Notes on Abstract Hermeneutics

Research in Phenomenology Research in Phenomenology 41 (2011) 45–59 brill.nl/rp

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback Södertörn University, Sweden

Abstract Using abstract art as a paradigm, this paper attempts to think, in a provisional manner, the parameters of what the author calls ‘abstract hermeneutics’—a way of thinking capable of responding to the withdrawing, or abstracting, movement of Being. Such abstract thinking— which is an abstracting thinking of the abstract—aims to step beyond objectivity precisely in order to return to phenomenological concreteness. Through an engagement with Heidegger’s understanding of the formal indicative role of the human being as sign (Zeichen), the affinity between the abstracting gestures of abstract art, and the absenting characteristic of human exis- tence, is explored.

Keywords Heidegger, hermeneutics, formal-indication, abstract art

Die Linien des Lebens sind verschieden Wie Wege sind, und wie der Berge Grenzen. Was hier wir sind, kann dort ein Gott ergänzen Mit Harmonien und ewigem Lohn und Frieden. Hölderlin, “An Zimmern”

Would it be something of note for philosophy today to address the question of abstract thought and, more specifically, aboutabstract hermeneutics, what- ever such a phrase might mean? When the challenge of our day seems still, and even more, one of stepping back “to the things themselves” to find a philosophical path to the concrete, why address such a question of the abstract? For, phenomenology’s call to the things themselves can be interpreted, and rightly so, precisely as a critique of abstraction. This can also be said in regard to the thoughts of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, insofar as they all share with phenomenology what could be called a desire or search for lost concreteness.

This critique of abstraction motivated by the search for lost concreteness should not, however, be confounded with the movement toward objectivity that defines modern philosophy. In their investigations concerning the origins and principles of human knowledge, British and French empiricists presented a critique of pure abstraction and its damage to philosophical thinking.1 Their critique of pure abstraction is a move away from ethereal metaphysics and toward the material, objective world. Modernity, motivated by a desire to grasp and control the material world, moves culturally from metaphysics to science. In the philosophical language of Modernity, it is the empirical and the objective, rather than the concrete, that stand opposed to the abstract. The call for stepping back to things themselves and the moving away from abstraction that this entails differs from the modern philosophical critique of pure abstraction insofar as what is being sought is concreteness rather than objectivity. Indeed, the stepping away from abstraction that can be seen in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology, Nietzsche’s genealogy, Freud’s psychoanaly- sis, and Marx’s political philosophy (as well as in several later developments of their thoughts)2 is a destruction or, if we prefer, a deconstruction of objectivity. The concrete is neither the objective nor what can be grasped through objectification. Objectification is abstraction performed in many ways, as reification and sublimation, as idealization or naturalization, alienating man from the concrete. Even if, in these movements of thought, the use of the terms ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ is quite confused and contradictory, it is clear that the fundamental opposition at work within them is to be found between objectivity and concreteness. The step back to things-in-themselves corresponds to the breaking-down of the naïve belief in objective reality, for it is only through this breaking-down that the concreteness of the real can break through. The concreteness of the real is ‘phantasmatic,’ as Reiner Schürmann wrote, in the introductory pages of Broken Hegemonies, while under Nietzsche’s inspiration: it can only be expe-

1) Condillac, “Des abstractions,” in Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines [ouvrage où l’on réduit à un seul principe tout ce qui concerne l’entendement humain] (Paris: Vrin, 2002): “Ces détails font voir quelle est l’influence des idées abstraites. Si leurs défauts ignorés ont fort obscurci toute la Métaphysique, aujourd’hui qu’ils sont connus, il ne tiendra qu’à nous d’y remédier,” 88. 2) There are several attempts to develop a philosophy of the concrete coming from these tradi- tions. See, for example, Herbert Marcuse, who tried to develop a philosophy of the concrete based on his readings of Heidegger and Marx. See Heideggerian Marxism, ed. R. Wollin and J. Albromeit (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); Gabriel Marcel, Essai de philosophie concrète (Paris: Gallimard, 1999); Karel Kosic, Dialektik des Konkreten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970); Jean Wahl, Vers le concret: Études de histoire de la philosophie contempo- raine (Paris: Vrin, 1932).