The book brings together discussions on the writings of philosophers who treat more systematically the questions of foundation and orientation, such as Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Pascal, and Patočka, and studies of literary works that explicitly thematize this question, such as Novalis, Hölderlin, Beckett, Platonov, and Benjamin. This multi-disciplinary approach brings to the fore the paradox that modern figures of grounding and orientation unground and disorient and demonstrates a critical path to review current understandings of modernity and post-modernity.
The book brings together discussions on the writings of philosophers who treat more systematically the questions of foundation and orientation, such as Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Pascal, and Patočka, and studies of literary works that explicitly thematize this question, such as Novalis, Hölderlin, Beckett, Platonov, and Benjamin. This multi-disciplinary approach brings to the fore the paradox that modern figures of grounding and orientation unground and disorient and demonstrates a critical path to review current understandings of modernity and post-modernity.
Dis-orientations: Philosophy, Literature and the Lost Grounds of Modernity
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Overview
The book brings together discussions on the writings of philosophers who treat more systematically the questions of foundation and orientation, such as Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Pascal, and Patočka, and studies of literary works that explicitly thematize this question, such as Novalis, Hölderlin, Beckett, Platonov, and Benjamin. This multi-disciplinary approach brings to the fore the paradox that modern figures of grounding and orientation unground and disorient and demonstrates a critical path to review current understandings of modernity and post-modernity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783482580 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dutton Penguin Group USA |
| Publication date: | 12/23/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 260 |
| File size: | 935 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Tora Lane is a Project Researcher at CBEES, Södertörn University, Sweden.
Contributors: Ludger Hagedorn, Research Fellow, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, Austria; Peter Hanly, Research Fellow, Boston College, USA; Krystof Kasprzak, PhD Student in Philosophy, Södertörn University, Sweden; Tora Lane, Project Researcher, CBEES, Södertörn University, Sweden; Michael Marder, Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy, University of the Basque Country, Spain; Helena Martins, Associate Professor, Pontifícia Universidade do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Jan Patočka; Johan Redin, Research Fellow, Södertörn University, Sweden; Marcia Sá Cavalcante, Schuback Professor of Philosophy, Södertörn University, Sweden; Irina Sandomirskaja, Professor in Cultural Studies, Södertörn University, Sweden; Gustav Strandberg, PhD student in Philosophy, Södertörn University, Sweden; Peter Trawny, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Martin Heidegger Institute, Wuppertal University, Germany; Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Professor of Philosophy, Södertörn University, Sweden.
Marcia Sa Cavalcante Schuback is Professor of Philosophy at Sodertorn University, Sweden. She has published widely in both English and Portuguese, including the Portuguese translation of Heidegger's Being and Time.
Tora Lane ph. D is a Project Researcher at CBEES, Sodertorn University, Sweden.
Read an Excerpt
Dis-orientations
Philosophy, Literature and the Lost Grounds of Modernity
By Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Tora Lane
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback, Tora Lane and ContributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-258-0
CHAPTER 1
Husserl and the Earth
Sven-Olov Wallenstein
Husserl's thought seems to lead in two opposite directions, which have been emphasized differently by commentators. On the one hand, his work follows a trajectory that takes us back to grounds and grounding, to foundations and ultimate justifications, and in this sense his quest for the meaning of the transcendental suggests that he is an arch-foundationalist. On the other hand, he is just as much the philosopher of transcendentality as horizon, of intentionality as openness toward the inexhaustibility of the object, and of interminable inquiries into the recesses of inner time consciousness and the body with its multifarious kinaesthetic relays to a pre-objective world. Between the two readings of Husserl there seems to be something like a switch of perspective, which makes the stability provided by one version waver and give way, as soon as we think that we have the picture straight. Maybe this tension is not something that ought to be resolved, but instead be preserved as an oscillation that gives Husserl's thought its momentum, and would cease to do so once we settle on either of the two options.
Rather than attempting to answer the question of which one of the two images is the right one, it appears more fruitful to follow this tension as far as it can take us. In the case of the manuscript D 17 that will be in focus here, 'The Originary Ark, The Earth, Does Not Move', this tension will propel us away from the earth, into space and the Copernican perspective, but then also back to earth as lived experience, in a movement where Husserl not only encounters what appears close to the science fiction of his time, but also is led to draw conclusions that in his own words might seem 'frankly crazy'. Yet again, this craziness is however not something that takes us away from rigorous science, making us lose our foothold and turn the ground beneath our feet to an abyss; on the contrary, it shows us the power of the ground at the precise moment when it seems to disappear.
THE GROUND OF THOUGHT: BODY AND EARTH
But how are we to orient ourselves in this space of what is, then, not exactly a problem to be solved, but more like a region that we must enter into, located in between the desire for a foundation and the desire to abandon it, or a least to break it open — these are probably not two desires, but desire itself in two facets?
Between the ground and the horizon there is a dimension in which thinking must find its orientation. The beginning of this type of questioning, at least in modern philosophy, can be found in Kant, when he in his 1786 essay 'Was heisst: sich im Denken orientieren?' examines how our concepts are formed. In the introduction he writes, 'Regardless of at how high a level we place our concepts and how much we abstract from sensibility, sensuous representations will always adhere to them, and their proper function is to make those concepts that have not been derived from experience apt for use in experience.' In order to 'find an orientation' in thought, Kant suggests, we must always bear the first, quasi phenomenological sense of the term orientation in mind: to have a sky above us, to perceive space as oriented according to the four cardinal points and divided into left and right according to our own body, all of which provides a pre-conceptual 'feeling' without which no orientation could exist. As a next step, Kant speaks of the relation to 'space in general', where we can find our bearings by using mathematical and geometrical methods. Finally, there is the 'space of thought', which we organize with the help of logic. Reason has an absolute need of such aids, Kant says, in order to 'orient itself in thought, in supersensible space, which for us is immeasurable and buried deep in the most profound of nights'. For Kant, orientation occurs through a hierarchical series of abstractions that all rest on a ground that provides the initial determination.
In some writings, this ground is understood in a more precise way as embodiment, so that the location in the pre-objective here of the lived body is what opens up the possibility of orientation. This is the famous argument in the pre-critical 1768 essay on the first ground of the differences between regions in space: the impossibility of making incongruent counterparts coincide (such as a right or left hand, which have all their internal relations in common) signals, against Leibniz's claims about space as relational and non-real, that we must always assume the irreducibility of absolute space. This absolute space is not yet formulated in terms of the non-conceptual and intuitive character pertaining to the forms of intuition as they are laid out after Kant's 'Copernican turn', but significantly through a reference to embodiment that would later be repressed, or at least downplayed, in the formulations of the 'Transcendental Aesthetic' in the first Critique. But rather than asking whether these references to embodiment can be integrated into the later work or not, the ambiguity of whether embodiment is a necessary condition or not, can be taken as a structural feature of transcendental philosophy as such from its initial Kantian envoi onwards.
This doubling of the transcendental, that is, in its necessary reference back to an empirical dimension that on one level appears to short-circuit it while at the same time already containing the movement of going beyond, has never ceased to haunt post-Kantian philosophy, and it surfaces most evidently in the phenomenological tradition. In order to develop this theme, the following remarks will take their cue from a small text by Husserl, the manuscripts D 17 (dated May 19, 1934); in fact, the first to be selected for posthumous publication in 1940, and later translated as 'Overturning of the Copernican doctrine in the normal interpretation of the world. The world as originary ark does not move. Foundational inquiries concerning the phenomenological origin of corporeality and the spatiality of nature in the first sense of natural science.' It is probably more known under the shorter title that has often been used, 'Die Ur-Arche Erde bewegt sich nicht', which gives it a more provocative twist, and which is even further emphasized in the French translation, where it has been joined together with the following manuscript D 18, 'Notizen zur Raumkonstitution', and D 12 IV, 'Die Welt der lebendigen Gegenwart und die Konstitution der ausserleiblichen Unwelt', under the title La terre ne se meut pas. The problem of ground and horizon here reach a particular extreme, in not just remaining within the confines of subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and historicity, but expanding out to include the world in a sense that touches the limit of the phenomenological concept of world by linking it to the earth, as a kind of absolute facticity that conditions all horizons.
If the claim that the earth does not move seems to exacerbate the provocation with respect to science, one must however remember that this is only true if we by science understand its Copernican version — which by the time Husserl wrote these notes down was already a thing of the past. Ever since the advent of relativity, a general theory of movement can take the earth, the sun, or any other astral body as point of reference for the determination of movement, and the claim that the earth does not move is no less justified than the opposite view; the seeming self-evidence of a moving earth has more to do with the symbolical value of the Galilean and then Copernican uprising against tradition and the Church, than with modern astronomy or astrophysics. Such obvious facts are often overlooked when one accuses Husserl of rebelling against science; in fact, what might seem as simply a rejection of Copernicanism in no way amounts to a return to a pre -scientific worldview, or any critique of contemporary physics as such. The bracketing in fact means that both the pre -scientific world and the scientific world of relativity or Copernicanism for Husserl are moments of naiveté, which does not mean that he rejects or even doubts their validity, only that the pre -scientific, Copernican and relative determinations of movement are all derivative from the point of view of the phenomenological origin. What Husserl first attempts in this manuscript, is to formulate a science where the origin of space is the foundation for both the natural experience of space as well as for the idealizations carried out in all types of science, but then also to step beyond this foundational logic and think the being of the earth itself as the origin of reason as such. This will indeed lead him to some of his most daring formulations — some of which he himself characterize as 'extravagant, frankly crazy', or as an expression of 'the most unbelievable philosophical hubris' (324/131).
My comments will not deal with science, Galilean, Copernican, Einsteinian, or in any other form, or with the question how to situate Husserl in relation to other philosophical reflections on science as they appeared in the first decades of the twentieth century. Instead I will attempt to connect Husserl's text to the theme of the conference and the research project that supports it, that is, to 'disorientations' and 'loss of ground as common ground'. This will perhaps produce what at first may appear like a rather oblique reading of the text, although when seen in this perspective, it begins to generate other possibilities. Here I will attempt to extract two possible answers to the question of orientation and disorientation, ground and loss of ground. They will not be simply opposed, but rather pass over into each other, although not simply in the sense of an order of foundation — as when Husserl aims to undertake 'grundlegende Untersuchungen', that is, not just basic, but foundational, even though they are 'all preparatory', as the original title on the cover of the convolute reads. It is more like a change of perspective, which makes it difficult to say which one of the two is foundational and which one derivative.
This comes across already in the title of Husserl's text. The straightforward meaning is that of the earth as an 'orginary ark' in the Biblical sense, which is also how the title is translated, but it is difficult not to hear a further allusion to the ground in the sense of the Greek arche, to the unmoved archi-earth. In Greek or German, arche and Arche (ark) are both feminine, and we could therefore not distinguish them from each other on a grammatical level, and this is one of the few texts where Husserl may be taken as making a pun, or at least drawing on linguistic polysemy. And even if no pun or equivocation was ever intended, it is true that both these senses of the word are operative in the text, and they divide amongst themselves two sets of implications that are at least not immediately compatible: the arche as the ground and the foundation, and the ark as the vessel which compensates for a loss of ground by providing us with a secondary ground after the flood has forced us to depart from the first. These are then brought together in the somewhat strange compound 'originary ark' (Ur-Arche) that either could be read, if we choose the Greek, as a mere tautology, or, choosing the German, as an originary substitution, as a supplement of ground.
More than just a pun, this in fact points to a crucial issue: phenomenology, understood as a project of infinite reason, a claim to an infinite determinability of being through thought, here approaches a limit. On the one hand, the limit is that which reminds us of the irreducible finitude of reason; on the other hand, it is that which opens reason, provides it with infinite and inexhaustible tasks, precisely as a function of finitude. Ground and horizon in this sense belong together, not just in the sense of a hierarchy of foundations that assures the bedrock for a construction to be pursued at will, but something like the retroaction of the horizon on the ground, whose result will be a dense and complex relation between the loss of ground and its retrieval.
HUSSERL'S RETURN TO THE EARTH
In Husserl, there is a gradual development of his approach to facticity that we can follow from his first works on the philosophy of arithmetic, which attempt to provide — at least as they appear in the polemic directed to him by Frege — an account of the psychological genesis of number, up to the last work on the crisis of the European sciences, which investigates the process of idealization, with geometry as the central case. The status of the idea — the eidos, ideality, ideal objects — was always at the centre of Husserl's work, and it was always a question of how it might be correlated to acts that occur in time, to a genesis. This means, however, that we must understand the genesis of the ideal without robbing it of a normative status, or rather, that we must rethink normativity itself as a mode of the temporal. The eidos is not located in the 'heavenly place', the topos ouranios of Plato, to which Husserl from the Logical Investigations onward often refers in order to emphasize that his Platonism is of a different kind (whether this exhausts, or even correctly circumscribes, Plato's thought of the eternal and the temporal, is of course a wholly different question). The Platonist option would in fact make ideal objects ontologically wholly independent of us and nullify knowledge just as efficiently as the psychologism that tempted Husserl in his earliest writings. Essences, the eide, are for Husserl always correlated to acts through which we constitute them, although precisely in the sense that they are constituted so as to appear, in their sense, independent of us, as in the case of those objects and relations that we find in mathematics, logic and geometry. To understand this correlation of the subjective and the objective is one of Husserl's main tasks, it is the very 'riddle' of knowledge that he attempts to solve, in ways that are continually displaced, deepened and expanded so as to include other problems of embodiment, time, history and intersubjectivity. In the Crisis, this becomes a question of how to understand the relation between such objects and the lifeworld through a genesis that is at once historical and preserves their normative ideality, and it is in this context of these last works that we find the manuscript on the earth, where he pushed some of the motifs that guide the analysis of the crisis in the sciences to their limit.
For some interpreters, most famously Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this development takes Husserl to the limits of phenomenology, where the task of establishing a 'rigorous science' must be abandoned, not in the sense of a failure, but as an opening to a different form of analysis of our being the world that is close to Heidegger. For others, like Derrida, this limit was there from the start, and rather than short-circuiting the phenomenological reflection, it is what opens it and gives it its momentum, although in the sense of a paradox that constantly calls for new articulations. Husserl's path would in this reading take him toward a more profound sense of the transcendental, and the shift from epistemology to ontology that Merleau-Ponty wants to detect (presumably in analogy to the shift in his own work from the phenomenology of perception toward an ontology of the flesh and the visible) is there from the start as an oscillation, or more precisely as a blurring of the line between the two that belongs to the metaphysics of presence as such.
(Continues...)
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