Abstract
After reviewing the status of the concept of the phenomenon in Husserl’s phenomenology and the aim of successive attempts to reform, de-formalize, and to widen it, we show the difficulties of a method that, following the example of Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology, intends to connect the phenomenon directly to the revelation of an exteriority. We argue that, on the contrary, Marc Richir’s phenomenology, which strives to grasp the phenomenon as nothing-but-phenomenon, is more likely to capture the “meaning” of the phenomenological, and hence to help us orient in the field of problems that phenomenology encounters without always knowing how to tackle them. Yet, this extension of the phenomenon’s domain does not thereby encompass everything: there may well be certain issues that require a phenomenology without phenomenon; but the meaning of this cannot be determined before the complete reenvisioning of transcendental phenomenology.
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Notes
Derrida (1978, p. 131).
“One could say that Husserl and Heidegger constitute the first generation; Fink, Landgrebe, Patočka, Ingarden, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lévinas, Derrida, Ricoeur and Desanti the second; M. Henry (who straddles the second and the third), K. Held, B. Waldenfels, J.-L. Marion and M. Richir the most important figures of the third,” Schnell (2011, p. 6).
Majolino (2010).
“[…] it is possible to give an account of knowledge without falling into dogmatism or into a truncated empiricism only by setting a discourse situated on another level than the one that defines the rationalist discourse on the one hand; or any construction based on sensible data (and besides, it doesn’t matter that they are “atomic” as the first empiricists thought, or the result of “gestaltic” structures, as it has been maintained in the beginning of the twentieth century) and on the other hand, that both only reduplicate the real (or reduce it in a dogmatic way) without explaining in what it justifies and legitimizes a piece of knowledge.” Schnell (2007, pp. 41–42).
On this question, see Schnell (2004).
The concept of phenomenological construction, reinvigorated by Alexander Schnell, exemplifies this movement, see Schnell (2007).
Husserl (1970, p. 862).
“The term phenomenon refers preferably to acts of intuitive representation, thus on the one hand to perceptive acts and on the other to acts of presentification (Vergegenwärtigung) […]”: translated from the French. See Husserl (1959, pp. 281–282). [T. N. Findlay opted for the word appearance: (äußere Gestalt) instead of phenomenon: (Vorgang), his translation reads as follows: “Talk of ‘appearance’ has a preferred application to acts of intuitive presentation, to acts of perception, on the one hand, and to acts of representation, on the other, e.g. acts of remembering, imagining, or pictorially representing (in the ordinary sense) (Husserl 1970, p. 860). Husserl used the term Erscheinung and not Phänomen, for further reference see: Husserl (1900, p. 705)]. We understand by phenomenon 1) the concrete intuitive lived experience that, in this case coincides with Husserl’s definition of representative representation. According to Husserl, one mistakenly calls phenomena real components of the phenomenon in the first sense, that is to say the act of appearing of the intuitive act. See Husserl (1970, p. 861).
“It is absolutely certain that coupled concepts of internal and external perception and concepts of obvious perception and non-obvious perception cannot coincide. The first couple is determined by concepts of the physical and of the psychical, however one may distinguish them; the second expresses the […] adequate opposition between perception (or intuition in the narrowest sense of the word) of which the perceiving intention is exclusively oriented towards a content that is really present to it, and the inadequate perception, simply presumptive (vermeintlich) of which the intention does not find its fulfilling in the present content but rather constitutes through it, as it is unceasingly unilateral and presumptive (präsumptiv), a transcendent being given “in person.” In the first case, the felt content is at the same time the object of perception. The content means nothing else, it only refers to itself. In the second case, the content and the object are separated […]. It is in this division that, from the point of view of the theory of knowledge, dwells the essence of the difference that one has sought between internal and external perception.” (Translated from the French (Husserl 1959, pp. 287–288). Indeed, he concedes that if one understands psychical phenomena as real components of our conscience, as lived experience itself, and if one understands internal perceptions as adequate ones in which intention finds an immanent fulfilling in corresponding lived experiences, thus “the extension of internal perception no doubt coincides with the extension of adequate perception.” But it must be noted that “[…] all sensorial contents, sensations, also belong to the realm of lived experiences in general” and that on the other hand, “non-internal perceptions” do not coincide with external perceptions, but with “the larger extension of transcending, inadequate, perceptions,” ibid., p. 289.
“[…] given that even adequate perceptions of this kind perceive lived experiences, as they are comprehended, as belonging to the psychophysical myself-as-man that perceives them (thus as belonging to the objective, given, world), they are in this respect stained with an essential inadequacy.,” Ibid., p. 289.
Ibid., p. 286.
Majolino (2010, p. 20).
In other words: “[…] “phenomena” are the entire whole of what stands in daylight or of what can be brought to light […],” Heidegger (1986, p. 55). Heidegger points out here that “the Being can show itself from itself in as many different ways as there are ways to access it” (das Sich-an-ihm-selbst-zeigende), ibid., p. 55.
“[…] what expresses the one and the other has, prima facie, nothing to do with what one calls “Erscheinung,” apparition or even “blosse Erscheinung,” pure ap-parition,” ibid., p. 57.
Schnell (2005, p. 26).
Ibid., p. 55.
See Marion (1989).
“Beings and the Phenomenon,” Marion (1998, p. 63).
The whole enigma consists precisely in the way of conceiving this unthinkability.
“What makes the singularity of the Singular (and of any singular) is out of this field of presence, it goes under the surface, but it keeps nonetheless in-sisting from the deep unconscious place, out-of history, where it has been discarded in the in-determinacy of the not-as.” Marquet (1996, p. 137). On this subject, see Florian Forestier, “Phénoménologie et singularité,” online review of the Collège international de Philosophie, http://www.ciph.org/fichiers_contreAllee/F%20Forestier%20p%20C-All%C3%A9e.pdf.
Greisch (2000, p. 42).
See “The Breakthrough and the Broadening,” in Marion (1998, p. 38).
Marion (1998, p. 203).
Marion (2002, p. 125).
“Ana-morphosis indicates that the phenomenon takes form starting from itself. In this way, we can better understand that the phenomenon can come from ‘elsewhere’ and from itself. It comes from its own depths to its own form according to a phenomenological distance that remains strictly internal. The phenomenon always comes from ‘elsewhere’ since it appears as giving itself; but because it gives itself to itself, this ‘elsewhere’ remains intrinsic to it.” (Marion 2002, p. 124). The phenomenon is only understood in its phenomenality in the sense of its own shape that ipseitizes it reveals itself in it. In Marion’s work In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), this terminology is amended: the matter is no longer about the self of the phenomenon but about the “self of givenness,” ibid., p. 31. And, it is the devoted that, bearing the passivity of its exposure to givenness, «transfers» the self to the phenomenon, ibid., p. 52.
Novotny (2011).
“Levinas and Husserl are quite close here. But by acknowledging in this infinitely other as such (appearing as such) the status of an intentional modification of the ego in general, Husserl gives himself the right to speak of the infinitely other as such, accounting for the origin and the legitimacy of language. He describes the phenomenal system of nonphenomenality.” Derrida (1978, p. 125).
Novotny (2011, p. 228).
According to Rolf Kühn: “Life as a non-concept means […] a reality whose very essence escapes the generalizing determination because every generality necessarily contains an abstraction from “life” that in the sense of an accomplishment can precisely only manifest itself in an individuated way[…]” from “The original place of phenomenology and metaphysics,” Kühn (2011, p. 129).
Thus, it is perhaps with Kant that we find the clearest presentation of necessity. In order to pose the phenomenon and also to pose a non-given: the thing in itself is indeed not beyond the phenomenon and is nothing else but the beyond within the phenomenon. According to Kant, one cannot pose the phenomenon without posing first that it is “phenomenon of,” and the fact that its phenomenality calls for an exteriority that is necessarily extra-phenomenal. This exteriority characterizes by the same token the gap between experience and reason insofar as “[…] experience never satisfies reason entirely”: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, §57. For Kant (1997), the status of the thing in itself as a problem is co-originary with the status of knowledge as problem. that is to say, the form of the specific reflection that philosophy calls on when Kant seeks to think knowledge as such. In other words, the thing in itself is posited by the philosopher whose perspective spontaneously splits the question of the real into two issues: the real as what we must deal with directly on the one hand, and, on the other, the real as that from which we can think the fact that we are dealing with it.
Taking up the title of an article by Jocelyn Benoist.
Richir (2008a, p. 208).
See Schnell, “Speculative foundations of phenomenology”.
Even if—in order to moderate Richir’s reserves—one can consider that this eidetic is less, as in Husserl too, an already-there—that interiorization of the constraint met in intentionality when, thrusting towards transcendence, it tries to access the latter precisely in what characterizes it as transcendence—in what the eidetic would already be itself the product of a co-constitution. On this subject, see the by Jacques English’s important work: Sur l’intentionnalité et ses modes (Paris: PUF 2005). For Richir, as we will see, the matter is, on the contrary, to decorrelate the transcendental from the eidetic and to develop a theory of the pure phenomenon detached from any prior categorial system.
Richir (2000a, p. 24).
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 20.
“[…] our experience of language, and more particularly of the language that makes the meaning—and not ‘sign’ in the sense of ‘sign’ of an information, of a state-of-things or state-of-facts—but shows that the meaning in the making is always an adventure” that “the beginning is an enigma that, strangely, requires us […], and the end is, just as strangely, an enigma that […] we hope to make a little less inscrutable,” Richir (1992, p. 28).
According to a dialectic well described by Alexander Schnell at the end of “Speculative foundations of phenomenology”.
See Richir (2002). There is in the eidetic itself a transcendentally accidental character, but this transcendental accidentality does not implicate the ideality of essence in view of what it determines, what gathers in it, and that only becomes meaningful under its horizon.
Richir (2005), pp. 162–163.
The co-belonging of the schematic and affective is well explained by the author in Richir (2006, pp. 312–313) (in particular).
On this subject, see Schnell (2011), and also the second part of my dissertation: Le réel et le transcendantal, Enquête sur les fondements spéculatifs de la phénoménologie et le statut du phénoménologique: “Introduction à la phénoménologie génétique de Marc Richir.”
Yet, how could one conceptualize the establishment of an architectonic register without resorting to another one, without having this dependence implying a relation of structural subordination? An architectonic register builds itself, Richir retorts, by the architectonic transposition of another register. The relation from the one to the other is thus not from the grounding to the grounded but from the basis to the transposed. What builds itself from the basis is a “Stiftung” itself “with no principle” which feeds from the “rough material” that the basis provides, but which institutes a proper ad hoc order. What comes first in the constituting order is thus always the most archaic, the most undetermined and it is retroactively, from the instituted register, that the basis appears “as” a ground in which the instituted structure is then retrojected. For Richir “[…] there is no reason of (eidetic) essence that makes one Stiftung go to another one, but only transcendental conditions of effectuation of Stiftung. […],” Richir (2000b, p. 108).
Richir (2008b, p. 207).
Ibid., p. 210.
As Rolf Kühn pointed out concerning Michel Henry: “Indeed, how would the emptiness of the non-saturation of intuition and the excess of the appearing in general let themselves be connected together in givenness if it was not for a praxis that crosses them and which is not subjected to the measure of intuition but only to its own action?” Kühn (2011, p. 149). Or even: “with the economy of pathic immanent praxis this in-between forms itself, as a middle, in which phenomenology and metaphysics will be able to keep exchanging with each other,” ibid., p. 150.
Let me make it clear that I consider Phénoménologie en esquisses as the most important contribution to phenomenology—and maybe to philosophy in the last 20 years.
What Richir thematizes is the phenomenalization of a meaning—the total process according to which a meaning can phenomenalize itself as question of itself—as ipseization of a meaning becoming concrete—and not the position of uncertainty where the consent to the movement of a meaning in the making puts into play the possibility of meaning in general. Let us emphasize the fact that, formally, Richir performs all of these these analyses—with an accuracy and an attention to detail far superior to Derrida’s. In particular, in Richir’s On the sublime and the self. Variations (I and II) are extremely rich from the point of view of the updating of the processes of co-emergence of the singularity-exteriority pairs and selfness. It is indeed the question of the “point of view” on these analyses that I am raising here.
In a certain way, Richir explores the issue of configurations in his resumption of the question of phenomenological anthropology (in Richir (2000b). And yet, what escapes any form of elucidation of the term phenomenon is in principle once more the fact of being there: experience is only experience in what one learns from it, and exteriority, of which the phenomenological-transcendental analysis unveils the muteness, is only mute and empty from the point of view of meaning… Its irreflexibility conveys, on the side of existence, a fundamental positivity, but which is inexpressible as a phenomenon.
Maesschalck (2011).
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Translated by François-Carl Svenbro and Maia Nahele.
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Forestier, F. The phenomenon and the transcendental: Jean-Luc Marion, Marc Richir, and the issue of phenomenalization. Cont Philos Rev 45, 381–402 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9227-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9227-8