Heidegger, Prynne and 'Parataxis'

'in Cambridge, let's split'

-Iain Sinclair, Red Eye

In an attempt to get an initial grasp on the Heidegger-Prynne interface, I have reached for my little pile of back issues of the Cambridge journal Parataxis, most of which I bought from Drew Milne around 17 years ago. Edited largely by Milne, from 1991 to 2001, the content in Parataxis: Modernism and Modern Writing has long overpowered me with its complexity, representing as it does a benchmark for criticism of the contemporary poetries of J. H. Prynne and other representatives of what Milne, in Parataxis 3, tentatively labels ‘the Cambridge axis’. Now that, tragically, so much of this seems posthumous – Parataxis, the Cambridge axis, myself – the time is at least perhaps opportune for a less intimidated attempt on my part to understand the positions which Parataxis articulated, in particular in relation to Prynne and Heidegger. It is clear to me now, finally, after all my years of starstruck bafflement, that the Parataxis critics articulated a triad of suspicions: of a phenomenology-aligned reading of Prynne’s poetry, of aligning Prynne with Romanticist poetic tradition, and of the concern with a return to prior temporality which Prynne’s work shares with Heidegger’s. Yet Parataxis also voices Prynne’s own resistance to circularity, and it seems important that his powerful critique of totalized recursion is echoed in the pages of the journal by a particular critique (Alan Marshall’s) of Cambridge cultural Marxism’s negative dialectical approach, which usefully begins to restate the relation between Prynne’s poetry and phenomenology. You could even conjecture that Marshall's intervention in the penultimate issue of Parataxis in 1996 represented as significant a moment within the genealogy of academic Prynne reception, as the later, broader but perhaps less interesting, shift from the early-mid 1990s, cultural critique mode of Parataxis (a mode energized by the fury of 1980s anti-Thatcherism), to the depoliticized exegetical mode of Glossator 2: On the Poems of J. H. Prynne [online here] in 2010. 

Disregarding the possibility of Heideggerian Marxism, in Parataxis 9 Milne responded to Marshall’s claims on the part of phenomenology by seeking to cordon off the diverging critical approaches of Marxism and Heideggerianism still further.

‘If any attempt is made to relate what “phenomenology” might mean for poetry, the phenomenology of experience suggested by Hegel and Marx is in sharp conflict with that developed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The “experience” of capitalism may be incommensurate with a phenomenological account of experience.’

In my experience, the letter from your university informing you that you have earned £4500 this year as an hourly paid lecturer, is an equally gritty and vicious phenomenon whether you view it with your Marx or your Heidegger specs on. (As is the lack of a letter when you are then sacked without warning, after having been assured repeatedly that your contract would be renewed). But in the next number of Parataxis, in his article ‘Speculative Assertions: Reading J. H. Prynne’s Poems’, Milne’s reading of the reference in Prynne’s ‘Foot and Mouth’ to the ‘Pressure Sensitive/ Tape (also known as RUBAN ADHESIF and NASTRO ADHESIVO)’, persists in separating Heideggerian from Marxist perspectives on our experience of this world. In this reference of Prynne’s to what Milne calls ‘the trans-national language inside rolls of Scotch tape’, Milne writes, ‘The world-at hand is figured not as the transcendence of tools in the revelatory unveiling of Being, but as an implicated concern for the techniques and habits which sustain this world.’ This sort of sardonic pillorying of Heideggerian terminology is particularly depressing given Milne’s inability to stand by the Marxism to which he opposes that terminology. The response to Marshall in issue 9 comments that ‘there remains the task of showing how dialectical thinking which is critical of what is usually thought of as phenomenology could be developed, or how an account of the affinities between Adorno and Prynne could be sustained’. This comment is hardly an investment of faith in original Parataxis co-editor Simon Jarvis’ landmark Adornian reading of ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, which had appeared in Parataxis 1 (and which has been republished here). 

Jarvis’ article argued that Prynne’s poetic resists the presentation of phenomenological immediacy because such a presentation would be undialectical. Prynne’s poem ‘The Numbers’, Jarvis maintains, does not supply us with ‘a choice to seal off some realm of this-ness which could be seen as impervious to external determination’:

‘Attempts (such as that of Michael Grant in the Dictionary of Literary Biography) to assimilate Prynne’s wish to start from individual experiences to Husserlian phenomenology write off his acknowledgement that to understand individual experience is also to go beyond it. Prynne invokes demonstrative immediacy not phenomenologically, as a category, but dialectically, as a moment: once examined, apparent immediacy necessarily reveals its own mediatedness.’

Before I get to Marshall’s reaction to these remarks, I want to note two further attempts, other than Marshall's, to reclaim the possibility of recognizing phenomenological immediacy in Prynne. The first relates to the particular immediacy of a certain strand of Prynne’s poetic discourse which we could call his Londoner’s language. Prynne’s origins as a Londoner are rarely attended to by critics, though there are occasional references to his registering of wartime experience in his poems. But it seems to me that in his essay for Parataxis 9, ‘Counterfactual Prynne: An Approach to Not-You’, John Wilkinson unwittingly touched on precisely the arch London quality of Prynne’s language, when he wrote of the Not-You line ‘our confidence is end-up like a roller towel’, that it is ‘a characteristically Prynnian witticism which tends to make exposition sound laboured’. Academic exposition is attracted, because ‘end-up like a roller towel’ is a hermetic, difficult phrase. Why a roller towel ? But this phrase also carries a sort of difficulty which renders exposition unnecessary: because it is as if hermeneutic mediation is resisted by precisely the incisive immediacy – the sheer phenomenological baldness – of the language’s quality of underworld hermeticism. This line of Prynne’s is a slap round the face with a rolling pin, never mind a roller towel. A new semantic content has been displaced, from elsewhere, somewhere covert, and is suddenly here. This London tenor of phrasing has maintained its speakers outside the law for centuries, and it will continue to shock academic interpreters whilst holding its secrets close. 

This first attempted reclamation of phenomenological immediacy, like the second one which I want to note now, enlists an attention to Prynne’s involvement with what we could call visionary phenomenology.

                                                                            [...] This is the place

   where, deaf to meaning, the life stands

      out in extra blue. [...] [The Oval Window ]

N. H. Reeve’s extended discussion of these lines in his ‘further note’ on The Oval Window for Parataxis 6, begins by relaying his ‘suspicions’ of their communication of visionary experience. ‘Any celebration of an enhanced, heroic moment, unashamed to assert its claim to superiority, almost automatically gives rise to suspicions as to the interests it could be serving.’ However, Reeve continues, ‘in this case […] those suspicions stay secondary’. For ‘here the momentary thrill can remind us that this cynicism reflects a loss to which we are not reconciled, that there is still the ghost of something dear to us which we expect poetry to awaken’. It is precisely the phenomenological experience of visionary shock, that is – or what Reeve goes on to term ‘an apparently immediate sensation’ – which brings us to awareness of both the desacralization and disenchantment of this life, which typically is not definite enough to be ‘the’ life, and the continuing existence (however spectral it may be) of ‘a degree of intensity and radiance unavailable to our normal categories’.      

Reeve’s reference to ‘the Romantic tradition of the privileged lyric moment’, suggests the relation of Prynne’s involvement with such visionary phenomenology to the Romanticist poetic tradition from which his poetry is distanced elsewhere in Parataxis. In his ‘Speculative Assertions’ essay of 2001, for instance, Milne maintains that ‘Foot and Mouth’ ‘could be read as a satirical revision of the conflicts of ethos and pathos enjoyed in the late romanticist and quasi-philosophical readings associated with [Harold] Bloom’s Wallace Stevens or Heidegger’s Holderlin [sic]’. (In his footnote to this Milne notes that the ethos/pathos opposition was in fact later ‘deployed by Prynne’s de Kooning/ O’Hara essay’). In a significant comment in a letter to Allen Fisher of 16 September 1993, published in Parataxis 6, Milne aligned his long-standing suspicion of the poetic lineage of ‘faded romanticism’ – a romanticism far from Prynne’s own romanticism of ‘extra blue’! – to his scruple regarding phenomenological readings. One suspects here too a suspicion of the concept of poetic tradition itself; the postmodernist suspicion that anything connected, integrated or whole is universalist, coupled with a Marxist charge that poetic linguistic beauty is that which is consumed by the bourgeoisie and produced by the naïvely artisanal (those who believe themselves to be ‘originally’ related to language).

‘In the restricted notion of poetry, a phenomenology of experience and faded romanticism gesture at the tradition of poetry while implying utopian ideas about the civic possibilities of language. What makes it restricted is the assumption of a poetic relation to language, and an overdetermined sense of what constitutes formal beauty and coherence.’   

Milne offers Fisher no explanatory background for these assertions, beyond the rather inane remark that ‘I take it that one of the faultlines in contemporary poetry and poetics is the relation between a restricted notion of “poetry” and a more dispersed sense of a poetic relation to linguistic manifolds’. However, in his important article for Parataxis 9, ‘The Two Poetries and the Concept of Risk’, Marshall usefully explained how Milne’s statements invoke ‘the idea of the two traditions of modern poetry’. In relation to this schema, Milne’s ‘restricted notion’ of poetry refers to the notions of the Stevens, or ‘symbolist’, tradition. Marshall summarizes:

‘A typical formulation of the two traditions of modern poetry thesis can be found in the criticism of Marjorie Perloff, particularly in the essay “Pound/ Stevens: whose era?’, where Perloff uses these two authors and the apparently incommensurable positions of what become in effect their respective critical camp-followers to entrench a dichotomized formalism, already known perhaps from the writings of Charles Altieri as that of the objectivist versus the symbolist, but variously referred to here as: the constructionist versus the expressionist, the encyclopaedic (or epic) versus the lyric, the fragmentary versus the meditative, and so on.’

Milne’s determined opposition to aligning Prynne’s writing with the Stevens, or symbolist/Romanticist poetic tradition is clear in ‘Speculative Assertions’, when he distances Prynne from ‘humanism’ and ‘civic personhood’. Milne acknowledges (the early) Prynne’s ‘lyric sequences’, but recasts Prynnean lyric as anti-lyric, a lyric mangled by the ‘destructions of subjectivity akin to anti-humanist phenomenology’ which drive it. Such a lyric is intrinsically only a diminished Olsonian ‘epic’ anyway. (Phenomenology is seemingly now admissible, as a prop for Milne’s anti-humanist inclination).

‘Prynne’s poems eschew the vocalizations of humanism, providing neither a congealed “voice” nor an identifiable persona or civic personhood. The bardic temptations of post-humanist epic – that poetry could include everything and  history – are brought into the briefer focus of lyric sequences. Song is acknowledged as an expressive parameter, but the agencies prompting lyricism are not those of a singer, and are more easily read as destructions of subjectivity akin to anti-humanist phenomenology.’

It is the Parataxis article on Prynne most willing to engage with Heidegger's thinking which is also most sympathetic to associating Prynne’s poetry with Romanticist poetic humanism. In their essay ‘Deaf to Meaning: On J. H. Prynne’s The Oval Window ’, which appeared in Parataxis 3 (and is republished here), N. H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge read the following lines from The Oval Window :

 It is not quite a cabin, but (in local speech)

                                      a shield, in the elbow of upland water,

                                      the sod roof almost gone but just under

                                      its scar a rough opening: it is, in first

                                      sight, the oval window. […]

Reeve and Kerridge argue that this description of what they call (reflecting on the picture on the volume’s cover, and anticipating Prynne’s 2008 ‘Huts’ essay) a ‘rough shepherd’s hut’, ‘seems to touch’ on ‘various Romantic traditions of negotiating a place for the self, a place of at least provisional stability, amidst the boundless organicism of the world’. Where Milne admits lyric into Prynnean poetics only if its very constitution is warped by ‘destructions of subjectivity’, Reeve and Kerridge attend to the way in which The Oval Window rearticulates the remnants of a Romantic poetic of self-stabilization. ‘The poem’s emphasis is always on the temporary, threatened, fragmentarily glimpsed moments of “staying put”, and the barely habitable condition of such buildings as would make Heideggerean “dwelling” possible.’ In this connection, Reeve and Kerridge also quote the lines referring to the arctic tern which ‘stays put wakefully, each following suit/ by check according to rote’. They comment that the tern’s condition – of ‘patience which is not passive lethargy, repose which is alert and vigilant rather than timidly self-protective’ – represents ‘something close to what Heidegger meant by “dwelling”, a kind of reverential letting-be and letting-come of the world in which man was properly rooted’.

Such references to a form of ‘dwelling’ that stabilizes the subject are echoed in D. S. Marriott’s article in Parataxis 9, ‘Contemporary British Poetry and Resistance: Reading J. H. Prynne’, which, in its discussion of the relevance of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth to ‘Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform’, relates the idea of ‘dwelling on the earth in the light of day’ to Prynne’s preoccupation with return. Marriott states that the poem ‘elliptically refers’ to Orpheus’ ‘need to return to the land of the dead to reclaim (and ultimately lose) the lost love’. Prynne’s poem’s metaphor of ‘the sun making things “worse”’, argues Marriott, ‘draws on the local-existential sense of being on earth in the Orphic myth and its explicit connection between human life and dwelling on the earth in the light of day’; the latter ‘two processes’ are ‘etymologically linked in the Latin derivation of humanus from humus’.

In his essay in the same number of Parataxis, ‘The Spirit of Poetry: Heidegger, Trakl, Derrida and Prynne’, Anthony Mellors writes of ‘Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform’ that it represents Prynne’s ‘most protracted meditation on the subject of return’.  Marriott’s article quotes the following lines:

                                   […] To our unspeakable loss; we make

sacred what we cannot see without coming

                                      back to where we were.

                                Again is the sacred

          word, the profane sequence suddenly graced, by

                                     coming back. […]

The Parataxis critics suggest two distinct ways of reading such meditations on return. Marriott’s reference to the ‘semantically incomplete and referentially opaque’ nature of Prynne’s poetry, straightforwardly explains Prynne’s own references to unspeakability and ‘what we cannot see’, as well as the uncertainty (in the second cluster of lines just quoted) as to exactly what the profane has been ‘suddenly graced’ into. Marriott, moreover, encourages us to be wary of the idea that such opaque reflections on return were formulated as a conscious critique of secular, liberal-progressivist rationality: Prynne’s poetic opacity, Marriott writes, ‘cannot be construed as an oppositional hermeticism as Mellors argues [in his PhD thesis]’. But Mellors’ charge, in the pages of Parataxis, that the idea of return in Prynne is a ‘mystical’ one, is indeed instinct with his criticism of the opacity of Prynne’s poetic language, which Mellors casts in Heideggerian terms. ‘Prynne wants to get rid of “meaning” altogether, and replace it with a formal significance, which, through the indeterminate contingencies of poetic Saying, moves beyond them to reaffirm a hidden agenda of mystical return.’

Milne had already evinced a similar dislike for the idea of ‘mystical return’ when, in a letter to Prynne of 7 March 1993, which was published in Parataxis 5, he noted his poetic ‘determination’ when writing his own Satyrs and Mephitic Angels, ‘to evade a Heideggerian fetish of the etymological and pre-Socratic grounds of language and being’. A specifically Heideggerian mysticism is clearly Milne’s particular target, since here he also writes of ‘a Benjaminian dependence on a theological mystification of history which is often my own gnostic temptation in the face of defeated reason’. So late-Benjaminian mystification of history is endorsed, whilst Heideggerian mystical restoration of origins, or what Mellors calls ‘the Heideggerean project of “destruction” that attempts to clear away metaphysical abstractions from supposedly original properties’, is impugned. Quoting from Derrida’s Of Spirit, Mellors extended to Prynne his suspicion of Heideggerian return to an ‘original temporality’:

‘Heidegger constantly invokes the spiritual (especially in the essays on Hölderlin, Rilke, and Trakl) and, like Prynne, claims to undercut Christian (and Platonic) appropriations of the term by returning to a prior or original temporality: “In its most proper essence, as the poet and thinker allow it to be approached, Geist is neither Christian Geistlichkeit nor Platonic-metaphysical Geistigkeit.”’

Mellors goes on to practically accuse Prynne’s poetic of the late 1960s of Aryanism when, having noted that ‘the arcane pursuit of etymological value arises as a justification for and sublimation of crude beliefs in national, racial, and sexual superiority’, he specifically compares Heidegger’s essay on Trakl to Prynne’s ‘A Pedantic Note in Two Parts’. ‘As in Prynne’s essay, we are dealing [in Heidegger’s Trakl essay] with the cultural programme of defining and returning to our “proper home” in a neat dovetailing of Indo-European linguistic origins with the philosophy and poetics of temporality.’ This sort of alignment of Prynne with Heidegger’s Nazi Aryanism strikes me as being little more than sensationalism: when Prynne observes that the runic wynn 'was the name for "bliss"; it was a proper name, reaching right across Germania and back before the division of the Indo-European peoples', he is not advocating racial exclusivity or hegemony.

It seems to me that the critique put forward in Parataxis of Prynne’s concern with return to a prior or original temporality, needs to be tempered by an awareness of the resistance to circularity which Prynne expressed elsewhere in Parataxis. I am thinking of the attack on totalized recursion made by Prynne in a letter to Milne of 21 March 1993, published in the journal’s issue 5. ‘If swinish contentment or stoic damage control are both off the map, then the work of any manifold (poetry included) must be directed so as to minimize inclusion in the main structure of unrecognized recursive loops.’ In their Parataxis article Reeve and Kerridge had already wondered, in connection with The Oval Window, about the nature of the ‘quest’ in that poem for ‘alternative responses to the world, Heideggerean or otherwise, which are not artificially stabilized by controlling circuits and mechanisms’. But such a controlling circuit – a ‘main structure of unrecognized recursive loops’ – could itself be linguistic, recalling the ‘Infantile,/ recursive pandect’ already posited by Prynne as early as the Wound Response poem ‘An Evening Walk’. The ‘main structure’ of his letter to Milne indeed seems to refer to totalized significatory or semantic circularity: later in the letter Prynne writes of ‘the cycle of pure irony’, and it is in relation to the possibility that both Milne’s and his own poetries now are trapped within and stabilized by their hyper-vigilance, that Prynne desires a poetic irony ‘directed to forward the passage of non-circular predicates’:

‘Perhaps this is my own current look-out, indeed, and I reserved a bolt-hole at the outset here [in this letter] by referring to non-conductive irony, coyly leaving room for a version not armed against itself (I think that’s a recursive illusion anyway) so much as directed to forward the passage of non-circular predicates.’  

Prynne’s observation of the Cambridge late modernist tendency towards hyper-vigilant poetic irony echoes Out to Lunch’s insightful witness, in his review of Wilkinson’s ‘Harmolodics’ for Parataxis 4, of the ‘frozen gaze of Parataxis [sic] scruple’. Coyly concealed behind his post-punk nom de plume, Ben Watson pointed here to the recursive circuit of total scruple which characterizes the late modernist poetics propounded within Parataxis (and which was precisely what was so intimidating to a graduate student like myself, newly arrived in Cambridge and trying to find the confidence to position myself in relation to late modernist poetries – in particular to the work of Iain Sinclair, the Olsonian element of which is a special victim of Cambridge scruple). It seems to me (now) that the Parataxis scruple is frozen by nothing other than the academic prejudice of which it ultimately consists. When Milne, writing in Parataxis 4, simply asserts that ‘Adorno’s critique of Heidgger’s [sic] poetics of Hölderlin in his essay ‘Parataxis’ (recently translated in Notes to Literature vol. 2) remains pertinent’ to Martin Harrison’s use of Heidegger, but does not explain how or why it remains pertinent, the student senses a cultural Marxism whose argumentation has become paralyzed by its own arrogance.   

Marshall’s article for Parataxis 9 offers close readings of two poets, Prynne and George Oppen, ‘who are ordinarily associated with the Objectivist tradition as defined or redefined by Olson and others’. But this positioning of these poets does not lead Marshall to cordon them off within the field of ‘open’ poetry – Marshall underlines ‘the inadequacy of the idea of the two poetries, one that is open [Pound/Olson etc.] and one that is closed [Stevens etc.]’. Therefore, and whereas Milne disdains attention to ‘phenomenology of experience’ as a feature of the ‘restricted’ (closed) poetry he critiques as a Marxist, Marshall’s approach frees the potential for a phenomenological reading of Prynne whilst showing Parataxis cultural Marxism to be paralyzed within a ‘fixed opposition’:

‘I shall argue that the kinds of risk both writers [Oppen, Prynne] take cannot be properly understood with reference simply to the fixed opposition between 1. lyric ego meditating on the phenomenology of experience and, 2. unbeautiful dance [cf. Milne’s ‘improvised dance’ in P 6, 28] over the manifolds of language. I shall argue that neither writer abandons the phenomenology of experience altogether.’

Marshall’s intervention against Parataxis cultural Marxism also locates that Marxism’s paralysis in the negative dialectical approach to Prynne advanced by Jarvis’s work on ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’. In this way, Marshall echoes Prynne’s own resistance to circularity with a critique of paralytic negative dialectical criticism of Prynne, which again restores the potential for phenomenological readings of Prynne’s poetry. Marshall identifies a ‘danger for “dialectical” criticism […] in its haste to disavow phenomenology, “as a category”’, of encouraging a lack of ‘daring the “moment”’.

‘In an early essay for Parataxis, Simon Jarvis wrote: “Prynne invokes demonstrative immediacy not phenomenologically, as a category, but dialectically, as a moment: once examined, apparent immediacy necessarily reveals its own mediateness.” A truly dialectical criticism would have nothing to fear from “apparent immediacy”. On the contrary, the danger for “dialectical” criticism is that in its haste to disavow phenomenology, “as a category”, it will turn mediation into an empty truism, without ever daring the “moment”.’

To get frozen, recursive-dialectical reading of Prynne moving by ‘daring the “moment”’ would first involve recognizing, with Marshall, that poetry is itself a contingent process of phenomenological (visionary) definition: ‘each poem is a trial, a process, an attempt to come “face to face to a fact” (as Thoreau aptly puts it) rather than a complete facing up’. Recovery of the ‘mediated immediate’ that is the phenomenology of experience within a poem, is, Marshall argues, therefore only possible through a recovery of the ‘element of process’ – both within our practice of reading and then, when our reading is un-frozen, within the poem itself:

‘[…] any language can be regarded as reified: that is, only by recovering a moment of the process (or to put it in the statutory pigeon-Hegelian, of the mediated immediate in the instance of its mediation) can language and experience reflect upon each other (in the way that Hegel says the concept of the object reflects upon the subject): this element of process is riskily evoked in the reified analogue of the reading process itself.’

Habermas on Cassirer in the 1920s (2)

In Habermas’ presentation in ‘The Liberating Power of Symbols’, the conflict in the 1920s between Cassirer and Heidegger is related to the former’s concern with a humanist, normative (Kantian) constitutionalism. This concern of Cassirer’s is reflected in his upholding of (German-)Jewish ‘ethical ideals’ and civility, in the face of the emergence of fascist political myth.

Fundamental to Habermas’ account of Cassirer is his emphasis on Cassirer’s understanding that it is (in Habermas’ words) ‘the dynamic of symbolization which drives the process of civilization forward’. ‘In the symbolic constitution of human existence and in the symbolic mediation of our life activity the path towards a humane conduct of life is already anticipated.’ This stress on Cassirer’s insights into the entwinement of symbolization and civilization or humanization, underwrites Habermas’ presentation of the Cassirer-Heidegger opposition as an opposition between German-Jewish civility and Heidegger’s (mythic) thinking of (mythically) autonomized, fated praxis – ‘between the decent, cultured spirit of a cosmopolitan humanism, and that fatal rhetoric set on throwing man back onto the “hardness of his fate”’. This proto-Nazi hardness refers to a praxis without fundamental or transcendental norms, such as the norms which, in Cassirer’s thinking, derived from the (post-)Kantian transcendental analysis of language; Habermas suggests that it was Cassirer’s unwillingness to run with and generalize Humboldt’s revolutionary use of Kant’s notion of the transcendental, or ‘transform the heuristic priority which the transcendental analysis of language and of the linguistically constituted lifeworld does in fact enjoy in his researches into a systematic priority’ of his theory of symbolization, which lay behind the limitation of the 1929 Davos disputation to a superficially culturo-philosophical rather than fully philosophical-political debate.

‘The question of the evaluation of symbolic forms remained open, and the normative foundations remained entirely unclear. This may be the systematic reason why the controversy in Davos did not touch on the real crux of the dispute. The conflict between Cassirer and Heidegger, which extended into the political domain, was not played out. The opposition between the decent, cultured spirit of a cosmopolitan humanism, and that fatal rhetoric set on throwing man back onto the “hardness of his fate”, was reflected only in a contrast of gestures and mentalities.’

A foregrounding of the transcendental conception of language derived from Humboldt’s innovations, or of the linguistic ‘normative foundations’ of (the construction of) symbolic forms would, Habermas suggests, have enabled Cassirer to develop the civilizing impetus or content within his theory of symbolization; ‘the emancipatory power of symbolic shaping’.

‘With this step Cassirer could have overcome his epistemologically constricted vision, and resolved the conflict between the perspectivism of equiprimordial worlds [symbols acting as concepts], on the one hand, and the emancipatory power of symbolic shaping [symbols acting as images], on the other, which dogs his philosophy of symbolic forms.’

Habermas observes that Heidegger himself, by the stage of Davos, had not yet achieved a non-nominalist pragmatics of language in his own thinking: ‘it is worth noting that Cassirer, on the basis of his reception of Humboldt, had already long since achieved the turn towards a pragmatics of language which still lay in the future for Heidegger’. Yet ironically, it was Heidegger at Davos who pointed to Cassirer’s lack of an emphasis on the transcendental aspect or normative foundations of his philosophy of symbolic forms – precisely the emphasis which could have stood up to Heidegger’s praxis without norms. For Heidegger a ‘terminus a quo’ – what Habermas calls the ‘fundamental dimension’ – remains unprobed by Cassirer:

‘One could say that for Cassirer the terminus ad quem is the whole of a philosophy of culture in the sense of an elucidation of the wholeness of the forms of the shaping consciousness. For Cassirer the terminus a quo is utterly problematical […] Cassirer’s point is to emphasize the various forms of the shaping in order, with a view to these shapings, subsequently to point out a certain dimension of the shaping powers themselves.’

As Habermas underlines later in The Liberating Power of Symbols, it would be left to Apel subsequently to turn a transcendental view of language against Heidegger’s upholding of autonomized linguistic praxis: Apel insists, Habermas saw, on ‘a transcendental-hermeneutic conception of language, which was directed against the autonomization of the world-disclosing function of language in Heidegger’s history of Being’. For Apel, as Habermas reiterates, ‘Innerworldly “praxis” is only “mediated” by the disclosing “poiesis” of linguistic world-constitution.’ 

Yet as Habermas also shows, it is Cassirer’s political pronouncements of the 1920s which evince the normative aspect of his philosophy, and illustrate his repeated appeal to ‘Kant’s theory of law’. ‘When Cassirer took a stand on matters of public concern he made no attempt to conceal his fundamental normative convictions.’ Habermas quotes from Cassirer’s 1928 Constitution Day speech, to demonstrate how it (as Habermas puts it) ‘sketched with bold strokes the origins of human rights and democracy in the tradition of rational law’: ‘the idea of a republican constitution is in no sense a stranger, let alone an alien intruder, in the overall context of the history of German thought and culture’. Instead, Cassirer maintained, Weimar republicanism ‘grew out of this very ground, and was nourished by its most authentic forces, the forces of Idealist philosophy’.

Jankel Adler. 'Woman with Hat'. 1940

Habermas observes how Cassirer’s support of the normative political process of Weimar constitutionalism was followed by an analysis of the collapse of this constitutionalism, which occurred along with the fatal threat to ‘normatively significant cultural processes’ (Habermas’ words) such as civilizing symbolization. In one of his last essays, the 1944 ‘Judaism and the Modern Political Myths’, Cassirer upheld German-Jewish humanist, normative ‘ethical ideals’ against the bad foundationalism represented by what Habermas calls the ‘fake primordiality of political myths’.

‘We [modern Jews] had to represent all those ethical ideals that had been brought into being by Judaism and found their way into general human culture, into the life of all civilized nations. […] If Judaism has contributed to breaking the power of the modern political myths, it has done its duty, having once more fulfilled its historical and religious mission.’    

Cassirer saw how Nazi political myth enlisted the support of technological products of the scientific enlightenment, perceiving the political practice of the Nazis to be – as Habermas writes – ‘an ominous fusion of myth and technology: fascist mobilization succeeds by employing modern techniques of mass communication in the service of the revival of mythical forms of thought’. Moreover, Cassirer, as Habermas interestingly suggests, could therefore argue for the value of the monotheistic myth of Judaism precisely because Judaism historically fed into a humanizing (German-Jewish) religious enlightenment, rather than into a dehumanizing scientific enlightenment:

‘It is worth noting that Cassirer trusts religious far more than scientific enlightenment as a counter-force to the violence of political myths – he relies on the confinement of myth within its own proper sphere, which was long ago achieved by monotheism.’    

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.’       

Walser Addendum: Two Anthropologies

It may be that my reading of Walser in recent posts – with its reliance upon Simmel’s theory of depersonalization and then Jaspers’ projection of a hermeneutic of transcendence – is riven by a tension between two conflicting anthropologies, functionalist and transcendental. In his Karl Jaspers, Thornhill notes that whilst a functionalist anthropology ‘views human life as both produced, and adequately described, by its objective forms’, a transcendental anthropology such as Jaspers’ promotes the view that ‘the human being is most human, most existent, insofar as it is least material, and least bound by the objective forms (laws) of scientific rationality and social orientation’. Thornhill observes:

‘The constructive receptions of Kant which underpin the philosophies of Jaspers and Heidegger [...] describe an unbridgeable fissure at the centre of German existential thinking. On one side of this, Jaspers insists on the ethical difference of humanity from its forms. On the other side, Heidegger insists on its ethical adequacy to these. Jaspers’ philosophy is a morally transcendental anthropology, in which humanity interprets itself most truthfully in its unconditioned imperatives. This has later echoes in the neo-Kantian writings of Habermas. Heidegger, by contrast, provides the basis for a functionalist anthropology, anticipated already by Georg Simmel and Carl Schmitt, and echoed later by Arnold Gehlen, in which human life interprets itself as delivered unto its realized objective forms. Jaspers’ anthropology is strongly obligated to the remnants of idealism and transcendental subjectivism, and it creates a metaphysic of the person on the foundation of these. In Heidegger’s anthropology, in contrast, the transcendental subject, and its ethical derivates in practical reason, are replaced by a historicist metaphysic of the Volk, or of the functions which the Volk imposes upon its members.’

In my presentation of Simmel’s theory of depersonalization here it is unclear whether I am maintaining that Simmel critiques the functionalization of the human or (as Thornhill indicates) merely discerns it.

Behind the Mountains, part 3

A second radical implication of Walser’s articulation of modern self-abnegation, relates to the way in which it enables his writing to develop its thinking of freedom. In ‘Tobold (II)’ the narrator celebrates the fact that ‘I was a servant! I served!’:

‘My position, consequently, was a good one, which sufficed to set my person to rights. Isn’t it true our lives first take on beauty when we’ve learned to be unassuming, to forget or set aside our own wishes and desires, and instead devote ourselves with all our liberated, willing hearts to a precept and lifelong service, to satisfy people with our conduct, and meekly and boldly forgo beauty?’

The dialectic of the precept and liberation here is accompanied by a twinning of self-abnegation and self-exaltation (or self-transcending self-elevation), which Walser proposes in the preceding sentence. ‘So exalted I felt, even, I can say, yes, elevated far above my own person, which I scarcely dignified any more with so much as a hasty glance, or rather a hasty thought.’ Self-transcended, the narrator paradoxically no longer looks down on himself as on an alienated object (with ‘a hasty glance’), and can instead give a ‘hasty thought’ to his serving self. Walser’s sense of transcendence as something that gives one back to oneself, was voiced already in the following statements of the narrator’s towards the beginning of ‘Tobold (II)’.

‘Newly emerged from a terrible weariness of life, I attained fresh insights, began to enjoy living. As Peter, I’d had no real worldview, no true notion of life; […]. Living can be so tiresome when you lack an inspiring, elevating thought or point of view or vision to help you come to terms with the disappointments awaiting you in life. No longer did I chase after fame or the like; the sublime no longer drew my gaze. I had learned to love the small and insignificant, and, armed with this kind of love, I found life beautiful, just, and good. I was delighted to renounce all ambition.’

These lines identify self-abnegation, cast in terms of the renunciation of monetary ‘ambition’, with the self-transcending self-elevation enabled by pursuit of a transcendental idea, or ‘an inspiring, elevating thought or point of view or vision’. Walser thereby suggests that truly el(ev)ating happiness, true enjoyment of life, can be attained by holding to an inspiring vision of non-elevation. Elsewhere in ‘Tobold (II)’, the narrator identifies the happy condition of non-elevation itself – of ‘modest being’ – with spectatorship of an inspiring vision of others’ happiness. Genuinely fulfilling personal modesty is here contingent upon (liminal observation of) others’ illusory ‘glory’. Walser ironizes the notion that the elevated might really be freer: for him what matters is holding to the transcendental idea of happiness, to the 'glow' that surrounds the aristocratic diners 'playing their roles'. ‘I always took great pleasure in observing the splendour, the glory; for myself, though, I’d always desired a place in the quiet, modest background from which I could gaze with happy eyes up to and into the bright glow.’ The ‘twilight shadow’ is where the ‘common servant’ finds ‘a great benevolence’ and feels ‘most secure, most faithfully sheltered’, precisely because privileged life is viewed as a mere ‘magical spectacle’, at which the narrator ‘thought it lovely just to look on, entranced’. The idealizing worldview - the ‘whole picture’ – is what he ‘found so beautiful and cherished above all else’. But just this idealization of power is what enables him to find freedom in the refusal of power. ‘So I was always conscious of my merit, station, and joy in life, and took extraordinary delight in the modest being I embodied.’

In a short piece from 1917, ‘The End of the World’, Walser’s twinning of self-abnegatory, radical modesty with the self-transcending self-elevation enabled by pursuit of a transcendental idea, can be seen to expand into what could be called a broader geo-political twinning of apocalypse (or the limit) with utopia (or absolute freedom). In this piece, after ‘imagining the end of the world […] as a sea of bliss in which it could rock forever’, ‘everything looked so prosperous, fine, and free that at once the child was convinced this was the end of the world’. In this context we could also think of the inversion of nature associated by Walser with human conflict in ‘The Battle of Sempach’; when ‘Nature is […] annihilated in a battle’. ‘The sound was like a black, gaping abyss, and the sun now appeared to be shining from a darkened sky, glaring down more dazzling than ever, but as though from a hell, not the heavens.’ Here, unnaturally, the sun becomes brightest when as if apocalyptically detached from its heavens. Excessive brightness – brightness aspiring to the absolute, pushed to its limit – has already been associated with apocalypse on the previous page. ‘The whole earth, no matter how bright it looked, seemed to him to rumble and thunder in anger.’ Walser sees the earth, like the sky, to be darkened by its own aspiration to dazzle. A conception of the end of the world, for Walser, is inseparable from the conception of a transcendental urge towards brightness, freedom, utopia.

Walser’s imbrication of the limit and transcendence seems to me to be echoed by Karl Jaspers’ theorization of the decisive hermeneutic of transcendence available to those in existential crisis. As Thornhill summarizes in his book on Jaspers, for Jaspers ‘Transcendence is accessible only to a decisive hermeneutic, which stands in the absolute limit-situation of human existence, interpreting transcendence through its own crisis.’ Thornhill quotes 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”.’

For Jaspers, Thornhill writes, ‘Being […] 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.’ Jaspers’ conception of the decisive hermeneutic of transcendence practiced by those in crisis, rests on the view that, subjectively, such implosions (as Thornhill notes) 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’. The narrator in ‘Tobold (II)’ indeed decides to reflect upon self-abnegation, identifying it as a decision to ‘devote ourselves with all our liberated, willing hearts to a precept and lifelong service, to satisfy people with our conduct, and meekly and boldly forgo beauty’. Continuing his self-hermeneutic, he emphasizes too that to freely and decisively act upon such radical modesty, and ‘forgo heaven’, is to interpret the possibility of transcendence ‘many times more beautiful’:

‘For when I forgo something beautiful: doesn’t a brand-new, never-before-dreamed-of beauty a thousand times more beautiful come flying toward me in reward for my display of goodwill and my kind, strongly felt self-denial? And if, of my own free will, elevated by courage and compassion to nobler sentiments, I should forgo heaven: won’t I then, sooner or later, in reward for my righteous behaviour, fly into a heaven many times more beautiful?’    

We can view Walser’s writing as a whole in Masquerade and Other Stories as itself a decisive hermeneutic of transcendence, undertaken by a vulnerable adult. In linguistic terms, the transcendence at which it aims is, surely, the sort of visionary register to which Bernofsky points when – in her translator’s preface – she quotes from Walser’s ‘Meine Bemühungen’ (‘My Efforts’) of 1928-29. There he comments that in his late work he was ‘experimenting in the linguistic field in the hope that there existed in language an unknown vivacity which it is a pleasure to awaken’. This vivacity is in language but also beyond it, as Walser hinted already in his piece ‘Tableau Vivant’ from 1909. ‘Words won’t venture anywhere near the description of this dynamo. He sings, or something around him seems to be trembling with sounds. Behind the mountains, bells are ringing.’ Walser’s staged tableaux and prose masquerades are also aiming at transcendence in terms of an ideal ‘whole picture’, or ‘dream’, the construction of which they often dramatize. I am thinking here in particular of these marvellous lines in ‘The Aunt’:

‘Gradually I came into the mountains and soon reached an isolated village ringed all around by high crags; this was the birthplace of my mother. It seemed strange to me, yet also familiar and familial. The whole world, and I as well, appeared wonderfully old and young; earth and earthly life were suddenly a dream; I felt everything was perfectly comprehensible, yet also utterly inexplicable.’



Karl Hofer, 'Montagnola' (c. 1930)

What better description could there be of the goal of Jaspers’ hermeneutic process working towards (in Thornhill’s words) ‘a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’? Walser here captures the existential uncertainty – the sense of the ‘utterly inexplicable’ – which, for Jaspers, accompanies any decisive hermeneutic bid for a transcendental cognitive unity at the limit of knowledge. As Thornhill observes in Karl Jaspers, whilst Heidegger argued that language (as Thornhill puts it) ‘defines and constitutes the practically disclosed horizon of the world’, and thus ‘expressly excludes all ideal components from experience’, Jaspers by contrast maintained 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’. Thornhill, moreover, describes Jaspers' implicit fusion of Hamannian hermeneutics and Kantian epistemology by referring to Jaspers’ view of revelation or transcendence as mere ‘appearance’ – a term which seems to parallel Walser’s ‘whole picture’ or ‘dream’:

‘The hermeneutic of revelation […] has its profound validity in its ability to signal that the ideal limits of cognition do not reflect the absolute limits of being itself. Nonetheless, with Kant, Jaspers also argues that transcendence can only be knowable as a mere appearance of the possible unity of knowledge: true transcendence, thus, is inevitably beyond the limits of human thought.’

Walser’s lines in ‘The Aunt’, therefore, seem to me to exemplify what Jaspers would call an aesthetic cipher. Ciphers, though also decisive ‘moments of experience, embedded and disclosed in human historical life’, are for Jaspers (as Thornhill writes) ‘only the fleeting appearance of guiding ideas – akin to Kant’s transcendental ideas – which give shape to, but do not encompass, the ultimate underlying unity of human life and knowledge’. For Jaspers a truthful hermeneutic of ciphers ‘always also requires a critical-epistemological approach’ – Thornhill emphasizes – which with Kant and against Hamann, posits God as ‘an “idea”, which illuminates the limits of human consciousness, but which is never the realized experience of human transcendence’. (Walser: ‘It seemed strange to me, yet also familiar and familial.’) Thornhill sees that for Jaspers, it is indeed ‘only because the idea of God is not the experience [but the] appearance of transcendence that it is interpretable as transcendence’. As I have argued elsewhere, you could say that mere appearance lends the quality of definition (or decision) to Jaspers’ visionary hermeneutics – in Thornhill’s words, ‘it is the (epistemological) recognition of the limits of human knowledge which makes the (hermeneutical) disclosure of transcendence, in ciphers, so radical and truthful’.