritual and ethical decisions we make each and every day.
Exactly because Wikipedia, unlike its more traditional predecessor, isn’t dependent upon printing heavy and formidable tomes, peer review, and scholarly fastidiousness, it has been able to grow and expand at an unprecedented rate. As we all know, anyone who has the time is able to write or edit an entry on any topic they deem sufficiently notable. The only overriding criterion is that the entry be written from a neutral point of view and avoids the ideological entanglements that regularly dog editorial and scholarship. Even the CIA was caught out on this count and discovered to be editing the entry of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.
Thus far, the site boasts well over nine million articles in over 253 languages, leaving its predecessors in the dust with absolutely no hope of ever reclaiming the mantle. But a question of quality has repeatedly stolen the Wiki-revolution’s thunder; entries have often proven false, subject to ideological dispute and replete with expletives and numerous other imaginative acts of vandalism.
Its tremendous allure lies, at least in its more utopian flashes of brilliance, in that it has successfully decentralized the decision of who and what is to be included within the annals of human knowledge. Finally, all those self-taught experts and autodidacts with an intimate knowledge of everything from Star Trek to Angel, Halo, goblins, fluff and Thomas Hardy have been provided the opportunity to add their five cents to the fountain of knowledge. The myriad of factoids amassed over the years while toiling away at their hobbies and weekend distractions, thought inane by friends and trivialized by spouses, have been granted a legitimate place and vindicated as anything but trivial in virtue of their incorporation and place alongside ‘The Cuban Missile Crisis’, ‘Leonardo de Vinci’ and ‘Sigmund Freud’. For many, seeing their life’s work ‘made real’ is a very liberating experience, redeeming a life-long passion for something that perhaps only a small band of devotees truly care about, such as the history of the Swedish pop group Atomic Swing.
At times, an almost religious zeal overtakes Wikipedians in what can only be called the pious belief they are contributing to something that transcends their more mundane preoccupations, even if that knowledge pertains to the various powers and character traits of the five hundred odd Pokémon that live a digital existence.
[1] Wikipedia.org, Wikipedia, Accessed 3/10/2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Mob Mentality
The fairly dated clip from Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat, with which I'm sure all of you are familiar perfectly demonstrates the terrifying nature of the crowd and mob mentality where almost all critical perspective is capable of being obliterated in an instant. Even when such sentiments exist privately, it is the crowd which is able to pool irrational and hateful instincts together into a abhorrent and very scary force for destruction. Such a dynamic was perhaps most brilliantly exposited in Elias Canetti's ingenious work Crowds and Power, a book that we need to re-read and grapple with if we are to understand today's fraught times.
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Top U.S. Commander in Middle East Resigns, March 11, 2008
Adm. William Fallon the top U.S. military commander for the Middle East resigned yesterday. Fallon is regarded in some circles as the most significant figure opposed to military conflict with Iran and perhaps the individual most responsible for putting a damper on the Bush Administration's desire to hasten its plans for a military strike against nuclear facilities and Revolutionary Guard compounds. Has the last moderate voice with ties to the Administration been felled?
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=4431212&page=1
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=4431212&page=1
Gordon Prather on Operation Merlin II, Saturday, March 8, 2008, Antiwar.com
Some much needed background to the CIA-Mossad Plot against Iran.
http://antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=12481
http://antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=12481
Between Immanent and Hermeneutical Phenomenology
‘Philosophy will never seek to deny its “presuppositions,” but neither may it merely admit them. It conceives them and develops with more and more penetration both the presuppositions themselves and that for which they are presuppositions.’[1]
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit
‘With the name “logic,” Hegel reclaims what has continuously constituted the logos of philosophy – and thus reclaims what has engendered every logic: logos signifies that no identity is given, that no identity is simply available, and that identity and unity are always, in their very simplicity and absoluteness, the movement of self-identification and self-unification. Logos designates the “making” of every “given” – that is to say, its “giving” and, more precisely, its “giving of itself”: thus, logos designates the identical not as substance but as act.’[2]
Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative
Introduction
In this paper we have set ourselves the unenviable task of elucidating the phenomenological methods of G.W.F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. The paper is divided into two parts. Part I provides a detailed exposition and critical engagement with Hegel’s phenomenological method as presented in his great work, Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807).[3] In this part of the paper we will address four theses which we take to characterize Hegelian phenomenology. Firstly, Hegel’s phenomenology is a Science (Wissenschaft) of the experience of consciousness, shot through with a normative logic that guides its development. Secondly, Hegel’s method emerges out of a decisive confrontation with scepticism. Thirdly, Hegel’s phenomenology is essentially a pedagogical exercise which finds its denouement in Absolute Knowing, the point from which philosophy proper can begin. Finally, the coordination of the two points of view at work in PhG, namely, consciousness and the phenomenologist, is what facilitates the text’s internal movement without compromising the immanent development of Geist.
Part II expounds the basic tenets of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology as presented in his magnum opus Sein und Zeit (1927).[4] We initially explore the prejudices that have led to our ensnarement within a state of forgetfulness vis-à-vis the question of being and consider Heidegger’s exhortations to raise this question anew. Heidegger tells us that ‘fundamental ontology…must be sought in the existential analysis of Dasein.’[5] But rather than dwell upon the minutiae of the existential analytic, we will examine Heidegger’s interpretation of the originary and constitutive elements of phenomenology, that is to say, the Greek words, phainomenon and logos, as he interprets them. We hope to show as a result that his reconfiguration of logos as hermēneuein was indispensable to his understanding of the phenomenology of human existence in terms of a phenomenological hermeneutics.
Although we compare and contrast the respective phenomenological methods of Hegel and Heidegger throughout the paper, it is only in Part III that we overtly proceed along comparative lines. There we scrutinize not only Heidegger’s criticisms of dialectical philosophy but also the neo-Kantian philosopher, Paul Natorp’s objections to phenomenological method which he regards as ultimately self-defeating. It is in this way that we hope to elicit an encounter of sorts between Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenology.
Part I
Phenomenology and the Logic of Phenomena
Heidegger, in 1930-1931, delivered a series of lectures in which he analysed several sections of Hegel’s PhG. In the opening pages of these lectures Heidegger cites the complete title of PhG. This is by no means insignificant. Why? Despite his, at times excessive haste to assimilate Hegel into the history of Western metaphysics, he has espied something which many of Hegel’s admirers have since passed over without even a passing consideration. The full title of Hegel’s text reads: System of Science: Part One, Science of the Experience of Consciousness.[6] The subtitle of the text, Science of the Experience of Consciousness, makes especially clear the theme we wish to belabour in our treatment of Hegel throughout this paper. Thus contrary to naturalism and more specifically psychologism, Hegel takes our epistemic relation to an object to have a complex logical structure, which although made explicit only within the course of experience, is nevertheless both rational and necessary.[7] The PhG is ‘the Science of the experience which consciousness goes through’.[8] The overarching thrust of Hegelian phenomenology is thus to demonstrate that all of our experience from the most rudimentary to the most sophisticated is conceptually mediated and comprised of a multiplicity of moments integrated within a complex and differentiated totality.[9] The ‘moments of the whole are patterns of consciousness.’[10] Hegel does not apply a dialectical method but engages in phenomenological description teasing out the conceptual and logical commitments, within which consciousness finds itself entangled in its experience of its object.[11] We wish to emphasize this point because we believe it strikes at the very heart of Hegel’s phenomenological endeavour. Hegel states the purpose of PhG with an unusual degree of lucidity in the Introduction to his Wissenshaft der Logik,[12]
‘In the Phenomenology of Spirit I have exhibited consciousness in its movement onwards from the first immediate opposition of itself and the object to absolute knowing. The path of this movement goes through every form of the relation of consciousness to the object and has the Concept[13] of science for its result. This Concept therefore (apart from the fact that it emerges within logic itself) needs no justification here because it has received it in that work; and it cannot be justified in any other way than by this emergence in consciousness, all the forms of which are resolved into this Concept as into their truth.’[14]
In PhG we do not encounter Hegel’s philosophy proper, a ‘presupposition’ of which is the identity of thought and being.[15] PhG, according to Hegel acts as a ‘deduction’ of the ‘Concept of pure science’.[16] ‘Absolute Knowing,’ the point d’appui of Hegel’s ontological logic, is the result and culmination of the transformation and supersession of a multitude of disparate shapes of consciousness (Gestalten des Bewuβtseins), which dissolve immanently in and through the experience of their respective objects. ‘Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is’.[17] The relation of consciousness to its object, at least in principle, elicits from within experience itself, its self-determination and metamorphosis. The clichés regularly bandied about which accuse Hegel of positing a predetermined telos, presupposing the Absolute from the start, or finally reverting back to a dogmatic pre-Critical metaphysics are erroneous insofar as we take the textual evidence seriously. On the contrary, and to the chagrin of Hegel’s detractors, it is only at the end of the process of phenomenological dialectic that he feels himself able to unabashedly state,
‘Absolute knowing is the truth of every mode of consciousness because, as the course of the Phenomenology showed, it is only in absolute knowing that the separation of the object from the certainty of itself is completely eliminated: truth is now equated with certainty and this certainty with truth.’[18]
We will make the case for such a reading of PhG in some detail below. Phenomenology provides a series of stepping stones by which ‘natural consciousness’ can attain the vantage point of Science or speculative philosophy. [19] The transitions from one shape of consciousness to another best illustrate the normative dimension of Hegelian phenomenology. The logical character of consciousness’s experience becomes palpable in the irremissible tension between consciousness’s claim to adequately know its object, and the veritable poverty of this knowledge, which comes to light in the course of experience itself. This process in turn generates increasingly mediated and intricate varieties of experience and knowledge. According to Hegel, this transformation is logically necessitated and irreducible to the caprice of experience.
At a glance we might think that it is on this point Husserlian phenomenology and its diverse progeny depart most patently from the legacy of Hegel. Moreover, as we shall see, Heidegger in his magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (1927), as well as in numerous lecture courses prior to its publication, openly declared his hostility towards dialectic.[20] Not to mention, his lecture actual course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in which he unequivocally repudiates the efforts of the philosopher Nicolai Hartmann to demonstrate the affinity of Hegelian and Husserlian phenomenology. [21] There are no doubt significant differences, some of which may be irreconcilable, but nonetheless we will argue throughout this paper that the issue is not as black and white as Heidegger is wont to argue. Not only are the disparities between Hegelian phenomenology and contemporary phenomenology far more nuanced than Heidegger presents them, but there also exists the very real prospect for their mutual illumination.
Hegel and the Problem of Scepticism
The Introduction is of first-rate importance for anyone wishing to properly understand PhG. It is here that Hegel stipulates the minimal conditions necessary for phenomenology to begin. He starts by criticizing a roughly ‘Kantian’ position; some commentators have claimed he means Reinhold in particular, but we shall leave that debate to one side for the moment. It’s clear, however, that Hegel’s criticisms could also be efficaciously applied to Hobbesian, Cartesian and Lockean epistemologies. Any epistemology which treats cognition as an instrument or intermediary lying between the subject and objective reality runs the risk of falling into the despair of an irreparable scepticism.[22]
In the aftermath of Immanuel Kant’s Copernican Revolution there was an intense period of debate within German intellectual life. Key members of the intelligentsia such as F.H. Jacobi and J.H. Obereit saw nihilism as an inevitable consequence of Kant’s critical philosophy because, in their opinion, it reduced objective reality to merely the subjective conditions of human understanding, relegating the realities of God, Freedom, and the Immortality of the Soul to things-in-themselves which could never become objects of human cognition. Kant famously wrote in his Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (KRV) that he had embarked upon the critique of pure reason in order to make room for faith. He had, however, in many of his contemporaries’ eyes left only an unbearable and gaping chasm.[23] This is the context in which we would like to situate Hegel’s opening remarks of the Introduction. He perspicaciously recognizes the ease with which one can slide from the so-called organon theory of knowledge[24] to despair and the belief that any such attempt to know reality independently of our representations is doomed to failure. The similarities between Hegel’s presentation of this eventuality in the Introduction and the concluding remarks of the first book of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature are uncanny:
‘The wretched condition, weakness, and disorder of the faculties, I must employ in my enquiries, encrease my apprehensions. And the impossibility of amending or correcting these faculties, reduces me almost to despair, and makes me resolve to perish on the barren rock, on which I am at present, rather than venture myself upon that boundless ocean, which runs out into immensity.’[25]
Hegel echoes this Humean sentiment when he writes in the Introduction:
‘A certain uneasiness seems justified, partly because there are different types of cognition, and one of them might be more appropriate than another for the attainment of this goal, so that we could make a bad choice of means; and partly because cognition is a faculty of a definite kind and scope, and thus, without a more precise definition of its nature and limits, we might grasp clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth. This feeling of uneasiness is surely bound to be transformed into the conviction that the whole project of securing for consciousness through cognition what exists in itself is absurd, and that there is a boundary between cognition and the Absolute that completely separates them.’[26]
When cognition is thought of as a medium for grasping objective reality, the subject’s apprehension of the object is invariably distorted, since it bears the indelible mark of the cognitive act through which it initially came to be known. It begins with a model of knowledge that emphasizes either the activity of the knowing subject or the receptivity of the cognitive process.[27] Even if ‘cognition is not an instrument of our activity but a more or less passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then again we do not receive the truth as it is in itself, but only as it exists through and in this medium.’[28] Try as we might to refine and examine the instrument of cognition there remains, for Hegel, an intractable problem.
Any effort to eliminate the impact of cognition upon the apprehension of the object is a fruitless exercise which results only in an infinite regress because one is inescapably reliant on the medium of cognition and can never be sure that one has fully determined its fundamental character and the definitive limits of its operation. He writes, ‘if by testing cognition, which we conceive of as a medium, we get to know the law of its refraction, it is again useless to subtract this from the end result.’ He continues, ‘For it is not the refraction of the ray, but the ray itself whereby truth reaches us, that is cognition; and if this were removed, all that would be indicated would be a pure direction or a blank space.’[29] Furthermore, any attempt to subtract the impact of cognition upon our apprehension of the object, by means of a supervening and introspective operation of the mind, falls short of a pure and unadulterated cognizance. This is because it is only by means of the instrument of cognition that an object can be known by a subject at all. As a consequence, this model of cognition finds itself caught up in a circular begging of the question because without the instrument of cognition the object simply evaporates for the knower.
Hegel’s polemic against a very general vision of epistemology prepares the way for his questioning its aforementioned pre-eminent assumption. This conception of the relation between knower and known ‘takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition. Above all, it presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real’.[30] What is Hegel’s alternative to a road that can only lead to an all-encompassing scepticism? Hegel’s reply may well be an unexpected one for some. It seems that an image of Hegel and his philosophy has been erected since the polemics of F.W.J. Schelling and Ludwig Feuerbach, which has unfortunately become indissociable from and even a substitute for reading his actual texts.
This is true of both the analytic and Continental reception of Hegel. For example, Jürgen Habermas in his Knowledge and Human Interests writes that Hegel’s objection to the organon theory of knowledge ‘is obviously only valid presupposing that there can be something like knowledge in itself or absolute knowledge independent of the subjective conditions of possible knowledge.’[31] But Habermas ignores a fairly straightforward point. First, as far as Hegel is concerned we are still a long way off breaching the environs of philosophical reflection, and thus, by Hegel’s lights, can’t begin a phenomenological inquiry by first trying to determine the transcendental conditions under which experience and knowledge are possible. Second, Hegel wishes to begin, as we will argue in greater detail below, his phenomenological investigation with the assumptions of natural consciousness in tact i.e. that the object is distinct from me and has an existence independent of the conditions under which I cognize it.[32] So when Habermas alleges that ‘Hegel’s critique does not proceed immanently’[33] it is in fact he that falls short of following the immanent development of consciousness in PhG. It is in large part due to a pervasive and influential simulacrum of Hegel’s thought that many are taken aback when they learn that scepticism is in fact integral to his thinking in both its phenomenological and philosophical manifestations. So contrary to Feuerbach’s claims,[34] Hegel believes that the conclusions of scepticism must be pursued, albeit not in the manner we have outlined hitherto, which in his opinion, only lead to dogmatism or solipsism.
It is Hegel’s conviction that Science can only liberate itself from the shackles of equipollence by turning on itself. Hegel greatly admired ancient scepticism and the doctrine of equipollence which it formulated. While he only had contempt for its modern descendent, advocated by figures in Germany, such as G.E. Schulze, whose scepticism cum dogmatism only served to sully the noble lineage of its ancient predecessor.[35] He regarded it dogmatic because it based itself uncritically upon the immediate certainty of matters of fact and sense data. But as Hegel says, ‘One bare assurance is worth just as much as another.’[36] This is Hegel’s invocation of the two sets of tropes articulated by classical scepticism. The term ‘trope’ expresses a fundamental premise of sceptical argumentation, which holds that for every thesis or argument an equally probable thesis or argument can be found.[37] This leaves the possibility of certitude and self-satisfied dogmatism on shaky terrain and crystallizes the issue of equipollence, to wit, the problem of deciding between two opposing albeit equally probable theses.[38]
It is this seemingly insoluble issue that leads Hegel to exclaim that Science cannot rest assured in its self-professed indubitability and by virtue of that fact feel itself worthy of our esteem and praise. As Robert R. Williams has perceptively discerned, Hegel strongly believes that scepticism if wielded efficaciously can play an indispensable role in the process of speculative philosophizing.[39] It purveys the negative and critical dynamism which is a precondition of speculative philosophy.[40] Williams characterizes Hegel’s phenomenology as a self-accomplishing scepticism because the immanent dissolution and movement of consciousness emanates from consciousness’s own self-subversion.[41] In this respect, modern scepticism is impoverished by comparison. It is insufficiently critical, and thus in the final analysis incoherent, because it fails to unleash the same degree of critical and destructive vehemence with which it savages metaphysics, towards its own preconceptions and dogmas.[42] The issue of equipollence as a consequence never becomes a problem for it.[43]
This is the compelling reason for Hegel’s attempt at an ‘exposition of how knowledge makes its appearance’.[44] Hegel is above all concerned with how knowledge appears to consciousness. He is not preoccupied with a metaphysical inquiry in any conventional sense. As Stephen Houlgate has astutely observed, Hegel doesn’t straightforwardly seek to furnish an explanation of the quidditas or whatness of things i.e. that which makes a thing what it is.[45] Since Hegel’s so-called Objective Idealism, as developed in WL, doesn’t subtend the preliminary stages of PhG, we have at least ex hypothesi, no intimation of Hegel’s own metaphysical convictions. Too many philosophers and commentators to count have claimed that he sneaks his own metaphysical prejudices surreptitiously through the back door, but we’ll leave that issue aside for the moment.
Pedagogy and Preliminary Stipulations
What is interesting though, especially with respect to PhG, is the emphasis placed by Hegel the ‘absolute systematiser,’ and ‘totalizing metaphysician’ on pedagogy as the abiding rationale for phenomenology. ‘The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along this road is, in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science.’[46] So unlike Wittgenstein’s ladder which must be thrown away after one has climbed it,[47] Hegel’s ladder arises out of a demand placed on philosophy by natural consciousness to justify its standpoint as Science. The ‘individual has the right to demand that Science should at least provide him with the ladder to this standpoint, should show him this standpoint within himself.’[48]
However, if natural consciousness is prematurely introduced to the standpoint of Science, in the words of Hegel, ‘it makes an attempt, induced by it knows not what, to walk on its head too, just this once; the compulsion to assume this unwonted posture and to go about in it is a violence it is expected to do to itself, all unprepared and seemingly without necessity.’[49] On the one hand, natural consciousness mustn’t peremptorily defer to the standpoint of philosophy. While on the other, it is compelled if it is ever to surpass its own point of view which it accepts simpliciter, in spite of itself, to tread ‘the pathway of doubt,’ and ultimately ‘the way of despair’.[50] As PhG unfolds it’s clear that each shape of consciousness takes itself to have grasped reality in itself. It is in this sense that we can say that each shape of consciousness takes itself to be absolute.
A simple objection to Hegel’s method can be presented here: if each shape of consciousness takes itself to be absolute through its conviction that it knows its object most adequately, couldn’t consciousness remain satisfied with its knowledge of the object and thereby eschew following the path of despair and ‘violence at its own hands’ which thence ‘spoils its own limited satisfaction’?[51] Isn’t Hegel simply perpetuating an Aristotelian prejudice that all human beings intrinsically desire knowledge and strive ceaselessly to know?[52] On this reading then, PhG can never possibly get off the ground without the philosopher, who behind the scenes engenders putatively ‘immanent’ tensions and thereby instigates the dialectical transitions from one shape of consciousness to another. It is only by means of Hegel’s ventriloquist act that consciousness can lose its object i.e. it can recognize that its criterion of knowledge fails to sufficiently grasp the object, and then find it once again i.e. through an adjustment of its criterion of knowledge, it takes itself to have once more understood the object adequately. We shall argue, however, that Hegel can dispatch this objection, even though its very structure (as an argument) makes it hard to unequivocally refute. We shall address how he manages to circumvent this criticism in the following paragraphs. But before we do this, our exegesis of the Introduction needs to be further extended, because it is there that Hegel makes some important stipulations which delineate the minimal conception of consciousness necessary for phenomenology to begin.
Hegel was a post-Kantian and child of the Aufklärung so we can be confident that the he was in deep agreement with Kant’s remarks in the Preface to the first edition of KRV, ‘Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit.’[53] Hegel undoubtedly took seriously Kant’s exhortation to be self-critical but felt he had eschewed the sceptical outcome of the latter’s Critical philosophy.[54] As Charles Taylor points out, the nature of Hegel’s system is to demonstrate all partial reality as dependent upon an Absolute which in turn generates this partial reality.[55] The plethora of dualisms proliferated by Kantian philosophy, between appearances and thing-in-themselves, freedom and necessity, concept and intuition, subject and object etc…, are to put it somewhat crudely, for Hegel, the consequence of the unwarranted exaltation of such a partial reality.
This reading, however, is potentially misleading because it gives the impression that there exists a nascent drive towards totalization which implicitly governs the development of consciousness from the outset. Jean Hyppolite is surely correct to surmise Hegel’s incompatibility with the Cartesian gesture of guarantying epistemological certitude by means of the process of universal doubt.[56] We have already seen how Hegel repudiates the desiccated method adopted by much of modern philosophy which tries to vouchsafe the adequacy of our knowledge by honing the instrument of cognition. The reason why Hegel precludes the employment of the strategy of universal doubt is that it would fall within the province of philosophical reflection. Something at this stage to which, as we have seen, he can have no recourse if he is to satisfy the demands of natural consciousness. He begins with natural consciousness in order to convey the ultimate necessity and self-legitimating character of Science for natural consciousness. It is in this sense we can say Hegel is not preaching to the converted.
What constitutes natural consciousness? Hegel stipulates in the Introduction a minimal conception of consciousness pared down to what he takes to be the bare essentials. While remaining consonant with the assumptions of natural consciousness, he provides us with the most basic and abstract criteria necessary for consciousness to be related to an object.[57] The problem of equipollence casts a shadow over Hegel’s minimal description of consciousness. The purpose of his rudimentary description of consciousness is that it is prima facie uncontroversial. This is important because otherwise it would render Hegel’s initial stipulation of the fundamental constituents of consciousness’s relation to an object vulnerable to sceptical attack. For example, if Hegel had furnished his conception of consciousness’s relation to an object with a highly sophisticated and nuanced array of properties and determinations, not only would it be incessantly subject to criticism in its particulars, it would also lack the force that his later descriptions of perception and the understanding accrue from their phenomeno-logically immanent derivation. The aim at this stage is not to overcome the problem of equipollence, but to foist upon his possible critics, contrary to their own predilection, an awkward dilemma. It allows Hegel to reply to his critics, ‘what then is your proposal for consciousness’s minimal relation to an object?’ For lack of an alternative Hegel deems his starting point although not in itself necessary, the only feasible alternative for an immanent phenomenology. It is in this respect that one may assert natural consciousness to be predicated upon doxa.[58] His description of consciousness goes thus,
‘Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it, or, as it is said, this something exists for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating, or of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing. But we distinguish this being-for-another from being-in-itself; whatever is related to knowledge or knowing is also distinguished from it, and posited as existing outside of this relationship; this being-in-itself is called truth.’[59]
Furthermore,
‘Consciousness provides its own criterion from within itself, so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself…In consciousness one thing exists for another, i.e. consciousness regularly contains the determinateness of the moment of knowledge; at the same time, this other is to consciousness not merely for it, but is also outside of this relationship, or exists in itself: the moment of truth. Thus in what consciousness affirms from within itself as being-in-itself or the True we have the standard which consciousness itself sets up by which to measure what it knows.’[60]
For Hegel, consciousness’s relation to an object is comprised of several elements: (1) Consciousness distinguishes itself from the object. (2) Simultaneously consciousness relates itself to the object. (3) Through this relation the object exists for consciousness. This relation is an epistemic one, in that by relating to an object consciousness takes itself to know the object.[61] (4) Consciousness supplies itself with a criterion of what it takes the object to be in itself or an sich. Consciousness articulates contradictions from within itself, as a consequence of the disparity between what consciousness takes the object to be in itself and its concurrent experience of the object which reveals the former to be merely for it.[62] The upshot of this contradictory moment is that consciousness recognizes the inadequacy of its criterion i.e. its knowledge of the object or what it had taken the object to be in itself. ‘Hence it comes to pass for consciousness that what it previously took to be the in-itself, is not an in-itself, or that it was only an in-itself for consciousness.’[63] Consciousness makes the necessary adjustments to its knowledge so that it is once more appropriate to the object of experience. ‘Since consciousness thus finds that its knowledge does not correspond to its object, the object itself does not stand the test; in other words, the criterion for testing is altered when that for which it was to have been the criterion fails to pass the test; and the testing is not only a testing of what we know, but also a testing of the criterion of what knowing is.’[64] This brings consciousness’s criterion of knowledge into line with its concurrent experience of the object i.e. what consciousness presently takes the object to be in itself. ‘Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience [Erfahrung].’[65]
This development is completely internal to consciousness and thus remains faithful to the strictures of immanence which Hegel takes himself to have substantiated.[66] He contends that, ‘the essential point to bear in mind throughout the whole investigation is that these two moments, ‘Concept’ and ‘object’, ‘being-for-another’ and ‘being-in-itself’, both fall within that knowledge which we are investigating.’[67] Consciousness’s dissolution and reconstitution occurs through a multiplicity of moments. This process is not formulaic but rather a function of consciousness’s experience of the object; the infamous triadic structure of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, commonly taken to express the movement of Hegelian dialectic, is an aberration culled from an unmitigated oversimplification.[68] Hegel would surely think it an overwrought and reified schema imposed externally upon a dialectical movement always already at work and inherent to consciousness’s relation to its object.
However, a more formidable quandary presents itself. The Introduction sets the stage for and opens onto a section entitled A. Consciousness which is comprised of three chapters, Sense-Certainty: Or the ‘This’ and ‘Meaning’, Perception: Or the Thing and Deception, and Force and the Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World. A problem arises for the interpreter because Hegel’s definition of the most primitive form consciousness can take arguably entails aspects which implicitly amount to a description of self-consciousness. This is of course untenable if Hegel doesn’t wish to compromise the integrity of his commitment to immanence. Even though Hegel may have been quick to dismiss this allegation, claiming that self-consciousness requires additional relations and determinations, for example, in the section named B. Self-Consciousness, IV. The Truth of Self-Certainty he states that ‘self-consciousness is Desire in general.’[69] It’s nevertheless interesting to examine this at times perplexing issue, especially when read alongside Robert B. Pippin’s seminal reading of Hegel in Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Although others, such as the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer,[70] had previously stressed the impossibility of fully understanding the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness in PhG, if Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant and his formulation of the transcendental unity of apperception were not taken into account, Pippin was the first to dedicate an entire book to this pressing issue.
The problem we have brought to the forefront revolves around the Introduction’s positing of natural consciousness’s intrinsic capacity to simultaneously differentiate itself from its object and yet relate to it. The question is whether consciousness is conscious of this. It would appear so given that Hegel’s description emphasizes both reflexive and transitive elements i.e. ‘Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it…and the determinate aspect of this relating, or the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing.’[71] This passage evinces the I’s spontaneous ability to differentiate itself from and relate itself to something. It knows and is thus aware that it is not the object and that the object is not it. This awareness is tantamount to self-awareness because the I explicitly thematizes itself as not being the object. In this regard we can agree with Pippin that Hegel adheres to the apperceptive thesis because the preponderance of the distinction made by the subject between itself and the object entails that the ‘I think must be able to accompany all my representations’.[72] But while Kant is unapologetically advancing at this stage in the B-Deduction a conception of self-consciousness, Hegel’s narrative still has some way to go until it reaches this stage. With a measure of poetic licence we can say that Hegel’s adaptation of Kant’s theory of apperception would sound something like the ‘I am not the object and the object is not me must be able to accompany all my representations.’ Although it is a rather clumsy formulation on our part we take it to convey well the point we are struggling to articulate.[73] The somewhat thorny question of whether the description of consciousness offered in the Introduction, insofar as it possesses self-awareness is not already a precipitate conception of self-consciousness. Pippin’s reading would seem to assent to such a characterization[74] since he emphasizes above all Hegel’s identification of the Concept with self-determining subjectivity.[75]
There is further evidence of Hegel’s covert reliance upon a model of self-consciousness in the Introduction. As we have seen, consciousness has the ability to reflect upon its knowledge and compare it with its experience of the object. Consciousness thereby assesses the adequacy of its knowledge with respect to its actual experience and as a result is able to surmise shortcomings in its knowledge, which it proceeds to rectify. Consciousness is therefore able to explicitly thematize both its knowledge i.e. what it takes the object to be merely for it, and its experience i.e. what it takes the object to be in itself, so as to effect a transformation of both.[76]
‘For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth. Since both are for the same consciousness, this consciousness is itself their comparison; it is for this same consciousness to know whether its knowledge of the object corresponds to the object or not.’[77]
And,
‘Consciousness knows something; this object is the essence or the in-itself; but it is also for consciousness the in-itself. This is where the ambiguity of this truth enters. We see that consciousness now has two objects: one is the first in-itself, the second is the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself…the first object, in being known, is altered for consciousness; it ceases to be the in-itself, and becomes something that is the in-itself only for consciousness…this then is the True: the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself.’[78]
The features of thematization, comparison and reflection attributed to consciousness by Hegel surely suffice as evidence of self-conscious activity. As we can see, he unambiguously states that consciousness separates and objectifies its knowledge which it distinguishes from the object qua in itself. The crux of the matter is that only now do we confront the ‘mechanism’ which tears consciousness out of its calm repose and stasis and propels it to ceaselessly move beyond its self-proclaimed limits.[79] Only a self-conscious being endowed with the ability to thematize, discriminate, compare and reflect could feel the pangs of dissatisfaction with its knowledge of the object of experience. The description of consciousness posited by Hegel is in part an acknowledgement of this. He knows very well that it’s the coordination and interplay of these various capacities which provoke thought’s restlessness and propensity to advance beyond its dogmatism and one-sidedness. We have not deviated from our previous characterization of Hegel’s method as strictly descriptive out of choice, it seems in part necessary if we are to explain and understand the dynamic of PhG itself. It is interesting to note that Hegel himself invokes a transcendental argument in order to vindicate the distinction he makes between the I’s knowledge and what it takes the object to be in itself: ‘the distinction between the in-itself and knowledge is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all.’[80]
This issue however is by no means settled once and for all. One could argue to the contrary, that consciousness is able partake in psychic operations such as comparison and reflection without being explicitly aware that it was engaged in such activities, somewhat similar to the notion of pre-reflective consciousness found in the work of twentieth century phenomenologists like Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre. But such an argument remains, in the final analysis, unconvincing because first it occludes the Kantian legacy which so profoundly shapes and underpins Hegel’s problematic.[81] Second, and more importantly, it negates the active and reflexive nature of consciousness as depicted in the passages adduced above.
Determinate Negation and the Philosophical ‘We’
Against, the leitmotiv of Kantian humility, Hegel proposes the principle of ‘determinate negation,’ which beyond the merely negative effects of critique has positive and constructive consequences for consciousness’s knowledge of its object. PhG is therefore not to be read simply as via negativa. Determinate negation isn’t a principle which is applied externally to the matter under consideration, for that would be a gross violation of Hegel’s own claims to immanence, not to mention countermand the possibility of an authentic description of consciousness’s experience of the object.[82] Hegel even goes so far as to say that the phenomenologist[83] simply plays the role of a passive observer while consciousness undergoes its self-examination.[84] The labour of determinate negation is only visible to the eye of the philosopher who examines the development of consciousness from his or her own standpoint. Consciousness is oblivious to the presence of determinate negation because it is unaware of the fact that its own experience of the object conforms to or is imbued with this philosophical principle. Hegel can’t simply presume Spinoza’s principle of omnis affirmatio est negatio as averred in the latter’s Ethics.[85] The idea that every determinate position is at once a negation and that every determinate negation is at once a particular position must show itself to be true of the subject’s experience of the object and hence cannot be taken as the materia prima and well-spring of the transformations of consciousness’s way of relating to the object. In other words, determinate negation should not be seen as effectuating the transformations of consciousness, but as in lieu gleaned by the philosopher who simply observes consciousness’s oscillation between its loss of the object and later rediscovery in a novel presentation.
The philosopher does not then simply describe consciousness’s experience of the object. Consciousness’s experience and its development possess philosophical import. With the arrival of a ‘new true object’ on the scene, the phenomenologist elicits the logical necessity of its emergence from that which preceded it. On the one hand, this is just another level of description albeit tempered by philosophical nomenclature. While on the other, the phenomenologist’s spelling out of the necessity of the transition from one shape of consciousness to another is itself equally necessary because it is the means by ‘which the succession of experiences through which consciousness passes is raised into a scientific progression’.[86] Consciousness neither uncovers nor understands the provenance of the new object to which it relates. The progressive thrust of PhG is disclosed ‘behind the back of consciousness.’[87] Since consciousness is not privy to the necessity of this transformation, the preceding shape of consciousness need not accede to its own self-sublation. The philosopher does not jettison consciousness’s experience and by means of a contrived logical connection proceed to artificially stitch together the various shapes of consciousness. The philosopher rather draws out the phenomeno-logical consequences of consciousness’s own experience. To wit, the philosopher shows how the new shape of consciousness explicitly advances what the antecedent shape had embodied implicitly within itself. For us, the philosophers, therefore, the emergence of the new object ‘appears at the same time as movement and a process of becoming.’[88] We have largely focused our attention upon the first level of appearance i.e. that which appears directly to consciousness. This second level of appearance, which appears to the philosopher, is the appearance of the Absolute’s own self-externalization and is articulated as such.
Hegel is able to circumvent the accusation that the philosopher who already possesses absolute knowledge expedites consciousness’s development by furnishing transcendent sign posts which guide PhG’s machinic generation of new shapes of consciousness on the road to Absolute Knowing. This criticism is in one sense true. The philosopher does facilitate consciousness’s progression, but only insofar as he formalizes consciousness’s experience. This act of formalization is a precondition of progress, but not its source. The reason why we can think of it as a precondition, is that if it were not to occur, consciousness, as we noted above, may never surpass its own self-assurance in the veracity of its knowledge. There is a slight tension here though, because, at least on our reading, the givenness of the object i.e. what consciousness takes the object to be in-itself, should in and of itself be able to erode consciousness’s confidence in its knowledge of the former. The exploration of this tension will sadly have to been left for another time.
Part II
Heidegger and the Question of Being
We will now provide a cursory outline of the opening statements of Martin Heidegger’s chef d’oeuvre, Sein und Zeit. This will allow us to determine, in brief, the aims, objectives and ends of Heideggerian phenomenology, in contradistinction to the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl. A thorough discussion of Heidegger’s differences and criticisms of Husserl cannot be given here. We will only try to demarcate those instances in which Heidegger conceived himself as departing from Husserl’s project. Familiarising ourselves with the lineaments of Heidegger’s transfiguration of phenomenology as phenomenological ontology will also permit of comparison with Hegelian phenomenology as exposited above. Although reams of literature have been dedicated to the elucidation of the basic tenets of SZ, a rehearsal of sorts is in order before we can delve into those issues which continue to confound even the most perspicuous and sympathetic of Heidegger’s interpreters.
Heidegger tells us in the Introduction to SZ that the question of the meaning of being has all but been forgotten by philosophy. ‘Being and its structure transcend every being and every possible existent determination of being. Being is the transcendens pure and simple.’[89] The aim of SZ is to bring this question to the forefront of philosophical debate and reclaim it from a history of occlusion and neglect. The reasons for the question of being’s slide into oblivion are legion. But in the Introduction Heidegger enumerates three prejudices with which we must come to terms prior to the inauguration of fundamental ontology and the Destruktion of the history of metaphysics. The deconstruction of the tradition is an undertaking we mustn’t take lightly if we desire to exhume and unearth those phenomena which have been victim to the obfuscation and perversion of metaphysical discourse. It is in this respect that the phenomenological inflection of Heidegger’s self-assigned task becomes perceptible. In SZ Heidegger alacriously champions the phenomenological war-cry “To the things themselves!”[90] Thus, in principle, he is quintessentially in agreement with Husserl. What, at least in part, motivates this oedipal drama is Heidegger’s conviction that the master had fallen short of his own rigorous and exacting imperative.[91] Simply put, transcendental phenomenology for Heidegger, was ultimately incapable of availing itself of the resources necessary for the illumination of the Ur-etwas, the ‘original something’ to which phenomenological intuition strives to access.[92] This issue is greatly complicated by the hermeneutical twist Heidegger gives to his phenomenology of Dasein or being-there.[93] It turns out to be, in the final analysis, not only impossible, but even undesirable that we reach some sort of terminus in which the Ur-etwas would be finally laid bare once and for all. We shall now try to explicate in greater detail the three prejudices alluded to above, to which Heidegger draws our attention, and claims have underwritten philosophy’s approach to the question of being hitherto.
First, ‘“Being is the most “universal” concept’.[94] On this view we regard being as a property like any other. By way of abstraction Seiendheit or ‘beingness’ operates like any other predicate. It is merely distinguished by the fact that qua predicate it functions at the highest level of generality. Heidegger as an avid reader of Aristotle could not take seriously such a brazen answer to the Seinsfrage. Aristotle had deigned long ago that ‘being’ does not straightforwardly behave like a very general predicate.[95] Heidegger took seriously the Aristotelian dictum that being is said in manifold ways and set himself the task of uncovering a single sense in which all beings could be said to be.[96] Is there a single unifying sense able to encompass being’s multiple expressions as essence, substance, accident, actuality, potentiality, truth and falsehood? The very posing of this question undercuts the view of being as merely the most universal concept. The incommensurability of its many senses instead leaves us in a veritable quagmire.
Heidegger’s involution within Aristotelian ontology by no means comes to an end here. Crucially, in §6 of the Introduction, he claims that ancient ontology did in fact posit a single sense of being, which formed the substratum of the many other disparate senses. Furthermore, he argues that this sense of being is fundamentally determined by privileging a definite mode of time, namely, the present. For Aristotle, at least on Heidegger’s reading, being is, in the final analysis, understood as parousia or ‘presence’ (Answesenheit).[97] What is, is therefore at bottom, what is present.[98] The meaning of being qua presence abrades the more primordial meaning of being, which in Division II of SZ, Heidegger will argue is time. By the end of SZ, time turns out to be not only the transcendental horizon of Dasein’s understanding of its being, but the meaning of being as such.[99] Metaphysics is defined for Heidegger by its powerless to think its hypostatization of a specific mode of temporality.[100] We can perhaps only now have an inkling as to the reasons why Heidegger is so fond of telling us that the ‘concept of “being” is…the most obscure of all.’[101]
The second prejudice is that the ‘concept of “being” is indefinable.’[102] The being of beings has generally been thought of in terms of beings, consigned to what Heidegger calls, the ontic domain i.e. that which concerns itself with the investigation of beings or entities. ‘We can conclude only that “being” is not something like a being.’[103] This is the reason we shall refrain from capitalizing ‘being’ with a capital B as is the wont of some scholars and translators of Heidegger. The problem with this practice is that it instigates the pernicious tendency which Heidegger unequivocally and on countless occasions states he wishes to avoid, that is to say, an understanding which can only possibly envision ‘being’ in terms of ‘beings’. The upshot of the so-called ontological difference is to bring about the obsolescence of this traditional practice. Irrespective of whether one reads Heidegger’s disciples or his most virulent opponents, the ontological difference, is acknowledged as the sine qua non of this thought. Its perdurance despite the various upheavals, reversals and breaks undergone by his philosophy through to his later period is plain to see, even to the most perfunctory of readers. As we know, Heidegger famously distinguishes the ontical from the ontological. In contrast to the former, ontology preoccupies itself with ways of being and their structural features. The ontico-ontological difference itself entails correlative distinctions such as the existentiell and the existential, the apophantic and the hermeneutic, the factual and the categorial etc…[104] For the moment we must put these distinctions to one side. They will however receive clarification throughout this part of the paper.
The third and final prejudice is that ‘“Being” is the self-evident concept’[105] since every proposition can be analysed as including the copula ‘is’.[106] As a consequence, being is regarded as transparent and diaphanous. Such complacency never even glimpses that which it takes for granted. As Heidegger points out, such a view pays scant attention to the incomprehensibility of our ‘average comprehensibility’ of being. ‘It shows that an enigma lies a priori in every relation and being toward beings as beings.’[107] The enigma which Heidegger is attempting to unravel here is our own pre-ontological understanding of being,[108] which he will show through a series a dazzling phenomenological analyses ‘ultimately belongs to the essential constitution of Dasein itself.’[109] We incessantly speak, act and think via the invocation of the copula by which we link together subject and predicate, and yet are reluctant to probe further to into the murky recesses which allow this manner of speaking, acting and thinking. ‘We do not know what “being” means. But already when we ask, “What is being?” we stand in an understanding of the “is” without being able to determine conceptually what the “is” means.’[110] For Heidegger, ‘we live already in an understanding of being’ but the elusive and indeterminate nature of its meaning for us demands that we repeat the Seinsfrage. However, before this repetition can impress itself upon us, we must ‘first of all…work out adequately the formulation of the question.’[111]
But who poses this question and how should our inquiry proceed, if we desire not to repeat the same misguided perambulations and confusions that have for the past two millennia surrounded the Seinsfrage? The who in question is of course Dasein, or ‘being-there’ which has been almost universally identified with the being of humanitas.[112] ‘Regarding, understanding and grasping, choosing, and gaining access to, are constitutive attitudes of inquiry are thus themselves modes of being of a particular being, of the being we inquirers ourselves in each case are.’[113] Heidegger would firmly rebuke Sartre some two decades later in his letter to Jean Beaufret, which he expanded into his famed Brief über den Humanismus (1947) for making just this equation. This important issue has befuddled and exasperated both friend and foe. But let it suffice for now to say that like its Hegelian counterpart, Heideggerian phenomenology is not primarily interested in the quidditas of things.[114] On the contrary, Dasein is defined in terms of Existenz rather than essence.[115] In SZ Heidegger emphasizes his inversion of the primacy of essentia over existentia a propos Dasein, and his detachment of the latter from its filiation with its Latin cognate, which denotes ‘objective presence’ or Vorhandenheit.[116] Dasein, however, ‘is a being that does not simply occur among other beings.’ Dasein is, according to Heidegger, ‘ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being.’[117] This very sketchy portrayal of Heidegger’s conception of Dasein only paints a rather emaciated picture. But for the moment it is all we require, since the more pressing question of Heidegger’s phenomenological method awaits explication.
Why Phenomenological Ontology?
It has already been intimated that before we are able formulate the question of the meaning of being we must first assay the specificity of the being of Dasein, and this is the purported raison d’être of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.[118] As we previously mentioned, Heidegger like Hegel, is convinced of the faithfulness of his phenomenological method to the ‘things themselves’. ‘It is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is also opposed to taking over concepts only seemingly demonstrated; and likewise to pseudo-questions which often are spread abroad as “problems” for generations.’[119] The task of ontology is the explication of ‘being itself.’[120] Heidegger, however, postulates an important caveat vis-à-vis the possibility of ontology: ‘Ontology is possible only as phenomenology.’[121] Depending on how one interprets the aims and objectives of SZ, Heidegger’s phenomenology can be read as having an analogous structure to that of Hegelian phenomenology or as markedly differing from it.
As we have seen, Hegelian phenomenology acts as a propaedeutic to speculative science, a science which begins only once the identity of thought and being has been accepted. PhG can therefore be feasibly extricated from Hegel’s philosophy which takes the form of an ontological logic. On the one hand, Heidegger adopts a comparable strategy to Hegel. For Heidegger a phenomenological analysis of that being, which is ontologically as well as ontically distinctive, namely Dasein, is a precondition of our posing the question of the meaning of being in general.[122] Hence the priority Heidegger assigns to the ontical without which existential analysis would be impossible: ‘the roots of the existential analysis…are ultimately existentiell – they are ontic.’[123]
For Hegel this simply isn’t an issue if the identity of thought and being is acknowledged in advance of the inauguration of philosophy proper, making phenomenology’s task, in the final analysis, a dispensable one.[124] On the other hand, for Heidegger the question of the meaning of being is indissociable from the ‘who’ that poses, interprets and understands this question. For Heidegger there is no foreseeable point in the future, when after a protracted and exhaustive period of investigation we could finally declare to be rid of Dasein. Moreover, for Heidegger it is not a matter of observing a Dasein riven from the phenomenologist undertaking the phenomenological investigation of Dasein in its everydayness. Unlike Hegelian phenomenology, Heidegger’s existential analytic has no need of a mediator who articulates the experiential trajectory of consciousness’s development. For Heidegger the interrogator and the interrogated are one and the same, and everything hinges on the ebb and flow of their intrinsic interrelation. Heidegger does not so much collapse the distinction between the interrogator and interrogated but rather stresses their relatedness and inseparability. But the decisive question is whether this is a genuine improvement and circumvention of the refractive mediation concomitant with the philosopher’s descriptive unfolding of consciousness’s experience in PhG. In the final part of this paper we will attempt to broach this question explicitly. But before we do so a fuller elaboration of the specificities of Heidegger’s method is in order.
Logos as Apophansis and Logos as Hermēneuein
Phenomenology is the science of phenomena. Like Hegel, Heidegger uses the German word Wissenshaft to describe his method. Even though we know that Heidegger will soon expunge this term from his philosophy, it is nonetheless germane that he employs it in SZ to describe the phenomenological enterprise. The Greek phainomenon means what shows itself and is hence manifest.[125] Heidegger distinguishes phainomenon from ‘appearance’. By ‘appearance’ Heidegger means something which through its self-showing points to something else that is not manifest, ‘it means that something makes itself known which does not show itself…Appearing is a not showing itself.’[126] Appearing, however, is only possible on the basis of a self-showing of something.[127] And because of this Heidegger argues that the notion of appearance presupposes the concept of phenomenon.[128] ‘Accordingly, phenomena are never appearances, but every appearance is dependent upon phenomena.’[129] ‘Semblance’ behaves in a similar manner, because it looks like something or ‘seems’, which again is only possible on the basis of the phenomenon qua self-showing in itself.[130] Phenomenon thus designates a distinctive way something can be encountered.
Hegel also meant his conception of phenomenology in this sense, but, as we have seen, contends that consciousness’s experience of phenomena disrupts and incites the break down of its pre-existing conceptions of the object. Hegelian phenomenology delineates the immanent logos or logic of phenomena and their development into increasingly sophisticated conceptual structures. Does the phenomenology of Hegel with its advocacy of a phenomeno-logical approach to the progressive development of appearances in relation to consciousness, more literally exemplify the Greek terms of phainomenon and logos, than does Heidegger’s? Consciousness, as we know, does not explicitly acknowledge the universal and necessary conditions of the possibility of objective judgements, to which only the philosopher is privy. What are the ramifications of understanding the meaning of ‘logical necessity’ in this transcendental sense? Or in other words, what are the repercussions for our comparison of Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenological method?
Heidegger’s repartee would probably be that the logos of Hegel’s phenomeno-logical project, is not the same logos with which he is concerned, but an palsied and derivative phenomenon. But we must bear in mind that PhG is comprised of two strata, namely, consciousness, its knowledge of the object and the object of experience itself, and the philosopher who describes the vicissitudes of consciousness, through the stages of brimming confidence, self-abnegation and finally transmutation. The transcendental component of which we have spoken is thematized strictly at the philosophical level, while consciousness remains ignorant and perhaps even obdurate as to the inexorability of its self-overcoming. Attentiveness to the phenomenal is therefore not sacrificed by Hegel in the name of transcendental arguments. We are thus not dealing with a transcendental or dialectical philosophy in any conventional sense. Hegel’s phenomenology is able to pre-empt the standard argument invoked by Heidegger against transcendental philosophy, to wit, that it does violence to the self-showing of phenomena. We shall review Heidegger’s invective against dialectic in the paragraphs that follow, but for now we will try to determine what logos means for him in SZ.
In a lecture course from 1923-1924, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Heidegger states that insofar ‘as apophantic λόγος can characterize a human being’s existence, it pervades a human being’s entire dealings with his world, all seeing, interpreting, articulating.’[131] Any attempt to understand the meaning of phenomenology and its salience for human existence must ponder the meaning of logos. Logos literally translated means ‘speech’ but has been interpreted by the tradition variously as reason, judgement, concept, definition, ground and relation.[132] These definitions fatally obviate the more primordial meaning to which Heidegger aspires. Heidegger wishes to demonstrate that prior thinking of logos has taken it to mean: ‘to make manifest “what is being talked about” in speech.’[133] He goes on,
‘Aristotle explicates this function of speech more precisely as apophainesthai. Logos lets something be seen (phainesthai), namely what is being talked about, and indeed for the speaker (who serves as the medium) or for those who speak with each other. Speech “lets us see,” from itself, apo…, what is being talked about. In speech (apophansis), insofar as it is genuine, what is said should be derived from what is being talked about. In this way spoken communication, in what it says, makes manifest what it is talking about and thus makes it accessible to another.[134] Such is the structure of logos as apophansis.’[135]
Heidegger argues that logos as apophansis has the structure of synthesis, because it lets ‘something be seen in its togetherness with something’.[136] Subject and predicate are synthesized in order to form a judgement. But apophansis or propositional judging is not for Heidegger the original performance of truth.[137] The kind of truth that appears in such judgments is only one form of truth and a derivative one at that.[138] For Heidegger, apophantic statements, in the words of Thomas Sheehan, ‘co-perform,’ the givenness of things.[139] But neither the performance nor the givenness that it obtains are sufficiently primordial.[140] Phenomenology, taking its cue from Aristotle, ultimately aspires to the enactments of truth as aletheia or unconcealment, that is to say, the givenness of entities as self-giving or autodisclosive (on alethes).[141] However, insofar as some modality of the givenness of beings is co-performed in a logos apophantikos, we should be able to uncover within the structure that underpins apophansis traces of a more original human co-performance of disclosure.[142] ‘The “being true” of logos as alētheuein means: to take beings that are being talked about in legein as apophainesthai out of their concealment; to let them be seen as something unconcealed (alēthes); to discover them.’[143]
For the Heidegger of SZ any explanation of aletheuein and aletheia remains bound to the question of logos.[144] We still are yet to provide a satisfactory answer to this question. Heidegger in the concluding pages of the Introduction affords us an answer and it is absolutely vital if we wish to understand Heidegger’s phenomenological method:
‘The logos of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of hermēneuein, through which the proper meaning of being and the basic structures of the very being of Dasein are made known to the understanding of being that belongs to Dasein itself. Phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutics in the original signification of that word, which designates the work of interpretation.’[145]
Dasein and world form a circle. Heidegger augments the purview of the traditional hermeneutic circle between the text and its reading to the most primordial stratum of Dasein’s existence.[146]
‘The “circle” in understanding belongs to the structure of meaning, and this phenomenon is rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein, in interpretative understanding. Beings, which, as being-in-the-world, are concerned about their being itself have an ontological structure of the circle.’[147]
This is why he regards apophantic assertion to be a deficient mode of hermeneutic assertion.[148] Apophantic assertions are not false. They are misleading because they suggest that a form of predicate calculus is sufficient for describing our world.[149] By isolating subject and predicate and then unifying them in a judgement such as ‘the hammer is heavy,’ the hammer and its properties are cut off from their dependence upon our everyday understanding, which is embedded with numerous skills, discriminations and practices.[150] Critical reflection only comes into play when our ordinary ways of coping break down, and is made possible on the basis of our everyday background practices which it can never fully articulate.[151] ‘We call primordial the “as” of circumspect interpretation that understands (hermēneia), the existential-hermeneutical “as” in distinction from the apophantical “as” of the statement.’[152] Dasein’s taking something as something structures its understanding of entities. When Heidegger says that Dasein’s understanding possesses the existential structure of a project (Entwurf), he is not talking about a plan of action but the taking-as, as a mode of disclosure which allows Dasein to make sense of its being-in-the-world.[153]
As Richard Rorty has observed, Heidegger, like the Wittgenstein of Philosophische Untersuchungen, diagnoses the misplaced confidence of traditional philosophy in the belief that there must somehow be entities which are atomic in the sense of being what they are independent of their relation to other entities.[154] Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, in different ways, focus their attention upon the idea of relationality rather than subsistent relata. SZ’s argument for the primordiality of Zuhandensein effectively means that everything is related within a nested structure of purposive relations variously name by Heidegger the ‘in-order-to’, ‘where-in’, ‘with-which’, ‘towards-which’, and ‘for-the-sake-of-which’, which guides and runs through all of Dasein’s practical involvement within the world.[155]
Dasein’s being-in-the-world subtends its equipmental, referential, and involvement wholes. The phenomenon of world is the particular way the world manifests itself, and worldliness is the way of being of the world and of all its various subworlds.[156] ‘Things at hand are encountered within the world. The being of these beings, handiness, is thus ontologically related to the world and to worldliness.’[157] The world is always already ‘there’ but can never be encountered as such i.e. as an extant thing. Although we are unable to do justice to this notion here since it is not directly relevant to the subject matter of this paper, it should be borne in mind that the world remains unthematized, when we are engaged and unreflectively coping within it.
Wittgenstein famously wrote in the opening lines of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) that the ‘world is the totality of facts.’[158] Heidegger insists on the contrary that ‘the world is not the sum of all extant beings, not the universe of natural things – that the world is not at all anything extant or handy.’[159] World is a determination of the being of Dasein. The world is not extant but it certainly exists.[160] By this he means that it does not have the mode of being of an object, despite being ‘more objective than all objects’.[161] ‘World exists – that is, it is – only if Dasein exists, only if there is Dasein.’[162] And this is because the ‘ontological sense’ of world is imbued with or if you prefer structured by ‘significance’ (Bedeutsamkeit): the nested structure of meaningful interconnections within which we all dwell. For Heidegger we are always already thrown into a world of meaning, even if when in our more nihilistic moods it seems devoid of meaning. Dasein is not a human subject standing over against an object (Gegen-stand), but the unity of self and world, ‘self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world.’[163]
Part III
Phenomenological Description, Dialectic and the Problem of ‘Stilling the Stream’
For Heidegger, Hegel never really manages to get at the things themselves, because the intuition (Anschauung) through which the phenomenon is initially given and then described by the philosopher, is always already mediated through its expression (Ausdruck) in concepts.[164] This is why Heidegger so vigorously objects to dialectical method in SZ, and in a host of lecture courses preceding it. Dialectic confuses Ausdruck with Anschauung, and because of this confusion deludes itself into believing that it determines the phenomenon by means of its conceptual apparatus. It thus finds itself in the manifest contradiction of feigning its complete apprehension of the given, while in fact granting that nothing is in fact given. It is for this reason that Heidegger snidely opines that dialectic, ‘which was a genuine philosophic embarrassment, becomes superfluous.’[165]
But didn’t we argue above that Hegel doesn’t have a dialectical method as such? Yes, and we were right to do so. Just as commentators have challenged Heidegger’s reading of Platonic dialectic, we can demonstrate the tendentiousness of such an indictment of Hegel’s method, and moreover, ask under what pretence can Heidegger lay claim to a pure seeing (Anschauung) of the phenomenon, especially in the aftermath of Hegel?[166] Ironically, in his lecture course Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität)[167] Heidegger levels the accusation that dialectic ‘cannot hold out in such a thing as staying with the object and allowing it to prescribe the right mode of grasping it and the limits to this.’[168] But this is exactly what Hegel claims his phenomenology is doing. Of course we can dispute whether in fact he abides by this principle, just as we can dispute whether Heidegger really disentangles himself from the cul-de-sacs he associates with transcendental phenomenology. But unfortunately we cannot authoritatively settle these questions here. In the present paper we can only hope to convey the subtlety and persuasive case made by each philosopher for their respective methods. What we can say however, is that Heidegger mistakenly reckons the consciousness of PhG to have a single object i.e. its knowledge.[169] We know however, that consciousness has two objects, its knowledge of the object and what it takes the object to be in-itself. This distinction of course falls within consciousness. And if anything this is where we must draw a line in the sand between Hegel’s phenomenology and the modern phenomenological movement.[170]
Leaving aside for the moment Heidegger’s crusade against Cartesianism and his casting aside of Husserl’s self-constituting transcendental ego, there remain a number of acute and perhaps unbridgeable differences between the two conceptions of phenomenological method. Husserl wished to describe our experiences from within the first-person perspective while Hegel’s consciousness is at a remove.[171] The phenomenologist describes the experiences of a third-person perspective which undercuts itself and is successively enveloped by ever more comprehensive ones. Because it operates on the basis of the third-person perspective which is described extraneously by the philosopher, Hegel may never be able to alleviate the suspicions of contemporary phenomenologists. The phenomenologist can invariably claim that consciousness’s experience and its descriptive translation by the philosopher are not equivalent, and that something is inevitably lost in this transition from third-party experience to philosophical expression.
In an early text entitled, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (1919), Heidegger evaluates the redoubtable neo-Kantian Paul Natorp’s critique of phenomenology.[172] Natorp’s critique, to which we will turn shortly, could not only be applied to the problem of the methodological setup of Hegel’s phenomenology, but actually had a very real impact upon the young Heidegger, inciting his wariness and suspicion of philosophies which fetishized the notion of intuition. Theodore Kisiel, deems Natorp’s objections to be pivotal in mitigating Heidegger’s up to then untrammelled confidence in the power of intuitive fulfilment and preference in SZ to speak in terms of Dasein’s understanding of being, as the interface of thrownness and projection.[173]
Natorp’s criticisms are two-fold: first, Husserl’s method of reflective description brings the stream of experiences to a grinding halt. The experiences cease to be lived and are instead ‘looked at’.[174] Through plucking experiences from out of the flow of conscious experience we, in Natorp’s words, ‘still the stream’ and so purge the latter of its inimitable movement.[175] The second objection concentrates upon whether the immediate matter of phenomenology is expressible at all. Phenomenological description, despite its best efforts, is an intrinsically procrustean method in that it continues to circumscribe and subsume concrete immediacy under abstraction categories.[176] Any attempt at immediate description is effectively futile, since expression and verbalisation, generalise the immediately lived and thereby foment its objectification.[177]
On the one hand, Hegel, arguably escapes this dilemma, because we can make the case that it is his avowed desire to elicit the conceptual commitments of consciousness which spring from its knowledge and experience of the given. Hegel is therefore able to side-step the danger outlined by Natorp, because he never adopts the charade of a pure unmediated intuiting. While on the other hand, if we claim that Hegel’s phenomenological method is essentially the same as that of Husserl à la Kojève,[178] without an attunement to its specific modus operandi, this predicament is merely exacerbated, because the givenness of the object is even more attenuated by virtue of the fact that the stream of experience is not lived through by the phenomenologist in the first-person, but transposed into the third-person perspective of consciousness as such. Furthermore, this problem is intensified because the Gestalten which form A. Concsiousness, namely, Sense-Certainty, Perception, and Force and Understanding, are more akin to paradigms which are merely constitutive of our comportment to entities in the world, derived through an anterior moment of abstraction. This isn’t a problem as far as Hegel is concerned, and as we have seen, particularly in our examination of his relationship to scepticism, he has good reason for such an approach. Despite this being the case, we can be sure that many contemporary phenomenologists and epistemologists will be left with a bitter aftertaste and remain unpersuaded of the virtues of Hegel’s phenomenological method.
The way Heidegger manages to avoid the seemingly congenital defeasibility of phenomenological description, is first, to argue for a non-reflective understanding, and second, the non-objectifying conceptualization that it itself provides.[179] Heidegger criticized the privilege that Husserl placed upon the mode of givenness of perception. In Logische Untersuchungen Husserl predominantly distinguishes between the signitive, the imaginative and the perceptual modes of givenness, and ranks them in accordance with their ability to give us the object as directly, originally, and optimally as possible.[180] Perception is held to be superior because it is the only type of intention that presents the object itself in its bodily presence.[181] For Heidegger the imperceptible non-objective presence of world around which Dasein circumspectly moves takes precedence over bodily presence correlative to perceivedness.[182] World can never be apprehended by means of intuition. It is only by way of the understanding and therefore interpretative exposition from out of a prior meaningful whole that we can give expression to world. ‘“Intuition and “thought” are both already remote derivatives of understanding. Even the phenomenological “intuition of essences” is based on existential understanding.’[183] This is even further complicated by Heidegger’s temporalization of the understanding, the upshot of which is to turn the understanding into an unceasing, futural, finite transcendence. Unfortunately we are unable to explain the significance of this introduction of temporality by Heidegger into the hermeneutical work of the understanding because it would involve a thorough analysis of Division II of SZ, which would be cavalier to attempt at this stage of the paper. It should however be born in mind that there remains a great deal more work to be done if we are to satisfactorily comprehend the at times recondite transformation of phenomenology undertaken by Heidegger in SZ.
Conclusion
Perhaps the only virtue of this paper is that it indicates that there remains a massive amount of research that still needs to be done. Clearly the methodological approaches of Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenology share certain affinities. But are their differences more significant than those points at which their interests seemingly overlap? The divergence of their respective methods becomes most conspicuous on the issue of phenomenology’s relation to ontology. We have recapitulated this argument ad nauseam only because it is so important to understanding each philosopher’s methodology on its own terms. Rather than produce a garbled rigmarole by arbitrarily conflating those ideas and concepts which in fact underscore their philosophical originality, we should emphasize the distinctiveness of each philosopher’s conception of the phenomenological project.
For Hegel the themes of immanence and education play a central part, with ontology proper yet to arrive on the scene. It is the seemingly effortless coordination of two vantage points within the text, namely that of consciousness and the philosopher, which expedites PhG’s development on the route to Absolute Knowing. Both positions operate at distinct levels, and so produce the internal movement of Geist without violating the respective concerns and commitments of the other. The philosopher merely formalizes the experience that consciousness goes through. And consciousness experiences its object without the philosopher forever peering over its shoulder, admonishing it to turn its attention to the necessary conditions of its experience. By means of its own conscious reflexivity it is able to determine for itself the inadequacy or shortcomings of its conception of the object and modify it accordingly so that it falls into line with its concurrent experience of that object. Hegel thus does not in a patriarchal fashion loom over and delineate consciousness’s experience, ignoring the object’s givenness, but allows consciousness to engender and undergo its own self-transformation.
For the Heidegger of SZ on the other hand, ontology is only deemed possible by means of phenomenology. In this respect, ontology for Heidegger has abdicated its traditional role as the science of being qua being. Phenomenology for Heidegger does not pave the way for ontology in the way that it does so for Hegel. These two modes of philosophical inquiry are now explicitly bound to one another. Heidegger in large part owes this insight to Husserl whose phenomenological revolution undoubtedly impresses itself upon many of the methodological guidelines argued for in SZ. The existential analytic’s acknowledgment of the indispensability of the ontical is the upshot of phenomenology and ontology’s indissociable entwinement. The emphasis placed by Heidegger on the interrelatedness of interrogator and interrogated is also a testament to this methodological preference which runs through the entire book. At this point Heidegger is unable to avail himself of any other means for broaching the Seinsfrage. It is only in the 1930s that Heidegger begins to distance himself from the phenomenological hermeneutics of SZ in order to think the truth of beyng from out of the Da of Da-sein. The success or failure of this shift of focus will however have to be left for another occasion.
What are we to make of our staged encounter between two of the most controversial philosophers in the Western philosophical canon? We have thus far eschewed the issue of whether a rapprochement would be possible between Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenology. Both recognise the importance of mediation, albeit in different ways. Both mount powerful critiques of the primacy of theoretical knowledge and the pre-eminence of objectival being. But when all is said and done we have pointed to what is arguably an irreparable rift between their respective conceptions of the phenomenological project. On the basis of our analyses and conclusions born in the course of this paper we would have to say that a fruitful encounter is certainly possible, but that at the level of method, their elective affinity is dissolved. For Hegel phenomenology can only ever have a pedagogic and propaedeutic function, whereas for Heidegger, at least in SZ, phenomenology ultimately redefines the very ‘how’ of philosophizing.
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[1] Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit”, Martin Heidegger, trans. Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, 1996, p286-287, (§62)
[2] Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Jason Smith & Steven Miller, University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p21
[3] Henceforth, PhG.
[4] Henceforth, SZ.
[5] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p11, (§4)
[6] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Martin Heidegger, trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, p2
[7] What Hegel means by ‘necessity’ and its significance as a category which informs PhG’s development is by no means a cut and dried issue. See for example, A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Quentin Lauer, Fordham University Press, 1976, p34-35
[8] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, trans. A.V. Miller, with analysis of the text and foreword by J.N. Findlay, Oxford University Press, 1977, p21, (§36)
[9] See Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Commentary Based on the Preface and Introduction, Werner Marx, trans. Peter Heath, University of Chicago Press, 1988, p90
[10] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p56, (§89)
[11] Hegel’s Phenomenological Method, Kenley R. Dove, Review of Metaphysics, 23, 4, (June, 1970), p615
[12] Henceforth, WL.
[13] In this paper we prefer to use ‘Concept’ rather than A.V. Miller’s rendering of Begriff as ‘Notion’.
[14] Science of Logic, G.W.F. Hegel, trans. A.V. Miller, with a foreword by Professor J.N. Findlay, Humanity Books, 1969, p48
[15] The Immanence of Thought: Hegel’s Critique of Foundationalism, David S. Stern, The Owl of Minerva, 22, 2 (Fall, 1990), p29; Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel, William Maker, State University of New York Press, 1994, p73
[16] Science of Logic, G.W.F. Hegel, p49
[17] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p11, (§20)
[18] Science of Logic, G.W.F. Hegel, p49
[19] Hegel, Charles Taylor, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p127; Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed. with Supplementary Chapter, Herbert Marcuse, Routledge, 2000, p93
[20] It should be added that Heidegger’s diatribe against dialectic is not explicitly aimed at Hegel. His critique is best characterized as a dispute with a much broader position, which arguably encompasses both Platonists and Hegelians. We will detail Heidegger’s objections below and examine whether they can be tailored to the specifics of Hegel’s phenomenological dialectic.
[21] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Martin Heidegger, p21
[22] We are by no means suggesting that Hegel in the Introduction provides an adequate critique of the above named philosophers. At this stage such an undertaking is simply not his main concern. He has outlined a general epistemological position in order to differentiate his own strategy from his predecessors. As we shall see, it is the problem of scepticism which motivates Hegel’s opposition to various transcendental philosophical approaches, both realist and idealist, in favour of an immanent critique initially wedded to the assumptions of natural consciousness.
[23] Hegel, Frederick Beiser, Routledge, 2005, p25-29; see also The Fate of Reason, Frederick Beiser, Harvard University Press, 1993
[24] Knowledge and Human Interests, Jürgen Habermas, Polity Press, 1987, p10
[25] A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume, ed. David Fate Norton & Mary J. Norton, Oxford University Press, 2000, p172
[26] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p46, (§73), (my emphasis)
[27] Knowledge and Human Interests, Jürgen Habermas, p10
[28] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p46, (§73)
[29] Ibid, p47, (§73)
[30] Ibid, p47, (§74)
[31] Knowledge and Human Interests, Jürgen Habermas, p11
[32] It might be objected that this is just the position of transcendental realism attacked so persuasively by Kant in KRV. Against this criticism, we must reiterate that Hegel’s phenomenological investigation starts out from the stance of pre-philosophical common sense in order to demonstrate how this position breaks down by virtue of the disparity between what consciousness takes the object to be and its actual experience of the object. This immanent tension, according to Hegel, is merely described by the philosopher, and therefore must not be confused with the standpoint of philosophy as such. Kant’s transcendental turn that reversed the dogma of both rationalism and empiricism by claiming that objects must be seen as conforming to our mode of cognition rather than vice versa, and by extension the task of the Transcendental Deduction which sought to uncover the categories that provide the rules for all objective judgements are simply not germane to Hegel’s method or aims at this stage.
[33] Ibid, p12
[34] The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich, Humanities Press, 1983, p112
[35] On the Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy, Exposition of Its Different Modifications, and Comparison of the Latest Form with the Ancient One, G.W.F. Hegel, trans. with notes by H.S. Harris, p311-362, in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. with Introductions, by George di Giovanni and H.S. Harris with two essays by the translators, revised ed., George di Giovanni, Hackett, 2000
[36] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p49, (§76)
[37] Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Robert R. Williams, State University of New York Press, 1992, p104
[38] Ibid, p104-105
[39] Ibid, p103
[40] Ibid, p103
[41] Ibid, p104
[42] We would have to exempt David Hume here. These criticisms although maybe appropriate to Schulze fail to do justice to a thinker of such profound depth, verve and originality as Hume. He can only under interpretive duress be characterized as merely reworking a possibility already latent within Cartesianism. Unfortunately due to issues of space and relevance I cannot further elaborate here. For a thought-provoking challenge to such a reading see Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, Gilles Deleuze, trans. with an Introduction by C.V. Boundas, Columbia University Press, 1991
[43] Hegel writes in the Preface to PhG, ‘Dogmatism as a way of thinking, whether in ordinary knowing or in the study of philosophy, is nothing else but the opinion that the True consists in a proposition which is a fixed result, or which is immediately known.’ (PhS, G.W.F. Hegel, p23, §40)
[44] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p49, (§76), (my emphasis)
[45] An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd ed., Stephen Houlgate, Blackwell, 2005, p63
[46] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p50, (§78)
[47] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, Routledge, 2002, p82 (6.54)
[48] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p14-15, (§26)
[49] Ibid, p15, (§26)
[50] Ibid, p49, (§78)
[51] Ibid, p51, (§80)
[52] There is some textual evidence for this in PhG. For example, when he writes that ‘the goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Concept corresponds to object and object to Concept.’ (PhS, p51, §80). And where he claims that the very restlessness of thought itself disrupts consciousness’s indolence, ‘If it wishes to remain in a state of inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia.’ (PhS, p51, §80)
[53] Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, trans. & ed. Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p100-101 (A xii)
[54] Hegel virtually paraphrases Kant’s famous footnote of the Preface to the first edition of KRV in §78 of the Introduction to PhG. He writes, ‘The scepticism that is directed against the whole range of phenomenal consciousness, on the other hand, renders the Spirit for the first time competent to examine what truth is. For it brings about a state of despair about all the so-called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions, regardless of whether they are called one’s own or someone else’s, ideas with which the consciousness that sets about the examination [of truth] straight away is still filled and hampered, so that it is, incapable of carrying out what it wants to undertake.’ (PhS, p50, §78)
[55] Hegel, Charles Taylor, p127
[56] Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Jean Hyppolite, trans. Samuel Cherniak & John Heckman, Northwestern University Press, 1974, p12
[57] This act of abstraction could of course be deemed itself quintessentially ‘philosophical’ or only possible on the basis of a discourse which sets up certain issues and problems as meaningful by means of ‘theoretical’ cognition. This, we must admit, is a pertinent criticism, akin to Feuerbach’s remonstrations in his polemic Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy (1839). One can also imagine the early Heidegger chiding Hegel in a similar manner. Below we will in fact attempt a reconstruction of what such a critique might look like, given that Heidegger never explicitly mounted a critique of Hegel which emphasized this tack; he reserved that honour for his teacher Edmund Husserl. For the moment, we will attempt to show that Hegel has sufficient armoury at his disposal to respond to the above censure. Hopefully in the course of this defence it should become clear why we decided to set our exposition of the Introduction to PhG against the backdrop of Hegel’s relationship to scepticism in both its ancient and modern guises.
[58] Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Robert R. Williams, p127
[59] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p52-53, (§82)
[60] Ibid, p53, (§84)
[61] ‘Something is for it the in-itself; and knowledge, or the being of the object for consciousness, is, for it, another moment. Upon this distinction, which is present as a fact, the examination rests.’ (PhS, p54, §85) (my bold)
[62] Hegel, Charles Taylor, p130
[63] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p54, (§85)
[64] Ibid, p54-55, (§85)
[65] Ibid, p55, (§86)
[66] We should, however, remain on our guard with respect to the superiority claimed for the immanent approach, which arguably Hegel takes for granted, falling short of the demands incumbent upon a thoroughly self-critical philosophy.
[67] Ibid, p53, (§84), (translation modified)
[68] For the historical details of how this formula first gained currency see Hegel: A Biography, Terry Pinkard, Cambridge University Press, 2000; and The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Gustav E. Mueller, Volume XIX, June, 1958, Number 3, p411
[69] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p105, (§167)
[70] Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. and with an introduction by P. Christopher Smith, Yale University Press, 1976, p35
[71] ‘Dieses unterscheidet nämlich etwas von sich, worauf es sich zugleich bezieht; oder wie dies ausgedrückt wird: es ist etwas für dasselbe; und die bestimmte Seite dieses Beziehens oder des Seins von etwas für ein Bewuβtsein ist das Wissen.’ (Phänomenologie des Geistes, G.W.F. Hegel, ed. E. Moldenhauer & K.M. Michel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970, p76)
[72] Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, p246 (B131)
[73] Pippin’s makes a relevant point. He argues that both Hegel and Kant would ‘deny “realist” theories of consciousness, particularly rationalist claims about sensation being a direct, immediate, though “unclear” apprehension of objects. They agree, that is, on a basic consequence of the apperception thesis: that all apprehension is mediated by the subject’s taking itself to be apprehending in a specific way, so that a necessary component of any relation to objects is a self-relation.’ (Hegel’s Idealism, Robert B. Pippin, p35)
[74] ‘Whatever else Hegel intends by asserting an “Absolute Idealism,” it is clear by now that such a claim at the very least involves Hegel in a theory about pure concepts, and about the role of such concepts in human experience, particularly in any possible knowledge of objects, but also in various kinds of self-conscious, intentional activities.’ Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Robert B. Pippin, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p91
[75] Pippin’s reading can in many respects be read as a comprehensive exegesis of Hegel’s remark that ‘everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally Subject.’ (PhS, p10, §17)
[76] ‘But, in fact, in the alteration of the knowledge, the object itself alters for it too, for the knowledge that was present was essentially knowledge of the object: as the knowledge changes, so too does the object, for it essentially belonged to this knowledge.’ (PhS, p54, §85)
[77] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p54, (§85)
[78] Ibid, p55, (§86) (my bold)
[79] It is in this respect that PhG differs from Hegel’s earlier Jena period in which, as Hyppolite notes, he endorsed a form of ‘vital immanence’ through which ‘life’ and ‘infinity’ were thought to be identical. Contrariwise, in the PhG Hegel rescinds dependence upon anything which could to approximated to an acosmic substance inured within the very heart of being, instead preferring his text’s progressive trajectory to be carried out in accordance with the experiential content of consciousness itself. Conscious is not stirred from out of its quietude by either ‘life’ or ‘thought’ per se, but results out of the incongruity between consciousness’s knowledge and the givenness of the object. The notion of an acosmic entity furtively impelling the subject towards self-knowledge and self-coincidence with itself, becomes for Hegel a superfluous and regrettable doctrine. (See The Concept of Life and Consciousness of Life in Hegel’s Jena Philosophy, in Studies on Marx and Hegel, Jean Hyppolite, trans. with an Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography, by John O’Neill, Basic Books, 1969, p6). In this regard my reading is at variance with that of John Sallis who contends that ‘the movement is not something which the I accomplishes alone but is rather a movement of the absolute, i.e. belongs to that movement which the absolute is.’ (Hegel’s Concept of Presentation, in Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics, John Sallis, 2nd Expanded Edition, Indiana University Press, 1995, p54)
[80] Ibid, p54, (§85)
[81] Hegel affirms in a oft cited passage from the Science of Logic just how important he felt Kant’s discovery of the transcendental unity of apperception was: ‘It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the nature of the Concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, as unity of the I think, or of self-consciousness.’ (SL, p584)
[82] This is clearly where, for example, the readings of Quentin Lauer, Stephen Houlgate and William Maker diverge from the interpretation of Karin de Boer who regards determinate negation or negativity überhaupt as an external principle applied by Hegel to the particular philosophical problem under scrutiny. She curiously regards this principle as an ‘ontological perspective,’ which despite its richness and profundity, remains merely perspectival. It cannot, for de Boer, in principle be self-legitimating (Lecture given at the University of Warwick for the Colloquium in European Philosophy entitled Hegel and Derrida, 06/09/2007). This more recent interpretation seems to conflict with comments in her book, Thinking in the Light of Time, where she expressly acknowledges, although vis-à-vis WL that Hegel’s method is, at least prima facie, self-grounding. (Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger’s Encounter with Hegel, Karin de Boer, State University of New York Press, 2000, p221)
[83] We are using the terms philosopher and phenomenologist interchangeably.
[84] ‘But not only is a contribution by us superfluous, since Concept and object, the criterion and what is to be tested, are present in consciousness itself, but we are also spared the trouble of comparing the two and really testing them, so that, since what consciousness examines is its own self, all that is left for us to do is simply to look on.’ (PhS, p54, §85) (my bold)
[85] Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Jean Hyppolite, p14
[86] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p55-56, (§87)
[87] Ibid, p56, (§87)
[88] Ibid, p56, (§87)
[89] Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit”, Martin Heidegger, trans. Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, 1996, p33-34, (§7)
[90] Ibid, p30, (§7)
[91] During the course of an analysis of the First Book of Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, in his lecture course of 1925, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, Heidegger writes: ‘This idea, that consciousness is to be the region of an absolute science, is not simply invented; it is the idea which has occupied modern philosophy ever since Descartes. The elaboration of pure consciousness as the thematic field of phenomenology is not derived phenomenologically going back to the matters themselves but by going back to the traditional idea of philosophy.’ (History of the Concept of Time: Prologomena, Martin Heidegger, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Indiana University Press, 1985, p107)
[92] Why Students of Heidegger Will Have to Read Emil Lask, Theodore Kisiel, in Heidegger’s Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretative Signposts, ed. Alfred Denker & Marion Heinz, Continuum, 2002, p132
[93] Although we rely in this paper upon Joan Stambaugh’s translation of Sein und Zeit, unlike Stambaugh we choose not to hyphenate Dasein in keeping with the original.
[94] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p2, (§1)
[95] Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” Division I, Hubert Dreyfus, MIT Press, 1991, p10
[96] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, Continuum, 2005, p60
[97] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p22, (§6)
[98] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, p60
[99] Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Indiana University Press, 2003, p12
[100] Unfortunately it is beyond the remit of this paper to grapple with the various amphibolies and aporias presented in Division II of SZ. This part of the paper is concerned specifically with the phenomenological method employed by Heidegger. This we hope will facilitate an auspicious comparison with the method of Hegelian phenomenology. We would though like to make a single comment with respect to the modus operandi of horizonal temporality qua ‘ground’. If we may call it a ‘ground’, horizonal temporality, functions for Heidegger, in a completely different fashion to the way the conception of ‘ground’ has traditionally done so in the great metaphysical systems. For Heidegger’s ‘ground’ discards both presence and permanence in favour of finitude and temporal occurrence. It is disclosed in and through the unfolding of finite transcendence i.e. Dasein. (Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, Daniela Vallega-Neu, p14)
[101] Being and Time, p2, (§1)
[102] Ibid, p2, (§1)
[103] Ibid, p3, (§1)
[104] The most general characteristics of objectively present objects and Dasein are called categories and existentials respectively. ‘Existentials and categories are the two fundamental possibilities of the characteristics of being. The being which corresponds to them requires different ways of primary interrogation. Beings are a who (existence) or else a what (objective presence in the broadest sense).’ (SZ, p42, §9)
[105] Ibid, p3, (§1)
[106] Being-in-the-World, Hubert Dreyfus, p11
[107] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p3, (§1)
[108] ‘To be ontological does not yet mean to develop ontology. Thus if we reserve the term ontology for the explicit, theoretical question of the meaning of beings, the intended ontological character of Dasein is to be designated as pre-ontological. That does not signify being simply ontical, but rather being in the manner of an understanding of being.’ (BT, p10, §4)
[109] Ibid, p6, (§2)
[110] Ibid, p4, (§2)
[111] Ibid, p3, (§1)
[112] Although thanks to the benefit of hindsight we know this a simplification of sorts, especially in light of Heidegger’s later work. This issue, however, is not essential to our preoccupations because firstly, we recognise the speciousness of imposing a makeshift continuity of terminology where this is none. And secondly, because we acknowledge the illegitimacy of importing connotations that harbour resonances in the later texts, into Heidegger’s earlier thought, even though Heidegger himself at times conveyed the movement and reconfiguration of his philosophy as a seamless transition, which it plainly was not.
[113] Ibid, p5-6, (§2)
[114] ‘The expression “phenomenology” signifies primarily a concept of method. It does not characterize the “what” of the objects of philosophical research in terms of their content but the “how” of such research.’ (BT, p24, §7)
[115] ‘We shall call the very being to which Dasein can relate in one way or another, and somehow always does relate, existence [Existenz]. And because the essential definition of this being cannot be accomplished by ascribing to it a “what” that specifies its material content, because its essence lies rather in the fact that it in each instance has to be its being as its own, the term Dasein, as a pure expression of being, has been chosen to designate this being.’ (BT, p10, §4)
[116] Ibid, p39, (§9)
[117] Ibid, p10, (§4)
[118] Ibid, p6, (§2)
[119] Ibid, p24, (§7)
[120] Ibid, p24, (§7)
[121] Ibid, p31, (§7)
[122] Ibid, p33, (§7)
[123] Ibid, p11 (§4)
[124] This is arguably confirmed by Hegel’s relegation of phenomenology to a mere chapter of the third volume of his Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, between anthropology and psychology.
[125] Ibid, p25, (§7)
[126] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[127] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[128] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[129] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[130] Ibid, p25, (§7)
[131] Introduction to Phenomenological Research, Martin Heidegger, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Indiana University Press, 2005, p28-29
[132] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p28, (§7)
[133] Ibid, p28, (§7)
[134] Heidegger importantly qualifies this: ‘Not every “speech” suits this mode of making manifest, in the sense of letting something be seen by indicating it.’ (BT, p29, §7)
[135] Ibid, p28-29, (§7)
[136] Ibid, p29, (§7)
[137] Hermeneia and Apophansis: The Early Heidegger on Aristotle, Thomas Sheehan, in Heidegger et idée de la phenomenology, Franco Volpi et al., Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988, p68
[138] Ibid, p68
[139] Ibid, p69
[140] Ibid, p69
[141] Ibid, p68-69
[142] Ibid, p69
[143] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p29, (§7)
[144] Hermeneia and Apophansis, Thomas Sheehan, p70
[145] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p33, (§7) (translation modified)
[146] Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn, David Couzens Hoy, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p172
[147] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p143-144, (§32) (translation modified)
[148] Being-in-the-World, Hubert Dreyfus, p212
[149] Ibid, p212
[150] Ibid, p4
[151] Ibid, p4
[152] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p148, (§33)
[153] Ibid, p136, (§31)
[154] Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language, Richard Rorty, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p347
[155] Being-in-the-World, Hubert Dreyfus, p92
[156] Ibid, p97
[157] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p77, (§18)
[158] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p5 (1.1)
[159] The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Martin Heidegger, translation, introduction, and lexicon by Albert Hofstadter, Revised Edition, Indiana University Press, 1982, p296
[160] Ibid, p296
[161] Ibid, p299
[162] Ibid, p297
[163] Ibid, pp297
[164] Dialectic as “Philosophical Embarrassment”: Heidegger’s Critique of Plato’s Method, Francisco Gonzalez, Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 40, no. 3 (2002), p365
[165] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p22, (§6)
[166] Heidegger actually abandons the naïve belief in a notion of a pure seeing, by the time of SZ, found in a lecture course several years earlier called Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919-1920). For a more detailed analysis see Dialectic as “Philosophical Embarrassment”: Heidegger’s Critique of Plato’s Method, Francisco Gonzalez, Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 40, no. 3 (2002). In 1925 he wrote ‘phenomenology does not wish to be either a philosophy of intuition or a philosophy of the immediate. It does not want to be a philosophy at all in this sense, but wants the subject matters themselves.’ (History of the Concept of Time: Prologomena, Martin Heidegger, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Indiana University Press, 1985, p88). Of course there remains the problem of determining whether he in fact escapes a form of intuitionism. We will try to show very briefly below how he manages to free himself from intuitionism, particularly by highlighting his emphasis on Dasein’s understanding of being and his rethinking of phenomenology in terms of phenomenological hermeneutics. But since this question, although important, is not central to our discussion of Heidegger’s phenomenological method, we will have to leave a more extensive treatment of this issue for another time.
[167] Henceforth, (OHF).
[168] Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, Martin Heidegger, trans. John van Buren, Indiana University Press, 1999, p37
[169] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Martin Heidegger, p22
[170] We are not suggesting here that the phenomenological movement was a unitary or even coherent one. But we will suppose certain family resemblances so that a comparison with Hegel’s method does not become impossible.
[171] This issue strangely still hasn’t been adequately addressed by the literature. See for example, Phenomenology: Hegel and Husserl, Quentin Lauer, in Beyond Epistemology: NewStudies in the Philosophy of Hegel, ed. Frederick G. Weiss, Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1974, p174-196; Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Robert R. Williams, Chapter 5.
[172] Towards a Definition of Philosophy: With a Lecture Course “On the Nature of the University and Academic Study,” Martin Heidegger, trans. Ted Sadler, Athlone Press, 2000
[173] From Intuition to Understanding: On Heidegger’s Transposition of Husserl’s Phenomenology, Theodore Kisiel, in Heidegger’s Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretative Signposts, ed. Alfred Denker & Marion Heinz, Continuum, 2002, p176
[174] Heidegger in GA Bd. 56/57, 100f, cited by Kisiel in ibid, p176
[175] Ibid, p176
[176] Ibid, p176
[177] Ibid, p176
[178] Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, ed. Allan Bloom, Assembled by Raymond Queneau, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr., Cornell University Press, 1980, p171
[179] From Intuition to Understanding, Theodore Kisiel, p176
[180] Husserl’s Phenomenology, Dan Zahavi, Stanford University Press, 2003, p28
[181] Ibid, p29
[182] From Intuition to Understanding, Theodore Kisiel, p181
[183] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p138, (§31) (translation modified)
© Sadegh Kabeer
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit
‘With the name “logic,” Hegel reclaims what has continuously constituted the logos of philosophy – and thus reclaims what has engendered every logic: logos signifies that no identity is given, that no identity is simply available, and that identity and unity are always, in their very simplicity and absoluteness, the movement of self-identification and self-unification. Logos designates the “making” of every “given” – that is to say, its “giving” and, more precisely, its “giving of itself”: thus, logos designates the identical not as substance but as act.’[2]
Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative
Introduction
In this paper we have set ourselves the unenviable task of elucidating the phenomenological methods of G.W.F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. The paper is divided into two parts. Part I provides a detailed exposition and critical engagement with Hegel’s phenomenological method as presented in his great work, Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807).[3] In this part of the paper we will address four theses which we take to characterize Hegelian phenomenology. Firstly, Hegel’s phenomenology is a Science (Wissenschaft) of the experience of consciousness, shot through with a normative logic that guides its development. Secondly, Hegel’s method emerges out of a decisive confrontation with scepticism. Thirdly, Hegel’s phenomenology is essentially a pedagogical exercise which finds its denouement in Absolute Knowing, the point from which philosophy proper can begin. Finally, the coordination of the two points of view at work in PhG, namely, consciousness and the phenomenologist, is what facilitates the text’s internal movement without compromising the immanent development of Geist.
Part II expounds the basic tenets of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology as presented in his magnum opus Sein und Zeit (1927).[4] We initially explore the prejudices that have led to our ensnarement within a state of forgetfulness vis-à-vis the question of being and consider Heidegger’s exhortations to raise this question anew. Heidegger tells us that ‘fundamental ontology…must be sought in the existential analysis of Dasein.’[5] But rather than dwell upon the minutiae of the existential analytic, we will examine Heidegger’s interpretation of the originary and constitutive elements of phenomenology, that is to say, the Greek words, phainomenon and logos, as he interprets them. We hope to show as a result that his reconfiguration of logos as hermēneuein was indispensable to his understanding of the phenomenology of human existence in terms of a phenomenological hermeneutics.
Although we compare and contrast the respective phenomenological methods of Hegel and Heidegger throughout the paper, it is only in Part III that we overtly proceed along comparative lines. There we scrutinize not only Heidegger’s criticisms of dialectical philosophy but also the neo-Kantian philosopher, Paul Natorp’s objections to phenomenological method which he regards as ultimately self-defeating. It is in this way that we hope to elicit an encounter of sorts between Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenology.
Part I
Phenomenology and the Logic of Phenomena
Heidegger, in 1930-1931, delivered a series of lectures in which he analysed several sections of Hegel’s PhG. In the opening pages of these lectures Heidegger cites the complete title of PhG. This is by no means insignificant. Why? Despite his, at times excessive haste to assimilate Hegel into the history of Western metaphysics, he has espied something which many of Hegel’s admirers have since passed over without even a passing consideration. The full title of Hegel’s text reads: System of Science: Part One, Science of the Experience of Consciousness.[6] The subtitle of the text, Science of the Experience of Consciousness, makes especially clear the theme we wish to belabour in our treatment of Hegel throughout this paper. Thus contrary to naturalism and more specifically psychologism, Hegel takes our epistemic relation to an object to have a complex logical structure, which although made explicit only within the course of experience, is nevertheless both rational and necessary.[7] The PhG is ‘the Science of the experience which consciousness goes through’.[8] The overarching thrust of Hegelian phenomenology is thus to demonstrate that all of our experience from the most rudimentary to the most sophisticated is conceptually mediated and comprised of a multiplicity of moments integrated within a complex and differentiated totality.[9] The ‘moments of the whole are patterns of consciousness.’[10] Hegel does not apply a dialectical method but engages in phenomenological description teasing out the conceptual and logical commitments, within which consciousness finds itself entangled in its experience of its object.[11] We wish to emphasize this point because we believe it strikes at the very heart of Hegel’s phenomenological endeavour. Hegel states the purpose of PhG with an unusual degree of lucidity in the Introduction to his Wissenshaft der Logik,[12]
‘In the Phenomenology of Spirit I have exhibited consciousness in its movement onwards from the first immediate opposition of itself and the object to absolute knowing. The path of this movement goes through every form of the relation of consciousness to the object and has the Concept[13] of science for its result. This Concept therefore (apart from the fact that it emerges within logic itself) needs no justification here because it has received it in that work; and it cannot be justified in any other way than by this emergence in consciousness, all the forms of which are resolved into this Concept as into their truth.’[14]
In PhG we do not encounter Hegel’s philosophy proper, a ‘presupposition’ of which is the identity of thought and being.[15] PhG, according to Hegel acts as a ‘deduction’ of the ‘Concept of pure science’.[16] ‘Absolute Knowing,’ the point d’appui of Hegel’s ontological logic, is the result and culmination of the transformation and supersession of a multitude of disparate shapes of consciousness (Gestalten des Bewuβtseins), which dissolve immanently in and through the experience of their respective objects. ‘Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is’.[17] The relation of consciousness to its object, at least in principle, elicits from within experience itself, its self-determination and metamorphosis. The clichés regularly bandied about which accuse Hegel of positing a predetermined telos, presupposing the Absolute from the start, or finally reverting back to a dogmatic pre-Critical metaphysics are erroneous insofar as we take the textual evidence seriously. On the contrary, and to the chagrin of Hegel’s detractors, it is only at the end of the process of phenomenological dialectic that he feels himself able to unabashedly state,
‘Absolute knowing is the truth of every mode of consciousness because, as the course of the Phenomenology showed, it is only in absolute knowing that the separation of the object from the certainty of itself is completely eliminated: truth is now equated with certainty and this certainty with truth.’[18]
We will make the case for such a reading of PhG in some detail below. Phenomenology provides a series of stepping stones by which ‘natural consciousness’ can attain the vantage point of Science or speculative philosophy. [19] The transitions from one shape of consciousness to another best illustrate the normative dimension of Hegelian phenomenology. The logical character of consciousness’s experience becomes palpable in the irremissible tension between consciousness’s claim to adequately know its object, and the veritable poverty of this knowledge, which comes to light in the course of experience itself. This process in turn generates increasingly mediated and intricate varieties of experience and knowledge. According to Hegel, this transformation is logically necessitated and irreducible to the caprice of experience.
At a glance we might think that it is on this point Husserlian phenomenology and its diverse progeny depart most patently from the legacy of Hegel. Moreover, as we shall see, Heidegger in his magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (1927), as well as in numerous lecture courses prior to its publication, openly declared his hostility towards dialectic.[20] Not to mention, his lecture actual course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in which he unequivocally repudiates the efforts of the philosopher Nicolai Hartmann to demonstrate the affinity of Hegelian and Husserlian phenomenology. [21] There are no doubt significant differences, some of which may be irreconcilable, but nonetheless we will argue throughout this paper that the issue is not as black and white as Heidegger is wont to argue. Not only are the disparities between Hegelian phenomenology and contemporary phenomenology far more nuanced than Heidegger presents them, but there also exists the very real prospect for their mutual illumination.
Hegel and the Problem of Scepticism
The Introduction is of first-rate importance for anyone wishing to properly understand PhG. It is here that Hegel stipulates the minimal conditions necessary for phenomenology to begin. He starts by criticizing a roughly ‘Kantian’ position; some commentators have claimed he means Reinhold in particular, but we shall leave that debate to one side for the moment. It’s clear, however, that Hegel’s criticisms could also be efficaciously applied to Hobbesian, Cartesian and Lockean epistemologies. Any epistemology which treats cognition as an instrument or intermediary lying between the subject and objective reality runs the risk of falling into the despair of an irreparable scepticism.[22]
In the aftermath of Immanuel Kant’s Copernican Revolution there was an intense period of debate within German intellectual life. Key members of the intelligentsia such as F.H. Jacobi and J.H. Obereit saw nihilism as an inevitable consequence of Kant’s critical philosophy because, in their opinion, it reduced objective reality to merely the subjective conditions of human understanding, relegating the realities of God, Freedom, and the Immortality of the Soul to things-in-themselves which could never become objects of human cognition. Kant famously wrote in his Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (KRV) that he had embarked upon the critique of pure reason in order to make room for faith. He had, however, in many of his contemporaries’ eyes left only an unbearable and gaping chasm.[23] This is the context in which we would like to situate Hegel’s opening remarks of the Introduction. He perspicaciously recognizes the ease with which one can slide from the so-called organon theory of knowledge[24] to despair and the belief that any such attempt to know reality independently of our representations is doomed to failure. The similarities between Hegel’s presentation of this eventuality in the Introduction and the concluding remarks of the first book of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature are uncanny:
‘The wretched condition, weakness, and disorder of the faculties, I must employ in my enquiries, encrease my apprehensions. And the impossibility of amending or correcting these faculties, reduces me almost to despair, and makes me resolve to perish on the barren rock, on which I am at present, rather than venture myself upon that boundless ocean, which runs out into immensity.’[25]
Hegel echoes this Humean sentiment when he writes in the Introduction:
‘A certain uneasiness seems justified, partly because there are different types of cognition, and one of them might be more appropriate than another for the attainment of this goal, so that we could make a bad choice of means; and partly because cognition is a faculty of a definite kind and scope, and thus, without a more precise definition of its nature and limits, we might grasp clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth. This feeling of uneasiness is surely bound to be transformed into the conviction that the whole project of securing for consciousness through cognition what exists in itself is absurd, and that there is a boundary between cognition and the Absolute that completely separates them.’[26]
When cognition is thought of as a medium for grasping objective reality, the subject’s apprehension of the object is invariably distorted, since it bears the indelible mark of the cognitive act through which it initially came to be known. It begins with a model of knowledge that emphasizes either the activity of the knowing subject or the receptivity of the cognitive process.[27] Even if ‘cognition is not an instrument of our activity but a more or less passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then again we do not receive the truth as it is in itself, but only as it exists through and in this medium.’[28] Try as we might to refine and examine the instrument of cognition there remains, for Hegel, an intractable problem.
Any effort to eliminate the impact of cognition upon the apprehension of the object is a fruitless exercise which results only in an infinite regress because one is inescapably reliant on the medium of cognition and can never be sure that one has fully determined its fundamental character and the definitive limits of its operation. He writes, ‘if by testing cognition, which we conceive of as a medium, we get to know the law of its refraction, it is again useless to subtract this from the end result.’ He continues, ‘For it is not the refraction of the ray, but the ray itself whereby truth reaches us, that is cognition; and if this were removed, all that would be indicated would be a pure direction or a blank space.’[29] Furthermore, any attempt to subtract the impact of cognition upon our apprehension of the object, by means of a supervening and introspective operation of the mind, falls short of a pure and unadulterated cognizance. This is because it is only by means of the instrument of cognition that an object can be known by a subject at all. As a consequence, this model of cognition finds itself caught up in a circular begging of the question because without the instrument of cognition the object simply evaporates for the knower.
Hegel’s polemic against a very general vision of epistemology prepares the way for his questioning its aforementioned pre-eminent assumption. This conception of the relation between knower and known ‘takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition. Above all, it presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real’.[30] What is Hegel’s alternative to a road that can only lead to an all-encompassing scepticism? Hegel’s reply may well be an unexpected one for some. It seems that an image of Hegel and his philosophy has been erected since the polemics of F.W.J. Schelling and Ludwig Feuerbach, which has unfortunately become indissociable from and even a substitute for reading his actual texts.
This is true of both the analytic and Continental reception of Hegel. For example, Jürgen Habermas in his Knowledge and Human Interests writes that Hegel’s objection to the organon theory of knowledge ‘is obviously only valid presupposing that there can be something like knowledge in itself or absolute knowledge independent of the subjective conditions of possible knowledge.’[31] But Habermas ignores a fairly straightforward point. First, as far as Hegel is concerned we are still a long way off breaching the environs of philosophical reflection, and thus, by Hegel’s lights, can’t begin a phenomenological inquiry by first trying to determine the transcendental conditions under which experience and knowledge are possible. Second, Hegel wishes to begin, as we will argue in greater detail below, his phenomenological investigation with the assumptions of natural consciousness in tact i.e. that the object is distinct from me and has an existence independent of the conditions under which I cognize it.[32] So when Habermas alleges that ‘Hegel’s critique does not proceed immanently’[33] it is in fact he that falls short of following the immanent development of consciousness in PhG. It is in large part due to a pervasive and influential simulacrum of Hegel’s thought that many are taken aback when they learn that scepticism is in fact integral to his thinking in both its phenomenological and philosophical manifestations. So contrary to Feuerbach’s claims,[34] Hegel believes that the conclusions of scepticism must be pursued, albeit not in the manner we have outlined hitherto, which in his opinion, only lead to dogmatism or solipsism.
It is Hegel’s conviction that Science can only liberate itself from the shackles of equipollence by turning on itself. Hegel greatly admired ancient scepticism and the doctrine of equipollence which it formulated. While he only had contempt for its modern descendent, advocated by figures in Germany, such as G.E. Schulze, whose scepticism cum dogmatism only served to sully the noble lineage of its ancient predecessor.[35] He regarded it dogmatic because it based itself uncritically upon the immediate certainty of matters of fact and sense data. But as Hegel says, ‘One bare assurance is worth just as much as another.’[36] This is Hegel’s invocation of the two sets of tropes articulated by classical scepticism. The term ‘trope’ expresses a fundamental premise of sceptical argumentation, which holds that for every thesis or argument an equally probable thesis or argument can be found.[37] This leaves the possibility of certitude and self-satisfied dogmatism on shaky terrain and crystallizes the issue of equipollence, to wit, the problem of deciding between two opposing albeit equally probable theses.[38]
It is this seemingly insoluble issue that leads Hegel to exclaim that Science cannot rest assured in its self-professed indubitability and by virtue of that fact feel itself worthy of our esteem and praise. As Robert R. Williams has perceptively discerned, Hegel strongly believes that scepticism if wielded efficaciously can play an indispensable role in the process of speculative philosophizing.[39] It purveys the negative and critical dynamism which is a precondition of speculative philosophy.[40] Williams characterizes Hegel’s phenomenology as a self-accomplishing scepticism because the immanent dissolution and movement of consciousness emanates from consciousness’s own self-subversion.[41] In this respect, modern scepticism is impoverished by comparison. It is insufficiently critical, and thus in the final analysis incoherent, because it fails to unleash the same degree of critical and destructive vehemence with which it savages metaphysics, towards its own preconceptions and dogmas.[42] The issue of equipollence as a consequence never becomes a problem for it.[43]
This is the compelling reason for Hegel’s attempt at an ‘exposition of how knowledge makes its appearance’.[44] Hegel is above all concerned with how knowledge appears to consciousness. He is not preoccupied with a metaphysical inquiry in any conventional sense. As Stephen Houlgate has astutely observed, Hegel doesn’t straightforwardly seek to furnish an explanation of the quidditas or whatness of things i.e. that which makes a thing what it is.[45] Since Hegel’s so-called Objective Idealism, as developed in WL, doesn’t subtend the preliminary stages of PhG, we have at least ex hypothesi, no intimation of Hegel’s own metaphysical convictions. Too many philosophers and commentators to count have claimed that he sneaks his own metaphysical prejudices surreptitiously through the back door, but we’ll leave that issue aside for the moment.
Pedagogy and Preliminary Stipulations
What is interesting though, especially with respect to PhG, is the emphasis placed by Hegel the ‘absolute systematiser,’ and ‘totalizing metaphysician’ on pedagogy as the abiding rationale for phenomenology. ‘The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along this road is, in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science.’[46] So unlike Wittgenstein’s ladder which must be thrown away after one has climbed it,[47] Hegel’s ladder arises out of a demand placed on philosophy by natural consciousness to justify its standpoint as Science. The ‘individual has the right to demand that Science should at least provide him with the ladder to this standpoint, should show him this standpoint within himself.’[48]
However, if natural consciousness is prematurely introduced to the standpoint of Science, in the words of Hegel, ‘it makes an attempt, induced by it knows not what, to walk on its head too, just this once; the compulsion to assume this unwonted posture and to go about in it is a violence it is expected to do to itself, all unprepared and seemingly without necessity.’[49] On the one hand, natural consciousness mustn’t peremptorily defer to the standpoint of philosophy. While on the other, it is compelled if it is ever to surpass its own point of view which it accepts simpliciter, in spite of itself, to tread ‘the pathway of doubt,’ and ultimately ‘the way of despair’.[50] As PhG unfolds it’s clear that each shape of consciousness takes itself to have grasped reality in itself. It is in this sense that we can say that each shape of consciousness takes itself to be absolute.
A simple objection to Hegel’s method can be presented here: if each shape of consciousness takes itself to be absolute through its conviction that it knows its object most adequately, couldn’t consciousness remain satisfied with its knowledge of the object and thereby eschew following the path of despair and ‘violence at its own hands’ which thence ‘spoils its own limited satisfaction’?[51] Isn’t Hegel simply perpetuating an Aristotelian prejudice that all human beings intrinsically desire knowledge and strive ceaselessly to know?[52] On this reading then, PhG can never possibly get off the ground without the philosopher, who behind the scenes engenders putatively ‘immanent’ tensions and thereby instigates the dialectical transitions from one shape of consciousness to another. It is only by means of Hegel’s ventriloquist act that consciousness can lose its object i.e. it can recognize that its criterion of knowledge fails to sufficiently grasp the object, and then find it once again i.e. through an adjustment of its criterion of knowledge, it takes itself to have once more understood the object adequately. We shall argue, however, that Hegel can dispatch this objection, even though its very structure (as an argument) makes it hard to unequivocally refute. We shall address how he manages to circumvent this criticism in the following paragraphs. But before we do this, our exegesis of the Introduction needs to be further extended, because it is there that Hegel makes some important stipulations which delineate the minimal conception of consciousness necessary for phenomenology to begin.
Hegel was a post-Kantian and child of the Aufklärung so we can be confident that the he was in deep agreement with Kant’s remarks in the Preface to the first edition of KRV, ‘Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit.’[53] Hegel undoubtedly took seriously Kant’s exhortation to be self-critical but felt he had eschewed the sceptical outcome of the latter’s Critical philosophy.[54] As Charles Taylor points out, the nature of Hegel’s system is to demonstrate all partial reality as dependent upon an Absolute which in turn generates this partial reality.[55] The plethora of dualisms proliferated by Kantian philosophy, between appearances and thing-in-themselves, freedom and necessity, concept and intuition, subject and object etc…, are to put it somewhat crudely, for Hegel, the consequence of the unwarranted exaltation of such a partial reality.
This reading, however, is potentially misleading because it gives the impression that there exists a nascent drive towards totalization which implicitly governs the development of consciousness from the outset. Jean Hyppolite is surely correct to surmise Hegel’s incompatibility with the Cartesian gesture of guarantying epistemological certitude by means of the process of universal doubt.[56] We have already seen how Hegel repudiates the desiccated method adopted by much of modern philosophy which tries to vouchsafe the adequacy of our knowledge by honing the instrument of cognition. The reason why Hegel precludes the employment of the strategy of universal doubt is that it would fall within the province of philosophical reflection. Something at this stage to which, as we have seen, he can have no recourse if he is to satisfy the demands of natural consciousness. He begins with natural consciousness in order to convey the ultimate necessity and self-legitimating character of Science for natural consciousness. It is in this sense we can say Hegel is not preaching to the converted.
What constitutes natural consciousness? Hegel stipulates in the Introduction a minimal conception of consciousness pared down to what he takes to be the bare essentials. While remaining consonant with the assumptions of natural consciousness, he provides us with the most basic and abstract criteria necessary for consciousness to be related to an object.[57] The problem of equipollence casts a shadow over Hegel’s minimal description of consciousness. The purpose of his rudimentary description of consciousness is that it is prima facie uncontroversial. This is important because otherwise it would render Hegel’s initial stipulation of the fundamental constituents of consciousness’s relation to an object vulnerable to sceptical attack. For example, if Hegel had furnished his conception of consciousness’s relation to an object with a highly sophisticated and nuanced array of properties and determinations, not only would it be incessantly subject to criticism in its particulars, it would also lack the force that his later descriptions of perception and the understanding accrue from their phenomeno-logically immanent derivation. The aim at this stage is not to overcome the problem of equipollence, but to foist upon his possible critics, contrary to their own predilection, an awkward dilemma. It allows Hegel to reply to his critics, ‘what then is your proposal for consciousness’s minimal relation to an object?’ For lack of an alternative Hegel deems his starting point although not in itself necessary, the only feasible alternative for an immanent phenomenology. It is in this respect that one may assert natural consciousness to be predicated upon doxa.[58] His description of consciousness goes thus,
‘Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it, or, as it is said, this something exists for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating, or of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing. But we distinguish this being-for-another from being-in-itself; whatever is related to knowledge or knowing is also distinguished from it, and posited as existing outside of this relationship; this being-in-itself is called truth.’[59]
Furthermore,
‘Consciousness provides its own criterion from within itself, so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself…In consciousness one thing exists for another, i.e. consciousness regularly contains the determinateness of the moment of knowledge; at the same time, this other is to consciousness not merely for it, but is also outside of this relationship, or exists in itself: the moment of truth. Thus in what consciousness affirms from within itself as being-in-itself or the True we have the standard which consciousness itself sets up by which to measure what it knows.’[60]
For Hegel, consciousness’s relation to an object is comprised of several elements: (1) Consciousness distinguishes itself from the object. (2) Simultaneously consciousness relates itself to the object. (3) Through this relation the object exists for consciousness. This relation is an epistemic one, in that by relating to an object consciousness takes itself to know the object.[61] (4) Consciousness supplies itself with a criterion of what it takes the object to be in itself or an sich. Consciousness articulates contradictions from within itself, as a consequence of the disparity between what consciousness takes the object to be in itself and its concurrent experience of the object which reveals the former to be merely for it.[62] The upshot of this contradictory moment is that consciousness recognizes the inadequacy of its criterion i.e. its knowledge of the object or what it had taken the object to be in itself. ‘Hence it comes to pass for consciousness that what it previously took to be the in-itself, is not an in-itself, or that it was only an in-itself for consciousness.’[63] Consciousness makes the necessary adjustments to its knowledge so that it is once more appropriate to the object of experience. ‘Since consciousness thus finds that its knowledge does not correspond to its object, the object itself does not stand the test; in other words, the criterion for testing is altered when that for which it was to have been the criterion fails to pass the test; and the testing is not only a testing of what we know, but also a testing of the criterion of what knowing is.’[64] This brings consciousness’s criterion of knowledge into line with its concurrent experience of the object i.e. what consciousness presently takes the object to be in itself. ‘Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience [Erfahrung].’[65]
This development is completely internal to consciousness and thus remains faithful to the strictures of immanence which Hegel takes himself to have substantiated.[66] He contends that, ‘the essential point to bear in mind throughout the whole investigation is that these two moments, ‘Concept’ and ‘object’, ‘being-for-another’ and ‘being-in-itself’, both fall within that knowledge which we are investigating.’[67] Consciousness’s dissolution and reconstitution occurs through a multiplicity of moments. This process is not formulaic but rather a function of consciousness’s experience of the object; the infamous triadic structure of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, commonly taken to express the movement of Hegelian dialectic, is an aberration culled from an unmitigated oversimplification.[68] Hegel would surely think it an overwrought and reified schema imposed externally upon a dialectical movement always already at work and inherent to consciousness’s relation to its object.
However, a more formidable quandary presents itself. The Introduction sets the stage for and opens onto a section entitled A. Consciousness which is comprised of three chapters, Sense-Certainty: Or the ‘This’ and ‘Meaning’, Perception: Or the Thing and Deception, and Force and the Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World. A problem arises for the interpreter because Hegel’s definition of the most primitive form consciousness can take arguably entails aspects which implicitly amount to a description of self-consciousness. This is of course untenable if Hegel doesn’t wish to compromise the integrity of his commitment to immanence. Even though Hegel may have been quick to dismiss this allegation, claiming that self-consciousness requires additional relations and determinations, for example, in the section named B. Self-Consciousness, IV. The Truth of Self-Certainty he states that ‘self-consciousness is Desire in general.’[69] It’s nevertheless interesting to examine this at times perplexing issue, especially when read alongside Robert B. Pippin’s seminal reading of Hegel in Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Although others, such as the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer,[70] had previously stressed the impossibility of fully understanding the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness in PhG, if Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant and his formulation of the transcendental unity of apperception were not taken into account, Pippin was the first to dedicate an entire book to this pressing issue.
The problem we have brought to the forefront revolves around the Introduction’s positing of natural consciousness’s intrinsic capacity to simultaneously differentiate itself from its object and yet relate to it. The question is whether consciousness is conscious of this. It would appear so given that Hegel’s description emphasizes both reflexive and transitive elements i.e. ‘Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it…and the determinate aspect of this relating, or the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing.’[71] This passage evinces the I’s spontaneous ability to differentiate itself from and relate itself to something. It knows and is thus aware that it is not the object and that the object is not it. This awareness is tantamount to self-awareness because the I explicitly thematizes itself as not being the object. In this regard we can agree with Pippin that Hegel adheres to the apperceptive thesis because the preponderance of the distinction made by the subject between itself and the object entails that the ‘I think must be able to accompany all my representations’.[72] But while Kant is unapologetically advancing at this stage in the B-Deduction a conception of self-consciousness, Hegel’s narrative still has some way to go until it reaches this stage. With a measure of poetic licence we can say that Hegel’s adaptation of Kant’s theory of apperception would sound something like the ‘I am not the object and the object is not me must be able to accompany all my representations.’ Although it is a rather clumsy formulation on our part we take it to convey well the point we are struggling to articulate.[73] The somewhat thorny question of whether the description of consciousness offered in the Introduction, insofar as it possesses self-awareness is not already a precipitate conception of self-consciousness. Pippin’s reading would seem to assent to such a characterization[74] since he emphasizes above all Hegel’s identification of the Concept with self-determining subjectivity.[75]
There is further evidence of Hegel’s covert reliance upon a model of self-consciousness in the Introduction. As we have seen, consciousness has the ability to reflect upon its knowledge and compare it with its experience of the object. Consciousness thereby assesses the adequacy of its knowledge with respect to its actual experience and as a result is able to surmise shortcomings in its knowledge, which it proceeds to rectify. Consciousness is therefore able to explicitly thematize both its knowledge i.e. what it takes the object to be merely for it, and its experience i.e. what it takes the object to be in itself, so as to effect a transformation of both.[76]
‘For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth. Since both are for the same consciousness, this consciousness is itself their comparison; it is for this same consciousness to know whether its knowledge of the object corresponds to the object or not.’[77]
And,
‘Consciousness knows something; this object is the essence or the in-itself; but it is also for consciousness the in-itself. This is where the ambiguity of this truth enters. We see that consciousness now has two objects: one is the first in-itself, the second is the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself…the first object, in being known, is altered for consciousness; it ceases to be the in-itself, and becomes something that is the in-itself only for consciousness…this then is the True: the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself.’[78]
The features of thematization, comparison and reflection attributed to consciousness by Hegel surely suffice as evidence of self-conscious activity. As we can see, he unambiguously states that consciousness separates and objectifies its knowledge which it distinguishes from the object qua in itself. The crux of the matter is that only now do we confront the ‘mechanism’ which tears consciousness out of its calm repose and stasis and propels it to ceaselessly move beyond its self-proclaimed limits.[79] Only a self-conscious being endowed with the ability to thematize, discriminate, compare and reflect could feel the pangs of dissatisfaction with its knowledge of the object of experience. The description of consciousness posited by Hegel is in part an acknowledgement of this. He knows very well that it’s the coordination and interplay of these various capacities which provoke thought’s restlessness and propensity to advance beyond its dogmatism and one-sidedness. We have not deviated from our previous characterization of Hegel’s method as strictly descriptive out of choice, it seems in part necessary if we are to explain and understand the dynamic of PhG itself. It is interesting to note that Hegel himself invokes a transcendental argument in order to vindicate the distinction he makes between the I’s knowledge and what it takes the object to be in itself: ‘the distinction between the in-itself and knowledge is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all.’[80]
This issue however is by no means settled once and for all. One could argue to the contrary, that consciousness is able partake in psychic operations such as comparison and reflection without being explicitly aware that it was engaged in such activities, somewhat similar to the notion of pre-reflective consciousness found in the work of twentieth century phenomenologists like Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre. But such an argument remains, in the final analysis, unconvincing because first it occludes the Kantian legacy which so profoundly shapes and underpins Hegel’s problematic.[81] Second, and more importantly, it negates the active and reflexive nature of consciousness as depicted in the passages adduced above.
Determinate Negation and the Philosophical ‘We’
Against, the leitmotiv of Kantian humility, Hegel proposes the principle of ‘determinate negation,’ which beyond the merely negative effects of critique has positive and constructive consequences for consciousness’s knowledge of its object. PhG is therefore not to be read simply as via negativa. Determinate negation isn’t a principle which is applied externally to the matter under consideration, for that would be a gross violation of Hegel’s own claims to immanence, not to mention countermand the possibility of an authentic description of consciousness’s experience of the object.[82] Hegel even goes so far as to say that the phenomenologist[83] simply plays the role of a passive observer while consciousness undergoes its self-examination.[84] The labour of determinate negation is only visible to the eye of the philosopher who examines the development of consciousness from his or her own standpoint. Consciousness is oblivious to the presence of determinate negation because it is unaware of the fact that its own experience of the object conforms to or is imbued with this philosophical principle. Hegel can’t simply presume Spinoza’s principle of omnis affirmatio est negatio as averred in the latter’s Ethics.[85] The idea that every determinate position is at once a negation and that every determinate negation is at once a particular position must show itself to be true of the subject’s experience of the object and hence cannot be taken as the materia prima and well-spring of the transformations of consciousness’s way of relating to the object. In other words, determinate negation should not be seen as effectuating the transformations of consciousness, but as in lieu gleaned by the philosopher who simply observes consciousness’s oscillation between its loss of the object and later rediscovery in a novel presentation.
The philosopher does not then simply describe consciousness’s experience of the object. Consciousness’s experience and its development possess philosophical import. With the arrival of a ‘new true object’ on the scene, the phenomenologist elicits the logical necessity of its emergence from that which preceded it. On the one hand, this is just another level of description albeit tempered by philosophical nomenclature. While on the other, the phenomenologist’s spelling out of the necessity of the transition from one shape of consciousness to another is itself equally necessary because it is the means by ‘which the succession of experiences through which consciousness passes is raised into a scientific progression’.[86] Consciousness neither uncovers nor understands the provenance of the new object to which it relates. The progressive thrust of PhG is disclosed ‘behind the back of consciousness.’[87] Since consciousness is not privy to the necessity of this transformation, the preceding shape of consciousness need not accede to its own self-sublation. The philosopher does not jettison consciousness’s experience and by means of a contrived logical connection proceed to artificially stitch together the various shapes of consciousness. The philosopher rather draws out the phenomeno-logical consequences of consciousness’s own experience. To wit, the philosopher shows how the new shape of consciousness explicitly advances what the antecedent shape had embodied implicitly within itself. For us, the philosophers, therefore, the emergence of the new object ‘appears at the same time as movement and a process of becoming.’[88] We have largely focused our attention upon the first level of appearance i.e. that which appears directly to consciousness. This second level of appearance, which appears to the philosopher, is the appearance of the Absolute’s own self-externalization and is articulated as such.
Hegel is able to circumvent the accusation that the philosopher who already possesses absolute knowledge expedites consciousness’s development by furnishing transcendent sign posts which guide PhG’s machinic generation of new shapes of consciousness on the road to Absolute Knowing. This criticism is in one sense true. The philosopher does facilitate consciousness’s progression, but only insofar as he formalizes consciousness’s experience. This act of formalization is a precondition of progress, but not its source. The reason why we can think of it as a precondition, is that if it were not to occur, consciousness, as we noted above, may never surpass its own self-assurance in the veracity of its knowledge. There is a slight tension here though, because, at least on our reading, the givenness of the object i.e. what consciousness takes the object to be in-itself, should in and of itself be able to erode consciousness’s confidence in its knowledge of the former. The exploration of this tension will sadly have to been left for another time.
Part II
Heidegger and the Question of Being
We will now provide a cursory outline of the opening statements of Martin Heidegger’s chef d’oeuvre, Sein und Zeit. This will allow us to determine, in brief, the aims, objectives and ends of Heideggerian phenomenology, in contradistinction to the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl. A thorough discussion of Heidegger’s differences and criticisms of Husserl cannot be given here. We will only try to demarcate those instances in which Heidegger conceived himself as departing from Husserl’s project. Familiarising ourselves with the lineaments of Heidegger’s transfiguration of phenomenology as phenomenological ontology will also permit of comparison with Hegelian phenomenology as exposited above. Although reams of literature have been dedicated to the elucidation of the basic tenets of SZ, a rehearsal of sorts is in order before we can delve into those issues which continue to confound even the most perspicuous and sympathetic of Heidegger’s interpreters.
Heidegger tells us in the Introduction to SZ that the question of the meaning of being has all but been forgotten by philosophy. ‘Being and its structure transcend every being and every possible existent determination of being. Being is the transcendens pure and simple.’[89] The aim of SZ is to bring this question to the forefront of philosophical debate and reclaim it from a history of occlusion and neglect. The reasons for the question of being’s slide into oblivion are legion. But in the Introduction Heidegger enumerates three prejudices with which we must come to terms prior to the inauguration of fundamental ontology and the Destruktion of the history of metaphysics. The deconstruction of the tradition is an undertaking we mustn’t take lightly if we desire to exhume and unearth those phenomena which have been victim to the obfuscation and perversion of metaphysical discourse. It is in this respect that the phenomenological inflection of Heidegger’s self-assigned task becomes perceptible. In SZ Heidegger alacriously champions the phenomenological war-cry “To the things themselves!”[90] Thus, in principle, he is quintessentially in agreement with Husserl. What, at least in part, motivates this oedipal drama is Heidegger’s conviction that the master had fallen short of his own rigorous and exacting imperative.[91] Simply put, transcendental phenomenology for Heidegger, was ultimately incapable of availing itself of the resources necessary for the illumination of the Ur-etwas, the ‘original something’ to which phenomenological intuition strives to access.[92] This issue is greatly complicated by the hermeneutical twist Heidegger gives to his phenomenology of Dasein or being-there.[93] It turns out to be, in the final analysis, not only impossible, but even undesirable that we reach some sort of terminus in which the Ur-etwas would be finally laid bare once and for all. We shall now try to explicate in greater detail the three prejudices alluded to above, to which Heidegger draws our attention, and claims have underwritten philosophy’s approach to the question of being hitherto.
First, ‘“Being is the most “universal” concept’.[94] On this view we regard being as a property like any other. By way of abstraction Seiendheit or ‘beingness’ operates like any other predicate. It is merely distinguished by the fact that qua predicate it functions at the highest level of generality. Heidegger as an avid reader of Aristotle could not take seriously such a brazen answer to the Seinsfrage. Aristotle had deigned long ago that ‘being’ does not straightforwardly behave like a very general predicate.[95] Heidegger took seriously the Aristotelian dictum that being is said in manifold ways and set himself the task of uncovering a single sense in which all beings could be said to be.[96] Is there a single unifying sense able to encompass being’s multiple expressions as essence, substance, accident, actuality, potentiality, truth and falsehood? The very posing of this question undercuts the view of being as merely the most universal concept. The incommensurability of its many senses instead leaves us in a veritable quagmire.
Heidegger’s involution within Aristotelian ontology by no means comes to an end here. Crucially, in §6 of the Introduction, he claims that ancient ontology did in fact posit a single sense of being, which formed the substratum of the many other disparate senses. Furthermore, he argues that this sense of being is fundamentally determined by privileging a definite mode of time, namely, the present. For Aristotle, at least on Heidegger’s reading, being is, in the final analysis, understood as parousia or ‘presence’ (Answesenheit).[97] What is, is therefore at bottom, what is present.[98] The meaning of being qua presence abrades the more primordial meaning of being, which in Division II of SZ, Heidegger will argue is time. By the end of SZ, time turns out to be not only the transcendental horizon of Dasein’s understanding of its being, but the meaning of being as such.[99] Metaphysics is defined for Heidegger by its powerless to think its hypostatization of a specific mode of temporality.[100] We can perhaps only now have an inkling as to the reasons why Heidegger is so fond of telling us that the ‘concept of “being” is…the most obscure of all.’[101]
The second prejudice is that the ‘concept of “being” is indefinable.’[102] The being of beings has generally been thought of in terms of beings, consigned to what Heidegger calls, the ontic domain i.e. that which concerns itself with the investigation of beings or entities. ‘We can conclude only that “being” is not something like a being.’[103] This is the reason we shall refrain from capitalizing ‘being’ with a capital B as is the wont of some scholars and translators of Heidegger. The problem with this practice is that it instigates the pernicious tendency which Heidegger unequivocally and on countless occasions states he wishes to avoid, that is to say, an understanding which can only possibly envision ‘being’ in terms of ‘beings’. The upshot of the so-called ontological difference is to bring about the obsolescence of this traditional practice. Irrespective of whether one reads Heidegger’s disciples or his most virulent opponents, the ontological difference, is acknowledged as the sine qua non of this thought. Its perdurance despite the various upheavals, reversals and breaks undergone by his philosophy through to his later period is plain to see, even to the most perfunctory of readers. As we know, Heidegger famously distinguishes the ontical from the ontological. In contrast to the former, ontology preoccupies itself with ways of being and their structural features. The ontico-ontological difference itself entails correlative distinctions such as the existentiell and the existential, the apophantic and the hermeneutic, the factual and the categorial etc…[104] For the moment we must put these distinctions to one side. They will however receive clarification throughout this part of the paper.
The third and final prejudice is that ‘“Being” is the self-evident concept’[105] since every proposition can be analysed as including the copula ‘is’.[106] As a consequence, being is regarded as transparent and diaphanous. Such complacency never even glimpses that which it takes for granted. As Heidegger points out, such a view pays scant attention to the incomprehensibility of our ‘average comprehensibility’ of being. ‘It shows that an enigma lies a priori in every relation and being toward beings as beings.’[107] The enigma which Heidegger is attempting to unravel here is our own pre-ontological understanding of being,[108] which he will show through a series a dazzling phenomenological analyses ‘ultimately belongs to the essential constitution of Dasein itself.’[109] We incessantly speak, act and think via the invocation of the copula by which we link together subject and predicate, and yet are reluctant to probe further to into the murky recesses which allow this manner of speaking, acting and thinking. ‘We do not know what “being” means. But already when we ask, “What is being?” we stand in an understanding of the “is” without being able to determine conceptually what the “is” means.’[110] For Heidegger, ‘we live already in an understanding of being’ but the elusive and indeterminate nature of its meaning for us demands that we repeat the Seinsfrage. However, before this repetition can impress itself upon us, we must ‘first of all…work out adequately the formulation of the question.’[111]
But who poses this question and how should our inquiry proceed, if we desire not to repeat the same misguided perambulations and confusions that have for the past two millennia surrounded the Seinsfrage? The who in question is of course Dasein, or ‘being-there’ which has been almost universally identified with the being of humanitas.[112] ‘Regarding, understanding and grasping, choosing, and gaining access to, are constitutive attitudes of inquiry are thus themselves modes of being of a particular being, of the being we inquirers ourselves in each case are.’[113] Heidegger would firmly rebuke Sartre some two decades later in his letter to Jean Beaufret, which he expanded into his famed Brief über den Humanismus (1947) for making just this equation. This important issue has befuddled and exasperated both friend and foe. But let it suffice for now to say that like its Hegelian counterpart, Heideggerian phenomenology is not primarily interested in the quidditas of things.[114] On the contrary, Dasein is defined in terms of Existenz rather than essence.[115] In SZ Heidegger emphasizes his inversion of the primacy of essentia over existentia a propos Dasein, and his detachment of the latter from its filiation with its Latin cognate, which denotes ‘objective presence’ or Vorhandenheit.[116] Dasein, however, ‘is a being that does not simply occur among other beings.’ Dasein is, according to Heidegger, ‘ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being.’[117] This very sketchy portrayal of Heidegger’s conception of Dasein only paints a rather emaciated picture. But for the moment it is all we require, since the more pressing question of Heidegger’s phenomenological method awaits explication.
Why Phenomenological Ontology?
It has already been intimated that before we are able formulate the question of the meaning of being we must first assay the specificity of the being of Dasein, and this is the purported raison d’être of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.[118] As we previously mentioned, Heidegger like Hegel, is convinced of the faithfulness of his phenomenological method to the ‘things themselves’. ‘It is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is also opposed to taking over concepts only seemingly demonstrated; and likewise to pseudo-questions which often are spread abroad as “problems” for generations.’[119] The task of ontology is the explication of ‘being itself.’[120] Heidegger, however, postulates an important caveat vis-à-vis the possibility of ontology: ‘Ontology is possible only as phenomenology.’[121] Depending on how one interprets the aims and objectives of SZ, Heidegger’s phenomenology can be read as having an analogous structure to that of Hegelian phenomenology or as markedly differing from it.
As we have seen, Hegelian phenomenology acts as a propaedeutic to speculative science, a science which begins only once the identity of thought and being has been accepted. PhG can therefore be feasibly extricated from Hegel’s philosophy which takes the form of an ontological logic. On the one hand, Heidegger adopts a comparable strategy to Hegel. For Heidegger a phenomenological analysis of that being, which is ontologically as well as ontically distinctive, namely Dasein, is a precondition of our posing the question of the meaning of being in general.[122] Hence the priority Heidegger assigns to the ontical without which existential analysis would be impossible: ‘the roots of the existential analysis…are ultimately existentiell – they are ontic.’[123]
For Hegel this simply isn’t an issue if the identity of thought and being is acknowledged in advance of the inauguration of philosophy proper, making phenomenology’s task, in the final analysis, a dispensable one.[124] On the other hand, for Heidegger the question of the meaning of being is indissociable from the ‘who’ that poses, interprets and understands this question. For Heidegger there is no foreseeable point in the future, when after a protracted and exhaustive period of investigation we could finally declare to be rid of Dasein. Moreover, for Heidegger it is not a matter of observing a Dasein riven from the phenomenologist undertaking the phenomenological investigation of Dasein in its everydayness. Unlike Hegelian phenomenology, Heidegger’s existential analytic has no need of a mediator who articulates the experiential trajectory of consciousness’s development. For Heidegger the interrogator and the interrogated are one and the same, and everything hinges on the ebb and flow of their intrinsic interrelation. Heidegger does not so much collapse the distinction between the interrogator and interrogated but rather stresses their relatedness and inseparability. But the decisive question is whether this is a genuine improvement and circumvention of the refractive mediation concomitant with the philosopher’s descriptive unfolding of consciousness’s experience in PhG. In the final part of this paper we will attempt to broach this question explicitly. But before we do so a fuller elaboration of the specificities of Heidegger’s method is in order.
Logos as Apophansis and Logos as Hermēneuein
Phenomenology is the science of phenomena. Like Hegel, Heidegger uses the German word Wissenshaft to describe his method. Even though we know that Heidegger will soon expunge this term from his philosophy, it is nonetheless germane that he employs it in SZ to describe the phenomenological enterprise. The Greek phainomenon means what shows itself and is hence manifest.[125] Heidegger distinguishes phainomenon from ‘appearance’. By ‘appearance’ Heidegger means something which through its self-showing points to something else that is not manifest, ‘it means that something makes itself known which does not show itself…Appearing is a not showing itself.’[126] Appearing, however, is only possible on the basis of a self-showing of something.[127] And because of this Heidegger argues that the notion of appearance presupposes the concept of phenomenon.[128] ‘Accordingly, phenomena are never appearances, but every appearance is dependent upon phenomena.’[129] ‘Semblance’ behaves in a similar manner, because it looks like something or ‘seems’, which again is only possible on the basis of the phenomenon qua self-showing in itself.[130] Phenomenon thus designates a distinctive way something can be encountered.
Hegel also meant his conception of phenomenology in this sense, but, as we have seen, contends that consciousness’s experience of phenomena disrupts and incites the break down of its pre-existing conceptions of the object. Hegelian phenomenology delineates the immanent logos or logic of phenomena and their development into increasingly sophisticated conceptual structures. Does the phenomenology of Hegel with its advocacy of a phenomeno-logical approach to the progressive development of appearances in relation to consciousness, more literally exemplify the Greek terms of phainomenon and logos, than does Heidegger’s? Consciousness, as we know, does not explicitly acknowledge the universal and necessary conditions of the possibility of objective judgements, to which only the philosopher is privy. What are the ramifications of understanding the meaning of ‘logical necessity’ in this transcendental sense? Or in other words, what are the repercussions for our comparison of Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenological method?
Heidegger’s repartee would probably be that the logos of Hegel’s phenomeno-logical project, is not the same logos with which he is concerned, but an palsied and derivative phenomenon. But we must bear in mind that PhG is comprised of two strata, namely, consciousness, its knowledge of the object and the object of experience itself, and the philosopher who describes the vicissitudes of consciousness, through the stages of brimming confidence, self-abnegation and finally transmutation. The transcendental component of which we have spoken is thematized strictly at the philosophical level, while consciousness remains ignorant and perhaps even obdurate as to the inexorability of its self-overcoming. Attentiveness to the phenomenal is therefore not sacrificed by Hegel in the name of transcendental arguments. We are thus not dealing with a transcendental or dialectical philosophy in any conventional sense. Hegel’s phenomenology is able to pre-empt the standard argument invoked by Heidegger against transcendental philosophy, to wit, that it does violence to the self-showing of phenomena. We shall review Heidegger’s invective against dialectic in the paragraphs that follow, but for now we will try to determine what logos means for him in SZ.
In a lecture course from 1923-1924, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Heidegger states that insofar ‘as apophantic λόγος can characterize a human being’s existence, it pervades a human being’s entire dealings with his world, all seeing, interpreting, articulating.’[131] Any attempt to understand the meaning of phenomenology and its salience for human existence must ponder the meaning of logos. Logos literally translated means ‘speech’ but has been interpreted by the tradition variously as reason, judgement, concept, definition, ground and relation.[132] These definitions fatally obviate the more primordial meaning to which Heidegger aspires. Heidegger wishes to demonstrate that prior thinking of logos has taken it to mean: ‘to make manifest “what is being talked about” in speech.’[133] He goes on,
‘Aristotle explicates this function of speech more precisely as apophainesthai. Logos lets something be seen (phainesthai), namely what is being talked about, and indeed for the speaker (who serves as the medium) or for those who speak with each other. Speech “lets us see,” from itself, apo…, what is being talked about. In speech (apophansis), insofar as it is genuine, what is said should be derived from what is being talked about. In this way spoken communication, in what it says, makes manifest what it is talking about and thus makes it accessible to another.[134] Such is the structure of logos as apophansis.’[135]
Heidegger argues that logos as apophansis has the structure of synthesis, because it lets ‘something be seen in its togetherness with something’.[136] Subject and predicate are synthesized in order to form a judgement. But apophansis or propositional judging is not for Heidegger the original performance of truth.[137] The kind of truth that appears in such judgments is only one form of truth and a derivative one at that.[138] For Heidegger, apophantic statements, in the words of Thomas Sheehan, ‘co-perform,’ the givenness of things.[139] But neither the performance nor the givenness that it obtains are sufficiently primordial.[140] Phenomenology, taking its cue from Aristotle, ultimately aspires to the enactments of truth as aletheia or unconcealment, that is to say, the givenness of entities as self-giving or autodisclosive (on alethes).[141] However, insofar as some modality of the givenness of beings is co-performed in a logos apophantikos, we should be able to uncover within the structure that underpins apophansis traces of a more original human co-performance of disclosure.[142] ‘The “being true” of logos as alētheuein means: to take beings that are being talked about in legein as apophainesthai out of their concealment; to let them be seen as something unconcealed (alēthes); to discover them.’[143]
For the Heidegger of SZ any explanation of aletheuein and aletheia remains bound to the question of logos.[144] We still are yet to provide a satisfactory answer to this question. Heidegger in the concluding pages of the Introduction affords us an answer and it is absolutely vital if we wish to understand Heidegger’s phenomenological method:
‘The logos of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of hermēneuein, through which the proper meaning of being and the basic structures of the very being of Dasein are made known to the understanding of being that belongs to Dasein itself. Phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutics in the original signification of that word, which designates the work of interpretation.’[145]
Dasein and world form a circle. Heidegger augments the purview of the traditional hermeneutic circle between the text and its reading to the most primordial stratum of Dasein’s existence.[146]
‘The “circle” in understanding belongs to the structure of meaning, and this phenomenon is rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein, in interpretative understanding. Beings, which, as being-in-the-world, are concerned about their being itself have an ontological structure of the circle.’[147]
This is why he regards apophantic assertion to be a deficient mode of hermeneutic assertion.[148] Apophantic assertions are not false. They are misleading because they suggest that a form of predicate calculus is sufficient for describing our world.[149] By isolating subject and predicate and then unifying them in a judgement such as ‘the hammer is heavy,’ the hammer and its properties are cut off from their dependence upon our everyday understanding, which is embedded with numerous skills, discriminations and practices.[150] Critical reflection only comes into play when our ordinary ways of coping break down, and is made possible on the basis of our everyday background practices which it can never fully articulate.[151] ‘We call primordial the “as” of circumspect interpretation that understands (hermēneia), the existential-hermeneutical “as” in distinction from the apophantical “as” of the statement.’[152] Dasein’s taking something as something structures its understanding of entities. When Heidegger says that Dasein’s understanding possesses the existential structure of a project (Entwurf), he is not talking about a plan of action but the taking-as, as a mode of disclosure which allows Dasein to make sense of its being-in-the-world.[153]
As Richard Rorty has observed, Heidegger, like the Wittgenstein of Philosophische Untersuchungen, diagnoses the misplaced confidence of traditional philosophy in the belief that there must somehow be entities which are atomic in the sense of being what they are independent of their relation to other entities.[154] Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, in different ways, focus their attention upon the idea of relationality rather than subsistent relata. SZ’s argument for the primordiality of Zuhandensein effectively means that everything is related within a nested structure of purposive relations variously name by Heidegger the ‘in-order-to’, ‘where-in’, ‘with-which’, ‘towards-which’, and ‘for-the-sake-of-which’, which guides and runs through all of Dasein’s practical involvement within the world.[155]
Dasein’s being-in-the-world subtends its equipmental, referential, and involvement wholes. The phenomenon of world is the particular way the world manifests itself, and worldliness is the way of being of the world and of all its various subworlds.[156] ‘Things at hand are encountered within the world. The being of these beings, handiness, is thus ontologically related to the world and to worldliness.’[157] The world is always already ‘there’ but can never be encountered as such i.e. as an extant thing. Although we are unable to do justice to this notion here since it is not directly relevant to the subject matter of this paper, it should be borne in mind that the world remains unthematized, when we are engaged and unreflectively coping within it.
Wittgenstein famously wrote in the opening lines of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) that the ‘world is the totality of facts.’[158] Heidegger insists on the contrary that ‘the world is not the sum of all extant beings, not the universe of natural things – that the world is not at all anything extant or handy.’[159] World is a determination of the being of Dasein. The world is not extant but it certainly exists.[160] By this he means that it does not have the mode of being of an object, despite being ‘more objective than all objects’.[161] ‘World exists – that is, it is – only if Dasein exists, only if there is Dasein.’[162] And this is because the ‘ontological sense’ of world is imbued with or if you prefer structured by ‘significance’ (Bedeutsamkeit): the nested structure of meaningful interconnections within which we all dwell. For Heidegger we are always already thrown into a world of meaning, even if when in our more nihilistic moods it seems devoid of meaning. Dasein is not a human subject standing over against an object (Gegen-stand), but the unity of self and world, ‘self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world.’[163]
Part III
Phenomenological Description, Dialectic and the Problem of ‘Stilling the Stream’
For Heidegger, Hegel never really manages to get at the things themselves, because the intuition (Anschauung) through which the phenomenon is initially given and then described by the philosopher, is always already mediated through its expression (Ausdruck) in concepts.[164] This is why Heidegger so vigorously objects to dialectical method in SZ, and in a host of lecture courses preceding it. Dialectic confuses Ausdruck with Anschauung, and because of this confusion deludes itself into believing that it determines the phenomenon by means of its conceptual apparatus. It thus finds itself in the manifest contradiction of feigning its complete apprehension of the given, while in fact granting that nothing is in fact given. It is for this reason that Heidegger snidely opines that dialectic, ‘which was a genuine philosophic embarrassment, becomes superfluous.’[165]
But didn’t we argue above that Hegel doesn’t have a dialectical method as such? Yes, and we were right to do so. Just as commentators have challenged Heidegger’s reading of Platonic dialectic, we can demonstrate the tendentiousness of such an indictment of Hegel’s method, and moreover, ask under what pretence can Heidegger lay claim to a pure seeing (Anschauung) of the phenomenon, especially in the aftermath of Hegel?[166] Ironically, in his lecture course Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität)[167] Heidegger levels the accusation that dialectic ‘cannot hold out in such a thing as staying with the object and allowing it to prescribe the right mode of grasping it and the limits to this.’[168] But this is exactly what Hegel claims his phenomenology is doing. Of course we can dispute whether in fact he abides by this principle, just as we can dispute whether Heidegger really disentangles himself from the cul-de-sacs he associates with transcendental phenomenology. But unfortunately we cannot authoritatively settle these questions here. In the present paper we can only hope to convey the subtlety and persuasive case made by each philosopher for their respective methods. What we can say however, is that Heidegger mistakenly reckons the consciousness of PhG to have a single object i.e. its knowledge.[169] We know however, that consciousness has two objects, its knowledge of the object and what it takes the object to be in-itself. This distinction of course falls within consciousness. And if anything this is where we must draw a line in the sand between Hegel’s phenomenology and the modern phenomenological movement.[170]
Leaving aside for the moment Heidegger’s crusade against Cartesianism and his casting aside of Husserl’s self-constituting transcendental ego, there remain a number of acute and perhaps unbridgeable differences between the two conceptions of phenomenological method. Husserl wished to describe our experiences from within the first-person perspective while Hegel’s consciousness is at a remove.[171] The phenomenologist describes the experiences of a third-person perspective which undercuts itself and is successively enveloped by ever more comprehensive ones. Because it operates on the basis of the third-person perspective which is described extraneously by the philosopher, Hegel may never be able to alleviate the suspicions of contemporary phenomenologists. The phenomenologist can invariably claim that consciousness’s experience and its descriptive translation by the philosopher are not equivalent, and that something is inevitably lost in this transition from third-party experience to philosophical expression.
In an early text entitled, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (1919), Heidegger evaluates the redoubtable neo-Kantian Paul Natorp’s critique of phenomenology.[172] Natorp’s critique, to which we will turn shortly, could not only be applied to the problem of the methodological setup of Hegel’s phenomenology, but actually had a very real impact upon the young Heidegger, inciting his wariness and suspicion of philosophies which fetishized the notion of intuition. Theodore Kisiel, deems Natorp’s objections to be pivotal in mitigating Heidegger’s up to then untrammelled confidence in the power of intuitive fulfilment and preference in SZ to speak in terms of Dasein’s understanding of being, as the interface of thrownness and projection.[173]
Natorp’s criticisms are two-fold: first, Husserl’s method of reflective description brings the stream of experiences to a grinding halt. The experiences cease to be lived and are instead ‘looked at’.[174] Through plucking experiences from out of the flow of conscious experience we, in Natorp’s words, ‘still the stream’ and so purge the latter of its inimitable movement.[175] The second objection concentrates upon whether the immediate matter of phenomenology is expressible at all. Phenomenological description, despite its best efforts, is an intrinsically procrustean method in that it continues to circumscribe and subsume concrete immediacy under abstraction categories.[176] Any attempt at immediate description is effectively futile, since expression and verbalisation, generalise the immediately lived and thereby foment its objectification.[177]
On the one hand, Hegel, arguably escapes this dilemma, because we can make the case that it is his avowed desire to elicit the conceptual commitments of consciousness which spring from its knowledge and experience of the given. Hegel is therefore able to side-step the danger outlined by Natorp, because he never adopts the charade of a pure unmediated intuiting. While on the other hand, if we claim that Hegel’s phenomenological method is essentially the same as that of Husserl à la Kojève,[178] without an attunement to its specific modus operandi, this predicament is merely exacerbated, because the givenness of the object is even more attenuated by virtue of the fact that the stream of experience is not lived through by the phenomenologist in the first-person, but transposed into the third-person perspective of consciousness as such. Furthermore, this problem is intensified because the Gestalten which form A. Concsiousness, namely, Sense-Certainty, Perception, and Force and Understanding, are more akin to paradigms which are merely constitutive of our comportment to entities in the world, derived through an anterior moment of abstraction. This isn’t a problem as far as Hegel is concerned, and as we have seen, particularly in our examination of his relationship to scepticism, he has good reason for such an approach. Despite this being the case, we can be sure that many contemporary phenomenologists and epistemologists will be left with a bitter aftertaste and remain unpersuaded of the virtues of Hegel’s phenomenological method.
The way Heidegger manages to avoid the seemingly congenital defeasibility of phenomenological description, is first, to argue for a non-reflective understanding, and second, the non-objectifying conceptualization that it itself provides.[179] Heidegger criticized the privilege that Husserl placed upon the mode of givenness of perception. In Logische Untersuchungen Husserl predominantly distinguishes between the signitive, the imaginative and the perceptual modes of givenness, and ranks them in accordance with their ability to give us the object as directly, originally, and optimally as possible.[180] Perception is held to be superior because it is the only type of intention that presents the object itself in its bodily presence.[181] For Heidegger the imperceptible non-objective presence of world around which Dasein circumspectly moves takes precedence over bodily presence correlative to perceivedness.[182] World can never be apprehended by means of intuition. It is only by way of the understanding and therefore interpretative exposition from out of a prior meaningful whole that we can give expression to world. ‘“Intuition and “thought” are both already remote derivatives of understanding. Even the phenomenological “intuition of essences” is based on existential understanding.’[183] This is even further complicated by Heidegger’s temporalization of the understanding, the upshot of which is to turn the understanding into an unceasing, futural, finite transcendence. Unfortunately we are unable to explain the significance of this introduction of temporality by Heidegger into the hermeneutical work of the understanding because it would involve a thorough analysis of Division II of SZ, which would be cavalier to attempt at this stage of the paper. It should however be born in mind that there remains a great deal more work to be done if we are to satisfactorily comprehend the at times recondite transformation of phenomenology undertaken by Heidegger in SZ.
Conclusion
Perhaps the only virtue of this paper is that it indicates that there remains a massive amount of research that still needs to be done. Clearly the methodological approaches of Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenology share certain affinities. But are their differences more significant than those points at which their interests seemingly overlap? The divergence of their respective methods becomes most conspicuous on the issue of phenomenology’s relation to ontology. We have recapitulated this argument ad nauseam only because it is so important to understanding each philosopher’s methodology on its own terms. Rather than produce a garbled rigmarole by arbitrarily conflating those ideas and concepts which in fact underscore their philosophical originality, we should emphasize the distinctiveness of each philosopher’s conception of the phenomenological project.
For Hegel the themes of immanence and education play a central part, with ontology proper yet to arrive on the scene. It is the seemingly effortless coordination of two vantage points within the text, namely that of consciousness and the philosopher, which expedites PhG’s development on the route to Absolute Knowing. Both positions operate at distinct levels, and so produce the internal movement of Geist without violating the respective concerns and commitments of the other. The philosopher merely formalizes the experience that consciousness goes through. And consciousness experiences its object without the philosopher forever peering over its shoulder, admonishing it to turn its attention to the necessary conditions of its experience. By means of its own conscious reflexivity it is able to determine for itself the inadequacy or shortcomings of its conception of the object and modify it accordingly so that it falls into line with its concurrent experience of that object. Hegel thus does not in a patriarchal fashion loom over and delineate consciousness’s experience, ignoring the object’s givenness, but allows consciousness to engender and undergo its own self-transformation.
For the Heidegger of SZ on the other hand, ontology is only deemed possible by means of phenomenology. In this respect, ontology for Heidegger has abdicated its traditional role as the science of being qua being. Phenomenology for Heidegger does not pave the way for ontology in the way that it does so for Hegel. These two modes of philosophical inquiry are now explicitly bound to one another. Heidegger in large part owes this insight to Husserl whose phenomenological revolution undoubtedly impresses itself upon many of the methodological guidelines argued for in SZ. The existential analytic’s acknowledgment of the indispensability of the ontical is the upshot of phenomenology and ontology’s indissociable entwinement. The emphasis placed by Heidegger on the interrelatedness of interrogator and interrogated is also a testament to this methodological preference which runs through the entire book. At this point Heidegger is unable to avail himself of any other means for broaching the Seinsfrage. It is only in the 1930s that Heidegger begins to distance himself from the phenomenological hermeneutics of SZ in order to think the truth of beyng from out of the Da of Da-sein. The success or failure of this shift of focus will however have to be left for another occasion.
What are we to make of our staged encounter between two of the most controversial philosophers in the Western philosophical canon? We have thus far eschewed the issue of whether a rapprochement would be possible between Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenology. Both recognise the importance of mediation, albeit in different ways. Both mount powerful critiques of the primacy of theoretical knowledge and the pre-eminence of objectival being. But when all is said and done we have pointed to what is arguably an irreparable rift between their respective conceptions of the phenomenological project. On the basis of our analyses and conclusions born in the course of this paper we would have to say that a fruitful encounter is certainly possible, but that at the level of method, their elective affinity is dissolved. For Hegel phenomenology can only ever have a pedagogic and propaedeutic function, whereas for Heidegger, at least in SZ, phenomenology ultimately redefines the very ‘how’ of philosophizing.
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[1] Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit”, Martin Heidegger, trans. Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, 1996, p286-287, (§62)
[2] Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Jason Smith & Steven Miller, University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p21
[3] Henceforth, PhG.
[4] Henceforth, SZ.
[5] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p11, (§4)
[6] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Martin Heidegger, trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, p2
[7] What Hegel means by ‘necessity’ and its significance as a category which informs PhG’s development is by no means a cut and dried issue. See for example, A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Quentin Lauer, Fordham University Press, 1976, p34-35
[8] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, trans. A.V. Miller, with analysis of the text and foreword by J.N. Findlay, Oxford University Press, 1977, p21, (§36)
[9] See Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Commentary Based on the Preface and Introduction, Werner Marx, trans. Peter Heath, University of Chicago Press, 1988, p90
[10] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p56, (§89)
[11] Hegel’s Phenomenological Method, Kenley R. Dove, Review of Metaphysics, 23, 4, (June, 1970), p615
[12] Henceforth, WL.
[13] In this paper we prefer to use ‘Concept’ rather than A.V. Miller’s rendering of Begriff as ‘Notion’.
[14] Science of Logic, G.W.F. Hegel, trans. A.V. Miller, with a foreword by Professor J.N. Findlay, Humanity Books, 1969, p48
[15] The Immanence of Thought: Hegel’s Critique of Foundationalism, David S. Stern, The Owl of Minerva, 22, 2 (Fall, 1990), p29; Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel, William Maker, State University of New York Press, 1994, p73
[16] Science of Logic, G.W.F. Hegel, p49
[17] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p11, (§20)
[18] Science of Logic, G.W.F. Hegel, p49
[19] Hegel, Charles Taylor, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p127; Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed. with Supplementary Chapter, Herbert Marcuse, Routledge, 2000, p93
[20] It should be added that Heidegger’s diatribe against dialectic is not explicitly aimed at Hegel. His critique is best characterized as a dispute with a much broader position, which arguably encompasses both Platonists and Hegelians. We will detail Heidegger’s objections below and examine whether they can be tailored to the specifics of Hegel’s phenomenological dialectic.
[21] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Martin Heidegger, p21
[22] We are by no means suggesting that Hegel in the Introduction provides an adequate critique of the above named philosophers. At this stage such an undertaking is simply not his main concern. He has outlined a general epistemological position in order to differentiate his own strategy from his predecessors. As we shall see, it is the problem of scepticism which motivates Hegel’s opposition to various transcendental philosophical approaches, both realist and idealist, in favour of an immanent critique initially wedded to the assumptions of natural consciousness.
[23] Hegel, Frederick Beiser, Routledge, 2005, p25-29; see also The Fate of Reason, Frederick Beiser, Harvard University Press, 1993
[24] Knowledge and Human Interests, Jürgen Habermas, Polity Press, 1987, p10
[25] A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume, ed. David Fate Norton & Mary J. Norton, Oxford University Press, 2000, p172
[26] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p46, (§73), (my emphasis)
[27] Knowledge and Human Interests, Jürgen Habermas, p10
[28] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p46, (§73)
[29] Ibid, p47, (§73)
[30] Ibid, p47, (§74)
[31] Knowledge and Human Interests, Jürgen Habermas, p11
[32] It might be objected that this is just the position of transcendental realism attacked so persuasively by Kant in KRV. Against this criticism, we must reiterate that Hegel’s phenomenological investigation starts out from the stance of pre-philosophical common sense in order to demonstrate how this position breaks down by virtue of the disparity between what consciousness takes the object to be and its actual experience of the object. This immanent tension, according to Hegel, is merely described by the philosopher, and therefore must not be confused with the standpoint of philosophy as such. Kant’s transcendental turn that reversed the dogma of both rationalism and empiricism by claiming that objects must be seen as conforming to our mode of cognition rather than vice versa, and by extension the task of the Transcendental Deduction which sought to uncover the categories that provide the rules for all objective judgements are simply not germane to Hegel’s method or aims at this stage.
[33] Ibid, p12
[34] The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich, Humanities Press, 1983, p112
[35] On the Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy, Exposition of Its Different Modifications, and Comparison of the Latest Form with the Ancient One, G.W.F. Hegel, trans. with notes by H.S. Harris, p311-362, in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. with Introductions, by George di Giovanni and H.S. Harris with two essays by the translators, revised ed., George di Giovanni, Hackett, 2000
[36] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p49, (§76)
[37] Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Robert R. Williams, State University of New York Press, 1992, p104
[38] Ibid, p104-105
[39] Ibid, p103
[40] Ibid, p103
[41] Ibid, p104
[42] We would have to exempt David Hume here. These criticisms although maybe appropriate to Schulze fail to do justice to a thinker of such profound depth, verve and originality as Hume. He can only under interpretive duress be characterized as merely reworking a possibility already latent within Cartesianism. Unfortunately due to issues of space and relevance I cannot further elaborate here. For a thought-provoking challenge to such a reading see Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, Gilles Deleuze, trans. with an Introduction by C.V. Boundas, Columbia University Press, 1991
[43] Hegel writes in the Preface to PhG, ‘Dogmatism as a way of thinking, whether in ordinary knowing or in the study of philosophy, is nothing else but the opinion that the True consists in a proposition which is a fixed result, or which is immediately known.’ (PhS, G.W.F. Hegel, p23, §40)
[44] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p49, (§76), (my emphasis)
[45] An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd ed., Stephen Houlgate, Blackwell, 2005, p63
[46] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p50, (§78)
[47] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, Routledge, 2002, p82 (6.54)
[48] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p14-15, (§26)
[49] Ibid, p15, (§26)
[50] Ibid, p49, (§78)
[51] Ibid, p51, (§80)
[52] There is some textual evidence for this in PhG. For example, when he writes that ‘the goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Concept corresponds to object and object to Concept.’ (PhS, p51, §80). And where he claims that the very restlessness of thought itself disrupts consciousness’s indolence, ‘If it wishes to remain in a state of inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia.’ (PhS, p51, §80)
[53] Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, trans. & ed. Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p100-101 (A xii)
[54] Hegel virtually paraphrases Kant’s famous footnote of the Preface to the first edition of KRV in §78 of the Introduction to PhG. He writes, ‘The scepticism that is directed against the whole range of phenomenal consciousness, on the other hand, renders the Spirit for the first time competent to examine what truth is. For it brings about a state of despair about all the so-called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions, regardless of whether they are called one’s own or someone else’s, ideas with which the consciousness that sets about the examination [of truth] straight away is still filled and hampered, so that it is, incapable of carrying out what it wants to undertake.’ (PhS, p50, §78)
[55] Hegel, Charles Taylor, p127
[56] Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Jean Hyppolite, trans. Samuel Cherniak & John Heckman, Northwestern University Press, 1974, p12
[57] This act of abstraction could of course be deemed itself quintessentially ‘philosophical’ or only possible on the basis of a discourse which sets up certain issues and problems as meaningful by means of ‘theoretical’ cognition. This, we must admit, is a pertinent criticism, akin to Feuerbach’s remonstrations in his polemic Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy (1839). One can also imagine the early Heidegger chiding Hegel in a similar manner. Below we will in fact attempt a reconstruction of what such a critique might look like, given that Heidegger never explicitly mounted a critique of Hegel which emphasized this tack; he reserved that honour for his teacher Edmund Husserl. For the moment, we will attempt to show that Hegel has sufficient armoury at his disposal to respond to the above censure. Hopefully in the course of this defence it should become clear why we decided to set our exposition of the Introduction to PhG against the backdrop of Hegel’s relationship to scepticism in both its ancient and modern guises.
[58] Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Robert R. Williams, p127
[59] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p52-53, (§82)
[60] Ibid, p53, (§84)
[61] ‘Something is for it the in-itself; and knowledge, or the being of the object for consciousness, is, for it, another moment. Upon this distinction, which is present as a fact, the examination rests.’ (PhS, p54, §85) (my bold)
[62] Hegel, Charles Taylor, p130
[63] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p54, (§85)
[64] Ibid, p54-55, (§85)
[65] Ibid, p55, (§86)
[66] We should, however, remain on our guard with respect to the superiority claimed for the immanent approach, which arguably Hegel takes for granted, falling short of the demands incumbent upon a thoroughly self-critical philosophy.
[67] Ibid, p53, (§84), (translation modified)
[68] For the historical details of how this formula first gained currency see Hegel: A Biography, Terry Pinkard, Cambridge University Press, 2000; and The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Gustav E. Mueller, Volume XIX, June, 1958, Number 3, p411
[69] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p105, (§167)
[70] Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. and with an introduction by P. Christopher Smith, Yale University Press, 1976, p35
[71] ‘Dieses unterscheidet nämlich etwas von sich, worauf es sich zugleich bezieht; oder wie dies ausgedrückt wird: es ist etwas für dasselbe; und die bestimmte Seite dieses Beziehens oder des Seins von etwas für ein Bewuβtsein ist das Wissen.’ (Phänomenologie des Geistes, G.W.F. Hegel, ed. E. Moldenhauer & K.M. Michel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970, p76)
[72] Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, p246 (B131)
[73] Pippin’s makes a relevant point. He argues that both Hegel and Kant would ‘deny “realist” theories of consciousness, particularly rationalist claims about sensation being a direct, immediate, though “unclear” apprehension of objects. They agree, that is, on a basic consequence of the apperception thesis: that all apprehension is mediated by the subject’s taking itself to be apprehending in a specific way, so that a necessary component of any relation to objects is a self-relation.’ (Hegel’s Idealism, Robert B. Pippin, p35)
[74] ‘Whatever else Hegel intends by asserting an “Absolute Idealism,” it is clear by now that such a claim at the very least involves Hegel in a theory about pure concepts, and about the role of such concepts in human experience, particularly in any possible knowledge of objects, but also in various kinds of self-conscious, intentional activities.’ Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Robert B. Pippin, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p91
[75] Pippin’s reading can in many respects be read as a comprehensive exegesis of Hegel’s remark that ‘everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally Subject.’ (PhS, p10, §17)
[76] ‘But, in fact, in the alteration of the knowledge, the object itself alters for it too, for the knowledge that was present was essentially knowledge of the object: as the knowledge changes, so too does the object, for it essentially belonged to this knowledge.’ (PhS, p54, §85)
[77] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p54, (§85)
[78] Ibid, p55, (§86) (my bold)
[79] It is in this respect that PhG differs from Hegel’s earlier Jena period in which, as Hyppolite notes, he endorsed a form of ‘vital immanence’ through which ‘life’ and ‘infinity’ were thought to be identical. Contrariwise, in the PhG Hegel rescinds dependence upon anything which could to approximated to an acosmic substance inured within the very heart of being, instead preferring his text’s progressive trajectory to be carried out in accordance with the experiential content of consciousness itself. Conscious is not stirred from out of its quietude by either ‘life’ or ‘thought’ per se, but results out of the incongruity between consciousness’s knowledge and the givenness of the object. The notion of an acosmic entity furtively impelling the subject towards self-knowledge and self-coincidence with itself, becomes for Hegel a superfluous and regrettable doctrine. (See The Concept of Life and Consciousness of Life in Hegel’s Jena Philosophy, in Studies on Marx and Hegel, Jean Hyppolite, trans. with an Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography, by John O’Neill, Basic Books, 1969, p6). In this regard my reading is at variance with that of John Sallis who contends that ‘the movement is not something which the I accomplishes alone but is rather a movement of the absolute, i.e. belongs to that movement which the absolute is.’ (Hegel’s Concept of Presentation, in Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics, John Sallis, 2nd Expanded Edition, Indiana University Press, 1995, p54)
[80] Ibid, p54, (§85)
[81] Hegel affirms in a oft cited passage from the Science of Logic just how important he felt Kant’s discovery of the transcendental unity of apperception was: ‘It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the nature of the Concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, as unity of the I think, or of self-consciousness.’ (SL, p584)
[82] This is clearly where, for example, the readings of Quentin Lauer, Stephen Houlgate and William Maker diverge from the interpretation of Karin de Boer who regards determinate negation or negativity überhaupt as an external principle applied by Hegel to the particular philosophical problem under scrutiny. She curiously regards this principle as an ‘ontological perspective,’ which despite its richness and profundity, remains merely perspectival. It cannot, for de Boer, in principle be self-legitimating (Lecture given at the University of Warwick for the Colloquium in European Philosophy entitled Hegel and Derrida, 06/09/2007). This more recent interpretation seems to conflict with comments in her book, Thinking in the Light of Time, where she expressly acknowledges, although vis-à-vis WL that Hegel’s method is, at least prima facie, self-grounding. (Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger’s Encounter with Hegel, Karin de Boer, State University of New York Press, 2000, p221)
[83] We are using the terms philosopher and phenomenologist interchangeably.
[84] ‘But not only is a contribution by us superfluous, since Concept and object, the criterion and what is to be tested, are present in consciousness itself, but we are also spared the trouble of comparing the two and really testing them, so that, since what consciousness examines is its own self, all that is left for us to do is simply to look on.’ (PhS, p54, §85) (my bold)
[85] Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Jean Hyppolite, p14
[86] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p55-56, (§87)
[87] Ibid, p56, (§87)
[88] Ibid, p56, (§87)
[89] Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit”, Martin Heidegger, trans. Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, 1996, p33-34, (§7)
[90] Ibid, p30, (§7)
[91] During the course of an analysis of the First Book of Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, in his lecture course of 1925, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, Heidegger writes: ‘This idea, that consciousness is to be the region of an absolute science, is not simply invented; it is the idea which has occupied modern philosophy ever since Descartes. The elaboration of pure consciousness as the thematic field of phenomenology is not derived phenomenologically going back to the matters themselves but by going back to the traditional idea of philosophy.’ (History of the Concept of Time: Prologomena, Martin Heidegger, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Indiana University Press, 1985, p107)
[92] Why Students of Heidegger Will Have to Read Emil Lask, Theodore Kisiel, in Heidegger’s Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretative Signposts, ed. Alfred Denker & Marion Heinz, Continuum, 2002, p132
[93] Although we rely in this paper upon Joan Stambaugh’s translation of Sein und Zeit, unlike Stambaugh we choose not to hyphenate Dasein in keeping with the original.
[94] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p2, (§1)
[95] Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” Division I, Hubert Dreyfus, MIT Press, 1991, p10
[96] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, Continuum, 2005, p60
[97] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p22, (§6)
[98] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, p60
[99] Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Indiana University Press, 2003, p12
[100] Unfortunately it is beyond the remit of this paper to grapple with the various amphibolies and aporias presented in Division II of SZ. This part of the paper is concerned specifically with the phenomenological method employed by Heidegger. This we hope will facilitate an auspicious comparison with the method of Hegelian phenomenology. We would though like to make a single comment with respect to the modus operandi of horizonal temporality qua ‘ground’. If we may call it a ‘ground’, horizonal temporality, functions for Heidegger, in a completely different fashion to the way the conception of ‘ground’ has traditionally done so in the great metaphysical systems. For Heidegger’s ‘ground’ discards both presence and permanence in favour of finitude and temporal occurrence. It is disclosed in and through the unfolding of finite transcendence i.e. Dasein. (Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, Daniela Vallega-Neu, p14)
[101] Being and Time, p2, (§1)
[102] Ibid, p2, (§1)
[103] Ibid, p3, (§1)
[104] The most general characteristics of objectively present objects and Dasein are called categories and existentials respectively. ‘Existentials and categories are the two fundamental possibilities of the characteristics of being. The being which corresponds to them requires different ways of primary interrogation. Beings are a who (existence) or else a what (objective presence in the broadest sense).’ (SZ, p42, §9)
[105] Ibid, p3, (§1)
[106] Being-in-the-World, Hubert Dreyfus, p11
[107] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p3, (§1)
[108] ‘To be ontological does not yet mean to develop ontology. Thus if we reserve the term ontology for the explicit, theoretical question of the meaning of beings, the intended ontological character of Dasein is to be designated as pre-ontological. That does not signify being simply ontical, but rather being in the manner of an understanding of being.’ (BT, p10, §4)
[109] Ibid, p6, (§2)
[110] Ibid, p4, (§2)
[111] Ibid, p3, (§1)
[112] Although thanks to the benefit of hindsight we know this a simplification of sorts, especially in light of Heidegger’s later work. This issue, however, is not essential to our preoccupations because firstly, we recognise the speciousness of imposing a makeshift continuity of terminology where this is none. And secondly, because we acknowledge the illegitimacy of importing connotations that harbour resonances in the later texts, into Heidegger’s earlier thought, even though Heidegger himself at times conveyed the movement and reconfiguration of his philosophy as a seamless transition, which it plainly was not.
[113] Ibid, p5-6, (§2)
[114] ‘The expression “phenomenology” signifies primarily a concept of method. It does not characterize the “what” of the objects of philosophical research in terms of their content but the “how” of such research.’ (BT, p24, §7)
[115] ‘We shall call the very being to which Dasein can relate in one way or another, and somehow always does relate, existence [Existenz]. And because the essential definition of this being cannot be accomplished by ascribing to it a “what” that specifies its material content, because its essence lies rather in the fact that it in each instance has to be its being as its own, the term Dasein, as a pure expression of being, has been chosen to designate this being.’ (BT, p10, §4)
[116] Ibid, p39, (§9)
[117] Ibid, p10, (§4)
[118] Ibid, p6, (§2)
[119] Ibid, p24, (§7)
[120] Ibid, p24, (§7)
[121] Ibid, p31, (§7)
[122] Ibid, p33, (§7)
[123] Ibid, p11 (§4)
[124] This is arguably confirmed by Hegel’s relegation of phenomenology to a mere chapter of the third volume of his Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, between anthropology and psychology.
[125] Ibid, p25, (§7)
[126] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[127] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[128] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[129] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[130] Ibid, p25, (§7)
[131] Introduction to Phenomenological Research, Martin Heidegger, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Indiana University Press, 2005, p28-29
[132] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p28, (§7)
[133] Ibid, p28, (§7)
[134] Heidegger importantly qualifies this: ‘Not every “speech” suits this mode of making manifest, in the sense of letting something be seen by indicating it.’ (BT, p29, §7)
[135] Ibid, p28-29, (§7)
[136] Ibid, p29, (§7)
[137] Hermeneia and Apophansis: The Early Heidegger on Aristotle, Thomas Sheehan, in Heidegger et idée de la phenomenology, Franco Volpi et al., Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988, p68
[138] Ibid, p68
[139] Ibid, p69
[140] Ibid, p69
[141] Ibid, p68-69
[142] Ibid, p69
[143] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p29, (§7)
[144] Hermeneia and Apophansis, Thomas Sheehan, p70
[145] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p33, (§7) (translation modified)
[146] Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn, David Couzens Hoy, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p172
[147] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p143-144, (§32) (translation modified)
[148] Being-in-the-World, Hubert Dreyfus, p212
[149] Ibid, p212
[150] Ibid, p4
[151] Ibid, p4
[152] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p148, (§33)
[153] Ibid, p136, (§31)
[154] Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language, Richard Rorty, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p347
[155] Being-in-the-World, Hubert Dreyfus, p92
[156] Ibid, p97
[157] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p77, (§18)
[158] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p5 (1.1)
[159] The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Martin Heidegger, translation, introduction, and lexicon by Albert Hofstadter, Revised Edition, Indiana University Press, 1982, p296
[160] Ibid, p296
[161] Ibid, p299
[162] Ibid, p297
[163] Ibid, pp297
[164] Dialectic as “Philosophical Embarrassment”: Heidegger’s Critique of Plato’s Method, Francisco Gonzalez, Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 40, no. 3 (2002), p365
[165] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p22, (§6)
[166] Heidegger actually abandons the naïve belief in a notion of a pure seeing, by the time of SZ, found in a lecture course several years earlier called Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919-1920). For a more detailed analysis see Dialectic as “Philosophical Embarrassment”: Heidegger’s Critique of Plato’s Method, Francisco Gonzalez, Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 40, no. 3 (2002). In 1925 he wrote ‘phenomenology does not wish to be either a philosophy of intuition or a philosophy of the immediate. It does not want to be a philosophy at all in this sense, but wants the subject matters themselves.’ (History of the Concept of Time: Prologomena, Martin Heidegger, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Indiana University Press, 1985, p88). Of course there remains the problem of determining whether he in fact escapes a form of intuitionism. We will try to show very briefly below how he manages to free himself from intuitionism, particularly by highlighting his emphasis on Dasein’s understanding of being and his rethinking of phenomenology in terms of phenomenological hermeneutics. But since this question, although important, is not central to our discussion of Heidegger’s phenomenological method, we will have to leave a more extensive treatment of this issue for another time.
[167] Henceforth, (OHF).
[168] Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, Martin Heidegger, trans. John van Buren, Indiana University Press, 1999, p37
[169] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Martin Heidegger, p22
[170] We are not suggesting here that the phenomenological movement was a unitary or even coherent one. But we will suppose certain family resemblances so that a comparison with Hegel’s method does not become impossible.
[171] This issue strangely still hasn’t been adequately addressed by the literature. See for example, Phenomenology: Hegel and Husserl, Quentin Lauer, in Beyond Epistemology: NewStudies in the Philosophy of Hegel, ed. Frederick G. Weiss, Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1974, p174-196; Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Robert R. Williams, Chapter 5.
[172] Towards a Definition of Philosophy: With a Lecture Course “On the Nature of the University and Academic Study,” Martin Heidegger, trans. Ted Sadler, Athlone Press, 2000
[173] From Intuition to Understanding: On Heidegger’s Transposition of Husserl’s Phenomenology, Theodore Kisiel, in Heidegger’s Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretative Signposts, ed. Alfred Denker & Marion Heinz, Continuum, 2002, p176
[174] Heidegger in GA Bd. 56/57, 100f, cited by Kisiel in ibid, p176
[175] Ibid, p176
[176] Ibid, p176
[177] Ibid, p176
[178] Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, ed. Allan Bloom, Assembled by Raymond Queneau, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr., Cornell University Press, 1980, p171
[179] From Intuition to Understanding, Theodore Kisiel, p176
[180] Husserl’s Phenomenology, Dan Zahavi, Stanford University Press, 2003, p28
[181] Ibid, p29
[182] From Intuition to Understanding, Theodore Kisiel, p181
[183] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p138, (§31) (translation modified)
© Sadegh Kabeer
Rendering the Abysmal: A Reading of Nietzsche’s Eternal Return of the Same
‘More and more misfortune follows
From the blind man’s indignation.
Or the hand of Fate directs it.
Who can say God’s purpose falters?
Time is awake, the Wheel is turning,
Lifting up and overthrowing.’[i]
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
‘The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.’[ii]
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
Introduction
This paper is an attempt to understand Nietzsche’s self-proclaimed ‘thought of thoughts’, the eternal return of the same. In those that have attempted to think through its vital demands and repercussions, it has evoked an entire spectrum of emotion, feeling, and reaction. It marks indelibly, instigating everything from trauma and aghastness, to marvel, and more often than not, complete bemusement. It has come to be seen by many as Nietzsche’s riddle to posterity. Our efforts in this paper will be dedicated to soliciting a viable narrative encompassing the meaning, intent and ramifications of the doctrine of eternal return; an idea that on the surface can be traced back all the way to Heraclitus and a plethora of pagan cosmologies.
Despite this ancient and noble lineage Nietzsche’s rendition of eternal return nonetheless continues to strike us with an inexplicable and overwhelming feeling of vertigo. Do we dare invoke a pretence to ‘intelligibility’ vis-à-vis so vertiginous a thought, a thought that many have claimed loses all sense as soon as precocious or desiccated minds embark upon the process of its elucidation and scholarly exposition? Is Nietzsche’s riddle one that will ever admit of a final solution, or was its fragmentary demand intended by its creator to resound throughout history endlessly renewing itself? Is part of its allure and attraction for so many philosophers, writers and poets but a corollary of this insolubility, an enigma that will forever remain enigmatic? Do we abandon it as merely a fanciful thought experiment or do we grant it a vaunted and esteemed place within Nietzsche’s philosophy?
This question as well as the other by no means negligible ones already posed, and with which we open this paper, have the power to render us mute before we have even started. However, just as others have fought in the past to utter that which seemingly defies comprehension, we must refuse to willingly muzzle ourselves due to fear of venturing into nebulous and unforgiving territory, and therefore endeavour as best we can to engage in a meaningful way with the idea of eternal return.
The Burden of the Past and the Possibility of Release
Before proceeding any further it should be noted that Nietzsche uses two different words when speaking of the eternal return of the same: die ewige Wiederkunft[1] and die ewige Wiederkehr.[2] Joan Stambaugh, for example, translates the former as ‘return’ and the latter as ‘recurrence’. Nietzsche often seems to use the terms interchangeably, but Stambaugh is surely correct to emphasize their different connotations.[iii] A ‘recurrence’ is something which has run its course and occurs again, whereas a return implies a turning about and going back to an original place or state.[iv] Return, according to Stambaugh, emphasizes a going back, a completion of movement, while ‘recurrence’ is closer to ‘repetition’ in meaning than is ‘return’.[v] A more contentious thesis of Stambaugh’s however, is that Wiederkehr tends to be adopted in the more nihilistic depictions of the doctrine and Wiederkunft in its more positive manifestations.[vi] Moreover, Wiederkunft is also the word used in German to speak of the Second Coming of Christ, while Wiederkehr has no such connotation.[vii] The relevance of this further meaning will become apparent in course of our discussion.
Perhaps the best place to start for the exegete of Nietzsche’s eternal return is the penultimate aphorism of Book IV of The Gay Science (1882). But before turning to the aphorism itself it might be helpful to dwell on the heading given to it by Nietzsche, The greatest weight. The leitmotiv of weight and gravity persists throughout Nietzsche’s various attempts to articulate his thinking of the eternal return and aptly symbolizes the difficulty involved in understanding, affirming and lastly incorporating this transformative thought which came to Nietzsche for the first time while in Sils-Maria during the summer of 1881, ‘6,000 feet above sea level and much higher above all human things!’[viii] Interestingly, and surely not by coincidence, Nietzsche’s nemesis throughout much of his oeuvre, although perhaps most explicitly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), is designated by him with the name ‘the spirit of gravity’, that spirit which strikes vengefulness, resentiment and hatred into the innermost reaches of man’s soul.
Gravity bears the connotations of weight, influence, and furthermore signifies something which is of a grave and serious character, as well as that attractive force, famously discovered by Sir Isaac Newton with the falling of an apple, by which all bodies tend to move towards the centre of the earth. The figurative ‘weight’ imparted to us by the spirit of gravity however paradoxically does not draw us down towards the earth but in lieu fosters our repugnance of the worldly, and the equally powerful desire for the unchanging beyond semblance, beyond those shadows that parade across the walls of the cave to which we are enchained in our tawdry and inconsequential bodily existences.
Indeed, Socrates in the Phaedo regards the modus operandi of philosophy to be the soul’s liberation from its earth bound vessel and prison. Philosophy is the process of learning how to die, what he calls ‘practicing death’.[ix] In one sense this seems antithetical to Nietzsche’s thought of eternal return. Is not the eternal return of the same what Nietzsche in fact intended as a panacea to the spirit of vengefulness, the countermovement to the advent of nihilism, and mankind’s revulsion of life? Socrates, Nietzsche’s longtime adversary and most wily foe, indefatigable exponent of the syllogism, seemingly represents everything Nietzsche was rebelling against. But in another sense their aims coincide. Like Socrates, Nietzsche wishes to reconcile us to the play of freedom and necessity that inexorably governs our lives and over which we more often than not have little control. This situation pains us greatly, promoting a confused and distorted response in which we mistakenly conflate the frustration of our wills with complete impotence and hopelessness – is this not the dominant meaning with which the word ‘fatalism’ has been invested in our culture? We will return to this point below and how Nietzsche believes it possible to ‘redeem’ our reality from its state of neglect and distrust. But for now let’s return to the figure of ‘weightiness’ and Nietzsche’s challenge of eternal return.
The sense of ‘weight’ that Nietzsche wishes to convey in the title of the aphorism The greatest weight is of a different order altogether to the aforementioned. The sense of ‘weight’ in this instance is supposed to underwrite the difficulty of the task with which Nietzsche, or better, life itself confronts us. The effort to reckon with this ‘great weight’ Nietzsche sees with admirable clarity will either decimate our ragged and feeble frames or will incite us to rise to the challenge, transmuting our contorted, disfigured and camel-like souls from the burden each one of us takes existence to be. Only thus will we find ourselves able to dance with an unparalleled lightness of spirit and innocence, free of the pernicious myths of prelapsarianism and ‘our’ casting out of heaven for a crime we did not commit and for which we can never sufficiently expiate. This dilemma i.e. either affirm or implode, is aptly presented by Nietzsche in the guise of a demon:
‘What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”’
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you or perhaps crush you. The question in each and everything, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight.’[x]
Nietzsche’s demonic exhortation in The greatest weight acts as sort of heterodox homily or even ultimatum to all of us and the kinds of lives we each have chosen to lead. He reckons himself to be presenting us with an explosive and life-altering vision by means of which we will become sovereign individuals, able to expand and diversify the boundaries and dimensions of our self-creation and existence. The ultimatum is plural, because it is posed to every one of us that comes after him, but at once it is also singular, because by means of its transfigurative power it provides the means of our becoming equal to that which befalls us. In this respect we must align our reading with that of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, who understands the ethical and existential import of the eternal return unlike any other. In his The Logic of Sense (1969) he enunciates a sentiment that he will never tire of reiterating; a sentiment which even reappears in the final work he coauthored with his friend and longstanding collaborator Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1991). In the former text Deleuze writes that either ‘ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.[3] To grasp whatever happens as unjust and unwarranted (it is always someone else’s fault) is, on the contrary, what renders our sores repugnant – veritable ressentiment, resentment of the event.’[xi]
In the 1881 sketch alluded to above, we find ourselves presented with a question posed in the wake of the revelation of eternal return.
‘If we are not to be overwhelmed by it, our compassion must not be great. Indifference needs to have worked away deep inside us…Even the misery of future humanity must not concern us. But the question is whether we still want to live: and how!’[xii]
The adduced quote should remind us that the eternal return qua existential and ethical imperative is supposed to impress itself upon and radicalise the present, and in this way differentiates itself from both the Platonic conception of anamnesis and the Proustian notion of voluntary memory. The point is to forget and thereby disencumber ourselves of the burden and crippling effects of the past. This does not mean that Nietzsche has a naïve attitude or distaste for the historical and sedimented origins of our knowledge and values. Any reader of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) can attest to the contrary. What Nietzsche endeavours to make palpable is the decision with which we are faced – a decision which will allow us to remedy the unabated decline of our life-affirming instincts, and so rescue us from self-destruction. A decision that is first and foremost disclosive in character, and which he envisions countermanding the propriative event of nihilism: eternal return is Nietzsche’s most potent ‘counterthought’ to this event.[xiii] In the next section we will briefly explicate Nietzsche’s thoughts regarding this event, which have unfortunately been terribly misunderstood, relegated to mere platitude and a party piece for the dilettante to recite and re-enact over cocktails. We are of course referring to aphorism 125 of The Gay Science, [xiv] where Nietzsche famously through the voice of a ‘madman’ proclaims that God is dead.
The Preponderance of an Error and the Necessity of Confrontation
In his reading of The madman, René Girard provocatively argues that God’s collective murder by mankind is the very condition of his continued existence among us.[xv] It is only after God’s death that his true exaltation through religious rites, ceremonies and festivals can begin. This is Girard’s attempt to reinscribe Nietzsche within the very tradition he so vehemently opposed. Although certainly provocative, Girard’s argument founders and collapses under the weight of its own misconceptions. Girard’s reading simply denies the advent of the age of nihilism and thus precludes a priori the possibility of surpassing its stranglehold on life. Girard remains within the grip of the ‘error’ of Christian moralizing, a hitherto useful and essential tool, facilitating human preservation and growth. This however has come with a cost from which we may well never recover. Girard is stuck in a rut from which he is incapable of extricating himself.
In what has come to be known as the Lenzer Heide Notebook written on the 10th of June 1887 Nietzsche argues that the intellect’s proclivity for error and reductionism rescued men from self-destruction. The Christian moral hypothesis ‘shielded man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life, from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of preservation – in sum, morality was the great antidote to practical and theoretical nihilism.’[xvi] The provenance of Nietzsche’s animosity toward the morality of metaphysics and the metaphysics of morality[xvii] is not the belief that they are a source of ‘error’ in any conventional sense of the term.[xviii] Error is vital sustenance for life.[xix] His relentless polemic is driven by his opposition to the ‘physiological’ degeneration and sickness this valuation of life disseminates.[xx] The malaise induced by the values such a Weltanschauung propagates is only further exacerbated by the delusive attitude which denies nihilism tout court without seeking to understand and allow for a meaningful encounter with what is an irremissible event. Its denial is just one more example of resentment toward that which befalls us. Even if we find the Heideggerian idea which interprets this event as a dispensation and twofold movement of unconcealment-concealment of being untenable and somewhat bizarre, there must be a recognition that there has been a historical development and shift in the last two hundred years or so whereby European modernity’s internal contradictions and tensions have torn the sacred out of its erstwhile position of comfort and into the realm of the profane. We must even include the cherished values of the Enlightenment in this process of profanation. This does not mean that they are simply dispensed with in the name of the ‘godforsaken chimeras’ of ‘relativism’ and ‘postmodernist free-play’ but rather provides us with the impetus to fundamentally rethink such values in light of what is a force majeure, instead of obdurately clinging to them at any price. An obvious example of such obduracy is the current battle between the Straussian brand of neo-conservatism which deems it necessary to preserve the myth of good versus evil in order to consolidate social cohesion and control, and the active nihilist cum religious zealot who wishes to dragoon mankind within the strictures of a theocratic polity on the basis of holy writ. A battle that can only lead to a single outcome: mutually assured destruction. The recent rise of religious fundamentalism is not a resurgence of the sacred along the lines of a return of the repressed, but rather confirmation of the process of desacralization inaugurated by the death of God/advent of nihilism, whereby the loftiest and most esteemed values devalued themselves. Fundamentalism is a symptom of this messy and uneven process of devaluation which continues to be resisted and contested by an impulse so intractable that it will perhaps never be able to be conclusively extirpated.
To return specifically to Nietzsche himself, we should take note that he was fundamentally opposed to the idea of the eternal recurrence being taught ‘like a sudden religion!’ He stressed that it would have to ‘sink in slowly’ and that ‘entire generations’ would have ‘to build on it and become fruitful – so that it becomes a great tree overshadowing all humanity to come.’ He continues, ‘What are the couple of millennia in which Christianity has survived! For the most powerful thought many millennia are needed – long, long must it be small and powerless!’[xxi] The eternal recurrence is to act as a new ‘centre of gravity’ for mankind and the prime locus for the revaluation of all values hitherto, not contra Girard the reinstatement of Christendom.
Temporality and Redemption
To recapitulate: the dilemma we (post)moderns face is first whether we still what to live and if so how? This is humanity’s defining question in the aftermath of Nietzsche’s revelation of eternal return and the death of God.[xxii] All is proclaimed ‘In vain!’ and we are led to ask ourselves ‘‘Are not all “values just decoys that prolong the comedy without ever getting closer to a denouement?’’[xxiii] Enduring the belief that all is ‘In vain’ is ‘the most paralysing thought, especially when one realises one’s being fooled and yet has no power to prevent oneself being fooled.’[xxiv] With God’s murder the eternal recurrence becomes ‘the most extreme form of nihilism’; one is compelled to will ‘nothingness (‘meaninglessness’) eternally!’[xxv] If everything has already been, and if everything is destined to return just as it has happened innumerable times before, isn’t everything, in the final analysis, completely and utterly indifferent?[xxvi] The eternal recurrence is an attempt, on the part of Nietzsche, to make us cognizant of the eternal temporality of the world and so eviscerate our belief in the chimeras of an afterlife and history as a teleological process.[xxvii] His objective is to bring about the convergence of eternity and temporality. Time becomes eternal as the eternal recurrence.[xxviii] This point is not unproblematic and will be elaborated upon more fully below. If our analysis were to end here, we might conclude that the doctrine of the eternal recurrence is a fruitless venture, a useless idea that exacerbates the very condition Nietzsche had sought to overcome.
Nietzsche however, doesn’t intend for us to stop here. As we have already seen, The greatest weight emphasizes the transformative power of the thought of eternal return: ‘If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you or perhaps crush you.’ Keith Ansell-Pearson translates this sentence, ‘If you incorporate this thought within you, amongst your other thoughts, it will transform you.’[xxix] Nietzsche exhorts his readers to incorporate the eternal recurrence.[xxx] The ‘heaviest weight,’ ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would bear down upon every one of our actions. This thought’s incorporation would either destroy us, which the preponderance of nihilism would do anyway,[xxxi] or transform us beyond recognition.[xxxii] We would become capable of affirming our singular life ad infinitum, thereby impressing upon it ‘the image of eternity.’[xxxiii] One possible interpretation is that Nietzsche is presenting us with a new ethical imperative or existential precept, exhorting us to live our lives ‘as if’ every moment were eternal because it recurs eternally.[xxxiv] A kind of hypothetical imperative that will ensure we ‘remain faithful to the earth,’ and devoid of the lust for the otherworldly that has characterized all of Western metaphysics hitherto.[xxxv]
But an important question must be asked – is not this desire for eternity and temporality to converge the by-product of a residual resentment on the part of Nietzsche against human finitude and a more radical conception of temporality which fully divests itself of all nostalgia for infinitude and the immortal? And isn’t the overhuman but the upshot of this same resentful desire Jean-Paul Sartre would later designate as characteristic of the very structure of human subjectivity, the desire to be an in-itself-for-itself, a highly sophisticated and spiritualised form of cruelty and self-laceration?[xxxvi] Why does Nietzsche wish to preserve the effulgence of eternity? The answer in nuce is that it is only by means of the motif of eternity that he is able to truly effectuate a transformation of hitherto unforeseen magnitude and power, allowing mankind to truly embark upon the path of self-legislation and autarky. It is in this manner that Nietzsche rethinks and deepens the value of autonomy, which Kant took to be essential to moral action.
The unpublished cosmological proofs found in The Will to Power,[4] haven’t been very helpful in dispelling the charge of fatalism. These proofs presented in that text generally appear to be more indebted to the nihilistic understanding of the doctrine Nietzsche desired most to eschew, and which is convincingly rebutted by Zarathustra in On the Vision and the Riddle.[xxxvii]
‘“Behold this gateway, dwarf!” I continued. “It has two faces. Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long lane stretches back for an eternity. And the long lane out there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths; they offend each other face to face; and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: ‘Moment.’ But whoever would follow one of them, on and on, farther and farther – do you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?”
“All that is straight lies,” the dwarf murmured contemptuously. “All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.”
“You spirit of gravity,” I said angrily, “do not make things too easy for yourself! Or I shall let you crouch where you are crouching, lamefoot; and it was I that carried you to this height.’[xxxviii]
Time isn’t a circle as the repugnant little dwarf so complacently replies. The dwarf’s retort is little more than an obscene parody of the Christian idea of divine providence. For Nietzsche, everything that happens is ineluctably lost in the flow of time.[xxxix] Birth and death are the boundaries of the singular path we each travel.[xl] Human life is inescapably transient. Even gods must one day meet their demise. In the figurative gateway named Augenblick, literally the ‘glance of the eye,’ we become temporally distended, stretched between the raptures of past, future, and present. However, lest we forget Nietzsche reminds us that the supreme act of affirmation demands that despite this temporal distension we strive to impress the ‘image’ of eternity upon our lives at every moment, every here and now. The eternal and the fleeting converge in this sovereign act of affirmation. As Eugen Fink has persuasively argued, Nietzsche’s achievement is to have conceived an eternity of the transient repudiating any pretension to an eternity beyond time.[xli] He conceives time as eternal through the fusion of the metaphysical oppositions of transience/perdurance and singularity/recurrence.[xlii] Only after the interpenetration of these seemingly antithetical concepts has been fully assimilated can the exaltation of immanent life begin.
To affirm this eternity of suffering one requires what Nietzsche calls ‘great health’.[xliii] This metastable condition is beautifully described by Deleuze in the final work he authored before his death in 1995, Essays Critical and Clinical (1993), where he argues that literature appears as an enterprise of health:
‘…not that the writer would necessarily be in good health…but he possesses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible. The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums.’[xliv]
According to Nietzsche this man of ‘great health’ will inaugurate ‘the redemption of this reality’.[xlv]
‘This man of the future will redeem us not just from the ideal held up till now, but also from the things which will have to arise from it, from the great nausea, the will to nothingness, from nihilism, that stroke of midday and of great decision[5] which makes the will free again, which gives earth its purpose and man his hope again, this Antichrist and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness – he must come one day…’[xlvi]
Nietzsche recognized as does Deleuze ‘that we no longer believe in this world.’[xlvii] But Nietzsche held that the past, present and future of this world can be redeemed. Man one day will finally be free ‘to believe, not in a different world, but in a link between man and world’.[xlviii] He will only then be rid of his revengeful thrashing against the inexorable ‘it was’. ‘‘It was’ – that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy.’[xlix] The world is not straightforwardly amenable to out wills, for we are not children of the gods akin to Dionysus and Hercules. One of the consequences of this perceived impotence is that we revile time and perpetually yearn to turn back the clock while the present flits by lost to us forever, for which we in turn rebuke the present, fuelling a vicious circle of resentment and emasculation.
In What is Called Thinking? (1952), as well as in the slightly later, Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? (1953), Heidegger contends that Nietzsche’s association of revenge and time is a corollary of his recognition of something that we have already spoken of at some length, the will’s revulsion at the essence of temporality. Heidegger is also quick to add that the vengefulness in question is by no means psychological, but of a metaphysical ilk.[l] ‘The temporal is what must pass away…This is the representational idea of time that characterizes the concept of ‘time’ which is standard throughout the metaphysics of the West.’[li] The will is thoroughly imbibed with resentiment towards time’s passing and what has passed away. ‘The revulsion turns not against the mere passing, but against that passing away which allows what has passed to be only in the past, which lets it freeze in the finality of this rigor mortis.’[lii] The tradition since time immemorial has told us that true being exists beyond time, while that which exists within the flow of time dissipates and fades into what Plato called mē on, or non-being.[liii] The realm of the mundane is cast into a state of degradation while the supra-temporal is absolutized. This is the epitome of the will’s ‘deepseated revenge’ toward time.[liv] Nietzsche unambiguously sets himself up against this false dichotomy. Rather than simply invert the priority of the supersensuous in favour of the sensible, Nietzsche in a pithy and often quoted section of Twilight of the Idols entitled How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth, abolishes this distinction altogether.[lv] The reason why he abjures such a distinction is due to his uncompromising refusal to be co-opted by the reified methods of metaphysicians with their penchant for categorization and compartmentalizing. Nietzsche chooses to rely upon a different tack. He decides to redraw and creatively reinscribe the channels through which he is able to broach contact with the flux of the real.
Along similar lines, Alphonso Lingis has pointed out that Nietzsche views the entire history of Western metaphysics as characterized by its debasement of transience and transitory beings, and therefore stands as an indictment of this life which we live and this world we inhabit.[lvi] The commentaries of both Heidegger and Lingis reiterate the crux of the eternal recurrence: it is first and foremost an attempt on the part of Nietzsche to reconfigure mankind’s relation and existential comportment towards the all-encompassing nature of temporality and its brute uncompromising imposition upon our lives.
Pieces of Fate
The thought of eternal return which has left lesser mortals hopelessly mortified becomes inseparably bound to the will of the overman. The ‘heaviest weight’ is assimilated, broken down, digested and inscribed into the overhuman’s attitude and comportment toward the world, time and existence. In other words, it becomes constitutive of his being-in-the-world. Now there is no need to answer with an ecstatic ‘Yes’ after the demon’s incantation, because the affirmative disposition has been internalized, rendering the eternal recurrence superfluous as a conscious proposition bearing down upon all of our actions. It ceases to take the form of a hypothetical imperative or thought-experiment which must be repeated to oneself when undertaking an action. The overhuman’s forgetting of this original affirmation, which Nietzsche calls the ‘sacred “Yes”’ of the child,[lvii] is integral to the efficacy of incorporation. Only now are we able to broach Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati or ‘love of fate’. In the opening aphorism of Book IV of The Gay Science Nietzsche declares:
‘I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.’[lviii]
This aphorism expresses a desire still unrealized – the desire ‘to see as beautiful what is necessary’. Theodor W. Adorno in his Minima Moralia (1951) saw this formula as a recipe for political quietism and accommodation to the powers that be, no matter how abhorrent or oppressive.[lix] Adorno’s misunderstanding lies in the analysis of amor fati in isolation. When considered alongside the eternal recurrence, ‘the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world affirming individual’ we are led in a very different direction. One who loves fate ‘has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but…wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting de capo not just to himself but to the whole play and performance.’ He does this though because it is none other than himself ‘fundamentally…who needs precisely this performance – and makes it necessary: because again and again he needs himself – and makes himself necessary.’[lx] This is the central point. The advocate of amor fati shouts de capo because he needs the recurrence of the same and so generates the necessity of its return. He needs the recurrence of the same because it has been infused with the spirit of affirmation, and makes it necessary in affirming its existence. Here man becomes god as a vicious circle.[lxi] In other words, the overman attains the identity of his soul with fate.[lxii]
Deleuze interprets the eternal recurrence in a similar vein, but should be read cautiously as an interpreter of Nietzsche because of his own Spinozist inclinations. He conceives the eternal recurrence as a selective ontology.[lxiii] For Deleuze ‘the eternal return…has a double aspect: it is the universal being of becoming, but the universal being of becoming ought to belong to a single becoming. Only becoming-active has a being which is the being of the whole of becoming…as selective ontology, it affirms this being of becoming as the “self-affirming” of becoming-active.’[lxiv] The eternal return for Deleuze is a ‘centrifugal wheel’ that expels all reactive forces in its wake; [lxv] it is the act of repetition that selects and saves those activities wilfully affirmed; afterwards even laziness, stupidity and cowardice cease to be recognizable.[lxvi]
Despite its originality and conviction there is a genuine problem with Deleuze’s reading. It renders the eternal return superfluous and drains it of its tragic pathos, the very element which makes the eternal return so difficult and formidable to incorporate, and that sends chills down our spines due to the untold horror with which such a scenario hits us. The same maligned existence repeating itself ad infinitum without hope of eternal bliss or even the quietude of death. The conception of eternal return in terms of an ontological principle of individuation rooted in selective affirmation, whereby that which is chosen to be affirmed is concomitantly preserved and transmuted belittles the almost impossible demand to affirm that which pains us and leaves us inconsolable. Exactly because it is selective there is absolutely no incentive or inevitability to our reliving the tribulations, failures and daily agonies we have previously experienced. Unless we are up to this task of affirming just that which appears to us as beyond affirmation and yet nevertheless irrecusably impresses its affirmation upon us, the very notion of affirmation is without substance, and becomes merely a banal and hollow injunction of the super ego to partake in its own indulgence and satiation.[6]
Affirming the Tragic Beyond Spiritualized Cruelty
The almost insurmountable difficultly of incorporating eternal return should be abundantly clear. The suffocating burden of infusing every one of our actions with its resonance is aptly depicted in the horror such a prospect held for its creator. We have, for better or worse, been provided with an account of Nietzsche’s early reactions to the eternal recurrence in his communication of the doctrine to his friend and unrequited love, Lou Salomé:
‘Unforgettable for me are those hours in which he first confided to me his secret, whose inevitable fulfilment and validation he anticipated with shudders. Only with a quiet voice and with all signs of deepest horror did he speak about this secret. Life, in fact, produced such suffering in him that the certainty of an eternal return of life had to mean something horrifying to him. The quintessence of the teaching of eternal recurrence, later constructed by Nietzsche as a shining apotheosis to life, formed such a deep contrast to his own painful feelings about life that it gives us intimations of being an uncanny mask.’[lxvii]
Salomé argues that after his conception of the eternal recurrence Nietzsche became transfigured. His contradictions were not only heightened to an unbearable degree but he became irreparably torn between an unbridled loathing and an equally powerful desire to embrace the eternal recurrence of the same.[lxviii] Salomé concludes that madness was the only logical possibility for such a fractured and tormented soul. But these ad hominem remarks miss the point. Nietzsche’s credo that ‘Pain does not count as an objection to life’ flies in the face of Salomé’s diagnosis.[lxix] Rather than circumventing or merely resigning oneself to suffer existence interminably à la Schopenhauer, the task is to assimilate this very pain and suffering that has destroyed and crippled so many; the ‘free spirit’ is to ‘adopt a child’s attitude towards what used to constitute the seriousness of existence.’[lxx] The most solemn concepts of ‘God’ and ‘sin’ ‘will seem no more important to us than a child’s toy and a child’s pain seem to an old man, – and perhaps “the old man” will then need another toy and another pain, – still enough of a child, an eternal child!’[lxxi] This new existential comportment of the self evinces what is most essential in Nietzsche’s conception of the tragic. Nietzsche’s distinct and profound understanding of the tragedy of existence is perhaps the deepest of the chasms separating him from his predecessor Arthur Schopenhauer, and is visible as early as his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). For Nietzsche it is a matter not of reconciliation or resignation, but as we have seen, of redemption immanently procured.
‘The type of a spirit that takes into itself and redeems the contradictions and questionable aspects of existence…Dionysus versus the ‘Crucified’: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom – it is a difference in the meaning of it.[7] Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation…One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering:[8] whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering:[9] he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying to do so. The Christian denies even the happiest lot on earth: he is sufficiently weak, poor, disinherited to suffer from life in whatever form he meets it. The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.’[lxxii]
What separates the ‘Christian’[10] from the tragic man is what they take to be the meaning of their suffering and its significance within the greater scheme of things. For Nietzsche once again this is a matter of incorporation. The metabolism of the ‘Christian’ is unable to digest ‘the contradictions and questionable aspects of existence’ so he strives to negate this world and to seek salvation in another residing in ‘the beyond’. For the tragic man ‘adventure, danger and even pain…become a necessity’.[lxxiii] The tragic hero, the exemplar being Sophocles’ Oedipus, is defined by the free acceptance of his determination by fate. Heroically bearing the truth of one’s finitude is an act of affirmation that allows him to achieve something like authenticity, or even better, sovereign empowerment.
Conclusion
For Nietzsche, the doctrine of eternal recurrence stands opposed to the Day of Judgment, when eternal bliss and damnation will be handed down from on high.[lxxiv] ‘Have I been understood? – Dionysus against the Crucified…’[lxxv] The Wiederkunft or ‘Second Coming’ of the spirit of great health, the overhuman, redeems mankind from two millennia of enslavement under the yoke of vengefulness and bad conscience. With the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, God was ‘paying himself back’. God was ‘the only one able to redeem man from what, to man himself, has become irredeemable – the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor’.[lxxvi] The overhuman articulates a new affirmative praxis through his incorporation of the eternal recurrence of the same. Man’s redemption ceases to be beyond his grasp and that is why Nietzsche holds the Dionysian ideal of the eternal recurrence to be antithetical to the Day of Judgement: when man emerges as truly sovereign he becomes entitled to judge for himself.[lxxvii]
The Dionysian philosopher flatly repudiates the loathsome desire for time’s end. The eternal recurrence of the same becomes synonymous with ‘the innocence of becoming’.[lxxviii] Each time our life repeats itself just as it was a thousand times before. But with each repetition we are different; each time we have incorporated the lessons of the previous recurrence, but have forgotten it in our innocence. This in turn affects the repetition of the same. Everything is the same and yet we have changed, which provokes everything to thus be renewed and invested with a novelty which had been absent hitherto. Upon the arrival of the final figuration of the overhuman the condemnation of man and existence itself will be banished once and for all – the overhuman will partake in his own redemption and thereby become ‘the meaning of the earth.’[lxxix] Only now does the final metamorphosis proclaimed by Zarathustra take hold: the lion becomes a child.[lxxx] The overman, guardian of the sacred ‘Yes’, wills his own will in the creation of new values so as to emerge a circulus vitiosus deus;[11] what Nietzsche calls elsewhere ‘the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul.’[lxxxi]
Error, falsehood, delusion, the passions etc… are not to be blindly swept aside – they are the stuff of knowledge and the well-spring of human civilization. The efforts of instrumental reason to placate and deprive nature of its abundance and vivacity are a road to nowhere, a veritable cul-de-sac. Its advocacy of an anthropomorphic and lopsided vision acts as merely another mask for the insatiable striving of the human organism as it assimilates alien forces in the quest for stable and secure conditions for the production and reproduction of life. Human beings however are moving apace toward self-destruction as they continue to live in thraldom to resentiment and bad conscience. Nietzsche admonishes us to cultivate counterdispositions in order to undercut the malign drives and habits responsible for the preponderance of those values which hasten and ensure the degeneration of the most vital and life-affirming instincts.[lxxxii] These cultural configurations must be defanged and set upon a new course.
Nietzsche sees the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same as this possibility. It is to endow the earth with a new centre of gravity, breaking it out of its aimless stupor and select the composition of future (over)humanity. This task is not for the faint of heart. He tells us that we must first deracinate from each one of our souls every trace of compassion and pity before we will be able to proceed. It seems, almost despite himself Nietzsche has transposed an incarnation of the Day of Judgement into the immanent flow of time. ‘Damnation’ is stripped of the eternal – those not up to the challenge are instead assured their extinction – while those ‘free spirits’ who manage to incorporate the eternal recurrence will steer the course along which future generations will continue to develop and build:
‘Future history: more and more this thought will be victorious – and those who do not believe in it must ultimately die out in accordance with their nature! Only those who consider their existence to be capable of eternal repetition will remain: with such ones, though, a state is possible which no utopian has yet reached!’[lxxxiii]
Bibliography
1) Adorno, Theodor W., Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso, 1978
2) Allison, David B. ed., The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, MIT Press, 1985
3) Ansell-Pearson, Keith, How to Read Nietzsche, Granta Books, 2005
4) Ansell-Pearson, Keith, The Eternal Return of the Overhuman: The Weightiest Knowledge and the Abyss of Light, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 30, 2005
5) Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938 - 1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, 2003
6) Deleuze, Gilles, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman, Zone Books, 2001
7) Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Continuum, 1986
8) Deleuze, Gilles, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco, Verso, 1998
9) Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta, Athlone Press, 2000
10) Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester & Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, Continuum, 2001
11) Fink, Eugen, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, trans. Goetz Richter, Continuum, 2003
12) Girard, René, The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004
13) Haar, Michel, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans. Michael Gendre, State University of New York Press, 1996
14) Heidegger, Martin, What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray, Harper & Row, 1968
15) Heidegger, Martin, Nietzsche: Volumes I and II: The Will to Power as Art/The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell, Harper Collins, 1991
16) Krell, David Farrell, Infectious Nietzsche, Indiana University Press, 1996
17) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1992
18) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann & Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge University Press, 2002
19) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Modern Library Edition, 1995
20) Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge University Press, 1994
21) Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kauffman & R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1968
22) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. & trans. Daniel Breazeale, Humanity Books, 1979
23) Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson & Duncan Large, Blackwell Publishing, 2006
24) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1990
25) Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kauffman, Vintage Books, 1974
26) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge, Cambridge University Press, 2003
27) Plato, The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant, Introduction and Notes by Harold Tarrant, Penguin Books, 1993
28) Richardson, John, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, Oxford University Press, 2004
29) Safranski, Rüdiger, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch, Granta Books, 2002
30) Salomé, Lou, Nietzsche, trans. Siegfried Mandel, University of Illinois Press, 2001
31) Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, Routledge, 2003
32) Sophocles, The Theban Plays: King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, trans. E. F. Watling, Penguin Books, 1974
33) Stambaugh, Joan, All Joy Wants Eternity, Nietzsche Studien, 33 (2004)
34) Stambaugh, Joan, Nietzsche’s Thought of the Eternal Return, Joan Stambaugh, John Hopkins University Press, 1972
35) Vattimo, Gianni, Nietzsche: An Introduction, trans. Nicholas Martin, Athlone Press, 2002
[1] From the verb kommen, to come.
[2] From the verb kehren, to turn.
[3] Emphasis added.
[4] See in particular aphorisms 1062, 1063, 1064, 1066 and 1067 of The Will to Power (p546-50). These have often been read as Nietzsche’s attempt to furnish the eternal recurrence with scientific legitimacy. This matter will not be addressed here due to issues of space and relevance.
[5] Emphasis added.
[6] We are here being intentionally polemical and more than a little unfair to Deleuze in order to make a point that will be extended in the following section: the near impossibility of the demand placed upon us by eternal return. We have already noted the significance of Deleuze’s meditation on the ethics of amor fati – our objections, however, could perhaps be assuaged if we attempted to think Deleuze’s ethics of amor fati in tandem with his conception of eternal return qua selective ontology. Unfortunately we are unable to pursue this matter any further here, but it should nevertheless give us food for thought.
[7] Emphasis added.
[8] Emphasis added.
[9] Emphasis added.
[10] Let’s take Nietzsche’s ‘Christian’ to be merely an archetype of a far more general metaphysical and moral Weltanschauung.
[11] God as a vicious circle.
[i] The Theban Plays: King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Sophocles, trans. E. F. Watling, Penguin Books, 1974, p115
[ii] Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938 - 1940, Walter Benjamin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, 2003, p391
[iii] All Joy Wants Eternity, Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche Studien, 33 (2004), p337
[iv] Nietzsche’s Thought of the Eternal Return, Joan Stambaugh, John Hopkins University Press, 1972, p30
[v] Ibid, p30
[vi] All Joy Wants Eternity, Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche Studien,33 (2004), p340
[vii] The Eternal Return of the Overhuman: The Weightiest Knowledge and the Abyss of Light, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 30, 2005, p20 n1
[viii] The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson & Duncan Large, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, p238
[ix] The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Plato, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant, Introduction and Notes by Harold Tarrant, Penguin Books, 1993, p140
[x] The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kauffman, Vintage Books, 1974, p273-4
[xi] The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze, trans. Mark Lester & Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, Continuum, 2001, p149
[xii] The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p239
[xiii] Nietzsche, Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Martin Heidegger, trans. David Farrell Krell, Harper Collins, 1991, p172
[xiv] The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, p182 (125)
[xv] The Girard Reader, René Girard, ed. James G. Williams, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004, p257
[xvi] Writings from the Late Notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p116
[xvii] The phrase is Keith Ansell-Pearson’s. See The Eternal Return of the Overhuman, Keith Ansell-Pearson, p4
[xviii] Nietzsche: An Introduction, Gianni Vattimo, trans. Nicholas Martin, Athlone Press, 2002, p126
[xix] ‘There is only One world and it is false cruel, contradictory, seductive, meaningless…A world so constitutes is the real world…We need lies in order to conquer this reality, this ‘truth’, that means in order to live […] Metaphysics, morality, religion, science – these are considered merely as various forms of lying: with their aid, life can be believed in. ‘Life should inspire trust’: presented in these terms, the task is immense. In order to solve it, man must naturally be a liar; more than anything else, he must be an artist […] Metaphysics, morality, religion, science – all simply monstrous products of his will to art. (N Autumn 1887 – March 1888, V III.2 435, 11[415])’. Nietzsche quoted in Nietzsche: An Introduction, Gianni Vattimo, p135-6
[xx] Nietzsche: An Introduction, Gianni Vattimo, p127
[xxi] The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p240
[xxii] The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, p181 (125)
[xxiii] Writings from the Late Notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, p117
[xxiv] Ibid, p117
[xxv] Ibid, p118
[xxvi] Nietzsche and Metaphysics, Michel Haar, trans. Michael Gendre, State University of New York Press, 1996, p29
[xxvii] Nietzsche’s Philosophy, Eugen Fink, trans. Goetz Richter, Continuum, 2003, p80
[xxviii] Ibid, p80
[xxix] How to Read Nietzsche, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Granta Books, 2005, p80
[xxx] ‘If you incorporate the thought of thoughts within yourself, it will transform you. The question in everything that you want to do: “is it the case that I want to do it countless time?” is the greatest weight.’ – The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p239
[xxxi] Writings from the Late Notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, p119-20
[xxxii] At another point Nietzsche distances himself from the threats of eternal damnation so often made from the pulpit asserting that those whom ignore the eternal recurrence will suffer no consequences as a result. ‘This doctrine is mild in its treatment of those who do not believe in it; it has no hells or threats. Anyone who does not believe has a fleeting life in the consciousness of it.’ – The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p240
[xxxiii] Ibid, p240
[xxxiv] Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Rüdiger Safranski, trans. Shelley Frisch, Granta Books, 2002, p231; There is a great deal of textual evidence to support such a reading. For example, ‘We want to experience a work of art over and over again! We should fashion our life in this way, so that we have the same wish with each of its parts!’ – The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p241
[xxxv] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, p13
[xxxvi]Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, Routledge, 2003, p636
[xxxvii] Eugen Fink presents a similar argument in his Nietzsche’s Philosophy, p77
[xxxviii] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, p158
[xxxix] Nietzsche’s Philosophy, Eugen Fink, p91
[xl] Ibid, p91
[xli] Ibid, p91
[xlii] Ibid, p91
[xliii] Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, p71
[xliv] Essays Critical and Clinical, Gilles Deleuze, trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco, Verso, 1998, p3
[xlv] On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche, p71
[xlvi] Ibid, p70
[xlvii] Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta, Athlone Press, 2000, p171
[xlviii] Ibid, p170
[xlix] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, p139
[l] Nietzsche, Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Martin Heidegger, p221
[li] What is Called Thinking?, Martin Heidegger, trans. J. Glenn Gray, Harper & Row, 1968, p99
[lii] Ibid, p103
[liii] Nietzsche, Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Martin Heidegger, p225
[liv] Ibid, p225
[lv] Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1990, p51
[lvi] The Will to Power, Alphonso Lingis, The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison, MIT Press, 1985, p58
[lvii] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, p27
[lviii] The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, p223 (276)
[lix] Minima Moralia, Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso, 1978, p98
[lx] Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, p50-1 (56)
[lxi] Ibid, p51 (56)
[lxii] All Joy Wants Eternity, Joan Stambaugh, p341; see also The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, p535 (1041), part of which is quoted in Stambaugh’s paper.
[lxiii] Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Continuum, 1986, p72; there is certainly evidence for such a reading, ‘Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!).’ – The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, p545 (1058)
[lxiv] Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, p72
[lxv] Immanence: Essays on A Life, Gilles Deleuze, trans. Anne Boyman, Zone Books, 2001, p91
[lxvi] Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, p69
[lxvii] Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, University of Illinois Press, 2001, p130
[lxviii] Ibid, p130
[lxix] Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, p70
[lxx] The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p239
[lxxi] Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, p51 (57)
[lxxii] The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, p542 (1052)
[lxxiii] On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche, p71
[lxxiv] Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, p50 (56)
[lxxv] Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, p104
[lxxvi] On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche, p68
[lxxvii] Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, p104
[lxxviii] The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, 416 (787)
[lxxix] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, p13
[lxxx] Ibid, p27
[lxxxi] The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, p513 (983)
[lxxxii] Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, John Richardson, Oxford University Press, 2004, p102
[lxxxiii] The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p241
© Sadegh Kabeer
From the blind man’s indignation.
Or the hand of Fate directs it.
Who can say God’s purpose falters?
Time is awake, the Wheel is turning,
Lifting up and overthrowing.’[i]
Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus
‘The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. And this enemy has never ceased to be victorious.’[ii]
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History
Introduction
This paper is an attempt to understand Nietzsche’s self-proclaimed ‘thought of thoughts’, the eternal return of the same. In those that have attempted to think through its vital demands and repercussions, it has evoked an entire spectrum of emotion, feeling, and reaction. It marks indelibly, instigating everything from trauma and aghastness, to marvel, and more often than not, complete bemusement. It has come to be seen by many as Nietzsche’s riddle to posterity. Our efforts in this paper will be dedicated to soliciting a viable narrative encompassing the meaning, intent and ramifications of the doctrine of eternal return; an idea that on the surface can be traced back all the way to Heraclitus and a plethora of pagan cosmologies.
Despite this ancient and noble lineage Nietzsche’s rendition of eternal return nonetheless continues to strike us with an inexplicable and overwhelming feeling of vertigo. Do we dare invoke a pretence to ‘intelligibility’ vis-à-vis so vertiginous a thought, a thought that many have claimed loses all sense as soon as precocious or desiccated minds embark upon the process of its elucidation and scholarly exposition? Is Nietzsche’s riddle one that will ever admit of a final solution, or was its fragmentary demand intended by its creator to resound throughout history endlessly renewing itself? Is part of its allure and attraction for so many philosophers, writers and poets but a corollary of this insolubility, an enigma that will forever remain enigmatic? Do we abandon it as merely a fanciful thought experiment or do we grant it a vaunted and esteemed place within Nietzsche’s philosophy?
This question as well as the other by no means negligible ones already posed, and with which we open this paper, have the power to render us mute before we have even started. However, just as others have fought in the past to utter that which seemingly defies comprehension, we must refuse to willingly muzzle ourselves due to fear of venturing into nebulous and unforgiving territory, and therefore endeavour as best we can to engage in a meaningful way with the idea of eternal return.
The Burden of the Past and the Possibility of Release
Before proceeding any further it should be noted that Nietzsche uses two different words when speaking of the eternal return of the same: die ewige Wiederkunft[1] and die ewige Wiederkehr.[2] Joan Stambaugh, for example, translates the former as ‘return’ and the latter as ‘recurrence’. Nietzsche often seems to use the terms interchangeably, but Stambaugh is surely correct to emphasize their different connotations.[iii] A ‘recurrence’ is something which has run its course and occurs again, whereas a return implies a turning about and going back to an original place or state.[iv] Return, according to Stambaugh, emphasizes a going back, a completion of movement, while ‘recurrence’ is closer to ‘repetition’ in meaning than is ‘return’.[v] A more contentious thesis of Stambaugh’s however, is that Wiederkehr tends to be adopted in the more nihilistic depictions of the doctrine and Wiederkunft in its more positive manifestations.[vi] Moreover, Wiederkunft is also the word used in German to speak of the Second Coming of Christ, while Wiederkehr has no such connotation.[vii] The relevance of this further meaning will become apparent in course of our discussion.
Perhaps the best place to start for the exegete of Nietzsche’s eternal return is the penultimate aphorism of Book IV of The Gay Science (1882). But before turning to the aphorism itself it might be helpful to dwell on the heading given to it by Nietzsche, The greatest weight. The leitmotiv of weight and gravity persists throughout Nietzsche’s various attempts to articulate his thinking of the eternal return and aptly symbolizes the difficulty involved in understanding, affirming and lastly incorporating this transformative thought which came to Nietzsche for the first time while in Sils-Maria during the summer of 1881, ‘6,000 feet above sea level and much higher above all human things!’[viii] Interestingly, and surely not by coincidence, Nietzsche’s nemesis throughout much of his oeuvre, although perhaps most explicitly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), is designated by him with the name ‘the spirit of gravity’, that spirit which strikes vengefulness, resentiment and hatred into the innermost reaches of man’s soul.
Gravity bears the connotations of weight, influence, and furthermore signifies something which is of a grave and serious character, as well as that attractive force, famously discovered by Sir Isaac Newton with the falling of an apple, by which all bodies tend to move towards the centre of the earth. The figurative ‘weight’ imparted to us by the spirit of gravity however paradoxically does not draw us down towards the earth but in lieu fosters our repugnance of the worldly, and the equally powerful desire for the unchanging beyond semblance, beyond those shadows that parade across the walls of the cave to which we are enchained in our tawdry and inconsequential bodily existences.
Indeed, Socrates in the Phaedo regards the modus operandi of philosophy to be the soul’s liberation from its earth bound vessel and prison. Philosophy is the process of learning how to die, what he calls ‘practicing death’.[ix] In one sense this seems antithetical to Nietzsche’s thought of eternal return. Is not the eternal return of the same what Nietzsche in fact intended as a panacea to the spirit of vengefulness, the countermovement to the advent of nihilism, and mankind’s revulsion of life? Socrates, Nietzsche’s longtime adversary and most wily foe, indefatigable exponent of the syllogism, seemingly represents everything Nietzsche was rebelling against. But in another sense their aims coincide. Like Socrates, Nietzsche wishes to reconcile us to the play of freedom and necessity that inexorably governs our lives and over which we more often than not have little control. This situation pains us greatly, promoting a confused and distorted response in which we mistakenly conflate the frustration of our wills with complete impotence and hopelessness – is this not the dominant meaning with which the word ‘fatalism’ has been invested in our culture? We will return to this point below and how Nietzsche believes it possible to ‘redeem’ our reality from its state of neglect and distrust. But for now let’s return to the figure of ‘weightiness’ and Nietzsche’s challenge of eternal return.
The sense of ‘weight’ that Nietzsche wishes to convey in the title of the aphorism The greatest weight is of a different order altogether to the aforementioned. The sense of ‘weight’ in this instance is supposed to underwrite the difficulty of the task with which Nietzsche, or better, life itself confronts us. The effort to reckon with this ‘great weight’ Nietzsche sees with admirable clarity will either decimate our ragged and feeble frames or will incite us to rise to the challenge, transmuting our contorted, disfigured and camel-like souls from the burden each one of us takes existence to be. Only thus will we find ourselves able to dance with an unparalleled lightness of spirit and innocence, free of the pernicious myths of prelapsarianism and ‘our’ casting out of heaven for a crime we did not commit and for which we can never sufficiently expiate. This dilemma i.e. either affirm or implode, is aptly presented by Nietzsche in the guise of a demon:
‘What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”’
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you or perhaps crush you. The question in each and everything, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight.’[x]
Nietzsche’s demonic exhortation in The greatest weight acts as sort of heterodox homily or even ultimatum to all of us and the kinds of lives we each have chosen to lead. He reckons himself to be presenting us with an explosive and life-altering vision by means of which we will become sovereign individuals, able to expand and diversify the boundaries and dimensions of our self-creation and existence. The ultimatum is plural, because it is posed to every one of us that comes after him, but at once it is also singular, because by means of its transfigurative power it provides the means of our becoming equal to that which befalls us. In this respect we must align our reading with that of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, who understands the ethical and existential import of the eternal return unlike any other. In his The Logic of Sense (1969) he enunciates a sentiment that he will never tire of reiterating; a sentiment which even reappears in the final work he coauthored with his friend and longstanding collaborator Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1991). In the former text Deleuze writes that either ‘ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us.[3] To grasp whatever happens as unjust and unwarranted (it is always someone else’s fault) is, on the contrary, what renders our sores repugnant – veritable ressentiment, resentment of the event.’[xi]
In the 1881 sketch alluded to above, we find ourselves presented with a question posed in the wake of the revelation of eternal return.
‘If we are not to be overwhelmed by it, our compassion must not be great. Indifference needs to have worked away deep inside us…Even the misery of future humanity must not concern us. But the question is whether we still want to live: and how!’[xii]
The adduced quote should remind us that the eternal return qua existential and ethical imperative is supposed to impress itself upon and radicalise the present, and in this way differentiates itself from both the Platonic conception of anamnesis and the Proustian notion of voluntary memory. The point is to forget and thereby disencumber ourselves of the burden and crippling effects of the past. This does not mean that Nietzsche has a naïve attitude or distaste for the historical and sedimented origins of our knowledge and values. Any reader of On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) can attest to the contrary. What Nietzsche endeavours to make palpable is the decision with which we are faced – a decision which will allow us to remedy the unabated decline of our life-affirming instincts, and so rescue us from self-destruction. A decision that is first and foremost disclosive in character, and which he envisions countermanding the propriative event of nihilism: eternal return is Nietzsche’s most potent ‘counterthought’ to this event.[xiii] In the next section we will briefly explicate Nietzsche’s thoughts regarding this event, which have unfortunately been terribly misunderstood, relegated to mere platitude and a party piece for the dilettante to recite and re-enact over cocktails. We are of course referring to aphorism 125 of The Gay Science, [xiv] where Nietzsche famously through the voice of a ‘madman’ proclaims that God is dead.
The Preponderance of an Error and the Necessity of Confrontation
In his reading of The madman, René Girard provocatively argues that God’s collective murder by mankind is the very condition of his continued existence among us.[xv] It is only after God’s death that his true exaltation through religious rites, ceremonies and festivals can begin. This is Girard’s attempt to reinscribe Nietzsche within the very tradition he so vehemently opposed. Although certainly provocative, Girard’s argument founders and collapses under the weight of its own misconceptions. Girard’s reading simply denies the advent of the age of nihilism and thus precludes a priori the possibility of surpassing its stranglehold on life. Girard remains within the grip of the ‘error’ of Christian moralizing, a hitherto useful and essential tool, facilitating human preservation and growth. This however has come with a cost from which we may well never recover. Girard is stuck in a rut from which he is incapable of extricating himself.
In what has come to be known as the Lenzer Heide Notebook written on the 10th of June 1887 Nietzsche argues that the intellect’s proclivity for error and reductionism rescued men from self-destruction. The Christian moral hypothesis ‘shielded man from despising himself as man, from taking sides against life, from despairing of knowledge: it was a means of preservation – in sum, morality was the great antidote to practical and theoretical nihilism.’[xvi] The provenance of Nietzsche’s animosity toward the morality of metaphysics and the metaphysics of morality[xvii] is not the belief that they are a source of ‘error’ in any conventional sense of the term.[xviii] Error is vital sustenance for life.[xix] His relentless polemic is driven by his opposition to the ‘physiological’ degeneration and sickness this valuation of life disseminates.[xx] The malaise induced by the values such a Weltanschauung propagates is only further exacerbated by the delusive attitude which denies nihilism tout court without seeking to understand and allow for a meaningful encounter with what is an irremissible event. Its denial is just one more example of resentment toward that which befalls us. Even if we find the Heideggerian idea which interprets this event as a dispensation and twofold movement of unconcealment-concealment of being untenable and somewhat bizarre, there must be a recognition that there has been a historical development and shift in the last two hundred years or so whereby European modernity’s internal contradictions and tensions have torn the sacred out of its erstwhile position of comfort and into the realm of the profane. We must even include the cherished values of the Enlightenment in this process of profanation. This does not mean that they are simply dispensed with in the name of the ‘godforsaken chimeras’ of ‘relativism’ and ‘postmodernist free-play’ but rather provides us with the impetus to fundamentally rethink such values in light of what is a force majeure, instead of obdurately clinging to them at any price. An obvious example of such obduracy is the current battle between the Straussian brand of neo-conservatism which deems it necessary to preserve the myth of good versus evil in order to consolidate social cohesion and control, and the active nihilist cum religious zealot who wishes to dragoon mankind within the strictures of a theocratic polity on the basis of holy writ. A battle that can only lead to a single outcome: mutually assured destruction. The recent rise of religious fundamentalism is not a resurgence of the sacred along the lines of a return of the repressed, but rather confirmation of the process of desacralization inaugurated by the death of God/advent of nihilism, whereby the loftiest and most esteemed values devalued themselves. Fundamentalism is a symptom of this messy and uneven process of devaluation which continues to be resisted and contested by an impulse so intractable that it will perhaps never be able to be conclusively extirpated.
To return specifically to Nietzsche himself, we should take note that he was fundamentally opposed to the idea of the eternal recurrence being taught ‘like a sudden religion!’ He stressed that it would have to ‘sink in slowly’ and that ‘entire generations’ would have ‘to build on it and become fruitful – so that it becomes a great tree overshadowing all humanity to come.’ He continues, ‘What are the couple of millennia in which Christianity has survived! For the most powerful thought many millennia are needed – long, long must it be small and powerless!’[xxi] The eternal recurrence is to act as a new ‘centre of gravity’ for mankind and the prime locus for the revaluation of all values hitherto, not contra Girard the reinstatement of Christendom.
Temporality and Redemption
To recapitulate: the dilemma we (post)moderns face is first whether we still what to live and if so how? This is humanity’s defining question in the aftermath of Nietzsche’s revelation of eternal return and the death of God.[xxii] All is proclaimed ‘In vain!’ and we are led to ask ourselves ‘‘Are not all “values just decoys that prolong the comedy without ever getting closer to a denouement?’’[xxiii] Enduring the belief that all is ‘In vain’ is ‘the most paralysing thought, especially when one realises one’s being fooled and yet has no power to prevent oneself being fooled.’[xxiv] With God’s murder the eternal recurrence becomes ‘the most extreme form of nihilism’; one is compelled to will ‘nothingness (‘meaninglessness’) eternally!’[xxv] If everything has already been, and if everything is destined to return just as it has happened innumerable times before, isn’t everything, in the final analysis, completely and utterly indifferent?[xxvi] The eternal recurrence is an attempt, on the part of Nietzsche, to make us cognizant of the eternal temporality of the world and so eviscerate our belief in the chimeras of an afterlife and history as a teleological process.[xxvii] His objective is to bring about the convergence of eternity and temporality. Time becomes eternal as the eternal recurrence.[xxviii] This point is not unproblematic and will be elaborated upon more fully below. If our analysis were to end here, we might conclude that the doctrine of the eternal recurrence is a fruitless venture, a useless idea that exacerbates the very condition Nietzsche had sought to overcome.
Nietzsche however, doesn’t intend for us to stop here. As we have already seen, The greatest weight emphasizes the transformative power of the thought of eternal return: ‘If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you or perhaps crush you.’ Keith Ansell-Pearson translates this sentence, ‘If you incorporate this thought within you, amongst your other thoughts, it will transform you.’[xxix] Nietzsche exhorts his readers to incorporate the eternal recurrence.[xxx] The ‘heaviest weight,’ ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would bear down upon every one of our actions. This thought’s incorporation would either destroy us, which the preponderance of nihilism would do anyway,[xxxi] or transform us beyond recognition.[xxxii] We would become capable of affirming our singular life ad infinitum, thereby impressing upon it ‘the image of eternity.’[xxxiii] One possible interpretation is that Nietzsche is presenting us with a new ethical imperative or existential precept, exhorting us to live our lives ‘as if’ every moment were eternal because it recurs eternally.[xxxiv] A kind of hypothetical imperative that will ensure we ‘remain faithful to the earth,’ and devoid of the lust for the otherworldly that has characterized all of Western metaphysics hitherto.[xxxv]
But an important question must be asked – is not this desire for eternity and temporality to converge the by-product of a residual resentment on the part of Nietzsche against human finitude and a more radical conception of temporality which fully divests itself of all nostalgia for infinitude and the immortal? And isn’t the overhuman but the upshot of this same resentful desire Jean-Paul Sartre would later designate as characteristic of the very structure of human subjectivity, the desire to be an in-itself-for-itself, a highly sophisticated and spiritualised form of cruelty and self-laceration?[xxxvi] Why does Nietzsche wish to preserve the effulgence of eternity? The answer in nuce is that it is only by means of the motif of eternity that he is able to truly effectuate a transformation of hitherto unforeseen magnitude and power, allowing mankind to truly embark upon the path of self-legislation and autarky. It is in this manner that Nietzsche rethinks and deepens the value of autonomy, which Kant took to be essential to moral action.
The unpublished cosmological proofs found in The Will to Power,[4] haven’t been very helpful in dispelling the charge of fatalism. These proofs presented in that text generally appear to be more indebted to the nihilistic understanding of the doctrine Nietzsche desired most to eschew, and which is convincingly rebutted by Zarathustra in On the Vision and the Riddle.[xxxvii]
‘“Behold this gateway, dwarf!” I continued. “It has two faces. Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either to its end. This long lane stretches back for an eternity. And the long lane out there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths; they offend each other face to face; and it is here at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: ‘Moment.’ But whoever would follow one of them, on and on, farther and farther – do you believe, dwarf, that these paths contradict each other eternally?”
“All that is straight lies,” the dwarf murmured contemptuously. “All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.”
“You spirit of gravity,” I said angrily, “do not make things too easy for yourself! Or I shall let you crouch where you are crouching, lamefoot; and it was I that carried you to this height.’[xxxviii]
Time isn’t a circle as the repugnant little dwarf so complacently replies. The dwarf’s retort is little more than an obscene parody of the Christian idea of divine providence. For Nietzsche, everything that happens is ineluctably lost in the flow of time.[xxxix] Birth and death are the boundaries of the singular path we each travel.[xl] Human life is inescapably transient. Even gods must one day meet their demise. In the figurative gateway named Augenblick, literally the ‘glance of the eye,’ we become temporally distended, stretched between the raptures of past, future, and present. However, lest we forget Nietzsche reminds us that the supreme act of affirmation demands that despite this temporal distension we strive to impress the ‘image’ of eternity upon our lives at every moment, every here and now. The eternal and the fleeting converge in this sovereign act of affirmation. As Eugen Fink has persuasively argued, Nietzsche’s achievement is to have conceived an eternity of the transient repudiating any pretension to an eternity beyond time.[xli] He conceives time as eternal through the fusion of the metaphysical oppositions of transience/perdurance and singularity/recurrence.[xlii] Only after the interpenetration of these seemingly antithetical concepts has been fully assimilated can the exaltation of immanent life begin.
To affirm this eternity of suffering one requires what Nietzsche calls ‘great health’.[xliii] This metastable condition is beautifully described by Deleuze in the final work he authored before his death in 1995, Essays Critical and Clinical (1993), where he argues that literature appears as an enterprise of health:
‘…not that the writer would necessarily be in good health…but he possesses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible. The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums.’[xliv]
According to Nietzsche this man of ‘great health’ will inaugurate ‘the redemption of this reality’.[xlv]
‘This man of the future will redeem us not just from the ideal held up till now, but also from the things which will have to arise from it, from the great nausea, the will to nothingness, from nihilism, that stroke of midday and of great decision[5] which makes the will free again, which gives earth its purpose and man his hope again, this Antichrist and anti-nihilist, this conqueror of God and of nothingness – he must come one day…’[xlvi]
Nietzsche recognized as does Deleuze ‘that we no longer believe in this world.’[xlvii] But Nietzsche held that the past, present and future of this world can be redeemed. Man one day will finally be free ‘to believe, not in a different world, but in a link between man and world’.[xlviii] He will only then be rid of his revengeful thrashing against the inexorable ‘it was’. ‘‘It was’ – that is the name of the will’s gnashing of teeth and most secret melancholy. Powerless against what has been done, he is an angry spectator of all that is past. The will cannot will backwards; and that he cannot break time and time’s covetousness, that is the will’s loneliest melancholy.’[xlix] The world is not straightforwardly amenable to out wills, for we are not children of the gods akin to Dionysus and Hercules. One of the consequences of this perceived impotence is that we revile time and perpetually yearn to turn back the clock while the present flits by lost to us forever, for which we in turn rebuke the present, fuelling a vicious circle of resentment and emasculation.
In What is Called Thinking? (1952), as well as in the slightly later, Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? (1953), Heidegger contends that Nietzsche’s association of revenge and time is a corollary of his recognition of something that we have already spoken of at some length, the will’s revulsion at the essence of temporality. Heidegger is also quick to add that the vengefulness in question is by no means psychological, but of a metaphysical ilk.[l] ‘The temporal is what must pass away…This is the representational idea of time that characterizes the concept of ‘time’ which is standard throughout the metaphysics of the West.’[li] The will is thoroughly imbibed with resentiment towards time’s passing and what has passed away. ‘The revulsion turns not against the mere passing, but against that passing away which allows what has passed to be only in the past, which lets it freeze in the finality of this rigor mortis.’[lii] The tradition since time immemorial has told us that true being exists beyond time, while that which exists within the flow of time dissipates and fades into what Plato called mē on, or non-being.[liii] The realm of the mundane is cast into a state of degradation while the supra-temporal is absolutized. This is the epitome of the will’s ‘deepseated revenge’ toward time.[liv] Nietzsche unambiguously sets himself up against this false dichotomy. Rather than simply invert the priority of the supersensuous in favour of the sensible, Nietzsche in a pithy and often quoted section of Twilight of the Idols entitled How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth, abolishes this distinction altogether.[lv] The reason why he abjures such a distinction is due to his uncompromising refusal to be co-opted by the reified methods of metaphysicians with their penchant for categorization and compartmentalizing. Nietzsche chooses to rely upon a different tack. He decides to redraw and creatively reinscribe the channels through which he is able to broach contact with the flux of the real.
Along similar lines, Alphonso Lingis has pointed out that Nietzsche views the entire history of Western metaphysics as characterized by its debasement of transience and transitory beings, and therefore stands as an indictment of this life which we live and this world we inhabit.[lvi] The commentaries of both Heidegger and Lingis reiterate the crux of the eternal recurrence: it is first and foremost an attempt on the part of Nietzsche to reconfigure mankind’s relation and existential comportment towards the all-encompassing nature of temporality and its brute uncompromising imposition upon our lives.
Pieces of Fate
The thought of eternal return which has left lesser mortals hopelessly mortified becomes inseparably bound to the will of the overman. The ‘heaviest weight’ is assimilated, broken down, digested and inscribed into the overhuman’s attitude and comportment toward the world, time and existence. In other words, it becomes constitutive of his being-in-the-world. Now there is no need to answer with an ecstatic ‘Yes’ after the demon’s incantation, because the affirmative disposition has been internalized, rendering the eternal recurrence superfluous as a conscious proposition bearing down upon all of our actions. It ceases to take the form of a hypothetical imperative or thought-experiment which must be repeated to oneself when undertaking an action. The overhuman’s forgetting of this original affirmation, which Nietzsche calls the ‘sacred “Yes”’ of the child,[lvii] is integral to the efficacy of incorporation. Only now are we able to broach Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati or ‘love of fate’. In the opening aphorism of Book IV of The Gay Science Nietzsche declares:
‘I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.’[lviii]
This aphorism expresses a desire still unrealized – the desire ‘to see as beautiful what is necessary’. Theodor W. Adorno in his Minima Moralia (1951) saw this formula as a recipe for political quietism and accommodation to the powers that be, no matter how abhorrent or oppressive.[lix] Adorno’s misunderstanding lies in the analysis of amor fati in isolation. When considered alongside the eternal recurrence, ‘the ideal of the most high-spirited, vital, world affirming individual’ we are led in a very different direction. One who loves fate ‘has learned not just to accept and go along with what was and what is, but…wants it again just as it was and is through all eternity, insatiably shouting de capo not just to himself but to the whole play and performance.’ He does this though because it is none other than himself ‘fundamentally…who needs precisely this performance – and makes it necessary: because again and again he needs himself – and makes himself necessary.’[lx] This is the central point. The advocate of amor fati shouts de capo because he needs the recurrence of the same and so generates the necessity of its return. He needs the recurrence of the same because it has been infused with the spirit of affirmation, and makes it necessary in affirming its existence. Here man becomes god as a vicious circle.[lxi] In other words, the overman attains the identity of his soul with fate.[lxii]
Deleuze interprets the eternal recurrence in a similar vein, but should be read cautiously as an interpreter of Nietzsche because of his own Spinozist inclinations. He conceives the eternal recurrence as a selective ontology.[lxiii] For Deleuze ‘the eternal return…has a double aspect: it is the universal being of becoming, but the universal being of becoming ought to belong to a single becoming. Only becoming-active has a being which is the being of the whole of becoming…as selective ontology, it affirms this being of becoming as the “self-affirming” of becoming-active.’[lxiv] The eternal return for Deleuze is a ‘centrifugal wheel’ that expels all reactive forces in its wake; [lxv] it is the act of repetition that selects and saves those activities wilfully affirmed; afterwards even laziness, stupidity and cowardice cease to be recognizable.[lxvi]
Despite its originality and conviction there is a genuine problem with Deleuze’s reading. It renders the eternal return superfluous and drains it of its tragic pathos, the very element which makes the eternal return so difficult and formidable to incorporate, and that sends chills down our spines due to the untold horror with which such a scenario hits us. The same maligned existence repeating itself ad infinitum without hope of eternal bliss or even the quietude of death. The conception of eternal return in terms of an ontological principle of individuation rooted in selective affirmation, whereby that which is chosen to be affirmed is concomitantly preserved and transmuted belittles the almost impossible demand to affirm that which pains us and leaves us inconsolable. Exactly because it is selective there is absolutely no incentive or inevitability to our reliving the tribulations, failures and daily agonies we have previously experienced. Unless we are up to this task of affirming just that which appears to us as beyond affirmation and yet nevertheless irrecusably impresses its affirmation upon us, the very notion of affirmation is without substance, and becomes merely a banal and hollow injunction of the super ego to partake in its own indulgence and satiation.[6]
Affirming the Tragic Beyond Spiritualized Cruelty
The almost insurmountable difficultly of incorporating eternal return should be abundantly clear. The suffocating burden of infusing every one of our actions with its resonance is aptly depicted in the horror such a prospect held for its creator. We have, for better or worse, been provided with an account of Nietzsche’s early reactions to the eternal recurrence in his communication of the doctrine to his friend and unrequited love, Lou Salomé:
‘Unforgettable for me are those hours in which he first confided to me his secret, whose inevitable fulfilment and validation he anticipated with shudders. Only with a quiet voice and with all signs of deepest horror did he speak about this secret. Life, in fact, produced such suffering in him that the certainty of an eternal return of life had to mean something horrifying to him. The quintessence of the teaching of eternal recurrence, later constructed by Nietzsche as a shining apotheosis to life, formed such a deep contrast to his own painful feelings about life that it gives us intimations of being an uncanny mask.’[lxvii]
Salomé argues that after his conception of the eternal recurrence Nietzsche became transfigured. His contradictions were not only heightened to an unbearable degree but he became irreparably torn between an unbridled loathing and an equally powerful desire to embrace the eternal recurrence of the same.[lxviii] Salomé concludes that madness was the only logical possibility for such a fractured and tormented soul. But these ad hominem remarks miss the point. Nietzsche’s credo that ‘Pain does not count as an objection to life’ flies in the face of Salomé’s diagnosis.[lxix] Rather than circumventing or merely resigning oneself to suffer existence interminably à la Schopenhauer, the task is to assimilate this very pain and suffering that has destroyed and crippled so many; the ‘free spirit’ is to ‘adopt a child’s attitude towards what used to constitute the seriousness of existence.’[lxx] The most solemn concepts of ‘God’ and ‘sin’ ‘will seem no more important to us than a child’s toy and a child’s pain seem to an old man, – and perhaps “the old man” will then need another toy and another pain, – still enough of a child, an eternal child!’[lxxi] This new existential comportment of the self evinces what is most essential in Nietzsche’s conception of the tragic. Nietzsche’s distinct and profound understanding of the tragedy of existence is perhaps the deepest of the chasms separating him from his predecessor Arthur Schopenhauer, and is visible as early as his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). For Nietzsche it is a matter not of reconciliation or resignation, but as we have seen, of redemption immanently procured.
‘The type of a spirit that takes into itself and redeems the contradictions and questionable aspects of existence…Dionysus versus the ‘Crucified’: there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom – it is a difference in the meaning of it.[7] Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation…One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering:[8] whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy existence; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering:[9] he is sufficiently strong, rich, and capable of deifying to do so. The Christian denies even the happiest lot on earth: he is sufficiently weak, poor, disinherited to suffer from life in whatever form he meets it. The god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.’[lxxii]
What separates the ‘Christian’[10] from the tragic man is what they take to be the meaning of their suffering and its significance within the greater scheme of things. For Nietzsche once again this is a matter of incorporation. The metabolism of the ‘Christian’ is unable to digest ‘the contradictions and questionable aspects of existence’ so he strives to negate this world and to seek salvation in another residing in ‘the beyond’. For the tragic man ‘adventure, danger and even pain…become a necessity’.[lxxiii] The tragic hero, the exemplar being Sophocles’ Oedipus, is defined by the free acceptance of his determination by fate. Heroically bearing the truth of one’s finitude is an act of affirmation that allows him to achieve something like authenticity, or even better, sovereign empowerment.
Conclusion
For Nietzsche, the doctrine of eternal recurrence stands opposed to the Day of Judgment, when eternal bliss and damnation will be handed down from on high.[lxxiv] ‘Have I been understood? – Dionysus against the Crucified…’[lxxv] The Wiederkunft or ‘Second Coming’ of the spirit of great health, the overhuman, redeems mankind from two millennia of enslavement under the yoke of vengefulness and bad conscience. With the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, God was ‘paying himself back’. God was ‘the only one able to redeem man from what, to man himself, has become irredeemable – the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor’.[lxxvi] The overhuman articulates a new affirmative praxis through his incorporation of the eternal recurrence of the same. Man’s redemption ceases to be beyond his grasp and that is why Nietzsche holds the Dionysian ideal of the eternal recurrence to be antithetical to the Day of Judgement: when man emerges as truly sovereign he becomes entitled to judge for himself.[lxxvii]
The Dionysian philosopher flatly repudiates the loathsome desire for time’s end. The eternal recurrence of the same becomes synonymous with ‘the innocence of becoming’.[lxxviii] Each time our life repeats itself just as it was a thousand times before. But with each repetition we are different; each time we have incorporated the lessons of the previous recurrence, but have forgotten it in our innocence. This in turn affects the repetition of the same. Everything is the same and yet we have changed, which provokes everything to thus be renewed and invested with a novelty which had been absent hitherto. Upon the arrival of the final figuration of the overhuman the condemnation of man and existence itself will be banished once and for all – the overhuman will partake in his own redemption and thereby become ‘the meaning of the earth.’[lxxix] Only now does the final metamorphosis proclaimed by Zarathustra take hold: the lion becomes a child.[lxxx] The overman, guardian of the sacred ‘Yes’, wills his own will in the creation of new values so as to emerge a circulus vitiosus deus;[11] what Nietzsche calls elsewhere ‘the Roman Caesar with Christ’s soul.’[lxxxi]
Error, falsehood, delusion, the passions etc… are not to be blindly swept aside – they are the stuff of knowledge and the well-spring of human civilization. The efforts of instrumental reason to placate and deprive nature of its abundance and vivacity are a road to nowhere, a veritable cul-de-sac. Its advocacy of an anthropomorphic and lopsided vision acts as merely another mask for the insatiable striving of the human organism as it assimilates alien forces in the quest for stable and secure conditions for the production and reproduction of life. Human beings however are moving apace toward self-destruction as they continue to live in thraldom to resentiment and bad conscience. Nietzsche admonishes us to cultivate counterdispositions in order to undercut the malign drives and habits responsible for the preponderance of those values which hasten and ensure the degeneration of the most vital and life-affirming instincts.[lxxxii] These cultural configurations must be defanged and set upon a new course.
Nietzsche sees the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same as this possibility. It is to endow the earth with a new centre of gravity, breaking it out of its aimless stupor and select the composition of future (over)humanity. This task is not for the faint of heart. He tells us that we must first deracinate from each one of our souls every trace of compassion and pity before we will be able to proceed. It seems, almost despite himself Nietzsche has transposed an incarnation of the Day of Judgement into the immanent flow of time. ‘Damnation’ is stripped of the eternal – those not up to the challenge are instead assured their extinction – while those ‘free spirits’ who manage to incorporate the eternal recurrence will steer the course along which future generations will continue to develop and build:
‘Future history: more and more this thought will be victorious – and those who do not believe in it must ultimately die out in accordance with their nature! Only those who consider their existence to be capable of eternal repetition will remain: with such ones, though, a state is possible which no utopian has yet reached!’[lxxxiii]
Bibliography
1) Adorno, Theodor W., Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso, 1978
2) Allison, David B. ed., The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, MIT Press, 1985
3) Ansell-Pearson, Keith, How to Read Nietzsche, Granta Books, 2005
4) Ansell-Pearson, Keith, The Eternal Return of the Overhuman: The Weightiest Knowledge and the Abyss of Light, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 30, 2005
5) Benjamin, Walter, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938 - 1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, 2003
6) Deleuze, Gilles, Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, trans. Anne Boyman, Zone Books, 2001
7) Deleuze, Gilles, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Continuum, 1986
8) Deleuze, Gilles, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco, Verso, 1998
9) Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta, Athlone Press, 2000
10) Deleuze, Gilles, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester & Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, Continuum, 2001
11) Fink, Eugen, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, trans. Goetz Richter, Continuum, 2003
12) Girard, René, The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004
13) Haar, Michel, Nietzsche and Metaphysics, trans. Michael Gendre, State University of New York Press, 1996
14) Heidegger, Martin, What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray, Harper & Row, 1968
15) Heidegger, Martin, Nietzsche: Volumes I and II: The Will to Power as Art/The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell, Harper Collins, 1991
16) Krell, David Farrell, Infectious Nietzsche, Indiana University Press, 1996
17) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1992
18) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann & Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman, Cambridge University Press, 2002
19) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Modern Library Edition, 1995
20) Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe, Cambridge University Press, 1994
21) Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kauffman & R. J. Hollingdale, Vintage Books, 1968
22) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s, ed. & trans. Daniel Breazeale, Humanity Books, 1979
23) Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson & Duncan Large, Blackwell Publishing, 2006
24) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1990
25) Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kauffman, Vintage Books, 1974
26) Nietzsche, Friedrich, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge, Cambridge University Press, 2003
27) Plato, The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant, Introduction and Notes by Harold Tarrant, Penguin Books, 1993
28) Richardson, John, Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, Oxford University Press, 2004
29) Safranski, Rüdiger, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch, Granta Books, 2002
30) Salomé, Lou, Nietzsche, trans. Siegfried Mandel, University of Illinois Press, 2001
31) Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, Routledge, 2003
32) Sophocles, The Theban Plays: King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, trans. E. F. Watling, Penguin Books, 1974
33) Stambaugh, Joan, All Joy Wants Eternity, Nietzsche Studien, 33 (2004)
34) Stambaugh, Joan, Nietzsche’s Thought of the Eternal Return, Joan Stambaugh, John Hopkins University Press, 1972
35) Vattimo, Gianni, Nietzsche: An Introduction, trans. Nicholas Martin, Athlone Press, 2002
[1] From the verb kommen, to come.
[2] From the verb kehren, to turn.
[3] Emphasis added.
[4] See in particular aphorisms 1062, 1063, 1064, 1066 and 1067 of The Will to Power (p546-50). These have often been read as Nietzsche’s attempt to furnish the eternal recurrence with scientific legitimacy. This matter will not be addressed here due to issues of space and relevance.
[5] Emphasis added.
[6] We are here being intentionally polemical and more than a little unfair to Deleuze in order to make a point that will be extended in the following section: the near impossibility of the demand placed upon us by eternal return. We have already noted the significance of Deleuze’s meditation on the ethics of amor fati – our objections, however, could perhaps be assuaged if we attempted to think Deleuze’s ethics of amor fati in tandem with his conception of eternal return qua selective ontology. Unfortunately we are unable to pursue this matter any further here, but it should nevertheless give us food for thought.
[7] Emphasis added.
[8] Emphasis added.
[9] Emphasis added.
[10] Let’s take Nietzsche’s ‘Christian’ to be merely an archetype of a far more general metaphysical and moral Weltanschauung.
[11] God as a vicious circle.
[i] The Theban Plays: King Oedipus, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, Sophocles, trans. E. F. Watling, Penguin Books, 1974, p115
[ii] Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938 - 1940, Walter Benjamin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, 2003, p391
[iii] All Joy Wants Eternity, Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche Studien, 33 (2004), p337
[iv] Nietzsche’s Thought of the Eternal Return, Joan Stambaugh, John Hopkins University Press, 1972, p30
[v] Ibid, p30
[vi] All Joy Wants Eternity, Joan Stambaugh, Nietzsche Studien,33 (2004), p340
[vii] The Eternal Return of the Overhuman: The Weightiest Knowledge and the Abyss of Light, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue 30, 2005, p20 n1
[viii] The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson & Duncan Large, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, p238
[ix] The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Plato, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant, Introduction and Notes by Harold Tarrant, Penguin Books, 1993, p140
[x] The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kauffman, Vintage Books, 1974, p273-4
[xi] The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze, trans. Mark Lester & Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, Continuum, 2001, p149
[xii] The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p239
[xiii] Nietzsche, Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Martin Heidegger, trans. David Farrell Krell, Harper Collins, 1991, p172
[xiv] The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, p182 (125)
[xv] The Girard Reader, René Girard, ed. James G. Williams, The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2004, p257
[xvi] Writings from the Late Notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Rüdiger Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p116
[xvii] The phrase is Keith Ansell-Pearson’s. See The Eternal Return of the Overhuman, Keith Ansell-Pearson, p4
[xviii] Nietzsche: An Introduction, Gianni Vattimo, trans. Nicholas Martin, Athlone Press, 2002, p126
[xix] ‘There is only One world and it is false cruel, contradictory, seductive, meaningless…A world so constitutes is the real world…We need lies in order to conquer this reality, this ‘truth’, that means in order to live […] Metaphysics, morality, religion, science – these are considered merely as various forms of lying: with their aid, life can be believed in. ‘Life should inspire trust’: presented in these terms, the task is immense. In order to solve it, man must naturally be a liar; more than anything else, he must be an artist […] Metaphysics, morality, religion, science – all simply monstrous products of his will to art. (N Autumn 1887 – March 1888, V III.2 435, 11[415])’. Nietzsche quoted in Nietzsche: An Introduction, Gianni Vattimo, p135-6
[xx] Nietzsche: An Introduction, Gianni Vattimo, p127
[xxi] The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p240
[xxii] The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, p181 (125)
[xxiii] Writings from the Late Notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, p117
[xxiv] Ibid, p117
[xxv] Ibid, p118
[xxvi] Nietzsche and Metaphysics, Michel Haar, trans. Michael Gendre, State University of New York Press, 1996, p29
[xxvii] Nietzsche’s Philosophy, Eugen Fink, trans. Goetz Richter, Continuum, 2003, p80
[xxviii] Ibid, p80
[xxix] How to Read Nietzsche, Keith Ansell-Pearson, Granta Books, 2005, p80
[xxx] ‘If you incorporate the thought of thoughts within yourself, it will transform you. The question in everything that you want to do: “is it the case that I want to do it countless time?” is the greatest weight.’ – The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p239
[xxxi] Writings from the Late Notebooks, Friedrich Nietzsche, p119-20
[xxxii] At another point Nietzsche distances himself from the threats of eternal damnation so often made from the pulpit asserting that those whom ignore the eternal recurrence will suffer no consequences as a result. ‘This doctrine is mild in its treatment of those who do not believe in it; it has no hells or threats. Anyone who does not believe has a fleeting life in the consciousness of it.’ – The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p240
[xxxiii] Ibid, p240
[xxxiv] Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Rüdiger Safranski, trans. Shelley Frisch, Granta Books, 2002, p231; There is a great deal of textual evidence to support such a reading. For example, ‘We want to experience a work of art over and over again! We should fashion our life in this way, so that we have the same wish with each of its parts!’ – The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p241
[xxxv] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, p13
[xxxvi]Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, Routledge, 2003, p636
[xxxvii] Eugen Fink presents a similar argument in his Nietzsche’s Philosophy, p77
[xxxviii] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, p158
[xxxix] Nietzsche’s Philosophy, Eugen Fink, p91
[xl] Ibid, p91
[xli] Ibid, p91
[xlii] Ibid, p91
[xliii] Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, p71
[xliv] Essays Critical and Clinical, Gilles Deleuze, trans. Daniel W. Smith & Michael A. Greco, Verso, 1998, p3
[xlv] On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche, p71
[xlvi] Ibid, p70
[xlvii] Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta, Athlone Press, 2000, p171
[xlviii] Ibid, p170
[xlix] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, p139
[l] Nietzsche, Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Martin Heidegger, p221
[li] What is Called Thinking?, Martin Heidegger, trans. J. Glenn Gray, Harper & Row, 1968, p99
[lii] Ibid, p103
[liii] Nietzsche, Volume II: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Martin Heidegger, p225
[liv] Ibid, p225
[lv] Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1990, p51
[lvi] The Will to Power, Alphonso Lingis, The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison, MIT Press, 1985, p58
[lvii] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, p27
[lviii] The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, p223 (276)
[lix] Minima Moralia, Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott, Verso, 1978, p98
[lx] Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, p50-1 (56)
[lxi] Ibid, p51 (56)
[lxii] All Joy Wants Eternity, Joan Stambaugh, p341; see also The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, p535 (1041), part of which is quoted in Stambaugh’s paper.
[lxiii] Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Continuum, 1986, p72; there is certainly evidence for such a reading, ‘Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!).’ – The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, p545 (1058)
[lxiv] Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, p72
[lxv] Immanence: Essays on A Life, Gilles Deleuze, trans. Anne Boyman, Zone Books, 2001, p91
[lxvi] Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze, p69
[lxvii] Nietzsche, Lou Salomé, University of Illinois Press, 2001, p130
[lxviii] Ibid, p130
[lxix] Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, p70
[lxx] The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p239
[lxxi] Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, p51 (57)
[lxxii] The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, p542 (1052)
[lxxiii] On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche, p71
[lxxiv] Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche, p50 (56)
[lxxv] Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, p104
[lxxvi] On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche, p68
[lxxvii] Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche, p104
[lxxviii] The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, 416 (787)
[lxxix] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche, p13
[lxxx] Ibid, p27
[lxxxi] The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche, p513 (983)
[lxxxii] Nietzsche’s New Darwinism, John Richardson, Oxford University Press, 2004, p102
[lxxxiii] The Nietzsche Reader, Friedrich Nietzsche, p241
© Sadegh Kabeer
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Erstwhile Allies and Unfamiliar Foes: Will the US attack Iran?
Bravado, posturing and gnashing of teeth have long characterized US-Iranian relations. For almost thirty years, and in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution which brought Ayatollah Khomeini and his small coterie of disciples to power there has been a string of events that have gone to ensure the bad-blood and rancor between these erstwhile allies has continued unabated. Prior to the revolution, Iranians resented the US for the CIA-MI6 orchestrated coup d’etat of 1953 which overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadeq and later US support for the dictatorship of the Shah Mohammad-Reza Pahlavi.
Since the revolution, the Iran hostage crisis, US support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, Iran’s alleged involvement in the 1983 Beirut US Embassy and barracks bombings, the Iran-Contra Affair, and Iran Air Flight 655, have ensued and only gone to sour relations and entrench mutual hostility further. The US-led invasion of Iraq moreover, has opened up a whole other dimension to what many have likened to an ongoing war of attrition, replete with all the necessary accoutrements: mutual vilification and unrelenting of rhetoric.
The title of William O. Beeman’s recent book The Great Satan Vs the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other is more than apposite given the episodic tirades emanating from both Washington and Tehran, each with its own sense of righteous indignation, railing against the evils committed by the other. There was a period of relative calm, however. With the election of the reformist President Mohammad Khatami, a modus vivendi however distant and obscure became a distinct possibility. Perhaps fearing Iran would be next on the Bush Administration’s hit-list after an unparalleled display of military strength, which eviscerated Saddam Hussein’s crumbling regime in a matter of weeks, Khatami’s government made the offer of a ‘grand bargain’ in which everything was on the table; from Iran’s nuclear program, to recognition of Israel and the cessation of support, financial and otherwise to Lebanese and Palestinian militants.
Whether the offer was the result of benevolence or fear is really beside the point – what it does show is that the Iranian government is ultimately rational in an instrumental sense, and foremost interested in procuring its survival. This instrumentalist behavior has remained in evidence even since the election of the markedly more hard-line president in the form of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, who has been castigated on more than one occasion by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei who ultimately holds all the cards and the keys to every door.
The Jacobin period of the Islamic Revolution has subsided, even if it continues to rear its ugly head on occasion, and some time ago entered its Thermadorian phase where far more worldly interests act as the prime motivators governing the regime’s behavior. The regime’s old-guard is far more akin to the Soviet Politburo whose political machinations were strictly motivated by Realpolitik and often underwritten by jaded cynicism and whose foremost objectives were self-preservation and regional self-aggrandizement. The Islamic Republic corresponds well to such a paradigm and can hardly be called an exception in this regard. The infamous chant of ‘Death to America’ is but a stale nod to official ideology and rings hollow amongst the vast majority of Iranians, especially those born in the baby boom post-1979, and whom can be counted amongst the most pro-American populations in the Middle East.
Ahamadi-Nejad’s inflammatory and arguably anti-Semitic rhetoric has of course fanned the flames of controversy and in its shortsightedness acted as a boon for those elements in Washington, most notably Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office whose activities are about as obscure and elusive as Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat, where only the vestiges of a menacing grimace remain. Advocates of a strike against Iran know full-well that an enemy who bares his teeth can be exploited to brilliant effect and whose bearded visage can ably perform the role of ‘imminent threat’ personified, striking fear into the heart of the American and European publics.
While the reformists were at the helm the conventional wisdom held that the Iranian president was merely a figurehead, and thus the creature of subterranean forces at work within the Islamic Republic. The election in August 2005 of a little-known firebrand in the form of Ahmadi-Nejad claiming to represent Iran’s disenfranchised and destitute underclass with all of the appropriate demagogic trimmings has led to the Iranian president’s transformation by these selfsame politicians and pundits into a Hitlerian incarnation with a raging desire to inaugurate WWIII.[i] While Khatami was cast as a pathetic stooge incapable of making any impact upon the dogmatic values of the Islamic Republic, Ahamadi-Nejad, we are told, has his finger on the button and is itching to hasten the Twelfth Imam’s return by means of nuclear Armageddon. The Orientalist and neoconservative ally, Bernard Lewis, in an article written for the Wall Street Journal, even cooked up the bizarre theory that Ahmadi-Nejad would launch Iran’s nuclear weapons on August 22 2006 so as to coincide with the prophet Mohammad’s ascension from the Dome of the Rock!
The tactic employed here is very simple and extremely effective. By imposing on your enemy the category of the ‘irrational’ as opposed to the ‘rational’, negotiation and diplomacy necessarily emerge as futile and thereby precluded a priori. If a policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is unable to deter the Iranian government the only available option is preemption by means of military force. The result is Bush’s refrain ‘that no option is off the table’ when it comes to dealing with Iran, even if that means a ‘tactical’ nuclear strike. We are admonished further that force is the only language ‘these kinds of people’ understand. Lewis and dilettantes such as the British novelist Martin Amis and neoconservatives such as Michael Leeden and David Frum in their efforts to snuff out the path of diplomacy have endeavored to cast Iran beyond the pale of rational debate. Not surprisingly, it was Frum who was responsible for the subsumption of Iran, Iraq and North Korea under the banner of ‘an axis of evil’ in Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address,
The reality is slightly more nuanced however. Not only has there been no hard-evidence that Iran is currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program,[ii] there is the additional caveat that even if the regime were in possession of a nuclear arsenal, the Iranian president, who unlike the US president, isn’t commander-in-chief of the armed forces and so cannot launch any kind of military attack without the Supreme Leader’s authorization.
Another point that is often purposely overlooked is that Ahmadi-Nejad is ultimately elected and thus not a permanent fixture of the Iranian political scene. Whatever the limitations and gaping flaws of Iran’s few democratic processes, the Iranian president can be removed electorally. Ahmadi-Nejad was himself an underdog and few if any foresaw his electoral victory. Those who abstained from the last Iranian presidential elections out of disillusionment at the failure of Khatami’s government to change the status quo in 2009 may well kick Ahmadi-Nejad out of power and back into the obscurity from whence he came. Even his core-constituency to whom he had promised to uproot corruption and alleviate poverty have been left out in the cold and rightly resent the current president for promises he hasn’t kept.
The release in December 2007 of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in which all sixteen US intelligence agencies unanimously concluded that Iran had ceased its efforts to build a nuclear weapon back in 2003, came to the relief of many and it was subsequently argued by a slew of commentators that the NIE would provide Iran with some much needed breathing room; putting a damper on any plans for an imminent US strike against Iran.
Unlike Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea, Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a treaty which guarantees ‘the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination’.[iii] Iran, however, has refused to halt its nuclear enrichment program and as a consequence elicited three rounds of sanctions. The most recent set embodied in UNSC Resolution 1803 extends beyond Iran’s nuclear program, and calls for vigilance regarding Iranian financial institutions.
The impact of existing sanctions is already being felt in Iran, making it ever more difficult for Ahmadi-Nejad to hitch his wagon to the nationalist star. Every time it is invoked its emotive force is assuaged and it is likely if things continue in this manner Iranians will elect a more pragmatic leader in the 2009 presidential elections, even though they are fully within their rights as delineated in the NPT to domestically enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Iran’s abysmal human rights record and suffocation of personal freedoms guarantees, moreover that the manipulation of nationalist sentiment will only have a limited shelve life.
If the Bush Administration is preparing the ground for regime change in Tehran as the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh has argued, it seems to be running in tandem with the ongoing commitment to isolate Iran economically and politically by means of UN sanctions. Professor Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, like Hersh affirms the possibility of a US strike against Iranian nuclear targets and Revolutionary Guard bases at the end of Bush’s second term. An attack, he says, ‘continues to remain very much alive – particularly in this US election year when the possibility of an ‘October surprise’ is always there…the Republican president might do something to prolong the state of war and make it easier for Senator McCain to have an upper hand in the November election’.[iv]
A disinformation campaign has been waged in the face of the American public’s skepticism as to the merits of an attack against Iran,[v] in order to reframe the US’s ‘issues’ with the Islamic Republic from one of counter-proliferation to counter-terrorism.[vi] After the Bush Administration’s clear manipulation of intelligence in pursuit of a political agenda in the run up the US-led invasion of Iraq, the American public and world at large are no longer willing to take US intelligence claims at face value.
To this end, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has been placed on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations and been accused of instigating sectarian violence in Iraq and supplying ‘explosively formed perpetrators’ (EFP) responsible for killing Coalition soldiers. To what degree they are involved however, remains nebulous, especially since it is in the Islamic Republic’s interests to have an empowered Shia majority heading the present Iraqi government.
This was most recently highlighted by Ahamadi-Nejad’s two-day state visit to Iraq earlier this month during which Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maleki greeted the Iranian president with brimming smiles and much pomp. Iran has a vested interest in seeing the present Iraqi government succeed and is unlikely to throw in their lot with the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose view of Iran is itself shot through with skepticism and secondary to the causes of Iraqi and Arab nationalism, which he skillfully manages to blend with a radical brand of Shi’ism.
Middle East expert and editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, Alain Gresh, has further written that US commandos have been active in Iran since 2004 and that the US has substantially increased aid to Kurdish, Arab, Azeri and Baluchi minorities in an bid to destabilize the country. Although Iran is not by any definition a ‘new state,’ and possesses a fairly cohesive national identity, consolidated in the course of Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic’s rule, given the right combination and concatenation of causes and effects, its territorial integrity is far from impervious to the exploitation of age-old ethnic and tribal loyalties, which have been systematically suppressed since the rise to power of Reza Pahlavi Shah in the 1920s.
The vertiginous balancing act of forestalling Iraq’s total disintegration is a telling example of where such tactics can lead. US secret assistance, flirtation and unabashed support to groups such as the Baluchi Jund al-Islam, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq and the Kurdistan Free Life Party in conjunction with a wide-ranging aerial strike could make for a dangerous cocktail with potentially devastating consequences for the Iranian people; consequences that would almost certainly spread to Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, engulfing the region as a whole with catastrophic results.[vii]
[i] In reality it is only the American President George W. Bush who has spoken of an approaching WWIII, a prognosis taken right out of the mouth of neoconservative ideologue Norman Podhoretz.
[ii] The Politics of Non-Proliferation, Mohammad Kamaali, http://www.campaigniran.org
[iii] Article IV, Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, International Atomic Energy Agency, INFCIRC/140, 22 April 1970
[iv] Correspondence with the author, 6/3/2008
[v] For a thorough account of this disinformation campaign see, Iran: A Chronology of Disinformation, Gary Leupp, Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, February 17/18, 2007
[vi] Shifting Targets, Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, October 8, 2007
[vii] The Mujahedin-e-Khalq and the Kurdistan Free Life Party’s sister organization, the Kurdish Workers’ Party are both listed by the State Department as terrorist organizations.
© Sadegh Kabeer
Since the revolution, the Iran hostage crisis, US support for Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war, Iran’s alleged involvement in the 1983 Beirut US Embassy and barracks bombings, the Iran-Contra Affair, and Iran Air Flight 655, have ensued and only gone to sour relations and entrench mutual hostility further. The US-led invasion of Iraq moreover, has opened up a whole other dimension to what many have likened to an ongoing war of attrition, replete with all the necessary accoutrements: mutual vilification and unrelenting of rhetoric.
The title of William O. Beeman’s recent book The Great Satan Vs the Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other is more than apposite given the episodic tirades emanating from both Washington and Tehran, each with its own sense of righteous indignation, railing against the evils committed by the other. There was a period of relative calm, however. With the election of the reformist President Mohammad Khatami, a modus vivendi however distant and obscure became a distinct possibility. Perhaps fearing Iran would be next on the Bush Administration’s hit-list after an unparalleled display of military strength, which eviscerated Saddam Hussein’s crumbling regime in a matter of weeks, Khatami’s government made the offer of a ‘grand bargain’ in which everything was on the table; from Iran’s nuclear program, to recognition of Israel and the cessation of support, financial and otherwise to Lebanese and Palestinian militants.
Whether the offer was the result of benevolence or fear is really beside the point – what it does show is that the Iranian government is ultimately rational in an instrumental sense, and foremost interested in procuring its survival. This instrumentalist behavior has remained in evidence even since the election of the markedly more hard-line president in the form of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, who has been castigated on more than one occasion by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei who ultimately holds all the cards and the keys to every door.
The Jacobin period of the Islamic Revolution has subsided, even if it continues to rear its ugly head on occasion, and some time ago entered its Thermadorian phase where far more worldly interests act as the prime motivators governing the regime’s behavior. The regime’s old-guard is far more akin to the Soviet Politburo whose political machinations were strictly motivated by Realpolitik and often underwritten by jaded cynicism and whose foremost objectives were self-preservation and regional self-aggrandizement. The Islamic Republic corresponds well to such a paradigm and can hardly be called an exception in this regard. The infamous chant of ‘Death to America’ is but a stale nod to official ideology and rings hollow amongst the vast majority of Iranians, especially those born in the baby boom post-1979, and whom can be counted amongst the most pro-American populations in the Middle East.
Ahamadi-Nejad’s inflammatory and arguably anti-Semitic rhetoric has of course fanned the flames of controversy and in its shortsightedness acted as a boon for those elements in Washington, most notably Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office whose activities are about as obscure and elusive as Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat, where only the vestiges of a menacing grimace remain. Advocates of a strike against Iran know full-well that an enemy who bares his teeth can be exploited to brilliant effect and whose bearded visage can ably perform the role of ‘imminent threat’ personified, striking fear into the heart of the American and European publics.
While the reformists were at the helm the conventional wisdom held that the Iranian president was merely a figurehead, and thus the creature of subterranean forces at work within the Islamic Republic. The election in August 2005 of a little-known firebrand in the form of Ahmadi-Nejad claiming to represent Iran’s disenfranchised and destitute underclass with all of the appropriate demagogic trimmings has led to the Iranian president’s transformation by these selfsame politicians and pundits into a Hitlerian incarnation with a raging desire to inaugurate WWIII.[i] While Khatami was cast as a pathetic stooge incapable of making any impact upon the dogmatic values of the Islamic Republic, Ahamadi-Nejad, we are told, has his finger on the button and is itching to hasten the Twelfth Imam’s return by means of nuclear Armageddon. The Orientalist and neoconservative ally, Bernard Lewis, in an article written for the Wall Street Journal, even cooked up the bizarre theory that Ahmadi-Nejad would launch Iran’s nuclear weapons on August 22 2006 so as to coincide with the prophet Mohammad’s ascension from the Dome of the Rock!
The tactic employed here is very simple and extremely effective. By imposing on your enemy the category of the ‘irrational’ as opposed to the ‘rational’, negotiation and diplomacy necessarily emerge as futile and thereby precluded a priori. If a policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is unable to deter the Iranian government the only available option is preemption by means of military force. The result is Bush’s refrain ‘that no option is off the table’ when it comes to dealing with Iran, even if that means a ‘tactical’ nuclear strike. We are admonished further that force is the only language ‘these kinds of people’ understand. Lewis and dilettantes such as the British novelist Martin Amis and neoconservatives such as Michael Leeden and David Frum in their efforts to snuff out the path of diplomacy have endeavored to cast Iran beyond the pale of rational debate. Not surprisingly, it was Frum who was responsible for the subsumption of Iran, Iraq and North Korea under the banner of ‘an axis of evil’ in Bush’s January 2002 State of the Union address,
The reality is slightly more nuanced however. Not only has there been no hard-evidence that Iran is currently pursuing a nuclear weapons program,[ii] there is the additional caveat that even if the regime were in possession of a nuclear arsenal, the Iranian president, who unlike the US president, isn’t commander-in-chief of the armed forces and so cannot launch any kind of military attack without the Supreme Leader’s authorization.
Another point that is often purposely overlooked is that Ahmadi-Nejad is ultimately elected and thus not a permanent fixture of the Iranian political scene. Whatever the limitations and gaping flaws of Iran’s few democratic processes, the Iranian president can be removed electorally. Ahmadi-Nejad was himself an underdog and few if any foresaw his electoral victory. Those who abstained from the last Iranian presidential elections out of disillusionment at the failure of Khatami’s government to change the status quo in 2009 may well kick Ahmadi-Nejad out of power and back into the obscurity from whence he came. Even his core-constituency to whom he had promised to uproot corruption and alleviate poverty have been left out in the cold and rightly resent the current president for promises he hasn’t kept.
The release in December 2007 of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) in which all sixteen US intelligence agencies unanimously concluded that Iran had ceased its efforts to build a nuclear weapon back in 2003, came to the relief of many and it was subsequently argued by a slew of commentators that the NIE would provide Iran with some much needed breathing room; putting a damper on any plans for an imminent US strike against Iran.
Unlike Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea, Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), a treaty which guarantees ‘the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination’.[iii] Iran, however, has refused to halt its nuclear enrichment program and as a consequence elicited three rounds of sanctions. The most recent set embodied in UNSC Resolution 1803 extends beyond Iran’s nuclear program, and calls for vigilance regarding Iranian financial institutions.
The impact of existing sanctions is already being felt in Iran, making it ever more difficult for Ahmadi-Nejad to hitch his wagon to the nationalist star. Every time it is invoked its emotive force is assuaged and it is likely if things continue in this manner Iranians will elect a more pragmatic leader in the 2009 presidential elections, even though they are fully within their rights as delineated in the NPT to domestically enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Iran’s abysmal human rights record and suffocation of personal freedoms guarantees, moreover that the manipulation of nationalist sentiment will only have a limited shelve life.
If the Bush Administration is preparing the ground for regime change in Tehran as the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh has argued, it seems to be running in tandem with the ongoing commitment to isolate Iran economically and politically by means of UN sanctions. Professor Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, like Hersh affirms the possibility of a US strike against Iranian nuclear targets and Revolutionary Guard bases at the end of Bush’s second term. An attack, he says, ‘continues to remain very much alive – particularly in this US election year when the possibility of an ‘October surprise’ is always there…the Republican president might do something to prolong the state of war and make it easier for Senator McCain to have an upper hand in the November election’.[iv]
A disinformation campaign has been waged in the face of the American public’s skepticism as to the merits of an attack against Iran,[v] in order to reframe the US’s ‘issues’ with the Islamic Republic from one of counter-proliferation to counter-terrorism.[vi] After the Bush Administration’s clear manipulation of intelligence in pursuit of a political agenda in the run up the US-led invasion of Iraq, the American public and world at large are no longer willing to take US intelligence claims at face value.
To this end, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has been placed on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations and been accused of instigating sectarian violence in Iraq and supplying ‘explosively formed perpetrators’ (EFP) responsible for killing Coalition soldiers. To what degree they are involved however, remains nebulous, especially since it is in the Islamic Republic’s interests to have an empowered Shia majority heading the present Iraqi government.
This was most recently highlighted by Ahamadi-Nejad’s two-day state visit to Iraq earlier this month during which Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maleki greeted the Iranian president with brimming smiles and much pomp. Iran has a vested interest in seeing the present Iraqi government succeed and is unlikely to throw in their lot with the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose view of Iran is itself shot through with skepticism and secondary to the causes of Iraqi and Arab nationalism, which he skillfully manages to blend with a radical brand of Shi’ism.
Middle East expert and editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, Alain Gresh, has further written that US commandos have been active in Iran since 2004 and that the US has substantially increased aid to Kurdish, Arab, Azeri and Baluchi minorities in an bid to destabilize the country. Although Iran is not by any definition a ‘new state,’ and possesses a fairly cohesive national identity, consolidated in the course of Pahlavi and the Islamic Republic’s rule, given the right combination and concatenation of causes and effects, its territorial integrity is far from impervious to the exploitation of age-old ethnic and tribal loyalties, which have been systematically suppressed since the rise to power of Reza Pahlavi Shah in the 1920s.
The vertiginous balancing act of forestalling Iraq’s total disintegration is a telling example of where such tactics can lead. US secret assistance, flirtation and unabashed support to groups such as the Baluchi Jund al-Islam, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq and the Kurdistan Free Life Party in conjunction with a wide-ranging aerial strike could make for a dangerous cocktail with potentially devastating consequences for the Iranian people; consequences that would almost certainly spread to Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, engulfing the region as a whole with catastrophic results.[vii]
[i] In reality it is only the American President George W. Bush who has spoken of an approaching WWIII, a prognosis taken right out of the mouth of neoconservative ideologue Norman Podhoretz.
[ii] The Politics of Non-Proliferation, Mohammad Kamaali, http://www.campaigniran.org
[iii] Article IV, Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, International Atomic Energy Agency, INFCIRC/140, 22 April 1970
[iv] Correspondence with the author, 6/3/2008
[v] For a thorough account of this disinformation campaign see, Iran: A Chronology of Disinformation, Gary Leupp, Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, February 17/18, 2007
[vi] Shifting Targets, Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, October 8, 2007
[vii] The Mujahedin-e-Khalq and the Kurdistan Free Life Party’s sister organization, the Kurdish Workers’ Party are both listed by the State Department as terrorist organizations.
© Sadegh Kabeer
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Jean-Luc Nancy: Mytho-poiesis and the Persistence of Community
Prologue
‘Not long ago, it was still possible to speak of a “crisis of sense”....But a crisis can always be analyzed and surmounted. One can rediscover sense that is lost, or one can at least indicate approximately the direction in which it is to be sought. Alternatively, one can still play with the fragmentary remains or bubbles of a sense adrift. Today, we are beyond this: all sense has been abandoned.’[1]
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World
‘What could be more common than to be, than being? We are. Being, or existence, is what we share.’[2]
Jean-Luc Nancy, Of Being-in-Common
‘A single being is a contradiction in terms.’[3]
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural
‘The absolute is between us.’[4]
Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative
The idea of community, or alternatively, the question of belonging, retains a strange and at times mystifying hold upon many of us. The telos of a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends where reverence for the law would be sufficient to maintain order and respect for others remains a distant prospect; advocates of realpolitik might even say a utopian one. Of course Kant had envisioned the cosmo-polis in Perpetual Peace (1795) as a regulative ideal to which states and their citizens must aspire. At the beginning of the 21st century another tendency can be seen to be aggressively asserting itself; this is the question of identity. Today it is a platitude to remark that ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and sexual identities, on both a macro and micro level, are increasingly responsible for the huge swathe of ferocious conflicts, struggles for rights, freedoms and recognition, presently raging across the globe, and engendering fractious relations between neighbours that had hitherto lived in a state of relative indifference, even friendship.
In the second half of the twentieth century up to the present, but especially in the aftermath of the Cold War, there has been from Bosnia to Kashmir, the United States, Darfur and the Middle East, an overwhelming resurgence in the assertion of national, ethnic, religious, linguistic and sexual identities. All of which are increasingly making themselves felt, at times in quite terrifying ways. Such identities allow us to participate in a community, something supra-individual, which turns against the tide of ceaseless motion, instability and flux precipitated by the global marketplace. A supra-individual identity lets us express ourselves in a way that profoundly shapes the manner in which we not only relate to ourselves as individuals, but also, and perhaps more importantly, how we relate to others. This is evident not only amongst minorities and the marginalised but with an equal intensity amongst the majority and even at the very seat of governmental power.
Supra-individual identities strike a chord in a way that one’s individuality based on the graphical representation of consumer purchases for that year is simply incapable. For decades marketing gurus have been preaching that consumerism ‘empowers’ us to express our individuality unlike any economic mode of exchange hitherto; it is according to them a great advance upon and liberation from the yoke of the past; a tact for breaking the shackles and ‘mind-forged manacles,’ to use William Blake’s expression, which pin us down independently of our own desires to a particular gender, ethnicity, and culture. Even age and class do not escape this nexus. We can, of course providing we have the financial means, become a man, women, young, old, posh, urban, or a hybrid of disparate and antagonistic creeds, genders and ages, cultures and lifestyles.
According to this narrative we are finally free to embrace with open wallets our genuine liberation and exhibit our individuality for all to see. This form of ‘negative liberty’ appears to be all that is left after the disenchantment of the world, the eclipse of Vernunft by Verstand, and the unmasking of age-old dogmas and pieties. Marx in The Communist Manifesto described vividly, in an oft cited passage, capitalism’s, and what he regarded as its representative class, the bourgeoisie’s, unparalleled ability to revolutionize itself in the most ingenious and brilliant ways, thereby ensuring its preponderance and continued vigour:
‘Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’[5]
This process still underway today in the form of the continued proliferation of free trade and the liberalisation of markets, has met with unanticipated obstacles and resistance; at least thus far they have severely failed to match the praise and laudation showered upon them by their most staunch advocates. A host of debilitating problems, both old and new, awaits redress: the incorporation of developing economies into the global market, poverty, starvation, the destruction of the environment, the issue of alternative energy sources, the rise of fundamentalism and drug addiction etc… Such maladies if not exacerbated, continue, giving rise to growing discontent, apathy and in some instances, the seeds of revolt. The status quo remains dissatisfying and indifferent – our relation to ourselves, our neighbours and even those people we have never met or seen in person on the other side of the planet, has been eclipsed and overcast by the shadow of exchange value and the unending parade of the spectacular. But does the status quo suffer (if it ever did) from a ‘crisis of sense’? Jean-Luc Nancy, the central figure of this paper, claims that rather than the epithet of ‘crisis,’ our present condition is best characterised as our exposure to an abandonment or withdrawal of sense; what he on occasion refers to as the tautological relationship between ‘sense’ and ‘world’.[6] We live in a world in which sense has irreparably withdraw and we yet continue to live, love, and work in that world; we thus, in fact, experience this withdrawal as itself harbouring some kind of meaning to be understood and reckoned with. This in some instances has given way to the precarious ‘demand for sense’ – a ‘demand of the world that it signify itself as dwelling, haven, habitation, safeguard, intimacy, community, subjectivity: as the signifier of a proper and present signified, the signifier of the proper and the present as such.’[7]
In this time of the atomised, apathetic and lassate individual there are a number of other trends increasingly imposing themselves onto the geopolitical scene. It appears some of us at least, desire to conjoin our own piece of driftwood to another and another, while at the same time excluding others, sometimes on a purely a priori basis. Out of this scenario we wish to provoke stasis, stability, so that the fluid is compelled to congeal and harden in order to make individual and communal identities immovable, even irrefrangible. Nancy argues that it is through the creation of myths that we found and articulate the common being of community. He adds, the ‘myth of the community…is always the myth of a communion – the unique voice of the many capable of inventing and sharing the myth.’[8] The myth of the community with a common being is univocal rather than plurivocal – a single voice is shared in lieu of a multiplicity of voices that share in their differences from one another.[9] We will return to this issue again and again in the course of the essay.
Moreover, if the conditions obtain we utilize the opposition of included/excluded to use, abuse and exploit others who happen to fall outside the limits of what is deemed acceptable to our clan, tribe or creed. Perhaps even to expel and dispossess them, and at its most extreme to cleanse and annihilate the other, extirpating his or her presence from the land we call our own and claim for our people or the mythology of our entangled driftwood. The land or autochthonous soil is presumed as a birth right, it is said to embody certain values and speak a history, whose repercussions continue to be felt in the here and now. It represents the myth of an autochthonous people whose origin coincides with the soil from which they primordially sprouted – the land bespeaks a history upon which battles were fought and where ancient kingdoms were won. Some even go so far as to contend that the land is drenched in the blood of their ancestors and so indissociably bound up with the blood line. The result? Armenia, Shoah, Rwanda, Darfur, Israel/Palestine.
But ethnic cleansing, the mass deportation and/or detention of immigrants, and genocide have not disappeared; it continues at this very moment as each one of us speak, read, write and think.[10] This is not simply a problem of the North persecuting and eviscerating the South with both its financial and military might. Such conflicts are rife in both hemispheres and are unfortunately with us for the foreseeable future. What of community then? Surely if it were possible it would be absurd not to discard the notion of community and the stable identity is professes to confer upon us and our relation to others? Is being born Jewish, Muslim, Russian, French, Christian, male, proletarian, female etc…not merely a contingent fact about us with no innate power of its own to compel us to behave in accordance with the mores and customs that identity exhorts us to abide by alongside our compatriots or coreligionists? Are we not beyond the ideological vestiges of what some might argue is merely an adept and less politically sensitive version of the doctrine of biological determinism? Has this doctrine, as Edward Said almost three decades ago diagnosed in Orientalism, been replaced by a more subtle form of discursive representation by which the other is fashioned and represented as other to the ends of subjugation and control by the metropole?[11] Contrary to this, could we not contend with the Sartreans (and also the abstract and immediate self-consciousness of the Phenomenology of Spirit’s life and death struggle) that in the final analysis since consciousness is ultimately nothing, these aleatory facts that supposedly define us, can be shorn off and negated until there is nothing but the bare ‘I’; the formal unity of apperception which is nothing but our point of view on the world and precondition of cognition; or alternatively, the cogito ego sum by which we bring the factical, or our situated facticity into hyperbolic doubt, thereby expunging its grip upon and distortion of our thought?
But why then this resurgence in the assertion of identity, whatever one may take ‘identity’ to mean; why its continued presence or ‘need’? Why has the middle-aged and at one time secular Ashkenazi Jew, chosen now to don the yamaka and observe the Sabbath? Why does the once irreverent Lebanese adolescent now passionately argue for a return to the piety of his forbears and denounce his parents’ for taking on the blasphemous ways of the kafir? And finally, why does the Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka fiercely call his brothers and sisters to arms so as to fight against the ‘foreign horde’ of Tamils held responsible for usurping their native homeland? This paper makes no attempt to address the root or underlying causes of such a resurgence – we merely wish to bring this trend to the readers’ attention in order to set a context for Nancy’s persistence in using the word ‘community’ to describe our being-in-common, despite the deep-seated reservations held by many philosophers and literati of his generation.[12]
The resurgence in the politics of community can only be unproblematically shrugged off and dismissed if we desire to wilfully misunderstand and misrecognise the provenance and allure of what Nancy calls immanentism, and its corresponding conception of community. Immanentism, as we shall see in the course of this essay, is when an essence, what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy’s longstanding collaborator would call a ‘typology’, is ‘set to work’ in the form of ‘economic ties’, ‘technological operations’ and ‘political fusion’; working through these various forms of social organisation so that the community emerges as an object of its own fashioning and work.[13] In other words, the ‘essence’ in question is all-encompassing and consequently responsible for the manufacture of every sphere of social existence. In this way the polity is envisioned as a work of art to be moulded in accordance with the unfolding of the essential criterion or type. The ‘essence’ operates as the immanent condition of its own reproduction and perdurance in and through the community. The community, Volk or nation, is thus transformed into a work (oeuvre).[14] The ‘worked’ or ‘operative’ community creates and works itself by means of ‘the subjective process par excellence’, to wit, the process of the community’s self-formation and self-production qua oeuvre is ultimately made possible in virtue of its being understood in terms of a absolute subject.[15] We will examine this process in greater detail below.
We have already noted that identity has the power to motivate individuals to commit heinous crimes, risk imprisonment and even death; some undertake such acts in the name of the sacred, others claim to do so in the name of their nation and the values they associate with the country in which they were born. We have already alluded to some of the dangers, and even catastrophic consequences of an entirely immanent conception of community, upon whose conditions of possibility we will elaborate upon further below; but in light of the preponderance and highly charged nature of the issues of ‘belonging’ and ‘identification’ can we unabashedly dispense with the idea of community and rescind it as a domain worthy of question? Part of the overarching ambition of this essay is to demonstrate that such an eventuality is not so easily achieved and that we cannot conclusively rid ourselves of its provocation to thoughtfulness. There is a palpable ‘need’, if we may put it this way, for a notion of community that eschews the folly and murderous violence of its immanent counterpart, while remaining faithful to our ethical and existential predicaments. Nancy’s philosophy can be read as the unpacking of a single and highly suggestive idea: the meaning of being and therefore our existence is both singularly plural and plurally singular, which means in nuce that as singular beings we are constitutively open to others.
In the preceding paragraphs we have only very sketchily outlined some of the issues and problems which surround the question of identity and the status of community. A status that is by no means guaranteed, vouchsafed or unambiguous. The objective of this essay is not to analyse concrete examples of multiculturalism or the politics of identity. Our aim here is to engage the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, examining the philosophical notion of community and the ontology of compearance (comparution) or perhaps more familiarly to readers of Heidegger, Nancy’s rewriting of the existential analytic of Dasein as presented in Being and Time in terms of Mitsein. The question of being is raised anew, but for Nancy the question becomes a matter of the shared and dispersive nature of sense relayed between singular beings in their singularity. Nancy, a philosopher who comes out of the Western tradition, offers no ‘solution’ or panacea to the aforesaid issues.[16] As we shall see, his notion of community can be interpreted as a tendency through which the community is always already in the process ‘unworking’ the operations of the social edifice. What is meant by this will receive further elucidation in due course. But it should be remembered that Nancy also comes after Kant (Critique), Nietzsche (genealogy), Heidegger (Destruktion and Abbau), and more finally Derrida (deconstruction and differance). Of more importance he comes after ‘Auschwitz’ and all that that proper name has come to signify and render mute, but with whose legacy we have not yet come to terms and perhaps will never be able.
Part I
The Nazi Myth
Perhaps most apposite place to begin our inquiry into the Nancean rethinking of community and ethical relations between persons, is the short essay co-authored by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, entitled The Nazi Myth, published in English in the journal Critical Inquiry in the winter of 1990, but originally dating from a conference held some ten years earlier. The Nazi Myth is not an analysis of the myths propagated by the National Socialist regime, but an elaboration of National Socialism’s self-constitution by means of a fascistic logic. Fascism is not to be pawned of as merely reason’s other; as merely unbridled irrationalism. Fascism possesses a logic of its own and so, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe claim ‘a certain logic is fascist, and…this logic is not wholly foreign to the general logic of rationality inherent in the metaphysics of the Subject.’[17] It is not the aim of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe to approach the ideology of National Socialism as either historians or even political scientists – by their own admission this is beyond the purview of their interest and expertise. Their objective rather is to adumbrate the implicated status of what in this text they call the ‘ideology of the subject’ in the fascistic logic running through National Socialist ideology,[18] which is not equivalent, but nevertheless related to what Nancy following Heidegger calls the onto-theological tradition; to wit, that which ultimately retains recourse to a ‘ground’ of some sort, which in turn grounds the beings of the world, bestowing meaning, sense, and direction upon them – combining the attributes of the ‘first cause’ sought out by traditional metaphysics, with the ‘highest being’, and governing interest of orthodox theology.
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s investigation into the mechanics of National Socialism in ideological terms is in itself nothing new – and at least initially they are happy to defer to Hannah Arendt’s magisterial study, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Largely reiterating Arendt’s conclusions, while at the same time incorporating their own research into the auto-production of the subject at work in the Jena Romantics, by which Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy mean for the most part the work of Friedrich Schlegel and the journal he confounded, Athenäum (1798-1800). We will now turn our attention not only to The Literary Absolute, a text again co-authored by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, but also Lacoue-Labarthe’s own research into the nature of ‘the political’[19] as presented in his Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics and The Fiction of the Political, which are almost in their entirety presupposed and incorporated by Nancy in his writings on community, in addition to their joint work at the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique.
Jena Romanticism and Self-Production
In order to give some historico-philosophical coordinates to the analyses of ‘national aestheticism’ and auto-production that will soon follow we will briefly turn to a short philosophical text which acts as a sort of overture prior to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s investigation into Romanticism proper, The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism. They regard this text not only as the ‘philosophical horizon of romanticism’ but also take it to be an exemplar of the shift of eidetics into aesthetics or perhaps even their conflation.[20] Its author remains unknown for sure and the fragment was only discovered in 1917 by Franz Rosenzweig whilst editing Hegel’s writings. It has been attributed by scholars to Schelling under the influence of Hölderlin, Hölderlin himself (e.g. Dieter Henrich), and even to Hegel (e.g. Otto Pöggeler), in whose handwriting the fragment was transcribed, albeit some time after its original composition. To be brief, the overriding conviction of this fragment is that ‘the highest act of reason, which – in that it comprises all ideas – is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are united as sisters only in beauty…Philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.’[21] Furthermore, it pinpoints an imminent challenge confronting philosophy if it is not to wither and fade into obsolescence:
‘We need a new mythology, however, this mythology must be at the service of the ideas, it must become a mythology of reason.
Until we render the ideas aesthetic, that is, mythological, they will not be of any interest to the populace, and vice versa: until mythology has become reasonable, the philosopher has to be ashamed of it. Thus the enlightened and the unenlightened finally have to shake hands; mythology must become philosophical in order to make the people reasonable, and philosophy must turn mythological in order to make the philosophers sensuous.’[22]
First, it is essential to make clear that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are not attempting to plot an overwrought genealogy which argues for a seamless ideological transition from Romanticism to National Socialism. Such a thesis would be absurd and cavalier to say the least. Rather, they regard Jean Romanticism as a movement without predecessors,[23] and yet only possible in the aftermath of Kant’s ‘critical turn’ and its attempted completion in the Third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgement.[24] We will now quickly gloss over the basic points of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of the System-Program.
The first and most important point is that the fragment strives to present the System of the subject itself in absolute terms,[25] what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe call the Subject-system.[26] Intimately connected in this conceptual figure are the ideas of Spirit (Geist) and aestheticism. Spirit is seen as an ‘organism’ or ‘living system’. Spirit and life are intertwined and beauty is the ideal to which they both aspire. Life essentially becomes a work of art.[27] The System-Program argues, as the above quotation confirms, that the philosophy of spirit must be an aesthetic philosophy. The notion of Bildung takes on great significance within the ideological constellation of Romanticism as well as what Lacoue-Labarthe delineates as the tradition of ‘national aestheticism’, which he claims was largely founded in early 19th century Jena and continued into the 20th century by the philosophy of Heidegger.[28] Bildung means both as process and result, to form, shape, fashion and cultivate.[29] Prior to the eighteenth century it denoted only the physical formation of an entity.[30] Kant continues to also use Bildung in this sense in the Critique of the Power of the Judgement when he speaks of the organism’s capacity for self-organization in terms of a bildende Kraft, or ‘formative power’.[31] This helps explain the later conceptual affiliation of Spirit with contemporary conceptions of the organism and organicity we noted above. From the eighteenth century onwards the notion of Bildung, however, would command the attention of a host of philosophical and literary figures. Perhaps Rousseau most famously in Emile or On Education (1762), a text that would go on to influence much of the German intelligentsia of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries e.g. Herder, Goethe, Schiller to name but a few.
The System-Program understands the idea of beauty as the ideality of the Idea which implies in turn that the Idea itself be determined as the beautiful Idea.[32] Ideality and beauty come to be understood as internally related so that beauty becomes the generality of the Idea as such. This is the definitive gesture of the slide from eidetics into aesthetics which we referred to above. As Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe note, bildende Kraft becomes synonymous with aesthetische Kraft; ‘formative power is aesthetic power.’[33] This intertwinement of formative power and aesthetic power would become essential for any entire tradition stressing the deep-rooted connection between the ethico-political and aesthetic domains. More importantly this tradition, which Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe contend stretches from the Jena Romantics through to Wagner, Nietzsche (particularly The Birth of Tragedy),[34] Jünger and even Heidegger, weds the notion of community and the political to a call for myth-making or what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe in their joint as well as single-authored writings have referred to as the process of fictioning. We will return to this idea in more detail below in relation to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s analyses of National Socialism’s ‘aestheticization of politics’.[35] But let’s for the moment return to The Nazi Myth.
The Ideology of the Subiectum
In that text, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argue that National Socialism like other ideologies claims to offer an all-encompassing and consistent political explanation of the world and history – it promotes a certain world-view or Weltanschauung.[36] An ideology, according to this definition, is usually reliant upon a specific concept or small number of interrelated ideas, such as ‘race,’ ‘class’ etc…, and with which it seeks to elicit a total and uncompromising explanation of the movement of history, and thus an unrivalled interpretation of the present, past, and future. The agent of this total explanation, which embodies it most fully, and that is to affect its realisation is the Subject-state.[37]
The Subject-state, might represent a particular class, an exalted race or party vanguard, that wills itself to be an absolute subject.[38] We might add that not only is the Subject-state self-produced, the product of auto-poiesis,[39] but conceives its raison d’être in terms of a circular rationale. In this way it can without bringing its own self-assurance into question rationalize both its successes and failures. On the one hand, the ascendancy of the Subject-state is both foreseen and retrospectively read as a Promethean struggle against all odds, while its failures are either omitted or interpreted as necessary for its consolidation on the road to glorious victory. On the other hand, and not without paradox, the Subject-state’s accession to power is posited at one and the same time, as the work of destiny and vindication of the ideology it advocates. Rather than construing ideology as Marx had done in The German Ideology as a camera obscura inverting and thereby distorting reality,[40] Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe examine the auto-production of the Subject-state and the conditions that subtend its capacity for self-constitution as well as the resources it draws upon for sustenance. Myth, as we shall see in due course, is absolutely vital to this process of self-production. The power of myth in awakened by means of an auto-poietic act or a poiesis of sense.[41]
The Greek poiēsis connotes ‘making, fabrication, production, poetry, poem,’ and derives from poiein, ‘to make, to do’.[42] The connections delineated by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe between myth, poiesis, and the ‘aestheticization of politics’ invoke all of the aforesaid senses of poiesis – myth, or better, mytho-poiesis is the means by which such an aestheticization is realised and in the light of which the polity is dismembered and reconstituted from the bottom up. Images of rebirth, renewal, and the phoenix rising from the ashes are the staple of not only the fascist but the national aesthetic canon more generally.[43] In this way political forms and ethical relations are to be made consonant with the fashioned production of the beautiful state commonly modelled on the beautiful soul. We will explore this dynamic in greater detail in the following sections of this essay, which according to Lacoue-Labarthe comes under the remit of what he calls onto-typology, the relation of the Gestalt or ‘figure’ to mytho-poiesis. But first a digression vis-à-vis Heidegger’s critique of the classical conception of the subject is in order, because it fundamentally shapes Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of the subjectivism evident within the Subject-state of the immanent community.
Excursus on Heidegger’s Critique of the Subject of Modern Metaphysics
It should be fairly clear by now that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe affirm Heidegger’s intuition announced in the early stages of his chef d’oeuvre, Being and Time that the subject as conceived by modern metaphysics i.e. the Cartesian cogito, but stricto sensu the Kantian figuration of the subject,[44] and its manifold permutations all the way through to its incarnation in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology, is in an irreparable state of dissolution. Despite the recent backlash against so-called ‘anti-humanism’, which has become a sort of byword for ‘neo-Heideggerianism’, in work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and others,[45] Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe continue to treat with the utmost seriousness Heidegger’s early insight which saw Dasein, or being-there, as an engaged and situated self that is always already thrown into the world, while also being projected into the future. Derrida in a well-known interview with Nancy entitled Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject, articulates his own ambiguous relationship to Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein, which we might say equally well characterises Nancy’s own relationship to what for all intents and purposes is a watershed, but also highly problematic moment in the history of philosophy:
‘I believe in the force and necessity (and therefore in a certain irreversibility) of the act by which Heidegger substitutes a certain concept of Dasein for a concept of the subject still too marked by the traits of the being as vorhanden, and hence by an interpretation of time, and insufficiently questioned in its ontological structure. The consequences of this displacement are immense, no doubt we have not yet measured their extent.’[46]
A complete rehearsal of the existential analytic of Dasein in Being and Time and all it entails would be inappropriate at this time. For purposes of clarification several of the more relevant and salient theses that go on to underpin Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s own critique of the ‘ideology of the subject’ and thus the inherent subjectivism of the Subject-state, will need to be briefly recounted. We will not only examine the potential ambiguities to which Derrida points above. But also show how they pass over into Heidegger’s later thought of the history of beyng. We will also have to be mindful of whether the equivocality of Heidegger’s account of Dasein permeates Nancy’s own recasting of the question of being in terms of Mitsein.
According to Heidegger, Dasein is defined by its Existenz rather than in terms of an essence.[47] With respect to Dasein he inverts, as he is fond of saying, the primacy of essentia over existentia, and detaches the latter from its filiation with its Latin cognate, which denotes ‘objective presence’ or Vorhandenheit.[48] Dasein, however, ‘is a being that does not simply occur among other beings.’ Dasein is, according to Heidegger, ‘ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being.’[49] And it is thus that Heidegger wishes to re-pose the question, for which he is both loathed and admired, and that he tells us has suffered two millennia of neglect – the Seinsfrage or question of being. But let us leave that to one side for the moment. More germane to our current endeavour is the argument put forth in Being and Time, for the primordiality of Zuhandensein or the ready-to-hand, which characterises Dasein’s most basic mode of comportment towards beings. What this effectively means, and we are being rather captious here, is that everything is related within a nested structure of purposive relations, variously named by Heidegger the ‘in-order-to’, the ‘where-in’, the ‘with-which’, the ‘towards-which’, and the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’. These modes of relating and comporting ourselves toward entities, at bottom, structures all of our practical involvements in the world. It is in this sense that many commentators, including Nancy himself, have argued that Heidegger took Kant’s granting of primacy to practical reason over theoretical cognition, more seriously than even Kant did himself.[50]
Heidegger as is well know argues that Dasein always already finds itself in a meaningful world. Dasein, as the story goes, is essentially being-in-the-world. He insists that ‘the world is not the sum of all extant beings, not the universe of natural things – that the world is not at all anything extant or handy.’[51] World is a determination of the being of Dasein. The world is not extant, but it nonetheless real, by which he means that world does not partake in the mode of being an object, despite being ‘more objective than all objects’.[52] ‘World exists – that is, it is – only if Dasein exists, only if there is Dasein.’[53] And this is because the ‘ontological sense’ of world is imbued with or if you prefer structured by ‘significance’ (Bedeutsamkeit): the nested structure of meaningful interconnections within which we all dwell. Dasein is not a human subject standing over against an object (Gegen-stand), but the unity of self and world, ‘self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world.’[54] Dasein is thus fundamentally an openness, historically and factically situated in the world. Nancy supports such a conclusion insofar as he acknowledges that ‘To be is to make sense.’[55] Hence for Nancy Dasein’s pre-ontological understanding of being is interchangeable with ‘action as sense’; the understanding of being is consequently always a sense-making.
Dasein is always already in the world and opens out onto a world that harbours within it a certain plenitude and abundance of significance and meaning. To this extent Levinas is correct, the es gibt, or ‘there is’ is a sort of generosity, quite unlike his own distinct reflections on the il y a.[56] Nancy distances himself by quite some way from Heidegger, when he speaks of an irreparable abandonment of sense. But at one and the same time he chooses to affirm that ‘Being itself is given to us as meaning.’[57] He is able to reconcile both insights, however, because in concert with the aforementioned, he avers that, and it is arguable that Heidegger was aware of this far more than Nancy is willing to admit: ‘Regretting the absence of meaning itself has meaning.’[58]
The question of the body, more specifically corporeity, is one to which Heidegger pays little if any attention, whereas for Nancy it is absolutely indispensable. Nancy, for better or worse, has correctly been cited by contemporaries such as Derrida, as an exemplary thinker, not unproblematically, of the body and touch.[59] While conversely, in the early work of Heidegger there is a near exclusive concern with Dasein’s spatial orientation, its facticity and historical situation, which condition the parameters of its understanding – but few, if any pages of Being and Time are dedicated to an exploration of Dasein’s corporeity or bodily materiality. One might even go so far as to say that the body is seen by Heidegger as being virtually incidental to Dasein’s being-in-the-world. [60] This ‘bias’ moreover is arguably carried over into Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, which focuses exclusively upon what we might cautiously refer to as the ‘metaphysical’ in contrast to the ‘naturalistic’ elements of the latter’s philosophy which he peremptorily brushes aside.
The philosopher who would fill this lacuna was of course Merleau-Ponty whose early work, Phenomenology of Perception and his unfinished, posthumously published masterpiece The Visible and the Invisible, left an indelible mark upon Nancy; his text Corpus being one such example. Corpus’s central motif is the consecration of the Eucharist, Hoc est enim corpus meum, ‘This is my body,’ which acts as the point of departure for Nancy’s reflections on corporeity and embodiment.[61] Nancy even goes so far as to claim that: ‘Coming neither before nor after, the sense of the body is given as the place of sense, as its circumscription and its exscription, as its end and its birth, its limit and its outcome, its aim and its obstacle, its being and its abyss.’[62] This considerable divergence from Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology of Dasein should be constantly borne in mind. An adequate treatment of this issue is beyond the scope of this paper, although we will on occasion recapitulate some of Nancy’s more salient ‘theses’ vis-à-vis the issue of embodiment when germane to the task at hand. However, it nonetheless remains important to acknowledge that Nancy’s thought is oriented by an inexorable discussion with Heidegger much like what Derrida refers to as his own Auseinandersetzung with the philosopher from Meßkirch, which cannot be facilely swept underneath the rug.
What of the Kehre or ‘turn’ often invoked to describe Heidegger’s thought of the post-war era, leading to the construction of a Heidegger I/Heidegger II distinction? Nancy of course does not restrict himself purely to Heidegger’s early writings, Being and Time in particular. He too endeavours to think the Kehre, albeit not in terms of a ‘change in focus’, in the course and development of Heidegger’s thought. On the contrary, Nancy’s own thought recognises and concurs, though not uncritically, with Heidegger’s own reflections on the Kehre in the preface to William J. Richardson’s seminal work, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1962). In that text Heidegger argues, contrary to popular belief, that the Kehre ‘is inherent in the very matter designated by the headings: “Being and Time,” “Time and Being”…The reversal (Kehre) is in play within the matter itself. Neither did I invent it nor does it affect merely my thought.’[63] Nancy’s thinking of community and what we might call, with some reservation, his ‘social ontology’, not only on the one hand, tentatively attests to the dissolution of the subject of modern metaphysics; but on the other hand, acknowledges the questions of being and the ontological difference must be reckoned with; an attitude that is not to be confused with obedient faithfulness to some kind of quasi-Heideggerian agenda. In fact, as we shall see Nancy embarks upon a rethinking of the question of being in toto. However, a few of the distinguishing features of the Kehre should be briefly re-enacted. With the Kehre Heidegger’s endeavours to bring to language the equiprimordial co-respondence or co-openness of beyng’s dispensation and the Da, within which man dwells and appropriates beyng through the sheltering of the truth of beyng in beings – this in essence is what he means when he at times elliptically speaks of die Sache selbst.
During the 1930s Heidegger began expressly hyphenating, but also thinking about Dasein in its adverbial sense. The adverb qualifies the verb in the ‘how’ of its unfolding, in terms of that unfolding. Da-sein thus delineates the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ of being, which had hitherto been the concern and province of the overwhelming majority of metaphysical thought.[64] The at times indiscernible line separating Dasein from homo sapiens in Being and Time should perhaps be apportioned much of the blame for the initial misunderstandings of Heidegger’s project, as either anthropological or a philosophy of existence. It was these debates that of course elicited Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism in his correspondence with Jean Beaufret and also his hyphenation of Da-sein, allowing him to emphasize either one of being-there’s respective elements when apposite to the matter at hand.
Da-sein rather than addressing beings in terms of their quiddity attends to them in terms of their Da-sein, to wit, in terms of the es gibt or ‘there is’, that which exceeds the physical dimensions and contours of the individuated.[65] As such Da-sein designates this imperceptible and intangible dimension which lines the visible. It points to the es gibt that maintains and traverses every phenomenon, as the phenomenality of all phenomena, while at once exceeding and escaping phenomenality, since it only ever receives phenomenalisation by means of its recession. In a short piece entitled Sense and Truth Nancy discerns and argues for the unpresentable nature of the ‘there is’ or what he calls ‘being as being’: ‘Being as being is being as the action of the verb “to be,” that is, being that “makes” [things] come into presence (and that, consequently, cannot itself be presented). One could say: being as being is the being that phenomenalizes the phenomenon, substantifies substance, or eventualizes the event.’[66]
However, even if we take all of this in our stride, it remains true to say that the originary revelation of beyng needs man as the Da, not as the ‘there’ but as the ‘open’ of beyng’s unfolding.[67] In the posthumously published Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) Heidegger affirms that this ‘sheltering-concealing needs the deepest clearing: beyng[68] “needs” man.’[69] It is our primordial openness to beyng, first articulated by Heidegger in terms of our (as Daseins) pre-ontological understanding of being, that allows him to later speak of our co-respondence to beyng as a privileged relation. But as Joan Stambaugh avers, it is the Ereignis or event of appropriation that permits of this unique co-respondence and reciprocity, thereby undermining the privileging of either relata.[70] We thus once again can discern an emphasis on the ‘how’ over the ‘what’ of being. The Da as the site of the operation of truth understood as the original unfolding of the Open, is no longer identified with Dasein’s ‘mineness’ (Jemeinigkeit). Da-sein implies the ‘there’ as the pre-ontical, pre-predicative and pre-individual ‘place’ or ‘aperture’ of beyng, while Da-sein understands ‘being’ as grounding and preserving the Da in beings.[71] Da-sein and Da-sein are inseparable since it is only in beings that the Da is at once sheltered and concealed.[72] It is in this way that the temporality of beyng in general is understood explicitly as Ereignis. Beyng now understood as granting its essence to man and man reciprocally appropriating beyng, by sheltering and preserving the truth of beyng in beings. Heidegger’s thinking, which Nancy undoubtedly appropriates, but also expropriates and disavows, as we hope to evince below, is a thinking of and at the limit – it is the endeavour to think from out of the eventful site of being.
The Proper of Man
A certain discomfort remains and continues to jar any straightforward accession to Heidegger’s ontology of Ereignis. What is it that provokes this jarring effect? Perhaps the most formidable obstacle is that to which we have already alluded above and what Derrida in The Ends of Man referred to as ‘the proper of man’. In that essay Derrida argues, and this is a difficult allegation to shake as we shall see, that in Heidegger’s thought ‘the thinking of the proper of man is inseparable from the question of the truth of Being.’[73] Related to this question is another perhaps even more pressing indictment of Heidegger’s critique of modern philosophy’s construal of the subject, and its ‘substitution,’ to use the words of Derrida, with Dasein. Derrida here is not only implying the presence of a certain esteem and privileging of man a propos other beings by Heidegger, but in addition to this, alleging that Heidegger remains in thrall, albeit with significant equivocality, to the essence of man conceived in terms of humanitas.[74] ‘We can see then that Dasein, though not man, is nevertheless nothing other than man.’[75] Does Heidegger’s philosophy despite his best efforts remain enveloped by anthropocentrism and the exaltation of mankind vis-à-vis the nonhuman? In the interview with Nancy, Derrida frames the dilemma thus:
‘In insisting on the as such, I am pointing from afar to the inevitable return of a distinction between the human relation to self, that is to say, that of an entity capable of consciousness, of language, of a relation to death as such, and so forth, and a nonhuman relation to self, incapable of the phenomenological as such – and once again we are back to the question of the animal. The distinction between the animal (which has no or is not a Dasein) and man has nowhere been more radical nor more rigorous than in Heidegger. The animal will never be either a subject or a Dasein. It doesn’t have an unconscious either (Freud), nor a relation to the other as other, any more than there is an animal face (Levinas). It is from this standpoint of Dasein that Heidegger defines the humanity of man.’[76]
Despite all of the multifarious twists and turns, the subtle niceties of the many vicissitudes of the existential analytic through to the ontology of Ereignis, there seems little room for manoeuvre with respect to the conclusions Derrida puts forth in The Ends of Man. Man for Heidegger simply occupies a privileged position vis-à-vis other beings in its relation to beyng. There is perhaps no better place where this priority is attested to than in the Letter on Humanism, which is deserving of extensive quotation:
‘But the essence of man consists in his being more than merely human, if this is represented as “being a rational creature.” “More” must not be understood here additively, as if the traditional definition of man were indeed to remain basic, only elaborated by means of an existentiell postscript. The “more” means: more originally and therefore more essentially in terms of his essence. But here something enigmatic manifests itself: man is in thrownness. This means that man, as the ek-sisting counter-throw (Gegenwurf) of being, is more than animal rationale precisely to the extent that he is less bound up with man conceived from subjectivity. Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this “less”; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by being itself into the preservation of Being’s truth…In his essential unfolding within the history of being, man is the being whose Being as ek-sistence consists in his dwelling in the nearness of being. Man is the neighbour of being.’[77]
Needless to say, the relation of man and beyng presented here is not merely a vulgar positing of mankind at the top of the food chain, or as the closest to God of the earthly creatures, as is the case for example in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. In that text Locke contends that mankind possesses dominion over the earth in virtue of his creation in the image of God, and his being set above the beasts and brutes and only a ‘little lower than the Angels’.[78] His capacity to reason, infer and deduce confers on him the natural right to appropriate nature in accordance with the exigencies of his self-preservation, and beyond that industriousness and the accumulation of wealth. ‘God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the Earth…He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational’.[79] Heidegger would of course interpret Locke as entirely trapped within the prejudices and dogmas of onto-theology. It is this fundamental prejudice that allows for the possibility of his assertion that man, the rational animal, possesses dominion over beings and the God-given right, even responsibility, to subjugate and manipulate them to his own ends. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the relationship of mankind and beyng is one of co-propriety – it is mankind that shelters and preserves the generosity of beyng’s dispensation. As Derrida insightfully remarks: ‘Propriety, the co-propriety of Being and man is proximity as inseparability…this co-propriety of man and of Being, such as it is thought in Heidegger’s discourse, is not ontic, does not relate two “beings” one to the other but rather, within language, relates the meaning of Being and the meaning of man.’[80]
But does Heidegger’s ‘substitution’ of the category of the subject with Dasein, despite his most sincere efforts, not retain the traits of a metaphysics of presence as hypokeimenon or ousia so that being-there continues to be defined by its relative stability, permanent self-presence, and sustained relation to self?[81] We cannot possibly settle this debate here. Our exposition of the rudiments of Heidegger’s critique of the subject of metaphysics’ self-sufficiency and self-presence, and brief foray into the issues surrounding the debate a propos ‘the proper of man,’ are intended not only to provide a context for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s investigation into the Subject-state, but also evoke a degree of hesitancy and scepticism regarding Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s own critique of the ‘ideology of the subject’. Even if we accept their critique, do they offer us a philosophy with a positive content in its stead? When we engage with Nancy’s notion of compearance and his rethinking of Mitsein in Being Singular Plural, this should be one of the foremost questions in our minds. We will have to ask ourselves whether Nancy repeats Heidegger’s ambiguous relationship to the nonhuman and, if such an evaluation proves to be in the affirmative, whether he can justifiably defend such equivocality. Is Nancy’s reconfiguration of Mitsein anything more than a mere recapitulation of Heidegger’s own fetishization of mankind? And even if we don’t wish to phrase it in such strong terms, are not traces of an overarching occlusion of the nonhuman i.e. the animal, vegetal, microbiological, at work in Nancy’s thinking of compearance and being-with?
Mytho-poiesis and National Aestheticism
Thus far we have examined some of the features of the Subject-state and Heidegger’s critique of the subject of metaphysics that underpins much of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s attitude to the subjectivism inherent to the constitution of the immanent community. We have also, albeit with some brevity spoken of the work of auto-poiesis that governs its reproduction, but as of yet have paid scant attention to the nature of myth. The text with which we began this paper was after all entitled The Nazi Myth. What is myth and how are we to understand its quasi-mystical power to captivate us and enchant the world? As Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe seek to demonstrate, myth, poiesis, and art, tied together by mimesis, provide a formidable instrument of identification. As Nancy writes in Myth Interrupted:
‘Myth is of and from the origin, it relates back to a mythic foundation, and through this relation it founds itself (a consciousness, a people, a narrative).
It is this foundation that we know to be mythic. We now know that not only is any “reconstitution” of the initial surging forth of mythic power itself “a myth,” but also that mythology is our invention’.[82]
Furthermore,
‘Myth is above all full, original speech, at times revealing, at times, founding the intimate being of community. The Greek muthos – Homer’s muthos, that is, speech, spoken expression – becomes “myth” when it takes on a whole series of values that amplify, fill, and ennoble this speech, giving it the dimensions of a narrative of origins and an explanation of destinies.’[83]
Readers of The Republic know well that Plato’s construction of the ideal state is predicated at least in part upon the exclusion of myths and considerable effort is made in order to distinguish with as little equivocation as possible the difference between muthos and logos. As a matter of fact there exists a great deal of equivocation in Platonic discourse as to the status of myth as we shall soon see. For now we should note that both muthos and logos are uses of speech or modes of discourse, but myth is a fiction in the active sense of fashioning, whose role it is to propose, and perhaps even impose, models or types; types to be imitated by means of which individuals, states and nations can comprehend and identify themselves. Myth represents multiple and different existences as immanent to its own unique and univocal fiction.[84] It achieves this through the mobilization of a figure. This is what Nancy means when he says that mythology is figuration proper.[85] The issue of ‘mimetism’ is integral to understanding myth since it is only in virtue of our imitation of models, types or exemplars that we are able to ensure identity.[86] Methexis is the manner in which we participate directly in this process of identification, and the means by which a quasi-mystical fusion is affected, eliding all differences between persons.
Exemplarity and the Fiction of Founding
The ancient Greeks as did the Romans relied upon myths to furnish a model of exemplarity. One only has to take a brief glance at the section of the sixth book of Cicero’s On the Commonwealth called Scipio’s Dream in order to garner this insight.[87] The ‘hero makes the community commune – and ultimately he always makes it commune in the communication that he himself effects between existence and meaning, between the individual and the people’.[88] Lycurgus, Theseus, Moses, Romulus, Mohammed are exemplars to be imitated, and thereby reproduced.[89] The admonition to imitate eminent men, those who founded the community and established its laws, is incidentally a chief feature of the republican tradition from Cicero to Machiavelli and beyond. In The Prince Machiavelli underwrites the importance of imitation/mimesis to the end of competent and effective leadership. In the following quote from The Prince we can see at work what Nancy designates with the phrase ‘myth is a myth’.[90] He argues that myth understood in terms of inauguration and foundation is itself a myth, a fiction or invention.[91] Myth is not simply representation but a representation that works, that is operative, producing itself, and thus as an auto-poietic mimesis it is a fiction that founds.[92]
‘a ruler should read historical works, especially for the light they shed on the actions of eminent men…and above all, to imitate some eminent man, who himself set out to imitate some predecessor of his who was considered worthy of praise and glory, always taking his deeds and actions as a model for himself, as it is said that Alexander the Great imitated Achilles, Caesar imitated Alexander, and Scipio imitated Cyrus.’[93]
Here we see, although with perhaps some license, that the myth of the great hero, or statesman, gives birth to the perpetuation of two entwined myths – the myth of the founder, the hero that establishes the community and its laws, and the myth of founding itself, thus mutually reinforce one another – Achilles, Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, the list goes on ad nauseam; the myth of the proper, in this instance the proper name, expedites the communion of the community, the appropriation of the myths of the past, and their renewal in its most recent avatar. Plato’s deployment of myth is arguably distinct from these kinds of founding appropriation, which for the most part remain entirely reliant upon pre-existing mythical elements from which they solicit their power and efficaciousness.[94] As Lacoue-Labarthe importantly observes, the myth of the cave in Book Seven of The Republic has no ‘mythic source’ per se, it is self-formed and self-grounded thereby furnishing the foundations of Plato’s political vision.[95] We might say that it acts as a kind of auto-posited fulcrum without precedent.
Plato had strenuously disapproved of the use of myths because of what he deemed to be their sacrilegious content; he felt the myths told and propagated at his time degraded and misrepresented the divine. The difference of Plato’s own myth of the cave is of course that it is self-grounded or auto-posited. However, we should remain cautious here, taking our cue from Nancy, because as we have already noted, the myth which takes itself to be self-grounded and self-formed may well have already descended into the mythic, despite its best intentions to the contrary. The Platonic disdain for mimetism, which as we have seen is inseparable from myth as such, is tied to an equally potent distaste, not to mention distrust of the theatre and tragedy.[96] The actor doesn’t participate in the essence of that which he or she represents on stage, but merely imitates it. The actor beguiles us with her talent or knack for imitating that into which she has no real or genuine insight. The provocation of particular emotions by the theatre is seen by Plato as dubious and decadent, even potentially dangerous; especially because of its predication on ‘miming’ or mimicking certain roles and actions.[97] This however is not our main concern. What is of interest here for us is the establishment of the profound connections made via mimesis, between mythology, poiesis (invention, creation) and art. Myth like the work of art is an instrument of identification and so can be understood as the mimetic instrument par excellence.[98]
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe ask a pertinent question regarding the mythology of National Socialism: why did German totalitarianism take the form of a virulently racist regime? Why not class struggle or some other form? Although we would certainly have to be cautious before averring that National Socialism’s totalitarian character resided purely in its racist ideological program, the question of why the figuration of German totalitarianism took the form of racism, rather than class struggle or some other ideology is important. The answer: first, the ‘German problem’ was first and foremost one of identity.[99] Second, myth in this context, and as we outlined above, functioned as an ‘identificatory mechanism’, leading racist ideology to act as fodder for the voracious construction of myth; in this instance, the myth of the Aryan. At work here is what Lacoue-Labarthe in Typography as well as The Fiction of the Political, delineates as the work of onto-typology.[100]
The figuration of a ‘type’ is not merely a process of ‘fabulation’, but the conception of a model of identity that has been formed and realised.[101] The Hölderlinian call for the inauguration of a ‘new mythology’ that we descried in the System-Program was by no means a call for a retrieval or recuperation of the myths told by the ancients. On the contrary, the ‘new mythology’ would need to be created, moulded and fashioned. It would have to be sui generis. The System-Program was a response to the diremption or ‘arche-separation’ of Urteil and Seyn, subject and object, and the law and life, into antipodal conceptions thought to be originally and primordially ‘united in intellectual intuition’.[102] The poiesis of a ‘new mythology’ was thought to harbour the ability to render the rational sensuous, and accessible to the masses. Nancy argues that the working in concert of mimesis and poiesis is what provides the means by which the Subject-state can produce and sustain its particular typology. Mimesis facilitates the myth’s reproduction while the poiesis of sense creatively dispenses the myth’s founding character – at work here is an ontology of fiction or fictioning premised on the metaphysics of the self-present subject characteristic of the onto-theological tradition.
‘Mimesis is the poesis of the world as true world of gods, of men, and of nature. The myth of myth is in no way an ontological fiction; it is nothing other than an ontology of fiction or representation: it is therefore a particularly fulfilled and fulfilling form of the ontology of subjectivity in general.’[103]
Lacoue-Labarthe emphasizes that the ‘type’, also referred to as the Gestalt or ‘figure’ is of immense importance to this program i.e. the auto-poiesis of a new mythology. In his reading of On the Question of Being, Heidegger’s famous letter on the question of nihilism to Ernst Jünger, he defines it as ‘the final name of the Idea, the last word designating Being as “theorized” in its difference from beings – that is to say transcendence, or the meta-physical as such.’[104] The onto-typological relates to a ‘figure’ that both gathers together and bestows meaning upon beings.[105] Lacoue-Labarthe’s meticulously composed essay Typography in fact examines in admirable detail Heidegger’s own highly problematic relationship to mimesis which at least in certain respects repeats Plato’s own exclusion of myth and animosity toward theatrics.
The Gestalt in Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art: The Final Refuge of Metaphysics?
Lacoue-Labarthe notes with great perspicacity that in The Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger takes up the word Gestell in order to make it mean the gathering together of all the modes of stellen meaning to set, to put, to place – the most germane to the aesthetic domain being Herstellen (produce), Darstellen (present) and Feststellen (institute, constitute) – and through which Heidegger attempts to ground the work in its essence as ‘truth’s being fixed in place in the figure.’[106] Lacoue-Labarthe as we have seen regards the ‘figure’ as the residuum of the metaphysics of presence. Furthermore, he claims that Heidegger’s retention of the ‘figure’, in his ruminations on the Ursprung of the artwork, was at least partially a consequence of his sympathetic attitude towards the tradition of national-aestheticism, that would continue well after the failure of his rectorship into the final decades of his working life. In Originary Ethics Nancy underlines the fact that Heidegger by means of numerous strategies places considerable emphasis upon gathering and fixity, and that these should not be viewed as either ethically or politically neutral: ‘terms like “shepherd,” “guarding,” and “protective heed” aren’t entirely free of evangelistic, backward-looking connotations. They evoke a sense of preservation, a conservation of what ought to be open and to be risked.’[107] But that of course doesn’t mean that such terms are intrinsically fascistic or even in sync with the guiding thread of national-aestheticism, although given Heidegger’s former triumphalism and assertion that it is ‘the spiritual world of a people…that most deeply preserves the people’s strengths, which are tied to earth and blood’, we most no doubt remain deeply mistrustful of such motifs, which continue to emphasize the pertinence of a fictioning of the political by dint of a poiesis of sense.[108] We cannot possibly do justice to Heidegger here and so shall not attempt a worthy explication a propos his thinking of Dichtung, which is mediated by his reading of above all Hölderlin, but also Rilke and Trakl. In a far less auspicious move we shall by means of a short digression attempt an exposition of Heidegger’s notion of the ‘figure’ or Gestalt in the context of his meditations on the nature of the artwork. In The Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger articulates one of the most nuanced and unsettling presentations of the Gestalt, as Lacoue-Labarthe well recognises. It is worth making a brief incursion into this matter so as to appreciate just how complex and sophisticated Heidegger’s thinking of the ‘figure’ in fact is. And although Lacoue-Labarthe does not say this explicitly it might well be seen as the summit and epitome of onto-typology as such. The onto-typology of National Socialism, by contrast, will be shown in the following section in its complete and utter brazenness and crudity.
The setting-of-truth-into-the-work (das Sich-ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit) which Heidegger defines as the essence of art, establishes itself in the strife and ‘space’ that truth itself opens up.[109] The truth of the artwork is present only as the strife between clearing and concealing in the opposition between earth and world, which in turn belongs to the history of being (Seinsgeschichte), and its epochal constellations.[110] All great artworks irrespective of their medium, erect within the density of a specific earth a ‘figure’ (Gestalt) of ‘truth’ or disclosure.[111] ‘This strife which is brought into the rift-design, and so set back into the earth and fixed in place, is the figure…The createdness of the work means: the fixing in place of truth in the figure. Figure is the structure of the rift in its self-establishment. The structured rift is the jointure [Fuge] of the shining of truth.’[112] The Gestalt acts as the trace of a strife between world, a historic dimension, and an earth, which is to say a pre-historical ‘ground’.[113] Its purpose is to bring to light the ‘crack’, ‘fissure’ or ‘rift’ (Riss) that unites by means of antagonism, the historicality of the world and the a-historicality of the earth.[114] It is the earthly tendency or proclivity of the work of art, which forecloses the possibility of it exclusively belonging to the world and therefore history.[115] The artwork enters history only after having given birth to history. ‘Art is history in the essential sense: it is the ground of history.’[116] The capacity of a ‘great’ artwork to make manifest the unity of an entire epoch with unparalleled acuity is therefore ultimately non-historical; it is what binds world and earth together and most clearly evinced by the caesura situated in the ‘figure’ of the artwork.[117] Lacoue-Labarthe surely hits the marks when he claims that Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art attempts to pin down and fix in place the truth of the strife of earth and world in the ‘figure’; a figure that bears within it the quality of a fundamental fissure or antagonism. This is of course what sets Heidegger’s version of the Gestalt apart from its more jejune and otiose variations. But whether such a gesture could be framed within a broader narrative or meta-historical explanation is another matter. The myriad of difficulties that such an endeavour would present almost certainly accounts for Lacoue-Labarthe’s own scepticism and hesitancy in arguing for the supra-historical validity of a history of onto-typology.
The Will-to-Art, or Onto-typology of National Socialism
In the case of National Socialism the issue is far more straightforward and all the more brutal for that. The ‘type’ or ‘figure’ as construed by National Socialism was racial, more specifically the ‘Aryan’ type. Race, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, is the identity of a ‘formative power’, of a type, and therefore a bearer of myth. ‘It is the myth of ‘mythopoiesis’ itself, of which the type, by the very logic of aesthetico-political immanentism, is both production of and produced by fiction.’[118] Myth signifies nothing but itself and is the product of pure self-formation. The locus of its truth is contained in the self-foundation of the Volk or race. In this onto-typology the ontology of subjectivity reaches its fulfilment – the Aryan type as absolute subject is enacted as pure will willing itself.[119]
The exaltation of a ‘type’ or figure set in contradistinction to other fabricated counter-types and even non-types is a trait commonly found in the polity fashioned in conformity with such ‘aesthetic’ criteria. One only need look to the typology of the ‘Aryan’ and the ‘Jew’ as figured in the ideological scheme of National Socialism. It is well known that many Nazi ideologues held the Aryan type to be the quintessence of form and beauty. The Aryan’s soul possessed a definite form and so had a natural penchant for myth and self-fictioning.[120] While the ‘Jew,’ on the contrary, was figured not only as the personification of ‘ugliness,’ but also as the race without Seelengestalt.[121] The ‘Jew’, failed to constitute a type on account of his amorphous and formless soul, which by definition was incapable of fashioning a subject or proper being (être-propre) for himself. This apparently, according to Alfred Rosenberg, perhaps the most influential of the Nazi ideologues, explains the ‘Jew’s’ distaste and disinclination to myth. Maurice Blanchot rethought and rephrased this racist canard concisely when he stated that the ‘myth of the Jew’ is the man supposedly ‘liberated from myths.’[122] In Rosenberg’s vile narrative the ‘Jew’ is the infinitely mimetic being, the ‘site of an endless mimesis.’[123] And this is why, according to Rosenberg, he is not the antipode of the Aryan, the ‘Jew’ is not his counter-type, but instead his very contradiction. In this obscene equation the ‘Jew’ is without type.
Germany’s ‘intellectual and aesthetic voluntarism’, the upshot of which was the onto-typology of the Aryan, and what Walter Benjamin once referred to as a ‘will to art’ was the consequence of its desire to appropriate for itself an identity and create its own subject.[124] This logic which we have explicated at some length consists of a twofold movement: the will-to-identity and the self-fulfilment of form, both of which belong ‘to the fundamental tendency of the subject, in the metaphysical sense of the word.’[125] This means that we are never able to rest on our laurels or calmly rest assured in the righteousness of our cause and the purity of our arms. Such complacency Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argue only invites the dangerous slide into a will-to-identity and the reassertion of an immanent form of community.
What are we to do in such a predicament? If ‘there can be…no community outside of myth,’ is descent into the immanent community and identitarian thinking an inevitable eventuality?[126] Nancy’s answer is in the negative. Myth is not intrinsically bound to the logic of fascism. On the contrary, divested of the imperious subjectivism and domineering will-to-identity at work in the immanent community, myth can embark upon the radical possibility of interrupting and displacing itself. In this way the ‘interruption of myth’ becomes also ‘the interruption of community.’[127] Community emerges, according to Nancy, not merely as a means of resistance but strikingly as ‘resistance itself.’[128] Such an explanation will seem strained or maybe farfetched. Isn’t Nancy being overconfident in myth’s ability to disrupt itself and shatter the affinity it has often held with the totalizing community of essence? This is not a question we can answer at this point – we must first address Nancy’s own ‘positive’ understanding of community, and it is to this which we now turn.
Part II
The Inoperative Community and Negativity Without Use
In a much debated letter written on the 6th of December 1937 to Alexandre Kojève, author of the hugely influential lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Georges Bataille poses a quandary of sorts:
If action (‘doing’) is – as Hegel says – negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has ‘nothing more to do’ disappears or remains in a state of ‘unemployed negativity.’[129]
By ‘unemployed negativity’ Bataille meant the residue of human negativity that would continue to persevere at the ‘end of history’ once the labour of the Concept had come full circle and all possibilities had been exhausted. The remnants of negativity would consequently take the forms of laughter, eroticism, and joy in the face of death.[130] Nancy transposes the theme of desoeuvrement, or inoperativeness, Bataille’s ‘negativity without use,’[131] into an understanding of community which is devoid of a shared ‘essence’ or ‘type’ that would ensure the community’s reproduction and unsullied immanence. By contrast, what Nancy refers to as our being-in-common is without any common being, substance or essence that could be said to be ‘workable’ or the object of a ‘formative power’. According to Nancy, the being of beings that overdetermines our being-in common, cannot be viewed as an entity which could be said to possess a prior substance that would pre-exist or underlie its multiple, singular plural articulations.[132] What this means will be explained more fully in due course. For now let it suffice to say that our being-in-common is not a substance that could be subject to predication and thereby possess a determinate identity. ‘Being in common means…no longer having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place, such a substantial identity, and sharing this (narcissistic) “lack of identity.”’[133] Our being-in-common can be understood as tantamount to a sharing in our lack of identity. It is in this sense that the community can be said to be ‘inoperative’ or ‘unworked’. There is no common identity, whether it be race, religious denomination, or subject of history, that could be said to be constitutive of it. The community hangs together only in virtue of its ‘unworkable’ character. But what would such a community amount to? Is not the idea of a community possessing a substantial identity that binds its members one to another, the necessary definition of community? Doesn’t the very idea of an ‘inoperative’ community strike us as fundamentally aporetic, or even a contradiction in terms? In La communauté désoeuvreé Nancy endeavours to disabuse us of such a premature conclusion. Community isn’t the result of a subsistent identity’s operation, but lies rather in our shared finitude, and thus a shared relation to death; not only our own deaths but the death of others. It is this which for Nancy exceeds and eludes the grasp of any metaphysics of the self-present and perduring subject.[134] We will explore why this is the case later in our discussion, but first we might find it helpful to take our leave of a pertinent observation made by Nancy in The Inoperative Community:
‘Community is calibrated on death as on that which it is precisely impossible to make a work (other than a work of death, as soon as one tries to make a work of it). Community occurs in order to acknowledge this impossibility, or more exactly…the impossibility of making a work out of death is inscribed and acknowledged as “community.”
Community is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed to others. Community is what takes place always through others and for others. It is not the space of the egos – subjects and substances that are at bottom immortal – but of the I’s, who are always others (or else are nothing). If community is revealed in the death of others it is because death itself is the true community of I’s that are not egos.’[135]
Nancy’s notion of community presented here is quite unlike the life and death struggle of Hegel’s Phenomenology in which an abstract and immediate self-consciousness, a ‘pure being-for-self’ is compelled to stake its life in order to supersede its present state of immediacy and therefore implicit dependence upon the other. For Hegel ‘it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won’.[136] It is the quest to demonstrate its perfect freedom and independence from things or otherness in toto, which is the provenance of the life and death struggle. This struggle for Hegel acts as a necessary stage on the road to mutual recognition. Our very real confrontation with death is turned into a vehicle for the continued progression of the dialectic. This is of course what Nancy’s notion of the inoperative community tries its utmost to avoid. We have already shown the reasons for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s fundamental suspicion of the classical figuration of the subject, and the tendency toward an identitarian logic such a figuration induces. Hegel however by no means fits into such a cosy narrative, a point which Nancy’s own writings a propos Hegel are the first to confirm. We will not therefore mount or even attempt anything like a ‘Nancean critique’ of Hegel here. It will suffice for our present purposes to note merely that for Nancy the model of mutual recognition does not pose itself as a problem in the same way it does for Hegel. For Hegel mutual recognition is absolutely indispensable for the satisfaction of self-consciousness. Although Nancy would up to a point agree with Hegel that ‘Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.’[137] He would, however, be far less keen to endorse Hegel’s conclusion that self-consciousness ‘exists only in being acknowledged.’[138] We will try our best to explain why this is the case.
Firstly, we must make the obvious point that Nancy would be quick to disavow Hegel’s modified understanding of the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception. He does however concede in his own way to the idea that desire is fundamentally a desire for the other, although we are never strictly, to use the words of Judith Butler, ‘subjects of desire’.[139] He writes in his most recent text vis-à-vis Hegel, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, that: ‘Trembling from the trembling of the other, and with the other, the self comes into desire. Self-consciousness is essentially desire, because it is consciousness of self as and out of its consciousness of the other.’[140] We aren’t according to Nancy, especially if we wish to frame it in eidetic terms, always already inscribed within an economy of desire which would give rise to self-conscious beings impelled by a logic of dissatisfaction and satiation.[141] Nor are we exposed to the other in virtue of risking our own lives in the face of the other, while concomitantly seeking his death. Of course Hegel does not actually ‘put to work’ the death of the other and he certainly never makes a work of it; the other must survive in the form of the servile consciousness if the dialectic is not to lose momentum. What Nancy does refuse though, not without a whole new set of issues arising, is that the staking of one’s life is the prerequisite of a relation to one’s own mortality; that we must in a very literal sense stare death right in the face. Community is on the contrary the very ‘place’ where our finitude is revealed to us in our being-with others with whom we share our finite co-existence as an unmasterable limit.
Before delving any deeper into the question of our finite being-with others we must first state an important qualification a propos the inoperative community: the inoperative community, unlike Hegel’s Prussian state or Marx’s vision of the authentically communist society after the successful defence of the revolution by the dictatorship of the proletariat, has no eschatological content whatsoever. There is no telos or culminating point of history in which the inoperative community could finally be said to have been enacted and realised as a historical destiny.
In The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben asks in a way that greatly resonates with what we have thus far encountered in Nancy’s thought of community: ‘What could be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions…but by belonging itself?’[142] The common is thought by Agamben as the point of indifference between the proper and the improper, as something that can never be subject to appropriation or expropriation.[143] This is again very similar to Nancy. In his important essay The Decision to Existence Nancy endeavours to slough off any residual disdain or contempt for the quotidian and mundane latent in Heidegger’s descriptions of ‘idle talk,’ ‘curiosity,’ and ‘ambiguity’.[144] In stark contrast, Nancy argues that every one of our experiences is implicated in the ‘they’.[145] And so the ‘they’ or the ‘one’ ‘is never other than we.’[146]
Heidegger calls ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ a specific attunement on our part to that which the unique situation (Situation) demands of us.[147] Moreover, the connection between die Entschlossenheit (resolution, resolve, decisiveness) and erschließen (to disclose, to open up), should not be lost on us. Anticipatory resoluteness is not an act of human volition but a mode of disclosure. ‘The situation cannot be calculated in advance and pregiven like something objectively present waiting to be grasped. It is disclosed only in a free act of resolve that has not been determined beforehand, but is open to the possibility of such determination…the resolution must be kept free and open for the actual factical possibility in accordance with its own meaning as a disclosure.’[148] For Nancy decision is not a matter of enjoining our appropriate or proper attunement to the Moment (Augenblick) of authentic praxis, by which Dasein, attentive to its worldly situation as a whole and to its uniterable singularity finds itself called to decision. Although Heidegger’s idea here is in no way to be confused as is often the case by his less perspicuous critics with a brash voluntarism, Nancy continues to find problematic the emphasis placed upon the propriety of decision, that which is most appropriate and subject to appropriation by existence. We have already shown at some length why this is the case with respect to Derrida’s Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger, which Nancy takes up in other forms. Although Heidegger himself questions this priority in his final writings, namely On Time and Being,[149] it nonetheless remains an issue that has evoked unease amongst the philosophers of Derrida’s generation and after. And this is why Nancy decides in favour of ‘the mundanity of decision.’[150] Such a stance undermines any attempt to ground decision beyond our experience of the mundane. To advance beyond these parameters and claim decision in the name of ‘being,’ ‘history,’ or a ‘spiritual mission,’ etc… is no longer thought to be feasible or desirable.[151] In this way the ‘they’ can be said by Nancy to be a, if not the locus of disclosure;[152] ‘the “proper” (eigen, Eigentlichkeit), takes place nowhere other than right at the “improper,” right at everyday existence’.[153] The point of this brief digression was not to show how the Nancean notion of decision deviates from its Heideggerian predecessor. The point rather was to demonstrate Nancy’s abandonment of any pretence to propriety, but also evince in a more patent fashion the disavowal of any penchant for messianism, including the subtleties of the Derridean messianism without a messiah.
It is in this respect that Nancy and Agamben’s thinking vis-à-vis community diverges. For example, Agamben writes that the ‘novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.’[154] Although Agamben could never be interpreted as advocating an unseemly or bromide teleology or messianic creed there remains nonetheless a palpable messianic inflection (most probably inherited from his deep ties to Benjamin’s work) to his prognosis which foresees the conflict between the State and the non-State of whatever singularities in what we might call ‘epic’ terms; and of which Tiananmen is taken by him to be paradigmatic. Although such a conflict is by no means inevitable, it does function as the horizon of the ‘politics to come’. The inoperative community eschews any such messianic inflection because for Nancy the ontological and the ethical exist in a state of fundamental, albeit jarring and dissonant reciprocity.[155] The meaning of being for Nancy, as we shall see in greater detail below, is the meaning of being-with, and the ethical consists in the inoperative community’s ‘unworking’ and thus break down of the subject-community’s will-to-identity and concomitant self-production. Community is not a state of affairs to be achieved, but a process always already ‘unworking’. We do not here wish to overstate the differences between Nancy and Agamben’s thought with respect to community. There are profound resonances and affinities that we can’t unfortunately go into any further here. The reason for our juxtaposing this ‘snapshot’ of Agamben’s ‘coming community’ with Nancy’s ‘inoperative community’ was to make even clearer the distinctness of Nancy’s contribution. Unlike Agamben, he does not understand ‘community’ as something to be augured or foreseen. ‘Community’ is always inoperative and in its inoperation affects openness, plurality and multiplicity. Such ‘unworking’ traverses the community no matter how oppressive or totalizing the social body and so forecloses the advent of total closure, even if such a closure remains possible in principle; constantly one can bear witness to burgeoning and emergent lines of flight as Deleuze and Guattari might say, which provoke dissonance and rupture, forestalling the incline toward complete immanence. Immanence in this negative sense is, as Deleuze says, an immanence to something other than itself, as opposed to the articulation of an immanence, purely immanent to itself alone.[156] It is in this way that such essentialist social forms are able to operate and reproduce an overarching criterion of identity through which the body politic is made to achieve complete consistency, while negating any overt recourse to a transcendent entity or avatar as such. Although we are unable to tackle this issue any here further we should note that such a conception of immanence bears little similarity to the Deleuzian notion of immanence, which as Deleuze ceaselessly reiterates, is stricto sensu immanent to itself, and with which Nancy shares a certain sympathy.
Nancy subscribes to the thesis, following the lead of Lyotard that the time of so-called ‘grand-narratives’ is at an end.[157] If history has ceased to be the history of the consciousness of freedom, of humanity, or class struggle, what avenues are left for us to pursue in order to describe and comprehend our political, ethical, and ontological condition? We are left with what Nancy calls ‘finite history’ and with it the community that no longer partakes in a shared essence or collective destiny. ‘It is a matter of the space of time, of spacing time and/or of spaced time, which gives to ‘us’ the possibility of saying ‘we’ – that is, the possibility of being in common, and of presenting or representing ourselves as a community – a community that shares or that partakes of the same space of time, for community itself is this space.’[158] Such a thinking of community is characterised by its thorough sobriety, forgoing any nostalgia for archaic social forms or sacred kinship structures which long ago disappeared from the face of the earth[159] – the space of community does not emerge as a gift of beyng to be sheltered and preserved by humankind.
Nancy claims: ‘The plurality of beings is at the foundation [fondment] of Being.’[160] Community is never a collective sense, but rather that which allows for our engagement with sense, and so in this way can be seen as the very spacing of sense.[161] The ‘space’ of community does not perform the role of a site which would unify or gather together into an organic whole the disparate, dispersed and multiple character of sense, thereby affecting its closure. Nancy here tries to eschew those motifs and impulses evinced in Heidegger’s writings that stress the themes of unicity, oneness, preservation, organicity and the inflammation of the spiritual truth of the Volk bound to the pre-eminence of such onto-aesthetico-typological determinations as blood, soil, and autochthony.[162] The groundless nature of community accounts for its essential ambiguity, and thus the unavoidable vacillation between unicity and multiplicity.[163]
Nancy’s ontology of co-existence which turns primarily upon the axis of the singular plurality of being-with is not simply a rehashing of §26 of Being and Time, The Mitdasein of the Others and Everyday Being-with, and all that follows therefrom. Nor is it intended as a ‘corrective’ or ‘taming of Heideggerian excesses’. Nancy skilfully draws on elements of Heidegger’s early as well as later work while revolutionizing much of their content, and bursting free from the confines and propensity toward unification into a single saying found in Heideggerian figures like Geheiss, the calling that gathers all acts of calling, enjoining speech to respond in turn,[164] and the four-fold. [165] In opposition to Heidegger, Nancy argues that the logos is irreducibly divided (partagé), coming to presence only in singular articulations from out of disparate and differentiated origins.[166] The thinking of community as we hope to elaborate further below is committed to differential relations between singular beings in their singularity.
We might add en passant, albeit not arbitrarily, that Nancy’s thinking of community would also preclude any recourse to the contractarian tradition represented by such figures as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and in the second half of the twentieth century by John Rawls. We do not wish here to abrade the often considerable differences separating advocates of the social contract, but instead bring to the fore a common presupposition which unites them: sociality in any meaningful sense of the word is only possible when agents existing in the state of nature,[167] agree upon (and thereby consent to) a form of political organisation (usually that decided upon by the majority), insofar as it remains consonant with their self-interest and desire for self-preservation. In doing so all individuals are compelled to resign their wills to a sovereign authority concerning matters of the public good. The sovereign authority as a direct consequence of such a compact is endowed with the right and hence the authority to make decisions on behalf of its members, to which they are obliged to obey.[168] It is only in this way that an end to the turmoil and lawlessness of the natural condition, the result of the unabated conflict of wills and judgements, can be achieved. Only after the crisis of political judgement has been resolved can men embark upon the properly political life, own property and be assured of peaceful coexistence with their neighbours. For Nancy such a scenario would be an abstraction from what he and Lacoue-Labarthe refer to as the sphere of ‘politics’ (la politique) i.e. the play of forces and interests engaged in the conflict over representation and political governance. By contrast, the notions of being-in-common, being-with, and the inoperative community etc…seek to broach a thoughtful encounter with what in contradistinction to ‘politics’ they refer to as ‘the political’ (le politique) i.e. the site where what it means to be in common is open to dispute and discussion.[169]
The contract theoretician in abstracting from the sphere of ‘politics’, even when consciously aware of its contrived nature or power as an explanans i.e. when conceived as a heuristic device for the construction of a just social order on the basis of self-interest etc…, naturalises a state of endemic conflict as mankind’s irredeemably fallen condition. Such a conception obviates what Nancy terms the clinamen, the inclination and inclining of one self to another; a proclivity which flies in the face of social atomism or the solipsistic marauders of the state of nature, which all fail to understand the ontological sociality of community and the compearance of selves.[170]
Community, ‘is not a gathering of individuals, posterior to the elaboration of individuality, for individuality as such can be given only within such a gathering.’[171] Nancy’s own enterprise is perhaps most apparent in Being Singular Plural, in which he sets himself the daunting task of explicating ‘the primordial, ontological condition of being-with or being-together’.[172] Being-with is not regarded by Nancy as a regional ontology governing intersubjective relations but as the very meaning of being,[173] defining our ontological and ethical condition, and presupposed by any account of individual agents brought into conflict as a consequence of their subjective preferences. [174] Sociality can in no way be derived from human artifice, which is not to say that Nancy would want to deny the vast impact of prostheses and technics upon the modes and forms of our coexistence or being-with others. His working out of what he calls ecotechnics patently testifies to this.[175] Nonetheless, Nancy wishes to make the point that in our very being we are never isolates cut off from others and the world; we are always being-with-others and being-toward-the-world.[176] This is in many ways Nancy’s very own incursion into ‘first philosophy,’ whose last recognisable manifestation was the ‘fundamental ontology’ of Heidegger.[177] In the next section we will attempt to further unravel Nancy’s ontology of the social.
The Spatiality of Being-With
Our co-existence is made possible by means of two constitutive moments of our being-toward-the-world. The first being simply that ‘we are,’ we exist in the hic et nunc. The second moment is the constitutive finitude of our existence. ‘What could be more common than to be, than being? We are. Being, or existence, is what we share...But being is not a thing that we could possess in common. Being is in no way different from existence, which is singular each time.’ He continues, ‘being is not common in the sense of a common property. But that it is in common. Being is in common.’[178] The opening line of this section stressed our being-toward-the-world because it is precisely the opening gambit of Being and Time that Nancy abjures. As we saw above, in Being and Time Heidegger had argued that it was first necessary to interrogate that being which is ontically distinguished in virtue of its concern about its being i.e. Dasein. The being of Dasein must first receive elucidation before we can proceed onto the question of being. This is Nancy’s main bone of contention with the existential analytic as such. Although Heidegger in §26 of Being and Time, elaborates Dasein’s being-with others, the investigation continues to be guided by and framed in light of the question, who is Dasein?[179] In the final analysis, the co-existential or co-originary appearance of the self with others is aufgehoben by Heidegger within the broader scheme of the existential analytic.[180] ‘The question of Being and the meaning of Being has become the question of being-with and of being-together’.[181]
On the basis of initial impressions, the spatiality of community we alluded to above can be understood in much the same way as Heidegger’s arduous struggle in the Beiträge to articulate what he calls time-space (Zeit-Raum). In fact, Nancy even at one point remarks that ‘being-with is the sharing of a simultaneous space-time’.[182] But how are we to think about space-time or time-space?[183] In the Beiträge Heidegger avers that ‘Space and time, each represented for itself and in the usual connection, themselves arise from time-space, which is more originary than them themselves and their calculatively represented connection.’[184] The ontical dimensions of the mathesis universalis, integral to Descartes conceptualization of nature as res extensa, emerge interstitially from out of the aperture of time-space.[185] Time-space is the dehiscence of the es gibt, the virtual and pre-ontical process which allows for ontical individuation. In the case of Nancy, the ‘space-time’ of community, is a Mitwelt, that ought to be thought as an ontological category announcing our co-existence and being-together, irreducible to the lineaments of the ontical, while exceeding the limits of representational thought. ‘If being-with is the sharing of a simultaneous space-time, then it involves a presentation of this space-time as such. In order to say “we,” one must present the “here and now” of this “we.”’[186]
Nancy’s thinking of community aspires to examine our being as compearance or co-appearance (comparution). The ‘with,’ ‘mit,’ or ‘cum’ becomes constitutive of Dasein’s being. For the Heidegger of the Beiträge we saw that Da-sein implied the ‘there’ as the pre-ontical, pre-predicative and pre-individual ‘place’ or ‘aperture’ of beyng. The ‘with’ of our being-with, according to Nancy, performs a similar function: it is the indispensable virtuality of our plural, relational, and shared co-existence; impossible to abstract from its determinate modes of articulation that are themselves always multiple. The ‘with’ furthermore is always simultaneous with its singular concretions as the space of our being-in-common.[187] The ‘with’ is not the ‘condition of possibility’ of our finite co-existence, in any conventional sense, because it is the exact contemporary of those terms which comprise it.[188] People, cultures, groups, networks, lineages and languages are the determined articulations of the ‘with’ in its singular plurality. Here Nancy continues to think through the repercussions of the inoperative community, the attempt to articulate our being-in-common without a substantial or common being.[189] The question of whether it remains only humans who are to be ontically distinguished, while the nonhuman continues to be viewed as Weltarm or ‘world-poor’ is something we will eventually have to address[190] – but for the moment we shall try to gain a better understanding overall of Nancy’s ‘project’.
Nancy quoting Being and Time writes that ‘sense’ is ‘the structure of the opening’, and emphasizes the active character of Dasein’s ‘making-sense’ of the world, which is not to be equated with a production of sense.[191] He underscores the verbal, active, and transitive senses of Dasein, being-there, which as we saw above, has no substantial identity because it is defined exclusively by its existence.[192] Nor can being-there be reduced to the web of significance in which it is engaged when actively coping with the world.
Two features of Nancy’s exposition of our being-with forestall the possibility of a substantial identity being attributed to each singular Dasein or to the plural ‘with’. The first is the ecstatic character of Dasein’s temporal co-existence in the world. The second is Nancy’s deployment of the notion of singularity, which for now it will suffice to say, is the means by which beings are exposed and open to one another in their shared finitude. Both suppose that it is being-with that furnishes the possibility of meaning. The meaning of being is co-originary and given as being-with, and the with must be thought as an aperture of a space-time that both distributes and yet remains co-extensive with any such singular distribution of singularities.[193] ‘There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.’[194]
The Ek-stases of Finite Ex-posure
It is well-known that Heidegger opposed any conception of time which perpetuated the misunderstanding that it was somehow internal to the mind or the product of consciousness. And this is why he preserved and extended the senses of the Greek Ekstase, ekstatikon, derived from the verb existanai, existēmi, meaning ‘to displace’ or ‘to derange’.[195] We should also bear in mind the senses of the Latin ecstasis meaning ‘a being besides oneself’, ‘trance’ and ‘rapture’.[196] Heidegger wished to convey temporality as ‘the original outside itself, the ekstatikon’[197] wedded to and in the final analysis supporting Dasein’s transcendence. The three temporal ecstasies of future (Zukunft), having-been (Gewesenheit), and present (Gegenwart) remain inseparable from one another and exist equiprimordially.[198] Dasein exists distended and stretched out between these three ecstasies of time, by being ahead of itself in the future, drawing on its past, while always being concerned and open to the present. The ecstasies underwrite our practical comportment to beings in the world, by which we expect the future, retain the past and enpresent (gegenwärtigen) the present.[199] Expectancy, retention and enpresenting are not merely the way by which we grasp the being of equipment in its ‘then’, ‘formerly’ and ‘now’ but are the source of such temporal determinations.[200] Nor are they phases of our consciousness of time or temporal duration; they are the unity of temporality’s temporalization into which as Dasein we are each inexorably thrown.
Reasonably early on in The Inoperative Community Nancy poses the somewhat rhetorical question: ‘Community, or the being ecstatic of Being itself?’[201] The structure and consequences of Dasein’s ecstatic temporality are rethought by Nancy and inscribed within the analytic of being-with. As finite beings we inescapably ek-sist within the flow of time; the inoperative community thus not only relies on the excess provoked by our shared mortality[202] but also by the fact that we ek-sist with others ecstatically outside of ourselves spliced up and dispersed in virtue of our shared pasts, presents and futures. Because as being-there we exist perennially outside of ourselves we can never be said to be entirely self-present. Our temporal existence never has a single impetus driving it forth. In this way we are always hearkening backwards, while at the same time being propelled forth with others and so share a temporal way of being-in-the-world, which we cannot control and of which we are not the authors. The rapturousness of community breaks up any possibility of the will-to-identity we witnessed in the absolutist Subject-state. Ecstasy is always a matter of ‘sharing’ (partage) and so by definition refuses the entreaties of the solipsist. Because we are always ‘outside of ourselves’ so to speak, and so distended in time, we are able to broach contact with the temporalisation of the temporality of the other. It is by means of this contact that both our births and our deaths are presented to us, which in turn confirms our own lack of ground i.e. that we are not self-sufficient and unmediated beings and that our existence lies outside of ourselves.[203] In other words, the presentation and understanding of ourselves only ever takes place with and in others.
The issue of temporal exposure is not quite as straightforward as we have presented however. Nancy understands our temporal exposure to other singular beings in conjunction with an equal, if not greater emphasis on the spatial dimensions of any such exposure. He understands singular beings as extended and in virtue of their extension, exposed to one another. This is fully worked out in what might be called his ‘bodily ontology’ which we will only gloss over here. The ‘with,’ as we have seen, is that place in which finite beings co-appear. This place, populated by singular beings, exists not as a unity but as a multiple division of sites, for which Nancy on occasion uses and adapts the term partes extra partes (‘parts outside parts’). Partes extra partes traditionally expressed the mechanical and external set of relations between either the individual parts of an object, or the relations between one object and another object.[204] In this way his thinking of the body avoids any such connotations which would imply a desire for organicity or a natural holism characteristic of the canon of national aestheticism. Nancy uses the term partes extra partes in order to convey the relations of exteriority between singular bodies, which are extended and exposed by relations of contact and separation to other singular bodies.[205] And these are by no means only human bodies. Bodies and the constitutive parts of bodies are extended and exist in a relation of exteriority to one another, never occupying the same place.[206] Furthermore, the body for Nancy is the site of touch which makes sense, but as materiality, is itself outside of all sense.[207]
The phenomenal materiality of co-appearance, for we are inescapably embodied beings, is therefore never purely a matter of Dasein’s perennial temporal distension, which causes it to be ecstatically ‘outside itself’ and thereby exposed; our exposure to one another as singular beings is also the outcome of the material contact of bodies and those elements constitutive of bodies extended in the space-time of the ‘with’.[208] Upon contact with another body ‘outside of itself’ the material body in its singularity is exposed and thus compears with the other.[209] ‘Body is the total signifier, for everything has a body, or everything is a body…and body is the last signifier, the limit of the signifier’.[210] Material bodies are seen, touched and sensed only from an outside and in a relation of exteriority by which they touch one another at a mutual distance or separation.[211] The corporeal isn’t conceptualised as merely a mode of disclosure; it is the fractured opening or spacing of discrete places at the very limit of sense, what Nancy terms ‘effraction’.[212] Finite bodily sense articulates space in its contact with other disparate bodies, and thereby constitutes the expanse of our existence.
‘Not long ago, it was still possible to speak of a “crisis of sense”....But a crisis can always be analyzed and surmounted. One can rediscover sense that is lost, or one can at least indicate approximately the direction in which it is to be sought. Alternatively, one can still play with the fragmentary remains or bubbles of a sense adrift. Today, we are beyond this: all sense has been abandoned.’[1]
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World
‘What could be more common than to be, than being? We are. Being, or existence, is what we share.’[2]
Jean-Luc Nancy, Of Being-in-Common
‘A single being is a contradiction in terms.’[3]
Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural
‘The absolute is between us.’[4]
Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative
The idea of community, or alternatively, the question of belonging, retains a strange and at times mystifying hold upon many of us. The telos of a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends where reverence for the law would be sufficient to maintain order and respect for others remains a distant prospect; advocates of realpolitik might even say a utopian one. Of course Kant had envisioned the cosmo-polis in Perpetual Peace (1795) as a regulative ideal to which states and their citizens must aspire. At the beginning of the 21st century another tendency can be seen to be aggressively asserting itself; this is the question of identity. Today it is a platitude to remark that ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and sexual identities, on both a macro and micro level, are increasingly responsible for the huge swathe of ferocious conflicts, struggles for rights, freedoms and recognition, presently raging across the globe, and engendering fractious relations between neighbours that had hitherto lived in a state of relative indifference, even friendship.
In the second half of the twentieth century up to the present, but especially in the aftermath of the Cold War, there has been from Bosnia to Kashmir, the United States, Darfur and the Middle East, an overwhelming resurgence in the assertion of national, ethnic, religious, linguistic and sexual identities. All of which are increasingly making themselves felt, at times in quite terrifying ways. Such identities allow us to participate in a community, something supra-individual, which turns against the tide of ceaseless motion, instability and flux precipitated by the global marketplace. A supra-individual identity lets us express ourselves in a way that profoundly shapes the manner in which we not only relate to ourselves as individuals, but also, and perhaps more importantly, how we relate to others. This is evident not only amongst minorities and the marginalised but with an equal intensity amongst the majority and even at the very seat of governmental power.
Supra-individual identities strike a chord in a way that one’s individuality based on the graphical representation of consumer purchases for that year is simply incapable. For decades marketing gurus have been preaching that consumerism ‘empowers’ us to express our individuality unlike any economic mode of exchange hitherto; it is according to them a great advance upon and liberation from the yoke of the past; a tact for breaking the shackles and ‘mind-forged manacles,’ to use William Blake’s expression, which pin us down independently of our own desires to a particular gender, ethnicity, and culture. Even age and class do not escape this nexus. We can, of course providing we have the financial means, become a man, women, young, old, posh, urban, or a hybrid of disparate and antagonistic creeds, genders and ages, cultures and lifestyles.
According to this narrative we are finally free to embrace with open wallets our genuine liberation and exhibit our individuality for all to see. This form of ‘negative liberty’ appears to be all that is left after the disenchantment of the world, the eclipse of Vernunft by Verstand, and the unmasking of age-old dogmas and pieties. Marx in The Communist Manifesto described vividly, in an oft cited passage, capitalism’s, and what he regarded as its representative class, the bourgeoisie’s, unparalleled ability to revolutionize itself in the most ingenious and brilliant ways, thereby ensuring its preponderance and continued vigour:
‘Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’[5]
This process still underway today in the form of the continued proliferation of free trade and the liberalisation of markets, has met with unanticipated obstacles and resistance; at least thus far they have severely failed to match the praise and laudation showered upon them by their most staunch advocates. A host of debilitating problems, both old and new, awaits redress: the incorporation of developing economies into the global market, poverty, starvation, the destruction of the environment, the issue of alternative energy sources, the rise of fundamentalism and drug addiction etc… Such maladies if not exacerbated, continue, giving rise to growing discontent, apathy and in some instances, the seeds of revolt. The status quo remains dissatisfying and indifferent – our relation to ourselves, our neighbours and even those people we have never met or seen in person on the other side of the planet, has been eclipsed and overcast by the shadow of exchange value and the unending parade of the spectacular. But does the status quo suffer (if it ever did) from a ‘crisis of sense’? Jean-Luc Nancy, the central figure of this paper, claims that rather than the epithet of ‘crisis,’ our present condition is best characterised as our exposure to an abandonment or withdrawal of sense; what he on occasion refers to as the tautological relationship between ‘sense’ and ‘world’.[6] We live in a world in which sense has irreparably withdraw and we yet continue to live, love, and work in that world; we thus, in fact, experience this withdrawal as itself harbouring some kind of meaning to be understood and reckoned with. This in some instances has given way to the precarious ‘demand for sense’ – a ‘demand of the world that it signify itself as dwelling, haven, habitation, safeguard, intimacy, community, subjectivity: as the signifier of a proper and present signified, the signifier of the proper and the present as such.’[7]
In this time of the atomised, apathetic and lassate individual there are a number of other trends increasingly imposing themselves onto the geopolitical scene. It appears some of us at least, desire to conjoin our own piece of driftwood to another and another, while at the same time excluding others, sometimes on a purely a priori basis. Out of this scenario we wish to provoke stasis, stability, so that the fluid is compelled to congeal and harden in order to make individual and communal identities immovable, even irrefrangible. Nancy argues that it is through the creation of myths that we found and articulate the common being of community. He adds, the ‘myth of the community…is always the myth of a communion – the unique voice of the many capable of inventing and sharing the myth.’[8] The myth of the community with a common being is univocal rather than plurivocal – a single voice is shared in lieu of a multiplicity of voices that share in their differences from one another.[9] We will return to this issue again and again in the course of the essay.
Moreover, if the conditions obtain we utilize the opposition of included/excluded to use, abuse and exploit others who happen to fall outside the limits of what is deemed acceptable to our clan, tribe or creed. Perhaps even to expel and dispossess them, and at its most extreme to cleanse and annihilate the other, extirpating his or her presence from the land we call our own and claim for our people or the mythology of our entangled driftwood. The land or autochthonous soil is presumed as a birth right, it is said to embody certain values and speak a history, whose repercussions continue to be felt in the here and now. It represents the myth of an autochthonous people whose origin coincides with the soil from which they primordially sprouted – the land bespeaks a history upon which battles were fought and where ancient kingdoms were won. Some even go so far as to contend that the land is drenched in the blood of their ancestors and so indissociably bound up with the blood line. The result? Armenia, Shoah, Rwanda, Darfur, Israel/Palestine.
But ethnic cleansing, the mass deportation and/or detention of immigrants, and genocide have not disappeared; it continues at this very moment as each one of us speak, read, write and think.[10] This is not simply a problem of the North persecuting and eviscerating the South with both its financial and military might. Such conflicts are rife in both hemispheres and are unfortunately with us for the foreseeable future. What of community then? Surely if it were possible it would be absurd not to discard the notion of community and the stable identity is professes to confer upon us and our relation to others? Is being born Jewish, Muslim, Russian, French, Christian, male, proletarian, female etc…not merely a contingent fact about us with no innate power of its own to compel us to behave in accordance with the mores and customs that identity exhorts us to abide by alongside our compatriots or coreligionists? Are we not beyond the ideological vestiges of what some might argue is merely an adept and less politically sensitive version of the doctrine of biological determinism? Has this doctrine, as Edward Said almost three decades ago diagnosed in Orientalism, been replaced by a more subtle form of discursive representation by which the other is fashioned and represented as other to the ends of subjugation and control by the metropole?[11] Contrary to this, could we not contend with the Sartreans (and also the abstract and immediate self-consciousness of the Phenomenology of Spirit’s life and death struggle) that in the final analysis since consciousness is ultimately nothing, these aleatory facts that supposedly define us, can be shorn off and negated until there is nothing but the bare ‘I’; the formal unity of apperception which is nothing but our point of view on the world and precondition of cognition; or alternatively, the cogito ego sum by which we bring the factical, or our situated facticity into hyperbolic doubt, thereby expunging its grip upon and distortion of our thought?
But why then this resurgence in the assertion of identity, whatever one may take ‘identity’ to mean; why its continued presence or ‘need’? Why has the middle-aged and at one time secular Ashkenazi Jew, chosen now to don the yamaka and observe the Sabbath? Why does the once irreverent Lebanese adolescent now passionately argue for a return to the piety of his forbears and denounce his parents’ for taking on the blasphemous ways of the kafir? And finally, why does the Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka fiercely call his brothers and sisters to arms so as to fight against the ‘foreign horde’ of Tamils held responsible for usurping their native homeland? This paper makes no attempt to address the root or underlying causes of such a resurgence – we merely wish to bring this trend to the readers’ attention in order to set a context for Nancy’s persistence in using the word ‘community’ to describe our being-in-common, despite the deep-seated reservations held by many philosophers and literati of his generation.[12]
The resurgence in the politics of community can only be unproblematically shrugged off and dismissed if we desire to wilfully misunderstand and misrecognise the provenance and allure of what Nancy calls immanentism, and its corresponding conception of community. Immanentism, as we shall see in the course of this essay, is when an essence, what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy’s longstanding collaborator would call a ‘typology’, is ‘set to work’ in the form of ‘economic ties’, ‘technological operations’ and ‘political fusion’; working through these various forms of social organisation so that the community emerges as an object of its own fashioning and work.[13] In other words, the ‘essence’ in question is all-encompassing and consequently responsible for the manufacture of every sphere of social existence. In this way the polity is envisioned as a work of art to be moulded in accordance with the unfolding of the essential criterion or type. The ‘essence’ operates as the immanent condition of its own reproduction and perdurance in and through the community. The community, Volk or nation, is thus transformed into a work (oeuvre).[14] The ‘worked’ or ‘operative’ community creates and works itself by means of ‘the subjective process par excellence’, to wit, the process of the community’s self-formation and self-production qua oeuvre is ultimately made possible in virtue of its being understood in terms of a absolute subject.[15] We will examine this process in greater detail below.
We have already noted that identity has the power to motivate individuals to commit heinous crimes, risk imprisonment and even death; some undertake such acts in the name of the sacred, others claim to do so in the name of their nation and the values they associate with the country in which they were born. We have already alluded to some of the dangers, and even catastrophic consequences of an entirely immanent conception of community, upon whose conditions of possibility we will elaborate upon further below; but in light of the preponderance and highly charged nature of the issues of ‘belonging’ and ‘identification’ can we unabashedly dispense with the idea of community and rescind it as a domain worthy of question? Part of the overarching ambition of this essay is to demonstrate that such an eventuality is not so easily achieved and that we cannot conclusively rid ourselves of its provocation to thoughtfulness. There is a palpable ‘need’, if we may put it this way, for a notion of community that eschews the folly and murderous violence of its immanent counterpart, while remaining faithful to our ethical and existential predicaments. Nancy’s philosophy can be read as the unpacking of a single and highly suggestive idea: the meaning of being and therefore our existence is both singularly plural and plurally singular, which means in nuce that as singular beings we are constitutively open to others.
In the preceding paragraphs we have only very sketchily outlined some of the issues and problems which surround the question of identity and the status of community. A status that is by no means guaranteed, vouchsafed or unambiguous. The objective of this essay is not to analyse concrete examples of multiculturalism or the politics of identity. Our aim here is to engage the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, examining the philosophical notion of community and the ontology of compearance (comparution) or perhaps more familiarly to readers of Heidegger, Nancy’s rewriting of the existential analytic of Dasein as presented in Being and Time in terms of Mitsein. The question of being is raised anew, but for Nancy the question becomes a matter of the shared and dispersive nature of sense relayed between singular beings in their singularity. Nancy, a philosopher who comes out of the Western tradition, offers no ‘solution’ or panacea to the aforesaid issues.[16] As we shall see, his notion of community can be interpreted as a tendency through which the community is always already in the process ‘unworking’ the operations of the social edifice. What is meant by this will receive further elucidation in due course. But it should be remembered that Nancy also comes after Kant (Critique), Nietzsche (genealogy), Heidegger (Destruktion and Abbau), and more finally Derrida (deconstruction and differance). Of more importance he comes after ‘Auschwitz’ and all that that proper name has come to signify and render mute, but with whose legacy we have not yet come to terms and perhaps will never be able.
Part I
The Nazi Myth
Perhaps most apposite place to begin our inquiry into the Nancean rethinking of community and ethical relations between persons, is the short essay co-authored by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, entitled The Nazi Myth, published in English in the journal Critical Inquiry in the winter of 1990, but originally dating from a conference held some ten years earlier. The Nazi Myth is not an analysis of the myths propagated by the National Socialist regime, but an elaboration of National Socialism’s self-constitution by means of a fascistic logic. Fascism is not to be pawned of as merely reason’s other; as merely unbridled irrationalism. Fascism possesses a logic of its own and so, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe claim ‘a certain logic is fascist, and…this logic is not wholly foreign to the general logic of rationality inherent in the metaphysics of the Subject.’[17] It is not the aim of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe to approach the ideology of National Socialism as either historians or even political scientists – by their own admission this is beyond the purview of their interest and expertise. Their objective rather is to adumbrate the implicated status of what in this text they call the ‘ideology of the subject’ in the fascistic logic running through National Socialist ideology,[18] which is not equivalent, but nevertheless related to what Nancy following Heidegger calls the onto-theological tradition; to wit, that which ultimately retains recourse to a ‘ground’ of some sort, which in turn grounds the beings of the world, bestowing meaning, sense, and direction upon them – combining the attributes of the ‘first cause’ sought out by traditional metaphysics, with the ‘highest being’, and governing interest of orthodox theology.
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s investigation into the mechanics of National Socialism in ideological terms is in itself nothing new – and at least initially they are happy to defer to Hannah Arendt’s magisterial study, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Largely reiterating Arendt’s conclusions, while at the same time incorporating their own research into the auto-production of the subject at work in the Jena Romantics, by which Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy mean for the most part the work of Friedrich Schlegel and the journal he confounded, Athenäum (1798-1800). We will now turn our attention not only to The Literary Absolute, a text again co-authored by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, but also Lacoue-Labarthe’s own research into the nature of ‘the political’[19] as presented in his Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics and The Fiction of the Political, which are almost in their entirety presupposed and incorporated by Nancy in his writings on community, in addition to their joint work at the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique.
Jena Romanticism and Self-Production
In order to give some historico-philosophical coordinates to the analyses of ‘national aestheticism’ and auto-production that will soon follow we will briefly turn to a short philosophical text which acts as a sort of overture prior to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s investigation into Romanticism proper, The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism. They regard this text not only as the ‘philosophical horizon of romanticism’ but also take it to be an exemplar of the shift of eidetics into aesthetics or perhaps even their conflation.[20] Its author remains unknown for sure and the fragment was only discovered in 1917 by Franz Rosenzweig whilst editing Hegel’s writings. It has been attributed by scholars to Schelling under the influence of Hölderlin, Hölderlin himself (e.g. Dieter Henrich), and even to Hegel (e.g. Otto Pöggeler), in whose handwriting the fragment was transcribed, albeit some time after its original composition. To be brief, the overriding conviction of this fragment is that ‘the highest act of reason, which – in that it comprises all ideas – is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are united as sisters only in beauty…Philosophy of the spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.’[21] Furthermore, it pinpoints an imminent challenge confronting philosophy if it is not to wither and fade into obsolescence:
‘We need a new mythology, however, this mythology must be at the service of the ideas, it must become a mythology of reason.
Until we render the ideas aesthetic, that is, mythological, they will not be of any interest to the populace, and vice versa: until mythology has become reasonable, the philosopher has to be ashamed of it. Thus the enlightened and the unenlightened finally have to shake hands; mythology must become philosophical in order to make the people reasonable, and philosophy must turn mythological in order to make the philosophers sensuous.’[22]
First, it is essential to make clear that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are not attempting to plot an overwrought genealogy which argues for a seamless ideological transition from Romanticism to National Socialism. Such a thesis would be absurd and cavalier to say the least. Rather, they regard Jean Romanticism as a movement without predecessors,[23] and yet only possible in the aftermath of Kant’s ‘critical turn’ and its attempted completion in the Third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgement.[24] We will now quickly gloss over the basic points of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of the System-Program.
The first and most important point is that the fragment strives to present the System of the subject itself in absolute terms,[25] what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe call the Subject-system.[26] Intimately connected in this conceptual figure are the ideas of Spirit (Geist) and aestheticism. Spirit is seen as an ‘organism’ or ‘living system’. Spirit and life are intertwined and beauty is the ideal to which they both aspire. Life essentially becomes a work of art.[27] The System-Program argues, as the above quotation confirms, that the philosophy of spirit must be an aesthetic philosophy. The notion of Bildung takes on great significance within the ideological constellation of Romanticism as well as what Lacoue-Labarthe delineates as the tradition of ‘national aestheticism’, which he claims was largely founded in early 19th century Jena and continued into the 20th century by the philosophy of Heidegger.[28] Bildung means both as process and result, to form, shape, fashion and cultivate.[29] Prior to the eighteenth century it denoted only the physical formation of an entity.[30] Kant continues to also use Bildung in this sense in the Critique of the Power of the Judgement when he speaks of the organism’s capacity for self-organization in terms of a bildende Kraft, or ‘formative power’.[31] This helps explain the later conceptual affiliation of Spirit with contemporary conceptions of the organism and organicity we noted above. From the eighteenth century onwards the notion of Bildung, however, would command the attention of a host of philosophical and literary figures. Perhaps Rousseau most famously in Emile or On Education (1762), a text that would go on to influence much of the German intelligentsia of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries e.g. Herder, Goethe, Schiller to name but a few.
The System-Program understands the idea of beauty as the ideality of the Idea which implies in turn that the Idea itself be determined as the beautiful Idea.[32] Ideality and beauty come to be understood as internally related so that beauty becomes the generality of the Idea as such. This is the definitive gesture of the slide from eidetics into aesthetics which we referred to above. As Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe note, bildende Kraft becomes synonymous with aesthetische Kraft; ‘formative power is aesthetic power.’[33] This intertwinement of formative power and aesthetic power would become essential for any entire tradition stressing the deep-rooted connection between the ethico-political and aesthetic domains. More importantly this tradition, which Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe contend stretches from the Jena Romantics through to Wagner, Nietzsche (particularly The Birth of Tragedy),[34] Jünger and even Heidegger, weds the notion of community and the political to a call for myth-making or what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe in their joint as well as single-authored writings have referred to as the process of fictioning. We will return to this idea in more detail below in relation to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s analyses of National Socialism’s ‘aestheticization of politics’.[35] But let’s for the moment return to The Nazi Myth.
The Ideology of the Subiectum
In that text, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argue that National Socialism like other ideologies claims to offer an all-encompassing and consistent political explanation of the world and history – it promotes a certain world-view or Weltanschauung.[36] An ideology, according to this definition, is usually reliant upon a specific concept or small number of interrelated ideas, such as ‘race,’ ‘class’ etc…, and with which it seeks to elicit a total and uncompromising explanation of the movement of history, and thus an unrivalled interpretation of the present, past, and future. The agent of this total explanation, which embodies it most fully, and that is to affect its realisation is the Subject-state.[37]
The Subject-state, might represent a particular class, an exalted race or party vanguard, that wills itself to be an absolute subject.[38] We might add that not only is the Subject-state self-produced, the product of auto-poiesis,[39] but conceives its raison d’être in terms of a circular rationale. In this way it can without bringing its own self-assurance into question rationalize both its successes and failures. On the one hand, the ascendancy of the Subject-state is both foreseen and retrospectively read as a Promethean struggle against all odds, while its failures are either omitted or interpreted as necessary for its consolidation on the road to glorious victory. On the other hand, and not without paradox, the Subject-state’s accession to power is posited at one and the same time, as the work of destiny and vindication of the ideology it advocates. Rather than construing ideology as Marx had done in The German Ideology as a camera obscura inverting and thereby distorting reality,[40] Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe examine the auto-production of the Subject-state and the conditions that subtend its capacity for self-constitution as well as the resources it draws upon for sustenance. Myth, as we shall see in due course, is absolutely vital to this process of self-production. The power of myth in awakened by means of an auto-poietic act or a poiesis of sense.[41]
The Greek poiēsis connotes ‘making, fabrication, production, poetry, poem,’ and derives from poiein, ‘to make, to do’.[42] The connections delineated by Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe between myth, poiesis, and the ‘aestheticization of politics’ invoke all of the aforesaid senses of poiesis – myth, or better, mytho-poiesis is the means by which such an aestheticization is realised and in the light of which the polity is dismembered and reconstituted from the bottom up. Images of rebirth, renewal, and the phoenix rising from the ashes are the staple of not only the fascist but the national aesthetic canon more generally.[43] In this way political forms and ethical relations are to be made consonant with the fashioned production of the beautiful state commonly modelled on the beautiful soul. We will explore this dynamic in greater detail in the following sections of this essay, which according to Lacoue-Labarthe comes under the remit of what he calls onto-typology, the relation of the Gestalt or ‘figure’ to mytho-poiesis. But first a digression vis-à-vis Heidegger’s critique of the classical conception of the subject is in order, because it fundamentally shapes Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of the subjectivism evident within the Subject-state of the immanent community.
Excursus on Heidegger’s Critique of the Subject of Modern Metaphysics
It should be fairly clear by now that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe affirm Heidegger’s intuition announced in the early stages of his chef d’oeuvre, Being and Time that the subject as conceived by modern metaphysics i.e. the Cartesian cogito, but stricto sensu the Kantian figuration of the subject,[44] and its manifold permutations all the way through to its incarnation in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology, is in an irreparable state of dissolution. Despite the recent backlash against so-called ‘anti-humanism’, which has become a sort of byword for ‘neo-Heideggerianism’, in work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and others,[45] Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe continue to treat with the utmost seriousness Heidegger’s early insight which saw Dasein, or being-there, as an engaged and situated self that is always already thrown into the world, while also being projected into the future. Derrida in a well-known interview with Nancy entitled Eating Well, or the Calculation of the Subject, articulates his own ambiguous relationship to Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein, which we might say equally well characterises Nancy’s own relationship to what for all intents and purposes is a watershed, but also highly problematic moment in the history of philosophy:
‘I believe in the force and necessity (and therefore in a certain irreversibility) of the act by which Heidegger substitutes a certain concept of Dasein for a concept of the subject still too marked by the traits of the being as vorhanden, and hence by an interpretation of time, and insufficiently questioned in its ontological structure. The consequences of this displacement are immense, no doubt we have not yet measured their extent.’[46]
A complete rehearsal of the existential analytic of Dasein in Being and Time and all it entails would be inappropriate at this time. For purposes of clarification several of the more relevant and salient theses that go on to underpin Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s own critique of the ‘ideology of the subject’ and thus the inherent subjectivism of the Subject-state, will need to be briefly recounted. We will not only examine the potential ambiguities to which Derrida points above. But also show how they pass over into Heidegger’s later thought of the history of beyng. We will also have to be mindful of whether the equivocality of Heidegger’s account of Dasein permeates Nancy’s own recasting of the question of being in terms of Mitsein.
According to Heidegger, Dasein is defined by its Existenz rather than in terms of an essence.[47] With respect to Dasein he inverts, as he is fond of saying, the primacy of essentia over existentia, and detaches the latter from its filiation with its Latin cognate, which denotes ‘objective presence’ or Vorhandenheit.[48] Dasein, however, ‘is a being that does not simply occur among other beings.’ Dasein is, according to Heidegger, ‘ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being.’[49] And it is thus that Heidegger wishes to re-pose the question, for which he is both loathed and admired, and that he tells us has suffered two millennia of neglect – the Seinsfrage or question of being. But let us leave that to one side for the moment. More germane to our current endeavour is the argument put forth in Being and Time, for the primordiality of Zuhandensein or the ready-to-hand, which characterises Dasein’s most basic mode of comportment towards beings. What this effectively means, and we are being rather captious here, is that everything is related within a nested structure of purposive relations, variously named by Heidegger the ‘in-order-to’, the ‘where-in’, the ‘with-which’, the ‘towards-which’, and the ‘for-the-sake-of-which’. These modes of relating and comporting ourselves toward entities, at bottom, structures all of our practical involvements in the world. It is in this sense that many commentators, including Nancy himself, have argued that Heidegger took Kant’s granting of primacy to practical reason over theoretical cognition, more seriously than even Kant did himself.[50]
Heidegger as is well know argues that Dasein always already finds itself in a meaningful world. Dasein, as the story goes, is essentially being-in-the-world. He insists that ‘the world is not the sum of all extant beings, not the universe of natural things – that the world is not at all anything extant or handy.’[51] World is a determination of the being of Dasein. The world is not extant, but it nonetheless real, by which he means that world does not partake in the mode of being an object, despite being ‘more objective than all objects’.[52] ‘World exists – that is, it is – only if Dasein exists, only if there is Dasein.’[53] And this is because the ‘ontological sense’ of world is imbued with or if you prefer structured by ‘significance’ (Bedeutsamkeit): the nested structure of meaningful interconnections within which we all dwell. Dasein is not a human subject standing over against an object (Gegen-stand), but the unity of self and world, ‘self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world.’[54] Dasein is thus fundamentally an openness, historically and factically situated in the world. Nancy supports such a conclusion insofar as he acknowledges that ‘To be is to make sense.’[55] Hence for Nancy Dasein’s pre-ontological understanding of being is interchangeable with ‘action as sense’; the understanding of being is consequently always a sense-making.
Dasein is always already in the world and opens out onto a world that harbours within it a certain plenitude and abundance of significance and meaning. To this extent Levinas is correct, the es gibt, or ‘there is’ is a sort of generosity, quite unlike his own distinct reflections on the il y a.[56] Nancy distances himself by quite some way from Heidegger, when he speaks of an irreparable abandonment of sense. But at one and the same time he chooses to affirm that ‘Being itself is given to us as meaning.’[57] He is able to reconcile both insights, however, because in concert with the aforementioned, he avers that, and it is arguable that Heidegger was aware of this far more than Nancy is willing to admit: ‘Regretting the absence of meaning itself has meaning.’[58]
The question of the body, more specifically corporeity, is one to which Heidegger pays little if any attention, whereas for Nancy it is absolutely indispensable. Nancy, for better or worse, has correctly been cited by contemporaries such as Derrida, as an exemplary thinker, not unproblematically, of the body and touch.[59] While conversely, in the early work of Heidegger there is a near exclusive concern with Dasein’s spatial orientation, its facticity and historical situation, which condition the parameters of its understanding – but few, if any pages of Being and Time are dedicated to an exploration of Dasein’s corporeity or bodily materiality. One might even go so far as to say that the body is seen by Heidegger as being virtually incidental to Dasein’s being-in-the-world. [60] This ‘bias’ moreover is arguably carried over into Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche, which focuses exclusively upon what we might cautiously refer to as the ‘metaphysical’ in contrast to the ‘naturalistic’ elements of the latter’s philosophy which he peremptorily brushes aside.
The philosopher who would fill this lacuna was of course Merleau-Ponty whose early work, Phenomenology of Perception and his unfinished, posthumously published masterpiece The Visible and the Invisible, left an indelible mark upon Nancy; his text Corpus being one such example. Corpus’s central motif is the consecration of the Eucharist, Hoc est enim corpus meum, ‘This is my body,’ which acts as the point of departure for Nancy’s reflections on corporeity and embodiment.[61] Nancy even goes so far as to claim that: ‘Coming neither before nor after, the sense of the body is given as the place of sense, as its circumscription and its exscription, as its end and its birth, its limit and its outcome, its aim and its obstacle, its being and its abyss.’[62] This considerable divergence from Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology of Dasein should be constantly borne in mind. An adequate treatment of this issue is beyond the scope of this paper, although we will on occasion recapitulate some of Nancy’s more salient ‘theses’ vis-à-vis the issue of embodiment when germane to the task at hand. However, it nonetheless remains important to acknowledge that Nancy’s thought is oriented by an inexorable discussion with Heidegger much like what Derrida refers to as his own Auseinandersetzung with the philosopher from Meßkirch, which cannot be facilely swept underneath the rug.
What of the Kehre or ‘turn’ often invoked to describe Heidegger’s thought of the post-war era, leading to the construction of a Heidegger I/Heidegger II distinction? Nancy of course does not restrict himself purely to Heidegger’s early writings, Being and Time in particular. He too endeavours to think the Kehre, albeit not in terms of a ‘change in focus’, in the course and development of Heidegger’s thought. On the contrary, Nancy’s own thought recognises and concurs, though not uncritically, with Heidegger’s own reflections on the Kehre in the preface to William J. Richardson’s seminal work, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1962). In that text Heidegger argues, contrary to popular belief, that the Kehre ‘is inherent in the very matter designated by the headings: “Being and Time,” “Time and Being”…The reversal (Kehre) is in play within the matter itself. Neither did I invent it nor does it affect merely my thought.’[63] Nancy’s thinking of community and what we might call, with some reservation, his ‘social ontology’, not only on the one hand, tentatively attests to the dissolution of the subject of modern metaphysics; but on the other hand, acknowledges the questions of being and the ontological difference must be reckoned with; an attitude that is not to be confused with obedient faithfulness to some kind of quasi-Heideggerian agenda. In fact, as we shall see Nancy embarks upon a rethinking of the question of being in toto. However, a few of the distinguishing features of the Kehre should be briefly re-enacted. With the Kehre Heidegger’s endeavours to bring to language the equiprimordial co-respondence or co-openness of beyng’s dispensation and the Da, within which man dwells and appropriates beyng through the sheltering of the truth of beyng in beings – this in essence is what he means when he at times elliptically speaks of die Sache selbst.
During the 1930s Heidegger began expressly hyphenating, but also thinking about Dasein in its adverbial sense. The adverb qualifies the verb in the ‘how’ of its unfolding, in terms of that unfolding. Da-sein thus delineates the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’ of being, which had hitherto been the concern and province of the overwhelming majority of metaphysical thought.[64] The at times indiscernible line separating Dasein from homo sapiens in Being and Time should perhaps be apportioned much of the blame for the initial misunderstandings of Heidegger’s project, as either anthropological or a philosophy of existence. It was these debates that of course elicited Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism in his correspondence with Jean Beaufret and also his hyphenation of Da-sein, allowing him to emphasize either one of being-there’s respective elements when apposite to the matter at hand.
Da-sein rather than addressing beings in terms of their quiddity attends to them in terms of their Da-sein, to wit, in terms of the es gibt or ‘there is’, that which exceeds the physical dimensions and contours of the individuated.[65] As such Da-sein designates this imperceptible and intangible dimension which lines the visible. It points to the es gibt that maintains and traverses every phenomenon, as the phenomenality of all phenomena, while at once exceeding and escaping phenomenality, since it only ever receives phenomenalisation by means of its recession. In a short piece entitled Sense and Truth Nancy discerns and argues for the unpresentable nature of the ‘there is’ or what he calls ‘being as being’: ‘Being as being is being as the action of the verb “to be,” that is, being that “makes” [things] come into presence (and that, consequently, cannot itself be presented). One could say: being as being is the being that phenomenalizes the phenomenon, substantifies substance, or eventualizes the event.’[66]
However, even if we take all of this in our stride, it remains true to say that the originary revelation of beyng needs man as the Da, not as the ‘there’ but as the ‘open’ of beyng’s unfolding.[67] In the posthumously published Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) Heidegger affirms that this ‘sheltering-concealing needs the deepest clearing: beyng[68] “needs” man.’[69] It is our primordial openness to beyng, first articulated by Heidegger in terms of our (as Daseins) pre-ontological understanding of being, that allows him to later speak of our co-respondence to beyng as a privileged relation. But as Joan Stambaugh avers, it is the Ereignis or event of appropriation that permits of this unique co-respondence and reciprocity, thereby undermining the privileging of either relata.[70] We thus once again can discern an emphasis on the ‘how’ over the ‘what’ of being. The Da as the site of the operation of truth understood as the original unfolding of the Open, is no longer identified with Dasein’s ‘mineness’ (Jemeinigkeit). Da-sein implies the ‘there’ as the pre-ontical, pre-predicative and pre-individual ‘place’ or ‘aperture’ of beyng, while Da-sein understands ‘being’ as grounding and preserving the Da in beings.[71] Da-sein and Da-sein are inseparable since it is only in beings that the Da is at once sheltered and concealed.[72] It is in this way that the temporality of beyng in general is understood explicitly as Ereignis. Beyng now understood as granting its essence to man and man reciprocally appropriating beyng, by sheltering and preserving the truth of beyng in beings. Heidegger’s thinking, which Nancy undoubtedly appropriates, but also expropriates and disavows, as we hope to evince below, is a thinking of and at the limit – it is the endeavour to think from out of the eventful site of being.
The Proper of Man
A certain discomfort remains and continues to jar any straightforward accession to Heidegger’s ontology of Ereignis. What is it that provokes this jarring effect? Perhaps the most formidable obstacle is that to which we have already alluded above and what Derrida in The Ends of Man referred to as ‘the proper of man’. In that essay Derrida argues, and this is a difficult allegation to shake as we shall see, that in Heidegger’s thought ‘the thinking of the proper of man is inseparable from the question of the truth of Being.’[73] Related to this question is another perhaps even more pressing indictment of Heidegger’s critique of modern philosophy’s construal of the subject, and its ‘substitution,’ to use the words of Derrida, with Dasein. Derrida here is not only implying the presence of a certain esteem and privileging of man a propos other beings by Heidegger, but in addition to this, alleging that Heidegger remains in thrall, albeit with significant equivocality, to the essence of man conceived in terms of humanitas.[74] ‘We can see then that Dasein, though not man, is nevertheless nothing other than man.’[75] Does Heidegger’s philosophy despite his best efforts remain enveloped by anthropocentrism and the exaltation of mankind vis-à-vis the nonhuman? In the interview with Nancy, Derrida frames the dilemma thus:
‘In insisting on the as such, I am pointing from afar to the inevitable return of a distinction between the human relation to self, that is to say, that of an entity capable of consciousness, of language, of a relation to death as such, and so forth, and a nonhuman relation to self, incapable of the phenomenological as such – and once again we are back to the question of the animal. The distinction between the animal (which has no or is not a Dasein) and man has nowhere been more radical nor more rigorous than in Heidegger. The animal will never be either a subject or a Dasein. It doesn’t have an unconscious either (Freud), nor a relation to the other as other, any more than there is an animal face (Levinas). It is from this standpoint of Dasein that Heidegger defines the humanity of man.’[76]
Despite all of the multifarious twists and turns, the subtle niceties of the many vicissitudes of the existential analytic through to the ontology of Ereignis, there seems little room for manoeuvre with respect to the conclusions Derrida puts forth in The Ends of Man. Man for Heidegger simply occupies a privileged position vis-à-vis other beings in its relation to beyng. There is perhaps no better place where this priority is attested to than in the Letter on Humanism, which is deserving of extensive quotation:
‘But the essence of man consists in his being more than merely human, if this is represented as “being a rational creature.” “More” must not be understood here additively, as if the traditional definition of man were indeed to remain basic, only elaborated by means of an existentiell postscript. The “more” means: more originally and therefore more essentially in terms of his essence. But here something enigmatic manifests itself: man is in thrownness. This means that man, as the ek-sisting counter-throw (Gegenwurf) of being, is more than animal rationale precisely to the extent that he is less bound up with man conceived from subjectivity. Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this “less”; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by being itself into the preservation of Being’s truth…In his essential unfolding within the history of being, man is the being whose Being as ek-sistence consists in his dwelling in the nearness of being. Man is the neighbour of being.’[77]
Needless to say, the relation of man and beyng presented here is not merely a vulgar positing of mankind at the top of the food chain, or as the closest to God of the earthly creatures, as is the case for example in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government. In that text Locke contends that mankind possesses dominion over the earth in virtue of his creation in the image of God, and his being set above the beasts and brutes and only a ‘little lower than the Angels’.[78] His capacity to reason, infer and deduce confers on him the natural right to appropriate nature in accordance with the exigencies of his self-preservation, and beyond that industriousness and the accumulation of wealth. ‘God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the Earth…He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational’.[79] Heidegger would of course interpret Locke as entirely trapped within the prejudices and dogmas of onto-theology. It is this fundamental prejudice that allows for the possibility of his assertion that man, the rational animal, possesses dominion over beings and the God-given right, even responsibility, to subjugate and manipulate them to his own ends. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the relationship of mankind and beyng is one of co-propriety – it is mankind that shelters and preserves the generosity of beyng’s dispensation. As Derrida insightfully remarks: ‘Propriety, the co-propriety of Being and man is proximity as inseparability…this co-propriety of man and of Being, such as it is thought in Heidegger’s discourse, is not ontic, does not relate two “beings” one to the other but rather, within language, relates the meaning of Being and the meaning of man.’[80]
But does Heidegger’s ‘substitution’ of the category of the subject with Dasein, despite his most sincere efforts, not retain the traits of a metaphysics of presence as hypokeimenon or ousia so that being-there continues to be defined by its relative stability, permanent self-presence, and sustained relation to self?[81] We cannot possibly settle this debate here. Our exposition of the rudiments of Heidegger’s critique of the subject of metaphysics’ self-sufficiency and self-presence, and brief foray into the issues surrounding the debate a propos ‘the proper of man,’ are intended not only to provide a context for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s investigation into the Subject-state, but also evoke a degree of hesitancy and scepticism regarding Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s own critique of the ‘ideology of the subject’. Even if we accept their critique, do they offer us a philosophy with a positive content in its stead? When we engage with Nancy’s notion of compearance and his rethinking of Mitsein in Being Singular Plural, this should be one of the foremost questions in our minds. We will have to ask ourselves whether Nancy repeats Heidegger’s ambiguous relationship to the nonhuman and, if such an evaluation proves to be in the affirmative, whether he can justifiably defend such equivocality. Is Nancy’s reconfiguration of Mitsein anything more than a mere recapitulation of Heidegger’s own fetishization of mankind? And even if we don’t wish to phrase it in such strong terms, are not traces of an overarching occlusion of the nonhuman i.e. the animal, vegetal, microbiological, at work in Nancy’s thinking of compearance and being-with?
Mytho-poiesis and National Aestheticism
Thus far we have examined some of the features of the Subject-state and Heidegger’s critique of the subject of metaphysics that underpins much of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s attitude to the subjectivism inherent to the constitution of the immanent community. We have also, albeit with some brevity spoken of the work of auto-poiesis that governs its reproduction, but as of yet have paid scant attention to the nature of myth. The text with which we began this paper was after all entitled The Nazi Myth. What is myth and how are we to understand its quasi-mystical power to captivate us and enchant the world? As Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe seek to demonstrate, myth, poiesis, and art, tied together by mimesis, provide a formidable instrument of identification. As Nancy writes in Myth Interrupted:
‘Myth is of and from the origin, it relates back to a mythic foundation, and through this relation it founds itself (a consciousness, a people, a narrative).
It is this foundation that we know to be mythic. We now know that not only is any “reconstitution” of the initial surging forth of mythic power itself “a myth,” but also that mythology is our invention’.[82]
Furthermore,
‘Myth is above all full, original speech, at times revealing, at times, founding the intimate being of community. The Greek muthos – Homer’s muthos, that is, speech, spoken expression – becomes “myth” when it takes on a whole series of values that amplify, fill, and ennoble this speech, giving it the dimensions of a narrative of origins and an explanation of destinies.’[83]
Readers of The Republic know well that Plato’s construction of the ideal state is predicated at least in part upon the exclusion of myths and considerable effort is made in order to distinguish with as little equivocation as possible the difference between muthos and logos. As a matter of fact there exists a great deal of equivocation in Platonic discourse as to the status of myth as we shall soon see. For now we should note that both muthos and logos are uses of speech or modes of discourse, but myth is a fiction in the active sense of fashioning, whose role it is to propose, and perhaps even impose, models or types; types to be imitated by means of which individuals, states and nations can comprehend and identify themselves. Myth represents multiple and different existences as immanent to its own unique and univocal fiction.[84] It achieves this through the mobilization of a figure. This is what Nancy means when he says that mythology is figuration proper.[85] The issue of ‘mimetism’ is integral to understanding myth since it is only in virtue of our imitation of models, types or exemplars that we are able to ensure identity.[86] Methexis is the manner in which we participate directly in this process of identification, and the means by which a quasi-mystical fusion is affected, eliding all differences between persons.
Exemplarity and the Fiction of Founding
The ancient Greeks as did the Romans relied upon myths to furnish a model of exemplarity. One only has to take a brief glance at the section of the sixth book of Cicero’s On the Commonwealth called Scipio’s Dream in order to garner this insight.[87] The ‘hero makes the community commune – and ultimately he always makes it commune in the communication that he himself effects between existence and meaning, between the individual and the people’.[88] Lycurgus, Theseus, Moses, Romulus, Mohammed are exemplars to be imitated, and thereby reproduced.[89] The admonition to imitate eminent men, those who founded the community and established its laws, is incidentally a chief feature of the republican tradition from Cicero to Machiavelli and beyond. In The Prince Machiavelli underwrites the importance of imitation/mimesis to the end of competent and effective leadership. In the following quote from The Prince we can see at work what Nancy designates with the phrase ‘myth is a myth’.[90] He argues that myth understood in terms of inauguration and foundation is itself a myth, a fiction or invention.[91] Myth is not simply representation but a representation that works, that is operative, producing itself, and thus as an auto-poietic mimesis it is a fiction that founds.[92]
‘a ruler should read historical works, especially for the light they shed on the actions of eminent men…and above all, to imitate some eminent man, who himself set out to imitate some predecessor of his who was considered worthy of praise and glory, always taking his deeds and actions as a model for himself, as it is said that Alexander the Great imitated Achilles, Caesar imitated Alexander, and Scipio imitated Cyrus.’[93]
Here we see, although with perhaps some license, that the myth of the great hero, or statesman, gives birth to the perpetuation of two entwined myths – the myth of the founder, the hero that establishes the community and its laws, and the myth of founding itself, thus mutually reinforce one another – Achilles, Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar, the list goes on ad nauseam; the myth of the proper, in this instance the proper name, expedites the communion of the community, the appropriation of the myths of the past, and their renewal in its most recent avatar. Plato’s deployment of myth is arguably distinct from these kinds of founding appropriation, which for the most part remain entirely reliant upon pre-existing mythical elements from which they solicit their power and efficaciousness.[94] As Lacoue-Labarthe importantly observes, the myth of the cave in Book Seven of The Republic has no ‘mythic source’ per se, it is self-formed and self-grounded thereby furnishing the foundations of Plato’s political vision.[95] We might say that it acts as a kind of auto-posited fulcrum without precedent.
Plato had strenuously disapproved of the use of myths because of what he deemed to be their sacrilegious content; he felt the myths told and propagated at his time degraded and misrepresented the divine. The difference of Plato’s own myth of the cave is of course that it is self-grounded or auto-posited. However, we should remain cautious here, taking our cue from Nancy, because as we have already noted, the myth which takes itself to be self-grounded and self-formed may well have already descended into the mythic, despite its best intentions to the contrary. The Platonic disdain for mimetism, which as we have seen is inseparable from myth as such, is tied to an equally potent distaste, not to mention distrust of the theatre and tragedy.[96] The actor doesn’t participate in the essence of that which he or she represents on stage, but merely imitates it. The actor beguiles us with her talent or knack for imitating that into which she has no real or genuine insight. The provocation of particular emotions by the theatre is seen by Plato as dubious and decadent, even potentially dangerous; especially because of its predication on ‘miming’ or mimicking certain roles and actions.[97] This however is not our main concern. What is of interest here for us is the establishment of the profound connections made via mimesis, between mythology, poiesis (invention, creation) and art. Myth like the work of art is an instrument of identification and so can be understood as the mimetic instrument par excellence.[98]
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe ask a pertinent question regarding the mythology of National Socialism: why did German totalitarianism take the form of a virulently racist regime? Why not class struggle or some other form? Although we would certainly have to be cautious before averring that National Socialism’s totalitarian character resided purely in its racist ideological program, the question of why the figuration of German totalitarianism took the form of racism, rather than class struggle or some other ideology is important. The answer: first, the ‘German problem’ was first and foremost one of identity.[99] Second, myth in this context, and as we outlined above, functioned as an ‘identificatory mechanism’, leading racist ideology to act as fodder for the voracious construction of myth; in this instance, the myth of the Aryan. At work here is what Lacoue-Labarthe in Typography as well as The Fiction of the Political, delineates as the work of onto-typology.[100]
The figuration of a ‘type’ is not merely a process of ‘fabulation’, but the conception of a model of identity that has been formed and realised.[101] The Hölderlinian call for the inauguration of a ‘new mythology’ that we descried in the System-Program was by no means a call for a retrieval or recuperation of the myths told by the ancients. On the contrary, the ‘new mythology’ would need to be created, moulded and fashioned. It would have to be sui generis. The System-Program was a response to the diremption or ‘arche-separation’ of Urteil and Seyn, subject and object, and the law and life, into antipodal conceptions thought to be originally and primordially ‘united in intellectual intuition’.[102] The poiesis of a ‘new mythology’ was thought to harbour the ability to render the rational sensuous, and accessible to the masses. Nancy argues that the working in concert of mimesis and poiesis is what provides the means by which the Subject-state can produce and sustain its particular typology. Mimesis facilitates the myth’s reproduction while the poiesis of sense creatively dispenses the myth’s founding character – at work here is an ontology of fiction or fictioning premised on the metaphysics of the self-present subject characteristic of the onto-theological tradition.
‘Mimesis is the poesis of the world as true world of gods, of men, and of nature. The myth of myth is in no way an ontological fiction; it is nothing other than an ontology of fiction or representation: it is therefore a particularly fulfilled and fulfilling form of the ontology of subjectivity in general.’[103]
Lacoue-Labarthe emphasizes that the ‘type’, also referred to as the Gestalt or ‘figure’ is of immense importance to this program i.e. the auto-poiesis of a new mythology. In his reading of On the Question of Being, Heidegger’s famous letter on the question of nihilism to Ernst Jünger, he defines it as ‘the final name of the Idea, the last word designating Being as “theorized” in its difference from beings – that is to say transcendence, or the meta-physical as such.’[104] The onto-typological relates to a ‘figure’ that both gathers together and bestows meaning upon beings.[105] Lacoue-Labarthe’s meticulously composed essay Typography in fact examines in admirable detail Heidegger’s own highly problematic relationship to mimesis which at least in certain respects repeats Plato’s own exclusion of myth and animosity toward theatrics.
The Gestalt in Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art: The Final Refuge of Metaphysics?
Lacoue-Labarthe notes with great perspicacity that in The Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger takes up the word Gestell in order to make it mean the gathering together of all the modes of stellen meaning to set, to put, to place – the most germane to the aesthetic domain being Herstellen (produce), Darstellen (present) and Feststellen (institute, constitute) – and through which Heidegger attempts to ground the work in its essence as ‘truth’s being fixed in place in the figure.’[106] Lacoue-Labarthe as we have seen regards the ‘figure’ as the residuum of the metaphysics of presence. Furthermore, he claims that Heidegger’s retention of the ‘figure’, in his ruminations on the Ursprung of the artwork, was at least partially a consequence of his sympathetic attitude towards the tradition of national-aestheticism, that would continue well after the failure of his rectorship into the final decades of his working life. In Originary Ethics Nancy underlines the fact that Heidegger by means of numerous strategies places considerable emphasis upon gathering and fixity, and that these should not be viewed as either ethically or politically neutral: ‘terms like “shepherd,” “guarding,” and “protective heed” aren’t entirely free of evangelistic, backward-looking connotations. They evoke a sense of preservation, a conservation of what ought to be open and to be risked.’[107] But that of course doesn’t mean that such terms are intrinsically fascistic or even in sync with the guiding thread of national-aestheticism, although given Heidegger’s former triumphalism and assertion that it is ‘the spiritual world of a people…that most deeply preserves the people’s strengths, which are tied to earth and blood’, we most no doubt remain deeply mistrustful of such motifs, which continue to emphasize the pertinence of a fictioning of the political by dint of a poiesis of sense.[108] We cannot possibly do justice to Heidegger here and so shall not attempt a worthy explication a propos his thinking of Dichtung, which is mediated by his reading of above all Hölderlin, but also Rilke and Trakl. In a far less auspicious move we shall by means of a short digression attempt an exposition of Heidegger’s notion of the ‘figure’ or Gestalt in the context of his meditations on the nature of the artwork. In The Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger articulates one of the most nuanced and unsettling presentations of the Gestalt, as Lacoue-Labarthe well recognises. It is worth making a brief incursion into this matter so as to appreciate just how complex and sophisticated Heidegger’s thinking of the ‘figure’ in fact is. And although Lacoue-Labarthe does not say this explicitly it might well be seen as the summit and epitome of onto-typology as such. The onto-typology of National Socialism, by contrast, will be shown in the following section in its complete and utter brazenness and crudity.
The setting-of-truth-into-the-work (das Sich-ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit) which Heidegger defines as the essence of art, establishes itself in the strife and ‘space’ that truth itself opens up.[109] The truth of the artwork is present only as the strife between clearing and concealing in the opposition between earth and world, which in turn belongs to the history of being (Seinsgeschichte), and its epochal constellations.[110] All great artworks irrespective of their medium, erect within the density of a specific earth a ‘figure’ (Gestalt) of ‘truth’ or disclosure.[111] ‘This strife which is brought into the rift-design, and so set back into the earth and fixed in place, is the figure…The createdness of the work means: the fixing in place of truth in the figure. Figure is the structure of the rift in its self-establishment. The structured rift is the jointure [Fuge] of the shining of truth.’[112] The Gestalt acts as the trace of a strife between world, a historic dimension, and an earth, which is to say a pre-historical ‘ground’.[113] Its purpose is to bring to light the ‘crack’, ‘fissure’ or ‘rift’ (Riss) that unites by means of antagonism, the historicality of the world and the a-historicality of the earth.[114] It is the earthly tendency or proclivity of the work of art, which forecloses the possibility of it exclusively belonging to the world and therefore history.[115] The artwork enters history only after having given birth to history. ‘Art is history in the essential sense: it is the ground of history.’[116] The capacity of a ‘great’ artwork to make manifest the unity of an entire epoch with unparalleled acuity is therefore ultimately non-historical; it is what binds world and earth together and most clearly evinced by the caesura situated in the ‘figure’ of the artwork.[117] Lacoue-Labarthe surely hits the marks when he claims that Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art attempts to pin down and fix in place the truth of the strife of earth and world in the ‘figure’; a figure that bears within it the quality of a fundamental fissure or antagonism. This is of course what sets Heidegger’s version of the Gestalt apart from its more jejune and otiose variations. But whether such a gesture could be framed within a broader narrative or meta-historical explanation is another matter. The myriad of difficulties that such an endeavour would present almost certainly accounts for Lacoue-Labarthe’s own scepticism and hesitancy in arguing for the supra-historical validity of a history of onto-typology.
The Will-to-Art, or Onto-typology of National Socialism
In the case of National Socialism the issue is far more straightforward and all the more brutal for that. The ‘type’ or ‘figure’ as construed by National Socialism was racial, more specifically the ‘Aryan’ type. Race, according to Lacoue-Labarthe, is the identity of a ‘formative power’, of a type, and therefore a bearer of myth. ‘It is the myth of ‘mythopoiesis’ itself, of which the type, by the very logic of aesthetico-political immanentism, is both production of and produced by fiction.’[118] Myth signifies nothing but itself and is the product of pure self-formation. The locus of its truth is contained in the self-foundation of the Volk or race. In this onto-typology the ontology of subjectivity reaches its fulfilment – the Aryan type as absolute subject is enacted as pure will willing itself.[119]
The exaltation of a ‘type’ or figure set in contradistinction to other fabricated counter-types and even non-types is a trait commonly found in the polity fashioned in conformity with such ‘aesthetic’ criteria. One only need look to the typology of the ‘Aryan’ and the ‘Jew’ as figured in the ideological scheme of National Socialism. It is well known that many Nazi ideologues held the Aryan type to be the quintessence of form and beauty. The Aryan’s soul possessed a definite form and so had a natural penchant for myth and self-fictioning.[120] While the ‘Jew,’ on the contrary, was figured not only as the personification of ‘ugliness,’ but also as the race without Seelengestalt.[121] The ‘Jew’, failed to constitute a type on account of his amorphous and formless soul, which by definition was incapable of fashioning a subject or proper being (être-propre) for himself. This apparently, according to Alfred Rosenberg, perhaps the most influential of the Nazi ideologues, explains the ‘Jew’s’ distaste and disinclination to myth. Maurice Blanchot rethought and rephrased this racist canard concisely when he stated that the ‘myth of the Jew’ is the man supposedly ‘liberated from myths.’[122] In Rosenberg’s vile narrative the ‘Jew’ is the infinitely mimetic being, the ‘site of an endless mimesis.’[123] And this is why, according to Rosenberg, he is not the antipode of the Aryan, the ‘Jew’ is not his counter-type, but instead his very contradiction. In this obscene equation the ‘Jew’ is without type.
Germany’s ‘intellectual and aesthetic voluntarism’, the upshot of which was the onto-typology of the Aryan, and what Walter Benjamin once referred to as a ‘will to art’ was the consequence of its desire to appropriate for itself an identity and create its own subject.[124] This logic which we have explicated at some length consists of a twofold movement: the will-to-identity and the self-fulfilment of form, both of which belong ‘to the fundamental tendency of the subject, in the metaphysical sense of the word.’[125] This means that we are never able to rest on our laurels or calmly rest assured in the righteousness of our cause and the purity of our arms. Such complacency Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe argue only invites the dangerous slide into a will-to-identity and the reassertion of an immanent form of community.
What are we to do in such a predicament? If ‘there can be…no community outside of myth,’ is descent into the immanent community and identitarian thinking an inevitable eventuality?[126] Nancy’s answer is in the negative. Myth is not intrinsically bound to the logic of fascism. On the contrary, divested of the imperious subjectivism and domineering will-to-identity at work in the immanent community, myth can embark upon the radical possibility of interrupting and displacing itself. In this way the ‘interruption of myth’ becomes also ‘the interruption of community.’[127] Community emerges, according to Nancy, not merely as a means of resistance but strikingly as ‘resistance itself.’[128] Such an explanation will seem strained or maybe farfetched. Isn’t Nancy being overconfident in myth’s ability to disrupt itself and shatter the affinity it has often held with the totalizing community of essence? This is not a question we can answer at this point – we must first address Nancy’s own ‘positive’ understanding of community, and it is to this which we now turn.
Part II
The Inoperative Community and Negativity Without Use
In a much debated letter written on the 6th of December 1937 to Alexandre Kojève, author of the hugely influential lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Georges Bataille poses a quandary of sorts:
If action (‘doing’) is – as Hegel says – negativity, the question arises as to whether the negativity of one who has ‘nothing more to do’ disappears or remains in a state of ‘unemployed negativity.’[129]
By ‘unemployed negativity’ Bataille meant the residue of human negativity that would continue to persevere at the ‘end of history’ once the labour of the Concept had come full circle and all possibilities had been exhausted. The remnants of negativity would consequently take the forms of laughter, eroticism, and joy in the face of death.[130] Nancy transposes the theme of desoeuvrement, or inoperativeness, Bataille’s ‘negativity without use,’[131] into an understanding of community which is devoid of a shared ‘essence’ or ‘type’ that would ensure the community’s reproduction and unsullied immanence. By contrast, what Nancy refers to as our being-in-common is without any common being, substance or essence that could be said to be ‘workable’ or the object of a ‘formative power’. According to Nancy, the being of beings that overdetermines our being-in common, cannot be viewed as an entity which could be said to possess a prior substance that would pre-exist or underlie its multiple, singular plural articulations.[132] What this means will be explained more fully in due course. For now let it suffice to say that our being-in-common is not a substance that could be subject to predication and thereby possess a determinate identity. ‘Being in common means…no longer having, in any form, in any empirical or ideal place, such a substantial identity, and sharing this (narcissistic) “lack of identity.”’[133] Our being-in-common can be understood as tantamount to a sharing in our lack of identity. It is in this sense that the community can be said to be ‘inoperative’ or ‘unworked’. There is no common identity, whether it be race, religious denomination, or subject of history, that could be said to be constitutive of it. The community hangs together only in virtue of its ‘unworkable’ character. But what would such a community amount to? Is not the idea of a community possessing a substantial identity that binds its members one to another, the necessary definition of community? Doesn’t the very idea of an ‘inoperative’ community strike us as fundamentally aporetic, or even a contradiction in terms? In La communauté désoeuvreé Nancy endeavours to disabuse us of such a premature conclusion. Community isn’t the result of a subsistent identity’s operation, but lies rather in our shared finitude, and thus a shared relation to death; not only our own deaths but the death of others. It is this which for Nancy exceeds and eludes the grasp of any metaphysics of the self-present and perduring subject.[134] We will explore why this is the case later in our discussion, but first we might find it helpful to take our leave of a pertinent observation made by Nancy in The Inoperative Community:
‘Community is calibrated on death as on that which it is precisely impossible to make a work (other than a work of death, as soon as one tries to make a work of it). Community occurs in order to acknowledge this impossibility, or more exactly…the impossibility of making a work out of death is inscribed and acknowledged as “community.”
Community is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed to others. Community is what takes place always through others and for others. It is not the space of the egos – subjects and substances that are at bottom immortal – but of the I’s, who are always others (or else are nothing). If community is revealed in the death of others it is because death itself is the true community of I’s that are not egos.’[135]
Nancy’s notion of community presented here is quite unlike the life and death struggle of Hegel’s Phenomenology in which an abstract and immediate self-consciousness, a ‘pure being-for-self’ is compelled to stake its life in order to supersede its present state of immediacy and therefore implicit dependence upon the other. For Hegel ‘it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won’.[136] It is the quest to demonstrate its perfect freedom and independence from things or otherness in toto, which is the provenance of the life and death struggle. This struggle for Hegel acts as a necessary stage on the road to mutual recognition. Our very real confrontation with death is turned into a vehicle for the continued progression of the dialectic. This is of course what Nancy’s notion of the inoperative community tries its utmost to avoid. We have already shown the reasons for Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s fundamental suspicion of the classical figuration of the subject, and the tendency toward an identitarian logic such a figuration induces. Hegel however by no means fits into such a cosy narrative, a point which Nancy’s own writings a propos Hegel are the first to confirm. We will not therefore mount or even attempt anything like a ‘Nancean critique’ of Hegel here. It will suffice for our present purposes to note merely that for Nancy the model of mutual recognition does not pose itself as a problem in the same way it does for Hegel. For Hegel mutual recognition is absolutely indispensable for the satisfaction of self-consciousness. Although Nancy would up to a point agree with Hegel that ‘Self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.’[137] He would, however, be far less keen to endorse Hegel’s conclusion that self-consciousness ‘exists only in being acknowledged.’[138] We will try our best to explain why this is the case.
Firstly, we must make the obvious point that Nancy would be quick to disavow Hegel’s modified understanding of the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception. He does however concede in his own way to the idea that desire is fundamentally a desire for the other, although we are never strictly, to use the words of Judith Butler, ‘subjects of desire’.[139] He writes in his most recent text vis-à-vis Hegel, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, that: ‘Trembling from the trembling of the other, and with the other, the self comes into desire. Self-consciousness is essentially desire, because it is consciousness of self as and out of its consciousness of the other.’[140] We aren’t according to Nancy, especially if we wish to frame it in eidetic terms, always already inscribed within an economy of desire which would give rise to self-conscious beings impelled by a logic of dissatisfaction and satiation.[141] Nor are we exposed to the other in virtue of risking our own lives in the face of the other, while concomitantly seeking his death. Of course Hegel does not actually ‘put to work’ the death of the other and he certainly never makes a work of it; the other must survive in the form of the servile consciousness if the dialectic is not to lose momentum. What Nancy does refuse though, not without a whole new set of issues arising, is that the staking of one’s life is the prerequisite of a relation to one’s own mortality; that we must in a very literal sense stare death right in the face. Community is on the contrary the very ‘place’ where our finitude is revealed to us in our being-with others with whom we share our finite co-existence as an unmasterable limit.
Before delving any deeper into the question of our finite being-with others we must first state an important qualification a propos the inoperative community: the inoperative community, unlike Hegel’s Prussian state or Marx’s vision of the authentically communist society after the successful defence of the revolution by the dictatorship of the proletariat, has no eschatological content whatsoever. There is no telos or culminating point of history in which the inoperative community could finally be said to have been enacted and realised as a historical destiny.
In The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben asks in a way that greatly resonates with what we have thus far encountered in Nancy’s thought of community: ‘What could be the politics of whatever singularity, that is, of a being whose community is mediated not by any condition of belonging (being red, being Italian, being Communist) nor by the simple absence of conditions…but by belonging itself?’[142] The common is thought by Agamben as the point of indifference between the proper and the improper, as something that can never be subject to appropriation or expropriation.[143] This is again very similar to Nancy. In his important essay The Decision to Existence Nancy endeavours to slough off any residual disdain or contempt for the quotidian and mundane latent in Heidegger’s descriptions of ‘idle talk,’ ‘curiosity,’ and ‘ambiguity’.[144] In stark contrast, Nancy argues that every one of our experiences is implicated in the ‘they’.[145] And so the ‘they’ or the ‘one’ ‘is never other than we.’[146]
Heidegger calls ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ a specific attunement on our part to that which the unique situation (Situation) demands of us.[147] Moreover, the connection between die Entschlossenheit (resolution, resolve, decisiveness) and erschließen (to disclose, to open up), should not be lost on us. Anticipatory resoluteness is not an act of human volition but a mode of disclosure. ‘The situation cannot be calculated in advance and pregiven like something objectively present waiting to be grasped. It is disclosed only in a free act of resolve that has not been determined beforehand, but is open to the possibility of such determination…the resolution must be kept free and open for the actual factical possibility in accordance with its own meaning as a disclosure.’[148] For Nancy decision is not a matter of enjoining our appropriate or proper attunement to the Moment (Augenblick) of authentic praxis, by which Dasein, attentive to its worldly situation as a whole and to its uniterable singularity finds itself called to decision. Although Heidegger’s idea here is in no way to be confused as is often the case by his less perspicuous critics with a brash voluntarism, Nancy continues to find problematic the emphasis placed upon the propriety of decision, that which is most appropriate and subject to appropriation by existence. We have already shown at some length why this is the case with respect to Derrida’s Auseinandersetzung with Heidegger, which Nancy takes up in other forms. Although Heidegger himself questions this priority in his final writings, namely On Time and Being,[149] it nonetheless remains an issue that has evoked unease amongst the philosophers of Derrida’s generation and after. And this is why Nancy decides in favour of ‘the mundanity of decision.’[150] Such a stance undermines any attempt to ground decision beyond our experience of the mundane. To advance beyond these parameters and claim decision in the name of ‘being,’ ‘history,’ or a ‘spiritual mission,’ etc… is no longer thought to be feasible or desirable.[151] In this way the ‘they’ can be said by Nancy to be a, if not the locus of disclosure;[152] ‘the “proper” (eigen, Eigentlichkeit), takes place nowhere other than right at the “improper,” right at everyday existence’.[153] The point of this brief digression was not to show how the Nancean notion of decision deviates from its Heideggerian predecessor. The point rather was to demonstrate Nancy’s abandonment of any pretence to propriety, but also evince in a more patent fashion the disavowal of any penchant for messianism, including the subtleties of the Derridean messianism without a messiah.
It is in this respect that Nancy and Agamben’s thinking vis-à-vis community diverges. For example, Agamben writes that the ‘novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the State, but a struggle between the State and the non-State (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the State organization.’[154] Although Agamben could never be interpreted as advocating an unseemly or bromide teleology or messianic creed there remains nonetheless a palpable messianic inflection (most probably inherited from his deep ties to Benjamin’s work) to his prognosis which foresees the conflict between the State and the non-State of whatever singularities in what we might call ‘epic’ terms; and of which Tiananmen is taken by him to be paradigmatic. Although such a conflict is by no means inevitable, it does function as the horizon of the ‘politics to come’. The inoperative community eschews any such messianic inflection because for Nancy the ontological and the ethical exist in a state of fundamental, albeit jarring and dissonant reciprocity.[155] The meaning of being for Nancy, as we shall see in greater detail below, is the meaning of being-with, and the ethical consists in the inoperative community’s ‘unworking’ and thus break down of the subject-community’s will-to-identity and concomitant self-production. Community is not a state of affairs to be achieved, but a process always already ‘unworking’. We do not here wish to overstate the differences between Nancy and Agamben’s thought with respect to community. There are profound resonances and affinities that we can’t unfortunately go into any further here. The reason for our juxtaposing this ‘snapshot’ of Agamben’s ‘coming community’ with Nancy’s ‘inoperative community’ was to make even clearer the distinctness of Nancy’s contribution. Unlike Agamben, he does not understand ‘community’ as something to be augured or foreseen. ‘Community’ is always inoperative and in its inoperation affects openness, plurality and multiplicity. Such ‘unworking’ traverses the community no matter how oppressive or totalizing the social body and so forecloses the advent of total closure, even if such a closure remains possible in principle; constantly one can bear witness to burgeoning and emergent lines of flight as Deleuze and Guattari might say, which provoke dissonance and rupture, forestalling the incline toward complete immanence. Immanence in this negative sense is, as Deleuze says, an immanence to something other than itself, as opposed to the articulation of an immanence, purely immanent to itself alone.[156] It is in this way that such essentialist social forms are able to operate and reproduce an overarching criterion of identity through which the body politic is made to achieve complete consistency, while negating any overt recourse to a transcendent entity or avatar as such. Although we are unable to tackle this issue any here further we should note that such a conception of immanence bears little similarity to the Deleuzian notion of immanence, which as Deleuze ceaselessly reiterates, is stricto sensu immanent to itself, and with which Nancy shares a certain sympathy.
Nancy subscribes to the thesis, following the lead of Lyotard that the time of so-called ‘grand-narratives’ is at an end.[157] If history has ceased to be the history of the consciousness of freedom, of humanity, or class struggle, what avenues are left for us to pursue in order to describe and comprehend our political, ethical, and ontological condition? We are left with what Nancy calls ‘finite history’ and with it the community that no longer partakes in a shared essence or collective destiny. ‘It is a matter of the space of time, of spacing time and/or of spaced time, which gives to ‘us’ the possibility of saying ‘we’ – that is, the possibility of being in common, and of presenting or representing ourselves as a community – a community that shares or that partakes of the same space of time, for community itself is this space.’[158] Such a thinking of community is characterised by its thorough sobriety, forgoing any nostalgia for archaic social forms or sacred kinship structures which long ago disappeared from the face of the earth[159] – the space of community does not emerge as a gift of beyng to be sheltered and preserved by humankind.
Nancy claims: ‘The plurality of beings is at the foundation [fondment] of Being.’[160] Community is never a collective sense, but rather that which allows for our engagement with sense, and so in this way can be seen as the very spacing of sense.[161] The ‘space’ of community does not perform the role of a site which would unify or gather together into an organic whole the disparate, dispersed and multiple character of sense, thereby affecting its closure. Nancy here tries to eschew those motifs and impulses evinced in Heidegger’s writings that stress the themes of unicity, oneness, preservation, organicity and the inflammation of the spiritual truth of the Volk bound to the pre-eminence of such onto-aesthetico-typological determinations as blood, soil, and autochthony.[162] The groundless nature of community accounts for its essential ambiguity, and thus the unavoidable vacillation between unicity and multiplicity.[163]
Nancy’s ontology of co-existence which turns primarily upon the axis of the singular plurality of being-with is not simply a rehashing of §26 of Being and Time, The Mitdasein of the Others and Everyday Being-with, and all that follows therefrom. Nor is it intended as a ‘corrective’ or ‘taming of Heideggerian excesses’. Nancy skilfully draws on elements of Heidegger’s early as well as later work while revolutionizing much of their content, and bursting free from the confines and propensity toward unification into a single saying found in Heideggerian figures like Geheiss, the calling that gathers all acts of calling, enjoining speech to respond in turn,[164] and the four-fold. [165] In opposition to Heidegger, Nancy argues that the logos is irreducibly divided (partagé), coming to presence only in singular articulations from out of disparate and differentiated origins.[166] The thinking of community as we hope to elaborate further below is committed to differential relations between singular beings in their singularity.
We might add en passant, albeit not arbitrarily, that Nancy’s thinking of community would also preclude any recourse to the contractarian tradition represented by such figures as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and in the second half of the twentieth century by John Rawls. We do not wish here to abrade the often considerable differences separating advocates of the social contract, but instead bring to the fore a common presupposition which unites them: sociality in any meaningful sense of the word is only possible when agents existing in the state of nature,[167] agree upon (and thereby consent to) a form of political organisation (usually that decided upon by the majority), insofar as it remains consonant with their self-interest and desire for self-preservation. In doing so all individuals are compelled to resign their wills to a sovereign authority concerning matters of the public good. The sovereign authority as a direct consequence of such a compact is endowed with the right and hence the authority to make decisions on behalf of its members, to which they are obliged to obey.[168] It is only in this way that an end to the turmoil and lawlessness of the natural condition, the result of the unabated conflict of wills and judgements, can be achieved. Only after the crisis of political judgement has been resolved can men embark upon the properly political life, own property and be assured of peaceful coexistence with their neighbours. For Nancy such a scenario would be an abstraction from what he and Lacoue-Labarthe refer to as the sphere of ‘politics’ (la politique) i.e. the play of forces and interests engaged in the conflict over representation and political governance. By contrast, the notions of being-in-common, being-with, and the inoperative community etc…seek to broach a thoughtful encounter with what in contradistinction to ‘politics’ they refer to as ‘the political’ (le politique) i.e. the site where what it means to be in common is open to dispute and discussion.[169]
The contract theoretician in abstracting from the sphere of ‘politics’, even when consciously aware of its contrived nature or power as an explanans i.e. when conceived as a heuristic device for the construction of a just social order on the basis of self-interest etc…, naturalises a state of endemic conflict as mankind’s irredeemably fallen condition. Such a conception obviates what Nancy terms the clinamen, the inclination and inclining of one self to another; a proclivity which flies in the face of social atomism or the solipsistic marauders of the state of nature, which all fail to understand the ontological sociality of community and the compearance of selves.[170]
Community, ‘is not a gathering of individuals, posterior to the elaboration of individuality, for individuality as such can be given only within such a gathering.’[171] Nancy’s own enterprise is perhaps most apparent in Being Singular Plural, in which he sets himself the daunting task of explicating ‘the primordial, ontological condition of being-with or being-together’.[172] Being-with is not regarded by Nancy as a regional ontology governing intersubjective relations but as the very meaning of being,[173] defining our ontological and ethical condition, and presupposed by any account of individual agents brought into conflict as a consequence of their subjective preferences. [174] Sociality can in no way be derived from human artifice, which is not to say that Nancy would want to deny the vast impact of prostheses and technics upon the modes and forms of our coexistence or being-with others. His working out of what he calls ecotechnics patently testifies to this.[175] Nonetheless, Nancy wishes to make the point that in our very being we are never isolates cut off from others and the world; we are always being-with-others and being-toward-the-world.[176] This is in many ways Nancy’s very own incursion into ‘first philosophy,’ whose last recognisable manifestation was the ‘fundamental ontology’ of Heidegger.[177] In the next section we will attempt to further unravel Nancy’s ontology of the social.
The Spatiality of Being-With
Our co-existence is made possible by means of two constitutive moments of our being-toward-the-world. The first being simply that ‘we are,’ we exist in the hic et nunc. The second moment is the constitutive finitude of our existence. ‘What could be more common than to be, than being? We are. Being, or existence, is what we share...But being is not a thing that we could possess in common. Being is in no way different from existence, which is singular each time.’ He continues, ‘being is not common in the sense of a common property. But that it is in common. Being is in common.’[178] The opening line of this section stressed our being-toward-the-world because it is precisely the opening gambit of Being and Time that Nancy abjures. As we saw above, in Being and Time Heidegger had argued that it was first necessary to interrogate that being which is ontically distinguished in virtue of its concern about its being i.e. Dasein. The being of Dasein must first receive elucidation before we can proceed onto the question of being. This is Nancy’s main bone of contention with the existential analytic as such. Although Heidegger in §26 of Being and Time, elaborates Dasein’s being-with others, the investigation continues to be guided by and framed in light of the question, who is Dasein?[179] In the final analysis, the co-existential or co-originary appearance of the self with others is aufgehoben by Heidegger within the broader scheme of the existential analytic.[180] ‘The question of Being and the meaning of Being has become the question of being-with and of being-together’.[181]
On the basis of initial impressions, the spatiality of community we alluded to above can be understood in much the same way as Heidegger’s arduous struggle in the Beiträge to articulate what he calls time-space (Zeit-Raum). In fact, Nancy even at one point remarks that ‘being-with is the sharing of a simultaneous space-time’.[182] But how are we to think about space-time or time-space?[183] In the Beiträge Heidegger avers that ‘Space and time, each represented for itself and in the usual connection, themselves arise from time-space, which is more originary than them themselves and their calculatively represented connection.’[184] The ontical dimensions of the mathesis universalis, integral to Descartes conceptualization of nature as res extensa, emerge interstitially from out of the aperture of time-space.[185] Time-space is the dehiscence of the es gibt, the virtual and pre-ontical process which allows for ontical individuation. In the case of Nancy, the ‘space-time’ of community, is a Mitwelt, that ought to be thought as an ontological category announcing our co-existence and being-together, irreducible to the lineaments of the ontical, while exceeding the limits of representational thought. ‘If being-with is the sharing of a simultaneous space-time, then it involves a presentation of this space-time as such. In order to say “we,” one must present the “here and now” of this “we.”’[186]
Nancy’s thinking of community aspires to examine our being as compearance or co-appearance (comparution). The ‘with,’ ‘mit,’ or ‘cum’ becomes constitutive of Dasein’s being. For the Heidegger of the Beiträge we saw that Da-sein implied the ‘there’ as the pre-ontical, pre-predicative and pre-individual ‘place’ or ‘aperture’ of beyng. The ‘with’ of our being-with, according to Nancy, performs a similar function: it is the indispensable virtuality of our plural, relational, and shared co-existence; impossible to abstract from its determinate modes of articulation that are themselves always multiple. The ‘with’ furthermore is always simultaneous with its singular concretions as the space of our being-in-common.[187] The ‘with’ is not the ‘condition of possibility’ of our finite co-existence, in any conventional sense, because it is the exact contemporary of those terms which comprise it.[188] People, cultures, groups, networks, lineages and languages are the determined articulations of the ‘with’ in its singular plurality. Here Nancy continues to think through the repercussions of the inoperative community, the attempt to articulate our being-in-common without a substantial or common being.[189] The question of whether it remains only humans who are to be ontically distinguished, while the nonhuman continues to be viewed as Weltarm or ‘world-poor’ is something we will eventually have to address[190] – but for the moment we shall try to gain a better understanding overall of Nancy’s ‘project’.
Nancy quoting Being and Time writes that ‘sense’ is ‘the structure of the opening’, and emphasizes the active character of Dasein’s ‘making-sense’ of the world, which is not to be equated with a production of sense.[191] He underscores the verbal, active, and transitive senses of Dasein, being-there, which as we saw above, has no substantial identity because it is defined exclusively by its existence.[192] Nor can being-there be reduced to the web of significance in which it is engaged when actively coping with the world.
Two features of Nancy’s exposition of our being-with forestall the possibility of a substantial identity being attributed to each singular Dasein or to the plural ‘with’. The first is the ecstatic character of Dasein’s temporal co-existence in the world. The second is Nancy’s deployment of the notion of singularity, which for now it will suffice to say, is the means by which beings are exposed and open to one another in their shared finitude. Both suppose that it is being-with that furnishes the possibility of meaning. The meaning of being is co-originary and given as being-with, and the with must be thought as an aperture of a space-time that both distributes and yet remains co-extensive with any such singular distribution of singularities.[193] ‘There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.’[194]
The Ek-stases of Finite Ex-posure
It is well-known that Heidegger opposed any conception of time which perpetuated the misunderstanding that it was somehow internal to the mind or the product of consciousness. And this is why he preserved and extended the senses of the Greek Ekstase, ekstatikon, derived from the verb existanai, existēmi, meaning ‘to displace’ or ‘to derange’.[195] We should also bear in mind the senses of the Latin ecstasis meaning ‘a being besides oneself’, ‘trance’ and ‘rapture’.[196] Heidegger wished to convey temporality as ‘the original outside itself, the ekstatikon’[197] wedded to and in the final analysis supporting Dasein’s transcendence. The three temporal ecstasies of future (Zukunft), having-been (Gewesenheit), and present (Gegenwart) remain inseparable from one another and exist equiprimordially.[198] Dasein exists distended and stretched out between these three ecstasies of time, by being ahead of itself in the future, drawing on its past, while always being concerned and open to the present. The ecstasies underwrite our practical comportment to beings in the world, by which we expect the future, retain the past and enpresent (gegenwärtigen) the present.[199] Expectancy, retention and enpresenting are not merely the way by which we grasp the being of equipment in its ‘then’, ‘formerly’ and ‘now’ but are the source of such temporal determinations.[200] Nor are they phases of our consciousness of time or temporal duration; they are the unity of temporality’s temporalization into which as Dasein we are each inexorably thrown.
Reasonably early on in The Inoperative Community Nancy poses the somewhat rhetorical question: ‘Community, or the being ecstatic of Being itself?’[201] The structure and consequences of Dasein’s ecstatic temporality are rethought by Nancy and inscribed within the analytic of being-with. As finite beings we inescapably ek-sist within the flow of time; the inoperative community thus not only relies on the excess provoked by our shared mortality[202] but also by the fact that we ek-sist with others ecstatically outside of ourselves spliced up and dispersed in virtue of our shared pasts, presents and futures. Because as being-there we exist perennially outside of ourselves we can never be said to be entirely self-present. Our temporal existence never has a single impetus driving it forth. In this way we are always hearkening backwards, while at the same time being propelled forth with others and so share a temporal way of being-in-the-world, which we cannot control and of which we are not the authors. The rapturousness of community breaks up any possibility of the will-to-identity we witnessed in the absolutist Subject-state. Ecstasy is always a matter of ‘sharing’ (partage) and so by definition refuses the entreaties of the solipsist. Because we are always ‘outside of ourselves’ so to speak, and so distended in time, we are able to broach contact with the temporalisation of the temporality of the other. It is by means of this contact that both our births and our deaths are presented to us, which in turn confirms our own lack of ground i.e. that we are not self-sufficient and unmediated beings and that our existence lies outside of ourselves.[203] In other words, the presentation and understanding of ourselves only ever takes place with and in others.
The issue of temporal exposure is not quite as straightforward as we have presented however. Nancy understands our temporal exposure to other singular beings in conjunction with an equal, if not greater emphasis on the spatial dimensions of any such exposure. He understands singular beings as extended and in virtue of their extension, exposed to one another. This is fully worked out in what might be called his ‘bodily ontology’ which we will only gloss over here. The ‘with,’ as we have seen, is that place in which finite beings co-appear. This place, populated by singular beings, exists not as a unity but as a multiple division of sites, for which Nancy on occasion uses and adapts the term partes extra partes (‘parts outside parts’). Partes extra partes traditionally expressed the mechanical and external set of relations between either the individual parts of an object, or the relations between one object and another object.[204] In this way his thinking of the body avoids any such connotations which would imply a desire for organicity or a natural holism characteristic of the canon of national aestheticism. Nancy uses the term partes extra partes in order to convey the relations of exteriority between singular bodies, which are extended and exposed by relations of contact and separation to other singular bodies.[205] And these are by no means only human bodies. Bodies and the constitutive parts of bodies are extended and exist in a relation of exteriority to one another, never occupying the same place.[206] Furthermore, the body for Nancy is the site of touch which makes sense, but as materiality, is itself outside of all sense.[207]
The phenomenal materiality of co-appearance, for we are inescapably embodied beings, is therefore never purely a matter of Dasein’s perennial temporal distension, which causes it to be ecstatically ‘outside itself’ and thereby exposed; our exposure to one another as singular beings is also the outcome of the material contact of bodies and those elements constitutive of bodies extended in the space-time of the ‘with’.[208] Upon contact with another body ‘outside of itself’ the material body in its singularity is exposed and thus compears with the other.[209] ‘Body is the total signifier, for everything has a body, or everything is a body…and body is the last signifier, the limit of the signifier’.[210] Material bodies are seen, touched and sensed only from an outside and in a relation of exteriority by which they touch one another at a mutual distance or separation.[211] The corporeal isn’t conceptualised as merely a mode of disclosure; it is the fractured opening or spacing of discrete places at the very limit of sense, what Nancy terms ‘effraction’.[212] Finite bodily sense articulates space in its contact with other disparate bodies, and thereby constitutes the expanse of our existence.