The Réalité-humaine of Henry Corbin Rebecca Bligh A Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD Goldsmiths College August 2011 1 Acknowledgements To my mother and father, for their love, and for letting me loose on books. To Howard Caygill, for, well, for being Howard Caygill. Special thanks to Deirdre Daly, Isabel Waidner. And to the lot of you: well, you know who you are. x Dedicated to the presence of my father, 14.04.1944 – 29.01.09, who just happens to share a birthday with Henry Corbin. 2 “Talem eum vidi qualem capere potui” 3 Abstract This thesis sets out to correlate—to hyphenate, even—the dual and historically disparate personae of Henry Corbin the first French translator of Heidegger, and Henry Corbin, Iranian Islamist and pioneering comparative philosopher. The thesis’ cynosure is a case for the philosophicohistorically contextual reconsideration of Corbin’s infamous translation of Heidegger’s term Dasein as “réalité-humaine”, as the result of the young Corbin’s own profound engagement with Heidegger as informed by the then philosophically avant-garde. A contextual reading of Corbin’s late “Biographical Post-Scriptum” is enriched by the introduction of a correspondence between Corbin and the Warburg Library (chiefly Gertrud Bing), discovered to lie in the Warburg Library Archive in London, but which to date does not appear in Corbinian literature. The self-proclaimed point, and cause of Corbin’s divergence from Heidegger is examined further. Traces of Corbin’s own professed “debt” to Heidegger will be shown to have indeed persisted throughout Corbin’s oeuvre. Close readings of the ontological role accorded to the transcendental imagination by Heidegger (after Kant) in the Kant book, and Heidegger’s proofs of the finitude of both Being and Dasein, as set forth in (the majority of) those texts included in Corbin’s 1938 Gallimard translation of Heidegger, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? (including Part 4 of the Kant book) and Parts 1-3 of the Kant book are read against Corbin’s own philosophy of the imaginal. 4 Table of Contents Acknowledgements p.2 Epigraph p.3 Abstract p.4 Introduction p.6 Chapter One: From Paris to Teheran p.9 Chapter Two: Réalité-humaine p.28 Plate: p.13 of J.P. Sartre’s Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions p.36 Chapter Three: Corbin’s Debt to Heidegger p.55 Chapter Four: The Imagination in Heidegger’s Kant book p.79 Chapter Five: Corbin’s Imaginal p.114 Plate: Stanley Spencer’s The Resurrection at Cookham p.118 Plate: p.25 of J.L. Nancy’s Noli me Tangere; Dürer’s 32nd woodblock of the Small Passion p.119 Conclusion p.140 Bibliography p.145 5 Introduction Chapter One of this thesis considers Henry Corbin’s contribution to the communication of philosophical ideas between Germany and France in the 1920s and ‘30s. Not only for his role as Heidegger’s translator, but also his reviews of German publications for various journals, his own sojourn at Marburg, his engagement with Warburg Institute and its scholars, most notably Gertrud Bing and Ernst Cassirer, as documented in the Corbin-Warburg correspondence, as both discussed and discovered here (to the extent that although it is known to, and has been archived with characteristic efficiency by the Warburg Institute Archive, I have come across no other reference to it in the Corbinian literature). Chapter Two offers a reading, and a strong and I hope self-evident case for a reconsideration of Corbin’s Gallimard translation of Heidegger in its philosophicohistorical context: which reading Ethan Kleinberg has called a ‘proudly revisionist’1 history. Of course, as Nigel Tubbs has remarked2, it is perfectly possible for Corbin to have got Heidegger “wrong” and still produced a rich interpretation, valuable in its own right: albeit those of a more utilitarian regard for the task of the translator may not greet this proposition with such sanguinity. I must concede to having become quite invested in Corbin’s having got Heidegger “right”, at least at the outset, and have taken an at times pedantic joy in exposing a number of errors—factual, historical and orthographic—which appear in the literature in relation to the translation. Doubtless, a motivating factor has been to clear Corbin’s name, as translator, of the odium and opprobrium heaped upon it. I have grown quite fond of him, after all, and I hope I have gone some way toward this. Ultimately, as the author of the statement that if he himself lays claim to phenomenology, ‘it is because philosophical hermeneutics is essentially the key that opens the hidden meaning (etymologically the esoteric) underlying the exoteric statement,’3 we may imagine Corbin to have remained quietly sanguine at the prospect of having produced a translation of Heidegger, and of Dasein in particular, whose full contemporary resonance was and is only available to a self-initiated elite, or group of adepts, as indicated by this reading. This close reading of the translation also serves the purpose of characterising Corbin’s reading of Heidegger, in its precision, in order to situate most precisely the point and character of his divergence from Heidegger, which he himself pinpoints quite clearly in the late transcript “From Heidegger to Suhravardî”,4 against what he kept with him. To wit, that while departing the Heideggerian Weltanschauung, the horizon of finitude, Corbin does not abandon Dasein, departing rather in such a way as potentiates, for Corbin, a restoration to Dasein of its vertical plane, its “verizons”, as we might say: which restorative potential arises precisely at the intersection of their relative accounts of the ontological role of the imagination. Their divergence at this point may be accounted for as broadly consequential upon their respective ontotheological preference for either the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo which so forms and informs the 1 Ethan Kleinberg, in his preliminary viva notes 2 In his viva notes 3 H.Corbin, “From Heidegger to Suhravardî, also cited in my chapter “Corbin’s Debt to Heidegger” 4 Not for Corbin, the Deleuzian enculage; Corbin’s style as a reader is courteous, rather, chivalric, even at the moment of parting 6 paradigm of traditional western metaphysics (Heidegger), vs. a prophetic hermeneutics informed by the device of the significatio passiva (Corbin). A further, highly consequential, “pre-existential” choice that characterises the Occidental/Oriental difference5 for Corbin, is that between an Averroean, or Avicennan cosmology, as I have set out to show here in my chapter “Corbin’s Imaginal”. Finally, the thesis segues into a close comparative reading of Heidegger’s treatment of the finitudes of Being and of Dasein, and the ontological role of the imagination as set out in Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique? and the Kant book, against Corbin’s own philosophy of the imaginal. For Heidegger, Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”, whereby ‘rather than utilising ‘the “old” concept of truth’—the adequatio, i.e., according to which knowledge must correspond to objects—we should assume instead ‘that objects must conform to our (a priori) knowledge’. far from doing away with the adequatio, not only presupposes but ‘indeed even grounds it for the first time’ in ontology, since the correspondence of ontic knowledge to beings as “objects” now depends on the knowledge of beings as beings, i.e. on ‘the unveiledness of the constitution of the Being of beings’.6 Here we have the Kantian genesis of the old philosophical tussle between what Geroulanos has called a rationalism ‘allied to neocriticism and the claim that science proceeds from the reasoning human mind and encompasses the world as it may be understood’, opposed to a realism characterised by the claim ‘that science seeks to comprehend a grand world external to man and proceeds from the real data provided by this world’, 7 both of which were challenged by the convergence of post-Newtonian physics, i.e., Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and the emerging post-humanist thought of the 1920s and ‘30s. As Heidegger observes in the Kant book, both of these models of truth are constituted of subject-object relations. Whether you proceed from reason to the object or vice versa, the one is required to correspond adequately to the other. These are both thus truths of the adequatio. What makes of Heideggerian ontology what Meillasoux has called a “correlationism”, the “truth of Dasein” a truth of correlation is not only that for Heidegger, as per the Kant book, ‘the “I propose” which “accompanies” all representing’ is the ‘“I think”’, as an “I propose”—and always an “I think [something]”, e.g., ‘“I think substance”, “I think causality”—or rather, ‘always already [an] “it means”’8—but also that which was so interesting for Corbin’s French philosophical peers of the early 1930s about the Uncertainty Principle e.g., which Kojève, e.g., is known to have read both into, and through Heidegger, is that Geroulanos has referred to as ‘the interaction between observing and observed systems’.9 That which in both Heideggerian and Corbinian terms, we might describe as the (Being-, or) being-revealed in being’s being-revealing. The truth of correlation is always an ontic-ontological truth because it is ontological truth, i.e., the knowledge of beings as beings, which makes ontic truth, the knowledge of beings, possible. For Heidegger, as for Corbin, it is always an experiential truth: a truth of Verstehen, “understanding” as which is experienced, undergone; and of aleitheia, revelation. 5 N.B., this is not an earthly geographic distinction; there are Orientals in the West (mystics) for Corbin, as he is quick to aver. 6 M. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, ibid.