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.’    

Behind the Mountains, part 2

Gass returns to the characteristically depersonalized and depersonalizing quality of Walser’s writing when he notes the ‘detached, desperate “inhumanity” of his work’. The narrator’s depersonalizing self-negation is foregrounded explicitly in ‘The Alphabet’: ‘I. I skip over, for this is I myself.’ Depersonalizing narratorial strategies are most evident in ‘Tobold (II)’ however, in numerous instances of self-negating narration such as this sentence:

‘Concerning a keg of the finest rye whiskey that, to the delight of the steward and that of a certain additional person – namely, to my very own, grinning, hand-rubbing delight – showed up only to be closely inspected and quite thoroughly investigated and examined by the two abovementioned important or insignificant personages, I shall take care not to waste another word.’

In ‘Tobold (II)’, the ‘certain additional person’ that is the modern self is brushed aside and reduced to the point where his very moods and their attendant whims are directed by an invisible heteronomy. The narrator’s investigation of his workplace is less a focussed product of individual agency, than a dissipated effect of being seduced by that which is more powerful: ‘The castle itself was an imposing edifice, and the many beautiful rooms and chambers I was permitted to glance into as the mood struck me naturally captured my attention and interest with their aristocratic appearance.’ Narration once more becomes a vehicle for expressing the narrator’s self-alienation and loss of personal agency, in the following presentation of vigilant attention directed by the formless authority which it tends:   

‘One of the choicest duties I had to perform was caring for the numerous lamps, an occupation that gave me great pleasure, for I developed quite a fondness for it. Each evening at nightfall I brought light, so to speak, into the dubious twilight that reigned on all sides, or if you prefer, into the darkness. As the count was a fancier of beautiful lamps and lampshades, these always had to be tended and treated with the greatest care. On beautiful evenings, as I crept about the rooms, all quiet as a mouse, a delicate mood in the air, the entire castle seemed bewitched. All the rooms were as if enchanted, the park an enchanted park, and with my soft, discreet, cautious lamplight, I seemed like Aladdin leaping one evening with his magic or miraculous lamp up the high, broad palace steps spread with splendid oriental rugs.’  

In this passage the radical modesty of the narrator – as he creeps about the rooms, ‘all quiet as a mouse’ – renders him indistinguishable from the narrated environment: the succeeding clause, ‘a delicate mood in the air’, could refer to him just as easily as to the castle. Then this submersion of the narrator’s identity within the described environment blends into a self-alienation in the form of a self-fictionalization: ‘I seemed like Aladdin’. The sense of narratorial self-alienation has already been generated by the recurrently self-qualifying, self-negating prose: ‘I brought light, so to speak, […] or if you prefer […]’. Here we are reminded of Walser’s foregrounding of the depersonalized quality of his writing in ‘The Green Spider’, where the narrator refers to ‘my mouth and its modest tool, my inherited language’, so divorcing a potential description enabled by such language from his human physicality ‘incapable of […] stammering it out’. By self-consciously stressing that this is writing removed from its writer, Walser emphasizes his own radical alienation from the reader. This is the effect of the final lines of ‘A Flaubert Prose Piece’ too, which once more draw attention to Walser’s writerly self-abnegation and the depersonalized quality of his prose. ‘Her report contained nothing that might have surprised him. They glided and passed among the people gliding and passing by, like a dream vision within the vision of a dream.’  

I want to draw out the radical implications of Walser’s articulation of modern self-abnegation; of the radical modesty of being, as Gass puts it, ‘Lightly attached to people, to the formalities of society, to any work which lies beneath another’s will like a leg beneath a log’. To take a first example, Walser’s position of self-abnegation enables his writing to develop a powerful critique of self-interest. In her translator’s ‘Preface’ to the collection, Susan Bernofsky quotes Elias Canetti on Walser, in the former’s The Human Province : ‘His deep and instinctive distaste for everything “lofty”, for everything that has rank and privilege, makes him an essential writer of our time, which is choking on power.’ Walser’s fascination with power struggles – his typical focus on human relations in terms of conflict or war – is communicated, for instance, in the following passage in ‘Tobold (II)’. Here the narrator discerns two distinct forms of human conflict, low battles concerning self-interest and ‘noble’ battles concerning natural morality:

‘Intrigues show up in castles, the same as in all other major establishments and institutions. Now the cook wanted to incite me against the steward, now the steward against the cook, but all this factional bickering and class conflict left me cold, for I had no interest in it. Anywhere a noble, splendid, sensible struggle can be found, I’ll be glad, perhaps, to take part in it – why not? – for instance in the struggle of the good versus the wicked, the benevolent versus the malevolent, the open and flexible versus the hardened and insensitive, the quick-witted versus the unenlightened, the diligent and industrious versus those who do nothing yet always stay on top, the struggle of the guileless versus the crafty and sly. This could be a battle I might like to lend a hand in, it can rain blows and punches for all I care, the more the merrier.’     

Walser’s critique of modern, institutional self-interest relates to the way in which his writing – as I want to suggest – projects a similar opposition of modern purposive rationality to natural human life, to that proposed within Georg Simmel’s contemporaneous The Philosophy of Money. (Simmel’s text was published in 1907, whilst Walser’s ‘Aschinger’ and ‘The Battle of Sempach’ – to which we will refer soon – date from 1907 and 1908 respectively). In his German Political Philosophy, Chris Thornhill outlines how Simmel’s political and sociological theory involved ‘the first major step on the path towards a reconstruction of vitalist philosophy, especially that of Nietzsche’.

‘Like Nietzsche, […] Simmel saw the capitalist economy as marking the final triumph of the human being as a formally purposive agent, and he also saw the purposive rationality of capitalism as weakening or neutralizing the relation between people and the purposes or objects of their possession, and even between people and their own actions. Under the generalized rationality of capitalism, therefore, the purposes of economically constructed persons assume a heteronomous primacy over human life itself.’

Indeed, as Thornhill summarizes, because the formal purposiveness of modern monetary subjects involves an alienation of those subjects from their own true purposes, it generates – Simmel maintained in The Philosophy of Money – an experience of depersonalization, such as we have seen reflected throughout Walser’s prose pieces:

‘As an agent seeking purposes, he [Simmel] argued, the modern subject alienates itself from the experiential sources of genuine subjectivity, and it constructs itself as a thinly neutralized set of contents and objectives. The monetary alienation of the human subject from its purposes and actions, then, also leads to a weakening or dissipation of the relation between people and other people, and ultimately, to a weakening or dissipation of the person itself – to a lack of “definite substance in the centre of the soul” or to a diffuse experience of depersonalization.’

We can find Walser detailedly projecting an opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life within the following extraordinary description of war in ‘The Battle of Sempach’.

‘The rushing crowd, apparently full of passion, drew closer. And the knights stood their ground; suddenly they seemed fused together. Iron men held out their lances; you could have gone for a buggy ride across this bridge of lances, the knights were squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding – just the thing, you might think, for such an impetuous, raging human breast to impale itself on. Here, an idiotic wall of spikes; there, people half-covered with shirts. Here, the art of war, the most prejudiced there is; there, people seized with helpless rage. Just to put an end to this loathsome horror, one man after the other recklessly charged into a lance tip, maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage. Flung to the ground, that is, without even having struck the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel with his hand weapon, bleeding pitiably from his breast, tumbling head over heels, face down into the dusty excrement left behind by the noble steeds. This was the fate of all these almost naked men, while the lances, already red with blood, seemed to smile in scorn.’     

Walser’s tableau foregrounds two aspects of human experience. The ‘people half-covered with shirts’ represent passionate humanity. Their behaviour, their purposes, are self-directed: these are people simply ‘impetuous’ or ‘seized with helpless rage’, who are representatives of uncontrolled nature – ‘maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage’. On the other hand, there are the knights reified into their weapons: ‘an idiotic wall of spikes’, ‘the art of war, the most prejudiced there is’. On this side it is impossible to separate reified humans (‘Iron men’, ‘the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel’), from humanized lances which ‘seemed to smile in scorn’. These knights emblematize an alienated condition of formal purposiveness. Their behaviour is rigidly purposeful, to the point where they are themselves indistinguishable – ‘squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding’ – from the object-world of instrumentality and neutralization that they project. Walser obsessively delineates what he intuits to be the structuring conflict underlying modern life, and his forecast of the outcome is not utopian: as he writes in the preceding sentence, ‘Nature is always annihilated in a battle’. 

Thornhill shows how Simmel’s opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life was grounded in Nietzsche’s thinking about law, reason and nature. Nietzsche, Thornhill summarizes, thought that fear of nature stimulates the legislation of ‘rational or moral purposes for humans to pursue, so that they are distracted from their naturalness’. Laws are formed in order to differentiate human life from ‘the cyclical temporal processes of mere nature or from the chaotic temporal events of historical contingency’. ‘Laws and values produced in this manner serve to humanize the world’, Thornhill notes; ‘they allow human beings to live, at least, in an illusion of human justification and moral purpose’. But they also reflect ‘a fearful will to obtain power, a power that can only be secured through the extirpation of whatever is residually natural – including the residues of nature in reason itself’:

‘Whilst possessing the obvious psychological utility that they protect people from knowledge of their own naturalness, however, Nietzsche argued that the laws created by reason form highly coercive and dominatory intellectual structures, which, in seeking to suppress fear, fixate human reason on the acquisition of power.’ 

For Nietzsche, as Thornhill writes, this is ‘invariably the will to power of weak people’; it is ‘power resentfully desired by those who cannot contentedly tolerate the naturalness and spontaneous futility of life’. Those who cannot accept contingency, and remain trapped in nihilistic horror vacui, ‘produce sense for their lives only through the pursuit of obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’.  

We can argue that Walser’s writing articulates the perspective of those whom competitive capitalist society labels ‘weak’ or ‘vulnerable’ – of the radically modest – in order to discern, with Nietzsche and Simmel, the true weakness of those who pursue ‘obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’. In Walser’s ‘Aschinger’, their rushed, non-accepting satisfaction of appetitive processes of mere nature is not enough for the competitive and power-seeking, who must then flee into ‘the commercial air’.

‘The dissatisfied quickly find satisfaction at the beer spring and the warm sausage tower, and the satiated dash out again into the commercial air, generally with a briefcase beneath their arm, a letter in their pocket, an assignment in their brain, firm plans in their skull, and in their open palm a watch that says the time has come.’   

Walser suggests that, slotted into their new, artificial time (of money, not of nature), the supposedly ‘firm’ purposes of economically constructed persons do not derive from their own natural brains – or from any ‘definite substance in the centre of the soul’ – but are instead plucked out, as if at random, from the empty, depersonalized skulls within which they float. A critique of the modern differentiation of ‘plans’ from naturalness or contingency may also be said to lie behind Walser’s ironization of the self-with-attainments in ‘Tobold (II)’: ‘Incidentally, it should also be mentioned that the secretary was an excellent pianist. Why shouldn’t we have a fondness for people who bring us pleasure with their skills, gifts, sciences, or knowledge?’ Walser proposes, in ‘Marie’, that the illusory plans and instrumentalized attainments which animate the capitalist city merely sustain a society in which both ‘work’ and ‘sophisticated pleasure’ are paratactically, and barbarically, inseparable from ‘privation’:

            ‘“Where are you going?” Frau Bandi asked.

            “I’m not quite sure yet. Well, to one of the centres of contemporary civilization, culture, work, privation, sophisticated pleasure, modern elegance and education, to one of the big, noisy cities where I’ll learn how to go about winning some respect and repute for myself among my fellow men.”’

Tbc.

Scheitern, part 2

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

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

   

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

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

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

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

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

Existential Communication, part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued.

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...

Hamann and Jaspers, part 2

Freeing Human Transcendence from Law

Thornhill’s comparison of the two philosophers also traces ‘key distinctions’ between them. He begins by noting that Hamann’s thinking constituted an attempt to supplant Kantian epistemology with what W. M. Alexander called a ‘theological epistemology’, which relied on what Thornhill calls ‘Hamann’s conception of the linguistic cipher as pure divine disclosure’. ‘For Hamann’s pantheist hermeneutics, the relation to God (and therefore to human transcendence itself) is positively cast as an unalterable and dogmatic fact of history: as revelation.’ Viewed from Jaspers’ position, here Hamann – Thornhill stresses – ‘follows a logic of false objectivization […] which crudely encloses transcendence in material forms’. Whereas Hamann suggests that the ciphers of transcendence reveal (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the positive divinity of humanity’, Jaspers maintains that such ciphers indicate, as Thornhill puts it, ‘only the possible transcendence of humanity’. Jaspers’ critique of any false objectivization of transcendence, and refusal of positivizing religion, Thornhill sees, is grounded in Kant’s assertion of the limitedness of all knowledge. Thus as Thornhill writes, ‘even when he seeks to derive from Hamann a corrective to Kant’, Jaspers remains a Kantian when he argues that ‘revelation can never disclose in stable terms the potential transcendence of humanity, and truthful communication is rendered impossible wherever it assumes itself to be objectively in possession of truth’.

Jaspers’ agreement with Hamann’s attempts ‘both to give experiential substance to Kant’s subject, and to interpret transcendence as a full possible experience of humanity in history’, Thornhill importantly sees, means that – like Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Rosenzweig – Jaspers adopts from Hamann’s thinking ‘an epistemological structure which opposes experiential revelation to transcendental subjectivity’. Yet Jaspers also maintains – contra Hamann – that the revelation of transcendence is never, as Thornhill puts it, ‘tenable as a source of cognitive authority’. Whilst holding with Hamann to ‘the concept of revelation as a hermeneutic of possible transcendence’, and whilst he ‘draws heavily on the anti-idealist, anti-metaphysical and hermeneutical components of revelation theology (especially in its figuring by Hamann)’, Jaspers, Thornhill clarifies, argues that revelation ‘must ultimately be understood as an appearance of human historical relativity and limitation, not as the all-constituting axis of history’. This is because Jaspers ‘rejects the christological attempt (of which Hamann’s work is an example) to propose Jesus Christ himself as the unifying and sense-giving centre of human history, disclosed through the occurrence of revelation’. Jaspers’ position on revelation is also determined by his nature as a Kantian thinker, and by the grounding of his thinking in Kantian epistemology. As Thornhill emphasizes, ‘the foundation of Jaspers’ theological position might be viewed as a dialectical reading of Kant and Hamann’; Jaspers’ ‘theological reflections are […] premised in an implicit endeavour to effect a productive fusion of Hamann’s hermeneutics and Kant’s epistemology’:

‘Running through his entire debate with theology is a simultaneous attempt both to salvage the historical presence of transcendence in his theory of ciphers (influenced by Hamann’s linguistic theology), and yet also to understand this presence as a mere index of a possible non-realized unity of thought (influenced by Kant’s idealism). […] Hamann’s hermeneutics (for Jaspers) can indicate the transcending limit of human-being in a manner which is simply not possible for Kant’s formal epistemology. Despite this, however, Hamann cannot truly interpret this transcending limit as a limit, for his religious hermeneutics has no critical means for reflecting on where the ends of human reason are located.’

Thornhill also describes Jaspers' implicit fusion of Hamannian hermeneutics and Kantian epistemology by referring once more to Jaspers’ view of revelation or transcendence as mere ‘appearance’:

‘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.’

Ciphers, for example, though also decisive ‘moments of experience, embedded and disclosed in human historical life’, are for Jaspers (as Thornhill puts it) ‘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’. 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’. 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’.

Thornhill usefully redescribes Hamann’s opposition of experiential revelation to transcendental subjectivity, as an opposition of ‘theological hermeneutics to transcendental epistemology’ which represented ‘the key theological debate at the heart of the German Enlightenment’, and which ‘is also at the heart of Jaspers’ work’. Thornhill thus identifies Jaspers sustaining a ‘balance’ between Hamann and Kant, and occupying ‘an unresolved and uncertain dialectic’ between the two ‘conceptions of human being-in-the-world’:

‘The hermeneutical approach has no truth without epistemology, and epistemology has no truth without hermeneutics. Both epistemology and hermeneutics forfeit their truth, however, when they consider themselves in possession of it: either as the disclosed law of revelation or the formal law of cognition.’

Thornhill thus sees more to Jaspers than a relativization of the truths of hermeneutics and epistemology. For, Thornhill argues, in that he can be seen to ‘turn simultaneously against both Hamann and Kant’, Jaspers shows that both earlier thinkers ultimately falsify metaphysics – and in doing so falsify humanity.

Hamann sought to objectively manifest the truth of metaphysics by interpreting God as a fact of worldly existence and certainty, whilst Kant sought both to ideally manifest the truth of metaphysics by transposing metaphysical ideas into elements of human consciousness and praxis, and to limit the truth of metaphysics by formally limiting such idealist human elements against metaphysics. In contrast to these ‘formal-ideal and objectivizing responses to metaphysics proposed by Kant and Hamann’, Thornhill writes, Jaspers’ thinking suggests that all attempts ‘either objectively or ideally to manifest or limit the truth of metaphysics can only ever be false truths’. Thornhill clarifies that both Kant’s formal-ideal and Hamann’s objectivizing reactions to the metaphysical legacy, are ‘in one respect paradoxically identical: both examine the human relation to transcendence as a juridical form’. The options are merely that human consciousness ‘either legally determines its inclusion of, and difference from, metaphysics (Kant), or accepts the objective disclosure of God’s will (Hamann)’. By positing an ultimately juridical human relation to transcendence in these ways however, Thornhill observes, both epistemology and hermeneutics falsify the truths of both metaphysics and humanity. It is the juridical human relation to transcendence which we can find Jaspers contesting. ‘The truth of metaphysics and humanity, for Jaspers however, is only in the ongoing and relative (self-)interpretation of humanity as metaphysical.’ Jaspers’ concept of philosophical belief is thus distinguished by the fact that, precisely whilst it fuses epistemology and hermeneutics (or philosophy and revelation), ‘it also seeks to disclose human truths in a manner which neither hermeneutics nor epistemology alone can accomplish’.       

Irregular Language: Betz's Hamann

Vulnerability and the Vocation of Obscurity

In his After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann, John R. Betz follows Frederick Beiser and John Milbank in presenting Hamann, correctly I feel, as a figure whose ‘influence on the history of philosophy, while obscurely mediated, was, in fact, profound’. Betz’s landmark English-language study thus concretizes the recent rehabilitation of Hamann as a thinker who cannot be reduced to the sort of marginal irrationalist that Isaiah Berlin made of him in The Magus of the North. Hamann himself foresaw the obscure diffusion of his influence in his 1786 text ‘Divestment and Transfiguration: A Flying Letter to Nobody, the Well-Known’, when he noted the Christ-revering intent of his work. ‘The little stream of my authorship, despised like the waters of Shiloah that flow gently, was poured out for the sake of this king, whose name, like his reputation, is great and unknown.’ The obscure yet profound, at once ‘great and unknown’ influence of Hamann’s writing, is in keeping with his rôle as – in Betz’s words – ‘the first and arguably profoundest modern Christian thinker of language’.

The stream of Hamann’s writing flows indirectly; or, its banks are notoriously hard to bridge. Betz cites Ernst Jünger’s remark that Hamann thought ‘in archipelagos with submarine connections’, following on from his own comment on Heraclitus: ‘A confluence of ideas and sensations in that living elegy of a philosopher made his maxims into a group of small islands, lacking the bridges and ferries of method that would have established a community among them.’ Hamann’s texts constitute a practice of indirect communication, and require the reader to build the bridges, make the connections, herself. As Betz notes, a text like the Socratic Memorabilia has a ‘highly stylized public, dramatic, gnomic, allusive, oblique, ironic, pseudonymous, prophetic form’, which is grounded in Hamann’s ‘conviction that faith “cannot be communicated like merchandise”’. Hamann’s is an ‘elusive’, proto-modernist textuality, showing ‘endless associative links’ and a ‘defiance of any single significance’.     

Such strategies reveal a lack of trust in – or an ironizing of – his own communicative capacity. You could say that Hamann’s lack of trust derived from his stammering behaviour; whilst the ironization derived from his Christianity. The flight from direct communication is a form of self-denial, and Hamann’s authorship is (as Betz argues) ‘quite possibly the most rigorously Christian of modern times – both in its content and in its self-denying form ’. In some important phrases in Golgotha and Scheblimini, Hamann wrote of ‘the symbolic connection between the earthly crown of thorns and the heavenly crown of stars, and the relationship mediated in the form of the Cross between the opposing natures of the deepest abasement and the loftiest exaltation’. Betz summarizes how these phrases are an assertion of the Christian coincidence of worldly vulnerability and otherworldly, spiritual empowerment:

‘[T]his passage provides a clue to the whole of Hamann’s mimetic “cruciform” authorship: whereas the outward humility, folly, and (to rationalists) sheer incomprehensibility of his self-denying style mirrors the humility, apparent folly, and incomprehensibility (to Jews and Greeks) of Christ’s self-sacrifice on the Cross (Golgotha), the inner sublimity of his inspired, prophetic message shares in the power and the glory of the Spirit of the resurrection (Scheblimini). In short, we come to understand that the only thing that can make sense of Hamann’s writings is Christ – in the double aspect of majesty and abasement, of a glory hidden from the “wise and learned” beneath a rejected outward form.’  

Hamann’s elusive textual practices, guided by what Betz calls a ‘Christian irony and humour’, thus invoke a humility reminiscent of the statement St Paul made about himself, when quoting his critics, that ‘“His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account”’ (2 Cor. 10: 10). Betz notes that, more generally, the recognition of humility is ‘the fundamental intuition of Hamann’s thought’. He quotes Hamann’s comment that,

‘It belongs to the unity of divine revelation that the Spirit of GOd [sic] should have lowered himself and emptied himself of his majesty just as the Son of God did in assuming the form of a servant, and just as the whole of creation is a work of the greatest humility.’

The creation of the Bible by the Holy Spirit is another act of condescension, whereby the Holy Spirit (as Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote) ‘conceals himself, as Hamann strikingly puts it, “under all kinds of rags and tatters,” “under the rubbish” of the letter of Scripture.’ As Hamann writes in his Biblical Meditations :

‘How much did God the Holy Spirit humble himself when he became a historian of the most particular, contemptible, and insignificant events on earth in order to reveal to man in his own language, in his own history, in his own ways the plans, the mysteries, and the ways of the Godhead?’

To assert with Luther that, as Betz puts it, ‘there is no exaltation of the creature apart from Christ’s humility, which is the key to the economy of salvation and the logic of every ascent’, is also to maintain a Lutheran emphasis on human humility qua passivity and a dependence on – or readiness to accept – what ‘God accomplishes in and through human beings’, or ‘what only God can give: ontologically, the grace that heals our nature from sin; noetically, the faith that enlightens the darkness of ignorance’. To depend on ‘the grace of God’s prior condescension, in the absence of which Christianity is easily distorted into a kind of Promethean asceticism’ – a work ethic, muscular Christianity – is to resist ‘what we might claim for ourselves as something owed, whether through inheritance or through virtuous works’. Betz enables us to see how Hamann associates divine condescension and human humility alike with suffering and hence with true cognition. When ‘in Christianity God suffers on account of his loving proximity to human beings’, Betz notes, ‘for Hamann, Christ is the model of all true learning in that he “learned […] through what he suffered” (Heb. 5: 8)’.

‘In other words, for fallen human beings, just as authentic reasoning begins with the suffering of reason’s “insufficiency” and a corresponding recognition of one’s need for the light of faith and the guidance of revelation, true moral learning begins with the suffering of one’s moral weakness and a corresponding recognition of one’s need for grace.’

As Hamann notes, recognition of dependence on divine condescension renders proud, self-sufficient rational aspiration irrelevant: ‘The condescension of God to the earth; no tower of reason whose spire reaches to heaven’. Indeed, as Betz observes, for Hamann ‘the purpose of reason is precisely to deconstruct all proud knowledge falsely so called, the kind of knowledge which is really doxa but nevertheless opposes itself to faith, so that true knowledge can begin’. Importantly, this rational project of undermining proud rationalism looks forward to Jaspers’ existentialist critique of neo-Kantian epistemological reification. It also looks back, to Augustinian and then Lutheran resistance to late medieval conceptions of philosophical rationality, as Betz suggests when he traces the ‘modern doctrine of reason’ back beyond Renaissance humanism to late medieval distinctions between philosophy and theology, which ‘ceded to philosophy (and to reason) far greater capacities than the Augustinian and, later, Lutheran traditions allowed, each of which remained more profoundly impressed by the degree to which reason is affected by the fallenness of the will’. (It would be interesting to consider the unstable, post-juridical rationalities – shaken by paranoia or drug use – of Philip K. Dick, and perhaps of Robert Walser, in this context). The political dimension of Hamann’s critique of proud reason is also worth noting here; his distance from Moses Mendelssohn’s modern conception of rights as being ‘as it were, pre-possessed by reason and claimed by independents in the manner of private property, [whereas] for Hamann, they are something received in faith from the Creator by dependents as a covenantal gift’ (Betz).

Betz stresses Hamann’s underlying intention to develop, and not curtail, rationality. Quoting Hamann’s remark that ‘the true genius knows only his dependence and weakness, or the limits of his gifts’, Betz observes that Hamann’s Christian mode of cognition ‘glories ironically in weaknesses and limitations (2 Cor. 12: 9), whereby the intellect is made receptive of divine light and wisdom. Herein, and not in any proud rationalism, lies the true path to enlightenment.’ Hence, Betz writes, Hamann’s ‘occasionally vitriolic rhetoric is never directed at reason per se, which he considers a gift of God, but only at its idolatrous misuse and transgressing of its proper limits’. He cites Hamann’s comment that ‘Faith  has need of reason just as much as reason needs faith’. Referring to the arguments of his doctoral supervisor, the prominent Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer, Betz suggests that ‘one could even say that Hamann was more rational than his contemporaries, a kind of “radical Aufklärer,” in that, like Kant, but going beyond him, he subjected reason to metacritical  scrutiny’:

‘Specifically, Hamann calls attention to what the Aufklärer  virtually ignored, namely, the historical contingencies of tradition and the “impurities” of language and metaphor pervading all putatively “pure” thought. […] As a humbling of autonomous reason and all proud systems of thought (in the sense of 2 Cor. 10: 5), it is meant not to leave reason in a state of despair, but to prepare it for faith, thereby saving reason from theoretical suicide and providing it with its ultimate object, an object that can only be given.’       

To be continued.