Critical Hermeneutics

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Editor's Introduction

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Bernhard Waldenfels is certainly one of the leading representatives of the contemporary philosophical tradition with a phenomenological orientation. His scientific education, his intellectual background and his very rich range of publications, many of which have been translated into the major languages, characterise him as a significant heir to the great German philosophical tradition, which he has enlivened in creative contact with contemporary thought, of which he is an acknowledged protagonist...

Editoriale

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The Birth of Ethos out of Pathos

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An ethical epoché is required to leave the terrain of a self-evident morality and question its origin. In particular, four fundamental motifs of the ethical dimension are identified: pathos, to be thematised as an alternative to the persistent activist unilateralism; response, which always involves body and soul; diastasis with its stumbles and subtractions; and finally coaffection, in which the social dimension of experience is announced. Ethical behaviour feeds on the magma of pathos, which in turn would be blind and directionless without any ethos.

Encountering the Indeterminacy of the Self

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In recent decades, phenomenology and hermeneutical phenomenology have taken the lead in addressing the question of personal identity through the inquiry of “who are you?”. However, this lead has questionable aspects in capturing the relationality between self, others, and the surrounding world, characterized by its ever-changing state. To understand personal identity in its ever-changing state of becoming, the primary focus of this paper is twofold: firstly, exploring how to reconcile these complex relations into a unified conception of personal identity by following Husserl’s notion of “indeterminate determinacy” and his theory of variation, and secondly, considering the limitations of defining this unity as an “autobiography or biography" in accordance with Arendt’s notion of a "life-story". In the final analyses the notion of life-story will be revised together with Waldenfels’s analyses on “radical alien” and Sözer’s “in-between”. This will prompt a reconsideration of personal identity as a process, leading to a genetic phenomenological perspective that recognizes the “indeterminacy of the self”.

Beyond the Primacy of Representation

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The primacy of representation, to which – at least according to Paul Ricoeur – Edmund Husserl would have remained faithful, is radically questioned in Emmanuel Levinas’ famous essay on the "ruin of representation" (1959). The phenomenological structure of intentionality, in which “something appears as something”, confirms the need to “break out of the magic circle of representation”. Indeed, it is precisely by means of a detailed analysis of “intentionality”, insofar as the latter appears as characterized by an essential Mehrmeinun. Levinas brings out the overcoming of representation, that is, the abandonment of the latter's claim to subordinate thought to the objective necessity of presence. Within the horizon of presence, the necessity of being-thus-and-not-otherwise overwhelms the sense of the possible, and the actual evidence annihilates the being-able-to-be-otherwise of human experience. Through the analysis of intentionality and its potentiality, it is possible to bring out the transition from a philosophy of the necessary constraints of evidence, linked to the primacy of representation, to a philosophy of the power-able-to-be-otherwise. After all, the ruin of representation is the ruin of the instant or eternity of evidence, relegated into the actuality of consciousness. By subtracting itself from the self-referential necessity of evidence, the ethical Sinngebung evocated by Levinas at the end of his 1959 article connects intentionality to the sense of the possible, making explicit its openness to the future in radical form.

Die Leiblichkeit in der reflexiven Anerkennung

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The paper aims to analyse the role of Entfremdung in the process of self-awareness. In the Anmerkungen zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität of 1920, Husserl reflects on the Entfremdung of the concrete bodily self, using the alterity or the meeting with the extraneous as a model. The conscious relation of the natural self to its soma (das Physische) is constituted in the context of the experience of the extraneous (das Fremde). The reference to the other than oneself also seems to occur in the transcendental self-reflection of the self, investigated in the late manuscripts on temporality (C- Manuscripts). Firstly, in such manuscripts, the living present (lebendige Gegenwart) is both identity and difference from self, and precisely as a continuous transition from identity to other-than-self, to difference from self, it constitutes the original ground of the transcendental ego. Secondly, it is possible to grasp a correlativity: that between the bodily self-reflection and the temporal self-reflection of the transcendental ego. Both are based on the opposition and mediation of subjective and objective. Following this path, it can be said that in the reflections on original temporality, the dynamics of bodily self-reflection are iterated: it is no coincidence that in the C Manuscripts Husserl designates the temporal Ego objectified in self-reflection as Non-Ego. Even in the case of the original temporal self-reflexivity, it is otherness that mediates the relation to the self, an otherness that is not identified with but connected to the transcendental body of others.

Responding to the Appeal of Those Who Are not (yet) There

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Intergenerational justice represents a crucial theme in the on-going debate in ethics, politics and law. In what follows, I would like to show that a determined phenomenological perspective drawing from the motive of alterity can shed new light on such a topic. Importantly, my concern will be to display how this approach can provide a thorough justificatory underpinning for a responsibility towards future generations, while denouncing the main shortcomings that mainstream approaches reveal when dealing with this issue.

Copy or Doubling?

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The question I intend to address here concerns the ontological status of the Doppelgänger (the Double). “Who” is the Double? How is it connected to our lives, and to other lives? I would like to describe, from an interdisciplinary perspective, the ambiguity of this figure, which has been interpreted in art and literature as a copy of the original or as a doubling of the self. Drawing on Waldenfels’s reflections on the experience of the alien, I will try to show that the intrinsic ambiguity of the Doppelgänger is rooted in an ambiguity that is even more original than that of the Double: the ambiguity of our own life, which is always intertwined with that of others, with what is alien. What makes us to some extent radically alien even to ourselves and, precisely for this reason, “founded” on our very “groundlessness” is our relational, contextual or responsive freedom.

Bruchstellen einer diachronen Erfahrung

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Experience is investigated according to those breaking points where the unexpected surfaces and the surprise of the extraordinary and the alien breaks through. What happens is always in the postponement between pathos and response; this represents the fundamental agreement of a responsive phenomenology: it is never a quiet succession, but always something arriving too early or too late. Threshold experiences such as hesitation, delay, waiting, pausing, stumbling are investigated in this framework.

Breakpoints of a Diachronic Experience

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Limit-Forms of Time

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To establish what time is, as in Plato’s iconic definition (“moving image of eternity”, Timaeus 37d), one often has to emphasize its relation to what time is not. Time seems to be defined dialectically, in terms of what is not eternal, not extra-temporal, etc. Husserl’s phenomenology as well shows how experience involves several borderline forms of time. But these sui generis forms of timelessness are for Husserl as many modes of time, they are variations of the same constituent temporality. Time thus presents its dialectical counterparts within itself, rather than being metaphysically drawn ex nihilo from eternity. Allzeitlichkeit, for example, is the capacity of idealities to be in any time; Überzeitlichkeit is the property of the I to function as the focus of appearance in any possible living experience; Zugleichkeit is the proper mode of the a priori of correlation, i.e. the fact that the intertwined processes of Objektivierung and Subjektivierung occur at the same time; Urzeitigung and Selbstzeitigung describe the primordial dimension of the absolute flow of consciousness (Urprozess); finally, Simultaneität and Gleichzeitigkeit refer respectively to the system of sedimented sense (secondary passivity) and to the modality of its reactivation. All these boundary forms do not negate time, but entertain a constitutive relationship with its becoming. Overall, then, Husserl’s view is that of a pluralistic and polyhedric unity of time.

Variations, Pause, and Restart

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In the following paper, we will focus in particular on the research and reflections carried out by the French anthropologist Philippe Descola, who offers us a useful perspective to radically rethink the conceptualisation that, through a millenary movement, has led our Western culture, represented by what he calls the Moderns (borrowing an expression from Bruno Latour), to objectify the natural environment and to deploy it as a separate and unmanageable entity to be dominated.

Der Leib als Urmedium und der Körper als Vehikel der Technik

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Living corporeity is the intermediate element between nature and culture, which must be thought of as a reciprocal interconnection, since as corporeal beings we always move on a threshold. In the reflection of the bodily self, a doubling between the living body as a functioning subject and as a material object is revealed; after all, even one's own body sometimes takes on the features of a foreign body, as is the case in the experience of illness. In the technical instrument, the body is prolonged and this highlights the connection between the technique of the thing and the technique of the self; however, despite the gradual autonomisation of the technical element from the living corporeity, there remains what escapes calculation and looms large in the subtraction of the alien.

The Body as Original Medium and Vehicle of Technique

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Starting with the Body Beyond the Body

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The aim of this article is to focus on the double entanglement of the body as an original medium and as a vehicle of technique. It follows Waldenfels’ long course of investigations devoted to these issues. In particular, the author will try to highlight the strong points of his proposal, attempting to critically extend their range, on the one hand, and problematizing certain assumptions that may become the subject of further investigation, on the other. He will focus above all on the question of the bodily self as embedded in and structured by many gestures and practices that are properly technical. Finally, the author will show how the conceptual tools of this phenomenology can be employed in the analysis of some significant contemporary phenomena.

Bodies and Natures

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Das Unbewußte als Fremdes

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Through a comparison of the phenomenological motif of the alien and the psychoanalytic motif of the unconscious, a critique is advanced against Cartesian dualism, which recurs today in the natural sciences and in the split of the contemporary individual, divided between spirit and nature, the proper world and the alien world, the inner sphere and the outer sphere. It is a matter of thinking of an original subtraction, an absent presence that begins with ourselves, in a slippage that achieves no synthesis.

The Unconscious as the Alien

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Between the Visible and the Invisible

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In this contribution I will attempt to sketch a phenomenology of dreaming in what appear to be its most important characterisations: for example, a specific (a)temporality, an essential ineffability, its relation to the waking world and a particular causality. In order to do this, I will be guided by two authors – Maria Zambrano and Maurice Merleau-Ponty – who seems to be apparently distant but who share a vision of dreaming as a life-world in continuity with the waking world, which is comprehensible only by adopting a non-rational gaze, such as that offered by poetry and myth. The final aim will be to rehabilitate the dreaming experience as a lived one, able to express deep subjective meanings.

The (im)possible Task

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The compatibility between the phenomenological method and the subject of the unconscious has long been called into question, not only by external critics but also by authors whose theoretical background had been shaped precisely by their confrontation with Husserl’s phenomenology. To date, the evolution of Husserlian philology, on the one hand, has notably softened such stance, testifying to how the father of phenomenology himself directly and repeatedly grappled with this problem. On the other hand, however, there seem to be intrinsic aspects to the notion of phenomenology as such that would lead to underestimate its potential, outright excluding concepts or entire realms of experience, such as that gathered under the title of the unconscious. In this article, we intend to revisit certain moments in Husserl's work from which it becomes clear that not only is phenomenology capable of addressing the problem of the unconscious, but above all it proves to be particularly effective in accounting for it, providing important methodological indications for its analytical framing. In the concluding section, we will finally touch upon some possible avenues for a phenomenological investigation of the unconscious, differentiated by the assumption of distinct exemplary phenomena as guiding thread (Leitfaden) of the analysis.

Hermeneutics and Epistemology

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In a collection of essays published in the 1970s under the title Vernunft in die Zeitalter der Wissenschaft, Gadamer confronts developments in analytical epistemology, arguing about epistemology from a hermeneutical point of view. Relations between the two traditions remain difficult. Paolo Parrini was among the few who opened to a real dialogue, neither superficial nor formal. He considered the hermeneutical tradition from an epistemological point of view, finding many connections via a third view between metaphysical realism and strong relativism. This theoretically dense and challenging perspective was expressed in two essays – “Ermeneutica ed epistemologia” (1998) and “Ermeneutica ed epistemologia 2: Heidegger, Kant e la verità” (2011). Parrini focused on the concept of Offenheit der Erfahrung in Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode and, later, on Heidegger’s theory of truth as alètheia. In this paper the author argues that original results of Parrini’s research confirm the fruitfulness of the encounter between hermeneutics and epistemology. He tries at the same time to identify some friction points and theoretical constraints, for further comparative development, in theory of language and theory of history, on which Gadamer’s ontological hermeneutics lies. The first tends to eliminate any distance between experience and language; the second presents conflicting aspects about identity conditions of past events, as investigated in history. To become fully productive, the dialogue between epistemological and hermeneutical traditions will be able to face a deep revision about these topics.

The Time Enigma

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The essay aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the theoretical and aesthetic interpretation of Claude Debussy's musical work by Vladimir Jankélévitch, while simultaneously delineating how and why the phenomenon of Debussysm emerges as an innovative and revolutionary style, if compared to the previous tradition. The text discusses the potential relationships between philosophical Phenomenology and musical Impressionism, highlighting - also through the concepts of mystery and instantaneity - how the philosopher reads in the composer's music the emergence of a vision of reality centered on the punctuativity of events.

Contents / Indice

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Contents