Either/Or (Part I)

Here are some of my reading notes on the first part of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

‘that eternity which lies not outside time but in the midst of it’ [51. Compare, regarding actualizing the eternal in the temporal (Bergman), the reference on 37 to ‘an idea that joined the finite and the infinite’. Cf. also 54, for instance the remark that ‘Only where the idea is brought to rest and transparency in a definite form can there be any question of a classic work’ (compare 103: ‘the stillness of the moment’). These references to rest and stillness are themselves worth comparing with Kierkegaard’s (hereafter SK’s) notion of ‘suspension’: ‘The art of recollecting and forgetting will also prevent a person from foundering in any particular relationship in life – and assures him complete suspension.’ (295) This effect of an ‘artistically [vs. ethically] achieved identity’ of forgetting and recollecting seems to me to correspond to the Buddhist meditative condition of detachment or acceptance; for me mindfulness can be what SK, on the same page, calls ‘the Archimedean point with which one lifts the whole world’. Suspension - also because it is an aesthetic position - is of course a relativistic state: one ‘does not hoist full sail for any decision’ (293).] 

‘When was it that the hetairias became common in Greece except at the time when the state was in the process of disintegration? And does not our age have a striking likeness to that age, which not even Aristophanes could make more ludicrous than it actually was? Has not the bond that in the political sense held the states together, invisibly and spiritually, dissolved; has not the power in religion that insisted upon the invisible been weakened and destroyed […]’ [141. These statements, like the similar ones in Irony, seem to evoke the conditions of Weimar era Germany – as well as the conditions of our time.]

‘Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.’ [149. Cf. the ‘subjectivity reflected in itself’ on 143, and the quotation from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right regarding ‘the right of subjective freedom’ on 626 n. 13.]

 

‘since we […] acknowledge as characteristic of all human endeavour in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature’s infinite coherence, that an individual’s wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary prodigality […]’ [151. Cf. the advocacy of concise communication – ‘simple statements’, ‘time-and-talk-saving pithy aphorisms’, ‘economizing’ – on 465. Cf. too the recommended ‘venture in fragmentary endeavour’ in line with ‘the disjointed and desultory character of unfinished papers’, and a vocation of obscurity, on 152 (& 137).]    

[quotation above from 151 regarding ‘fragmentary prodigality’ continues with:] ‘what is the producing individual’s enjoyment is the receiving individual’s also, not the laborious and careful accomplishment or the tedious interpretation of this accomplishment but the production and the pleasure of the glinting transiency, which for the producer holds much more than the consummated accomplishment, since it is a glimpse of the idea and holds a bonus for the recipient, since its fulguration [Fulguration] stimulates his own productivity […]’ [152. 629 n. 36 glosses ‘Fulguration’ as a loan word in Danish, meaning ‘a sudden flashing (for example, the flashing of molten gold or silver)’. Compare, therefore, 129: ‘Then in the most distant heavens, far off on the horizon, one sees a flash; it speeds away swiftly along the earth, is gone in an instant. […] it seems as if the darkness itself has lost its composure and is starting to move. […] There is an anxiety in that flash; it is as if in that deep darkness it were born in anxiety – just so is Don Giovanni’s life. There is an anxiety in him, but this anxiety is his energy. […] Don Giovanni’s life is not despair; it is, however, the full force of the sensuous, which is born in anxiety; and Don Giovanni himself is this anxiety, but this anxiety is precisely the demonic zest for life.’ In this relation, compare too SK’s constellation of aesthetic-intellectual love, risk and a Nietzsche-like terror of natural contingency (contingent even in its ‘infinite coherence’). ‘With what kind of love do we embrace nature? Is there not a secretive anxiety and horror in it, because its beautiful harmony works its way out of lawlessness and wild confusion, its security out of perfidy? But precisely this anxiety captivates the most. So also with love, if it is to be interesting. Behind it ought to brood the deep, anxious night from which springs the flower of love. Thus the nymphaea alba [white water lily] rests with its calyx on the surface of the water, while thought is anxious about plunging down into the deep darkness where it has its root.’ (424; cf. 294) On 102 Don Giovanni is posited as ‘absolutely musical’ because, unreflective and nonverbal, he ‘does not have that kind of [intellectual] continuance at all but hurries on in an eternal vanishing, just like the music’.]

‘love is always present tense’ [226]

‘the repelling force always required in the negative, which is actually the principle of motion. It is not merely repelling but infinitely repulsive, and whoever has the basic principle behind him must necessarily have infinite momentum for making discoveries.’ [285. Cf. Hegel’s infinite absolute negativity adopted in Irony, and Hegel’s definition of negativity as ‘the turning point of the movement of the Notion […] the innermost source of all activity’ quoted in 641 n. 3. Cf. with this principle of motion the ‘movement of thought […] in the service of reflection’ discussed on 188, where, for the will (mediation, and the ethical) to begin, or to free itself from serving reflection, it ‘must be altogether impartial, must begin in the power of its own willing; only then can there be any question of a beginning’. The logic of this replacement of the principle of (aesthetic-)intellectual motion by the free exercise of the will (the decision, ethics), seems to me to be analogous to the meditative logic wherein mindfulness emerges from (within, ‘in the power of’) the body’s own wisdom: the breath. Cf. also, however, SK’s opposition of spirit-motion to the perpetual motion imposed by the capitalist work ethic. He writes of the ‘businesslike zeal with which they work at the office’ on 289: ‘There is an indefatigable activity that shuts a person out of the world of spirit and places him in a class with the animals, which instinctively must always be in motion.’ (Cf. SK on ‘busy bustlers’ on 25, and critiquing working for a living on 31).]    

‘There is so much talk about man’s being a social animal, but basically he is a beast of prey, something that can be ascertained not only by looking at his teeth. Therefore, all this chatter about sociality and community is partly inherited hypocrisy and partly studied perfidy.’ [288. Cf. the quotation from Aristotle’s Politics in 642-43 n.12: ‘man is by nature a political [social] animal. […] the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts’. Cf. 22, and also Hobbes?]

‘Every erotic relationship must always be lived through in such a way that it is easy for one to produce an image that conveys all the beauty of it.’ [390. Cf. 418: ‘For love, everything is a symbol […]’; ‘Erotic love is much too substantial to be satisfied with chatter, the erotic situations much too significant to be filled with chatter. They are silent, still, definitely outlined, and yet eloquent, like the music of Memnon’s statue. Eros gesticulates, does not speak; or if he does, it is an enigmatic intimation, symbolic music.’]     

‘To have an understanding of the moment is not such an easy matter, and the one who misunderstands it is doomed to boredom for life. The moment is everything, and in the moment woman is everything; the consequences I do not understand.’ [433. Cf. the seducer’s statements with the references to the moment on 90 and (as 658 n. 209 points out) The Concept of Anxiety, 82-91.]

As in my previous post on The Concept of Irony, the page numbering here refers to the relevant volume of the Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings. 

The Research of Hope

William Kluback’s ‘Karl Jaspers and Schmuel Hugo Bergman: Believing Philosophers’ appeared in the collection edited by Richard Wisser and Leonard H. Ehrlich, Karl Jaspers: Philosopher among Philosophers. Kluback opens with a scene which movingly evokes the attempt to perpetuate Weimar era German-Jewish thought after the Holocaust, in the form of a philosophical conversation between Israel and postwar Germany: a meeting on a street in Jerusalem in April 1949 between Jaspers and Bergman (the subject of my previous post on this blog), who had been the first Rector of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. ‘In 1948,’ Kluback notes, ‘Jaspers had published a book on philosophical faith, Der philosophische Glaube. Bergman had reviewed the book in the newspaper Haaretz a day or two before and now the friends spoke about it.’ Jaspers’ book, writes Kluback, made ‘a deep impression’ on Bergman. ‘The book rightly shocked him. He was stunned by its description of the spiritual situation of the time and by the helplessness of the philosophy that was offered to a tortured mankind.’ For Bergman, Kluback continues, ‘The shattering nature of the problem’ exposed by Jaspers’ book ‘lies in the silence of transcendence’: that is, in contemporary nihilism. Kluback – from the vantage-point of an adherent of religious tradition – points to a post-Kantian ‘anarchy of autonomous, sophistic subjectivity, of inescapable relativism, and of an incurable hedonism’. Weimar thought itself, viewed from Kluback's position, was already coloured by nihilism: ‘Bergman was right when he saw the shattering consequences of nihilism in the decades before 1948 and those which were yet to come.’

Kluback understands nihilism in terms of social coercion, or the way in which a power-hungry rationalism can turn itself into political dogmatism. As ‘philosophers in the age of despotism’, Bergman and Jaspers, Kluback maintains, ‘worried about the efficacy of philosophy […] only because at times some of their colleagues turned to political insanity while others fought and died in physical and spiritual exiles’. For Kluback, ‘The philosopher knew that in the tempests of politics nihilism was the ever present threat to spiritual and physical survival’, because ‘When Bergman spoke of the shattering effect of Jaspers’s book, he recognized the power of nihilism, the profanation of the sacred and the blatant and uncontrolled will to power’. Kluback could be talking about the will-sapping, depressing corruptions which characterize the marketized state bureaucracies of the UK today, such as the higher education system; actually here he is referring to the threat to the creation of the new state of Israel.

‘Hugo Bergman described his reaction to this discussion of nihilism as shattering, threatening the birth of a state in a hostile world where the depths of the oppositon [sic] had hardly been measured. The future demands an unflinching courage, a masterful self-confidence and an incontrovertible hope in man’s reasonableness.’ 

Nihilism hits at the root of the philosopher’s decisive participation in state-building, Kluback emphasizes, because ‘The problem of values was not merely academic; it became the essential quality for the society, the expression of the state’. The emergent state demands an education – a transmitted and interpreted intellectual culture, a community of debate – which is not eroded by nihilism.

‘The Arab question had become acute for the independent Jewish state. There were the historical values, the constitution, the rule of law and the security of the state; all these issues had to be addressed. These were debated and needed consensus and solution. The philosophers had a role to play.’

Kluback’s suggestion, therefore, is that nihilism threatened Jaspers’ philosophical work towards the refoundation and rehumanization of Germany, just as it threatened Bergman’s work as a public intellectual in the new Israel. We can note too that the anti-nihilist ‘historical values’ shared by all three thinkers to which Kluback refers in this connection – Jaspers, Bergman and Buber – were precisely the philosophical values which came to fruition in 1920s Germany:

‘The philosopher [in Israel] accepted the role of educator. Jaspers knew this well. He had been an educator in a Germany destroyed by Nazism. He spoke to the people of the true German spirit. His voice was heard. He had to lay the foundations of a Germany that would seek to lessen the effect of twelve years of totalitarianism. Bergman and Buber had similar tasks in an emerging state. Jaspers would continue his work from Basle, Bergman and Buber from a divided Jerusalem.’

          

It is clear that the post-postmodern supermarket that is the contemporary university is unable to offer such an anti-nihilist education. The blogosphere is awash with disaffected academics (or post-academics) complaining of their alienation from a higher education system lacking in values – for instance an English lecturer in the UK notes today’s inane cacophony of academic discourse, whilst an American Max Scheler scholar comments on the recent interviewing of only one philosopher, himself, for a post in philosophy (the other candidates included an historian and someone from an English department). Both examples point to the fact that the university itself now is programmed by a relativistic nihilism – by the educators’ own inability to hold to any value, effectively, other than their own self-assertive need to hustle, and make some noise. The academic system fosters quasi-celebrities, strange spectral celebrities whose elite peer group glamour is accrued through the canny autopoietic administration of existing knowledges, rather than the creation of new knowledges; it is as if short-term subcultural infamy is to be attained through the collective self-distancing from truth, rather than long-term public fame - the fame of a Kierkegaard, say - achieved following the individualistic creation of new truths. The Scheler scholar, in his blog post [here], concludes that the genuine philosopher can only respond by returning to the work of searching for truth: ‘we can resist the postmodernist on the grounds that not all texts inspire in the same way; philosophical texts are those that inspire the search for truth [his italics]’. Jaspers’ definition of nihilism in his The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, quoted here by Kluback, had indeed focussed exactly on the absence of truth and loss of faith:

 

‘“While demonology and deification of man,” he said, “offer a substitute for faith, open unbelief is known as nihilism. The nihilist ventures to appear without disguise. For him all contents of faith are untenable, he has unmasked all interpretations of the world and of being as delusions: for him everything is conditional and relative; there is no fundament, no absolute, no being as such. Everything is questionable. Nothing is true, everything is permissible.”’

It is in contrast to such a nihilist that Bergman and Jaspers, Kluback maintains, are ‘believing philosophers’.

‘When other men compromise and conform to the needs of the time the philosopher remains embedded in his belief in freedom, in human dignity and the communicating community. These beliefs the philosopher shares with all reasonable beings. In them he sees a hint of the Idea of mankind. The philosopher sees danger in nihilism; it becomes his single antagonist.’

Bergman argued, Kluback writes, that ‘if we are to prevent the danger of nihilism “we must turn to God:” this is the powerful task which Jaspers gives to philosophy’. ‘“What he would like,” Bergman remarked, “is the renewal of philosophical belief that is hidden in the religious, the transformation of religion into philosophy. This certainly will not be the way of mankind, although it may be the way of a minority.”’ Kluback signals that (Jaspers’ and) Bergman’s concept of philosophical faith, and their practice as believing philosophers, may be regarded as being elitist (or at least as being avant-gardist); he observes of Bergman that ‘He knew that a turning toward God was not the answer for mankind, but he also knew that the philosopher had to be a believer; on his faith others depended’. Yet Jaspers’ conception of faith, like Bergman’s concept of revelation, is – Kluback stresses – not exclusive. The believer, Jaspers wrote, must be able to ‘acknowledge the faith that is alien to him as a possible truth emerging from a different source, even if he is unable to understand it’. Bergman, Kluback writes, ‘found in revelation a universality which was at the foundation of his idea of The Believing Community’. Kluback suggests how Bergman's position on the hinge of two faiths, liberal-rational philosophical faith and potentially dogmatic-exclusive religious faith, was determined by his own inspiring conception of a decisively directing, socially unifying revelation:

‘He moved easily between philosophical and religious faith. In fact, it would be difficult to distinguish one from the other in his life and thought. This is comprehensible because he believed that a revelation was given to the people and it concerned their earthly destiny, their service to mankind and their vision of a future that spoke of justice, compassion and love. In a letter to his life-long friend Robert Weltsch, the editor of the Jüdische Rundschau (11/2/71), Bergman spoke of his conviction “that only a new moral direction would make it possible to find a solution for all difficulties, however utopian this may be”.’

Kluback also quotes from an important 1945 letter to the philosopher Jacob Fleischmann in which Bergman clarified his idea of the non-dogmatic path of faith – the shared ‘new moral direction’ – which springs from revelation.

‘“I do not believe in an absolute religion. All religious art [sic, pres. ‘religions’], in my view, are methods to a goal, ways. The dogmatic divisions are artistic superstructures which religions have built over or under their dwelling (Bau). In my eyes they are not important. […] Every people, and their epochs have their paths to God. But God is one, and if we feel a nearness to the Jewish tradition, it is because this pedagogy, and not the dogmatic, is close to our heart. I don’t believe in the absolute truth of either Judaism or Christianity. I believe in a particular mission of the Jewish people which has shown itself in such a fruitful way in our time. Thus it is for me tasteless and laughable when Zionists draw from a religious-historical reality simply political consequences.”’

Like Jaspers, Bergman in this letter is suspicious of objective religious forms on account of their potential dogmatism. Again like Jaspers, Bergman would supplant such absolute religion with a decisive hermeneutic of transcendence; a path to God. Because of his personal closeness to Jewish tradition, Bergman (unlike Jaspers) identifies the path to God with his contemporary ‘particular mission of the Jewish people’. Thus for Bergman the non-dogmatic hermeneutic of transcendence itself has assumed the dimensions of a ‘religious-historical reality’: for him here the struggle towards transcendence takes place within contemporary Jewish history, just as for Jaspers, we could add, it first took place within the religious-historical reality of Weimar era Germany. Both religious-historical realities are built out of, and hence consist of, philosophical faith.

Noting that ‘What we find revealed in Jaspers is the capacity of philosophy to describe the nature of faith, a clarification of the modes of faith’, Kluback underlines the fact that Jaspers’ decisive hermeneutic of transcendence remains a Kierkegaardian, negative one. ‘Faith becomes for Jaspers certainty “coupled with distance.” […] Faith defies description; it belongs to experience. Man never escapes the reality of non-belief, of inner doubt and despair.’ Because, as Kluback writes, ‘Faith is not a given to be held in perpetuity undiminished’, ‘Bergman and Jaspers knew that faith was a struggle; it was a gift’. Thus just as the mission towards God is faith, in the sense that it consists of it, faith itself is, consists of, the struggle – the (transcendentally) decided, decisive risk. Kluback quotes from Jaspers’ final book, Philosophical Faith and Revelation : ‘“There is hope without deception”, he said, “only when we do not hold it to be a certainty, not even a probability, but dare to live by it because such a life can be worthy of us and founded in transcendence.”’

Kluback stresses that a philosophical life is ‘formed through commitment’; ‘The philosopher shows the way of faith; he must decide to travel it.’ His very commitment to the path also suggests, as Kluback intimates with an additional quotation from Philosophical Faith and Revelation, that philosophical faith can become a collective, rather than an exclusive or elitist, project: ‘all our actions are based on what we expect of men – and that means of ourselves. Whoever despairs of man despairs of himself. Contempt of man is self-contempt.’ Kluback reinforces this point: ‘Faith is the foundation of man’s actions, of his world view, of his concept of the future.’ Faith thus emerges as the quality which relates people to each other, as well as to the distinct (yet interrelated) phases of human experience – past, present and future. Once more, the point is that each ‘religious-historical reality’ quite literally consists of philosophical faith.

I have tried to suggest in this post that Kluback shows Weimar era Germany and the new postwar Israel alike to be exemplary religious-historical realities instancing how, as he put it, ‘The problem of values was not merely academic; it became the essential quality for the society, the expression of the state.’ The intuition that in these two historical and intellectual moments the projection of philosophical faith became a social – even a state – project, could perhaps become more sustainable through a consideration of the concern within Weimar thought with natural law; particularly if we understand the tradition of natural law thinking as an articulation of what Kluback calls ‘a sacred covenant of belief between the philosopher, the past, the present and the future’. Kluback’s opposition to the lineage of post-Kantian reason – ‘The [French] Revolution declared the end of the sacred tradition that declared that God is truth’ – brings him to quote from Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. ‘Each construct of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society […] connecting the visible and invisible world according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and moral natures’. Whereas now amidst our nihilism, Kluback comments, ‘We have discovered what it means to deify man, to identify history with natural law’, Jaspers and Bergman ‘knew that faith alone held together the sacred covenant that tied the generations to each other’.     

 

(The phrase 'the research of hope' is borrowed from Robert Hullot-Kentor's essay 'Critique of the Organic: Kierkegaard and the Construction of the Aesthetic' (reprinted in his Things beyond Resemblance))

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.’       

The Concept of Irony

Some Reading Notes

Here is the first in what I hope will be a series of occasional posts presenting some of my notes from the work of thinkers of central importance to Weimar thought. These notes may be on texts by thinkers of the Weimar period itself (Carl Schmitt, say), or alternatively on texts by earlier philosophers, such as Hobbes and Kierkegaard, who significantly influenced Weimar era theorists.   

Kierkegaard’s dissertation, The Concept of Irony, is referred to substantively in Adorno’s second Habilitationsschrift, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic (1933). Page references here are keyed to the relevant volume of the Princeton edition of Kierkegaard’s Writings.

‘Socrates, in assigning to insight, to conviction, the determination of men’s actions, posited the Individual as capable of a final moral decision, in contraposition to Country and to Customary Morality, and thus made himself an Oracle, in the Greek sense. He said that he had a daimon(ion) within him that counselled him what to do, and revealed to him what was advantageous to his friends.’ [Hegel, quoted on 161. Compare Hegel’s reference to self-knowing and freedom cited on 162; Kierkegaard (hereafter SK) on subjectivity versus ‘the established’ on 163 (cf. identity vs. the established on 126); & the remarks on heteronomy, subjectivity and decision in Hegel on 163-65 (cf. 263, 264).]

‘When we take into account that even in our countries, where the state, precisely because it has undergone a far deeper mediation, allows subjectivity a much greater latitude than that which the Greek state could allow, when we take into account, I say, that even in our countries someone living on private means is always a dubious person, we may infer from that how the Greek state must have regarded Socrates’ attempt to go his own way and live as a private person.’ [179. Cf. 447. Compare too the remark on Socrates’ ironic and ‘purely personal relation to individuals’ on 180-1. Compare also the remarks on the ironist, the Taugenichts (good-for-nothing) and a vocation of obscurity on 281 (& on Hamann: 434).]

‘True freedom, of course, consists in giving oneself to enjoyment and yet preserving one’s soul unscathed. In political life, true freedom naturally consists in being involved in the circumstances of life in such a way that they have an objective validity for one and through all this preserving the innermost, deepest personal life, which certainly can move and have its being under all these conditions but yet to a certain degree is incommensurate with them.’ [182-83]  

‘we do find [in Socrates] a most consistently sustained irony that lets the objective power of the state break up on the rock-firm negativity of irony. […] In this way he becomes alien to the whole world to which he belongs […] ; the contemporary consciousness has no predicate for him – nameless and indefinable, he belongs to another formation.’ [196. Cf. 447. Compare too the note on Socrates’ ‘negative relation to life’ on 39; & the remark on his inability to ‘contract any real relationship to the established order’ on 178. Cf. dissident consciousness: Schmitt-Luhmann-Konrad (etc.); & the category of the extraterritorial as in my ‘Vortex Out of German London’ (Kracauer: here)? See also the counterposition of ‘fear of the law’ to ‘conscious knowledge of why he acted’ on 228.]

‘In many ways, the Athens of this period calls to mind what Rome was at a later time. Intellectually, Athens was the heart of Greece. Thus when Greek culture approached its disintegration, all the blood rushed back violently into the chambers of the heart. Everything concentrated in Athens – wealth, luxury, opulence, art, science, recklessness, the enjoyment of life – in short, everything that, as the city hastened toward its ruin, could also help to glorify it and illuminate one of the most brilliant intellectual dramas conceivable. There was a restlessness in Athenian life; there was a palpitation of the heart intimating that the hour of disintegration was at hand. But from the other side, that which was the condition for the decline of the state proved to have immense significance for the new principle that was to appear, and the disintegration and decay became indeed the fertile soil of the new principle.’ [200-1. Compare the Weimar/ interwar period?]

‘It [‘the contemporary age’] does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone – this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community?’ [246-47. Community as a mere temporary alliance of the self-interested or combative: so that now, the phrase ‘care in the community’ means nothing at all. Cf. the comment on irony as ‘isolation according to its concept’ on 249.]

‘dissimulation denotes […] the objective act that carries out the discrepancy between essence and phenomenon; irony also denotes the subjective pleasure as the subject frees himself by means of irony from the restraint in which the continuity of life’s conditions holds him – […] Irony […] has no purpose; its purpose is immanent in itself and is a metaphysical purpose. […] irony, in which the subject has no purpose.’ [255-56. Irony as a freeing from contingency; beyond this, for SK, is the sort of acceptance of heteronomy commented on (in terms of assigned virtuous tasks) at 235. Compare the important remarks on a religious reconciliation with actuality on 297, 298 (on the latter page SK writes of ‘becoming clear and transparent to oneself, not in finite and egotistical self-satisfaction but in one’s absolute and eternal validity’, anticipating Either/Or, part II (& cf. 445, 299 here)).]

‘Here, then, we have the idea […] as the infinite absolute negativity. Now, if this is to become something, the negative must assert itself again in a finitizing of the idea – that is, in making it concrete. [> existentialism?] The negative is the restlessness of thought, but this restlessness must manifest itself, must become visible; its desire must manifest itself as the desire that actuates the work, its pain as the pain it engenders. If this does not happen, then we have only the unreal actuality of contemplation, devotion, and pantheism.’ [312. Compare SK’s reference to infinite absolute negativity on 26, the sourcing Hegel quotation on 476, and 131. Cf. also 305 (‘In no way is the true ideal in the beyond’); 319 (‘The true actuality becomes what it is; the actuality of romanticism merely becomes.’) Cf. too 271.]

‘if our generation has any task at all, it must be to translate the achievement of scientific scholarship into personal life, to appropriate it personally. [On subjectivity as truth (cf. in Bergman, Dialogical Philosophy), compare the note on 219 and 552 n. 189 (>Postscript etc.).] […] Irony as a controlled element manifests itself in its truth precisely by teaching how to actualize actuality, by placing the appropriate emphasis on actuality. In no way can this be interpreted as wanting to deify actuality in good [socialist] St. Simon style or as denying that there is, or at least that there ought to be, a longing in every human being for something higher and more perfect. But this longing must not hollow out actuality; on the contrary, life’s content must become a genuine and meaningful element in the higher actuality whose fullness the soul craves. [Actualized actuality an element of transcendental(-ized) life: the quotation continues onto the next page.]’ [328]  

A Return to Postwar Humanism?

I am interested by the statement made by the leftist London cultural historian Ken Worpole, in his response early last year to new editions of novels by Alexander Baron [here], that ‘we sorely need’ a ‘return’ to the ‘vital postwar humanist “moment” in European cinema, fiction and intellectual life’. I can certainly identify the category of postwar humanism in terms of (what I have called elsewhere on this blog) ‘English existentialism’: Murdoch, Wilson, and quite probably Gascoyne, Read and Baron himself. Karl Jaspers is presented by Chris Thornhill as an – perhaps the – exemplary German humanist thinker of the immediate postwar period. But as I read more deeply in Thornhill’s books, I am realizing that the postwar German moment of reconstruction was far from straightforwardly humanist: there is also the functionalist strand of social thought, or social philosophy, which culminates in Luhmann’s antihumanism. I wonder too whether, within the British context, Worpole’s category of postwar humanism is not rendered similarly paradoxical by the development of welfare state ideology: the British functionalism?  

I found Worpole’s article via Susie Thomas’s worthwhile piece for the Literary London Journal, ‘Alexander Baron’s The Lowlife (1963): Remembering the Holocaust in Hackney’ [here]. I have written about Baron's wonderful novel myself elsewhere, though I have not been able to approach its treatment of the war. Thomas notes of Baron’s protagonist Harryboy Boas:     

‘Harryboy's longing for oblivion, and his repeated failure to retain any material possessions, is also connected to the fate of the Jews in postwar Europe: in particular to the need to be exonerated of the guilt of surviving. At one point Harryboy considers becoming a slum landlord in the East End: “I could get a whole tribe of immigrants in here, straight off the boat, paying me a pound a week each to kip on mattresses on the floor. My golden future”. But he loses the houses in a crap [sic] game: “Empty, the burden of possession lifted from me, I walked away”. Only by having nothing can he remain innocent.’

This resonates, I feel, with my own strangely innocent and contactless life, as a London-born, guilt-born son of an East German refugee, and in particular with the idea of a 'vocation of obscurity', which I propounded in my book Iain Sinclair and then, on this blog, in relation to Hamann's early form of Christian existentialism. It is as if already with Hamann, humanism is contiguous with a more Eastern-style, Zen or Daoist detachment from the subject, an abdication of agency; in the same way, perhaps, as a dialectic of humanism (manifesting for example as post-Kierkegaardian decisionism) and antihumanism (Heideggerian indifferentism/fatalism; Schmitt?) later emerged to vividly characterize interwar German thinking.

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

Here I want to lay out some noteworthy features of Jaspers’ theory of existential communication, as outlined by Thornhill in his writings on Jaspers. An obvious virtue of Thornhill’s comparative, synoptic method of intellectual history is that it enables us to begin to situate Jaspers’ work on existential communication in relation to the communication theories of a range of philosophers.

Communication as passion and transformation:
 P K Dick, Martian Time-Slip, Hebrew edn

Jaspers’ theory of existential communication is perhaps best summarized by Thornhill when, in Karl Jaspers, he describes 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 attempts to give an account of human freedom which resists both formal-idealist and objectivist preconditions’. In his SEP entry on Jaspers [here], Thornhill notes that the concept of existential communication was introduced in inchoate form by Jaspers in his early psychological work of 1919, Psychology of World Views. Jaspers argues that, in Thornhill’s words, ‘the freedom of consciousness to overcome its limits and antinomies can only be elaborated through speech’. Speech is posited as ‘a process in which consciousness is elevated beyond its limits through intensely engaged communication with other persons, and in which committed communication helps to suspend the prejudices and fixed attitudes of consciousness’. Thornhill sees that this means that, importantly, ‘Existentially open consciousness is therefore always communicative, and it is only where it abandons its monological structure that consciousness can fully elaborate its existential possibilities.’ With this ‘early doctrine of communication’, Thornhill observes, Jaspers ‘helped to shape a wider communicative and intersubjective shift in German philosophy’, and in this way ‘the resonances of his existential hermeneutics remained palpable in the much later works of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur’.

Thornhill underscores the innovatory character of Jaspers’ dialogical model of communication, citing Arendt’s remark that Jaspers is the ‘first and only philosopher who ever protested against solitude’. For Jaspers, Thornhill writes, ‘The attempt to think existence without relation to other existence merely limits existence to a sub-category of objectifying cognitive systems.’ He goes on, in Karl Jaspers, to quote from the second volume of Jaspers’ Philosophy. ‘The “being of existence is not an objective category”, Jaspers explains’:

‘I can speak out of possible existence, as far as another person hears me – then the existence of both is for each other, but this being-for-each-other is not given for their knowledge. Existence as conviction, belief, absolute consciousness cannot be known.’

Jaspers’ emphasis on dialogue, which derived from his early psychological theorizing and psychiatric work, meant that though it was – as Thornhill puts it in SEP – ‘assimilating Kierkegaardian elements of decisiveness and impassioned commitment’, Jaspers’ version of early existential thinking took Kierkegaard’s ‘cult of interiority, centred in the speechlessness of inner life’, to represent ‘a miscarried attempt to envision the conditions of human authenticity’. ‘The decision for authentic self-overcoming and cognitive unity can only occur, he argued, through shared participation in dialogue.’ Jaspers, like Adorno and Michael Theunissen after him, Thornhill notes, maintained that ‘the closed inwardness of the despairing Kierkegaardian subject remains ensnared in the formal problems of Kantian idealism’. Kierkegaard’s existentialism, for Jaspers, hence ‘fails in its intention to connect reflexivity to experience’, and ‘to provide an account of thinking existence (or existential reason) which is decisively different from formal reason’. For Jaspers, Thornhill writes, it is ‘only in speech which reflects experience that subjectivity can truly escape the idealist and dialectical formalization against which Kierkegaard protests’.    

Thornhill usefully elaborates on how Jaspers’ theory of communication operates as a critique of the idealist process of reification. He stresses that Jaspers viewed true communication as motivated by a post-metaphysical quest to disclose truth. ‘The genesis of true communication, Jaspers asserts, occurs when we recognize that the transcendent source of human legitimacy (metaphysics) has been obscured, but nonetheless attempt to disclose a distinct realm of essentially human truthfulness.’ Humans, he suggests, ‘become truthful through the spoken disclosure of a relation to their ideas, not through the prior formalization of this relation’. Speech is theorized as (enabling) a type of cognition which can resist reification, without becoming submerged within experience. Anticipating Habermas, as Thornhill notes, Jaspers’ thinking ‘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’. Speech therefore, for Jaspers, (Thornhill writes) is ‘an eternally unfinished event (not a prior or ideal unity) in which humans relate most truthfully to their own practical and epistemological determinants (ideas)’. In (true) speech, ‘a cognitive process occurs in which thinking is not formally separated from praxis or experience, but in which thinking still maintains a specific inner coherence and identity against pure experience and action’. Speech for Jaspers, Thornhill summarizes, ‘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’.

For Jaspers the (post-)idealist development of a human relation to truth is bound up with our freeing from objective certainty. He 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’. This emphasis within his thinking on our freeing from objective certainty, is a central reason why the theory of existential communication represents, as Thornhill notes, perhaps ‘the most important philosophical innovation instituted by Jaspers’, and also ‘the crucial dimension in his transcendental anthropology’. For Jaspers, Thornhill writes, the ‘progress from worldly orientation towards reflexive transcendence’ is a process in which the subject’s relation ‘towards its own objective positions, ideas and convictions, and therefore also towards its fellow human beings, detaches itself increasingly from any realized or nameable structure’. This coupling of the ongoing process of reflexive transcendence with a freeing from objectivity or formalization, Thornhill sees, is closely related to Jaspers’ theorization of unfinished interpersonal communication:

‘My truth, Jaspers claims, is a manner of being-towards-myself in which I consider myself as a quality which is neither formal, nor purposive, nor objective. The realization of this truth, however, has its only objective outcome in a manner of being-towards-others: only in an uncertain, relative and communicative disposition towards others can I begin to explain my own unstable experience of myself as possible transcendence.’   

Thornhill repeatedly returns to the connection which Jaspers’ thinking traces between truth and uncertain communication. ‘Human beings begin to speak truthfully to each other, he implies, when they reflect upon those components to their experience which cannot be objectively explained or categorized, and where their cognitive/experiential forms are radically questioned and altered.’ Or again: ‘The precondition of truthful existence, he explains, is a recognition of uncertainty, and this uncertainty is given exemplary form in speech.’ Jaspers’ communication theory thus suggests a privileging of dysfluency, given that – as Thornhill continues – ‘speech enacts this uncertainty and implies its possible resolution’. It is as if the fraught lived experience of dysfluency, or any other form of ‘failing’ communication, itself points towards a fluency, or harmonious speech, which marks transcendence. He quotes here from Jaspers’ Reason and Existenz : ‘The imperfection of communication and the weight of its failing become the openness of a profundity, which nothing can fulfil but transcendence.’

Crucially, Thornhill underlines how Jaspers’ concern with the sort of true, harmonious communication which signals or presages transcendence, separates his theory of communication from both Habermas’ theory of speech-acts and Heidegger’s concept of everyday language. For Jaspers true communication – Thornhill writes – is a ‘particular quality and integrity of the spoken word’, and is therefore ‘not possible in the common contexts of practical life, but only in momentary dialogues, in which interlocutors set themselves decisively beyond their everyday objective forms’. Again citing Reason and Existenz, Thornhill notes Jaspers’ statements that true communication ‘is manifest in the “elevated moments of apparent complete harmony”, which anticipate a “perfect truth and timeless oneness”’. ‘Communication is thus, in its metaphysically valid form,’ Thornhill concludes, ‘a privileged existential harmony between certain people: it is not a uniform means for the interpretive coordination of action’.

Thornhill seeks to explain Jaspers’ work as ‘a seminal position in the development of the transcendental, communicative line of philosophical anthropology, which is directly opposed to the anthropological and political positions which have emerged from Heidegger’s philosophy’. Jaspers’ writings, Thornhill sees, hold a ‘communicative vision of existential totality’ – a totality articulated in phrases such as ‘perfect truth and timeless oneness’. For Jaspers, Thornhill stresses, the ‘attainment of such transcendence’ or transcendental unity is ‘an essentially communicative process, in which free interaction in linguistic or cultural discourse illuminates the limits of objective and categorial fixity’. Speech ‘is always a hermeneutic of possible transcendence, and possible transcendence always requires speech’, precisely because, in its ‘relative, uncertain and interpretively open’ character, human communication is both ‘a reflection of the impossibility of truth’ and, as ‘an ongoing attempt to articulate truthfulness’, is ‘the only practically possible expression of transcendence’.

Jaspers’ theory of communication, Thornhill emphasizes, is thus integral to his attempt to recuperate the metaphysical as a concrete moment in human life. It is in speech, Jaspers indicates, that (in Thornhill’s words) ‘concrete human existence experiences itself practically as a possibility for radical otherness to its worldly and cognitive forms’, and ‘reflects itself theoretically or metaphysically on that basis’. Jaspers’ communication theory refuses Kant’s ‘formal limiting of human existence against metaphysics’, and what Thornhill calls Jaspers’ ‘metaphysic of communication’ positions itself as ‘an alternative to the limiting of metaphysical contents through the regulative or “legislatory” functions of transcendental reason’. On account of Jaspers’ attempt to ‘radicalize the metaphysical content of idealism’, as Thornhill puts it, and to ‘replace transcendental idealism with an experiential, and thus communicative idealism, in which formal antinomies of reason figure as the vital antinomies of experience’, speech for Jaspers ‘articulates an unrealized metaphysical/anthropological perspective against the realized juridical unity in which metaphysical contents are resolved by Kant’. Thornhill argues that Jaspers’ notion of communication as an ‘experimental corrective to idealism’, represents ‘a crucial innovation in the development of models of intersubjectivity, speech-hermeneutics and the theory of consciousness’. He also proposes that Jaspers’ attempt to ‘think beyond the antinomies of idealism’ by converting transcendental idealism into an experiential/communicative idealism, ‘for which the unity of consciousness is never resolved’, can be identified as ‘an attempt to avoid the (allegedly) false overcoming of idealism in Heideggerian ontology’.

As Thornhill notes, ‘The only path beyond the reification of life and reason in formal idealism is, Jaspers indicates, to retrace the steps which originally led to idealism: thus to reinterpret the metaphysical legacy itself.’ Yet Jaspers, Thornhill writes, clearly ‘stands out as a significant early thinker in the tradition of post-metaphysical, post-idealist intersubjectivism’, because his ‘hermeneutical turn’ replaces the formal cognitive structures of idealism with ‘an interpretive-existential concept of truth, which sees truth as the interpretive and communicative expansion of consciousness, not its formal limitation’. Jaspers’ argument that (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the human only begins with the end of idealist reification’, means that humanity ‘can only begin to interpret itself where the form of Kantianism is allowed to unfold as a narration of substantial human becoming, not as a reified set of intelligible relations’. Yet for Jaspers, as Thornhill emphasizes, the communicative freedom or communicative transcendence which represent such personal becoming, can never be realized:

‘The communicative foundation of Jaspers’ […] theories of freedom and transcendence is based precisely on the fact that he does not believe in absolutely valid individual self-transcendence. It is precisely the fact that the particular can never be proclaimed as the universal, that praxis can never be ideal, which grounds Jaspers’ theory of communicative transcendence.’

Jaspers’ hermeneutic-existential Kantianism holds that, as Thornhill puts it, ‘the antinomy of particular experience and total unity of knowledge cannot be genuinely overcome through any manner of personal experience’: it is ‘only in the existential interpretation of its antinomical limitedness that individual life has any access to the terms of its own transcendence’. Providing an example of such existential interpretation, Thornhill refers to the ‘communicative experiences of freedom’, which offset ‘the given order of human form and function’ by enabling humanity to become – in the early terms of Psychology of World Views – ‘a life in suspension [Schwebe]’, and to detach itself from what Thornhill calls ‘the modes of [reified] inner compulsion which form its life’. Yet such communicative freedom ‘is never realized. The dissolution of objective form occurs only in the relativity of communication, and such communication is principally defined by the fact that it is always incomplete.’

To be continued...incomplete...