DOCSLIB.ORG

Mgr. Martin Ritter, Ph.D. Into the World. the Movement of Patočka's

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Mgr. Martin Ritter, Ph.D. Into the World. the Movement of Patočka's Univerzita Karlova Fakulta humanitních studií Mgr. Martin Ritter, Ph.D. Into the World. The Movement of Patočka’s Phenomenology Habilitační práce Praha 2019 1 2 Table of Contents 1 Introduction................................................................................... 5 Part I. The Developments of Patočka’s Phenomenology ........... 13 2 Seeking Evidence ........................................................................ 15 3 Hubris of Transcendental Idealism ........................................... 21 4 Life of Inwardness ...................................................................... 31 5 Basically Negative Being in the World ...................................... 41 6 Call of Transcendence ................................................................ 49 7 At the Heart of Space ................................................................. 59 8 Movement of Existence ............................................................... 69 9 Asubjective Phenomenology ...................................................... 77 Part II. Rethinking Existence ....................................................... 89 10 (Dis)Appropriating (the) Body ................................................ 91 11 Performing the Soul through Movement .............................. 101 12 Thinking (A)subjectivity through Mediality ........................ 113 13 Passing Through the World (as) Crisis ................................. 127 14 Super-Civilized Existence ...................................................... 141 15 Omnia Vincit Amor ................................................................ 149 3 4 1 Introduction Jan Patočka is without a doubt the most influential and arguably the most important Czech philosopher of the 20th century and one of the principal members of the second generation of the phenomenological movement. For Patočka, philosophy is not only theory, but rather a way of responsible life, of life responsible to truth. His acceptance of becoming one of the spokesmen for Charter 77, which criticized the Czechoslovak communist government for violating human rights, then seems a logical consequence of his philosophical way of life. Yet, during his lifetime Patočka was not actively engaged in politics, not even in non- political politics. Rather, he philosophically reflected on ontological fundaments of human being in the world. His thought was inspired mainly by two founding thinkers of phenom- enology Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Yet, he followed these thinkers by quite radically criticizing them, and developed his own, original and inspiring, phenomenologi- cally based philosophy. In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in Patočka’s thought. In Eng- lish, Francesco Tava (2015) published a book on Patočka’s philosophy emphasizing its political dimension and James Mensch (2016) a monograph focusing on Patočka’s asub- jective phenomenology. In German, Filip Karfík (2008) offered an interpretation of some of the key dimensions of Patočka’s philosophy. In French, there are two books by Renaud Barbaras (2007 and 2011c), monographs written by Émilie Tardivel (2011), Emre Şan (2012), Karel Novotný (2013), and, recently, Marion Bernard (2016b) and Frédéric Jacquet (2016).1 One finds also some collective volumes, such as Abrams and Chvatík (2011) or Meacham and Tava (2016), or special issues focused on Patočka’s philosophy (Hagedorn – Dodd 2016). There is only a limited amount of Patočka’s works available in English. Until re- cently, there have been four books translated into English, all of them written by Patočka in the second half of the 1960s or in the 1970s: An Introduction to Husserl’s Phenomenol- ogy (Patočka 1996a); Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History (Patočka 1996); Body, Community, Language, World (Patočka 1998); and Plato and Europe (Patočka 2002a). Now, also Patočka’s habilitation The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem from 1936 is available in English (Patočka 2016a). Some of Patočka’s shorter essays and studies can be found in Kohák (1989) and Manton (2007). Fortunately, many important works by Patočka unavailable in English are found in French. And, there is also a representative selection of Patočka’s writings in German.2 1 One could also mention the book by Učník (2016). 2 For an overview of Patočka’s available texts, see Tava (2016: 156–158). 5 Cause Acknowledging the growing interest in Patočka’s philosophy and considering the character of available primary and secondary literature, I find a comprehensive, in-depth, and con- temporary presentation of Patočka’s phenomenology in English to be a missing but indeed necessary addition to the overall discourse. I deliberately focus on phenomenology as the fundamental dimension of Patočka’s thought. Although there might be some disagreement about the core of Patočka’s philoso- phy, it is obvious that phenomenology is continuously its methodological point of depar- ture and in this sense the basis of it. Yet it is far from being a steady basis. Rather, it was, implicitly or explicitly, a constant problem for Patočka. His concept of phenomenology was permanently evolving and it is crucial to fully appreciate the motives behind, and grounds for, its different transformations. The growing interest in Patočka nowithstanding, there is no monograph on Patočka providing with a complete picture of the developments of Patočka’s phenomenology. Therefore I seek to offer, in the first half of my book, a succinct reconstruction of Patočka’s phenomenology throughout its evolution. Such a survey is important, and interesting, not only because it makes it possible to comprehend the internal logic of the development of Patočka’s thought. It also provides the contexts necessary for everyone who wants to ap- propriately understand Patočka’s concerns and intentions, and hence the meaning of his propositions, in different phases of his thought. Besides this reconstruction, I also intend to demonstrate how, and why, Patočka’s phenomenology is relevant for contemporary thought, while this importance cannot be re- duced to ethical contexts and political problems of Europe in the post-European world. Hence, in the second half of the book, I focus on Patočka’s concept of the movement of existence, which I find the most promising part of his asubjective phenomenology. I do not only interpret this concept but rather rethink, and appropriate, it to make it useful for analyzing contemporary existence. Overview Part I of the book explicates the main phases of Patočka’s phenomenology. Chapter 2, which presents crucial thoughts of Patočka’s rarely discussed disserta- tion, explains why Husserl’s phenomenology was so attractive for young Patočka. Phe- nomenology as a transcendental theory of experience discovers the conditions of the pos- sibility of reality while grounding its findings on intuition, or evidence. Taking a closer look, however, one can see that Patočka’s early phenomenology, which primarily describes the conditions of our knowledge of reality, is unable to disclose reality itself. One can formulate it also this way: his concept cannot disclose life. Highlighting this problem, the chapter identifies a reason for the conceptual shift between Patočka’s dissertation and his habilitation. Chapter 3 explicates Patočka’s habilitation on the natural world as radically trans- forming Husserl’s concept of Lebenswelt. I summarize Patočka’s analysis of the natural world to focus on the concept of transcendental subjectivity. How can this subjectivity be achieved and, even more importantly, what is this subjectivity? I suggest interpreting Patočka’s identification of the concept of constituting subjectivity with that of “intermesh- ing monads” as pointing to a trans-individual process of life embodied by the monads on- tologically grounding the world. 6 Patočka’s manuscripts written during World War II are analysed in Chapter 4 as antitipacing Patočka’s late asubjective phenomenology. After explicating the key concept of inwardness, with which Patočka substitutes Husserl’s notion of an “ego,” I inspect Patočka’s method: his attempt to capture the life of inwardness subjectively. Although the war manuscripts factually point to, and call for, the desubjectification of phenomenology, Patočka’s methodological focus on the subjective acts of an ego does not allow for it. Chapter 5 analyses the book-length study Eternity and Historicity from the middle of the 1940s, which offers an interestingly contextualized polemics with Husserl’s phe- nomenology while developing an important concept of the dialectic of spirit, and hence also of the dialectic of appearing. In contrast to the war manuscripts, Patočka sees no pos- sibility of spirit’s being in harmony with the world. He deprives the given in the world of any positive value so that he can claim that the negative reaction of (the human) spirit to objectivity is “being in the full meaning of the word.” Eternity and Historicity thus presents a radically subjectivist form of absolute humanism: it is the human being itself in its trans- cending activity that is the meta-physical here. The concept of “negative Platonism” from the 1950s, considered by some scholars as capturing the essence of Patočka’s philosophy in toto, is articulated in Chapter 6. I elu- cidate the basic intention and explicate the essentials of Patočka’s concept by placing at- tention on the experience of freedom as the fundament of metaphysics. I clarify the “idea” as both identical or reducible to freedom and as the
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Heidegger, Renaud Barbaras, and the Phenomenology of Desire Introduction
    © Christos Hadjioannou, 13 June 2013. Paper delivered at Phenomenology’s Presence, the 4th Annual Phenomenology 1 Conference at the University of Sussex (UK). Unpublished paper. Heidegger, Renaud Barbaras, and the phenomenology of desire Introduction The interplay between presence and absence has always been an important theme in phenomenology, especially in the hermeneutic phenomenology of Martin Heidegger.1 This interplay has also been an important topic in other strands of philosophy, notably the ones that take Hegelian dialectics as their point of departure, fostering a particular understanding of (human) life as subjectivity; a subject whose life is moved by virtue of desire: desire to perceive, to understand and/or to incorporate the external object. As such, desire betrays a being that is finite, insufficient and incomplete. It is a subject characterized by lack. It is generally considered that Heidegger doesn’t have an account of desire2. It is assumed that the notion of desire is ignored by Heidegger, because it is historically tied up with subjectivity and thus doesn’t fit his existential analytic of Dasein. Instead of desire, we have an account of mood [Stimmung]. Whenever we look for the way factical Dasein moves and discloses presence and absence on the pre-reflective level, we encounter Angst.3 In this paper I have two modest aims: Firstly, I will try to present some of the main arguments of the contemporary French phenomenologist, Renaud Barbaras (Sorbonne), who tries to articulate a phenomenology of desire. The prospect is to try to bring Barbaras in fruitful dialogue with the young Heidegger, because I am of the opinion that at some point Heidegger did what Barbaras tries to do today.4 The philosophical problems that inform Barbaras’s phenomenology pose a possible entry point into raising some questions and trying to attain a better understanding of some early Heideggerian notions.
    [Show full text]
  • A Sophic Phenomenology of Invariant Vitalism
    1 Anthony Paul Smith ‘The Mother of God – the Damp Earth’: A Sophic Phenomenology of Invariant Vitalism Our contemporary climate, in both the literal and metaphoric senses, is determined by three forces: the capitalist victory that demands everything reduce its value to the quantitative measure of money, the ideology of scientism which says all truth is reducible to the mechanics that science can alone elucidate, and the resurgence of ‘fundamentalist’ religion unmoored by theological or religious metaphysics. In the humanities these determinations go unchecked by an apolitical and aneconomic anti- metaphysical Anglo-American philosophy, both the reaction in “Continental philosophy” threatening to solidify into a narrow neo-rationalism against the anti-science occultism of Heideggerian philosophy and its kin, the continued naïve idealism of English department appropriations of deconstruction, and the self-perpetuated captivity of theology both to positivist scientism and the ghettos of identity politics. What unites all of this is a certain refusal of the perversity of nature. Nature appears to be purposely deviating from what is accepted as good, proper, or reasonable in democratic societies. Nature itself appears to be refusing to go away, to separate itself off from ‘culture’ and the human person, and insists on inhering to every part of culture and in every human person. This paper is an attempt to think differently from within the humanities; to think a strange economic ecology of life, or invariant vitalism, which lies at the heart
    [Show full text]
  • Summary the Becoming-Other of the Existence, Essay on Contemporary
    Summary The Becoming-other of the Existence, Essay on Contemporary Phenomenology, is both a systematic and a historical study of phenomenology. By choosing a systematic problem of becoming-other of the existence it attempts to present and to confront five major contemporary phenomenologists in France within a single phenomenological field: Henri Maldiney, Claude Romano, Jean-Luc Marion, Renaud Barbaras, and Marc Richir. The study enters phenomenology with Edmund Husserl and presents some key original concepts invented by two generations of post-husserlian authors who marked out the road to contemporary phenomenology: Martin Heidegger, Erwin Straus, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jan Patočka, Emmanuel Lévinas. Then it turns to “evential empiricism” in the work of Maldiney and Romano who consider the existent and the world in their belonging-together: the event is thus understood as co-birth of the subject and the world. Nevertheless, because of the fact that the existence that “becomes-other” is necessarily a finite existence, a radically separated existence from the metaphysical transcendence of the world, three other authors must become involved in the discussion: Marion, whose adonné is a limit of the givenness, and then Barbaras and Richir who explore the most archaic layers of the subjectivity within a phenomenological metaphysics. Finally, all the contours of the single phenomenal field are presented synthetically which allows to see some tasks for an actual phenomenological analysis, including one major problem of Husserl: that of the phenomenological ethics. Keywords: contemporary phenomenology; event; becoming; existence; ethics; Henri Maldiney; Claude Romano; Jean-Luc Marion; Renaud Barbaras; Marc Richir. .
    [Show full text]
  • Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Space
    The 3rd BESETO Conference of Philosophy Session 5 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Space Preliminary Reflection on an Archaeology of Primordial Spatiality LIU Shengli Peking University Abstract The fundamental significance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of space in his early masterpiece, Phenomenology of Perception (hereafter referred as PhP), has been largely underestimated, if not completely ignored, in the literature of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. This underestimation can be traced back to the received view that space problem is not the primary theme of PhP, but only a touchstone for the general theses Merleau-Ponty wants to defend. This paper tries to argue that even space problem is not the chief concern of PhP in the thematic sense, it has fundamental importance in the argumentative sense. We will show that the chief concern of PhP is to estab- lish the primitive openness of human consciousness towards the world through the intermediary of body by characterizing the existential structure of human being as “being-in-the-world”. We will argue in this paper that the primitive structure of being-in-the-world is ultimately revealed through an integrated spatial archaeology which is nothing but Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of space. The spatial archaeol- ogy of the lived body establishes the rootedness of consciousness in its body, while the spatial archaeology of the perceived world further reveals the primordial hold of the body on its world. Only by this integrated spatial archaeology can the general thesis of “being-in-the-world” be finally established. Towards the end of the paper, we will explicate the argumentative significance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of space by clarifying the fact that space is one of the primordial expressions of our being-in- the-world.
    [Show full text]
  • Art Bulletin, 74.4 (Dec. 1992)
    1992 Mark Antliff. “Cubism, Celtisms, and the Body Politic.” Art Bulletin , 74.4 (Dec. 1992): 655-68. Print. The author shows how Bergsono’s philosophy was used to support Celtic left-wing nationalism in Brittany (via Putteau cubism). David Ayers. Wyndham Lewis and Western Man . New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992: 251. Print. See Ch. II, “Bergson,” 16-29. The author states: “But it is paradoxically Bergson who is central, to any consideration of how Lewis conceives the self. Although Bergson is usually treated with hostile scorn, particularly in Time and Western Man , his work provides Lewis with an essential conceptual framework” (p. 16). Ernesto Ballesteros Arranz. Presencia de Schopenhauer . Cuenca, Spain: Ediciones de la Universidad Castilla-La Mancha, 1992: 76. Humanidades, 2. Print. The author deals with Bergson and Jean Piaget in relation to Schopenhauer. Eng. Trans. The Presence of Schopenhauer. Karen Dean Benson. “Education as Developing Self: The Importance of Feeling and Intuition.” Diss. U of California-Berkeley, 1992: 499. UMI no. AAC 9304857. DAI, 53.10 (1993). Print. The author states in her abstract: “Drawing upon Jung, Langer, Bergson, and Noddings, the feeling and intuiting components as educationally neglected aspects of the self are investigated within the formulation of a self that is at once universalistic in nature but also admits of a variety of cultural and individual elements” (p. 3470). Henri Bergson, Lettere a Xavier Léon e ad altri . Ed. Renzo Ragghianti. Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1992, 187. (Instituto Italiano per Gli Studi Filosofici, Serie Testi, 12) This consists of heretofore unpublished letters by Bergson to the editor of the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale (Xavier Léon).
    [Show full text]
  • Lived and Grasped Experience in the Aesthetics of Lars-Ivar Ringbom
    Lived and grasped experience in the aesthetics of Lars-Ivar Ringbom Jan-Ivar Lindén This essay is about neither the biography of Lars-Ivar Ringbom, including his role as an influential professor in art history and his contributions to Finnish modernism, nor the interesting relation between Lars-Ivar and his no-less influential son Sixten Ringbom, also a professor in art history.1 Instead, I will focus on the topic mentioned in the title: lived and grasped experience. This thematically elaborated perspective has as its main purpose rendering the aesthetics of Ringbom accessible by stressing the plausible aspects and, in this way, the approach is nourished by what is often called the hermeneutic principle of charity. The older philosophical tradition plays an important role in this context, but at the same time Ringbom’s seminal work on The Battle Concerning Illusion in Painting (Kampen om illusionen i måleriet),2 published in 1931, is one of the early Scandinavian texts making an original contribution to those currents of thought which were of great importance on the Continent in the first decades of the twentieth century (and that have found a revival in the contemporary interest in phenomenology and questions of embodiment).3 I also stress the parallels between the phenomenological concept of lived experience and central issues in the so-called philosophy of life, represented 1 Concerning this relation, see Marja Väätäinen, ‘From Ringbom to Ringbom: The Art of Art History of Lars-Ivar Ringbom and Sixten Ringbom: A Mythmaker and a Myth-Breaker in Åbo, Finland’ Journal of Art Historiography, No.
    [Show full text]
  • The Problem of Nature in the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty
    Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 5-8-2020 The Problem of Nature in the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty Alessio Rotundo Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Part of the Continental Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Rotundo, A. (2020). The Problem of Nature in the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1868 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. THE PROBLEM OF NATURE IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MERLEAU-PONTY A Dissertation Submitted to Duquesne University Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Alessio Rotundo May 2020 Copyright by Alessio Rotundo 2020 THE PROBLEM OF NATURE IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MERLEAU-PONTY By Alessio Rotundo Approved on December 9th, 2019 ________________________________ ________________________________ Dr. Laney Rodemeyer Dr. Fred Evans Associate Professor Professor Duquesne University Duquesne University Philosophy Philosophy ________________________________ Dr. Anthony Steinbock Professor Stony Brook University Philosophy ________________________________ ________________________________ Dr. Daniel Selcer Dr. Kristine L. Blair Associate Professor and Interim Chair Dean, Duquesne University Duquesne University McAnulty College and Graduate School Philosophy of Liberal Arts iii ABSTRACT THE PROBLEM OF NATURE IN THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF MERLEAU-PONTY By Alessio Rotundo May 2020 Dissertation supervised by Dr. Lanei Rodemeyer In my dissertation, I show that Merleau-Ponty’s idea of nature yields a double meaning: nature as ensemble of genetic and productive processes that are attainable in experience (phenomenal nature) and nature as that which enables this experience (transcendental nature).
    [Show full text]
  • HORIZON 8 (2) 2019 : I. Research : J. Čapek : 516–535
    HORIZON 8 (2) 2019 : I. Research : J. Čapek : 516–535 ФЕНОМЕНОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ ИССЛЕДОВАНИЯ • STUDIES IN PHENOMENOLOGY • STUDIEN ZUR PHÄNOMENOLOGIE • ÉTUDES PHÉNOMÉNOLOGIQUES https://doi.org/10.21638/2226-5260-2019-8-2-516-535 RENAUD BARBARAS AND THE MULTIPLE MEANING OF “LIFE”1 JAKUB ČAPEK PhD in philosophy, Associate Professor. Charles University, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Faculty of Arts. 116 38 Prague, Czech Republic. E-mail: jakub.capek@ff .cuni.cz Th e recent philosophy of Renaud Barbaras counts among the most original contributions to the phenomenology of life. My article examines it in the light of some conceptual observations based on the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Th e early phenomenological texts illustrate the complexity of the phenomenological approach to the living inasmuch as “life” can be said in diff erent ways, it is plural in meaning; further, life is also plural in that it can be attributed to a plurality of beings (consciousness, organisms, certain forms of existence, etc.). When developing his own account, Barbaras starts from a profound analysis of the phenomenological idea of correlation and comes to a new notion of life which is no longer attributed to organisms but to the world. Th e article critically follows this move from the life of organisms to the life of the world and articulates certain questions that this move can raise. Th e background of these questions is the double plurality of the notion of life. Even though saying that “life” has multiple meanings and attributions is purely formal and general, this multiplicity can serve as a ground for the phenomenological analysis of the way life is indeed experienced in its diff erent meanings.
    [Show full text]
  • The Problem of History in the Temporal Ethics of Henri Bergson
    The Problem of History in the Temporal Ethics of Henri Bergson, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze David Ventura Royal Holloway, University of London PhD in Philosophy Declaration of Authorship I, David Ventura, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: _______________________________ Date: 23/03/2020 2 Abstract This thesis explores the ethics of relating oneself to temporality that emerges in the philosophies of Henri Bergson, Emmanuel Levinas and Gilles Deleuze. Focusing on Bergson’s, Levinas’ and Deleuze’s respective suggestions as to how an ethical relation to a time of novelty is effectuated, this thesis argues that each of those ethical models retains a problematic relation to history, and that a potential resolution to this problem is only found in Deleuze and Guattari’s joint work. Starting with an exploration of Bergson’s metaphysical writings, this thesis argues that Bergson’s conception of intuition remains insufficiently attuned to that practice’s implication with the domain of history, and that this presents a problem for Bergson’s ethical philosophy. The thesis then turns to Bergson’s The Two Sources of Morality and Religion to argue that this text, despite seemingly historicising the intuition, in fact fails to provide a resolution to the problem of history that announces itself in Bergson’s metaphysical writings. Motivated by these failures in the Bergsonian oeuvre, this thesis then turns its attention to two self-professed Bergsonians, Levinas and Deleuze, to consider the extent to which their respective ethical philosophies can be said to provide a resolution to the Bergsonian problem of history.
    [Show full text]
  • Psychoanalysis of Nature the Mutual Transference Between the Body and the World
    MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY Psychoanalysis of Nature The Mutual Transference Between the Body and the World by Stefan Bogdan Drapac. A thesis submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of the requirement for degree of Master Program Department of Philosophy Memorial University Newfoundland May/2019 St. John’s Newfoundland and Labrador ABSTRACT The purpose of this thesis is to pursue the posthumous conversation started by Jacques Lacan and Maurice Merleau-Ponty during the last century. We are entitled to think that the friendly and critical exchange between psychoanalysis and phenomenology has not reached a climax point in which it can be asserted that there is no place for further research in this field. The legitimacy of our project is proven by the common preoccupation of Lacan and Merleau- Ponty, namely, the human enigma and the relation with the other. The investigation of the human leads Lacan to elaborate a topology that will help us to grasp the spatial structure of being, and which Merleau-Ponty will investigate, at the end of his work, as the ontology of the flesh. Conversely, thanks to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Lacan’s psychoanalysis sees itself stripped of mathematic dogmatism. For Merleau-Ponty, renewal of philosophy cannot be achieved without the contribution of psychoanalysis. The new approach will lead to a new elucidation of the notion of being in nature. Returning to the things themselves, Merleau-Ponty shows that Nature is not an object of knowledge or a positive science, but an original dimension of Being from where we emerged. In his last work, Merleau-Ponty is inspired by Freud’s psychoanalysis; he is immediately interested in the chiasm that exists between spirit and body, flesh and language and human and nature.
    [Show full text]
  • Passivity in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty Donald Jack Beith
    Passivity in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty Donald Jack Beith Department of Philosophy McGill University, Montreal Submitted August, 2012 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree Doctor of Philosophy. © Donald Beith 2012 Abstract Modern philosophy, from Descartes and Kant to early articulations of the phenomenological method, is based upon the premise that nature is synthetically established by human consciousness. In his late thinking, Merleau-Ponty rethinks the notion of passivity, a concept he opposes to the pure activity of constituting consciousness, and through which he explains how novel meaning can emerge in nature without being the product of constituting activity. While Merleau-Ponty's early works are systematic studies of human consciousness, and though many interpreters thereby take these works to be premised upon the primacy of consciousness as a constituting activity, I argue that there is a pivotal redefinition of passivity underway throughout his corpus. I explicate Merleau-Ponty's rethinking of passivity by drawing three progressively richer concepts of passivity out of his works: first is a structural passivity through which conscious or vital activities are mediated by an environment, second is a genetic passivity according to which the activities of consciousness and life are formed out of developmental processes, and third is a more radical sense of passivity which generates living activities without itself being a mode of constituting activity. Explaining this notion of generative passivity requires a complex investigation of the temporal structure within which original meaning emerges in life. I explain this temporal "institution" of meaning by studying specific phenomena: animal embryology and growth, as well as human development in childhood and puberty.
    [Show full text]
  • A Philosophical Anthropology Against The
    ELVIRA GROZA ADRIAN GROZA THE EXPERIENCE OF THE LIMIT OR THE FAILURE OF THE HUMAN: A PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AGAINST THE BACKDROP OF THE SACRED-PROFANE DIALECTIC Elvira Groza Colegiul Național “Mihai Eminescu”, Oradea, Romania. E-mail: [email protected] Adrian Groza Episcopia Ortodoxă Română, Oradea, Romania. Email: [email protected] Abstract: The text aims to analyze modes of subjectivation in the context of the meta- experience of the sacred-profane dialectic, particularly in the context of the full concealment of the sacred in the profane. The authors start from the hypothesis of the revelation of an irreducible ontological structure of the human, which is the experience of the paradoxical limit between aformal and formal. Consequently, the endeavor of the authors is structured as a way of confirming their hypothesis through: 1) analysing the specificity of Eliade’s anti-reductionist approach as a historian and philosopher of religions and his openness towards anthropology; 2) the application of phenomenology and hermeneutics in order to show Eliade’s research scheme: facts - forms - symbolical structures - existential structures; 3) explaining the experience of the paradoxical limit between the sacred and the profane as a structure of the human; 4) inventorizing the human structures and the modes of subjectivation generated by the irreducibility of the experience of the paradoxical limit; 5) a brief account of the reinterpretation of the experience of the limit as a structure of the humanity in contemporary phenomenological writings. The authors consider that the experience of the paradoxical limit between the sacred and the profane, the miracle and the ordinary, is irreducible, and the proof is the interpretation of that limit in contemporary philosophical works in the form of: sovereignty (Georges Bataille), self-affection of Life (Michel Henry), or desire of the self through the other (Renaud Barbaras).
    [Show full text]