Bergman on Dialogical Philosophy

Shmuel Hugo Bergman’s little-known but intensely readable primer, Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber, presents a series of lectures given by Bergman in 1962. In his ‘Preface’, translator Arnold Gerstein – aptly, I sense – describes Bergman’s original language as ‘a semiformal but elegant conversational Hebrew that is compelling to students and philosophers alike’. The intimacy of Bergman’s lecturing style thus mirrors that of his subject: the dialogue. Nathan Rotenstreich, in his ‘Foreword’, maintains that the term ‘dialogical philosophy’ is ‘undoubtedly taken from Martin Buber’; both Rotenstreich and Gerstein, however, note that for Bergman it is Kierkegaard who emerges as ‘the central link in the history of the philosophy of the dialogue’ (in Gerstein’s words).

Later sections of Bergman’s study address other thinkers of central importance to Weimar era philosophy: Eugen Rosenstock, Franz Rosenzweig. Yet the first and by far the longest part of the book focusses on Kierkegaard’s thought. In some introductory statements prefacing this part, Bergman suggests the affinity of dialogical thinking to existentialist thinking: ‘What distinguishes any genuine dialogue is the fact that the participants are individuals, each bearing their own specific and generic traits. They are not abstractions but men of flesh and blood.’ On the following page Bergman adds a caveat: ‘The philosophy of dialogue which we will discuss in these lectures is not the same as “existentialism,” since not every existential philosophy stresses the dialogical factor; however, the two schools are identical with respect to the position of the individual within the philosophical system.’ As Bergman puts it later, ‘With this stress on the importance of the individual self, the single man in all his existential individuality, Kierkegaard lays the foundation for what has subsequently been called dialogical philosophy.’ But, as Rotenstreich rightly observes, Bergman’s treatment of dialogical philosophers’ relationship to existentialism is ultimately of lesser importance than the emphasis his book places on ‘the centrality of man’s individuality and the relationships and encounters between individuals and with God’. Bergman notes, for instance, that Kierkegaard’s dislike for German Romanticism’s ‘tempestuousness and exaggerated subjectivism that isolated man’, meant that he ‘strenuously sought the way to religion through the use of subjective irony’.

Crucially, in connection with Weimar political philosophy’s decisionism, Bergman shows how Kierkegaard’s thinking of the decision forms an aspect of his thinking of man’s emergent relationship with God, repeatedly referring to ‘the autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’. Because, as Bergman writes, for Kierkegaard ‘Real action is in the internal decision of man’, therefore for him ‘Man’s relation to God is not direct or objective; it is an inner relation, a relation of risk’. For Kierkegaard, as Bergman notes, within the moral and religious dimension of life ‘direct communication is impossible’. ‘In order to see God, one must break the direct-passive relationship. Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act, and he confronts the reality of God.’ 

Bergman emphasizes that the I-Thou relation, the relationship of man to man, is the concern of post-Kierkegaardian dialogical philosophy:

‘Actually, in spite of the tremendous importance of dialogue for Kierkegaard, the major dialogue for him is between man and God. The dialogue between man and man has no function in religious life because religious man leads a solitary life and cannot disclose to others the task that is imposed on him.’

Bergman’s attention to the importance of religious ‘silence’ or ‘speechlessness’ reappears within the context of his discussion of the modality of ‘non-Socratic learning’ within which, for Kierkegaard (as Bergman puts it), ‘a genuine mutual relationship between God and man is created’: learning as divine revelation.

‘The relationship between man and man is invariably Socratic – that is, it will always be such that one man, when he teaches another, even when he teaches him about revelation and faith, can only be an agent or a midwife. He cannot take the place of direct revelation, which comes through God as teacher.’

Commenting on Kierkegaard’s Repetition, Bergman stresses how ‘the essence of revelation’ involves a recreation of man by God, and that ‘God alone can recreate man’. ‘The learner is given something that was not within him and for which he was unprepared, and so the moment in which he receives the doctrine or revelation is of crucial importance.’ It is here that Bergman evokes the sort of divine revocation of speechlessness ‘which is expressed among Jews in the prayer: “Oh Lord, open thou my lips and my mouth may declare thy praise”’. We remember how Bergman wrote of how in relation to God, man’s ‘inner nature […] bursts forth in an independent act’: ‘Man enters this personal dialogue with God only through God’s action.’ It is as if the spiritual release afforded by the human decision is matched by – though it does not have the power to solicit – a divine revocation of our silence.

For instance when it juxtaposes Ferdinand Ebner’s view that (in Bergman’s words) ‘Man’s spirit is in its essence a receiving spirit dwelling in a relationship to a giving spirit’, with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s argument that (as Bergman puts it) ‘logos finds its way to our physical life and awakens it to the life of the spirit’, Bergman’s book foregrounds the position that ‘language is the revelation of God to man’. Noting that ‘this viewpoint predominates in the thought of Rosenstock, a friend of Rosenzweig’, Bergman explores the philosophy of language presented by Rosenstock in his Angewandte Seelenkunde [Applied Psychology], a text published in 1924 (but largely written some years before).

Bergman focusses on the concept of ‘true speech’ – revelational speech – which Rosenstock developed as a result of his view that, as Bergman phrases it, ‘The word, “logos,” is a revelation of divine presence’:

‘In speech [for Rosenstock] there are two levels, reflecting the distinction between true and ordinary speech. The two levels are the compulsion (or necessity) of speaking, and the ability to speak. True speech is not voluntary or arbitrary; it is not a matter of will but a necessity whose force causes speech to spring forth. True speech springs forth almost against the will of man, and thus all true speech is revelation.’

With this idea that ‘The word is given to man or forces itself upon him’, Bergman clearly echoes his earlier commentary on Kierkegaard – where he wrote of how ‘Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act’. It is as if Bergman’s exegesis of the philosophers’ views of the experience of revelation has become as compulsive and involuntary as the experience itself. Yet though for Rosenstock ‘true speech’ entails that (as Bergman puts it) ‘the speaker is entirely subject to his own speech’, this does not mean that for Bergman such involuntary revelational speech divorces the speaking/spoken subject from his own existential individuality. The example of revelational speech which Bergman provides – the Jewish hermeneutic practice of ‘the law of intra-linear parallelisms in the Book of Psalms’ – is itself, Bergman observes, ‘grounded in distress and necessity’.

‘In prayer Israel encircles the prayer leader, who passes in front of the Ark, while others release him by repeating the prayer which he has recited with such total self-absorption and compulsion that he does not hear it. The congregation repeats his prayer, paralleling it by half-lines in such a way that he can and must hear what he has prayed, and in this way they free him from his distress. This is true speech.’  

At the end of his book Bergman returns to this logic of call and response – of sacred language or prayer and hermeneutics – which characterizes revelational speech, noting how Buber (in his ‘The History of the Dialogical Principle’) situated the event of call and response at the core of his thinking influenced by Hasidism:

‘[…] the question of the possibility and reality of a dialogical relationship between man and God, thus of a free partnership of man in a conversation between heaven and earth whose speech in address and answer is the happening itself, the happening from above and the happening from below, had already accosted me in my youth. In particular since the Hasidic tradition has grown for me into the supporting ground of my own thinking, hence since about 1905, that had become an innermost question for me.’

The de-individualizing tendency within the dialogical philosophy of language treated by Bergman emerges clearly however, when he discusses Rosenstock’s idea of ‘liturgical grammar’. Bergman glosses Rosenstock’s notion of calling as recreation: ‘Rosenstock says that liturgical grammar would change Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” to read, “God, you have called me, therefore I am.”’ Bergman underlines how ‘The calling comes first and establishes the “I.”’ He also stresses the scriptural precedence for the idea that ‘only from the “Thou” can the “I” be created’. ‘The classic example is I Samuel, 3:5, where young Samuel turns to Eli and says: “Here am I for thou called me.”’ Within Bergman’s study of dialogical philosophy therefore, there seems to be a tension between his emphasis on the involuntary (and even de-individualizing) aspect of religious experience, and his emphasis on the contrasting ‘autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’ – on an individual’s decisive, committed, risk-taking experience. This tension seems to me to be resolved, though, by Bergman’s ongoing attention to the concept of redemption as recreation: that is, to a redemption of man by God which precisely enables man’s exercise of personal agency.

Bergman’s reading of Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption suggests that ‘the redemption of the world must be perceived as a vital process, as the animation of the world’. This sort of redemption is evoked again within Bergman’s account of Buber’s notion of the state of ‘realization’, which Bergman describes as ‘the perception of reality in its immediacy, when one leaps into it, as it were, and identifies with it’. Towards the end of his book, Bergman relays the illustration of realization offered by Buber in one essay in his 1913 Daniel, Dialogues on Realization – a precursor of Buber’s I and Thou of 1923:

‘Buber illustrates this with the example of a Swiss pine […]. If […] I open myself to the tree with all my energy directed toward it, if I assimilate it, as it were, commit myself to it, then I am transformed and I become the tree itself. […] I experience a particular tree. I identify myself with it, without surrendering my unique position. I succeed, in other words, in conjoining the two, myself and the tree. I have access thereby to the mystery of reality. […] Entering the mystery of reality is […] a higher state of activity which I initiate and through which I open myself and transform my energy into a magical strength that fascinates and gratifies, while quieting the chaos around me. […] This is the great miracle of realization which this essay attempts to describe. Something of the philosophy of the dialogue emerges here, because the true dialogue also has the same openness and commitment along with the self-preservation of the person speaking.’       

Martian Time-Slip, part 2

In Martian Time-Slip Dick clearly upholds individual freedom, whether it be in terms of the schizophrenic ‘turn inward to meaning’ or Zitte’s bid for economic freedom. Yet the novel’s representation of mental illness also emphasizes the negative aspect of subjective inwardness. Dr Glaub draws attention to how ‘“in child autism, as with Manfred, there is no language at all, at least no spoken language. Possibly totally personal private thoughts…but no words.”’ Dick stresses how autistic noncommunication cages the subject within privatized existence – a sort of privatization which chills Jack Bohlen despite his experience of an empathy with the autistic boy, when he is ‘caught in a symbiosis with this unfortunate, mute creature who did nothing but rake over and inspect his own private world, again and again’. Earlier in the text, when he is exploring the ‘Public School’, Bohlen is troubled by the way in which autism ‘was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavour; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values’. Bohlen thinks that it is important that ‘The child learned that certain things in the culture around him were worth preserving at any cost’, and that ‘His values were fused with some objective human enterprise’. Dick bemoans the divorce of the radically noncommunicative from a communal objectivity, which he thinks of in terms of a taught tradition of values and culture. This divorce also represents the entrance to what Doreen Anderton, in conversation with Bohlen, calls ‘“the Tomb World”’.

‘Jack thought, And people talk about mental illness as an escape! He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a mouldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death.’

Dick thus associates psychotic noncommunication with a condition of total reification, or a freezing within an absence of experience; an absence of change. ‘It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.’ Yet despite lamenting the breakdown of the subject’s relation to objectivity in this way, Dick also offers a critique of objectivity in the form of the ‘composite psyche’ represented by the Public School. In this context he once more upholds the individual’s freedom, accusing an unfree society of imposing a diagnosis of mental illness on any child who displays signs of personal singularity:



Paul Klee. Early Sorrow. 1938

‘It was a battle, Jack realized, between the composite psyche of the school and the individual psyches of the children, and the former held all the key cards. A child who did not properly respond was assumed to be autistic – that is, oriented according to a subjective factor that took precedence over his sense of objective reality.’

Hence whilst Dick bemoans the alienation of the radically noncommunicative from intersubjective objectivity, or ‘the reality of interpersonal living, of life in a given culture with given values’, he critiques their educational institution – the Public School – which represents the ‘link’ to the ‘inherited culture’, and which is there ‘not to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines’. ‘It bent its pupils to it [the culture]; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children which might lead them in another direction had to be ironed out.’ Bohlen views ‘the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School’ as being, on one level, ‘an invention arising from necessity’ – insofar as its very neurosis offers the children a bulwark against their own psychosis, or ‘a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one’s course back to mankind and shared reality’. The reified, ‘compulsive-obsessive’ environment which the Public School represents – ‘a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises’ – at least enables ‘a deliberate stopping, a freezing somewhere along the path’ of psychosis. But Bohlen is also preoccupied by the way in which the Public School environment represents the conversion of ‘inherited culture’ into a form of reified intersubjectivity.

‘[…] Jack Bohlen, for the life of him, could not accept the Public School with its teaching machines as the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t of value. For the values of a society were in ceaseless flux, and the Public School was an attempt to stabilize those values, to jell them at a fixed point – to embalm them.’

It seems to be apparent, therefore, that what the novel’s treatment of the interface between mental illness and impaired communication is focussed on, above all else, is reification. Dick laments reified intersubjectivity just as he laments reified subjectivity. In Martian Time-Slip an important definition of psychosis returns to the vocabulary of jelling or coagulation, to describe the self reified beyond empathy and communication:

‘A coagulated self, fixed and immense, which effaces everything else and occupies the entire field. Then the most minute change is examined with the greatest attention. That is Manfred’s state now; has been, from the beginning. The ultimate stage of the schizophrenic process.’

It is as if the reified self expands until, become pure 'attention', it wipes itself out. Jameson’s ‘Philip K. Dick, in Memoriam’ concludes with a discussion of Dick’s prophetic treatment of the ‘end to individualism’ which increasingly characterizes society now. In response to the ‘death of the subject’, Jameson sees Dick’s writing as staging a ‘fitful and disturbing reappearance’ of ‘the collective’ – when the collective reappears precisely in the context of our reified intersubjectivity, or ‘the logic of stereotypes, reproductions and depersonalization in which the individual is held in our own time, “like a bird caught in cobwebs” (Ubik)’. Jameson reads Dick’s fiction as colliding a marginal collective made up of the vulnerable and the posthumous, with the radically alienating world of digitalized, virtualized intersubjectivity imposed on us by technology and mass media: within this scenario, Dick can attach some sort of redemptive value to the reification experienced by the autistic or ‘half-life’ community.

‘It is a literature in which the collective makes a fitful and disturbing reappearance, most often in a paralyzed community of the dead or the stricken, their brains wired together in a nightmarish attempt to find out why their familiar small-town worlds are lacking in depth or solidity, only to discover that they are “in reality” all immobilized together in some cryogenic half-life.’

As Jameson would go on to stress, in his ‘History and Salvation in Philip K. Dick’, in Martian Time-Slip Dick upholds the marginal, immobilized collective as the only social formation capable of future mobility. At the end of the novel, Dick presents Manfred Steiner as having been rescued, eventually, by Jack Bohlen’s attempt to communicate with him. In the novel’s climactic scene back-from-the-future Steiner may now be, as Jameson puts it, an ‘android-type prosthetic being’, but this is also Steiner’s (in Jameson’s phrase) ‘final apotheosis’, and a moment in which he can thank Bohlen for his humanity. ‘It lapsed into silence and then it resumed, more loudly, now. “You tried to communicate with me, many years ago. I appreciate that.”’ Though physically quite literally semi-reified, by now Steiner has found a way of releasing himself from the sort of contemporary reified intersubjectivity emblematized by the AM-WEB building, precisely – so Dick suggests – as a result of a developing capacity for communication and relationality. Bohlen asks Steiner, ‘“Did you escape AM-WEB?”’ ‘“Yesss,” it hissed, with a gleeful tremor. “I am with my friends.” It pointed to the Bleekmen who surrounded it.’ Relating to the Bleekmen, as Bohlen had surmised earlier, can enable Steiner to break through reification, by learning how to adjust – to change – precisely through learning how to be true to his own singularity:

‘Perhaps, for the first time in his life, the boy was in a situation to which he might make an adjustment; he might, with the wild Bleekmen, discern a style of living which was genuinely his and not a pallid, tormented reflection of the lives of those around him, beings who were innately different from him and whom he could never resemble, no matter how hard he tried.’  

Franziska Moebius. Kinder im Weg. Leipzig 2006.
transit trauma and arrested development

Martian Time-Slip

‘Helio, lowering his book, said, “This child has a speech impediment which I am overcoming.”’

Edward, Spitalfields 1989
by Marketa Luskacova

It is, surely, Dick’s unflinching presentation of the interface between mental illness and impaired communication in his 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip, which brought Patricia Warrick – as Umberto Rossi notes in The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick – to comment on the ‘terrible sincerity’ of the text. For Fredric Jameson, in his ‘History and Salvation in Philip K. Dick’, the settlements on Mars in Martian Time-Slip represent ‘the most depressing of all his novelistic “realities”’ – though I would add that the settlements presented in A Maze of Death are none too cheering either. The sincerity which Dick achieves in Martian Time-Slip is particularly sobering, I would argue, because it posits the misery involved with mental illness to be an increasingly generalized condition within contemporary life. When Rossi writes that ‘the title of the 1963 novella “All We Marsmen” – that Dick expanded into the novel – might also suggest that it is a story about “All We Madmen (and Women)”’, I would go further and emphasize Dick’s intention in the novel to suggest that, increasingly, We Are All Madmen and Madwomen now. Martian Time-Slip has Jack Bohlen remark that schizophrenia poses ‘“one of the most pressing problems human civilization has ever faced”’; later the text describes schizophrenia as ‘the most pervasive, ominous psychic process known to man’.   

Mental illness is repeatedly presented by Dick in terms of a breakdown of communication and relationality. He has the psychiatrist, Dr Glaub, observe that ‘“In autism, especially, the faculty of interpersonal communication is drastically impaired.”’ As Rossi comments, in connection with the novel’s autistic protagonist Manfred Steiner and his disturbance in time-sense, ‘the time-slip that allows Manfred to see what will happen also prevents him from communicating with others in the present’. Dr Glaub describes ‘“disturbed persons”’ as ‘“encapsulated individuals cut off from ordinary means of communication”’. Bohlen articulates Dick’s understanding of such noncommunicative isolation:

‘Now I can see what psychosis is: the utter alienation of perception from the objects of the outside world, especially the objects which matter: the warmhearted people there. And what takes their place? A dreadful preoccupation with – the endless ebb and flow of one’s own self. The changes emanating from within which affect only the inside world. It is a splitting apart of the two worlds, inner and outer, so that neither registers on the other. Both still exist, but each goes its own way.’

Dick’s understanding of mental disturbance as a confinement within interiority, relates to his sense that contemporary mental illness derives from the influence of the exercise of modern rationality. Manfred Steiner’s father traces his son’s autistic alienation back to the influence of Manfred’s mother’s academic personality, with its detachment from lived sensuous experience, its coldness and lack of love. Her dominative, instrumental rationality has reified her. By contrast, Silvia Bohlen is ‘a genuine mother and woman, vital, physically attractive, alive’:

‘In his own mind, Steiner blamed it all on his wife; when Manfred was a baby, she had never talked to him or shown him any affection. Having been trained as a chemist, she had an intellectual, matter-of-fact attitude, inappropriate in a mother. She had bathed and fed the baby as if he were a laboratory animal like a white rat. She kept him clean and healthy but she had never sung to him, laughed with him, had not really used language to or with him. So naturally he had become autistic; what else could he do?’

Dick consolidates an imputed critique of today’s academic culture and academic reason, when he has Dr Glaub refer to disturbed ‘“minds so fatigued by the impossible task of communicating in a world where everything happens with such rapidity that -”’. Here it is difficult not to think of the purposelessly accelerated, bureaucratized conditions of contemporary academic production – or this society’s ‘publish-or-perish’ privileging of the quantity of academic research produced over its quality – and the damage that these conditions do to our mental health. Martian Time-Slip in fact offers a potent Weberian or Frankfurt School-like prophecy of our existing culture of enforced higher education, intensified social differentiation and career specialization:

‘The ad listed all the skills in demand on Mars, and it was a long list, excluding only canary raiser and proctologist, if that. It pointed out how hard it was now for a person with only a master’s degree to get a job on Earth, and how on Mars there were good-paying jobs for people with only B.A.’s [sic].’

Jack Bohlen further illuminates this vision of a fast-paced, specialized polis, the complexity of which entails an ultimately changeless, reified and reifying, density of experience which threatens our sense of the freedom of the self.

‘“Frankly, Kindly Dad, I emigrated to Mars because of my schizophrenic episode when I was twenty-two and worked for Corona Corporation. I was cracking up. I had to move out of a complex urban environment and into a simpler one, a primitive frontier environment with more freedom. The pressure was too great for me; it was emigrate or go mad. […] I went mad standing in line at the bookstore. Everybody else, Kindly Dad, every single person in that bookstore and in that supermarket – all of them lived in the same building I did. It was a society, Kindly Dad, that one building.”’

The novel develops its critique of the modern use of instrumental reason in the course of a conversation in which Heliogabalus describes schizophrenia as ‘“the savage within the man”’, and Arnie Kott responds by calling it a ‘“reversion to primitive ways of thought”’. Helio identifies psychoanalysis, taken as an instance of the sort of modern instrumental reason which would reshape suffering selves, to be a ‘“vainglorious foolishness”’ which is mistaken in its therapeutic mission of restoring the subject to optimum functionality and sense of purpose.

‘“Question they never deal with is, what to remold sick person like. There is no what, Mister.”

“I don’t get you, Helio.”

“Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to meaning . There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them.”’ 

Dick here suggests that in a real sense mental illness is itself a valid response to the perennial philosophical question of human purpose. Modern instrumental rationality involves an objectivizing use of reason, which latches on to objects to ‘turn to practical use’; in contrast, (rational) irrationality can refuse objectivity and seek not practical purpose, but the impractical purpose of uncovering the absolute grounding humanity. It is in this context of the ‘turn inward to meaning’ that Dick’s conception of irrationality, converges with the conception of existential reason developed in Jaspers’ thinking: as Chris Thornhill notes in his Karl Jaspers, 'transcendence' is for Jaspers 'an inner attribute of truthfully self-interpreting humanity'. Dick’s defence of the schizophrenic turn inward to meaning is also supported by the novel’s depiction of the Martian environment; Mars is presented as ideal territory for asocial interior voyagers towards the sources of human value, in a way that recalls a phrase from Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat : the ‘private moon voyage’. Early in the novel, Bohlen judges that his father will adjust to Mars precisely because he is ‘in touch with some level of knowledge which told him how to behave, not in the social sense, but in a deeper, more permanent way’. Then the ‘lonely’ children of Mars appear; frantic yet diffident, Kafka-solitary pursuers of the transcendental beneath the surface. Young hermeneuticians, slightly dazed by the austere immensity of their ‘black-night-without-bottom’, the landscape of their quest.

‘The children had a large-eyed, haunted look, as if they were starved for something as yet invisible. They tended to become reclusive, if given half a chance, wandering off to poke about in the wastelands. […] When he flew by ‘copter, Arnie always spotted some isolated children, one here and another there, toiling away out in the desert, scratching at the rock and sand as if trying vaguely to pry up the surface of Mars and get underneath…’

 

The novel’s foregrounding of the schizophrenic turn inward to meaning has a sociopolitical correlate in Dick’s characteristic vaunting of repairman Otto Zitte’s doomed bid for personal economic freedom.

‘He hated the big racketeers, too, same as he hated the big unions. He hated bigness per se; bigness had destroyed the American system of free enterprise, the small businessman had been ruined – in fact, he himself had been perhaps the last authentic small businessman in the solar system. That was his real crime; he had tried to live the American way of life, instead of just talking about it.’

Of course these statements are representative of Dick’s typical populist celebration of, in Jameson’s words (in his ‘Philip K. Dick, In Memoriam’), ‘small employees such as record salesmen, self-employed mechanics and petty bureaucrats […] caught in the convulsive struggles of monopoly corporations and now galactic and intergalactic multinationals’. Darko Suvin, Rossi records, has interpreted the AM-WEB building in Martian Time-Slip as a reference to the ‘American Web of big business, corrupt labour aristocracy and big state’. The novel’s defence of an individual’s freedom, in the face of both the right-wing and left-wing varieties of reified intersubjectivity which manifest in our contemporary convergence of monopoly capitalism and bureaucratic statism, is clear.     

To be continued.

Scheitern, part 2

Thornhill shows the congruity of Jaspers' conception of foundering communicative reason as a decisive ‘hermeneutic of possible transcendence’, with the Weimar socialist theologian Paul Tillich’s theorization of revelation. For Tillich as for Jaspers, revelation involves ‘the shattering of reason’ (in Thornhill’s words); precisely as such however, revelation ‘is not the negation of reason’, because it is ‘the moment where reason experiences its highest degree of transcendent and unconditioned truthfulness’. Both Jaspers and Tillich conceive of revelation as being ‘not solely a fact of faith, but also a philosophical possibility of human reason’, which presents itself wherever reason founders, or ‘encounters the limits of its formal processes’. Thornhill also explains how Jaspers’ theory of the limit, or of a decisive hermeneutic operating in existential limit-situations, parallels Tillich’s conceptualization of kairos, and how both thinkers thus theorize a ‘decisive moment of responsible transcendence’.

Tillich used the concept of kairos to capture what he called ‘fulfilled time’; the moments in human life ‘in which eternity breaks in’ on the usual conditions of human history. In Thornhill’s words, kairos is thus ‘a moment of historical time in which human life reflects upon its possibilities at the limits of its historicality’; in a way recalling Jaspers’ theory of the limit, Thornhill notes, Tillich could therefore assert kairos as a ‘historical consciousness […] whose ethos is unconditioned responsibility for the present moment in time’. Thornhill stresses that – and whilst Heidegger simply ‘interprets the moment of human decision as the awareness of the immutability of the historical forms in which human life is placed’ – Tillich and Jaspers alike understand ‘true kairological decisiveness’ to be an ‘ethical position’. This is because they both sense that genuine ‘transcendent(al) self-knowledge’ articulates itself in ‘acts of active self-choice, self-disclosure and, in the strict sense, historical responsibility towards others’. Both Tillich and Jaspers assert, Thornhill clarifies, that ‘kairos provides the grounds for an innerworldly ‘metaphysic of responsibility’. Quoting Tillich, Thornhill emphasizes this point:      

   

‘It is only in the kairological specificity of historical responsibility, not in the compliance with “universal law”, that human life explains and enacts the possibilities of its transcendence. The decisive moment of responsible transcendence (kairos for Tillich; Grenze [limit] for Jaspers) does not effect here (as for Barth) an absolute crisis of the human realm. Rather, in quasi-Kantian, or even quasi-Weberian manner, both Tillich and Jaspers see the kairos of responsibility as an ethical intrusion into the existing conditions of human life, and as an unconditioned position of accountability towards these conditions.’

It is important to note, finally, that when (what Thornhill calls) Jaspers’ ‘ethical kairology’ enables him to posit an innerworldly metaphysic of responsibility, he is thereby nonetheless thinking towards a true non-secularity; for Jaspers, as Thornhill writes, ‘the truth of history, although interpreted in history, cannot be reconciled with the present conditions of historical life’. Thornhill underlines this point by explicating the shared foundations of Jaspers’ and Karl Barth’s ‘eschatological hermeneutic as the guarantor of the historicality of history’.

Jaspers and Barth, Thornhill sees, ‘share the conviction that revelation cannot be objectified in a particular set of worldly imperatives, and that revelation cannot be cemented in any system of legal or political obligation’. Both assert that, as Thornhill puts it, ‘No order within history itself, […] can arrogate the authority of transcendence to itself. Any attempt of this kind is merely an example of bad secularity, or bad metaphysics.’ Hence both thinkers claim that ‘the disclosure of transcendence occurs at all times at the limit of history, and that it cannot be incorporated into the fixed orders of everyday history’. Moreover both Barth and Jaspers indicate that ‘human life can only interpret itself adequately insofar as it interprets itself and its products under the index of their limits and their possible otherness’. Barth and Jaspers’ shared argument that ‘humanity interprets its own transcendence only as it brings into suspension the forms in which it exists, only as it knows itself external to the forms of its worldliness’, Thornhill stresses, is precisely why Barth (from a christological viewpoint) and Jaspers (from a hermeneutical viewpoint), ‘retain a far stronger attachment to the eschatological basis of Christianity than their opponents amongst liberal and conservative theologians’. Jaspers’ identification of a truthful hermeneutic of transcendence with a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis or failure, means that for him – as for Barth – transcendence is, in Thornhill’s words, ‘merely a decisive possibility at the limit of the temporal’; for both thinkers ‘true interpretation must take place at the limit of objective self-awareness’, and ‘all attempts interpretively to integrate transcendence into a historical synthesis inevitably fall into the trap of false objectification’. Jaspers and Barth’s shared conviction that, as Thornhill writes, ‘the interpretation of revelation is never final’ is therefore what brings both Jaspers and Barth to suggest ‘an either explicitly or implicitly eschatological hermeneutic as the guarantor of the historicality of history’: both thinkers hold ‘the essentially eschatological belief that human history in its present condition cannot provide for final truthfulness, and that the truth of history, although interpreted in history, cannot be reconciled with the present conditions of historical life’.      

Thornhill thus pays considerable attention to the way in which Jaspers, like Barth, argues that ‘the interpretation of transcendence cannot be historically fixed as a reflex within any continuum of culture, politics or doctrine’. Yet, crucially, Thornhill also suggests that the type of non-secularity established within Barth’s thinking, is distinct from the true non-secularity established within Jaspers’. The truth of the non-secularity thought by Jaspers, Thornhill’s argument hints, hinges on his proposal of a self-hermeneutic of individual failure. Jaspers, Thornhill sees, charges Barth and the dialectical theologians with interpreting revelation as ‘the unique source of authority against human history’; precisely in their opposition to secular legitimacy, they ‘succeed only in recreating revelation at the limit of human history as a new source of objective authority’. Thornhill writes that when Barth in this way insisted on the objective authority of revelation, and so ultimately aligned himself with the Lutheran theologian Emanuel Hirsch and Barth’s other reactionary adversaries, he became ‘complicit in the process which secularizes and materializes religious contents’.

Crucially, Thornhill stresses that, viewed from Jaspers’ perspective, Barth’s thinking of radical anti-secularity necessarily creates an ‘objectivizing system of belief’, precisely because it fails to recognize ‘the human relativity of all truly transcendental interpretation’. Thornhill maintains that when the Lutherans, viewed from Jaspers’ position, ‘crudely press revelation into service for the authority of the nation state’, and Barth poses revelation at the limit of history as a new source of objective authority, this is because – so Jaspers’ thinking intimates – they all obscure ‘the absolute relativity of revelation’. ‘In this respect, both eliminate the genuine transcendence of revelation, which is its uncertainty, and both falsely concretize transcendence as authority – as law.’ Thornhill’s work suggests that, in opposition to this juridical tendency of Weimar theology, Jaspers’ identification of a truthful interpretation of transcendence with a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis or failure, recreates the relativity of truly transcendental hermeneutics, and so establishes a true non-secularity – one which ‘relies on an interpretive component of humanity, secularity and liberality ’.  

Scheitern

In the last of this series of posts drawing heavily on Chris Thornhill's work on Karl Jaspers, I want to present a summary of Thornhill’s account of a central concept within Jaspers’ thought: that of foundering or failing (Scheitern). Probably the most fundamental context within which Thornhill addresses Jaspers’ concept of failure, is that of what Thornhill calls Jaspers’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘respective fusions of negative-anthropological and negative-metaphysical positions’. Influenced by Jaspers’ student Jeanne Hersch’s work on metaphysics and ontology in Jaspers, and discarding both Leonard Ehrlich’s description of his thinking as ‘negative theology’  and Sebastian Samay’s categorization of his thought as ‘negative ontology’ – though he does not contest Samay’s characterization – Thornhill suggests that we view Jaspers’ work as collapsing the universal metaphysics of Kantianism into a ‘negative-anthropological metaphysic’. Thornhill sees Jaspers as making ‘a clear Kierkegaardian addition to his basic Kantian position’. Kierkegaard’s theology, Thornhill notes, correlated a ‘negative anthropology’ – ‘in which the conditions for authentic human-being recede ceaselessly into the indeterminate, suffering interior of the historical person’ – with a ‘negative metaphysic’ which views the transcendent essence of humanity as a quality which can only be addressed as a ‘manifest absence’. Thornhill identifies a similar correlation within Jaspers’ thinking, resulting in a comparable negative-anthropological metaphysic.



              Jeanne Hersch                  

Jaspers’ reconstruction of Kant asserted, Thornhill writes, that ‘the possibility of transcendence enters human interactions as a telos, which draws life progressively out of its material orientations’. However unlike Kant, Thornhill argues, Jaspers also asserts that humanity ‘only has truthful access to the possibility of its own transcendence insofar as it reflects upon the impossibility of this possibility: in its failure (Scheitern)’. Partly determinant as it is of Jaspers’ communicative, negative hermeneutic liberated from objectivist preconditions, his negative-anthropological metaphysic maintains, as Thornhill puts it, that ‘human life only constitutes itself through processes of transcendent (self-)interpretation which cannot be accomplished in the modes of action and existence which are open to it’. Referring to Hersch’s explication, Thornhill adds that for Jaspers, ‘The metaphysical moment of transcendence […] exists only in a relation of unattainability to human reflection, and as such it describes both the unity and the absolute end of all determinations of human-being’. Thornhill also shows how Jaspers’ negative-anthropological metaphysic moves on from Kant’s philosophy of religion, and his ‘theory of religious unknowingness’. For Jaspers takes the absence of positive human knowledge about God as (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the fundamental experiential basis of human existence itself’:

‘In his response to Kant’s scepticism, Jaspers thus replaces the formal uncertainty of God, which is at the core of Kant’s critique of metaphysics, with an experiential uncertainty, which interprets transcendence as an elusive possibility of human life, and which ceaselessly refers humanity to a pained experience of its own antinomies and limits. The lack of a positive knowledge of God is for Jaspers, therefore, not an index of the formal limits of reason, but an experience of the limits of existence.’      

For Jaspers, metaphysical transcendence – Thornhill summarizes – ‘is thus never present: it is self-interpretation against the limit of this absence’. Jaspers’ subjection of ‘the tradition of occidental metaphysics to a hermeneutical (anthropological) reconstruction’ in this way, enlists the aid of his theory of ciphers of transcendence. Thornhill’s account of Jaspers’ thinking here quotes from the third volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy :

‘Human speculation, he asserts, interprets its innermost (metaphysical) essence in what he calls the ciphers of transcendence. Ciphers are “being which brings transcendence to the present”, and which permits human-being to interpret fleetingly its primary transcendent origin. “Wherever I read the cipher”, Jaspers explains, “I am responsible, because it is only through this that I read my self-being […] I attempt to tear myself out of the constant falling; I take myself in hand; I experience the decision, which emanates from me”.’

Thornhill sees Jaspers’ philosophy to be ‘a fractured, antinomical ontology’, ‘whose triadic conception of human life’ – in terms of levels such as orientation, illumination and metaphysics – is ‘rendered internally fluid by the fluidity of being itself, and of the absolute in being’. ‘“With the insight into the fragmentary nature of being”, he explains, “the demand for an ontology ceases and transforms itself into an impulse to obtain being, which I can never acquire as knowledge, through self-being”.’ In other words, as Thornhill puts it, ‘Only insofar as we experience and recognize the inevitable crisis (Scheitern) of our attempts to interpret our transcendent origin do we actually begin to approach this origin.’ Jaspers thus ‘de-objectifies the truth-claims of metaphysics’, so as to replace them with the self-interpretations undertaken by shattered humans. Thornhill continues:

‘Orientation, illumination and metaphysics are thus ways in which being is present to human consciousness. But none of these, ontologically, is being. Being, rather, is present only negatively, as a series of possible implosions in the order of human consciousness, in which consciousness is referred to its own limits.’

Thornhill distinguishes between such implosions in ‘objective logic’ – limit-situations such as ‘death, guilt, suffering and anxiety’ – and implosions in ‘subjective logic’. Crucially, in subjective logic, these implosions are ‘decisions’, through which ‘human life decides interpretively to reflect upon its own possibilities (ideas), acts in a manner which accords with these, and thus places itself upon a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’. In other words, as Thornhill summarizes, ‘Transcendence is accessible only to a decisive hermeneutic, which stands in the absolute limit-situation of human existence, interpreting transcendence through its own crisis.’ For Jaspers the ‘truthful hermeneutic of transcendence’, in Thornhill’s words, is ‘also a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis’. Thornhill quotes once more from the third volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy : ‘“Failing [Scheitern]”, Jaspers argues, “is the encompassing ground of all cipher-being. Seeing the cipher of the reality of being arises from the experience of failing”.’ Jaspers’ argument is grounded in his sense that, as Thornhill puts it, ‘Transcendence discloses itself as a response to the existential questions which I ask about myself, but for which – ultimately – no answer can be found in the world.’

‘My knowledge of my own absolute crisis releases me from any conviction that I can obtain cognitive or objective certainty about the conditions of my life. For this reason, however, it also prepares me for the evanescent interpretation of my transcendence in ciphers. The meaningful interpretation of the cipher, therefore, is possible only for being, which is “shattered as existence” and which “finds its ground in the being of transcendence”.’

We have already explored – in earlier posts – Jaspers’ understanding of foundering in terms of the imperfect communication which can begin to explain transcendence to humanity. Whilst Kierkegaard saw ‘the temporal presence of God’s absence only in closed interiority’, Thornhill notes, Jaspers sees ‘the presence of God’s absence as disclosed in the absolute, and yet absolutely believing, relativity of interpersonal communication’. You could say that speech, for Jaspers, is at once necessarily decisive and necessarily dysfluent; just as, whilst for him philosophical belief (as Thornhill writes) ‘has its only hold in the ciphers of transcendence’, the interpretation of these ciphers is ‘only existentially binding because they do not stabilize transcendence as certainty, but merely refer humanity to its own possibilities’. Necessarily dysfluent communication exemplarily enacts and enables recognition of our existential and cognitive uncertainty: the ‘imperfectibility of all communication’, Jaspers asserts in Reason and Existenz, reflects the ultimate inadequacy of ‘every shape of truth in the world’. But whilst human communication for Jaspers is a reflection of the impossibility of truth, enacting our existential uncertainty, the committed quality of existential communication also implies the possible resolution of that uncertainty: Reason and Existenz states how, ‘The imperfection of communication and the weight of its failing become the openness of a profundity, which nothing can fulfil but transcendence’. Necessarily failing, existential communication thus nonetheless forms what Thornhill calls ‘an ongoing attempt to articulate truthfulness: it is the only practically possible expression of transcendence’.  

To be continued.

Existential Communication, part 3

We can now begin to see more clearly why Thornhill summarizes Jaspers’ philosophy of communication as a ‘doctrine of committed existential relativity, which charges all absolutizing or totalizing world-views with a primary falsehood’, and which tries to give an account of human freedom which ‘resists’ both Kantian ‘formal-idealist’ and Heideggerian ‘objectivist’ preconditions. Thornhill emphasizes that the precondition of truthful existence is for Jaspers ‘a recognition of uncertainty, and this uncertainty is given exemplary form in speech’. Speech for Jaspers, as Thornhill writes, is ‘an activity in which consciousness is liberated from its prior (juridical) reification in idealism, but in which it also maintains a distinction against the objectively instituted orders of freedom posited by more avowedly anti-idealist thinkers’, such as Heidegger. Referring to the second volume of Philosophy, Thornhill cites Jaspers’ argument that the ‘necessity of existential communication’ is always an expression of freedom, and it is therefore always ‘objectively incomprehensible’. As we have seen, Jaspers suggests, as Thornhill puts it, that ‘The more I decide  to act in accordance with the unconditioned logic of my existence (ideas)’, ‘the more I disengage myself from any objective a priori certainty about what it means to exist, or about the final truth of my existence’.  Jaspers argues, moreover, that because speech is (in Thornhill’s words) ‘by character relative, uncertain and interpretively open’, it constitutes ‘the only medium in which human existence can describe or enact its own relative, uncertain and interpretively open relation to its ideas’. This is why, to summarize, ‘whilst Kant reflects both the foreclosure and the possibility of metaphysical truths by outlining a doctrine of equal, universal, and anti-authoritarian law as the foundation for free, truthful humanity’, Jaspers, ‘for very similar reasons, outlines a doctrine of tolerant communication’.

In order to understand more fully how such a theory of tolerant communication underpins Jaspers’ conception of worldly human freedom and liberalism, we can return to his thinking on revelation, and the relation of his thought as a whole to contemporaneous political theology. Jaspers’ ‘most central interest’ in theology, Thornhill notes, is revelation; revelation is ‘at the heart of all his debates with his theological contemporaries’. Jaspers viewed revelation as it is generally conceived by religious thinkers, Thornhill writes, as ‘the key example of a hypostatic belief-system, which confers falsely absolute objectivity on its contents, and which is absolutely at odds with his own existential theory of transcendent(al) uncertainty’. Jaspers therefore sought to reconceive of revelation as - in Thornhill's words - 'an ongoing and uncertain aspect of human existence, which must forever be relatively, spontaneously and communicative(ly) redisclosed'. Such a relative and spontaneous interpretation of revelation is for Jaspers the basis of true belief; of 'philosophical belief'. Thornhill identifies Jaspers as outlining here a 'tantalizingly unexplored position in the broad tradition of theological/anthropological inquiry', because he is seeking to supplant the typical model of submission to concretized 'revelation as law, or as the ground of law', with his own model of an ongoing, uncertain hermeneutic realization of the originary truth which revelation constitutes. 'The reinterpretation of this truth is not a mere re-declaring of primary truths, but a course of reflexive and communicative human fulfilment.' Jaspers' assertion that the originary truth which revelation constitutes is, as Thornhill puts it, 'a truth which is internal to the experiences, thoughts and words of people', along with his sense that 'the realization of the primary truths of revelation still awaits completion', hence introduces a liberal anthropology of tolerant communication, or the possibility of free human praxis to the religious concept of revelation. Jaspers' opposition in this way to acceptance of concretized revelation as law, Thornhill notes, was 'directed very generally against Catholic theologians, and very specifically against the conservative Protestant theologians of inter-war Germany'. It also offers 'a striking counterpoint to certain more conservative perspectives in Jewish political theology': Thornhill references Leo Strauss.      

We can now see more clearly how what I am calling Jaspers' liberal anthropology of tolerant communication, enabled him to reconceive historical freedom and responsibility. Thornhill helpfully distinguishes Weber's concept of historical responsibility (as 'a means of securing worldly authority'), from Jaspers' conception of historical responsibility as 'an essentially communicative attitude and mode of praxis'. For Jaspers, Thornhill explains, a human's 'unique historicality [...] only legitimizes itself insofar as it reflects forms of commonality and experience, the disclosure of which requires truthful communication'. In its emphasis on 'the transcendentally communicative essence of historical uniqueness', Jaspers' thinking is indebted to Dilthey's transcendental historicism. Here we could also remember how Jaspers' concept of (philosophical) belief, as Thornhill writes, 'always contains an interpersonal communicative dimension'. 'The disclosure of human transcendence in revelation only truly becomes revelation as it is spoken by people amongst themselves.' This is because of the tolerant quality of communicative humanity; because 'only in an uncertain, relative and communicative disposition towards others can I begin to explain my own unstable experience of myself as possible transcendence'. One freedom enabled within Jaspers' liberal anthropology of tolerant communication is thus the freedom to communicate interpretively on human transcendent possibilities; yet for Jaspers such tolerant hermeneutic communication also enables us to think possibilities of historical freedom and responsibility. Indeed it enacts historical freedom and responsibility: in Jaspers' view, (philosophical belief entails that) particular historical moments of transcendentally interpretive conversation clear space for histories of openness and equality. Jaspers, Thornhill notes, 'bases his hermeneutic on the conviction that God - as a quality of human transcendence - is hidden, and that all qualities of God can only be suggested as non-formal, non-material ways of being between people'; moreover, the 'hiddenness of the interpreted truth founds a way of being towards others in liberality, tolerance, freedom and historicality'.   

Thornhill shows how Jaspers’ concern with the freedom to communicate interpretively on human transcendent possibilities, or with the freedom of human thought to access what Thornhill calls ‘the uncertain historical conditions of its transcendence’, underpins the theory of democratic republicanism expounded by Jaspers in later works such as his 1961 book The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man. Jaspers, Thornhill notes, asserted that ‘democracy has its legitimacy over other forms of government because it provides a situation in which human thinking is able to develop its own resources of tolerance, culture and responsibility’. Democratic order ‘at least offers the chance that human thinking might communicatively open itself towards others in committed historicality and responsibility’. The sort of responsible truthfulness embodied and enacted by hermeneutic communication is not possible in non-democratic orders (such as have come to determine the education system now); democracy alone ‘is able to sanction a sphere of free communication which is not directly regulated by the technical, political or ideological imperatives of state and economy’. Whilst Jaspers thought that in non-democratic orders, as Thornhill writes, ‘the access of human thought to the uncertain historical conditions of its transcendence is invariably obstructed by the imposition of technical and ideological commands on the processes of human thinking’, like Arendt, Jaspers in Of Truth indicated that ‘human thought and action, if unregulated by technical strategy, create a world of spontaneous but utterly committed historicality and responsibility’.

Thornhill goes on to expound the relation of Jaspers’ theory of communicative transcendence to his democratic humanism. Thornhill argues that in their conceptions of the human, Heidegger and Lukács take up positions which are ‘closely united against Jaspers’. For Jaspers, Thornhill maintains, both Lukácsian totality and Heideggerian Dasein see human truthfulness as ‘an objective unity of knowledge’, in which ‘the elusive diremption of ideas and objective life, which (for himself) always defines true humanity, is superseded by a unifying practical, and thus anti-humanist, authoritarian ontology’. For Jaspers any attempt – such as Heidegger’s or Lukács’ – ‘to postulate a mediated (ontological) totality in historical knowledge’, is ultimately to resort to what Thornhill calls ‘a falsely mystical notion of uniform truth, in which knowledge is fixed in inner-worldly practical objectivity and endless time’. Lukács, Heidegger and Jaspers, Thornhill notes, all conceive of ‘the totality or unity of knowledge, in which reflection is perfectly united with its phenomena, as the ultimate ground and motive of human thinking and of humanity’. Yet for Jaspers objective totality ‘is always false totality’, and the riven, failing, non-objectified process of communicative transcendence which works towards unified knowledge never achieves such totality. ‘Any attempt to collapse the primary antinomy of human being into the processes of a unitary worldliness, he thus implies, destroys the truth of humanity itself.’ Thornhill adds: 

‘[Jaspers] always indicates that these unities of knowledge and reason can never be finally realized, and that meaningful humanism is always the consequence of the exteriority of unified knowledge to objective human praxis. Because the unity of knowledge cannot be reached, he implies, humans must define themselves communicatively in the uncertain historicality of relativity and tolerance, which reflect (but do not fulfil) a striving for totality or unity.’ 

Thornhill explores how Jaspers’ view of communication as ‘a gradual event of interpretation in which consciousness experiences, interprets and begins to articulate its own possible founding totality’ (in Thornhill’s words), points towards Habermas’ ‘development of communication as a means of salvaging reason from its idealist reification’. The critique of neo-Kantianism underlying Jaspers’ theory of communication has ‘exemplary character for subsequent communication-theoretical innovations’, because whilst, for Jaspers, communication becomes ‘the medium in which the ideal/metaphysical components of human-being can be disclosed’, it remains ‘of fundamental importance’ for him that ‘these elements are never pre-stabilized as a prior unity of being’. Jaspers’ existential-hermeneutical approach, Thornhill sees, anticipates Habermas’ communication theory’s critique of the idealist process of reification, when Jaspers implies that speech is ‘a mode of agency in which human reflection places itself in relation to underlying ideas, but does not formalize these as unitary components of its own original structure’. Whilst never categorically abandoning ‘the idealist precondition that human consciousness has an ideal structure against being itself’, and thus holding to Kant’s recognition that ‘the true is not real, and that human praxis is not true praxis unless it is motivated from sources which are outside itself (by ideas)’, Jaspers resists the reificatory result of Kantian idealism ‘merely to trace the ideal limits of human consciousness against the sources of its truth’ (in Thornhill’s words). Kant’s formal-rational attempt to define the relation of consciousness towards truth does not, for Jaspers (Thornhill writes), ‘give a sufficiently full account of the diverse ways in which human-being can experience and articulate its origin, unity and ideality’.

This is why, Thornhill sees, speech emerges within Jaspers’ thinking as an ‘eternally unfinished event (not a prior or ideal unity) in which humans relate most truthfully to their own practical and epistemological determinants (ideas)’; humans ‘become truthful through the spoken disclosure of a relation to their ideas, not through the prior formalization of this relation’. For Jaspers, speech ‘transposes the foundation of idealism into an ongoing experienced process: in speech, the human relation to truth (ideas) is not realized before, but through experience’. This process – that of reflexivity, as it is redefined within Jaspers’ ‘communicative-hermeneutical reconstruction of Kantian notions of reason’ – is ‘not a solitary cognitive agency, but a practically self-clarifying, and essentially other-including way of disposing oneself towards the truths of experience’:

‘Existentially committed speech, he claims therefore, is a mode of interaction in which human experiences can disclose and interpret their transcendent(al) components. [...] Speech is […] therefore conceived by Jaspers as a medium of ideal praxis, in which practical reflection and ideal self-illumination originate from each other, and in which the ideas of human knowledge clarify themselves through the praxis of human experience.’

Crucially however, Thornhill maintains that though this quality of existential communication as ideal praxis ‘generally opens the ground for a communicative critique of formal reason’ such as Habermas’, it does not enable his existential philosophy to ‘move seamlessly into the positive hermeneutics of speech later associated with Habermas’. Jaspers’ reconstruction of Kant’s epistemology ‘only as a negative hermeneutic of possible unity’ means, Thornhill argues, that Jaspers does not – unlike Heidegger, Arendt and Habermas – ‘see spoken reason as the foundation for positive agreement, or for the positive disclosure of the world. Rather, he sees truthful speech as the elucidation of the inner transcendent(al) possibilities of consciousness.’ Such an elucidation is a negative one. Thornhill suggests that Jaspers ‘actually moves close to a negative-hermeneutical counterpart to Adorno’s negative dialectics’, in that Jaspers’ negative hermeneutics can be seen as ‘a way of imagining the metaphysical unity and totality of consciousness as a condition which (against Kant) cannot be formally excluded from reason, but which (against Hegel) cannot be stabilized as an objective order of knowledge’. ‘Such unity, thus, can only be negatively interpreted, as truthful absence’. Because Jaspers’ communicative existentialism holds that – perhaps rather as for dysfluent speakers – ‘at no time […] can speech place consciousness in a unitary relation to truth’ (as Thornhill puts it), Jaspers, like Adorno, can be seen developing a philosophical position ‘subverting both Kantian epistemology and Hegelian phenomenology, which does not incorporate consciousness in positive or juridical form, and which sees the truth of consciousness only in the self-interpretation of fleeting appearances’.       

Existential Communication, part 2

Thornhill usefully underlines the differences of Jaspers’ theory of communicative transcendence from Hegelian and Heideggerian theories of communication. Thornhill argues that viewed from Jaspers’ position, Heidegger’s philosophy is ‘deficient both in communication and transcendence, for it construes both speech and transcendence as everyday operations in which consciousness always produces its own unity as a system of inner-worldly meanings’. Heidegger and Jaspers alike see transcendence as ‘a moment of communicative disclosure in which the [Kantian] formal separation of the elements of reason is overcome’, and in which ‘the practical experiences of being are thoroughly reflected as a unity of lived knowledge and meaning’. For Heidegger, the unity of knowledge obtained through the transcendence of Dasein is (Thornhill notes) ‘an immanent unity, in which thinking and acting are plurally reflected as the world, and outside which there is no transcendental recourse for judgement or ethics’. Yet Jaspers argues – Thornhill sees – ‘that the practical relations of Dasein are ultimately superseded by the communicative self-reflection of individual existence in a logic of progressive transcendence’. Like Heidegger, Jaspers certainly (Thornhill writes) ‘conceives of transcendence as communicatively interpretable, and therefore embedded in worldly relations of praxis and experience’. Yet he also ‘overcomes idealism by transposing pure and practical reason into a deferred unity of knowledge, in which consciousness (as transcendence) ceaselessly interprets and experiences its own ideal forms’. This means that, contra Heidegger, Jaspers – and here Thornhill refers us to the second volume of his Philosophy – ‘states unequivocally that existential communication has its (albeit deferred) outcome in the overcoming of worldly finitude, immanence and objective plurality in a reflected totality of knowledge’.

For Jaspers, Thornhill states, speech is ‘the medium of disclosure in a transcendent(al) phenomenology, which encompasses all forms of human thought and experience, all cognitive and practical life’. Truthful speech, ‘by its own inner logic’, is for Jaspers ‘the mode of human agency which interprets the possible unity of the ideal and the practical moments in human-being’:

‘Heidegger, however, argues that language defines and constitutes the practically disclosed horizon of the world, and it thus expressly excludes all ideal components from experience. Jaspers, in contrast, claims that language always positions human consciousness in a relation (albeit existentially uncertain) to its primary ideal unity (its transcendence), and it thus permits an ideal/practical disclosure of this unity.’

In this sense, and whilst Heidegger offers a practical-linguistic critique of ‘the epistemological stasis of Kant’s transcendental reason’, Jaspers ‘remains a Kantian’; truthful speech, Jaspers’ arguments imply, ‘always derives its truth from its disclosure of a horizon in which reflection positions itself around ideas’.   

Thornhill goes on to note that, particularly as evolved later in his 1947 book Of Truth, Jaspers’ concept of communicative reason, ‘although primarily influenced by Kant, is […] also strongly indebted to Hegel’. Jaspers shares with Hegel the view that, as Thornhill writes, ‘All worldly interaction […] involves a communicative disclosure of common knowledge, in which the immediate subject/object antinomies of consciousness and self-consciousness are overcome through the shared processes of self-clarification and recognition’. Yet, Thornhill stresses, Jaspers’ Kantianism ensures that for him, Hegel’s ‘communicative phenomenology of common life’ is exceeded by transcendent(al) phenomenology, or ‘only ever a subsidiary moment in Jaspers’ philosophy of transcendent(al) unity’. Jaspers only suggests, Thornhill sees, that the ‘communicative processes of objective, social and historical recognition which Hegel elaborates in his phenomenology’, are ‘the preconditions of the higher levels of unity, which cannot be objectively formed, and which are thus conceived in Kantian terms’. ‘The modes of communication which effect the objective formation of general consciousness and spirit only constitute a mediated foundation for the subsequent establishment of higher unity in non-worldly transcendence.’  

Thornhill also emphasizes how the grounding of Jaspers’ communicative existentialism in his concept of a deferred unity of knowledge – in which consciousness (as transcendence) ceaselessly interprets and experiences its own ideal forms – enables him to think beyond the sort of formalized models of humanity posed by Weber and Kant himself. Thornhill argues that law (for Kant) and communication (for Jaspers) are ‘parallel terms in which humanity can relate itself to its humanly metaphysical substance’. Crucially, however, Thornhill sees, whilst in law ‘the possible legitimacy of human-being’ – or the transcendent source of human legitimacy – is ‘always established as an a priori unity of form’, in speech ‘this same unity is infinitely deferred, and reflexively contingent upon its local contexts and contents’.

Weber’s attempt to ‘supersede Kant’s formal humanism’ through his ‘anthropological critique of Kant, transposing formal law into the lived moments of committed interpretation and charismatic politics’, is for Jaspers – Thornhill maintains – not successful. ‘Like Kant, Weber still conceives of human integrity on the basis of a realized unity of law.’ Such a realized unity of law, Jaspers intimates, reappears in what Thornhill calls the ‘anthropology of politics’ which Weber counterposes to Kant’s ‘anthropology of legality’. Because Weber’s anthropology produces ‘a doctrine of law-giving authority, which remains on the level of reified material organization’, as Jaspers suggests (in Thornhill’s words), it merely perpetuates the ‘reified juridical form’ of politics. Thornhill writes that for Jaspers, speech is ‘the form of idealism as content’: in processes of communication human truth shifts from being captured as reified form – when consciousness freezes itself in a realized unity – to being that which is spontaneously and freely produced or disclosed, when the subject places itself in an open, tolerant relation to other subjects.  Jaspers seeks to supplant the form of anthropologies with the content of an existentialism conceived as unstable, ongoing transcendental activity of interpretive speech:

‘Against this background, Jaspers’ theory of communication is not only conceived as a counter-term to theoretical anthropologies based in law, but also to theoretical anthropologies based in politics. His communicative existentialism thus proposes a way beyond the antinomies of Kantian metaphysics and Weberian sociology, towards a conception of human-being in which humanity cannot be resolved as either the form of politics or the order of law, but in which the human discloses its integrity in constant deferral and unresolved experience.’

As we have seen already, Thornhill likewise argues that Jaspers’ ongoing, experiential or communicative idealism offers a way of thinking beyond the sort of formalized model of humanity represented by Heideggerian Dasein. Jaspers, Thornhill writes, sees Heidegger as a philosopher who, ‘like Weber, Dilthey and Simmel before him, solves the reification of consciousness in Kantian idealism merely by recreating the transcendental subject as an inner-worldly objective unity of consciousness’, which ‘invariably sediments itself as a falsely realized hypostatic order’. Thornhill maintains that Jaspers’ thinking shows that, insofar as it is ‘the form of thinking in which formalized consciousness indicates, accepts and yet aestheticizes the limits of its own existence, and so remains closed to the totality of transcendence’, Heidegger’s ontology never escapes the antinomies of Kantianism, such as reflection and experience, and simply ‘sustains and exacerbates the reification of consciousness initiated by transcendental idealism’. ‘Indeed, ontology (for Jaspers) merely reorganizes the transcendental illusions of idealism as Dasein, for Dasein directly reflects an internally congruent system of apparent meanings, which, limited against other totalities, constitute the arena of human validity.’ Jaspers’ thinking, like Adorno’s, thus critiques Heidegger’s ontology as (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the metaphysic of the reified world’. Thornhill argues that Jaspers suggests that Heideggerian ontology, with its allegedly false supersession of formal idealism, implies the upholding of a formalized historical subject – a subject wherein metaphysics has simply been translocated into ‘an objectively realized, ontological unity of human reflection’:

‘Jaspers clearly shares Heidegger’s belief that idealism formalizes human existence by separating reflection from experience. However, unlike Heidegger, he also believes that the reification of thought and experience in idealism cannot be corrected via a historicization of the human subject, through which the formal/juridical relation of thought to being is replaced with a formed historical unity.’   

Whilst sharing Heidegger’s diagnosis of the idealist antinomy of (reified) thought and (reified) experience, then, Jaspers returns us to the idealist truth that – as Thornhill puts it – ‘the unity of consciousness (truth) cannot be determined or elaborated in objectivity’. Quite simply, Jaspers ‘refuses to dismantle the metaphysical superstructure at the heart of Kant’s idealism’:

‘On the contrary, the primary value of Kantianism is, he argues, that (despite its formalism) it still sustains a conception of human life and human agency, in which humanity is only fleetingly explicable as a series of decisively transcendent possibilities, which are falsified wherever they are objectified, and which are appreciable only as they are openly communicated.’

Rather than seeking to think beyond idealism, its antinomies and reifications, in practical ontology, or by posing an objectively realized, ontological unity of human reflection, Jaspers suggests that the formality of idealism can only be overcome through a hermeneutical reconstruction of Kant’s theory of consciousness itself. Jaspers thus develops his communicative idealism, ‘for which the unity of consciousness is never resolved’ (as Thornhill notes). Yet Jaspers’ hermeneutic-experiential idealism is also ‘an ideal theory of self-interpretation’ in which the transcendent(al) forms of consciousness can be ‘disclosed through particular experiences’; it is a practical (self-) hermeneutic ‘in which the ideal form of consciousness (its unity) is always engaged in interpreting itself as content’. Thornhill’s reading enables us to set the praxis of such a nonreifying, communicative idealism in contrast to that of Heidegger’s reifying, historicizing ontology.     

To be continued.