Diapositiva Ljubljana, 2011 Wen-Sheng WANG HOW IS ARISTOTLE'S CONCEPTION OF PHYSIS IMPLICATED IN HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY? -WITH SPECIAL CONSIDERATION GIVEN TO HUSSERL'S THOUGHT CONCERNING ETHICS We know Aristotle divides sciences (episteme) into three parts: physical 3 science (theoretike), productive science (poietike), and practical science (praktike). (Metaphysics, 1025b 19-25) They concern themselves with different classes of things: physis, techne, and ethos. Physis is of those things that are generated by nature. That from which they are generated is matter. That which they become is form. So physis is characterized such that the form is generated from the matter itself (1032a 16-18). Techne is those things that are generated artificially. In contrast to physis, the form of techne is not generated from matter itself, but from the soul of a human being. (1032b 1-3) However, is it that techne stands inevitably in contrast to physis? Aristotle's example of health can answer this question. The process of medical healing is a kind of techne. The physician follows and really does his conception of process as to how a patient is to be healthy. Aristotle's following saying is very meaningful: "If the subject is to be healthy this must first be present, e.g. a uniform state of body." (1032b 5-7) This process is called production, not a natural, but an artificial "making" (1032a 2628), which is meant by techne. According to Aristotle, the process from a final something which the physician himself can produce towards health is called "making" (1032b 10). The whole process consists in "thinking" and "making". The point is that the physician should realize his medical thinking in a present patient which Aristotle stresses as "that" (tode ti) (1032b 20). The present patient is something that preexists. What preexists is of the level of matter that Aristotle especially characterizes as an invalid person, namely a person in the "privation" of health. Aristotle points out that a man becomes healthy from disease as the privation or absence of health. For health is the substance (ousia) of disease. (1032b 30-1033a 14) If a man becomes healthy, its process is the actualization or recovery of the absent health. So the physician must take care of this meaning of health as follows: he produces health according to the form, but in consideration of the matter from which the form is generated. We see this as a combination of physis and techne in how techne is oriented to physis. A person would doubt whether Aristotle thinks the generation of all techne is oriented to the generation of physis. We believe in general, for example, a man builds a house whose form is not generated from bricks or wood itself, but from his soul; a house is not the substance of bricks, because bricks can become something other, e.g., the Great Wall of China. In this sense Aristotle could not say the privation of house is in bricks, as if the bricks inescapably could become a house. But why does Aristotle still say: "Where the privation is obscure and has no name - e.g. in bronze the privation of any given shape or in bricks and wood the privation of the shape of a house - the generation is considered to proceed from these materials, as in the former case from the invalid" (1033a 5-10)? Our answer is: When, for example, a house is the privation in bricks, we could assume that a craftsman produces the house, as if it would be generated by nature. We remember that in his Critique of Judgment, Kant writes: "Beautiful art must look like nature, although we are conscious of it as art (craft)." (§ 45) When we read further: "Genius is the talent which gives the rule to art," and "Genius is the innate mental disposition through which nature gives rule to art" (§ 46). We see it as possible that a product (e.g., a house) can become what it is from bricks as it ought to be, because a genius gives the rule and the form of the house as if they were generated by nature from bricks. This house is a product of beautiful art. From such a viewpoint, we can say the generation of techne is oriented to the generation of physis through the medium of beautiful art. In parallel to this thesis: techne is oriented to physis since, for Aristotle, physical science is to be preferred to the productive and practical sciences, and theology is to be preferred to the physical and mathematical sciences (1026a 10-20). So according to this relationship, theology is the leading science over the other sciences. In The Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle shows a similar position. Here he evaluates theoretical or contemplative activity as the highest activity: the contemplative life is better than the life of enjoyment and the political life (1095b 15). Wisdom as complete knowledge of the first principles is beneficial for all animals and beings, while prudence (phronesis) is concerned 4 only with human goods (1141a 16-1141b 10). Prudence is inferior to wisdom (1143b 34) or prudence does not exercise authority over wisdom (1145a 6). And finally, when Aristotle sees happiness in accordance with the highest virtue, it is a contemplative activity, for it implies leisure, it is continuous rather than a practical activity, and it is self-sufficient (1177a 12-30). We must still emphasize that the contemplative or intellect activity is the divine element in human nature (1177a 12-18, 1177b 28). In the view of a human being as a kind of physis, the divine element as the pure form is generated from the matter of a human being. But this generation really is not merely by nature, but is often involved by choice through human will. This is mostly the human production. The process is set in motion not only by intellect and thought, but also by prudence and moral virtue (1139a 35). In other words, "the full performance of man's function depends upon a combination of prudence and moral virtue" (1144a 6). But Aristotle already points out that the product is only a particular end, not an end in itself, and the end in itself can be reached only by the contemplative activity. In this meaning, techne, regarding the production of human will in our practical life, still must be oriented to physis, regarding the generation by nature in the direction of the contemplative activity. In this combination of physis and techne, we see that phronesis as a doctrine of art (Kunstlehre) plays a middle role between physis and praxis. Under this discussion, we come to the theme of philia and sophia. Here I want to concern myself with two points: First point: Sophia, or wisdom, is the complete knowledge of the first principles. We know the first principle is for Aristotle something that moves without being moved. He has determined it as the object of desire and the object of thought. But although he says: "It causes motion as being an object of love..." (kinai de hos eromenon)(1072b 3), it is debatable whether the expression "love" is a real activity or only an analogue. Some scholars believe that the first principle is self-perfect actual, so that its presence provides a pursuer with actualization of potentiality; therefore, the relation of the moving pursuer to the unmoved mover is similar to, but really not, love itself (Volkmann-Schluck 1979: 195-196). This interpretation is originally based on the understanding that Aristotle values the physical (natural) generation from the moved to the unmoved rather than the generation out of human activity, despite the different meanings of love regarding Greek words "eros" and "philia". So "philosophy," originating from "philia-sophia," seems to be understood as pursuing wisdom rather than loving wisdom. We are moved to pursue wisdom, just as we love wisdom. 5 Second point: In The Nicomachean Ethics, philia can be also conceived as friendship. Friendship between relations might be distinguished and be of many kinds, but they all ultimately derive from paternal affection. The reason is "parents love their children as part of themselves" and "because that which comes from something else belongs to that from which it comes." (1161b 12-24) Similarly, we see for Aristotle that friendly feelings are distinguished, but their feeling for others are an extension of our feelings towards ourselves (1166a 1-2). But this self-love is not selfish, for man does it for his own good. A friend is another self. So when the good man acts for the sake of a friend, it belongs to the process of actualization of his own good. (1166a 15-20; 1167b 30-35) Because the sophia is the ultimate goal of natural generation of one's own good, philia now can be understood as derived from sophia. How, then, is the conception of the priority ofphysis in regard to techne and praxis implicated in Husserl's phenomenology? 6 II The phenomenological maxim "Back to the things themselves!" provokes us to think what the things themselves are or are not. Why does Husserl criticize expressions without meaning which should be obtained from the lived experience (I. Logische Untersuchung) or empty word-analysis under the influence of some scholastic philosophy (Philosophie als Strenge Wissenschaft, 27)? According to the discussion above, we can say that the meaning, which they express, is not generated from the matter of things themselves, but from the soul of a human being. Husserl's phenomenological thinking that the meaning of every predication must be originated from the pre-predicative experience is really based on the conception that form is generated from matter itself. We apply the phenomenological method epoche temporally to cease to conceive the meaning just constructed by the human soul. The phenomenological term "constitution" authentically signifies the generation of physis, not only in respect to the ontological genesis, but also in respect to the epistemological evidence of the things themselves. Further, the phenomenological kernel word "intentionality" certainly indicates a human activity, but it reflects the matter characteristic of the human consciousness itself. Husserl originally views human consciousness itself as a kind of physis of which the primary character of intentionality is understood to let its correlate "thing" be given as itself. The self-given-ness of a thing is shown completely according to its natural generation from matter to form. The question is whether or not the intentionality can let the thing be given in our consciousness without our technical (productive) contribution to the form or meaning, which could distort the authentic meaning generated from the matter of the thing itself, as Heidegger doubts in his Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (62-64, 132-133, 146-147). We understand that Husserl later penetrates into his genetic phenomenology in order to accomplish his idea of intentionality. In this way, the theme of passive synthesis of association indicates to us a starting point where the transcendental ego pole and its correlate both meet in an indifferent, co-present matter (hyle) phase and begin together their formation of meaning (Sinnbildung) by following their own generation of form from matter itself. Based on the passive synthesis, eidetic intuition manifests Husserl's conception ofphysis, too (Analysen zur Passiven Synthesis, Hua XI, 23). Either the ideation by the earlier Husserl or the eidetic variation by the later Husserl begins with an experienced instance. It plays also the role of matter by which generation aims at forming essence. The question as to how the essence as invariant can be acquired after multiple variations could be replied to more profoundly, when we explain it in view of the above-mentioned starting point, where every essential meaning develops and appears through the consciousness of differentiation in the face of the abstract moments that contrast with each other within a concrete gestalt-structure. This could make clear what Held has as an answer to that question: According to the rules that the essence as invariant brings to light, the reference of the consciousness of horizon is structuralized (Die Phänomenologische Methode, 29). For the essential rule and the horizon structure, both are generated from that starting point as gestalt-structure of the matter phase. Before we leave for the topic of ethics, two points should be highlighted. Firstly, Aristotle's concept of matter is different from Husserl's. Aristotle conceives the matter as a substance of outside thing, while Husserl understands the matter as sensile hyle within our sensibility and feeling, namely within our experience (Vetter [ed.]: Wörterbuch derphänomenolohischen Begriffe, "Hyle", S. 267). I concede this difference, and see Husserl's treatment of the kinesthetic consciousness assures this difference. Therefore, I do know what Husserl in the Ideas II asserts: "The traditional understanding of the hyle, sensations concerning features [Merkmale] of the thing, presupposes the kinesthetic sensations" (Hua IV, 56-57). Secondly, as already mentioned, the self-given-ness of a thing is shown completely according to its natural generation from matter to form. Does my 7 thesis take only one side of what Husserl asserts in the Ideals II in account: Nature is the foundation of the constitution of the personal world as the spiritual world, but ignore the other side: Spirit or soul (Geist) leads the constitution of the nature and the body and mind? My answer is just that the spirit must comprehend the direction of the natural generation from matter to form; the spirit lets nature generates itself as if that leads this. The spirit can do it, because it carries out the epoche, which lets itself and the nature be in an original hyletic relation. Leading of the spirit is not a "top-down" activity, but a "bottom-up" generative process. Now, we want especially to demonstrate that Husserl's conception of physis is reflected in his thinking of ethics. Naturally, because Husserl develops his ethics on the analogy of logics, we see already that the idea of physis is implicated in his introduction to the pure logics. In Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertethik 1908-1914 (Hua XXVIII) and Logische Untersuchungen: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik (1900), Husserl shows us, like Aristotle, three kinds of doctrines: theoretical, practical, and artistic. He says, according to some traditional understanding, the theoretical doctrine is concerned only with form and the practical as the artistic doctrine (Kunstlehre) is concerned also with material; but the artistic doctrine is mostly dependent on the psychology. (Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, 7) As a result, it is still in dispute whether logics or ethics is an empirical artistic doctrine or an idealistic theory. (Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertethik, § 2) Husserl makes clear that what is really at issue here is whether such artistic doctrine is dependent on a theory a priori or is itself an independent doctrine. (Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, 37-38) Husserl follows the first position, as he explains, "every normative and naturally practical discipline presupposes one or several theoretical disciplines as fundaments that must possess a theoretical content which is separable from all normalization."(47) This theoretical discipline is certainly not psychology, so we see Husserl's criticism of the logical psychologism and of a morality of sentiment (Gefühlsmoral). On the contrary, Husserl proposes pure logics and pure ethics, in order to provide criteria for the absolute normalization of logic and even science in general (255) on the one hand, and for ethics on the other hand. (Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertethik, § 2) But Husserl doesn't stick to a morality of understanding (Verstandesmoral) as an opponent of the morality of sentiment. Just as he favors Kant's and espe- 8 dally Leibniz's understanding of logics as pure and a priori, he sees it as his task "to construct the idea of pure logics on a sufficient broader basis" (Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, 223). He values Kant's contribution to the universal principles of ethics, but he sees it as a problem if this principle is only formal (Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertethik, § 5). Husserl actually does not refuse ethics as an artistic doctrine. He aims to connect the formal and material moments of ethics. Let us bring more implications of Husserl's conception of physis in regard to ethics to light. Artistic doctrine is originally techne, which, as we know, is generated artificially. Just as we note artistic doctrine is not generated from the matter itself but from the soul of the human being, so Husserl simply defines the artistic doctrine with respect to our goal positing (Zwecksetzung) (Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, 47). Regarding his newly published Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersenester 1920 und 1924 (Hua XXXVII), Husserl offers more details on the difference between artistic doctrine and theoretical science, namely the former is for the practical and the latter is for the theoretical interest (14-24). We understand artistic doctrine primarily as serving the concrete practical situation in relation to the different goals (14-15) and theoretical science as having the ultimate goal, though it would lay in infinity (17). When ethics is understood as artistic doctrine, it seems that what Husserl primarily cares about is whether the practical normative principle is only formal, not material, because this principle is generated just from our human soul, including our goal positing for the temporary concrete situation, but not for the ultimate goal. Husserl actually concedes that artistic doctrine ethics must be based on theoretical discipline. We could now interpret that techne, regarding the artistic doctrine, is oriented to physis, regarding the theoretical discipline. In other words, man produces the ethical doctrine to realize some goals in front of a certain situation or material condition, as if that doctrine could be generated from material or matter itself; the artistic doctrine is oriented to the natural ultimate goal. Since Husserl's conception of physis reflects the issue of genetic phenomenology and ethics, it is not odd that Husserl treats the topic of ethics more and more in connection with the genetic phenomenology: First, we see that Einleitung in die Ethik indicates this direction. By Husserl's complementary explanation of the ethics as artistic doctrine, he "extends the ethical judgment of the will or the goal of will to corresponding habitual property of the personality and to the underground of helpful or unfavorable dispositions" (8-9) and says: "So far as one personality has the faculty of self-evaluation, self-determination and self-education, and has also the faculty to 9 10 be consciously guided by the ethical obligatory norms in the self-formation, then all properties, including the intellectual property of a personality evidently fall within his/her own ethical domain"(9) (emphasis added). So we see the ethical artistic doctrine now in a more profound meaning, as it resides in the self-education of personality. In the process of self-education, we learn, as Aristotle shows in his The Nicomachean Ethics, how we are not to be moved (on the ground of our feelings (pathos)), but to be disposed (on the ground of our dispositions (hexis)) toward moral virtue (1106a 1-12). The word "faculty" (Fähigkeit) that Husserl uses above denotes actually what Aristotle means by ergon as a product of faculty (1098a 16), rather than by dynamis as mere faculty (1105b 22). In order to have ergon regarding a human being as a human being, our conduct should be regulated through phronesis (intellectual virtue), which is generated from hexis under our exercise and practice. In connection with Aristotle's conception of ethics, we understand that Husserl now makes an ethical judgment more from the viewpoint of properties of personality, which include feelings, faculties, dispositions, and intellects. It means, basically, that human goodness is not separable from human nature and that essence is generated from the matter itself. So we see that Husserl's conception of physis reflects the connection between his ethics and genetic phenomenology. Second, Husserl concerns himself with not only the individual ethics, but also the social ethics (Einleitung in die Ethik, 12-13). He emphasizes indeed that in the difference from morality, it is then that ethics is an artistic doctrine of right actions and the goals of such, and more so a general range of ethical right and wrong is to be determined. Husserl notices that the absolute ought/necessity for a man is characterized by "doing well to his next, his community, and lastly the humanity," inasmuch as "he does or will do it from his love intention (Liebesgesinnung)" (10). This thinking corresponds with what Husserl says in his lectures on Fichte (1917/18): "And the more truth life, the more love and eudemonia" (Und je mehr wahres Leben, umso mehr Liebe und Seligkeit) (Aufsätze und Vorträge 1911-1921, Hua XXV, 285), while we know the themes in Fichte's Lectures are developed in relation to his ideas of renewal and critique, which are presented in the Japanese Kaizo articles of 1923-24 (Aufsätze und Vorträge 1922-1937, Hua XXVII, 3-124). Certainly, the topic of ethical love reflects Husserl's conception of the judgment of ethics in consideration of the property of a personality. But we agree with what Janet Donohoe shows in her Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity (2004) - that the ethical love should be understood in view of Husserl's genetic phenomenology. According to her, the community of ethical love belongs to the secondary level, which is derived from an intersubjectivity at the most fundamental level, and the constitution of such intersubjectivity "is grounded in the anonymous constituting of time that allows for a more origi-nary connection between the ego and Other" (144). This is another point of the connection between Husserl's ethics and genetic phenomenology. As a neo-Aristotelian, Alasdair MacIntyre writes in his Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990): "For part of what put the philosophical tradition which runs from Socrates to Aquinas at odds with the philosophical thought of modernity, whether encyclopaedic or genealogical, was both its way of conceiving philosophy as a craft, a techne, and its conception of what such a craft in good order is."(61) We see he follows Aristotle's words: "Every good is ergon of a techne" (The Nicomachean Ethics, 1152b 19), and he points out that the end products of techne are characterized by "reasoning, which it requires both intellectual and moral virtues." (61; 1140a 20-21) Besides that, he notes our "enquiry into the nature of what is the good and the best" is a science (episteme) and a "master-craft" (61; 1094a 27). At the beginning of the Metaphysics is techne, and the "master-craftsman" is "the person with sophia" or "philosophos." (61) So, a teleological process runs through Aristotle's three sciences—physical, productive, and practical science—of which we at the opening of this paper spoke: from productive to physical, by way of practical science. How they correspond: of physis, techne, and ethos, techne is oriented to physis, but through the media of ethos. Under another perspective, the character of techne is not only confined within the productive science, but extended into the scope of the practical science. Because the ultimate goal of the physical science is not only theoretical understanding of the human good, but also the practical embodiment in the life of the theory enquirer himself (Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, 63), the virtue is needed for the practice of techne, which is oriented to the genuine good as the ultimate goal. The virtue self is a techne, or techne is extended as a "virtue-guided craft" (63). We know the moral virtue and the intellectual virtue (phronesis) interact and determine themselves and each other during our practice and exercise. The ultimate goal is the telos of physis. In view of MacIntyre's reflecting back to Aristotle's thinking, we understand with certainty that Husserl estimates his ethics as an artistic doctrine in the sense that our thesis in this paper shows: phronesis plays the mediate role between sophia and praxis, which includes philia. 12 References: Aristoteles: Metaphysik, übersetze und herausgegeben von Franz F. Schearz, Stuttgart: Phillip Reclam, 1970. Aristotle: Metaphysics, translated by W. D. Ross, eBooks@Adelaide, 2007. Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics, translated by J.A.K. Thomson, England: Penguin, 2004. Donohoe, Janet: Husserl on Ethics and Intersubjectivity: From Static to Genetic Phenomenology, New York: Humanity Books, 2004. 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Xin YU A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION ON EINFÜHLUNG AND EINSFUHLUNG.1 FROM TH. LIPPS, M. SCHELER TO E. STEIN () 13 Edith Stein was one of the first phenomenologists that gave considerable reflection and thought to the problem of empathy [Einfühlung]. The concept of empathy got its classic formulation in the works of Theodor Lipps. Stein was familiar with Lipps' works and utilized his reflections on empathy in order to contextualize her own response which was published in her 1916 doctoral dissertation, On the problem of Empathy. She wrote: "Almost immediately, I was given another bitter pill to swallow: [Husserl] required that... I had to make a thorough study of the long list of works by Theodor Lipps."2 At the same time, we can see the great influence of Max Scheler in Stein's On the Problem of Empathy. Of course, Scheler was affected by Stein in turn. Thus, in this essay I will start from Lipps' concept of "empathy", interpret how Stein refuted him and her own ideas, then turn to Scheler, and at last make clear the relationship between Stein and Scheler on the concepts of Einfühlung and Einsfühlung. 1 In English translation, Einfühlung is translated as empathy. But there is no equivalence of the word "Einsfühlung". Einsfühlung was translated as the feeling of oneness by English translator Waltraut Stein in Edith Stein's On the Problem of Empathy. And in Scheler's book of The Nature of Sympathy, the German word was translated as the feeling of identification by Peter Heath. Therefore, I choose to use the original German words to avoid the problem of translation. 2 E. Stein, Life in a Jewish Family (1891-1916): An Unfinished Autobiography, trans. Josephine Koeppel, O.C.D. The Collected Works of Edith Stein: Volume I. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1986, pp. 269-270. 14 1. Theodor Lipps on aesthetic empathy There is a well known example of aesthetic empathy in Lipp, i.e. the example he uses of the circus acrobat. Lipps uses the circus acrobat to help his readers understand what he meant by empathy. As such, Lipps outlines that when I watch the acrobat moving on a tightrope, "I am one with the acrobat and go through his motions inwardly."3 This example illustrates well what Lipps means by his concept of empathy, and more precisely, his concept of aesthetic empathy. "In a word, I am now with my feeling of activity totally in the moving figure. I am also spatially, insofar as there can be the question of a spatial extension of the ego, in the place of that figure. I am transported into it. As far as my consciousness is concerned, I am totally identical with it. While I feel myself active within the perceived figure, I feel myself to be at the same time free, light, and proud. That is aesthetic imitation, and it is at the same time aesthetic Einfühlung." 4 Lipps claimed there is a fusion between the empathizing subject and his object. Just as he himself announced, "Einfühlung is the fact described here that the object is ego and thereby the ego object. It is the fact that the contrast between myself and the object disappears.. "5 "A distinction only arises when I setp out of complete empathy and reflect on my 'real T'"(Empathy, p. 16) Lipps characterized empathy as "a process of involuntary, inner imitation whereby a subject identifies through a feeling with the movement of another body [...] Because empathy involves an involuntary projection into something else, the individual subject tends to lose itself."6 3 E. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, (English translation of Zum Problem der Einfühlung), trans. Waltraut Stein, O.C.D. The Collected Works of Edith Stein: Volume III. Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989, p. 16. In following text, I will simply designate the source after the quotation as (Empathy, p.x). 4 Th. Lipps, "Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung, und Organempfindungen", in: Archiv für die gesammte Psychologie, 1(1903), pp. 185-204, p. 191. The English translation is borrowed from Gustav Jahoda, "Theodor Lipps and the Shift from 'Sympathy' to 'Empathy'", in: Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 41(2), pp. 151-163; Spring 2005. Published online in: Wiley Interscience (www.interscience.wiley.com), p. 155. 5 Th. Lipps, "Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung, und Organempfidungen", p. 188 (Jahoda, "Theodor Lipps," pp. 154f.). 6 Rudolf A. Makkreel, "How is Empathy Related to Understanding?," in: Issues in Husserl's Ideas II, ed. Thomas Nenon and Lester Embree, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996, p. 199. What he stressed is the lost of the subject in the object. But such dissolution of the "I" in the object is just what Stein opposed. 2. Edith Stein on Einfühlung and Einsfühlung a) Stein's refutation of Lipps' understanding of empathy and her own concept of empathy (Einfühlung) Stein unequivocally rejected Lipps' concept of empathy. She said, "(Lipps' empathy is) exactly what we no longer recognize as empathy." As to the example of the acrobat, she points out, "I am not one with the acrobat but only 'at' him." She interpreted that the experience "I move" is not primordial;7 "it is non-primordial for me." (Empathy, p. 16) Primordiality and non-primordiality are very important concepts for Stein, which she used to descriptively differentiate between acts such as memory, expectation, fantasy, as well as empathy. In Stein's view, "all our own present experiences are primordial." "But not all experiences are primordially given nor primordial in their content."(Empathy, p. 15 7) Such experiences include memory, expectation, and fantasy. As the acts to be carried out here and now, these acts are primordial. But their object, that is, the content of these acts are non-primordial, because they only represent their object, and do not have the object bodily present before them. Stein illustrates by means of the example of the memory of a joy the primordiality and non-primordiality of this kind of acts. When I am remembering a joy, the act of remembering which I am doing now is primordial. And in this sense, all the experiences might have the character of primordiality. On the other hand, however, the content of joy remembered is non-primordial. It is a past primordial joy. When the joy happened in the past, that is, in "a former 'now'", in Stein's term, it was given primordially. But now the content is not present, rather is represent in my memory. In a word, "the present non-primordiality points back to the past primordiality."(Empathy, p. 8) Empathy also has the same character. It "is primordial as present experience though non-primordial in content."(Empathy, p. 10) But there is a distinction between memory and empathy. In the memory, the primordially remembering "I" meets with the non-primordially remembered "I". The remembering "I" is the subject, and the remembered "I" in turn is the object. They do not coincide with each other. The remembering "I" is 7 The equivalence of "primordial" in German is "original". Marianna Sawicki translated it as "original" in her works. But in accordance with the English translator of On the problem of empathy I use the word of primordial. present, but the remembered "I" is past. Nevertheless, there is a consciousness of sameness in memory. The remembering "I" and the remembered "I" are joined together by a continuity of experience. How about empathy? "The subject of the empathized experience, however, is not the subject empathizing, but another."(Empathy, p. 10) It's the essential distinction between empathy, on the one hand and memory, expectation, fantasy, on the other hand. These two subjects in empathy are separate. For example, when I am empathizing the other's joy, I do not have the experience that I feel this joy primordially. While the other subject feels his joy primordially, I only experience it as non-primordial. "In my non-primordial experience I feel, as it were, led by a primordial one not experienced by me but still there, manifesting itself in my non-primordial experience."(Empathy, p.11) Thus, Stein gave a definition of empathy as following, 16 "empathy in our strictly defined sense as the experience of foreign consciousness can only be the non-primordial experience which announces a primordial one." (Empathy, p. 14) Now we can turn back to the example of the acrobat. In Stein's view, I am empathizing the motion of the acrobat as I watching him on the tightrope, but the experience of "move" is non-primordial for me. "And in these non-primordial movements I feel led, accompanied, by his movements." (Empathy, p. 17) According to what we mentioned above, the moving acrobat and the empathizing I are two separate subjects. The movements are only primordial for the moving acrobat, not for the watching "I". Thus, it's impossible for the empathizing subject and the empathized "object", that is, the subject of the movement to be one, as Lipps formulated. Further, Stein claimed that the movements made by the spectator are primordial for himself. It is possible that the spectator is unconscious of his own movement, for example, "he may pick up his dropped program and not 'know' it". The reason is that he is immersing in empathy. But this does not mean the spectator's "I" becomes the acrobat's "I". The act of picking up is still primordial for him at that time, although he is not conscious of it when it happens. If he then reflects on this, he will find his own primordial movement at that time. In contrast with this, the experience of the acrobat can never be primordial for the spectator. Stein therefore commented, "what led Lipps astray in his description was the confusion of self-forgetfulness, through which I can surrender myself to any object, with a dissolution of the 'I' in the object."(Empathy, p. 17) Thereby Stein made a distinction between empathy and a feeling of oneness, that is, Einfühlung and Einsfühlung, in German. The prefix "ein-" means "into", but "eins-" means "one". Einfühlung is not to be mixed up with Einsfühlung. b) Stein on Einsfühlung Let us see how Stein elaborated her conception of the feeling of oneness [Einsfühlung]. When we are all joyful over the same event, such as a good news, we have "the same" feeling. This "same" feeling needs to be investigated closely. On the one hand, I have a joy for the good news. On the other hand, I empathize that other people hearing the good news with me at the same time also be joyful over it. In the pattern of primordiality and non-prim ordiality, my joy is primordial and other's joy empathized by me is non-primordial. But 17 in this case, it seems that the boundary between primordiality and non-pri-mordiality is disappears. In fact, Stein claimed, the feeling of "I" and "you" coincide "in every respect", "from the 'I' and 'you' arises the 'we' as a subject of a higher level."(Empathy, p. 17) It is to be noted that it's not I and you who have the "same" feeling, but "we" have. "A 'we,' not an 'I,' is the subject of the empathizing."(Empathy, p. 18) She held that the feeling such as joy could get enriched since there is a difference between my feeling and others' feeling. I grasp empathically this difference, and in a particular situation can my joy go beyond the obstacle, and then arrive at a higher level. Should the others in the same situation experience the same thing, "we" feel a joy of a higher level. It is properly what she means by the feeling of oneness, that is, Einsfühlung. As we have seen, Edith Stein creatively distinguished Einsfühlung from Einfühlung. This distinction had great influence on Scheler. As Marianne Sa-wicki said, "This work [Zur Phaenomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass], revised and expanded, was brought out again in 1923 under the title Wesen und Formen der Sympathie [...]. The expansion appears to have come in response to Edith Stein's distinction between Einfühlung and Einsfühlung [.. .]"8 8 Marianne Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science. The Literacy of Invesitgative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein, Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, p. 33. 18 In fact, Scheler and Stein affected and inspired each other on the problem of intersubjective experience. Stein had apparently carefully studied Scheler's works on sympathy as she prepared this dissertation. But what she read was the first version of this book. There is a huge difference between the two versions. And to some extent, we can say that Stein contributed to the expansion and revise of second version of Scheler's Sympathy. 3. Scheler on Einfühlung and Einsfühlung a) Scheler's classification and Einsfühlung In the first version of his book, Scheler classified three kinds of feelings as community of feeling [Miteinanderfühlen], fellow-feeling [Mitgefühl] and emotional infection [Gefühlsansteckung]. For Scheler, (1) community of feeling is the highest type of fellow-feeling. "It is a feeling-in-common."9 A and B as subjects feel the same feeling together. "Here the emotion that I perceive in another person is also my emotion, yet at the same time I am aware of the other's emotion as his or her own."10 The typical example is the parents feel the "same" sorrow for their dead child. (2) Fellow-feeling "involves intentional reference of the feeling of joy or sorrow to the other person's experience."(Sympathy, p. 13) Such a feeling is based on an act of understanding or 'vicarious' feeling [Nachfühlung]. Here B's commiseration is directed to A's suffering. These two are different facts. (3) Emotional infection "occurs only as a transference of the state of feeling, and does not presuppose any sort of knowledge of the joy which others feel."(Sympathy, p. 15) For example, we step into a pub and the cheerful atmosphere there will "infect" us. But this emotional infection has nothing to do with genuine fellow-feeling. In the second version of his Sympathy, Scheler revised his classification and added "emotional identification" [Einsfühlung] as the fourth type. It is evident that Stein's distinction between Einfühlung and Einsfühlung played a significant role in this expansion. Here Scheler also dealt with the example of the acrobat of Lipps. He was in agreement with Stein on the critique for Lipps at all. He claimed, "Lipps has wrongly sought to construe this as a case of aesthetic empathy."(Sympathy, p. 9 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, (English translation of Wesen und Formen der Sympathie) trans. Peter Heath, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul LTD, 1954, p. 13. In following text, the source will be simply designated as (Sympathy, p. x) after the quotation. 10 Eugene Kelly, Structure and Diversity. Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler, Dordrecht/ Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, p. 147. 18) As we elaborated above, aesthetic empathy by Lipps means the subject sunk itself completely in its aesthetic object. Scheler quoted Stein's word, "I am not 'one with' the acrobat; I am only 'with' him"(Sympathy, p. 18) and claimed there is "a fictional 'I'" that carries out the intention and impulse of movement, which is a distinct phenomenon from "my individual self". "It is simply that my attention is passively fixed throughout on the fictional 'I', and by way of this, on the acrobat."(Sympathy, p. 18) In a word, Scheler does not agree with Lipps that there is the identification between the spectator and the acrobat. Scheler then put forward his own conception of Einsfühlung, which was sharply different from Stein's although her distinction between Einfühlung and Einsfühlung inspired him. Scheler characterizes Einsfühlung as following. "The true sense of emotional unity, the act of identifying one's own self with that of another, is only a heightened form, a limiting case as it were, of infection." His Einsfühlung "represents a limit in that here it is not only the separate process of feeling in another that is unconsciously taken as one's own, but his self (in all its basic attitudes), that is identified with one's own self." (Sympathy, p. 18) Rudolf A. Makkreel comprehends these words as such, "Einsfühlung was actually endorsed by Max Scheler as a plausible intensification of Einfühlung whereby the self is either totally, even hypnotically, swallowed up by the other, or vice versa where someone else is absorbed by me."11 Here we find an evident mistake or misunderstanding. Scheler clearly expresses that Einsfühlung is "a heightened form... of infection [Gefühlsansdeckung]". Einfühlung is not included in Scheler's classification of the intersubjective acts of emotion. In Scheler, we can often find the concept of projective empathy [projektive Einfühlung], but it is a negative concept by which Scheler designates Lipps' concept of empathy. Can we draw the conclusion that there is no concept of Einfühlung except projective empathy in Scheler? We cannot answer this question with a simple yes or no. 19 b) Scheler on Nachfühlen or Einfühlung in Stein's sense In fact, there is an understanding of Einfühlung as characterized by Stein in Scheler, that is, the reproduction of feeling or "vicarious" feeling or Nachfühlen in German. At some points in her text, Stein expressly showed her concept of empathy [Einfühlung] was identical with Scheler's Nachfühlen. For example, she said at one point, "Scheler interprets the understanding of in-(or, as he 11 Rudolf A. Makkreel, "How is Empathy Related to Understanding?", in: Issues in Husserls Ideas II, ed. Thomas Nenon & Lester Embree, Dordrecht/Boston/London, 1996, p. 200. 20 says, after-)feeling (empathy) and fellow feeling in the same way." 12 And, in turn, Scheler also referred the reader to E. Stein when he was discussing the conception of reproduction of feeling or vicarious feeling [Nachfühlen]. Scheler said, Witasek believes that what he had called "understanding" and "vicarious feeling" is only an "intuitive presentation of the experience in question". (Sympathy, p. 13) Then he referred the reads to Stein's on the Problem of Empathy in the footnote. Stein on her own part also said that Witasek takes empathy as an intuitive idea of another's experience. Thus, it is clear, that which Stein called Einfühlung but Scheler called Nachfühlen is the same thing. We have seen briefly how Stein described the essence of empathy [Einfühlung]. Now let us take a look at what Scheler said about reproduction of feeling (or "vicarious" feeling) [Nachfühlen]. Scheler claimed, "The reproduction of feeling or experience must be sharply distinguished from fellow-feeling." "In reproduced feeling we sense the quality of the other's feeling, without it being transmitted to us, or evoking a similar real emotion in us." He interpreted that "we feel the quality of the other's sorrow without suffering with him, the quality of his joy without ourselves rejoicing with him." In Stein's term, it means other's joy or sorrow is primordial for him, but non-primordial for me. Just as Scheler said, "I can quite visualize your feelings, but I have no pity for you." It means the reproduction of feeling "remains within the cognitive sphere, and is not a morally relevant act." (Sympathy, p. 9) Nevertheless, it is to be noted that empathy or Einfühlung is not the knowledge of foreign experience. "The experience back to which knowledge of foreign experience points is called empathy."(Empathy, p. 19) Here we must not go into the relationship of "empathy" to "knowledge of foreign experience". 4. The relationship of Einfühlung to Einsfühlung in Stein and Scheler Now it's confirmed that Stein's empathy [Einfühlung] and Scheler's reproduction of feeling [Nachfühlen] almost have the same meaning. Obviously, Einfühlung has a different function in Stein's theory from Nachfühlen in Scheler's theory. Now we will restrict ourselves only to the relationship of Einfühlung/ Nachfühlung to Einsfühlung in their theories. 12 See E. Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, footnote 27. Also see footnote 35, "Scheler raises the point that, in contrast with after-feeling [Nachfühlen] (our empathy), sympathy can be based on remaining in my own reproduced experiences that prevents genuine sympathy from prevailing." Stein outlined that it is, "Not through the feeling of oneness, but through empathizing, do we experience others. The feeling of oneness and the enrichment of our own experience become possible through empathy."(Empathy, p. 18) When I empathize your joy being the same as mine, and you empathize my joy being the same as yours, the subject of a higher level, "we", arises. But Scheler has a quite different view. He wrote, ".. .vicarious emotion [Nachfuh-lung] and fellow-feeling - completely exclude the sense of unity or true identification." (Sympathy, p. 33) According to Scheler, man is capable of achieving the identification only if the acts and functions operative in the cognitive, spiritual and rational sphere and the sphere of physical and corporeal sensation and sensory feeling are put out of action. Therefore, there is no identification where there is Nachfuhlung. However, we have found that the concept of Einsfuhlung actually has a totally different meaning in Scheler from in Stein. Stein mentioned in one footnote, "Scheler clearly emphasizes the phenomenon that different people can have strictly the same feeling (Sympathiegefuhle, pp. 9 and 31) and stresses that the various subjects are thereby retained. However, he does not consider that the unified act does not have the plurality of the individuals for its subject, but a higher unity based on them."(Empathy, endnote 28) 21 Here Stein particularly referred us to Scheler's book of Sympathiegefühle, page 9, where is the section of "Miteinanderfühlen".13 It is apparent that Stein's concept of Einsfühlung is based on Scheler's Miteinanderfühlen. It is the highest form of fellow-feeling for Scheler. And fellow-feeling [Mitgefühl] is based on Nachfühlung, as we showed above. So we can infer that Miteinanderfühlen is based on Nachfühlung although here "the functions of vicarious experience and feeling [Nachfühlung] are so interwoven with the very fellow-feeling itself as to be indistinguishable from it..." (Sympathy, p. 13) 5. Conclusion Thus, after distinguishing the various concepts of interests in relation to these two authors, we come to the result that they used different concepts to describe the same thing. We can summarize our analysis hereto as following. 13 Here Stein referred the readers to the first version of Scheler's Sympathy. It has another title Zur Phaenomenologie und Theorie der Sympathiegefühle und von Liebe und Hass. So I use Sympathiegefühle to refer to the first version. PHAINOMENA XX/79 DlAPOSITIVA 22 1) From the example of the acrobat used by Lipps, Stein refuted Lipps' concept of empathy by her own empathy defined by primordiality and non-primo-diality, and then creatively differentiated between Einfühlung and Einsfühlung. 2) This distinction affected Scheler so much that he revised and expanded his work on sympathy. In particular, he added the fourth type of Einsfühlung in the classification of intersubjective emotional acts. But Scheler's Einsfühlung is quite different from Stein's. He took Einsfühlung as a heightened form of infection [Gefühlsansteckung]. 3) Noting Makkreel's misunderstanding of Scheler's Einsfühlung being an intensification of Einfühlung, it was pointed out what Scheler means when he used the word Einfühlung, and that Nachfühlung is identical with Einfühlung in Stein's sense, which is affirmed by the words of both authors. 4) While Stein's Einsfühlung becomes possible only through Einfühlung, Scheler's Einsfühlung excludes Nachfühlung. But Stein's Einsfühlung is more similar with his Miteinanderfühlen. This type of feeling is based on Nachfühlung although Nachfühlung couldn't be further differentiated here. As far as we have seen, these two authors have clearly influenced one another. Stein carefully read Scheler's theory on sympathy in preparation of her dissertation, and Scheler in turn thoroughly studied Stein's work on empathy. After having studied the other one, both authors' theories underwent significant changes. Cited Works G. Jahoda, "Theodor Lipps and the Shift from 'Sympathy' to 'Empathy' ", in: Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, vol. 41/2 (2005), pp. 151-163 [published online in Wiley Interscience (www. interscience.wiley.com)]. E. Kelly, Structure and Diversity. Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler, Dordrecht/ Boston/ London 1997. Th. Lipps, "Einfühlung, innere Nachahmung, und Organempfindungen", in: Archiv für die gesammte Psychologie, 1(1903), pp. 185-204. R. A. Makkreel, "How is Empathy Related to Understanding?", in: Issues in Husserl's Ideas II, ed. Th. Nenon and L. Embree, Dordrecht 1996. M. Sawicki, Body, Text, and Science. The Literacy of Invesitgative Practices and the Phenomenology of Edith Stein, Dordrecht/ Boston/ London 1997. M. Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. P. Heath, London 1954. E. Stein, Life in a Jewish Family (1891-1916): An Unfinished Autobiography (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. I), trans. J. Koeppel, Washington, DC 1986. -----, On the Problem of Empathy (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, vol. III), trans. W. Stein, Washington, DC 1989. Ka-wing Leung HEIDEGGER'S CONCEPT OF FORE-STRUCTURE AND TEXTUAL INTERPRETATION1 Heidegger's conception of interpretation (Auslegung) in Being and Time 23 is decisive for the contemporary development of hermeneutics. As David Couzens Hoy says, the general movement that he calls the "hermeneutic turn" would not have been "imaginable without a dramatic change earlier in this century, the change brought about in philosophy by Martin Heidegger."2 Central to the change effected by Heidegger in Being and Time is the concept of fore-structure (Vor-struktur). Later, his student Hans-Georg Gadamer, in his book Truth and Method, also puts special emphasis upon this concept, making it the starting point of his own version of philosophical hermeneutics (GW1: 270/265). Due to the somewhat enigmatic character of Heidegger's writing style, it is often through the supposedly more accessible prose of Gadamer that Heidegger's concept of fore-structure is known to those who are interested in the contemporary theory of interpretation but whose primary profession is not philosophy. However, there are certain significant differences between their accounts of the fore-structure, which might cause those who know Heidegger's concept of fore-structure only through Gadamer's account to misunderstand it, especially in regard to its relation with tradition. The aim of this essay is to clarify Heidegger's concept of fore-structure. It will be divided into four sec- 1 This paper was presented at the Fourth Conference of the Phenomenology for East Asian Circle, 9-13th December 2010, Kaohsiung (Taiwan), National Sun Yat-Sen University. 2 David Couzens Hoy, "Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn," in Charles Guigon, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 170. tions. In the first section, we will first fill in some background for our clarification. Then, in the following sections, we will discuss Heidegger's account of the fore-structure in Being and Time and its genesis in his earlier lectures, Gadamer's theory of prejudice and its differences with Heidegger, and some implications of Heidegger's concept of fore-structure to textual Interpretation (Interpretation). Heidegger regards interpretation as the own possibility of the understanding (Verstehen), or as "the working-out of possibilities projected in understanding." He says in Being and Time: The projecting of the understanding has its own possibility - that of developing itself. This development of the understanding we call "interpretation". In it the understanding appropriates understandingly that which is understood by it. In 24 interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself. Such interpretation is grounded existentially in understanding; the latter does not arise from the former. Nor is interpretation the acquiring of information about what is understood; it is rather the working-out of possibilities projected in understanding. (SZ: 148/188-189) We have to be cautious against two views as regards the relation between understanding and interpretation in Heidegger: the one that sees interpretation as a derivative mode of understanding,3 and the one that takes understanding and interpretation to be one and the same thing.4 Dreyfus seems to suggest that Heidegger uses the term "interpretation" for "understanding as interpreting in the human sciences,"5 and therefore regards it as a derivative mode of understanding. He quotes the passage: If we interpret understanding as a fundamental existentiale, this indicates that this phenomenon is conceived as a basic mode of Dasein's Being. On the other 3 Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 195. 4 Stanley Rosen, "Horizontverschmelzung," in Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago/La Salle: Open Court, 1997), pp. 207-218. Against this supposedly Heideggerian view, Rosen tries to "suggest that there is a difference between understanding and interpretation, although the two are unquestionably related. In order to interpret something, we must first understand it" (p. 211). But it seems to me that it is precisely the view of Heidegger that we must have already understood something, in order to interpret it. 5 Dreyfus, Being-in-the-Word, p. 195. hand, 'understanding' in the sense of one possible kind of cognizing among others (as distinguished, for instance, from 'explaining'), must, like explaining, be Interpreted as an existential derivative of that primary understanding which is one of the constituents of the Being of the "there" in general. (SZ: 143/182) Heidegger intends to use the term "understanding" in a sense that he supposes to be the original or primary sense (GA20: 357/259), to mean a "fundamental existentiale" which, together with two other existentiales, i.e., state-of-mind (Befindlichkeit) and discourse (Rede), constitute the disclosedness in which the world and Dasein itself are disclosed. In this sense, understanding is "the condition of possibility for all of Dasein's particular possible manners of comportment" (GA24: 392/276). It is true that Heidegger regards understanding as it is conceived in the human sciences as a derivative mode of understanding in the original sense. The problem in Dreyfus' suggestion is that Heidegger does not use the term "interpretation" to designate understanding in the derivative sense. As we can see from the above quotation, Heidegger also uses the term "understanding"—or 'understanding,' with sin- 25 gle quotation marks, if we follow the usual practice of Heidegger as applied to the term "world" (SZ: 65/93)—to designate understanding in the human sciences. What Heidegger calls "interpretation" is, in his own words, understanding's own possibility, its development (Ausbildung), or the working-out of possibilities projected in it, rather than something else derived from it. Therefore, Heidegger says: "In interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself." If interpretation is understanding's own possibility, then understanding in the human sciences, as a derivative mode of understanding in the original sense, will also have its own form of interpretation, its own way of developing its own possibility, just as another derivative mode of primary understanding, explaining, also has its own kind of interpretation, which Heidegger calls "assertion" (Aussage), or "judgment" (Urteil), and regards as a derivative form of interpretation in the original sense (SZ: 153-154/195). On the other hand, although Heidegger regards interpretation as the development of understanding's own possibility, he does not see it as one and the same with understanding; otherwise, he would not have said that one arises from the other. Indeed, it is basic to Heidegger's concept of understanding that understanding is different from interpretation: on the one hand, what is understood does not necessarily get interpreted, as is evident from his concept of the understanding of being (Seinsverstandnis); and on the other hand, every interpretation must be grounded upon something that has already been 26 understood. As we will see in what follows, this is the fundamental idea that underlies Heidegger's concept of fore-structure. Heidegger characterizes interpretation as the appropriation of what is understood: "In it [interpretation] the understanding appropriates understanding^ that which is understood by it." This means that in interpretation we make into our own, into our property, what is in the first place foreign to us and does not belong to us. This character of interpretation is the most obvious in the case of translation, which, in Heidegger's words, is "making what was presented in a foreign language accessible in our own language and for the sake of it" (GA63: 11/9). In interpretation as appropriation, what is understood comes explicitly into sight. In other words, interpretation is also the making explicit of what is already understood. Heidegger says: To say that "circumspection discovers" means that the 'world' which has already been understood comes to be interpreted. The ready-to-hand (das Zuhandene) comes explicitly into the sight which understands. (SZ: 148/189) While what is understood is not always explicitly understood, explicit-ness (Ausdrucklichkeit) is the essential character of what is interpreted. Anything that is explicitly understood, or that is interpreted, has the structure that Heidegger calls "as-structure" (Als-Struktur), i.e., "the structure of something as something" (SZ: 149/189). "The 'as' makes up the structure of the explicit-ness of something that is understood. It constitutes the interpretation" (SZ: 149/189). The interpreting of something as something, or the making explicit of something that is understood, is in turn achieved on the basis of another structure, the structure that Heidegger calls "fore-structure."6 The fore-structure is composed of three elements: fore-having (Vorhabe), fore-sight (Vorsicht), and fore-conception (Vorgriff). Heidegger thinks that interpretation, as the appropriation of understanding and as the making explicit of what is understood, always operates in "something we have in advance," something that is "already understood" (SZ: 150/191). This is what Heidegger calls "fore-having." As something that is already understood, fore-having nev- 6 "Sinn ist das durch Vorhabe, Vorsicht und Vorgriff strukturierte Woraufhin des Entwurfs, aus dem her etwas als etwas verständlich wird." (SZ: 151) ertheless "need not be grasped explicitly by a thematic interpretation." In addition, "even if it has undergone such an interpretation, it recedes into an understanding which does not stand out from the background" (SZ: 150/191). It is what always remains inexplicit in the process of making something explicit, and what never completely stands out (unabgehoben) in the process of making something stand out (Abhebung). For example, in the case of the understanding of the ready-to-hand, what serves as the fore-having is the totality of involvement (Bewandtnisganzheit). "The ready-to-hand is always understood in terms of a totality of involvement" (SZ: 150/191). We have pointed out that Heidegger characterizes interpretation as appropriation; that is, as making into one's own what is in the first place foreign to one. What is to be interpreted is at first foreign to us. It is through the process of interpretation that we make it our own and transform it into our property. Heidegger also uses another term to characterize interpretation. He characterizes it as "unveiling" (Enthüllung). To speak of "unveiling" only makes sense if what is to be interpreted is veiled before the interpretation. Heidegger thinks that every interpretation is in possession of something that is already understood, but that which is already understood is "still veiled" (noch eingehüllt) (SZ: 150/191). It is through the process of interpretation that "it becomes unveiled." And this unveiling "is always done under the guidance of a point of view, which fixes that with regard to which what is understood is to be interpreted" (SZ: 150/191). This point of view is what Heidegger calls "fore-sight." It "'takes the first cut' (anschneidet) out of what has been taken into our fore-having, and it does so with a view to a definite way in which this can be interpreted" (SZ: 150/191). In other words, fore-sight guides our approach and directs our sight in the process of making explicit and unveiling what is already understood but is still veiled. Interpretation achieves the appropriation, explicitness, and unveiling, by putting what is held in fore-having and seen in a particular point of view into concepts. It can do this in two possible ways: "the way in which the entity we are interpreting is to be conceived can be drawn from the entity itself, or the interpretation can force the entity into concepts to which it is opposed in its manner of Being" (SZ: 150/191). In either case, the process involves articulating the entity that we are interpreting with certain concepts and, in thus doing, "the interpretation has already decided for a definite way of conceiving it, either with finality or with reservation" (SZ: 150/191). This is what Heidegger calls "fore-conception." Heidegger thinks that all interpretation is essentially grounded upon the structure constituted by fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception. He says: 27 28 Whenever something is interpreted as something, the interpretation will be founded essentially upon fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception. (SZ: 150/191) All interpretation, moreover, operates in the fore-structure, which we have already characterized. (SZ: 152/194) In Being and Time, Heidegger also uses the term "hermeneutical situation" (hermeneutische Situation) to designate the whole structure: Every interpretation has its fore-having, its fore-sight, and its fore-conception. If such an interpretation, as Interpretation, becomes an explicit task for research, then the totality of these 'presuppositions' (which we call the "hermeneutical Situation") needs to be clarified and made secure beforehand, both in a basic experience of the 'object' to be disclosed, and in terms of such an experience. (SZ: 232/275) Since Heidegger's discussion of the fore-structure in Being and Time is quite brief, it may be helpful to look into the genesis of this concept. The hermeneutical situation was first said to be composed of fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception in the 1923/24 WS lecture Introduction to Phenomenological Research, although at the time Heidegger did not connect them with the term "fore-structure." In this lecture, fore-having is characterized as "what is in view from the outset in the entire investigation," and "what is had from the outset for the investigation, upon which the look constantly rests"; fore-sight as "how what is placed in view from the outset is seen," and "the sort and manner of seeing what is held onto in the fore-having"; and fore-conception as "how what is seen in a specific way is conceptually explicated on the basis of specific motivation" (GA17: 110/79-80; translation modified).7 In the two preceding lectures, i.e., in the 1922 SS lecture Phenomenological Interpretations of Selected Treatises of Aristotle on Ontology and Logic and the 1923 SS lecture Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, only two out of the three elements of the fore-structure are mentioned—the fore-sight is missing. Heidegger says in the 1923 SS lecture: It is with respect to this authentic being itself that facticity is placed onto our fore-having when initially engaging it and bringing it into play in our hermeneutical questioning. It is from out of it, on the basis of it, and with a view to it that facticity will be interpretively explicated. The conceptual explicata which grow out of this interpretation are to be designated as existentials. 7 See also GA18: 274f. A "concept" is not a scheme but rather a possibility of being, of how matters look in the moment, i.e., is constitutive of the moment - a meaning drawn out of something - points to a fore-having, i.e. transports us into a fundamental experience - points to a fore-conception, i.e., calls for a how of addressing and interrogating. (GA63: 16/12-13) Here, just as in the 1922 SS, "fundamental experience" is the term used in Heidegger's characterization of fore-having,8 while here fore-conception is said to be a "how of addressing and interrogating," and in the 1922 SS it is regarded as some sort of "categorial articulation" (GA62: 111). In the 1921/22 WS lecture Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, although the terms "hermeneutical situation,"9 "fore-having," and "fore-conception" are found in the present edition issued as volume 61 of the Gesamtausgabe (GA61: 3, 19, 20),10 there is no mention that the hermeneutical situation is constituted by fore-having and fore-conception. The latter two concepts are not even mentioned together as a group.11 Yet we can still detect some early traces of the development of these two concepts, and even that of fore-sight, 29 which would only be added in the 1923/24 WS lecture. In the second part of this lecture, while looking for a definition of philosophy, Heidegger seeks to clarify "the original sense of definition" (GA61: 17/15). It is in this context that Heidegger states that every object "has its mode of genuinely being possessed" (GA61: 18/15), and in the respective modes of possession, "there are immanently co-functioning, according to the character of the possession or, according to the 'what' and the 'how' of the object (its 'Being'), definite forms of cognitive grasping and determining, specific forms of the clarification of each experience" (GA61: 18/16). The modes of grasping and determining are not something external to the modes of possession. They are not only "extrinsic accompaniments." Instead, they are "immanently" connected, like the two sides of the same coin: "the mode of possessing the object as such is itself an addressing of the object" (GA61: 18/16; translation altered). What Heidegger here calls the mode of possession clearly anticipates the concept of fore-having, 8 See also SZ: 232/275. 9 Theodore Kisiel suggests that the term "hermeneutische Situation' in fact "postdates the lecture course itself." See Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being & Time (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 233, 534 n.5. 10 See also PIA: 346, 348, 351, 364, 373. 11 Hence, Kisiel says: "[the 'hermeneutic situation' in] GA 61: 3 is a semester premature," and "the use of the term [Vorhabe] in GA 61: 19 is a semester too early." See Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger's Being & Time, pp. 499, 508. 30 and what he calls the mode of grasping and determining, or addressing, clearly anticipates the concept of fore-conception. From the way in which Heidegger here characterizes the mode of possession, we can also see how the concept of fore-sight arises out of a split in the concept of fore-having. The mode of possession is here characterized as "the 'what' and the 'how' of the object." In comparison, in the 1923/24 WS lecture, when the concept of fore-sight is introduced, fore-having, as we have seen above, refers only to the "what," to "what is had from the outset"; while the "how," "the sort and manner of seeing what is held onto in the fore-having," is covered by the newly introduced concept of fore-sight. A concrete example may also be helpful in understanding Heidegger's concept of fore-structure. Being and Time provides us with precisely such an example because this whole book is an attempt at interpretation. It attempts to provide an interpretation of the being of Dasein. If every interpretation is essentially grounded upon fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception, then the interpretation of Dasein in Being and Time must also be grounded upon this structure. In fact, in Being and Time, Heidegger even explicitly points out the hermeneutical situation in his interpretation of the being of Dasein. He states that Dasein is the fore-having, existence is the fore-sight, and existentiality is the fore-conception of his interpretation. Heidegger says: In its anticipatory resoluteness, Dasein has now been made phenomenally visible with regard to its possible authenticity and totality. The hermeneutical Situation which was previously inadequate for interpreting the meaning of the Being of care, now has the required primordiality. Dasein has been put into that which we have in advance and this has been done primordially—that is to say, this has been done with regard to its authentic potentiality-for-Being-a-whole; the idea of existence, which guides us as that which we see in advance, has been made definite by the clarification of our ownmost potentiality-for-Being; and, now that we have correctly worked out the structure of Dasein's Being, its peculiar ontologi-cal character has become so plain as compared with everything present-at-hand, that Dasein's existentiality has been grasped in advance with sufficient Articulation to give sure guidance for working out the existentialia conceptually. (SZ: 310-311/358-359)12 According to Heidegger's definition, "Dasein" refers to the "entity which each of us is himself" (SZ: 7/27); i.e., the entity which is traditionally called "man" (Mensch) (SZ: 11/32; GA24: 36/28), in contradistinction with those 12 See also SZ: 232f; GA17: 110. entities "whose character of Being is other than that of Dasein" (das nicht daseinsmäßige Seiende), which Heidegger calls "the present-at-hand" (das Vorhandene) or "the Being-present-at-hand" (Vorhandensein). Meanwhile, "existence" refers to the being of Dasein (SZ: 12/32, 42/67),13 in contrast to the being of the present-at-hand, which Heidegger calls "presence-at-hand" (Vorhandenheit) or reality. Finally, "existentiality" refers to the structure of the being of Dasein (SZ: 13/33); in other words, the structure of existence, whose conceptual articulation Heidegger calls "existentiale," in opposition to the "categories," which is the conceptual articulation of the being of the present-at-hand (SZ: 44/70). Therefore, generally speaking, what is in the fore-having of an interpretation is some sort of entity—a what that has already been understood but is still somewhat veiled. The fore-sight, or the point of view that guides the interpretation, is a how—the particular kind of being of the entity in question, or the way in which it is seen. As for the fore-conception, it is the particular conceptuality with which the entity in question is articulated or explicitly addressed. Gadamer in Truth and Method develops a theory of prejudice apparently based upon Heidegger's concept of fore-structure. Gadamer begins the section on "the hermeneutic circle and the problem of prejudices" with Heidegger and his concept of fore-structure, giving the impression that his theory of prejudice is nothing but the natural consequence of this concept. However, there are certain significant differences between their accounts of the fore-structure, which might cause those who know Heidegger's concept of fore-structure only through Gadamer's account to misunderstand it, especially in regard to its relation with tradition. First of all, Gadamer's choice of the term "Vorurteil" is already puzzling, insofar as it is meant to stand for what Heidegger calls "fore-structure." The German word "Vorurteil" literally means pre-judgment. For Heidegger, judgment is only a derivative form of interpretation (SZ: 153-154/195). It would be very unlikely that Heidegger would have used this term to refer to the condition of understanding out of a consideration of its etymology. In fact, throughout Being and Time, "Vorurteil" is always used in its usual and pejorative sense, 31 13 Cf. GA24: 36: "Die Seinsweise des Daseins bestimmen wir terminologisch als Existenz"; GA26: 159: "Existenz ist der Titel für die Seinsart des Seienden, das wir je selbst sind, das menschliche Dasein." 32 just as the English term "prejudice" is used. For his part, Gadamer's choice of the term "Vorurteil" is obviously connected with his intention to "rehabilitate the concept of prejudice" and to rehabilitate "authority and tradition" (GW1: 281/277). But the unity of his theory of prejudice, as I will attempt to demonstrate below, is in the main verbal rather than substantial, achieved largely only by the subtle manipulation of the ambiguity of the term " Vorurteil," through which things of very different nature are connected together in a single account. The term "Vorurteil" is used in Truth and Method in at least three different senses: (1) to stand for what Heidegger calls "fore-structure"; (2) to refer to provisional judgment or conjecture; and (3) to mean prejudice, according to the usual sense of the term. Whether Gadamer's theory is justified depends very much on the question of whether the different senses in which the term "Vorurteil" is used are substantially rather than only verbally connected. The above stated second sense in which the term "Vorurteil" is used derives from its literal meaning: "In itself, 'Vorurteil' means a judgment that is rendered before all the elements that determine a situation have been finally (endgültig) examined" (GW1: 275/270; translation modified). In this sense, it is the opposite of "final judgment" (Endurteil) (GW1: 275/270; translation modified). Therefore, I construe it as provisional judgment. Gadamer uses the term "fore-projection" (Vorentwurf) to explain Heidegger's concept of fore-structure, as though fore-structure were only some sort of provisional judgment or conjecture in the process of interpretation, which would be in constant need of revision. Gadamer says: A person who is trying to understand a text is always projecting. He projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text. Again, the initial meaning emerges only because he is reading the text with particular expectations in regard to a certain meaning. Working out this fore-projection, which is constantly revised in terms of what emerges as he penetrates into the meaning, is understanding what is there. (GW1: 271/267) But whether Heidegger ever uses the term "fore-structure" in this way is very much open to doubt. In our discussion of Heidegger's account of the concept of fore-structure in Being and Time and its genesis in his early lectures, we do not see Heidegger employing the term "provisional," or words with a similar meaning, to characterize the fore-structure. On the contrary, we see him explicitly stating that the fore-conception can be final: "the interpretation has already decided for a definite way of conceiving it, either with finality (endgültig) or with reservation" (SZ: 150/191). The reason that Heidegger employs a term with the prefix "vor-" to designate this structure of understanding is not because it is something provisional in contradistinction with something final. Rather, it is because it is something that we have already had, something that we have already understood, something that belongs to what Heidegger calls "perfect tense a priori" (apriorisches Perfekt) (SZ: 85/117). It is something that we must have already had before the carrying out of explicit interpretation. According to Heidegger, every interpretation must have fore-structure, regardless of whether it is provisional or final. Moreover, insofar as judgment is a derivative form of interpretation, every judgment must also have fore-structure, whether provisional or final. Gadamer's first step in delivering his theory of prejudice is to associate the term "Vorurteil" with Heidegger's concept of fore-structure. The bridge of this association is, on the one hand, to construe Heidegger's fore-structure as fore-projection, which, in Gadamer's usage, means some sort of provisional judgment or conjecture in the process of interpretation, which would be in constant need of revision, and on the other hand to use the term "Vorurteil" in the sense of provisional judgment according to its literal meaning. But this is only the first step. It is commonly believed that Gadamer's theory of prejudice relies on the literal meaning or etymology of the term "Vorurteil."14 But this is not completely true. Gadamer's second step in expounding his theory of prejudice is to criticize "the prejudice against prejudice" in the Enlightenment (GW1: 275/270). This second step is no less important than the first step in his theory of prejudice as a whole. But here, in the second step, the term "Vorurteil" cannot possibly be used in the sense of provisional judgment according to its literal meaning; otherwise, there would be no point at all in criticizing the conception of prejudice in the Enlightenment. For the thing against which Enlightenment has prejudice is not provisional judgment but prejudice in the usual sense of this English term. If Gadamer were solely relying upon the literal meaning of the term " Vorurteil," what he could say against the Enlightenment thinkers would merely be that they misused this term. While the term "Vorurteil" in itself means provisional judgment, it has been "limited in its meaning by the Enlightenment critique of religion simply to the sense of an 'unfounded judgment'" (GW1: 275/270-271). But this is clearly not the only thing that Gadamer wanted to achieve. Rather, his ultimate aim was to rectify the biased opinion on unfounded judgment. If this was his aim, then the term 14 For instance, see Robert Sokolowski, "Gadamer's Theory of Hermeneutics," in Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer (Chicago/La Salle: Open Court, 1997), p. 227. 33 34 "Vorurteil" as used by Gadamer in his critique of the Enlightenment cannot be used in the literal sense to refer to provisional judgment. After all, it makes no sense to say that "the fundemental prejudice of the Enlightenment is the prejudice against prejudice itself" (GW1: 275/270), if "prejudice" (Vorurteil) is used by Gadamer to mean provisional judgment according to its literal meaning. What Gadamer's theory of prejudice really draws on is the ambiguity of the term "Vorurteil" rather than its literal meaning or etymology. Of course, if we take notice of the different senses in which Gadamer uses the term "Vorurteil," we cannot but wonder how those different things referred to by the different senses of this word could possibly be integrated to form a coherent theory; i.e., how could what Heidegger calls fore-structure be associated with the provisional judgment, and how could these two things be integrated with what the Enlightenment called prejudice to form a coherent theory about the condition of understanding? As pointed out above, this is the crucial question as to whether Gadamer's theory of prejudice is justified. But this is an internal problem of Gadamer's theory that we will not discuss in detail here. We simply want to point out another salient difference between Heidegger and Gadamer: the difference in their views on tradition. According to Gadamer, in the Enlightenment doctrine, prejudice is divided into "the prejudice due to human authority and that due to overhastiness" (GW1: 276/271). Gadamer is mainly concerned with the former. This focus would be surprising if Gadamer's intention was to rehabilitate the literal meaning of the term "Vorurteil." This is because provisional judgment seems to have a closer connection with overhastiness than with authority, especially when we notice that it is one particular form of the prejudice due to human authority that Gadamer is concerned about; i.e., tradition, which is essentially something long-established, persistent, and constantly repeated. The ultimate aim of Gadamer's consecutive moves from prejudice to authority and from authority to tradition is to demonstrate that tradition, or "belonging to a tradition" (GW1: 296/291), is the condition of understanding. But there are many problems in Gadamer's account. First, how is Heidegger's concept of fore-structure of any use to his argument if what Heidegger calls "fore-structure" and what he calls "prejudice" in the sense of provisional judgment are completely different things? We may grant that prejudice in the sense of provisional judgment, no matter what its relation with Heidegger's concept of fore-structure may be, is in its own way also the condition of understanding. Even so, it is still questionable how this claim can be used to justify the assertion that prejudice in the sense of unfounded judgment is the condition of un- derstanding, insofar as provisional judgment and unfounded judgment are not necessarily one and the same thing. It is only because Gadamer uses one single word to denote two very different things that he seems to be able to easily pass from one point to another. Furthermore, even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that prejudice in the sense of unfounded judgment is the condition of understanding, how this point can be used to support the thesis that tradition is necessarily a condition of understanding is still problematic. For tradition is only one form of the prejudice due to authority, and the prejudice due to authority is again only one form of prejudice. Even if we agree that prejudice in the sense of unfounded judgment is the condition of understanding, we are still not obliged to agree that tradition is the condition of understanding. Why do we not say instead that prejudice due to overhastiness is the condition of understanding? Besides, if both prejudice and tradition are the condition of understanding, how are we to understand something like "suspension of our own prejudice" (GW1: 304/299) and "break with the continuity of meaning in tradition" (GW1: 280/275)? There are no such problems in Heidegger's concept of fore-structure or his theory of interpretation in general. It is true that Heidegger regards the fore-structure as the condition of understanding, but for him prejudice and tradition are not the condition of understanding. In addition, Heidegger does not employ one single word to denote these three different things. It is true that, according to Heidegger, we are "proximally and for the most part" under the influence of the other and the influence of tradition in our understanding, but this is not because they are the condition of understanding. It is rather because "Dasein is inclined to fall back upon its world" and "fall prey to the tradition" (SZ: 21/42). In other words, in Heidegger, the influence of tradition upon our understanding is not explained by the condition of understanding, but by the concept of falling. For Heidegger, contrary to Gadamer, tradition in itself bears no "hermeneutic productivity (GW1: 287/283) to our understanding. Heidegger not only does not regard tradition as an element of our historical-ity (Geschichtlichkeit), but even thinks that "tradition uproots the historicality of Dasein" (SZ: 21/43; translation altered). Tradition at first not only does not contribute to our understanding, but even keeps us from having authentic understanding: "Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial 'sources' from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we 35 need not even understand" (SZ: 21/43). The consequence is that we no longer understand "the most elementary conditions which would alone enable it to go back to the past in a positive manner and make it productively its own" (SZ: 21/43). Therefore, if we seek for an understanding of the primordial source, we must destruct the tradition and release what is blocked by it: "If the question of Being is to have its own history made transparent, then this hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved. We understand this task as one in which by taking the question of Being as our clue, we are to destroy the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at those primordial experiences in which we achieved our first ways of determining the nature of Being" (SZ: 22/44). IV. For Heidegger, hermeneutics is the carrying out of interpretation rather than the investigation of interpretation (SZ: 37; GA63: 9-14). Therefore, Being 36 and Time is a practice of hermeneutics in the sense that it contains an interpretation of Dasein. Accordingly, Heidegger discovered the fore-structure not because he was in the first place concerned with the method or condition of textual Interpretation. Rather, it was discovered in the course of Heidegger's investigations into the structure of existence, the structure of the being of Dasein. Although in Being and Time Heidegger is not concerned with textual Interpretation in the first place, what he says about interpretation is also true of textual Interpretation, if textual Interpretation is, as regarded by Heidegger, "a particular concrete kind of interpretation" (SZ: 150/192). This means that textual Interpretation is also an act of appropriation, and the making explicit of what is already understood, and it is essentially grounded upon the fore-structure. The only question that remains is whether there are any implications for the method of textual Interpretation, if what Heidegger says about this structure of interpretation is true. In fact, Heidegger himself indicates some implications of his conception of fore-structure for textual Interpretation. He says in Being and Time: An interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us. If, when one is engaged in a particular concrete kind of interpretation, in the sense of exact textual Interpretation, one likes to appeal to what 'stands there', then one finds that what 'stands there' in the first instance is nothing other than the obvious undiscussed assumption of the person who does the interpret- ing. In an interpretative approach there lies such an assumption, as that which has been 'taken for granted' (gesetzt) with the interpretation as such—that is to say, as that which has been presented in our fore-having, our fore-sight, and our fore-conception. (SZ:150/192) Heidegger thinks that every interpretation is grounded upon the fore-structure, which in a certain sense can also be called the "presupposition" of interpretation (SZ: 232/275), provided that it is not taken as the presupposition in the logical sense. Since textual Interpretation is a particular concrete kind of interpretation, every textual Interpretation is also essentially grounded upon the fore-structure, which is the presupposition and condition of every single Interpretation put forth. If an Interpretation is proposed by an interpreter who is not conscious of his own fore-structure and only appeals to what supposedly "stands there" in the text in support of his own interpretation, then what supposedly "stands there" is very probably only his own assumption based upon his own fore-structure. In other words, what he appeals to in support of his interpretation is very probably nothing other than his own assumption. If we 37 are not to fall into this kind of mistake, it is important to recognize the fore-structure. Heidegger also gives us some prescription for textual Interpretation according to his conception of fore-structure: If the basic conditions which make interpretation possible are to be fulfilled, this must rather be done by not failing to recognize beforehand the essential conditions under which it can be performed. What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way. This circle of understanding is not an orbit in which any random kind of knowledge may move; it is the expression of the existential fore-structure of Dasein itself. It is not to be reduced to the level of a vicious circle, or even of a circle which is merely tolerated. In the circle is hidden a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing. To be sure, we genuinely take hold of this possibility only when, in our interpretation, we have understood that our first, last, and constant task is never to allow our fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves. (SZ: 153/195) Gadamer devoted some paragraphs of Truth and Method to discussing the meaning of the above quoted passage of Heidegger. However, the first remark that he puts forward is already quite puzzling. He says: "What Heidegger is working out here is not primarily a prescription for the practice of understand- 38 ing, but a description of the way interpretative understanding is achieved." (GW1: 271/266) This remark is acceptable for most of what Heidegger says in Being and Time about the fore-structure or understanding in general, but for what is "here," for what Heidegger says in the above passage, it is simply not correct. Regardless of whether we can or should call it a prescription, what Heidegger says here is surely not only a description of the actual process of understanding. It is obviously normative in nature, in the sense that what he wants to tell us is how an interpretation should be carried out or how an interpretation is carried out in the right way. Only so can it be regarded as the "task" of interpretation. On the contrary, in the Interpretation of those who are not conscious of their own fore-structure, interpretation can be achieved in the wrong way, so that the task of interpretation, as stated by Heidegger, may not be fulfilled, although it is still grounded upon the fore-structure. What is even more puzzling about Gadamer's remark about this passage is that he not only sees it as being about the "correct interpretation" (GW1: 271/266), but himself also uses the word "prescription" (Forderung) to refer to what Heidegger says in the above passage (GW1: 272). It is clear from the context that what Heidegger means here by the "circle" is that "any interpretation, which is to contribute understanding, must already have understood what is to be interpreted" (SZ: 152/194).15 What is the need for interpretation if what is to be interpreted has already been understood? This is the conundrum that Heidegger was referring to in the phrase the "circle of understanding." Again, Gadamer's conception is also different from that of Heidegger on this point. What Gadamer means by the circle is that the interpreter "projects a meaning for the text as a whole as soon as some initial meaning emerges in the text" (GW1: 271/267). Obviously, Gadamer has projected what he learned about the "circular relationship between the whole and the parts" (GW1: 179/175) from traditional hermeneutics and rhetoric into what Heidegger calls the "circle of understanding."16 I am not saying that in the process of Interpretation no such thing occurs as what Gadamer calls "fore-projection"; i.e., the provisional judgment or conjecture about the meaning of a text. This is certainly a correct description of the process of Interpretation, about which "every interpreter who knows what he is about" can agree (GW1: 15 See also SZ: 7f, 314ff. 16 Cf. Jean Grondin: "Heidegger never speaks of the circle of the whole and its parts, but always of the circle between understanding and its unfolding in the interpretative process." See Grondin, "Gadamer's Basic Understanding of Understanding," in Robert J. Dostal, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 47. 271/266). The only problem is that it is not what Heidegger calls the circle or the fore-structure of understanding. We have already made clear that Heidegger's concept of fore-structure involves something that we have already understood—the point of view through which we approach this thing, and the conceptuality with which this thing is articulated. It means that every interpretation must be based upon something that we have already understood, which is the presupposition of interpretation in a certain sense. If this is true, then presuppositionless apprehending is only a myth. And if there is no way to "get out of the circle," the only thing we should do is "to come into it in the right way." The condition for this is that we are conscious of the essential condition or presupposition under which interpretation is performed, not blinded by our own assumptions on the one hand, and not captured by "fancies and popular conceptions" on the other hand. As regards textual Interpretation, to come into the circle in the right way requires us to step into the presupposition of the author of the text we are interpreting, to step into its particular concrete fore-structure. Since Heidegger thinks that understanding underlies every comportment of Dasein, for him interpretation is at work in everything we think and do, everything we say and write. If we want to understand what someone writes in the right way, we have to work out his particular concrete fore-structure, his presupposition of saying what he says and writing what he writes. Surely, this has to be done "in terms of the things themselves," and in the case of textual Interpretation, in term of the texts themselves. Unfortunately, in Being and Time, Heidegger does not indicate in further detail how we can work out the fore-structure in terms of the things themselves when we interpret a text. Perhaps, if we would like to get some ideas on this, we should turn to Heidegger's early lectures, in which he attempts to interpret Aristotle precisely by working out his fore-having and fore-conception.17 39 Abbreviation Works by Heidegger: GA17 Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Gesamtausgabe Band 17, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1994). [Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005).] 17 See GA62: 89, 111, 269; PIA: 372f. GA18 Grundbegriff der aristotelischen Philosophie, Gesamtausgabe Band 18, hrsg. von Mark Michalski (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 2002). GA20 Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, Gesamtausgabe Band 20, hrsg. von Petra Jaeger, 3., durchgesehene Auflage (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1994). [History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985).] GA24 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Gasamtausgabe Band 24, hrsg. von Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 3. Auflage (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1997). [The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, revised edition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988).] GA26 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz, Gesamtausgabe Band 26, hrsg. von Klaus Held, 2., durchgesehene Auflage (Frankfurt/ Main: Klostermann, 1990). GA61 Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phäno-nenologische Forschung, Gesamtausgabe Band 61, hrsg. von Walter Bröcker 40 und Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, 2., durchgesehene Auflage (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1994). [Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001).] GA62 Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, Gesamtausgabe Band 62, hrsg. von Günther Neumann (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 2005). GA63 Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität), Gesamtausgabe Band 63, hrsg. von Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, 2. Auflage (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1995). [Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999).] PIA "Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation)," in GA62, S.345-399. SZ Sein und Zeit, 17. Auflage (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1993). [Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinsion (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).] Works by Gadamer: GW1 Wahrheit und Methode, Gesammelte Werke Band 1, 6. Auflage (Tübingen: Mohr, 1990). [Truth and Method, second revised edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1988).] Dimitri Ginev HERMENEUTIC REALISM AS A CRITICAL THEORY I. Introduction 41 In the early 1970s the question of whether phenomenology could be a kind of critical theorizing has gained currency.1 No doubt, this question was actualized by Habermas' critical reading of Husserl's diagnosis of modern science's crisis. Authors like Aron Gurwitsch, Joseph Kockelmans, and Maurice Natan-son advocated in the 1960s the position that phenomenology is critical just because it provides a critique of science's objectivism and the natural attitude which is its pre-scientific ground. Yet is the critique of objectivism a sufficient condition for having a critical theory? The answer depends on the aims and goals governing the way of overcoming objectivism. Notoriously, Habermas' critical reading of the Crisis is inspired by the search for disclosing the "universal" (anthropologically invariant) interest in constituting objectivist theories of nature (or, natural-scientific theories). It is this (quasi-transcendental) search that informs his ambivalent position to the program suggested in the Crisis. Habermas' appreciation of that program is essentially linked to the two types of objectivism he distinguishes in his earlier work.2 On the one hand, there is the objectivism that deludes the natural sciences with the image of a reality-in-itself. It is a type of objectivism that wrongly admits the assumption that the reality which is thematically delineated in natural- 1 See, for instance, O'Neill (1972). 2 See on this point Habermas (1968), pp. 146-168. 42 scientific research is a "purely objective reality", being thereby not predicated on the constitution of meaning. By reviving in a phenomenological manner the forgotten reality of the primary (pre-scientific) meanings (the reality of the life-world), Husserl manages to combat successfully with this type of objectivism. This is why in the inaugural lecture from 1965 entitled "Knowledge and Interest" Habermas praises Husserl for his criticism of the "objectivist illusion" regarding the image of a reality-in-itself. On the other hand, however, there is another type of objectivism that struggles for freeing scientific knowledge from interest. By means of this objectivism, one attributes to science's theoretical knowledge pseudo-normative power from the concealment of its actual interest. The price Husserl has to pay in defending theory's interest-neutrality is too big: His diagnosis of the crisis of modern science (and the "humanity of modern Europe") remains tied to a sort of affirmative theorizing. It is a theorizing that by being not able to reveal the guiding interest in the objectivist study of nature, proves to be also not promoting the interest of emancipation (i.e. the interest that is at issue in critical theory).3 To sum up, Husserl's approach allows one to dismantle the "deficit of re-flexivity" both in scientific objectivism and the epistemological legitimation of that objectivism. Nonetheless, this approach succumbs to a kind of objectivism which was always attached to the traditional concept of theory. While criticizing the objectivist self-understanding of the sciences - so Habermas' argument goes - transcendental phenomenology fails to resists the objectivism that appeals to freeing of scientific knowledge from interest. There is no phenomenological reduction that can unfold the "universal species-interests" in constituting the different types of scientific knowledge. The nexus "constitutive interest - scientific knowledge" proves to be terra incognita for Husserl's transcendental-constitutional analysis. Now, in view of Habermas' criticism the question arises of whether phenomenology does have sufficient resources for overcoming the objectivism (and cognitive essentialism) traditionally associated with the epistemological nature of scientific theory? In raising this question, one has to address the kernel of phenomenology - its paradigm of constitutional analysis of meaning. In what follows, my aim is to show that Habermas' criticism is justified with regard to Husserl's transcendental phenomenology (including the version of it developed in the Crisis). Yet this criticism is irrelevant to the constitutional 3 Interestingly enough, twenty five years after his inaugural lecture devoted on the critical reading of the Crisis Habermas repeats the basic motives of his reading in a talk delivered at the German Congress for Philosophy (1990). See Habermas (1991), S. 34-48. analysis suggested by hermeneutic phenomenology. More specifically, I will be preoccupied with a version of that kind of phenomenology which is worked out with the intention to surmount the reificationist objectivism that analytical philosophy ascribes to the natural sciences. For reasons that will become clear later, this version is called hermeneutic realism. It is the concept of the world put forward by hermeneutic realism that surmounts the reificationism associated with those epistemological doctrines which claim that science succeeds in revealing a reality-in-itself. Hermeneutic realism manages to get rid of that reificationism by developing in particular a hermeneutic view of scientific objectification. However, it is not my aim to discuss this view here.4 In the remainder I will rather concentrate my efforts on the concept of critique implied by hermeneutic realism as a radically an-ti-reificationist kind of realism. In a tentative manner, hermeneutic realism serves the purpose of a critical philosophy since it succeeds in overcoming the Cartesian dualism by linking a critique of science's self-imposed identity in terms of objectivism and epistemological foundationalism with a hermeneutic theory of scientific practices and the constitution of research objects within the dynamics of these practices. Furthermore, hermeneutic realism acquires the status of a critical theory by dismantling scientism as an "ideology" sui generis. In other words, hermeneutic realism plays the role of a "critique of ideology", preserving thereby the original distinguishing feature of critical theory. In the present context of discussion, I would like to define scientism as that social-political advocacy of instrumental rationality built upon epistemological criteria of objectivism and foundationalism (and the concomitant objec-tivist construal of the world) which admits the relevance of this rationality to treating and solving all global environmental and ecological problems, i.e. all problems arising out from the scientific-technological control of nature. On another formulation, by declaring and instituting objectivist ("monologi-cal") study of nature as science's only possible self-understanding, scientism legitimizes politically the instrumental rationality implied by foundational-epistemological objectivism. Thus, scientism enables one to devise a strategy of global social engineering grounded upon that rationality. (A moderate form of scientism, typically advocated by Popper's critical rationalism, would be that one which replaces this strategy with a plurality of local initiatives of social engineering, or "piecemeal social engineering". In this case, foundationalism 43 4 For a detailed analysis of natural-scientific objectification in terms of hermeneutic phenomenology, see Ginev (2006). 44 is replaced by fallibilism, but epistemological objectivism is not given up.)5 By ignoring the interpretative dimension of scientific research (the research process as a reading process), scientism perverts the specificity of scientific rationality, preventing thereby the possibility to looking for alternative (noninstrumental) forms of science-nature relationship. The kind of critical theory that hermeneutic realism envisages is to be clarified in the first place by comparing the interpretative view of nature it puts forward with the way of addressing nature from the viewpoint of Habermas's quasi-transcendental theory of knowledge-guiding interests. Habermas rejects the idea of making nature a "communicative partner". On his view, it is impossible to use the language of dialogical interaction in a sphere of knowledge constituted by the interest in employing tools to change natural world for the purpose of satisfying our needs. In other words, since the constitution of nature within natural-scientific knowledge reflects the interest in the technological control of natural environment, the very admission that there is a nature with whom we could speak is non sequitur. One is able to get involved in a communication only with what is constituted by the interest in the achievement of mutual understanding based on the tenets of rational dialogue. Consequently, a hermeneutic dimension can be ascribed solely to the human sciences that are guided by such an interest. The critical theory suggested by hermeneutic realism is guided by the conviction that the "liberation of nature" is a prerequisite for achieving liberation from all other historically self-imposed compulsive forces. In reviving to a certain extent Marcuse's project for a "new science", I will spell out some motifs of the dialogical "liberation of nature" in the final section.6 Before addressing 5 Albrecht Wellmer (1974, p. 21) suggests nice and succinct estimation of the affirmative-political function of Popper's "liberal scientism" that deserves to be quoted: "The liberal justification of scientism accords not with critical but with conservative theory. It supplies the social engineers with the legitimation of measures in accordance with the dominant value system, ... i.e. in accordance with the stabilization of the existing social power structure." 6 I have in mind the project suggested in Chapter Six of One-Dimensional Man. On Marcuse's account, objectivist epistemology as providing legitimation of scientific rationality and technological manipulation of nature are welded together into various forms of social control. Yet this state of affairs is not an outcome of a specific societal application of science. The fusion of objectivist epistemology and technological control of nature is rather inherent in scientific research that is guided by the tenets of scientism as modern science's self-imposed ideological consciousness. The fusion is at the same time the point at which scientific rationality (thus legitimized) turns into rationality of social praxis. (See Marcuse 1964, pp. 165-176) Scientific rationality becomes a political paradigm of controlling and colonizing nature (including man's own nature). On this account, this problematic, however, my efforts will be concentrated on specifying the task of hermeneutic realism, and epitomizing the basic types of reificationism that this phenomenological doctrine promises to overcome. The critical function of hermeneutic realism consists in unmasking reificationist delusions that block the dialogical research of nature. Each type of reificationism I am going to address blocks in a specific fashion this dialogue. II. The Task of Hermeneutic Realism Hermeneutic realism is a doctrine developed originally by Patrick Hee-lan. According to him, the reality that is ready to hand in the process of scientific research is constituted as manifolds of meaningful "texts" by means of readable technologies. In this formulation, reading and constitution are intimately related. Texts are not written before starting a research process. Texts which science reads are artifacts of doing scientific practices, caused to be written by Nature on human instruments within the dynamics of changing configurations of such practices. Hermeneutic realism stresses that re- 45 ality is always already meaningfully constituted, being thereby a textualized and readable reality. The texts constituted by scientific practices of observation, instrumentation, experimentation, measuring, etc. serve as codes for the perceived objects in normal scientific everydayness.7 Being subjected to an ongoing reading, the reality is always in a process of constitution. Heelan argues that since more than logical coherence is called for, hermeneutic realism is not to be confused with a kind of conventionalism. There is an interchanging the standards of scientific rationality would imply exempting the ethos of doing research from the engagement in technological conquer of nature. By implication, new attitudes towards nature within natural-scientific research may come into being. Marcuse wrongly admits, however, that the technological rationality of instrumental control is crucially entangled with the growing significance of the instrumentalist and constructivist interpretations of scientific theories. In fact, scientism that justifies the transformation of scientific rationality into instrumental rationality of social exploitation of nature is not in need of such interpretations of scientific theories. The anti-instrumentalist interpretations are serving the ideological tenets of scientism (and thus, the technological conquer of nature) in no lesser degree. It is not the instrumentalism about science's theoretical entities that determines the direction of the transformation of nature into an objective resource for technological exploitation. More specifically, it is not instrumentalism as a particular position in the realism-debate by virtue of which scientific research is a priori technology. Accordingly, the methodological operationalism in interpreting science's theoretical entities cannot be put in a direct correspondence with social-practical operationalism of technological control of nature. 7 See Patrick Heelan (1983a) and (1983b). For a further development of hermeneutic realism see Crease (2009) and Ginev (2008c). 46 pretative fore-structure involved in the process of constitution that lays down conditions of possibility of uniting empirical objects to perceptual subjects via readable texts. Furthermore, hermeneutic realism differs from cultural or cognitive relativism by insisting on the horizonal character of reading scientific texts. There is always an interpretative commensurability (Gadamer's "fusion of horizons") that can take place between essentially different regimes of textualizing and reading. Furthermore, the interpretative commensurabil-ity between configurations of readable technologies persists in the semantic incommensurability between scientific theories' conceptual structures. It is the hermeneutic construal of world - the world as textualized by readable technologies - that has the potential of a critical de-reification of what is reified by an unreflective objectification. On the argument that will be developed, the hermeneutic construal of the world (as the core-doctrine of hermeneutic realism) allows one to place in a new philosophical constellation a well known claim put forward by Adorno and Horkheimer that myth is transformed into enlightenment at the price of transforming nature into objectivity. Adorno and Horkheimer specify their claim by stating that "men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things in so far as he can make them."8 Thus, the rationality of science becomes involved in the "dialectic of Enlightenment". Yet the point is how to come to grips with the claim that scientists construct knowledge about natural things in so far as they can construct those things. There are two possible readings of that claim. On the one hand, scientific knowledge is not only a deductive-nomolog-ical knowledge about the objective status of natural things, but it is also the cognitive base of possible manipulations with those things, aiming at total technological colonization of nature. The scenarios of such manipulations are inscribed in the very mathematical idealizations by means of which the constitution of natural things as research objects (i.e. the "mathematical objecti-fication of natural things") proceeds. Both the natural and the technological (artificial) states of affairs are governed by scenarios determined by a common class of mathematical idealizations. Since there is no clear demarcation line between objectifying natural things through scientific theories and manipulating them in accordance with scenarios promoted by the same mathematical ide- 8 Adorno and Horkheimer (1979), p. 9. alizations which are releasing the cognitive structure of scientific objectivity, to make natural things thematic objects of scientific investigation amounts to using them as material and resources for constructing technological artifacts. On this reading, Adorno and Horkheimer's claim means that the reduction of nature to a scientifically objectified reality opens the door to an unhindered expansion of instrumental-technological rationality. The second reading of the claim under discussion states that scientists can construct not only knowledge about natural things but the "things themselves" because these things are meaningfully constituted as research objects within the interrelated practices of scientific research. In other words, scientists can make the things they are studying just because they are involved in an interpretative interaction with those things, constituting them thereby as meaningful (readable) entities. To be sure, this is not the reading suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer. For them, the deductive form of science that "reflects hierarchy and coercion" identifies in an anticipatory manner the wholly conceived and mathematized nature with objective truth. In this anticipatory identification, enlightenment intends to secure itself against the return of the mythic.9 Paradoxically enough, however, through the full-fledged formalization of nature enlightenment returns to mythology. It is the endeavor of scientism to achieve domination of nature that rehabilitates the pre-historical cosmic myth. The absorption of nature into mathematical formalism enacts the essential similarity between the construction of objective knowledge in science and the (technological) transformation of what gets objectified by that knowledge. Assigning interpretative reading and interpretative constitution of research object to natural-scientific research is unacceptable for Adorno and Horkheimer. In rejecting the possibility of interpretative-dialogical attitude towards what is in scrutiny in the natural sciences, Habermas continues the line of reasoning set up by the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment. No doubt, the way of reducing nature to objectified reality that can be dominated technologically goes hand in hand with prompting science's self-understanding in terms of scientism. Promoting and cultivating this self-understanding is intimately related to the strategy of a total technological colonization of nature. Hermeneutic realism tries to unfold this self-understanding as a "false consciousness" concerning (i) science's cognitive specificity (and methodological rationality), (ii) science's professional ethos, and (iii) science's ultimate goals and aims. It is a self-understanding that is in a drastic discrepancy with 47 9 Adorno and Horkheimer (1979), p. 25. the interpretative nature of scientific research.10 Changing the self-imposed image and identity of science (that is legitimized by objectivist-foundational epistemology and philosophy of science) with a picture that depicts the interpretative practices (i.e. practices distinguished by "readable technologies") of scientific research would imply a new way of devising science-nature relationship beyond the objectivist reduction of nature. This is the task of hermeneutic realism as a critical philosophy. III. The Notion of Characteristic Hermeneutic Situation In a broader context, hermeneutic realism is a family of post-metaphysical doctrines whose common denominator is the conviction that (pace Rorty) the place vacated by (foundationalist and representationalist) epistemology should be occupied by hermeneutics. In supporting this thesis, the hermeneutic realist opens an avenue to new forms of dialogue between (post)analytic and Continental traditions of philosophizing. There is no objective reality that pre-48 cedes the reality of being-in-the-world. Before having the "world out there" as opposed to (and represented by) mind (the human cognitive abilities), the human beings are always already in the world of practices. Even the contemplation of "the world as objective reality" is a practice sui generis that is embedded in a configuration with other (cognitive and non-cognitive) practices. In another formulation, the ways of being in a practical world precedes the world as represented (or cognitively constructed) by mentality. Furthermore, the subject-object relation comes always into being within configurations of practices. Human agents might construct objective knowledge because of their involvements in "work-worlds". Moreover, "representing the world" or "constructing objective knowledge about the world" are actually sophisticated arrangements of various practices that cannot be isolated from the rest of the world of practices. Starting out from the ways of being in the world of practices prevents one from an initial hypostatization of a dualism between the epistemic subject and 10 The image of scientific research as an undertaking strongly succumbed to the credentials of truth claims that are checked by a foundational theory of knowledge, the objectivist construal of the world, and the epistemological representationalism is largely accepted by scientists as "science's philosophical self-understanding". This is why the image of science codified by the norms of objectivist-foundational epistemology becomes a kind of scientists' "false consciousness". Moreover, the latter is a prerequisite for manipulating scientific research for various political reasons, including the reasons of transforming nature into a resource of an actual or a possible exploitation. the objective world (and the dualism of conceptual framework and empirical content). The involvement in the world of practices is an interpretative mode of being in the world. Human beings are interpreting themselves in accordance with the possibilities they can appropriate and actualize in this involvement. In so doing, they are also interpreting the world of practices within the horizon of possibilities they have at their disposal. Being in the world of practices amounts to interpreting the world (and one's involvement in it) as a world projected upon possibilities that are engendered by the very interrelatedness of practices. On hermeneutic realism, the "horizon of understanding the world" (as a prerequisite for having an objective knowledge about the world) is tantamount to the "world as a horizon of understanding". Thus, the hermeneutic circularity is to be ascribed not only to interpretation as a particular cognitive procedure, but first and foremost to the being of human existence as being in the world of practices. Hermeneutic realism opposes all views that admit the following clauses: (a) the credentials of all truth claims must be checked by a foundational theory of knowledge; (b) the objective reality is organized into distinct objects, and the distinctness of each of them is prior to the constitution of meaning; (c) the mind of man is isolated from the world in a manner that enables it to represent the world through images, ideas, concepts and categories; (d) there is an invariant and universal semantic core in mind that contains series of meanings related to the basic structure of objective reality. Roughly speaking, hermeneutic realism is a kind of realism that gets rid of Cartesian dualism, epistemic representationalism, foundationalism, and cognitive (including linguistic-semantic) essentialism. It is a common place for those who subscribe to a certain version of hermeneutic philosophy that the world is not out there, and mind is always within the world. Hermeneutic realism is opposed above all to metaphysical realism and by implication to scientific realism. Metaphysical realism is criticized for the uncritical postulation of ontic primacy of the dualism between mind and mind-independent objective reality over the totality of being in the "work-world" of practices. The hermeneutic realist raises the critical question of whether mind does not belong to reality. Since most of the metaphysical realists are inclined to argue that mind is a part of objective reality, the hermeneutic realist focuses her criticism on the predicament concerning the reconciliation of the following two doctrines: (a) objective reality is independent of mind; and (b) mind is part of this reality. As a specific mode of "practical being in the world", scientific research is predicated on a dynamics of changing configurations of routine practices of 49 50 constructing instruments, designing and repeating experiments, preparing reports on observations, applying formal techniques for a graphical description, constructing systems of differential equations, calibrating instruments, controlling experimental systems, measuring control parameters of experimental systems, constructing various kinds of models, devising thought experiments, creating computer simulations, and so on. The routine reproduction of configurations of such practices constitutes the normal scientific everydayness of a certain research domain. It is the interrelatedness of practices of inquiry that projects an open horizon of possibilities for the research process. Such a horizon is always already transcendent with respect to the possibilities that get actualized in each particular situation of this process. As a mode of being-in-the-world, scientific research projects its being of interrelated practices upon possibilities. There is an ongoing appropriation of these possibilities in normal science. Through this appropriation an ongoing articulation of a domain's objects comes into being. The ongoing actualization of possibilities and the concomitant articulation of a domain of research objects are characterized by anticipations, expectations and orientations assigned to the community which carries out the research process. The possibilities projected by a normal scientific interrelatedness of practices are not to be confused with the possibilities stemming from a mental activity planning such a behavior, thereby providing an algorithm of how to choose and appropriate possibilities. Like the routine practices of research, the possibilities upon which the research process is projected do not have an autonomous reality sui generis. Any suggestion of a pure presence of possibilities projected before the practitioners of scientific research would rehabilitate essentialism in a new form. The existential possibilities of articulating a world are not independent of the ways of their actualization. More specifically, the projection of possibilities by configurations of scientific practices is always entangled with choosing, appropriating, and actualizing them. In stating that the articulation of meaningful objects comes into being through an ongoing interpretative appropriation of possibilities, one assumes that the configurations of practices are predicated on an intrinsic interpretative potentiality. This potentiality is due to the fact that all scientific practices serve the function of readable technologies in scientific research. Within the range of the cognitive outcomes of implementing such technologies are reports on observations or experiments, diagrams, comparative tables of measurements, analytical techniques for selecting control parameters in investigating dynamic behaviour, systems of equations, etc. To be sure, these outcomes are always semantically integrated in larger theoretical frameworks. Yet all situational outcomes as well as the very process of their semantic (trans-situational) integration (by means of a theoretical framework) are fore-structured by the inter-relatedness of practices. The research process in a given domain is always in a hermeneutic situation. Prima facie such a situation can be depicted in Heideggerian terms. In the research process the practitioners who are involved in it have ideas about the specificity of domain's theoretical objects in advance (i.e. the research is grounded in a fore-having); they see the outcomes of formal, experimental, and calculative procedures in advance (the research is predicated on a foresight); and they envisage the ways of further incorporation of each particular outcome (measurements, experimental results, diagrams, data-models, theoretical models, conceptual innovations, etc.) in new configurations of practices (i.e. the research process is characterized by a fore-conception). The triad of the research process' fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception lays out an open fore-structure of each stage of domain's cognitive structuring by means of the (dominant) theory's formalism and its actual semantic models. (Though not challenging the assumption of semantic completeness of domain's basic theory, the theory's possible semantic models are particular manifestation of domain's interpretative openness.) The hermeneutic fore-structure "works" against the attempts at codifying a complete cognitive structure of a scientific domain. It always reveals possibilities of modifying (in the extreme case, breaking down) the present codification. The hermeneutic fore-structure is not something that is statically pre-given to the dynamics of scientific research. In each configuration of scientific practices the unity of fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception opens itself in a specific manner. The hermeneutic fore-structure (as possibilities of seeing, having, and grasping domain's empirical and theoretical articulation) does not have a being-in-itself that might be separated from the changing configurations of scientific practices. Nevertheless, there is a general characteristic of how a domain's cognitive structuring gets constantly embedded in an open (and changeable) hermeneutic fore-structure. This general characteristic which persists in the articulation of a domain of scientific research I call a characteristic hermeneutic situation. From the very outset the scientific domain becomes disclosed (for a further articulation) in such a situation. The characteristic hermeneutic situation specifies the configurations of scientific practices as configurations of readable technologies. In other words, it specifies the research process as a process of reading. On a more technical level (and fol- 51 52 lowing Heelan's thread), a characteristic hermeneutic situation is identifiable by the complementarity of two dimensions of scientific research as a process of textualizing and reading (or better, textualizing-through-reading). These are the dimension of objectification (de-contextualization) and the dimension of contextualizing. The former dimension refers to representing and reading mathematically idealized entities with quantifiable parameters, allowing the construction of data-models. The de-contextualization is manifested by the formal-semantic isolation of texts (embodying mathematical idealizations, theoretical objects, data-models, research objects and spaces of representation) from their readable technologies. The second dimension refers to the need to re-contextualize the reading process during the empirical and formal construal of a domain's theoretical knowledge. As a rule, the re-contextualization demands a reflection on the hermeneutic situation within the reading process. The complementarity (or sometimes, the superposition) of both dimensions, which persists in a characteristic manner in all configurations of readable practices is another definition of the characteristic hermeneutic situation of scientific research. Thus, the characteristic hermeneutic situation, in which the domain of enzyme kinetics becomes disclosed, is the complementarity between the dimension of objectification as it is informed by a formalism that describes the kinetics of irreversible enzymatic reactions in terms of a relation between the reaction rate (the rate of bound substrate conversion to product) and the concentration of the substrate (plus the rate at which bound enzyme is unbound by substrate). The kernel of this formalism is the Michaelis-Menten equation, which rest on strong objectifying assumptions: (a) the product does not bind to the enzyme, thereby precluding the possibility of a reversibility of the reaction; (b) the total enzyme concentration remains constant; and (c) the whole system of the metabolic reaction that is catalyzed by enzyme remains in steady-state.11 The dimension of contextualizing was informed by the search of 11 In line with Heidegger's existential conception of science, one may admit that the domain of enzyme kinetics is disclosed by a particular kind of idealization through which a region of Nature itself is "mathematically projected". In this projection the chemical reactions taking part in metabolism as they are catalyzed by enzymes are uncovered beforehand as a domain present-at-hand. This mathematical determinism is unavoidable in Heidegger's scenario of the genesis of science's theoretical attitude from the "average everydayness" of the primordial mode of being-in-the-world. In fact, however, the Michaelis-Menten equation (as a model of chemical equilibrium) is introduced in 1913. Joseph Fruton describes the period from 1830 to 1914 as the time in which biochemistry was in a state of continuous transformation. (See Fruton 1990, pp. 48-71, and Fruton 1992, pp. 74-87.) the complexity of the chemical nature of protoplasm as a base of the metabolic processes in living organisms. This complexity can only be unfolded in a plurality of investigatory contexts. In the first decade of the 20th century the work in line with this dimension was stimulated by the rejection of the hypothetical (theoretical) entity of the "energy reach protoplasmic protein". In contextualiz-ing the study of the abovementioned complexity, those who did research along the lines of this dimension succeeded to weaken the Michaelis-Menten formalism (as this was later extended by the so-called Lineweaver-Burk plot). To come to grips with a characteristic hermeneutic situation of scientific research requires a transcendental reflection. IV. Hermeneutic Realism and Knowledge-Guiding Interests Following the line of reasoning regarding the transcendental reflection, one may conclude that hermeneutic realism de-privileges that question of validity which Habermas places in the core of his theory of communicative action. The paradigm of hermeneutic phenomenology's constitutional analysis of meaning demonstrates the "derivative character" of communicative inter-subjectivity. The latter takes always place in the trans-subjectivity of projected possibilities. By the same token, there is no consensus-oriented rational dialogue whose normative-conditional structure can be isolated from the world of changing configurations of practices. The dialogue is always already situated within and transcended by the world of practices. By implication, the question of validity of communicative action has to be addressed by having recourse to ontological questions of trans-subjective horizonality of communication. Otherwise, the stipulation of a counter-factual normativity of the unrestricted dialogue would have led to a kind of essentialist hypostatization. To reverse this statement: By reducing the world's trans-subjectivity to the inter-subjectivity of communicative interaction, one replaces the constitutional analysis of meaning by a transcendental theory of dialogical argumentation. Yet the price one will have to pay will be the restoration of epistemological foundationalism, though in a radically non-Cartesian form of a dialogical-argumentative rationality. Let me now spell out the main consequences for critical theorizing following from the profile of hermeneutic realism depicted so far. My aim will be to demonstrate that scientific research conceived of as an interpretative process is a locus of formation of a dialogical-communicative attitude towards nature. To reiterate, the task of hermeneutic realism as a critical philosophy consists in overcoming scientism in a manner that would allow one to elaborate on 53 54 models of science-nature relationship beyond scientism and the objectivist reduction of nature. In saying this, I return to the question of the sense in which hermeneutic realism does put forward an alternative to Habermas's quasi-transcendental epistemology as a base of critical theorizing. On Habermas's (and Karl-Otto Apel's) position, we cannot have a dialogical (communicative) relation to nature. The talk about the "liberation of nature in the name of its own rights" does not make sense in the epistemology of knowledge-guiding interests as well as in the theory of communicative action.12 In opposing the confinement of the rational dialogue in the sphere of social interaction solely, I will eventually try to show that hermeneutic realism (in rehabilitating motifs of Marcuse's project for a "new science") involves the moment of scientific (and technological) interaction with nature. Hermeneutic realism binds the perspective of critical theorizing not to the "question of validity" but to the "question of constitution". Steven Vogel is right when arguing that by treating the natural sciences' guiding interest in prediction and control of nature as determined by a mode of action that is built into the structure of the species as such, Habermas precludes the opportunity to address the issue of how interests in constituting scientific knowledge get generated in the dynamics of changing practices of research. By overlooking this issue, he acknowledges tacitly the objectivist picture of science and the positivist view about scientific rationality.13 This is why an interest in a dialogical partnership with nature is declared to be pointless in the realm of natural-scientific research. There is in Habermas' enterprise a hypostatization of a "species-wide universal interest" that is exempt from a genesis within the practical contexts of being-in-the-world (or to pit it in a more Heideggerian parlance, an interest that is deprived of "existential genesis"). Hermeneutic realism repudiates any kind of philosophy that in transcendental or quasi-transcendental manner claims that the natural world (or, the "potential world" of natural-scientific research)14 is constituted by a global knowledge-guiding interest. Such a philosophy - so the argument goes - hy-postatizes the global interest by ignoring the real dynamics of changing configurations of practices in which domains of scientific research (and thus, the 12 See in this regard also the highly illuminative analysis in Vogel (1996, pp. 106-170). 13 See Vogel (1991), pp. 255-58. 14 I am employing the expression of "potential world" in order to stress its irreducibility to the "actual world of the natural sciences" that is predominantly schematized by the epistemological standards of objectivism - a schematization that serves the aims of scientism as ideology. world of the natural sciences) get articulated. More specifically, Habermas' quasi-transcendental epistemology fails to resist the "anthropological reifica-tion" of an invariant interests-structure embedded in human action. In "deriving" all interests in having knowledge of a certain kind from the choices of possibilities within particular configurations of practices, hermeneutic realism avoids both the hypostatization of knowledge-guiding interests and the concomitant fallacy of an "anthropological reification".15 The constitution of an interest takes always place in the hermeneutic circularity of trans-subjective horizons and contingent-situational actualizations of possibilities. By the same token, it is always hermeneutically fore-structured with regard to the possibilities of reading one can appropriate by implementing the available readable technologies. A knowledge-guiding interest is neither fixed by internal (cognitive) goals, aims and values, nor determined by extra-scientific factors and demands. The former case is that of cognitive es-sentialism, typically illustrated by dominant doctrines in philosophy of science, while the latter - that of social determinism, typically advocated by constructivist sociologists and the so-called "social epistemologists". Being situated in an open leeway of possibilities (its hermeneutic fore-structure), a knowledge-guiding interest retains its "flexibility" within changing configurations of research practices. The formation of an interest in the constitution of scientific knowledge of a certain kind is never a finished process. It is rather a process that takes place within the ongoing interpretative circularity of projecting and appropriating possibilities of reading. By getting rid of objectivism about the image of a reality-in-itself, herme-neutic realism devises an existentialist approach to knowledge-guiding interests, opposing thereby cognitive essentialism and social determinism. On the 15 The argument against quasi-transcendental epistemology suggested by hermeneutic realism differs from David Hoy's postmodernist argument against universalism of Habermas' critical theory. Hoy (1994, p. 172) goes on to assert that philosophical hermeneutics insists on the reading of scientific theories as outcomes of context-bounded social actions. This is why - so his argument goes - scientific theories cannot lay claims to universal validity. According to hermeneutic realism, however, the context-boundedness is not an argument against universality. If scientific research (including that in the natural sciences) is reflexive enough about the contextuality of its own configurations of practices (including practices leading to the construction of theories), then it will be able to give an account in its own terms of how the particular contexts are constantly transcended in the research process. Thus, the reflection upon the context-boundedness will promote an account of scientific research's self-transcendence. This reflection vindicates a kind of "hermeneutic universality" within the scope of scientific research. It is an universality that works beneath the proliferation of contingent interpretations associated with particular readable technologies. See Ginev (2006), pp. 49-71. 55 56 hermeneutic account of scientific research, these are interests in interpretative constitution of various kinds of research objects. Since the constitution of objects in scientific research becomes possible through choosing, appropriating, and actualizing possibilities projected by the very interrelatedness of scientific practices, a knowledge-guiding interest is a stable tendency of possibilities choices. In other words, regardless of how the possibilities of doing research are informed by external (economic and political) factors or by established internal cognitive values, the knowledge-guiding interest (as fore-structured by the possibilities of reading in which it is situated) gets generated by the intrinsic dynamics of scientific practices. Due to this intrinsic dynamics, scientific research has its own potentiality for generating dialogical attitudes towards nature, since there is a leeway of possibilities whose choosing and actualizing leads not only to getting rid of the objectivist image of a reality-in-itself, but to constituting research objects that can be read in different contexts and horizons. Per definitionem, distinctive features of a "dialogical research" (such as interactive questioning, reflexive responsibility for asking questions, recasting outcomes of research in new horizons of interaction, asking about contextual meanings displayed by the objects of research, disclosing intrinsic historicity of sedimented meanings due to the "cultural destiny" of the "natural things", etc.) are displayed when the research objects are not entirely de-contextualized in accordance with objectivist epistemological criteria and norms, but their constitution remains open to new contexts and configurations of practices. (A requisite for an extreme de-contextualization is a sort of "mathematical reifica-tion" that consists in admitting the mathematical idealizations of objectifica-tion to be a pure presence of idealized objects independent of the dynamics of scientific practices and pre-given to the choices of possibilities for doing research and reading.16) Accordingly, the openness to a re-contextualization marks off a dialogical interaction with "natural things" under investigation. Re-contextualizing the research objects provokes at the same time a kind of interpretative reflexivity, which is also a part of the dialogical research.17 Hermeneutic realism is a program that tries to scrutinize science's intrinsic potentiality for constituting research objects in a dialogical manner. In ap- 16 See Ginev (2008a), pp. 111-136. 17 It is some versions of the feminist philosophy of science that most actively plead for a dialogical research in the natural sciences. The dialogical research exhibits a feminine sensitivity in the constitution of natural-scientific research objects. On the analysis of these versions of "dialogical feminism" in terms of a hermeneutic philosophy of science see Ginev 2008b. propriating possibilities for further contextualization of the reading process, and in overcoming the reificationist objectivism that forgets the meaningful constitution of reality, one turns to a kind of cognitive existentialism (as opposed to cognitive essentialism and social determinism) about the nature of scientific research. On its central tenet, the choice of possibilities in scientific research is not determined by a reality that is outside (beyond or behind) the dynamics of practices with readable technologies. The possibilities for a "dia-logical research" are also possibilities of de-reifying (or de-constructing) what gets objectified in scientific research. De-reifying is accomplished by re-con-textualizing research objects in new configurations of practices. Put differently, within "dialogical research" the de-reification (of presumably static objects in their "pure presence") goes hand in hand with the re-contextualization and the re-constitution of research objects.18 To stress once more, the dialogue consists in questioning what is under investigation in new contexts of practices characterized by new horizons of possibilities. Being attached to "dialogical research", a knowledge-guiding interest comes into being in a characteristic hermeneutic situation of the research process. To reiterate, the latter is a process oscillating between the pole of objectivist de-contextualization of what is under investigation and the pole of "dissemination" of the research objects in as many as possible configurations of scientific practices. The knowledge-guiding interests are located within the spectrum between these poles. This is why each of them is characterised by an objectivist and an interpretative-reflexive (dialogical) dimension. A characteristic hermeneutic situation in which a knowledge-guided interest is constituted should be defined by the balance between both dimensions. The more one is de-contextualizing the reading process (and the objects involved in it), the more the "dialogical dimension" gets hidden. Consequently, the more what is under investigation acquires the status of a reality-in-itself. By contrast, the more the interpretative-reflexive dimension gets emphasized, the more scientific research takes on the form of a dialogical process, and the more research process approaches the tenets of hermeneutic realism. References: Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer. 1979. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso Editions. Crease, R. 2009. Covariant Realism. Human Affairs 19: 223-232. 57 18 See on this point Rheinberger, Hagner and B. Wahrig-Schmidt (1997), pp. 7-22. Ginev, D. 2006. The Context of Constitution. Beyond the Edge of Justification, (=Bos- ton Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 247). Dordrecht: Springer. Ginev, D. 2008a. Transformationen der Hermeneutik. Zum Dialog zwischen herme-neutischer Philosophie und wissenschaftlichen Forschungsprogrammen, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann. Ginev, D. 2008b. Hermeneutics of Science and Multi-Gendered Science Education. Science and Education 17: 1139-1156. Ginev, D. 2008c. Cognitive Existentialism. The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 57: 227-242. Habermas, J. 1968. Technik und Wissenschaft als "Ideologie". Frankfurt/Main: Suhr-kamp. Habermas, J. 1991. Texte und Kontexte. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Hacking, I. 1999. Hacking 1999, The Social Construction of What? Cambridge Mass. and London: Harvard University Press. Heelan, P. 1983a. Natural Science as Hermeneutic of Instrumentation. Philosophy of Science 50: 181-204. Heelan, P. 1983b. Perception as a Hermeneutical Act. The Review of Metaphysics. 37: 58 61-76. Hoy, D. 1994. Critical Theory. Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell. Marcuse, H. 1964. The One-Dimensional Man, Boston: Beacon Press. O'Neil, J. 1972. Sociology as a Skin Trade. London: Heinemann. Rheinberger, H.-J., M. Hagner und B. Wahrig-Schmidt. 1997. Räume des Wissens. Repräsentation, Codierung, Spur. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Vogel, S. 1991. New Science, New Nature: The Habermas-Marcuse Debate Revisited. Research in Philosophy and Technology 11: 157-178. Vogel, S. 1996. Against Nature. The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory. Abany: SUNY. Wellmer, A. 1974. Critical Theory of Society. New York: The Seabury Press. Cathrin Nielsen BILDUNG ALS PLASTIKWORT In seinem Essay Plastikwörter. Die Sprache einer internationalen Diktatur 59 geht der Freiburger Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftler Uwe Pörksen der Beobachtung nach, dass die Umgangssprache zunehmend durch eine kleine Gruppe von Wörtern beherrscht wird, die eine merkwürdig zersetzende Wirkung auf den lebendigen Sprachleib ausüben. Sie lauten, um nur einige zu nennen, Modell, Wachstum, Innovation, Konzept, Ressource, Zukunft, fitness, Information. Wir stoßen überall auf sie; am weitreichendsten jedoch zeichnen sie jenen Diskurs aus, der die Einrichtung unserer Gesellschaft in das sogenannte Wissens- oder Informationszeitalter, und damit in einem ganz wesentlichen Sinne auch die Bildungsdebatte, begleitet. Linguistisch wären diese Wörter, so Pörksen, am ehesten als „konnotative Stereotype" zu bezeichnen, als von einem Hof vager Impulse umgebene Schemata; sie sind dadurch charakterisiert, dass sie die Unbestimmtheit der Sache unter dem Mantel wissenschaftlicher Bestimmtheit verbergen und sich damit der kritischen Auseinandersetzung hartnäckig entziehen. Anders gesagt: Plastikwörter bleiben merkwürdig blass; in ihrer Allgemeingültigkeit gleichen sie Amöben, jenen fließenden und beständiger Formveränderung unterworfenen Einzellern, die sich durch Teilung zu quallenhafter Größe vermehren.1 Zugleich geht von ihnen ein unheimlicher, verpflichtender Sog aus, der alles, was sich ihm zu entziehen sucht, buchstäblich alt aussehen lässt. 1 Vgl. Uwe Pörksen, Plastikwörter. Die Sprache einer internationalen Diktatur, Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt o. J., S. 21. 60 Ich möchte im Folgenden anhand von fünf Thesen versuchen, mich dem Charakter dieser Wörter und der in ihnen verborgenen Ontologie der Gegenwart zu nähern. Mit welchen Kriterien lassen sie sich identifizieren, was transportieren und zu was verpflichten sie? Meine (zum Teil an Pörksen angelehnten) Thesen lauten: 1. Plastikwörter haben keine Bedeutung, sondern eine Funktion. Sie besteht darin, Geschichte in Natur umzudeuten. 2. Die Natur der Plastikwörter ist eine liquidierte Natur und als solche das „Material der Zukunft". 3. Das Material der Zukunft ist die Zukünftigkeit selbst, die potenzielle Ressource, die auf ihren „Einsatz" wartet. Dies gilt auch für den Menschen und eine auf ihn bezogene Humantechnologie. 4. Die Plastikwörter dienen dem Ziel, substanzielle Wissensformen, die diesem Optimierungsprozess im Wege sind, zu verdrängen. 5. Die Verdrängung geschieht durch Verinnerlichung des Optimierungsgebots: Bildung heißt heute, sich für die ständige Umbildung offen zu halten. Zu 1. In den amorphen Plastikwörtern gibt sich zunächst eine Blickwendung zu erkennen, die das Verhältnis von Wort und Sache, von Bezeichnendem und Bezeichnetem und damit von Sprache und Wirklichkeit in ein neues Licht stellt. Dieses philosophisch seit jeher prekäre Verhältnis (adaequatio rei et in-tellectus) beginnt sich aufzulösen bzw. es beginnt sich zugunsten sprachlicher Schemata, die auf die offene Zukunft einer Sache ausgreifen, zu verschieben. Die neuen Begriffe wollen nichts mehr bergen, nichts mehr berühren oder treffen, sondern weisen in ihrem inneren Gestus weit über das empirisch Einlösbare hinaus. Der übersprungene empirische Bezug wird von einer Art Sprung aus der Geschichte begleitet (oder ist damit eins): Die in Frage stehenden Wörter sind nicht mehr geschichtlich in dem Sinne, dass sich in ihnen ein Tiefenraum der Erfahrung öffnet, dass sie aus Erfahrung sedimentierte Geschichte sind, die ihre Hemmschwellen und Schneisen, ihre Irrtümer, Dispositionen und Möglichkeiten mit sich führt. Es handelt sich vielmehr, so Pörksen, um „ahistorische Zugriffe auf die Welt"2. Nichts mehr an ihnen weist auf ihre epochale, lokale oder soziale Einbettung hin und damit auch auf ihre Einbettung in ein bestimmtes menschliches Maß. Die Sprache lässt vielmehr erkennen, wie ein „geschichtlicher Ort mobil gemacht und neu organisiert wird, wie aus 2 Ebd., S. 49. dem, was ist, eine verwandelbare ,Substanz' wird, und wie die Kontur einer neuartigen Kristallisation dieser Substanz [...] gezeichnet wird"3. Was Husserl also in seiner Krisis-Schrift als die Verselbständigung der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft aus ihrem Boden, der „Lebenswelt", kritisierte, erfährt in den Plastikwörtern eine zusätzliche Wendung, insofern diese ins Gewand der Wissenschaftlichkeit gehüllt in den Alltag zurückwandern und sich hier zu ungebundenen, bedürfniserzeugenden Autoritäten entfalten. Es handelt sich nicht mehr um wissenschaftliche Termini im engeren Sinne, die eine klar begrenzte Bedeutung haben, sondern um leere Projektile der Positivität schlechthin. Sie versprechen keine Fortschritt der objektiven Erkenntnis, sondern Fortschritt per se, wobei das, wohin fortgeschritten werden soll, angesichts der weit ausholenden Geste des Fortschreitens selbst unerheblich wird. Zu 2. Wie die Wörter selbst von eigentümlich amorphem Charakter sind, ist auch das, worauf sie zugreifen, durch einen dynamischen und sich entdiffe- 61 renzierenden Zug ausgezeichnet. Dies lässt sich beispielhaft am Begriff der „Entwicklung" zeigen. Als Übersetzung der lateinischen explicatio verweist er zunächst auf ein Auseinanderwickeln dessen, was noch ein- oder zusammengefaltet ist. Dabei geht es stets um ein Ausrollen und Entfalten von noch Keimhaftem, Undeutlichen ins Deutliche, wie es seinen paradigmatischen und über Jahrtausende verbindlichen Ausdruck in dem aristotelischen Modell von dynamis und energeia gefunden hat: Dem aller Entwicklung zugrunde liegenden Übergang von der dunkel im Stoff schlummernden Möglichkeit einer Sache zu ihrer ans Licht tretenden Wirklichkeit. Das, was sich entwickelt, wird zunehmend klarer; es gewinnt an Umriss und Bestimmtheit und damit, nach griechischer Auffassung, an Sein. Im 18. Jahrhundert vollzieht sich eine folgenreiche Wandlung, gewissermaßen „auf Taubenfüßen" (Nietzsche): Sie liegt in dem unscheinbaren grammatischen Übergang von der transitiven Bedeutung „aus A entwickelt sich B" in die intransitive „etwas entwickelt sich". Jetzt steht nicht mehr die bestimmte Erscheinung im Blickpunkt, an der sich eine Entwicklung vollzieht, sondern das namenlose intransitive Veränderungsgeschehen selbst. Dieses hat nun die Neigung, in einen neuen Transitiv überzugehen. Der Prozess selbst wird gewissermaßen zum hypokeimenon, zum zugrunde liegenden und handelnden Subjekt. Die sprachlich vorbereitete Hypostasierung eines sich ursprünglich 3 Ebd., S. 76. 62 an der individuellen Form intim vollziehenden Geschehens zum namenlosen Gesamtsubjekt, dem die einzelnen Lebensformen untergeordnet werden, erfährt im 19. Jahrhundert durch die aufkommende Evolutionstheorie an Ausbreitung und Vertiefung. Statt eines teleologisch gegliederten Ordnungsgefüges gewinnt nun die Vorstellung eines ziellosen, durch die bloße Aufeinanderfolge von selektiven Prozessen charakterisierten Entwicklungsgeschehens die Oberhand. Evolution wird als solche zum Prinzip. Die bestimmten Lebensformen und Gestalten verwandeln sich zu immer weiter gelockerten transi-torischen Knoten, an denen nicht ihre dezidierte Gestalt, sondern das Prinzip ihrer Ablösbarkeit und Perfektibilität interessiert. Das, was sich da entwickelt, ist mit anderen Worten offen und als dynamische Hyle seiner ewigen Zukünftigkeit überantwortet. Eine ähnliche Verschiebung finden wir im Begriff der fitness. Auch wenn seine Herkunft etymologisch nicht sicher geklärt ist, weist er doch auf das griechische Wort arete zurück, die Tauglichkeit oder Bestheit einer Sache. Die Alten bezeichneten damit die Eigenschaft, wodurch jemand oder etwas, ein Ding, ein Tier, ein Mensch oder Gott, in seiner spezifischen Besonderheit hervortrat. So besitzt etwa das Schuhwerk seine arete in der spezifischen Tauglichkeit für den menschlichen Fuß, beim Pferd liegt sie in seiner Schnelligkeit und Wendigkeit. Auch wenn die arete der menschlichen Seele nicht in unmittelbarer Analogie zu den aretai der anderen Lebewesen oder gar Sachen gesehen werden kann, ist doch deutlich, dass das, worauf die menschliche Seele blickt, durch ein Maß charakterisiert ist, das sie aus der indifferenten, sich ewig übermächtigenden Naturzeit in die Umschlossenheit ihres Seins hebt. In diesem Sinne bedeutet arete die Gefügtheit in einen maßvollen Zusammenhang, der nach Platon bzw. Sokrates in direktem Widerspruch zur offenen Überfülle des Werdens steht, zum unendlichen Progress, also zu dem, was sie pleonexia (das Immer-mehr-haben-wollen) nennen. Fitness im evolutionstheoretischen Sinne meint dagegen die bestmögliche Anpassungsfähigkeit an die Umwelt, die dazu führt, dass sich das auf diese Weise taugliche Individuum in größerem Maße im Sein halten kann als andere. Genauer kann sich nicht dieses Individuum länger im Sein halten, sondern ein ganz bestimmter Aspekt an ihm, nämlich sein sogenannter Genotyp, seine genetische Ausstattung, die sich in den Genpool der nächsten Generation zu retten und dort geltend zu machen vermag. Das Sein dieses Individuums besteht also näher besehen aus seinem Zukünftigsein; es passt sich an umwillen seiner Zukünftigkeit, und doch ist dieses Anpassungsgeschehen eigentlich ein passiver Vorgang. Denn es ist nicht so, dass das Individuum selbst seine Ver- wirklichung bestimmt, sondern es ist das Evolutionsgeschehen als solches, das als das eigentliche, wenn auch blinde Subjekt solche Genotypen vorzieht, die an sich das größte Maß an Adaptionsfähigkeit aufweisen, die also ganz im Gegensatz zur griechischen Vorstellung so wenig wie möglich in die Bestimmtheit treten. (Natürlich handelt es sich hier um keine begriffsgeschichtliche Nachzeichnung im engeren Sinne, sondern lediglich um den Aufweis einer Tendenz. Es wäre aber lohnend, der Verwandlung von arete zu fitness - mit einer wesentlichen Station bei Nietzsche - einmal nachzugehen.) Zu 3. Der in sich als offene Evolution verstandenen Natur, die ihre Gebilde ständig zugunsten neuer und anderer überholt, ist eine Form der technischen Herstellung angeglichen, die ebenfalls offen, innovativ und richtungslos vorgeht. Auch der zentrale Zug der modernen Forschung und Technik liegt in der prinzipiellen Vorläufigkeit ihrer Produkte. Wurde ehemals die Arbeit um eines bestimmten Werkes willen verrichtet, scheint das technische Gebilde ein vorübergehendes Mittel zu sein, das dazu dient, den Produktionsprozess als solchen im Fluss zu halten. Die einstigen ,Zwecke' werden zu Mitteln in einem völlig neuartigen Sinn: Als vorübergehende Stationen vermitteln sie die Produktionsphasen miteinander; der transitorische Charakter der Gebilde übereignet sie stets der Neu-, Um- und Weiterbildung. Das bedeutet, dass das technische Herstellen analog zu dem als Evolution verstandenen Naturgeschehen alle Formen der Bestimmtheit in sich als unendlichen Progress hineinzieht. Während das traditionelle Herstellen den Weg von der dynamis zur energeia, von der im Stoff bereitliegenden Möglichkeit zur hervorgetretenen Wirklichkeit nahm, erscheint jetzt umgekehrt das Seiende erst dann als ,wirklich', wenn es die offenen Bruchstellen der reinen Möglichkeit im Sinne der Weiterver-wertbarkeit an sich aufweist. Die eigenschaftslose Materie als die potenzielle Möglichkeit schlechthin ist nun das Wirkliche, während die durch ihre Verbindung mit der Form zur Wirklichkeit gelangte Möglichkeit sich als weniger ,seiend' erweist. Seit dem 20. Jahrhundert weist dieser Prozess eine spezifische Wendung auf, die ins Herz der Bildungsproblematik zielt. Technische Herstellung ist nun immer weniger nur als Radikalisierung neuzeitlichen Verfügungswissens zu begreifen, das in der Hand des menschlichen Subjekts liegt. Natur und Technik, Objekt und Subjekt beginnen sich vielmehr selbst in diesen umfassenden Entsubstanzialisierungsprozess aufzulösen und ineinander zu verschlingen. 63 64 Der qualitative Sprung liegt darin, dass sich Wissenschaft und Technik zunehmend nicht mehr nur auf die Optimierung von Produkten konzentrieren, das heißt auf die Verflüssigung all dessen, was ist, zum Potenzialträger und Material, sondern, wie der italienische Philosoph Massimo De Carolis schreibt, auf die Produktivität selbst, also auf die der Wissenschaft bislang entzogenen inneren „Vermögen" des Menschen. Mit anderen Worten: Es zeichnet sich eine grundsätzliche Infragestellung des Verhältnisses zwischen verfügbarer Natur und der conditio humana ab, wobei die Letztere als eine dem wissenschaftlichtechnischen Zugriff bislang vorenthaltene Dimension zunehmend in die Ers-tere verschwindet, und zwar sowohl auf der theoretischen wie auf der praktischen Ebene.4 Das wichtigste Zeugnis für diese Entwicklung ist das Auftreten der sogenannten Lebens- oder Biowissenschaften, d. h. derjenigen Disziplinen - von der Künstlichen Intelligenz über die Hirnwissenschaften bis hin zur Genetik -, die sich aus einer rein naturalistischen Perspektive mit den spezifischen Fähigkeiten des menschlichen Lebewesens befassen. Der Begriffsapparat, dessen sie sich bedienen, erkennt den Schlüssel zur Wechselwirkung dieses mit einem seltsamen Zug zur Virtualität ausgezeichneten Tieres mit seiner Umwelt nun ausdrücklich in der Vorstellung der Anpassung und der Optimierung der Fitness, wobei unter Fitness seine nahezu unbegrenzte Adaptionsfähigkeit verstanden wird. Die „humanen Technowissenschaften" bieten, so De Carolis, „die Illusion, die ganze Bandbreite der menschlichen Vermögen - in ihrer Verflochtenheit von biologischen, kognitiven und kommunikativen Vermögen - in potenzielle Ressourcen zu verwandeln, die nur auf ihren ,optimalen' Einsatz warten, der passend zu jedem neuen Vorkommnis auf dem Markt neu definiert werden kann." Gerade weil sich Subjekt und Objekt in diesem offenen Optimierungsgeschehen ineinander verschlingen, finden die kritischen Kategorien, die der Dichotomie zwischen Rationalität und Biologie, Technik und Natur, Täterschaft und passiver Hinnahme entsprangen, immer weniger Fugen zum Eingreifen, worauf auch De Carolis aufmerksam macht: „Es käme jedoch einer einseitigen Naivität gleich, sich auf diese entmenschlichenden' Aspekte der Technik zu beschränken, ohne auch auf das Faszinationspotenzial hinzuweisen, das damit zusammenhängt, dass den Einzelnen nun die Perspektive eröffnet wird, unbeschränkt auf sich selbst zuzugreifen, um völlig frei die eigene Identität zu konstruieren und zu modifizieren. [...] Es ist wichtig, auf diesem 4 Vgl. Massimo De Carolis, Das Leben im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, Zürich/Berlin 2009, S. 9. Punkt zu insistieren, weil die unvorhergesehene Übereinstimmung zwischen den Interessen der großen biopolitischen Netze und den intimsten Leidenschaften der Individuen das kritische Denken [...] gleichsam übertölpelt hat."5 Zu 4. Wie ich oben mit Pörksen sagte, sind die amorphen Plastikwörter - Fortschritt, fitness, Konzept, Strategie, Effizienz, Projekt, Information usw. - durch eine eigentümliche Vagheit und Unbestimmtheit ausgezeichnet. Zugleich geht von ihnen ein starker autoritativer Sog aus: Sie unterlaufen die Wirklichkeit, berauben sie ihrer geschichtlichen Substanz und verpflichten sie als solche zu einer prinzipiell entgrenzten und planbaren Zukunft. Um an zwei historische Kategorien Reinhart Koselleks zu erinnern: Der „Erwartungshorizont", den sie transportieren, übersteigt um ein vielfaches den „Erfahrungsraum", den die Sprache üblicherweise in sich beherbergt. Kosellecks These lautet bekanntlich, dass sich in der Neuzeit die Kluft zwischen Erfahrung und Erwartung zunehmend vergrößert, ja, dass sich die Neuzeit gerade darin als „neu" erfährt, 65 dass sie von Erwartungen erfüllt ist, die sich von allen bis dahin gemachten Erfahrungen entfernt haben.6 Die Plastikwörter dienen gewissermaßen als Katalysatoren dieses entgrenzten Aufbruchs in die Zukunft. Noch einmal Pörksen: „Man könnte diese Wörter Alltagsdietriche nennen. Sie sind griffig, und sie sind der Schlüssel zu vielen, sie öffnen riesige Räume. Sie infizieren ganze Wirklichkeitsfelder und sorgen dafür, daß die Wirklichkeit sich auf sie, als ihren Kristallisationspunkt, zuordnet."7 Statt inhaltlicher Präzisierung werden sie flankiert durch einen unersättlichen Konjunktiv: Alles wird schneller, besser, höher, effizienter, die Forschung zur „Spitzenforschung" oder gar zur „Spitzenforschung von Morgen", die immer weniger an die geschichtliche Wirklichkeit gekoppelt ist als an ihre eigene inhärente Übersteigerungsstruktur. Wo der Konjunktiv derart vorherrscht, beginnt der Indikativ aus dem Blick zu geraten. Mängel, Pathologien und das sogenannte Normale fallen in ihrer prinzipiellen Optimierungswürdigkeit zusammen, wie es vor allem in den gegenwärtigen Tendenzen der Medizin, die zum Vorreiter menschlicher Bildsamkeit avanciert, deutlich wird. Der Begriff „Krankheit" erscheint obsolet, menschliche Unterschiede und Besonderheiten werden zunehmend zu einem 5 Ebd. S. 287f. 6 Reinhart Koselleck, ,„Erfahrungsraum' und ,Erwartungshorizont' - zwei historische Kategorien", in: ders., Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt a. M. 1995, S. 349-375, hier S. 359. 7 Pörksen, Plastikwörter, S. 17. prinzipiell neutralen Pool des Lebens zusammengenommen und dem Wunsch nach „permanenter Steigerung", „unabschließbarem Wachstum" und „Verbesserung" (enhancement) angepasst. Die Zielsetzung liegt in der fitness schlechthin, d. h. wörtlich der „Eignung" - doch man fragt sich: Eignung wozu?8 Zu 5. Kommen wir damit zur fünften und letzten These. Wenn es so ist, dass jede Gesellschaft ihre tatsächlichen Voraussetzungen und Motive verleugnen muss, um sich effizient, flexibel und dennoch stabil zu halten, wie Nietzsche gesehen hat,9 dann muss man sich fragen, welches Wissen in unserer Gesellschaft, die sich als Wissensgesellschaft begreift, in den Schacht des verbotenen Wissens verdrängt wird, und auf welche Weise dies geschieht. Damit ist eine gewisse Paradoxie angesprochen: Wahrscheinlich keine Gesellschaft vor uns hat in einer so überreichen Weise über Wissen verfügt, und keine vor uns hat diese Flut an Wissen oder „Information", wie man heute sagt, dem Konsum des Ein-66 zelnen, dem „Verbraucher", so rückhaltslos anheimgegeben. Jeder hat zu jeder Zeit und an jedem Ort Zugriff auf alles, oder sollte es doch zumindest haben; daran arbeiten die Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien, die das flüssige Skelett dessen ausmachen, was wir als das „Recht auf Bildung" bezeichnen. Dennoch wäre es falsch, aus dieser durchgängigen Veröffentlichung des Wissens zu schließen, es gäbe keine Verbote. Sie äußern sich freilich nicht in offiziellen Restriktionen oder gar Zensur, sondern werden, wie Konrad Paul Liessmann schreibt, durch Verinnerlichung aufrechterhalten: „Wo es keine offiziellen Verbote im Bereich der Informationsannahme und Informationsweitergabe mehr gibt, müssen innere Instanzen diese Aufgabe übernehmen. Deshalb die übergroße Bedeutung, die der moralische Diskurs gegenwärtig einnimmt."10 Liessmann zielt mit dieser Bemerkung auf die Tatsache, dass gerade im moralischen Diskurs, zu dem man sich vor allem durch umfassende Information zu rüsten hat und der seinerseits wesentlich auf die Einebnung von Unterschieden zielt, jede Konfrontation des Menschen mit seiner eigenen Abgründigkeit und Geschichtlichkeit, seinen Affekten, geheimen Beweggründen und Verwurzelungen, d. h. mit seiner ganzen Kontingenz, all dem, was seinem Sein als reiner Potenzialität im Wege steht, unterbunden wird. 8 De Carolis, Das Leben im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, S. 254. 9 Vgl. hierzu Konrad Paul Liessmann, Philosophie des verbotenen Wissens. Friedrich Nietzsche und die schwarzen Seiten des Denkens, Wien 2000. 10 Ebd., S. 19. Mir scheint jedoch gerade in Bezug auf die Bildungsproblematik ein anderer Aspekt noch wichtiger zu sein. Er liegt in dem durch die Plastikwörter vorangetriebenen Übergriff auf den abgründigen Möglichkeitscharakter des Menschen selbst. Dadurch, dass diese Wörter auf die ständige Überholtheit und Überholbarkeit dessen, was ist, hinweisen und den Einzelnen damit aus seiner generativen, pluralen, lokalen und geschichtlichen Verwurzelung und den hier gelegenen Dispositionen und Möglichkeiten herauskatapultieren, zerstören sie die komplexe Zeitlichkeit des Menschlichen in ihrer geheimen Verkettung von Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft. Sie zwingen ihn stattdessen in die unablässige Konfrontation mit sich selbst als reinem Möglichsein. Das die tiefere, abgründige Plastizität des Menschen tragende Ineinanderspiel von Erinnerung und Erwartung mutiert so zu einer einseitigen Aufholjagd, die den Einzelnen einem prinzipiellen Gedächtnisschwund, und das bedeutet zugleich: Selbstschwund, überantwortet. Sich zu etwas bilden bedeutet heute: Sich bildbar halten, unendliche Formbarkeit, Proteusnatur. Dies findet schon in dem einfachen Verweis statt, sich keinen Gedanken mehr erlauben zu dürfen, den es bereits gab. Gewesen-zu-sein gilt bereits als Ausschlusskriterium für den Diskurs der Zukunft - nur, der Mensch ist immer schon zu einem großen Teil gewesen; „wenn wir den Mund aufmachen", so ein Gedanke Hofmannsthals, „reden immer zehntausend Tote mit". Dem ewigen Menschen von Morgen bleibt dagegen buchstäblich keine Zeit, sich in die Wirklichkeit einzubilden, mit der ganzen Zähigkeit und Gemessenheit wirklicher Bildungsvorgänge, und wiederum aus ihr das zu empfangen, was die Griechen als „Sein" bezeichnet haben. In einem solchen von der Last seiner Geschichte befreiten Dasein liegt zweifellos eine große verführerische Kraft; man sollte sich jedoch nicht darüber hinwegtäuschen, dass der Begriff der Möglichkeit nicht zuletzt den Aspekt der prinzipiellen Verwerfbarkeit in sich trägt. Es wäre zu fragen, was Bildung im Horizont einer solchen verinnerlichten Verwerfbarkeit eigentlich für den Einzelnen noch bedeuten kann. Mit anderen Worten: Gerade die Plastizität des Menschen, die sein innerstes Vermögen, aber zugleich seine abgründige Konfrontation mit dem Unendlichen markiert, und die mit der Notwendigkeit eines Sprunges aus dem reinen Möglichsein in die Geschichte konfrontiert werden muss, scheint mir heute in einer durchaus attraktiven, aber einseitigen und gefährlichen Weise in Anspruch genommen zu sein. Statt der Doppelsinnigkeit, die das Wort Bildung eigentlich in sich trägt, nämlich zugleich das offene Geschehen des Sich-Bildens zu sein wie der gewachsene Umriss, das bestimmte Sein, die sich ausdifferenziert habende, „schuldige" Lebensform, weist das Wort zunehmend 67 Züge eines Plastikworts auf: es wird ebenso verheißungsvoll wie leer, amorph, eine „konnotative Stereotype", in der sich niemand mehr zu erkennen geben kann und die sich der kritischen Auseinandersetzung entzieht, zukunftslastig und ewig wandelbar. Worauf sonst zielt das die Bildungsdebatte durchherrschende durchaus merkwürdige Wort von der „Zukunftstauglichkeit"? „Fit für die Zukunft" zu sein, wie es uns allenthalben nahegelegt wird, das ist in der Tat die wesentliche Eigenschaft des Plastiks, jener scheinbar harmlosen und gefälligen Substanz, von der Roland Barthes in den Mythen des Alltags schreibt: „Auf der einen Seite der tellurische Rohstoff, auf der anderen der perfekte Gegenstand. Zwischen diesen beiden Extremen ist nichts; nichts als ein zurückgelegter Weg, der von einem Angestellten mit Schirmmütze, halb Gott, halb Roboter, bewacht wird. Das Plastik ist weniger eine Substanz als vielmehr die Idee ihrer endlosen Umwandlung."11 68 11 Roland Barthes, Mythen des Alltags, Frankfurt a. M. 1964; zit. nach Pörksen, Plastikwörter, S. 21. Žarko Paie BODY-IMAGE AS AN EVENT: DELEUZE AND VIBRATIONS OF CONTEMPORARY ART Upcoming - Art as a roll of chaos 69 Whether through language-scripture-picture are opens the perspectives of contemporary art event that will upcoming? Eliminate the tone of the Prophetic dimension of speech and the apocalyptic tone in a speech about what the imminent future, It seems that contemporary art is immersed in the dark shadows of the present which has lost any sense of its own sovereign rights to the destruction of everything that exists, including ourselves. Do not just seminal thinkers-artists of modern times demanded to overcome the world of transcendence in immanence from Nietzsche to Artaud, from Duchamp to Debord? What we are left with one (not) of realized programs without insight into the future beyond the measures fulfillment of the present with greater intensity of techno-scientific power source and power control mechanisms of social reproduction of life? If art was only a view, narrative, and social intervention in the current state of the "world", then its imaginary power was reduced to a mere aesthetic character albeit with critical social services to rebellion against the world and its dominant symbolic forms (Groys, 2009). But there are moments of changing something that fits to fatal embrace the actuality and its immanent critique. Perhaps it is finally ripe to get rid of the temptation of the art that descends to the profane comment of philosophical and scientific interpretations of the world as well as the function of social change and awareness of a change in the world. These are all superficial and external terms of what contemporary art confronts us still retaining the primordial understand- 70 ing of creating something new-in-the-world. Upcoming is this possible and conceivable in thinking in language-scripture-picture perspective of the radical events. Elemental power in the chaotic dance of human and inhumane living together or mesh networks. It is endlessly reflected in the finite, eternity in a true temporality, and the images of unrepresentable the conceptual clarity of the world as an event. Art flows through the pictorial worlds of different epochs, leaving a trace of one and one-off events in their epoch-making time limits. It will be able to blaze and burn through the language, script and visual codes of art, philosophy and science (Deleuze/Guattari, 1991/2005). Deleuze open the three major forms of thinking which is defined as common game of the elemental power in understanding the primary state of chaos. From its magma and ash stems each possible creation of worlds. The ratio of infinity and finitude, and deterritorialisation, nature and the cosmos, man and inhumane occurs in three forms of relationship with the general chaos. Conceptual Art opens through sensations (sensatio) and construction of monuments, works of material traces. But the architecture is original art which articulate finite and infinite relations, the Earth and the cosmos. Science operates with the functions and structures, conceptual thinking and philosophy of language operates with linguistic forms, but all three forms doing together to the direct creative operations for producing new events. Art, however, appears to contrast science and philosophy as it is the elemental power of creating a new nearest state primary of chaos in the creation of artistic works. Complete the temporality of a work of art shows in the mode of possibility that the upcoming event (Heidegger, 1972). Time builds and breaks, such as imposing one of Heraclitus fragment of a child play with pebbles without any purpose other than in an act of creative play. Art and philosophy and science are mutually relation to "the ocean of chaos," so that in their symbolic games does not exceed a certain threshold of feeling, function/structure and conceptual language. Contemporary art can therefore be determined only negative. She was frantically searching for a lost place of reconciliation (space) and deterritorialization (time) of singularization. This is its indeterminacy and irreducibility on the philosophy of science. But at the same time it is the Promethean dream of a rule that connects the conceptual image-scripture-language with functions and structures of the world. The rest of the irreducible left her on the other side of each image as a perspective event. The rest is not only felt flashes of chaos. It is a holistic experience that a work of art opens its entry into the world and his departure from the material struc- ture of the work itself. The subject matter of artistic works in the open event of becoming/being a world Deleuze called the singularity (Deleuze/Guattari, 2008). It is finite and the infinite motion occurs through the subject of artists. But this is not happening so that the artist becomes the center, but the governor of events. The subject of contemporary art in the coming time, the gaps filled with the works, artifacts, performatives actions, interventions and provocations (provoking experiences and interactive communications event participants) is a singularity without modern subject as the actors work of art (Steinweg, 2009: 84-94, Zepke, 2009: 176-197). The artist is nothing but a relationship of singularity and deterritorialisation. So, the art is the state of overcoming the elemental power of the modern era. Conceptual language constructs the world as a network function with the feeling and experience of this side of the world hereafter. Everything is "here and there." Every thing has its place in the chaos of universal creative games only when the world is set in the horizon of techno-scientific games, with facilities in the area of social, political and cultural network events. To have your event perspective, it is obvious that it must produce a double effect. Must be placed in some relationship to the history of the mediality perspective as illusion that the participant (observer) participated in the act of artistic creation and must be in excess of the imaginary act of placing the works in deterritorialized space. It should be clearly noted that the concept of the perspective directions in the event is something else than the media conditions of contemporary art. First, the perspective is determined by the optical illusion effect views in the new century. With the Renaissance art of the body in space is becoming a subject as the figure due to the technical invention of geometry and linear perspective. It is a kind of Western symbolic form (Belting, 2009: 9-20). The power comes from the formal requirements of action in space and time. Without the perspective can not be technically rendering the world. But the notion of perspective is not only about the possibilities of perception of things and objects in space. The prospect is not measures of human "weapon" in the articulation of visual power. In horizon of the future, that will come, we are always far away from a perspective of original time. It is a possibility of setting up the subject/actors look at the upcoming deterritorialized zone of uncertainty of life. Interwoven networks, inhuman social relations, ideological conflicts over the occupation of empty seats and be able to download the same symbolic form for other purposes. Therefore, contemporary art must be interpreted through the deconstruction of the symbolic form of the modern world. The perspective of events in itself has the dimen- 71 72 sion of the possibilities of turning prospects. When Paul Virilio quotes Paul Klee that it is now catching objects, and not on them, then this is not a revolution of objects, but objects of revolution in the concept of the event (Virilio, 2000). View of the subject is no longer entering the body of the world. Now a self-worldliness of the world in its immanence of corporal condition is rooted in the body of an eccentric subject. Contemporary art is a scene of the revolution as a world perspective of the upcoming event. One can rightly say that there is no event without turning the art in the very core of the contemporary world (Paic, 2006). Language is the art of pictorial scripture in the elemental powers of chaos. >From the contingency of life that the world is and that is precisely the result that the desire for a thoughtful understanding of the chaos and the will of common coupling the lattice model, system, order. The entire history took place in the signs of dominance of one over the other. Art preceded was in the mythical world of philosophy, and of the new century and this we call the modern age of science has established his absolute rule over every other language of thought. Not surprisingly, therefore, that the paradox of our time lies in the fact that modern science research in the last secrets of the creation of the universe and the origin of life do not use mathematical symbols and formulas, but hybrid-scripture language arts and philosophy to explain their assumptions and theoretical solutions. Analogy and metaphors are used reasoning operation structural games with mythical language and pointing to what meanings last and first, and the mysterious yet open, to what no longer stands "behind" in Mysterium tremendum divine feast. That "after" is always "there". In the event of openness of the world as a work of art with a time stamp of the new apocalyptic power forever there is no more sublime thing that regulate social relations. Capital is neither sublime nor immanent manifestation of a radical reversal. The concept of structural capital and will develop the network of its cargo of artifacts as a visual representation of the gaps between the sublime and the banal reality of things material reproduction of life. Gilles Deleuze could therefore leave the following statement on file with Proust and signs of further explanation, in the wake of the Romantic dream of the artist-philosopher, and merging art with a conceptual language of philosophy. Namely, that despite criticism of the philosophy of art means a weapon of criticism can not be more than philosophical. "Philosophy and all its methods and its good will is not nothing compared to the mysterious forces of artistic works" (Deleuze, 1964: 76). When the modern world opens up in his country and aritmical vibrations, Inhuman vibration pulsing techno-sphere in which everything still belongs to the classical definition of man and his essence, then, is primarily portends the arrival of something ineffable sublime and terrible darkness. That is what is hidden behind the veil of reality that is self-devouring (Agamben, 2009: 2136). The possibility of breakthroughs and the limits on which contemporary art is, with all its restlessness, repeating gestures and strategies ancient predecessor of the historical avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century (from Dadaism, Constructivism and enchantment Surrealistic images of dreams and illusions of reality), Deleuze's thinking is to present the event as always becoming a new/different being the Identity of Being and Time. Art that transcends the artist (personality) open the creative chaos of becoming/being eternally other. Repetition does not cancels the difference. Moreover, it can be shown as a difference only constant variations there (Deleuze, 1969). The difference can not be thought without identity in time. Becoming/being eternal identity in other contemporary art achieves apparent change of form in the important events surrounding the temporality of life. Technological innovations have contributed to the formal and substantive changes in the status of new Media art as a practice activity. Video art is the techno-structure of the media obsolete. But it is the time integral of digital media continues in the new technological matrix. This applies to all forms of contemporary art from photography, film, performance and installation art. Thought-image corresponds to both conceptual art. Conceptualism in all its variations, including political and social intervention, is purely symbolic form of human-Inhuman constellations in real time. Language-scripture-text takes under its wing image of unrepresentable events (Alberro, 2003). The question is why conceptual art placed in the center of philosophical discussion on the new comparison pictures and script-language-text in the visual culture of modernity? Although it is undoubtedly the performativity of the body apparently is closer to what the term means the event - especially in Heidegger, and then in Derrida, Deleuze, Badiou -, conceptual art is philosophically geared towards the concept of silence as a picture-word without its transcendent referent. In other words, conceptual art is a radical abolition of the modern art of the subject. It is a text without the letter and the letter without words, without a sign of the case and the case without a sign - the exclusive immanence of form and content of art without a body. Between concept and image supersedes the difference in picture is not preceded by the term and the term is not preceded by the picture. Image and con- 73 74 cept in their productive unity corresponding singularity of events, this means that any narrative structure, a new "iconology" or "narratology" for new Media art is not only inappropriate tool of interpretation, but inadequate way of understanding what the image as a concept or concept as an image, regardless of whether it is the art of film or video-art, non-discursive points watchers, watchers, listeners. It is also the reason that more works of art can not be appropriately interpreted as ruling out some theoretical omega-point (neolaca-nian psychoanalysis, phenomenology, hermeneutics, relational aesthetics), but only the immanent, from his own horizon. For Deleuze, the only real aesthetic problem during the end of aesthetics in which the resident contemporary art (not) implemented a program of historical avant-garde: the entry of art into everyday life. The construction of such a life is not so untouchable world of life from the impact of techno-science and the ideological-political articulation of social relations in the form of capitalist control over the body of nature and human body. Iconoclastic way of contemporary art that leads to inhumane towards the horizon, feeling/experience of the world without secrets is the last historical event in the language of moving pictures-scripture-text objectified reality. Virtuality precedes actuality, not only because life has not always pre-machined product (ready made). Moreover, the life that art event into a work of art is virtually the same time-the actual act of intervention in its crevices, grooves and chaotic structure of becoming/ being different and other (Guattari, 1995). Perversion and theology In the text dealing with the analysis of body-language in the opinion of the contemporary French philosopher Pierre Klossowski, by one of the best studies on Nietzsche in French general, Gilles Deleuze has argued that "in some way our epoch reveals perversion" (Deleuze, 1993: 341). At the time of the Marquis de Sade had a perversion subversive function demolition order of moral law. When it is "unnatural" symbolically legitimized as a "natural" then it is within the demolition of "naturalness" of sexual relations between people of perversion of something quite different than in our era. Deleuze suggests that the essential difference, perverse, according to him, can only be called what it is exactly the objective power of the show, what makes the distinction between the two orders of nature-morality. If there is no obscenity of-itself, but the concerned authorities to enter into the gap of language that goes beyond the language of the act of his speaking situation reflection about the body, then the experience of transgression, language plays in language itself. But the language that allows the elevation of consciousness to the level of reflection on obscenity must be rooted in the body as a boundary between what is somatic body and the semiotic body. The paradoxical presence/absence of language in the body and body language comes to reality in an act of perverse pleasure. This is why Deleuze can perform a setting that is second invention of our epoch - the invention of theology (Deleuze, 1993: 342). The more is not necessarily believe in God, says Deleuze, because this is a quest for structure or form of expression of religious beliefs, not about the true religious feel. Although the latter position only modernized the statement of the dispute between Christian theology as "Christian philosophy" with the metaphysical tradition from which she had just performed subprime doctrine of the faith, not philosophical questions about the meaning of the divine in the world, it is noticeable however is something much more challenging for an opinion. Deleuze in the context of reading settings Klossowski states Gombrowic's Pornography/Cosmos novel to reach the key settings of overall opinion about the modern world "body without organs." In fact, theology in this sense becomes a superseding science about God, or, better, non-science of existential substance. Theology is found in dysfunction of language itself. Hence Klossowski, according to Deleuze, reasonably come to the view that the perversion of authority superseding the power reflected by the world of theology in the world without God (Deleuze, 1993: 342). The unity of theology and, therefore, is not pornography scandal of destruction of an idol of Christianity with the help of the Antichrist figure. It is about unity of structural dysfunction. Perversion and the theology of the dysfunctional ways leads to experience the body-language in contemporary visual culture as a fascination with body image. Both inventions of our epoch, the epoch-making fact sinkage of the subject to something beyond pornography as a visual language and bareness of the world in its dysfunction. Perversion is the language of the body-the body itself without any spiritual substance, and theology is superseding the speech of God as relation to things which is no longer crucial. Perversely-theological revolution of our epoch, if we radicalized Deleuze's fundamental idea of his anti-philosophy, is that the experience led to extreme pornography disappearance of the borders of the body itself in a total physicality of the world in general (Deleuze/Guattari, 1972). How is it possible to indicate that much 75 76 is accepted, but at the same time and fully unreflective then the phrase itself Deleuze, the body without organs? The body disappears in all the physicality of the world as a porn world only because it is exhausted what the body allows the body to be what enables the body to have a body. The body without organs is the result of dysfunction ontological language itself being transformed into a thing so it becomes a perversion of the experience and theology of the language itself-in-flesh. When the body disappears in a pure visual fascination with body image, then it is exhausted the possibility that the language opens up new horizons of sense of the world. Language remains without no authority, no substance. The body is subject, nor the master in his own house, what Lacan says about the subject in a new position within the world. The relationship of language and the body is analogous to the relationship that the traditional philosophy as a metaphysics of being gave to the Being and belonging relative beings. Language is the physical condition of possibility of speech in the absence of articulate language. When the body is "silent" than it speaks in a "language". The question that the opinion of Gilles Deleuze opens the inevitable reflection of modernity marked by gaps, communication, visuality and the body is therefore not only set in the new framework of relations of old concepts. It is a question of structural and formal conditions under which all else can talk about a world without horizons of its meaning. Or, in other words, it is a question about the dysfunctionality of the world reduced to the logic of the rule of global capital as a universal "desiring machine." The change in the way of talking about the life of this important defunct world testifies to the language that the world describes the ontological character of perversion: its reification corresponds to teological reification of speech of the body in a position of principle of transgression of moral and political restrictions. The Science of God deals with the body as an object because it has itself expelled from the center of the speech on the subject. God in the world of dysfunction that inhabit the bodies available as objects of desire. God can not be "subject" to forever guarantee the meaningfulness of the world. It is a "function" that in the general perversity of the world is what is, after all, derives from the transcendental lattice point: that, namely, acting as it or as a thing (on-itself). In all films that deal with perverted sexual relationships and their projected social and ideological-political problems of our era, like the masterpieces of the problem of relations between executioners and victims of Nazi totalitarian rule and inventions be the rule of sexual perversion and after the end of totalitarianism as a political-ideological system, Movie Night Porter by Liliana Cavani with brilliant actors Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling, still left behind that pornographic horor-body encounter in something sublime. What remains is a thing which produces the perversion and at the same time soften the language. Production and gasification of things sublime metaphysical loss of the activity level of the world itself. Poststructuralist theory of the subject, therefore, inevitably departs from this state of things. Language that expresses the subject is a "thing", and when that is no longer behind and there, but "there", as Lacan designated change the function of images in modern painting, which refers to the body in its perverse-theological stories of sexuality. Pornography without God is equal to the visual fascination orgasmic orgasm in white holes. Vacuity fact leads to the disappearance of the fact that sexual act imparts meaning. Reified language in the era of the rule differences (differences) gains its identity by being reduced to a visual communication between the image-bodies as objects of desire. Machine to calculate the language of new media, as it is accurately called the German theorist of visual-ity and new media Friedrich A. Kittler, corresponds to the idea of changing the language of the modern world that has become the image of the body without organs. Briefly expressed, in a phrase that hides what is result of discharge of the modern world in its realization of Western philosophy as metaphysics. In the heart of the very axiom of capitalism going to turn, we are witnessing the realisation of that matter. No longer talking about the idea of machines that work behind the things, but it comes to the realization of materialistic desires alone, and not pleasure himself in space-time zone vacuity of the machine itself. This zone is not the territory. This zone has a new code which registers the "logic of sensation". Mathematical structure of capitalism is identical to binary code that establishes a virtual reality. Instead of transcendent sources of ideas that allows beings to appear, rather than its structural-formal ontological primacy of the original, the body without organs is obstinate imanentism-body-image stuff. That change, which is more than a turn toward the body, leads Deleuze to offset against the whole tradition of philosophical aesthetics, such as, for example, held today in fenom-enological approach to art (Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and the psychoanalytic supplement), followed by something almost identical to the request of Malevich in the first Manifesto of Suprematism. Art is not reflected in the incidence of and relationships between subject and object, and painting pictures. Image resulting from body image alone in his immanentism no superior sources is addressed to the emotions and neurosystem, feel and sensibility, logic, metaphysics, sensation and not representation (Grosz, 2008: 3). 77 Immanence Already in its first crucial text for the entire "new" poststructuralistic orientation Nietzsche and the philosophy Deleuze put the problem of overcoming the dialectical understanding of the rule of reason in history (Deleuze, 1961). An alternative to Hegel's dialectic was found a difference in the game of life itself in its fragmentary. Immanence became a key moment to overcome the entire dialectic of history with its transcendental structure of thought "from above". To that extent the shift towards the body in its sensibility, logic sensation is, the result of Deleuze's anti-philosophy. The body is in its the-battle, and its openness to the world place is a radical shift of metaphysics. The notion that Deleuze was introduced as an alternative to the rule of reason is immanence (Gunzel, 1998). Coming down, metaphorically speaking, from heaven to earth, does not mean setting up of the lower rank on the upper. The distinctive concept of being as being, according to Nietzsche's view, here is elaborated in the context of territorial processes within the clinical method of 78 treatment of psychopathological symptoms. In the analogy, analysis of schizophrenia of capitalism, the concept of duplication of its proliferation in the formal sense of inability and fixed identity of the person, leading thus to turn one that fits the philosophy of immanence. It is thereby crucial to consider the theme of the body itself in this production of duplicate identities. Deleuze and Guattari are therefore in Anti-Oedipus introduced into circulation the term of Antonin Artaud body without organs. The function of this concept is quite concrete: determination of immanent forms of life which is to overall social functionalistic tendencies within language and communication that operate social sciences and humanities "objectified". Form of life that is paradigmatic of the whole social and clinical transformation is the figure of a masochist. Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus cite Artaud from his Theatre of Cruelty: "The body is a body. It is unique. It is not require any organs. The body has never organism. Organisms are the enemies of the body" /Deleuze/Guattari, 2008: 218). For Deleuze and Guattari in this programmatic Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty paragraph of his emphasis is not on the body against the body as such in terms of the integrity of the body itself, but the rejection of "organic organism organization" (Deleuze/Guattari, 2008: 218). Medical speaking, the body can not access the properties as a whole spiritual organism, but as a functional part. Body in relation to their transcendence, which had traditionally imparts the meaning eludes the inherent circuit. Organic in the organism as a system is nothing "natural" organic, rather than the result of modern articulation of science that analyzes what the basis of a lively scientific knowledge about life in general. Biologically term life is not the original concept of life. For it is in its analysis of the history of institutional oversight bodies through biopolitical production of knowledge about the body directed critical attention to Michel Foucault. Step towards what Deleuze thought as immanence bodies in his anti-philosophy just parsing the original concept of reified life. The body can not be otherwise placed in the center of modern thought without deconstructing the very notion of life. The body regains its integrity as opposed to the body so that the "living body" is something quite different from "living bodies" of the modern scientific approach to life. But, as Artaud was not in his theater of cruelty mystic origin of life assumed the contemporary commodification of life itself, but from the time he thought of the future life of ecstasy in his inexhaustible vitality, nor Deleuze did not succeed, but always being existential body without organs, which guarantees existence. Body, therefore, becomes the complex configuration of relationships in magma being not beyond something, but in the very here and now, within the very life of the body. The organism belongs to the organs of the body structure. When we say that it is constituted, should be recalled that for Heidegger, the fundamental structure of metaphysics in that it is onto-theological (Heidegger, 1959). Being, beings and God as the supreme being to think of these arrangements are always starting from the very position of beings. The organization says that the metaphysics of being and the ontological difference being derived from open cracks within the original battle. But this flaw is not the one flaw that Lacan assumes in his theory of decentred subject, which is located between the imaginary and the symbolic structure of the subject. The crack in question in the basic structure of metaphysics is not "visible" or the "noises". Metaphysics open the question of unrepresenting and verbally inexpressible but nonetheless "see" and "hear" within the openness of the body during his historic events. To grasp the epoch-making body, but still means a move from its contingency. Mortality as the final boundaries of the body is being mortality. Heidegger located a man in this area-Being "hear" and "there" because the body is mortal, that the body has the experience of ontological difference Being and beings. Experience is not a body of empirical givenness of existence of man in the human body, which opposed to all other living beings and their bodies, in existential experience of death being determined by their aware- 79 80 ness of their own finite existence. It is obvious that the French structuralists and poststructuralists and postmodernists (Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Lyotard) in its life balance with Hegel's dialectic came to this issue through the body and the existence of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. What, however, is crucial here is that the constitution of metaphysics, its internal structure. This means that the opinions of transcendental horizon is given precisely in what has since Nietzsche, the fundamental problem of overcoming the Hegelian dialectic. Specifically, it is a question of whether a one-off being in the very existence of the body as a living experience of being an alternative to Hegel's view of being in the absolute totality of the spirit? The issue is the scope not only the overall intentions of the anti-philosophy of Deleuze to turn against the body without organs, but also the whole anti- postmetaphysical or philosophy that after Lacan repeatedly returns to a new foundation subject. Can it therefore be one general subject without a body "is not" contingent, but the body becomes a one-time existence of language as the horizon of the world in which to live and such a body "that" as the temporal and finally? Finally, is not the only origin of the word used by Heidegger for the way the historical traditions of metaphysics - Verfassung, the organization - related to what the basic idea of structuralism, namely, that this is the logical and historical development or structuring of the world as a machine? The organism and the organs are by no means opposed to something mechanical and organical, nothing artificial, or "dead" as opposed to the living "structure" of the organism. Artaud's phrase about the body without organs in Deleuze's anti-philosophy therefore can be understood in an attempt to offset the absolute spirit of Hegel's dialectic. In the second part of the Science of Logic, Hegel says: "The whole is not an abstract unity, but unity as a multiplicity of distinctive, but this unity as the one on which the manifold relations with the other is the determination of the same which is a part" (Hegel, 1986: 269). Is not this place also the opinion of totality a sign of whole way of decon-struction of subject? Whole, therefore is not an abstract unity, but whole in a multiplicity of differences. What determines the unit in its entirety not come from any part of something beyond the parts, but is "above" parts. This is the transcendental unity of being or staying alone in a whole life of the whole idea. Opinon of subject as unconscious articulation of language in the symbolic horizon of the world assumes that the crack, but it leaves untouched. Body language as a subject - Lacan's setting - so says the traumatic truth of their own sacrifices as a whole to become a "person" or entity in terms of the master without the Lord. However, this is the language of the subject unconscious articulation of what Lacan in the tradition of metaphysics leaves without answers. This is the language of the unconscious, or what not to say, the thing. Anthropological horizon is the deprivation of the opinion of the whole, or better put, it is failing every subject with opinions paradigmatic case of theoretical psychoanalysis, Freud-Lacan, because in his return to Descartes and Hegel, it seems just from that same starting point that is at the very start of the deficient and denied: that is, in fact, "subject", the structural network of relations and intersubjective relationship between appearance and fact, as is done in media theory Flusser (Flusser, 2005). Every body of opinion and perspective can only be decreased below the level for which Hegel anthropology and problems of the "soul" - regardless of what psychoanalysis "soul" is treated in a more complex understanding of the subject of the unconscious - absolved within the subjective mind, the lowest stage in development of absolutes. The man may "have" authority only when he governed his life and has "his" being as particularly of his own existence. With Artaud's words, either consciously or unconsciously, but only life self-affirmation of life decide on authentical existence that is truly open. Which is the way life balance with Deleuze in Hegel's dialectic, that is how he came to immanence of the body without organs as a modern alternative to psychoanalitical concept of the unconscious (Lacan)? Does Deleuze, that logic is true sensation pictures of art in general, has in its dealing with outside bodies is beyond the mechanical organization of the world as a body? We can anticipate a basic Deleuze's conclusion before they show the direction of thought, the basic categories and a way of articulating a completely different understanding of the subject in the modern world of visuality. In the world body without organs it is no more reason to talk about culture in general. As Baudrillard pointed out that the analysis of the film Crash, and so he went even further than just thinking of Deleuze in consequence of its settings, when there is no desire (erogenous zones) in pure visual fascination with the machine itself as an object (the car and the highway as a metaphor of the contemporary world of objects), then there is no more a culture values. Vacuity of sense of the world finishes/ends up in the body without organs or in the clear visualization of desert world as picture. It is not the result of an act of the subject. But not even an object (ready made) from the surrounding world. Do even this last step in completing intercommunicative interface come faster as the world body that no longer applies to any company, nor the culture. Is it actially 81 82 Deleuze is indeed possible to save a few more aesthetic sensation, sensibility, ecstatic delight of the body in the new conception of art as they wish many contemporary theorists of the body as an image? Meta-aesthetics of sensations Deleuze and Guattari articulated two main concepts of the whole theory of new subjects: 1) desiring machines and 2) bodies whithout organs. Now it should be said that it is not only contrary to traditional notions of understanding. The first is not a mere opposition against the "machine soul", for example, while the other is not at issue against the opposition mechanically produced the body as an organism. The body without organs is therefore exempt body "without soul", ie, those souls that theological tradition was thrown out of the body as its over-world's aura. The body can not restore the dignity, of its original freedom, without dissolution of the metaphysical tradition in which he was detained. The machine of desire and the body without organs were apparently "robotic" terms of total reification of man. But in a situation of advanced capitalism as a socio-communicative systems perverse realization of man in things, schizophrenia is a mode of existence, split identity. Longing for what instinctive and mediated by cultural symbolic order of Western history is a machine, therefore, institutional (physically) an organized system of relationships between people and the territorial sequence of events in real time. The body without organs is the desiring machine for a life deprived of the "soul" to get right to the true life of the body in freedom from the bondage of the soul. Nietzsche's influence on Deleuze, undoubtedly, was crucial. Indeed, Nietzsche was a turning point in relation to Hegel and Marx's dialectics throughout Deleuze's opinion.That's the reason why his criticisms and Guattari psychoanalysis must understand the programmatic analysis of the modern body. Culture is the order of a perverse system of power, not the original desire to transcend opposites of mind and body, and immanently otherworldly, battle and values. It can be said that Deleuze's "philosophy of immanence," enters a radical step in deculturalization of modern world that has become exactly that which is sought by the new century: that, namely, the machine becomes reified desire for a new desire, objectified history as a storehouse of memories, clear visualization of reality numbers, pictures and words. Deleuze and Guattari to trace Artaud trying to make the shift from psychoanalysis. That does not mean that psychoanalyis is wrong side od the human's moon. After all, we can say that Artaud with Freud had common points in the interpretation of dreams as the basis of imagery. The art lies in the "heart of darkness" imaginary. So it comes to turn from something (Freud and Lacan) to something we received. It is not, therefore, a radical reversal of opinion, but turning on Nietzsche/Artaud's return to its original vitality of life as "unknown games, and pleasure of God". Psychoanalysis is for the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari psychiatrist socratical modern form of the Enlightenment: Know yourself so that You unconsciously aware that the end of the analysis (session) with the Other (the psychoanalyst). Instead, Shizo-analysis of the "machinery of desire" to be appointed by world in order to register signs of the body itself. It serves as some kind of record of all social disorder in the order of selection. State (condition) is a fundamental perversion of self-affirmation of life in the world telling linguistic horizon. Capitalism in this state is Shizo-body of social relations. They do not show a man a man, but is already ahead without substance and without subject. It is a state of pure self-determination of desire for desire. Deleuze and Guattari in their analysis have proved critical limits of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of the modern world. But it is not out beyond Marx's anthropological critique of Hegel's Absolute. In other words, they deconstructed the basic tenets of Marx's destructive dialectic of capitalism that man constitute entire social relations. From the structuralist theory it is simply not possible. The reason is that social relations are considered within the network structure and function of symbolic exchange as a sign of social networks signifier and signified. Why is it so crucial for the overall analysis carried out in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus and to understand the preferences of the body without organs just masochistic understanding of the body? Submission of pain, "his" body is not the goal of the subject who undergoes infliction of pain caused by someone else or himself. Masochist, according to Deleuze and Guattari do not follow any fantasy nor a mere contingency pain on the body. The basic lack of psychoanalytic interpretations of masochistic body is that the pain in terms of selffulfilling pain considered something transcendent. The experience of pain for pleasure as a necessary result, for psychoanalysis, from something which is transcendentt to body, allowing his pleasure at all. In touch with the views of Nietzsche, but in his first work, Deleuze come up with a solution of the philosophical, structural-ontological problem. Instead of Platonic duplication of the world, it is instead about materialistic deduction of subject to the authority that "there" in this reality below. To that extent we can not talk more about the subject that unconsciously an awareness that the truth of his subjectivity is the principle behind the well-being. Deleuze and Guattari in this process within 83 84 the assembly of desubjectivisation of masochistic body is saying because of the events based on the concept of processed scholastic theology of Duns Scott haeccetitats (this reality below). It is a mutual game of reality and the possibility that the principle of individuation allows becoming the subject. Masochism is, therefore, should not be construed as some kind of psychoanalytic psychopathological "propensity" towards such terrible pain in filing magnification (accumulation) of pleasure. It is something different. Instead of staying in the dialectics of economic goods (sadism-masochism), it is necessary to go beyond of discourse of power. Masochism is analyzed, and paradoxically, the only reasonable, in analogy with Hegel's dialectic of history in which the absolute truth requires self-awareness of being-in-itself to the low position (Slave) would be able to establish a whole is to establish a new principle - the economy, or work as a substance-subject bourgeois world. Masochism is a literary figure, but something much more than psychopathological form of the apparent loss of dignity in exchange for accumulated pleasure here in this body, anywhere outside of it. When the victim speaks the language of his tormentors, then the phenomenon of masochistic body should look radically different from Freud and psychoanalysis. For Deleuze, the essential difference between sadism and masochism lies in the opinion of sadism after de Sade where we can see two holds of nature: primary and secondary. The latter is directly experienced nature. It takes experience of creation and annihilation. However, the emphasis is on the first nature as a pure negation. In destructive attitude toward the body of another one can never arrive at the final state of pleasure, but is mediated by the absolute destruction of the body of another. Sadism in this primordially state as possible is just as absolutely annihilation. What is the problem of destructive-constructive dialectic of history that defines all the culture of capitalism as a structural mode of production "machinery of desire"? With Hegelian terms, and it is only in pervert shape and position of Marx's historical materialism, sadism and masochism is true. The torturers also an awareness of pain as pleasure in inflicting pain (suffering and overcoming pain with pleasure) is transferred to his awareness of the absolute destruction of the first and second nature. The proletariat is a self-history as a machine or some kind of masochistic desire for the realization of sadism in his definitive "appeasement" the disappearance of differences between the torturer and the victim. Deleuze and Guattari are trying to establish some kind of "differentiating dialectic" of history. This means that it is not possible to establish a new unit because it is, paradoxically, is possible only in the binary dialectic or binary oppositions Lord - Slave. When it comes to the abolition of both article by slave becomes a master, and slavery is no more substantial basis of his new master because it is not at all "master" but Slave is to reverse the history that was abolished in unity abolished two members, then the fundamental question of who is at all so subject of post-history? Strategy of Deleuze in his anti-philosophy of immanence is actually a highly philosophical strange. First it was because he interpreted the entire history of philosophy from the perspective of the establishment of immanence as orientation points of opinion. Thus, such an interpretation does not exhaust the hermeneutical interpretation of the text inside the circle because that would be the text of what became the basis for interpreting the new thinking. His method includes genaological method according to Nietzsche's method that is always a dialog-critical. This means that, for example, Spinoza opposes Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Hegel, Bergson, and Sacher-Masoch Freud to the concept of the body without organs of the body opposed the idea of mechanical and Shizo-analysis of psychoanalysis, and how to correctly recognize Gunzel in he's interpretation of Deleuze - to oppose of principles immanence of transcendence (Gunzel, 1998: 93). What are the consequences of such an interpretation? Deleuze is reasonably trying to undergo theoretical psychoanalysis on critical evaluation with respect to its starting position on the subject unconscious. It is already in that position present moment "suppression" of the radical of a different course of history and move the focus to another dominant order of ideas, as is the case with Lacan's settings on the de-centering subject, it is Deleuze's most significant achievement in the method of thinking. Conceive of a modern culture of global capitalism as a desiring machine which is equally pervasive war machine and the machine of sexual perversion of the order itself built on the ideological tenets of liberalism, it seems sufficient incentive for what has been the subject of this discussion. Do not enter here into the extensive exposure to the difficulties of such methods. We deal only with what is clearly in Deleuze's philosophical preferences of the body without organs. Before we show the consequences of such a critique of the subject for any possibility of thinking in a different order of significance of the body as an image (the logic of sensation), it should be a little more to keep the differences between psychoanalysis, Freud is not so much of Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari Shizo-analysis machines desire of contemporary visual culture of capitalism as a total history of the machine (Agamben, 2003). As mentioned in the writings of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus are Deleuze and Guattari make a radical step forward in this regard? Contrary to Lacan's psychoanalysis they like Derrida directed at reversing the funda- 85 86 mental psychoanalytic concept. Hence the emphasis on programmatic ma-zohistical body act to reverse the signifier. Instead of Freud's psychoanalysis the goal formula wo es ist, soll Ich werden that Deleuze is evidence that the unconscious as a subject of the ultimate scope of psychoanalysis, it is necessary to break a vicious circle of unconscious, which is located in a crevice of the language. This means that Deleuze deconstructs the very method by which the goal of psychoanalysis is observed within the assembly supervisory schizophrenia society of capitalism. Anti-Oedipus is a desire to reverse the machine that has lost "idealist" or a transcendent lever to reverse order of the imaginary nature of the symbolic order of sublime perversion of history. What needs to be reversed is only a basic ontological principle of psychoanalysis - the unconscious. This, of course, turns, and the new theory of the subject as the basis for a new visual culture of the modern world. What, then, instead of the unconscious? Nothing but the body as a machine of desire, not the language of the unconscious as a symbolic order. Against the "lack of ideology" of psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari are mainly in Anti-Oedipus affirmed denial of the institutional logic of justification of new contradictions in the understanding of the binary oppositions of madness and rationality. Return of the body without organs is not a return to something already in the history of what happened. Body without organs is a concept, not a state. Therefore, the method of philosophical interpretations of what is always subversive related Nietzschean-ized invention of affect and logic "heart". Sensing the very concepts of the body corresponds to "plateau" and not the category or higher levels. So the key concepts of Deleuze's thinking, such as nomadism, chaos, territoriality and reterri-torialisation, arising from the rhizome of the immanent unfolding tradition of binary opposition conscious-unconscious outside of what Merleau-Ponty put "object" of observation - the body in the surrounding world. In the writings of Logic of sense and What is philosophy? Deleuze presents the way of understanding art as a complex of perceptions and affects. Sensing that a framework of aesthetics is not separated, as in Kant, the intellectual sphere. The glory that was the key to Kant's aesthetic concept of overcoming opposition wise and sensible in unrepresentiability what is shown in the figure, no longer a transcendent figure. The logic of sense is, therefore, it is "logic" whose meaning can no longer look at language as a logical ordering scripture outside the body, but his very "heart". However, Deleuze does not rehabilitate the Pascal's "Order of the heart" against the mind in the inverted sense of metaphysics, which assumes the existence of an essence of being. Image created by artists but by the modern art of Cézanne, as was shown, and Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Heidegger, is located in the heart of the world. His body image opens a new "perspective". An artist his whole style of painting gently engaged into it without perspectivistic illusions truth of being. Not breach affects emotions. And it was Malevich's Suprematism in his Manifesto avant-garde art defined as "pure sensibility" in the dimensions of the image that no longer fascinated by the external "story", but is immanent in the essence of the world without pictures. Art is for the work of Deleuze that new creation and what is now the only thing that matters, not applicable over the intentions and the perception of its creator - the artist. In fact disappear differentiation of human-inhuman, because the artwork in its perceptive afective self-affirmation of life itself above the current one and another. But it happens so that they can not reconcile, but it opens up the natural-human-inhuman opening of the body as an image. Deleuze's interpretation of the painting, the English painter Francis Bacon in his book The Logic of sensation is probably one of the most important philosophical study of art after Merleau-Ponty books Visible and invisible on Cezanne and Heidegger's writings on the Origin of Artwork in which the author discusses the art of Van Gogh (Deleuze, 2005). It is not only a means on the interpretation of a painting of the last great modern painters of the 20th century. Rather, it is a study of the phenomenon of aesthetic and artistic subject of philosophical insight into the essence of art at the time of corporeal turn. What is a body without organs in his "aesthetic-artistic" openness can only be understood if, together with Bacon abrogate the distinction of the figurative and abstract painting. In the second conceptual part, to the abolition of the distinction between transcendence and immanence. For Deleuze, Bacon is a painter of the body without organs. In his painting confirms the logic of sensation (disembodiment as the embodiment) in the process of deterritorialising of desiring machines. For this approach the painting, which the "center" raises the body, in its somatical and semiotical sense is very important the change from the previous fenomenological and historical (hermeneutic) approach to artistic work (Cézanne - Van Gogh). There are three basic characteristics that Deleuze shows in the entire Bacon's work: (1) destruction of a defined body (2) download the object of artistic creation of characters human body without subject from which the products space affectivity (paradigmatic case is the image of the Pope who screams) and (3) the dynamics of being in processuality. 87 88 Destruction, download and dynamics pushing match what Deleuze and Guattari have developed the Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Destroys the body as an organism (mechanical assembly), so it opens the possibility of arriving at the center of the problem of artistic activities/ events affectivity artists living in the "logic of sensation", and all occur in space-time unfolding existence of life itself. Bodies dismembered, placed in space, is reduced to that body only, but not at "bare flesh", are located in the body-painting in which space covers only certain parts of the body. That does not mean that Bacon was the prevailing tradition of corpus mysti-cum sublime metaphysical and religious definition of the image displayed when a explicitly "obey" the spiritual in art. Bacon, on the contrary, create the picture image in which the body without organs does not belong to any gender/sex, or a spiritual signifier of body image. It is inhumane and animal bonding. The body is a desiring machine, regardless of its "function" in human-inhuman world. What he wanted is Artaud's theater of cruelty confirmed in Bacon's portraits. Body image is not a divine body. It is no archetype of the human body. Deleuze sees in Bacon's portraits of the final abolition of the idea of painting that shows what is unrepresentable. Lyotard, in the wake of Kant defines these words back in the postmodern sublime (Lyotard, 1991). Divine no longer shows in-picture. But it shows neither any of his remaining vestige. Instead, what images "showing" is, says Deleuze, or some kind of animal spirit of man. The "spirit" identical to that pig, cattle, dog man "living" their physical adventure of life. But neither the word spirit is no longer the one weight that is the whole metaphysical history of wearing a structured language to distinguish humanity of man and the external world in which live animals. If the body no longer resides in the human space, "home of the subject," then it is thrown into another world deterritorial-ized. A time to actually abolish the space in the traditional understanding of the word. Territories are not spaces. Reduction body to "meat" answers on reduction man to the thing at all. To that extent the interpretation of Deleuze in Bacon's painting directs necessarily an attempt to what shows the body without organs is inscript in Figure artistic activities/events. "The body is the figure, or rather the material figure. The Material of the figure must not be confused with the spatializing material structure which is positioned in opposition to it. The body is the Figure, not the structures. Conversely, the Figure, being a body, is not the face, and does not even have a face. It does have a head, because the head is an integral part of the body. It can even be reduced to the head. As a portraitist, Bacon is a painter of heads, not faces, and there is a great difference between the two" (Deleuze, 2008: 15). Somatical body in the form of their existence is not just "meat". It is a desiring machine, which resides in the universe being reified. Bacon as a portrait painter no longer portrays the "man" as such, no even idea of man. The head is not the center of spirituality, but what precisely Deleuze shows: the head of the physical center of the world deterritorialized body without organs. What inevitably follows from it is not only the disappearance of differences between humans and animals, but an attempt to open up the possibility of surpassing artistic abstract and representational painting. However, Bacon's paintings belongs to essentially transforming images in the event of the body itself. This completes the transition from finite to infinite. This is a decisive point of distinction Deleuze and Heidegger. For Heidegger there is a body-in the Being-of-the-world as the outside world. For Deleuze, who does not think the position of the subject, the body reverses differentiation of human, animal and machine. But, of course, only the body is something that has no other charactestic except that is "without authority". Bacon's painting depicts a just suspended the process of decomposition transcendental signifier images. As none of Artaud, and here is no longer functioning model of representational images. But now the question of which model picture has in mind when Deleuze plunges into the "riddle" Bacon corporeals turn? It obviously can not be a communication model picture, because the body without organs is not intercommunicative body. Their only "substance" is in a picture fascination and that is what Deleuze calls "logic of sensation". "There are two ways of going beyond figuration (that is, beyond both the illustrative and figurative); either toward abstract form or toward the Figure. Cézanne gave a simple name to this way of the Figure: sensation. The Figure is the sensible form related to a sensation: it acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addresses to the head, and acts through the intermediary of thw brain, which is closer to the bone. /.../ sensation is the opposite of the facile and ready-made, the cliché, but also of the "sensational", the spontaneous" (Deleuze, 2008: 25). 89 At one place the file on Bacon's painting Deleuze will explicitly say that the sensation is vibration. If we eliminate the so-called methodical speech, subject and object a sensation that sends their information to a work of art without a message of openness of the body without organs, then we are in doubt. Specifically, the communication model picture of the digital age media as a paradigm of visual culture is nothing more than displayed. The image is calculated and technology produced. The reality comes from its virtually interchangeable na- 90 ture which abolished the distinction originals and copies. Insofar the pictures in a model of communication is always the result of adjustment with body image in his state of visual information about something real. Communication is a model of image which shows manifestation of the socio-cultural change in ontological status of images in the digital age. This image information is modeled. Traditionally metaphysically speaking, its a bit of information that precedes any possible relationship between humans, animals and machines in a real-virtual community. When Deleuze explains the basic idea of "aesthetics" for the era of new media, which has essentially abandoned the distinction field observations "sensation" and "concepts", then the problem is that Bacon, in clothes of the figurative painting just completed a radical idea of the historical avant-garde with Malev-ich as a starting point. This idea does not refer to change society aesthetization world in which art becomes socially engaged comment, but to change the very essence of artistic activity. Key to these changes, which is indeed a big shift, but no more so in the direction, is entity ("artist" and his actions), but in the direction to obbject (a fact, place, event). That sensation comes from the whole fascination with the image of the body itself in its unique event. Sensation or feeling of logic as a "new aesthetic" is nothing but a performative and conceptual event of life itself in the pure physicality of events. It is the only remaining territory of contemporary art. In this reality below the real time and virtual space is going fascination with the visual image of the body itself. Therefore, the interpretation of the painting by Francis Bacon for Deleuze not only illustrates his own philosophical preferences, but also attempt to thinking of art in general in the modern world of machines rule of desire as the kinetic events of the body itself in its chaotic "nature" (Grosz, 2008). It is no coincidence that Slavoj Žižek in his book on Deleuze said that the first definition of Deleuze's philosophy that it is a "virtual philosopher," but also "ideology of digital capitalism" (Zizek, 2003). However, the critical judgments as much as was provocative, as long as rightly pointed out that Deleuze is not radically finished with Hegel's dialectic, however, are driven by Lacan's theory of decentred subject. Therefore, the shift towards the body without organs can not think without a radical critique of psychoanalytic theories of the subject. What is Deleuze's great innovation at the same time some highly questionable for understanding the modern world is that it is like and, indeed, the entire poststructuralist theory opened the metaphysical problem of overcoming the opposition of body and mind and thus showed how the inherent space within the body, but always comes to reified world and life. The problem is not that Deleuze was the only "virtual philosopher", or, thanks to the interpretation of Hardt and Negri's "ideology of digital capitalism", but that was the whole orientation of the said renewal of the subject and its critics (Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze) something else important. This is precisely the area of defining the world in its horizon of meaning. It belongs to transcendental position as capital of all things possible in the sublime perversion of capitalism in the real event in the world. The area that is critically analyzed the concept of Deleuze in the body without organs is the transformation of the concept of man as the structural fields of social relations. They may change or some kind of conscious decision politically articulated entity (Badiou's "Politics of Truth"), and so revolutionary it will turn itself transcendental horizon at all, or may not be significantly altered by a decision "subject", but structural changes in social relations in their mighty objectivity remains the same. Deleuze has indicated the problem of reification of social relations of life itself. The body without organs is not an overall solution to the puzzles of history marked by awareness about freedom of the original vitality of life. Bacon's painting is thus for Deleuze paradigmatic for a description of what is already the fate of the world without the "organs". On the contrary, body out of all inside-the-outside-world definitions of only the "heart" of the detterito-rializing world means turning towards what is already at the beginning of the historical avant-garde in art the key assumption - visualization of the world. This assumption is "sensational". It is, therefore, the field of pure sensation opposed to Kant's idea of inttelectual apparatus of imagination. Because the only thing remaining area of the head-body-picture sensation, which in itself has the intellectual power of imagination (fantasy Einbildung), then the fundamental question of turning towards contemporary art pictures-body-head can be formulated with Deleuze in the following way: why at all events of the modern world in real time and require a virtual space has left a symbolic body if I'm already living in their vitality on the other side of the body without organs/ organs without a body? Why, then, the body as the image disappears from the horizon of the world in general when it comes to the vacuity "desiring machines" in the pure pleasure of sharing things matter? We have seen that Baudrillard in the analysis of David Cronenberg film Crash has laid the basis for overcoming all the "small talk" post-modern revival of the subject and the theory of time it has come to the limits of physicality in aesthetized "the world" love "and" death "of the body itself. The remaining zones Unplayed games are still only in vacuity or defecation in the bare life as nothing biopolitical machine. But what a biopolitical machine? Instead of society and culture to which 91 they refer signs visualization of the world itself by making them lead to transparency, because both words are deprived of substantial importance, such as the Information Society and technoculture, is it not paradoxical that it is only politics and his character a true radical opposition to apocaliptic condition of possibility of radical changes of life itself? That politics is more than any real politics and counter-politics in real world. We have to develop much more reflexivity to the understanding that body-image in a digital desiring machine is construction of new horizon of communication. Performative turn in a very core of that event opens a possible turning point from material to fractal body as image in the age of techno-apocalyptic Event. References Agamben, G., (2003) Das Offene: Der Mensch und das Tier. Frankfurt/M. Suhrkamp. Agamben, G., (2009) Nacktheiten. Frankfurt/M. Fischer. Alberro, A., (2003) Conceptual Art and Politics of Publicity. London-New York. The 92 MIT Press. Belting, H., (2009) „Zu einer Ikonologie der Kulturen: Die Perspektive als Bildfrage", in: Boehm, G./Bredekamp, H. (ed.) Ikonologie der Gegenwart. München. Fink. p. 9-20. Deleuze, G., (1961) Nietzsche et la philosophie. Paris. Minuit. Deleuze, G., (1964) Proust et le signes. Paris. Minuit. Deleuze, G., (1969) Différance et répetition. Paris. Minuit. Deleuze, G./Guattari, F., (1972) Anti-Oedip. Paris. Minuit. Deleuze, G., (1993) Logik des Sinns. Frankfurt/M. Suhrkamp. Deleuze, G./Guattari, (1998) F., A Thousand Plateaus.Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London. Continuum. Deleuze, G./Guattari, F. (1991/2005) Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? Paris. Minuit. Deleuze, G., (2008) Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. London: Continuum. Flusser, V. (2005) Kommunikologie. Frankfurt/M. Fischer. Groys, B. (2009) Einführung in der Anti-Philosophie. München, Hanser. Grosz, E., (2008) Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York. Columbia University Press. Guattari, F., (1995) Chaosmosis. An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm.Sydney. Power Publication. Günzel, S., (1998) Immanenz. Zum Philosophiebegriff von Gilles Deleuze. Essen. Reiche Philosophie. Vol. 35 Hegel, G.W.F., (1986) Wissenschaft der Logik. Frankfurt/M. Suhrkamp. Heidegger, M., (1959) Identität und Differenz. Pfullingen. Neske. Heidegger, M., (1972) „Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes", in: Holzwege. Frankfurt/M. Klostermann. Lyotard, J.F., (1001) The Inhuman. Oxford. Polity Press. Paic, Ž., (2006) Image without World: The Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art. Zagreb, Litteris. Steinweg, M., (2009) „Das Unendliche retten: Kunst und Philosophie im Denken von Deleuze", in: Gente, P./Weibel, P., (ed.) Deleuze und die Künste. Frankfurt/M. Suhrkamp. p. 84-94. Virilio, P., (2000) The Information Bomb. London-New York, Verso. Zepke, S. (2009) „Deleuze, Guattari, and Contemporary Art", in: Holland, E. W./ Smith, D.W./Stivale,Ch.J. (ed.) Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text. London. Continuum. p. 176-197. Žižek, S. (2003) Organs Without Body. Deleuze and Consequences. London-New York. Routledge. 93 Izar Lunacek THE VISUAL CONSTRUCTION OF CARNIVAL CULTURE While the thesis behind this symposium1 appears to be the radical shift in 95 the status of the visual typical of our age in its opposition to the tradition of its past, this paper aims to present an alternative understanding of the visual that had run parallel to the reigning paradigm all along the history of traditional iconoclasm: that of the medieval carnival as described by M. M. Bakhtin. Carnival, including its modern-day incarnation, is of course a feast for the eyes and appears to fit the definition of a spectacle, vaguely justifying our association of it with the visual aspect of culture - but Bakhtin's point about medieval carnival is precisely in its opposition to the spectacular function, for it allows no mere spectators and the feast it prepares welcomes the intestines more warmly than the eyeballs. The specific imagery of the human body Bakhtin distills from the folklore as typically carnivalesque and incorporated within the broader term of »grotesque realism«, as he deems this visual realization of the carnival worldview, is in its basis profoundly anti-scopic. If the classical cannon of depicting the human body prefers man as a creature of sealed cracks and discrete protuberances, but wide-open and profound eyes through which he gobbles up the world in a sterile theoria, the grotesque cannon shuns the eyes in favor of gaping mouths, butt- and other cracks, wildly protruding bellies, breasts and phalli. The grotesque body enjoys its world in roaring laughter, 1 The article was first presented as a paper at the international symposium »Visual construction of culture« organized by the Center of visual culture and the journal Tvrda, held in Zagreb, Croatia. 96 with squinted, beady eyes and through the widely yawning mouth that ingests and digests the world in the most literary of fashions. »The eyes have no part in these comic images; they express an individual, so to speak self-sufficient human life, which is not essential to the grotesque. The grotesque is interested only in protruding eyes (.. .)«2 This is why medieval carnival cannot be called a spectacle: »it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle, seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because it's very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it.«3 But while carnival devours and is devoured by its spectators - while it is clearly not an object of aesthetic contemplation - it is just as far removed from common reality in its banal sense. Carnival is neither life nor art but a living picture. Despite the fact that it opposes the ocularly biased imagery underlying the dominant culture of its times, it incorporates its anti-ocular view in vivid imagery - moreover, an imagery much more colorful and visually suggestive than that of its opponent that officially prefers the visual to other senses. The carnival worldview is quite non-metaphorically that - a view - and thus inexistent outside of its pictorial incorporation. Bakhtin never speaks of carnivalesque concepts but of carnival imagery and of carnival pictures and his greatest concern is to stress that this imagery, rather then to be reduced to mere »funny pictures«, is to be understood as the carrier of a profound, complex and immesurably archaic philosophy inherent to the timeless »people«. Bakhtin stresses the highly non-artistic, non-theatrical character of the carnival just as strongly as its explicitly pictorial and exhibitionistic character. While expelling the neutral observer, he talks of carnival as composed of scenes and images and forming a literary taken »picture of the world«. Carnival is, paradoxically, an image with no observer; its stance is exhibitionistic but it counts on no neutrally observing Other to be shocked by its shameless display; it somehow manages to conceive the world as a stage lacking an auditorium but nevertheless staying a stage and not blending back into everyday, banal reality. Carnival mobilizes masks and costumes, but conceives them as truer identities than the everyday faces they conceal. It thus appears that carnival values the reality of the picture-plane above the reality of day-to-day life - not merely emotionally - as pleasant fantasies - but ontologically: in their 2 Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and his World, MIT press: Massachusetts, 1968, p. 316. 3 Ibid., p. 7. reality status and innermost truth-value. In short, while carnival is devised as a release of man from the stress of everyday life into the festive reality of the fanciful masquerade, it does not understand this shift as a temporary escape into a fantasy world that must eventually give way and return to the inescapable, harsh reality of the workday building up outside it, but as a crossing over from the false, ideologically structured banality of a citizen's everyday working life into the festive and holy sphere of the truer and higher reality of the pictorial. Carnival dissects the world with distances concretized in heavy, wooden masks and rearranges its elements into a living picture - just like the savages of Levi-Strauss slice up the world to attain signifiers from which to construct their myths. What the latter claims is the greatest misconception about the primitive mind - the notion that their use of elements from reality in their constructions aims not to signify the world but to mobilize it as a signifier -could also be claimed about the carnival pictorialization of reality: its pictures use the world as a ready material for their creative construction not as their reference for representation. This turning of the world into a ready-made object from which to construct a work of art might ring close to the modern subject of the will to power most explicitly embodied in the demonically creative individual of the romantic age, but there is a crucial difference between the two that has to do with carnival's archaic link with the pre-individuated primitive sociality. Because carnival holds no place for the unique individual (on the contrary, carnival thrives on doubling or dividing anything seemingly unique or indivisible), it is also not the creation of a single author but of the »people«. If the ideal romantic work of art demands as the underside of its sublime beauty a diabolically ingenious creator that is at once tragically excluded from it and burdened by the guilt of having mortified the world into a dirigible object, taking part in the co-creation of carnival's reconstruction of the world as a living picture holds the precisely opposite operation as its primary condition: transforming oneself into a comical object that will form one the bits of this authorless and spectatorless artwork. The above reference to primitive consciousness through one of its greatest investigators is not coincidental: despite the fact that Bakhtin explicitly claims that carnival is by no means merely a celebration of the biological, natural cycles and that it transgresses the harvesting festivities by injecting them with a sense of historical time, the origins of its conception of the pictorial can be traced back to the most ancient pagan rituals as described by other celebrated investigations. Mircea Eliade's insistence that the savage that ritually repeats 97 98 the events of the mythical time is not merely representing them but actually embodies them fully transgressing into the zero-hour at the beginning of the world is a piece of common intellectual knowledge.4 But if the masquerade of the tribe (that also has no spectators) does not merely signify the Dreamtime but lives it and if the masked tribesmen do not merely represent the ancestral gods but are them, does that not suggest that the very mythical time itself is nothing more than a masquerade and that a pagan's god is never embodied more fully than in the unlikely combination of a man and a wooden mask? In the cyclic worldview the pictorial reality is the highest plane of being. Not only do the primitive ritual theaters not represent any real past event from our point of view, they are also fully aware of the fact that they don't - with the addition that they cunningly use the scheme of transference of the holy onto a phantasmatically posited »mythical time« to originally produce it through what poses as its repetition but is actually its sole embodiment. It is on the misapplied logic of pictures as representation that the main thesis of the great James Frazer's work hinges. The Golden Bough claims that the ritual of burning or drowning a dummy representing god (as in modern day carnivals that still survive to this day) is actually a watered down, more civilized version of a primary ritual scene, where the society sacrificed a living scapegoat. Faced with the two rituals, Frazer assumes that the pictorial, dummy sacrifice is a representation of the original human sacrifice - a thesis seemingly confirmed by the modern-day extinction of the barbaric human sacrifice and survival of the dummy sacrifice in contemporary relics of cyclic rituals within civilized society. He misses however the blaring fact that the rituals of human sacrifice he lists to support his thesis all stem from relatively advanced social organizations, by rule oligarchic empires (Roman, Aztec), whereas surviving modern-day local celebrations are heir to a much older tradition of tribal rituals whose modern day relics they fit to a T. The conclusion that we have to extract from this, is that, far from the doll burning being a faded reflection of the original ritual murder and the dummy being a sorry representational replacement for the original reality of flesh and blood, the original sacrifice happened in the realm of the pictorial (where the holy unabashedly resided) and its later-day vulgarization into ritual murder is but its ideologically-motivated misappropriation by a fascistic, imperialist state. From the point of view of archaic and carnivalesque consciousness, the ritual murder isn't realizing 4 Comp. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, New york: Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 35. a fantasy they had only managed to represent by pictorial means, it's simply using unnecessarily messy means to paint the holy sphere, vulgarizing it with use of mortal flesh and blood. After all, the murdered slave-king is merely appointed in god's place for a day, while the puppet burning on Ash Wednesday quite unequivocally is god. According to what has been pointed out here then, carnival constructs a temporary social utopia from elements that are purely pictorial but that are simultaneously understood as of a higher order of reality than what is normally understood as direct, not-pictorially-mediated reality of everyday life. Being a religious view, this is a point where it coincides with the official religion of medieval Catholicism and its reduction of the everyday world to an illusion. But instead of positing its alternative into an undepictable true reality beyond the grave whose mere pictorial reflection makes up the world we live in, it places it in the even more pictorial, even more palpable sphere of carnival festivity that can be experienced here and now on a regular basis (and even with a tendency to establish itself as a permanent state of the world). The reality of carnival society is pictorial, but it is no mere fantasy. More than a pretty picture of a promised better tomorrow to dreamily observe during the relentless march of eternal progress, carnival is a holy, festive sphere, into which one may temporarily cross over numerous times during one's lifetime and eat, drink and be marry in, in a quite unabridged corporeal experience. »Carnival is the other, true life of the people.« Carnival is indeed a »visually constructed society«, for the utopia it paints is a distinctly social and not a natural paradise, a »life of the people«. Carnival constructs what it understands as the only true form of society in a space left out of both components of a commonwealth found in traditional social theory: it falls neither into the official public sphere under the domain of the ruling government nor into the private sphere of free endeavor. For carnival, society - what Bakhtin insistently call »the people« in a concept that may ring close to the phantas-matic people of historically practiced Marxism,5 but is radically different from it - happens publicly, in squares filled with fairs and celebrations, where actions are not limited by the concept of private freedom, but attain a universal meaning, while at the same time this public sphere is not presided over by any judging eye and remains »unofficial«. Carnival society is a pictorially created 5 »The people« of practiced Marxism are a fascinating phantom: it is in their name that the Party rules, but nobody knows who comprises their group. Occasionally, masses of listeners can be rhetorically accepted into this elite club and rebellious individuals may be expelled from its ranks - both to great populist effect. 99 100 space of freedom emerging between the domains of the private citizen and the official society. From the carnival point of view, both of the latter are also visually constructed, but hide their dependence on the pictorial and are thus deemed ideological constructions based on concealed fantasies. The official catholic society of the middle ages - in consistence with the iconoclastic paradigm of the dominant western historical tradition we could call metaphysical - openly shunned the realm of the pictorial as a sensual lure diverting us from the true domain of the spiritual. Eventually, the pictorial might be allowed in highly controlled usage and even then merely as a pedagogical ladder that could help illustrate difficult concepts of the spiritual domain to the intellectually less fortunate subjects. From the carnival point of view this slight indulgence towards the pictorial is utterly downplayed by the ruling paradigm and in fact holds the key to its ideological aspect that can perform its function of ruling and directing its subjects only with great dependence on the pictorial now taking on the role of fantasy. Visually suggestive images of the prize and the punishment, of the ideal and of the scapegoat are indispensable for ideology, ruling far more effectively then by method of expensive carrots and potentially dangerous sticks. Fantasy is visual and an ideology that uses it can also be described as "visually constructed", but fantasy differs from a picture in that it is blocked, merely observable and not livable, and always gazed upon only from a distance, from a controlled angle, kept safe behind a frame or a row of footlights. In the ideology of metaphysics, the world is turned into a mere picture by positing a fantasy of a non-pictorial, higher reality behind it. For catholic society of the middle ages, carnival, that insisted on being even more pictorial than the world, could only be condemned as a »representation of a representation« and thus farthest removed from the truth. For carnival, on the other hand, the world as such is pictorial per se, without being a representation of a non-pictorial »true« reality. From its point of view, the posited non-pictorial reality is itself a visually based fantasy (making metaphysics guilty of the idolatry it prohibits, the only difference being in that this idolatry is secretive while carnival's idolatry is obvious and open) and its answer lies in embracing the world as unrepresentatively pictorial in its entirety and thus crossing over into the sphere of permanent festivity of the picture plane. For instance, if catholic ideology was based in graphic images of heaven and hell (downplayed officially as only a subsidiary tool but in reality crucial to the functioning of the power-apparatus), carnival strategically understood them too literary and fully realized them in a single living picture that inevitably fused both diamet- rically opposed fantasies of the ruling paradigm. Most carnivalesque festivities were thus conceived as unabridged repetitions of a paradisical past Golden age (think of saturnalia, for instance, celebrating the actual return of the Golden age of Saturn's rule to earth) that were viewed by the official religious institutions as demonic or Satanist rites. Carnival by rule featured merry devils, drinking and dancing within a framework that was at once understood as a temporary return to the Garden of Eden. This sort of realization of an ideological system's positive fantasy into a livable, palpable picture that inevitably fuses it with its precise opposite, effectively disarms ideology by de-fantasizing both phantoms, of the prize and of the punishment. Even though carnival is a temporary affair, the figure of the jester, whose mask coincides with his face, is the carrier of an ethical stance that is applicable all-year round. A figure in the Seinfeld sitcom whose function fits the jester's thus demonstrates the carnival's stance to pictures in a suggestive example: in one of the episodes, the heroes all try to resist the temptation of »touching themselves« posed by a phantom of a naked woman parading between the borders of a window frame across the street. Kramer is the only one that advocates in favor of the fantasy (for this is what the naked lady is: fitted by a frame, unattainable, to be observed but never touched) and also loses the contest in asceticism due to it in comically record time. But the comical hero doesn't stop at opposing the pious by clinging to sweet fantasy: at the very end of the episode, Kramer as the first loser of the contest, manages something none of the others dare to dream - he transcends fantasy by realizing it. Kramer meets the woman and sleeps with her, in short, and the closing of the episode sees his more conservative friends waving, enchanted, to their friend who has somehow made his way into the framed picture across the street. This meditation on the status of the visual in carnival on one and metaphysics on the other side has perhaps paved a way for an answer to the paradox we encountered at the beginning of our investigation. Namely, why is it that the scarce and ascetic imagery (but nevertheless imagery) of metaphysical culture is so rich in allusions on the scopic while the content of carnival's vivid imagery shuns the very organ of sight it addresses and aims to abolish the spectator it has prepared it for. Of course, we could do away with the problem of the scopic fetishism of metaphysics by applying the logic of our previous argument on fantasy - suggesting that metaphysics openly denies what it secretly builds on and that its iconoclasm is an opposite reflection of its undisclosed voyeurism. But isn't this sort of simple dialectics also keen to suggest that carnival, while proclaiming a war on the visual, also depends on it by writing its mani- 101 102 festo in the language of pictures? This would suggest that carnival is not even hypocritical, but a completely naive activist, disavowing its claims already with the very form of their elocution. Surely issues are more complex. And they are too: carnival does not oppose being seen, it opposes »just looking«. If the metaphysical ideal is an all-seeing eye that no one can see, the body in the carnivalesque conception enjoys being seen in its hideous incompleteness. The point of the Real in the conception of classical metaphysics forbids its subject to gaze upon other gods but it also doesn't demand the subject's gaze to stay fixed on its visage because it knows that in a war of two equivalent idols its odds are always half-chance. Its command is »do not look at others and do not look at me but know that I am always watching you.« From the metaphysical point of view, carnival is trapped within the domain of the created - and in complete accordance with the classic command its credo is about not seeing and being seen, but the carnival's Real remains immanent to the created world of the visible as the highest and only plane of being in its ontology. If the classic conception is about seeing, carnival is about being seen, but this is not to say that they complement each other in a non-conflicting and mutually supporting way. Carnival, as we have stressed above, not only has no need for spectators but even tends towards their abolition. The exhibitionist trait so typical of carnival does not need an appalled or fascinated Other to sustain it: moreover, its organizing principle is a mechanism devised to suck in any observing Other non-violently into the festivities. This mechanism is laughter. Bergson says it all with pinpoint precision when he describes the comical as »unconscious. As if wrongly using Giges' ring, it makes itself invisible to itself while becoming visible to everyone else.« The universe of comedy - and carnival is comedy turned universal - is about being enjoyably oblivious to your own blatant visibility. Beyond the footlights, however, it's a different story: the spectator of a comedy, as Bergson suggests, is akin to a natural scientist6 - removed in his theater box, he is the embodiment of the ideal theoretical subject: unflinching, uncompassionate, sharply observing the misunderstandings that have escaped the comic hero's knowledge. The hero's punishment, delivered by the spectator, is laughter, and this is where, undocumented by Bergson, the two merge. The comic hero is full of himself, arrogantly oblivious to the dozens of gazes directed upon him from the numerous audience, thinking he has seen it all and remained unspotted, he also becomes invisible to himself and visible to the silent crowd in the darkened 6 Comp, ibid, p. 130. auditorium. This however - this famous feeling of superiority typical for the spectator of a comedy - puts the spectator in exactly the same shoes as the comic hero: a finite creature seated in the throne of the all-seeing eye. Being an incorporated creature, the spectator is convulsed by the enjoyment of laughter and the darkened, silent auditorium suddenly springs into view in roaring, bouncing laughter. Comedy is a way of recruiting the seemingly invisible spectators into the ranks of the visibly enjoying - and this identity of the two is achieved precisely by a lack of empathy that distinguishes other art-forms. The apathetic observer is transformed in his body-image as well: while laughter demands as its precondition a stance of the classical theoretical subject - an unfeeling, superior and invisible eye observing the comical spectacle from a distance - the moment of laughter not only renders the observer visible in his enjoyment, but simultaneously identifies him with the comical hero in his morphology. In laughter, the observer's eyes shrink into narrow slits, the face explodes into a million wrinkles and the mouth gapes open displaying the depths of the body and inviting the world to enter: the comical mask of the ancients embodies precisely this point of convergence between the comical hero and his seemingly neutral observer. The grotesque conception of the world, present in comedy and fully realized in carnival, appeared to us to be inconsistent because it operates precisely at this breaking point between seeing and being seen. Its hero is an arrogant but finite creature that prides itself as all-seeing in face of its blatant limitations that breaks up into an image of the body that sees nothing but is also defined by its pronounced visibility, exhibitionistically exposing itself to the gaze of any remaining neutral Other that is - through the bypass of being pushed into the seat of the all-seeing observer - tricked into becoming an equally blind and visible creature of enjoyment through his laughter. The grotesque conception of the world and the human body thus incorporates both body-images and oscillates between the two as each other's prerequisites. It offers images of blind enjoyment with a highly pronounced, exhibitionistic visibility whose function is partly to suck in any passing neutral observers but that also insists beyond the potential exhaustion of the domain of the Other: simply enjoying the exhibition of its blind visibility in the face of an empty sky - a total, all-encompassing picture of the world - lacking an observer, lacking a reference in the real but insisting in its picture-status - as the ideal of carnival society. Bakhtin insists that the specific carnival worldview was considered a profound and self-sufficient philosophy in its own time and was only later de- 103 104 graded into non-binding, superficial and merely ephemerally entertaining play with which to relax between serious endeavors holding the monopoly on approaching the Real. But after centuries of living underground the iconic turn that this symposium addresses among its primary thematic concerns seems to give some key points of carnival philosophy a new life in the spotlight. Could the iconic turn at least in part be understood as a triumphant reemergence of the carnival concept of the pictorial to the dominant surface level of cultural discourse? Bakhtin's insistence on a deeply democratic sentiment essential to carnival utopia seems to offer some ground to this thesis and modern democracy could indeed be understood as a fertile breeding ground for a legalization of the carnivalesque conception of man and world. Optimistically post-metaphysical theory of the postmodern age abounds with concepts aimed at returning dignity to the plane of pictures, freeing them from enslavement to a phantasmatical reality by theories of mimesis and representation and reinstating them as a non-referential plane of reality where crucial decisions previously ascribed to presupposed deeper levels really take place. The other crucial trait of the iconic turn, however, the desacralization of the image that occurs with its digitalization and multiplication transferring it from the domain of high art into the domain of the media - despite seemingly tilting in the direction of its status as popular culture, makes for quite a radical break with a key aim of carnival festivites. The technical-digital trait of the iconic turn parts with a tradition that encompasses both the metaphysical and the car-nivalesque plane of medieval culture. Carnival takes the idolatry directed at pictures even more seriously than metaphysical systems: whereas catholicism sanctifies a picture because of the object of its representation, carnival holds it for holy in itself. As has been pointed out above, the picture plane in carnival worldview is the only and at once highest plane of reality and its atmosphere is festive rather than banally quotidian. Compared to the culture of dominant metaphysics, carnival in its sympathy for pagan cyclism is much more fond of repetitiveness in the picture plane: its masks come in doubles, triples or whole hordes; epiphany is not a singular event to be recalled annually but repeats itself in its pictoriality year after year and is by definition a repetition already at its potential first occurrence; and if one of the holy images (that not only represent but unreservedly become god in ritual performance) should be damaged or destroyed, it is common tribal practice to remould it - to create god again with our mortal hands - and still conceive of it as something predating its very maker. But the repetition typical for pagan rituals including carnival differs from the repetitiveness of the picture in the age of its techni- cal reproduction: it is a repetition that is not completely mechanical and thus thrives on variation (e.g. the art of conceiving new mask-patterns each year that still fall within the limitations of the traditional recipe) and secondly, partly in connection with this, the repetition here does not strip the image of its holy aura, but - paradoxically - is its active generator (the picture is holy as far as it reproduces faithfully a template that may, however, be completely fictitious). In contrast to the progressive reputation that carnival attained in comparison with the paradigm of traditional metaphysics, it is now beginning to look awfully conservative, for it still clings to the creative touch of a human hand, the magic of real matter and insists on a (albeit consciously phantasmatic) template of its repetitions, all of which have been successfully abandoned by the postmodern iconic universe of equally original mechanical digitalized reproductions. This is because carnival is at once revolutionary, timely, historical and, on the other side, archaic, pre-modern, linked to a basic and timeless concept of humanity that is unbound to a specific stage of its technical progress. It is rustic, it works with objects, like sticks and rocks, and despite its utopian tendency towards an unrealistically global totalization, it is in its spirit a local festivity, operating with space-and-time-specific phrases, dialects and mobilizing local flora, fauna and cultural specifics as its building blocks. Carnival opens up the gates of the city to nomadic travelers, exotic animals, freaks of nature and »Indian wonders«, but keeps the highly territorialized village square as its constant backdrop. But is not carnival in a way still more revolutionary than the technical revolution? Let us examine the concept of virtual reality as a prime example of the real status of the pictorial in the digital world. Virtual reality aims at digitally, artificially creating a disembodied, purely sensual experience of a world that is as close to the sensual experience of the real world we live in. Carnival, on the other hand, actively transforms the actual world its participants live in, by dissecting and rearranging the very material that constructs it, into a picture7 in which man in his entirety can temporarily live and enjoy. The ideal of virtual reality is the brain in the tub, enjoying a completely undiminished experience of the world, completely unaware of the fact that it is just a brain in a tub. This image is carnivalesque in its completely unrealistic hyperbolization of 105 7 In contrast to virtual reality that paints its virtual worlds in relatively classic mimetic fashion reminiscent of the late renaissance or baroque (see Pixar's fascinating projects aimed at artificially synthesising visual sensations of fur, water, tin, food, etc), carnival's pictures are much more modernist in style. The masks used are highly simplified and stylized and were, as is known, a great inspiration to early modernists. 106 virtual reality and may serve a carnivalesque function of conceiving all experience as potentially pictorial, sensually floating with no anchoring reference - a conception that can ultimately cross out its last bit of the real that serves as its anchoring reference: the actual brain in the tub. The carnival point is that all experience is unreferentially pictorial, sensually unanchored - even if our brains remain skulled. The other example of a purely imaginary world that can offer real pleasure in the digital age is the Internet community. Like the carnival square, the Internet is a public space that is (at least officially) uncontrolled by state authority and thus forms a similar sort of a third sociality that spans the bridge between private and the officially public. Like in carnival, people enter into cyberspace behind masks, under assumed personalities - resulting in an equivalent leveling of all hierarchycal and social differences that promotes much more open, familiar contact and much wider socialization than in everyday life. Like the pictorial utopia of carnival, cyberspace could also be described as a »parallel, true life of the people« in which its members take part with an utterly virtual yet somehow truer part of their selves. On the other hand, while web-friends regularly treat each other to virtual rounds of drinks and cyber sex is becoming a much discussed option, it cannot be denied that cyberspace in its current form lacks much in the sense of the palpable and corporeal experience that is so accentuated in carnival. Since this is a problem possibly overcome in the utopian vision of virtual reality (again merely a vision and thus highly carnivalesque in its hyperbole: carnival seems to enjoy science fiction much more than realistic technology), the more serious issue is the way cyberspace, while enabling false identities and free socialization, is also heir to the profoundly anti-carnivalesque traditions of the disembodied observer and the private citizen. The more actively the browser engages in his »parallel life« in cyberspace, the less time is spent on transforming everyday life into a permanent festive picture. The closer to reality are fantasies fulfilled in virtual reality, the lesser is the danger of their effect on actuality. The more liberated your desired activity in cyberspace, the more urgent is the need for the purchase of a personal computer that can enable your prosecutable mortal body to remain hidden in the privacy of your own home. The community freely socializing in cyberspace has a backside in a multitude of isolated browsing individuals reduced to disembodied eyes fixed on screens and nervously twitching, operational hands. It is hard to bypass the blatant fact that the function of the overwhelming majority of Internet content is to foster and financially milk the sexual and social frustrations of the average browser8. While Internet may well promote carnivalesque goals of free socialization, it can still only be a tool for the realization of carnival that goes on in corporeal contact with unpredictable individuals under the open sky of public squares (or, of course, in its exact opposite: the absurd perfection of virtual reality to a degree of a complete corporeal and sensual experience of carnival where the real-life browsers can be reduced from shriveling eyes and hands into brains-in-tubs that can be effectively crossed out, amounting to exactly the same). Carnival isn't naively materialistic to accentuate the precious-ness of »real matter«, »real flesh« and »real space« as its milieu: on the contrary, it already understands all of it as a picture, where cyberspace can only fade into a »blocked« or »not fully realized« picture, thus in effect still a fantasy. Cyberspace is a haven for fantasy that has the power either to perpetuate the current order (by offering consolation in face of harsh reality) if it is fostered in its phantom form or challenge it if it is realized - not into banal reality but into a living picture. At first glance, it seemed that the difference between the repeatable image of digital world and that of the carnival was in the tie of the former to the possibilities of deterritorialization offered by modern technology while the latter was bound to an organic model of repetition (modeled on "nature" or "life"), but this should prove to be an inaccurate assessment in light of the carnival's intimate relationship with the "unnatural", "undead" core of nature that forms the insistently repetitive object embodying its holy lack that lies at the heart of its concept of repetition as sanctification. The difference that imposes itself upon attempts at repetition in the carnivalesque cosmos is identical to the rigidity of sticky matter as well as to the undefined region of the gap that lifts the pictorial above the profanity of illustration. The ungraspable difference between individual repetitions of carnival rites that sets them apart from mechanical reproduction is identical to the insistently repeating object itself. The repetition of carnival addresses something beyond the divergence between the natural and the technical. And, on the other hand, the difference between cyclic and mechanical repetition cannot be reduced to the difference between the digital and the analogous either because the very act of creating a picture counts on a digitalization of reality, a cutting-up of the 107 8 The proverbial pervert now doesn't even have to make the social effort to step up to a newsstand and purchase his favourite naughty magazine, what less mix with dozens of other sexual gourmands in a porn theatre. He can become a virtually disembodied eye browsing the webcams in a voyeur's fantasy and the exact opposite of the anti-voyeristic, anti-private and highly sociable carnival utopia. homologous universe into discrete object-bits. As of yet, there is still a slight difference between pictures made out of pixels and pictures made out of objects. And despite being reduced to a repeatable image, the Man of carnival remains ridiculously holy. 108 Povzetki/Abstracts Wen-Sheng WANG Kako povezati Aristotelovo pojmovanje physis s Husserlovo fenome- nologijo? - S posebnim poudarkom na Husserlovi misli o etiki Članek pričenjam s predstavitvijo Aristotelovega pojmovanja physis kot narave, kjer bistvo ali forma izhajata iz materije, vendar ne iz obrtniškega mišljenja kot pri techne. V nadaljevanju bom poskušal pokazati, kako je tako pojmovanje blizu Husserlovi fenomenologiji. Vidimo lahko, da nam Husser- 109 lova fenomenološka metoda omogoča vračanje nazaj k stvarem samim in nam s tem ponuja izkustvo le-teh kot physis. Toda, kaj in na kakšen način lahko k temu prispeva trascendentalna subjektiviteta, subjektiviteta, ki jo Husserlova fenomenološka metoda namerava razkriti? Ključne besede: physis, techne, praxis, phronesis, philia, sophia, Aristotel, Husserl. Wen-Sheng WANG How is Aristotle's Conception of physis Implicated in Husserl's Phenomenology? - With Special Consideration Given to Husserl's Thought Concerning Ethics This paper starts with an explanation of Aristotle's conception of physis, namely as nature where the essence or form comes out of matter, but not, like techne, out of a craftsman's thinking. Then I try to point out how this conception is implicated in Husserl's phenomenology. We see that Husserl's phenom-enological method lets us come back to the things themselves. We can experience them as physis. But what and how can the transcendental subjectivity, being what Husserl's phenomenological method aims to expose, contribute to it? Keywords: physis, techne, praxis, phronesis, philia, sophia, Aristotle, Husserl. Xin YU Fenomenološka raziskava o Einfühlung in Einsfühlung - Od Th. Lippsa in M. Schelerja do E. Stein Steinova na podlagi primera akrobata, ki ga uporablja Lipps, spodbije Lippsovo pojmovanje empatije z lastnim pojmovanjem, ki ga opredeli s pri-mordialnostjo in ne-primordialinostjo, ter uvede razlikovanje med Einfühlung in Einsfühlung. To razlikovanje je na Schelerja tako močno vplivalo, da je svoje delo o sočutju revidiral in razširil s tem, da je v klasifikaciji intersub-jektivnih čustvenih dejanj dodal še četrti tip Einsfühlung. Vendar se Scheler-jevo pojmovanje Einsfühlung razlikuje od Steinove, saj razume Einsfühlung kot višjo obliko vdiranja občutij[Gefuhlsansteckung]. Prek Makkreeljevega napačnega razumevanja Schelerjevega pojmovanja Einsfühlung-a kot stopnjevane oblika Einfühlung-a, izpostavljamo, kaj je pravzaprav Scheler menil z izrazom Einfühlung, ter da je Nachfühlung identičen Einfühlung v Steininem smislu, kar potrjujejo besede obeh avtorjev. Medtem ko je Steinino pojmovan-110 je Einsfühlung mogoče le preko Einfühlung, Schelerjevo pojmovanje Einfühlung izključuje Nachfühlung. Toda Steinino pojmovanje Einsfühlung je veliko bolj podobno njegovemu Miteinanderfühlen. Slednje temelji na Nachfühlung, čeprav se zdi, da se izraz Nachfühlung ne razlikuje od prejšnjega pojmovanja. Steinova in Scheler sta v interakciji uresničila lastni teoriji v različnih smereh. Ključne besede: Th. Lipps, M. Scheler, Einfühlung, Einsfühlung, primor-dialnost, ne-primordialnost. Xin YU A Phenomenological Investigation on Einfühlung and Einsfühlung-— From Th. Lipps, M. Scheler to E. Stein From the example of the acrobat used by Lipps, Stein refuted Lipps' concept of empathy by her own empathy defined by primordiality and non-primordi-ality, and then creatively differentiated between Einfühlung and Einsfühlung. This distinction affected Scheler so much that he revised and expanded his work on sympathy. In particular, he added the fourth type of Einsfühlung in the classification of intersubjective emotional acts. But Scheler's Einsfühlung is quite different from Stein's. He took Einsfühlung as a heightened form of infection [Gefühlsansteckung]. By Makkreel's misunderstanding that Scheler's Einsfühlung is an intensification of Einfühlung, we point out what Scheler means by the term of Einfühlung, and that Nachfühlung is identical with Einfühlung in Stein's sense, which is affirmed by the words of both authors. While Stein's Einsfühlung becomes possible only through Einfühlung, Scheler's Einsfühlung excludes Nachfühlung. But Stein's Einsfühlung is more similar with his Miteinanderfühlen. For Scheler, it is based on Nachfühlung although Nachfueühlung seems to be undifferentiated from it here. Stein and Scheler accomplished their own theories in different directions in interaction. Key Words: Th. Lipps, M. Scheler, E. Stein, Einfühlung, Einsfühlung, primordial, non- primordial. Ka-wing LEUNG Heideggrov pojem predstrukture in tekstualna interpretacija Pojem predstrukture je osrednji pojem Heideggrove ideje o interpretaciji. Pozneje je Gadamer ta pojem vključil v svojo teorijo filozofske hermenevtike, toda v resnici se njuni oceni bistveno razlikujeta in ravno to razliko učenjaki pogosto zanemarjajo. Članek bo sprva predstavil Heideggrov pojem predstrukture in nato bo pokazal razliko med Heideggrom in Gadamerjem. Na koncu bomo nakazali neke implikacije Heideggrovega pojma predstrukture za tekstualno interpretacijo. Ključne besede: predstruktura, interpretacija, razumevanje, Heidegger, Gadamer. Ka-wing LEUNG Heidegger's Concept of Fore-structure and Textual Interpretation The concept of fore-structure is central to Heidegger's idea of interpretation. Gadamer later incorporated this concept into his own theory of philosophical hermeneutics. But there are indeed certain significant differences between their accounts of the fore-structure, and these differences are often neglected by scholars. This essay will first present Heidegger's concept of fore-structure, and then we will demonstrate the differences between Heidegger and Gad-amer. At last, we will draw out some implications of Heidegger's concept of fore-structure to textual Interpretation. Keywords: Fore-structure, interpretation, understanding, Heidegger, Gadamer. PHAINOMENA XX/79 DlAPOSITIVA Dimitri Ginev Hermenevtični realizem kot kritična teorija Namen članka je oceniti kritično perspektivo scientizma in epistemološkega objektivizma, ki jo izpostavlja različica hermenevtične fenomenologije. Ta različica se obrača na vprašanje pomena konstituiranja raziskovalnih predmetov v naravoslovno-znanstvenih raziskavah. V nasprotju s Habermasovo kva-zi-trascendentalno fenomenologijo empirično-analitičnih znanosti, raziskava ponuja poskus interpretacije oblikovanja interesov, ki usmerjajo spoznavanje v teh znanostih. Prav tako se bo v članku preverila sama možnost 'dialoškega raziskovanja narave'. Ključne besede: temeljna analiza pomena, Habermas, berljive tehnologije/ heremenevtična predstrukutra raziskovanja, spoznavno-usmerjevalni interesi. Dimitri Ginev 112 Hermeneutical Realism as a Critical Theory The paper seeks to evaluate the critical perspective on scientism and episte-mological objectivism put forward by a version of hermeneutic phenomenology. It is a version that addresses the issues of the meaningful constitution of research objects in natural-scientific research. In opposing Habermas' quasi-transcendental epistemology of the empirico-analytical sciences, the paper offers an attempt at interpretative investigation of the formation of knowledgeguiding interests in these sciences. The possibility of a "dialogical research of nature" is scrutinized. Key words: constitutional analysis of meaning, Habermas, readable technologies, hermeneutic fore-structure of research, knowledge-guiding interests Cathrin Nielsen Izobrazba kot plastična beseda Članek prikazuje vpliv "plastičnih besed" (Uwe Pörksen) na aktualno razpravo o izobraževanju v naslednjih petih tezah: I) namen plastičnih besed je ponovno definirati zgodovino kot naravni proces, II) bistvo plastičnih besed je po svoji naravi fluidno in zato "investicija v prihodnost", III) investicija v prihodnost je tisti potencialni vir, ki čaka udejanje. To naj bi se obračalo tudi na človeštvo in specifično človeško tehnologijo. IV) Namen plastičnih besed je izločiti ali ukiniti osnovno znanje, ki predstavlja oviro optimizacijskemu procesu, ter V) ukinjanje se odvija skozi ponotranjanje klica k optimizaciji: edukacija danes pomeni ostajati odprt za re-edukacijo. Ključne besede: izobraževanje, človeška tehnologija, optimizacija, zgodovina, človeška narava. Cathrin Nielsen The Education as Plastic Word The article looks at the impact of "plastic words (Uwe Porksen) on the current debate about education by outlining the following five theses, I) the purpose of plastic words is to redefine history as a natural process, II) their essence is by nature fluid and thus an "investment in the future, III) the investment in the future is the one potential resource waiting for its call to action. This would also apply to humanity and a specific human technology. IV) Plastic words are intended to eliminate substantial knowledge that presents an obstacle to the optimization process, and V) elimination occurs through internalizing the call for optimization: education today means remaining open to re-education. Keywords: education, human technology, optimization, history, human nature. Žarko Paic Telo-podoba kot dogodek: Deleuze in vibriranja sodobne umetnosti Osrednja točka interpretacije Deleuzove antifilozofije imanence je predvsem koncept želečega stroja kot konstrukcije vizualne reprezentacije v sodobni umetnosti. Avtor poskuša raziskati, zakaj moramo opraviti nekaj povsem radikalnega s filozofskim povratkom k subjektu. Telo v sodobni kulturi pripada bistvenemu družbenemu in političnemu mestu brez organov v tehnološkem ali estetskem pomenu. Kakor sam avtor poudarja, Deleuzova antifilozofija imanence nam ponuja novi pristop k reinterpretaciji celotne metafizične zgodovine, toda le, če se odločimo prekiniti nizanje tradicionalnih razlik v jedru binarnega nasprotja med dušo-duhom in telesom. Deleuze s svojim konceptom želečega-stroja razišče ozadje metafizične tradicije, ki v sebi že nosi posledice Heideggra in Foucalta. Priča smo procesu izginjanja sodobnega telesa v napredovanju vizualizacije sveta kot pomenskega horizonta. Prav zato Deleuzova filozofija odpira novo konceptualno polje v prostoru sodobne umetnosti. Ključne besede: telo, podoba, želeči stroji, sodobna umetnost, filozofija. Žarko Paic The Body-Image as an Event: Deleuze and Vibrations of Contemporary Art Interpretation of Deleuze's antiphilosophy of immanence has the focal point in main concept of desiring-machine as construction of visual representation of contemporary art. Author try to explores why we have to do something completely radical with philosophical return to subject. The body in contemporary culture belongs to crucial social and political place without organs in technological and aesthetical sense. Deleuze antiphilosophy of immanence, as author argues, give us new approach to reinterpretation of all metaphysical history, but only if we decide to breaking the lines between traditional differences in the core of binnary opposition between soul-spirit and body. Deleuze goes behind the metaphysical tradition aftermath Heidegger and Foucault with his concept of desiring-machine. We are witnessing the proces of dissapearinng contemporary body in advancing visualisation of world as a horizon of mean-114 ing. That's the reason why Deleuze's philosophy open a new conceptual fields in the area of contemporary art. Keywords: body, image, desiring machines, contemporary art, philosophy. Izar Lunaček Vizualna konstrukcija karnevalske kulture Pričujoči članek analizira stališče srednjeveškega karnevala iz teoretskih opisov M. M. Bahtina ter ga prikazuje kot poudarjeno vizualnega in anti-skopičnega v isti sapi. Z drugimi besedami, karneval dojema slikovno kot edino pravo resničnost, a to počne prav s postavljanjem po robu skopičnemu nagnjenju sterilnega teoretskega subjekta, ki "samo gleda" - karnevalske slike so namenjenu življenju ne opazovanju. Ravno obratno stališče zastopata metafizika in ideologija, zgoščeni okrog podobe idealnega teoretika, ki svet z varne razdalje použiva skozi svoj pogled ter ga zvaja na "zgolj podobo", tako da za njim postulira fantazmo neke resničnejše, neslikovne realnosti. Stališče karnevala je naposled vzporejeno še z zamislimi postmodernega "ikonskega obrata". Čeprav obe stališči soglašata, da so slike edina oblika resničnosti sploh, pa med njima zeva tudi določena ključna razlika. Če postmoderne prakse kiberprostorske družabnosti in virtualne realnosti ustvarjajo vzporeden svet čiste slikovnosti, ki ga v zasebnosti svojih domov uživajo med seboj ločeni posamezniki, pa karneval že prisotni materialni svet spreminja v sliko, ta pa je nato fizično poseljena s telesi, ki v medsebojnem druženju prestopajo meje svojih zasebnih individualnosti. Ključne besede: karneval, Bahtin, ikonski obrat, slikovno, fantazma. Izar Lunaček The Visual Construction of Carnival Culture The paper analyses the worldview of Carnival as described by M. M. Ba-khtin, presenting it as simultaneously anti-scopic and highly visual. I.e., carnival conceives of the pictorial as the only true reality, but it does this by opposing the scopic tendency of "just looking" held by a sterile, theoretic subject: carnival pictures are to be lived, not watched. Its opposite is the metaphysical or ideological worldview whose icon is the ideal theoretician, removed from the world, ingesting it through its gaze and then reducing it to a "mere picture" by positing the fantasy of a truer, non-pictorial reality behind it. The carnival worldview is finally compared to the post-modern stance of the "iconic turn". While the two do coincide in seeing pictures as the only form of reality, a crucial difference is proposed. If post-modern practices of cyberspace sociality and virtual reality create a parallel space of pure pictoriality to be enjoyed by sequestered individuals in the privacy of their homes, carnival rather turns the existing, material world into a picture that can be physically inhabited by socializing bodies transgressing their private individualities. Key words: carnival, Bakhtin, iconic turn, the pictorial, fantasy. 116 Addresses of Contributors Prof. Dr. Wen-Sheng WANG Department of Philosophy National Chengchi University No.64, Sec.2, Zhinan Rd.,Wenshan Dist. 116 Taipei City Taiwan Assoc. Prof. Dr. Ka-wing LEUNG Department of Philosophy Tongji University 1239 Si Ping Road 200092 Shanghai China Dr. Xin YU Department of Philosophy Sun Yat-sen University No. 135 Xingang Xi Road 510275 Guangzhou China Prof. Dr. Dimitri Ginev Centre for Culturology St. Kliment Ohridsky University of Sofia Tzar Osvoboditel Blvd. 15 1000 Sofia Bulgaria Dr. Cathrin Nielsen lektoratphilosophie.de Editorial Office for Philosophy Rothschildallee 5 D-60389 Frankfurt am Main Germany Assoc. Prof. Dr. Žarko Paic Faculty of Textile Technology University of Zagreb Prilaz baruna Filipovica 28 10000 Zagreb Croatia Dr. Izar Lunaček Faculty of Letters Autonomous University of Barcelona 08193 Bellaterra Barcelona Spain ISSN 1318-3362 UDK 1 PHAINOMENA REVIJA ZA FENOMENOLOGIJO IN HERMENEVTIKO JOURNAL OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS GLAVNA UREDNICA/EDITOR IN CHIEF Andrina Tonkli Komel UREDNIŠKI ODBOR/EDITORIAL BOARD Jan Bednarik, Tine Hribar, Valentin Kalan, Branko Klun, Dean Komel, Ivan Urbančič, Franci Zore. MEDNARODNI ZNANSTVENI SVET/INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY BOARD Pedro M. S. Alves (Lisboa), Damir Barbarie (Zagreb), Rudolf Bernet (Leuven), Arno Baruzzi (Augsburg), Philip Buckley (Montreal), Donatella Di Cesare (Rome), Umesh C. Chattopad-hyaya (Allahabad), Ion Copoeru (Cluj), Jean François Courtine (Paris), Renato Cristin (Trieste), Lester Embree (Boca Raton), Adriano Fabris (Pisa), Günter Figal (Tübingen), Andrzej Gniazdowski (Warszawa), Klaus Held (Wuppertal), Heinrich Hüni (Wuppertal), FriedrichWilhelm von Herrmann (Freiburg), Dimitri Ginev (Sofia), Jean Grondin (Ankara), Guy van Kerckhoven (Brussel/Bochum), Pavel Kouba (Prague), Ioanna Kuçuradi (Istanbul), Thomas Luckmann (Konstanz), Javier San Martin (Madrid), Viktor Molchanov (Moscow), Liangkang Ni (Guangzhou), Karl Novotny (Prague), Tadashi Ogawa (Kyoto), Željko Pavic (Zagreb), Tatiana Shchyttsova (Minsk), Gunter Scholtz (Bochum), Hans Rainer Sepp (Freiburg), Önay Sözer (Istanbul), Silvia Stoller (Wien), Rainer Thurnher (Innsbruck), Peter Trawny (Wuppertal), Toru Tani (Kyoto), Helmuth Vetter (Wien), Ugo Vlaisavljevic (Sarajevo), Dan Zahavi (Copenhagen), Bernhard Waldenfels (Bochum), Andrzej Wiercinski (Toronto), Ichiro Yamaguchi (Yokohama) Chung-Chi Yu (Taipei). Tajnik urednistva/Secretary: Andrej Božič Revija izhaja štirikrat letno/Published quarterly. Revija objavlja članke s področja fenomenologije, hermenevtike, zgodovine filozofije, filozofije kulture, filozofije umetnosti in teorije znanosti. Recenzentske izvode knjig pošiljajte na naslov uredništva. The journal covers the fields of phenomenology, hermeneutics, history of philosophy, philosophy of culture, philosophy of art, phenomenological theory of science. Books for review should be addressed to the Editorial Office. NASLOV UREDNIŠTVA/EDITORIAL OFFICE ADDRESS Andrina Tonkli Komel, Založba Nova revija, d. o. o., Cankarjeva 10b, 1000 Ljubljana tel. (386 1) 24 44 560 info@nova-revija.si Oddelek za filozofijo (kab. 432b), Filozofska fakulteta, Aškerčeva 2, Ljubljana 1000, te. 386 1 2411106, dean.komel@guest.arnes.si Spletna stran/Website: http://www.fenomenolosko-drustvo.si