I Think Therefore We Are

Timothy Carlson — 2008-07-21T09:45:49Z

A review of
Recommencer en Phénoménologie
("Starting over in Phenomenology")
by Matthieu Villemot; Parole et Silence, 2007

A version in French of this review:
Parutions.com.

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From the beginning of the 20th century European humanism took the form of phenomenology, which can be seen as idealism's modern way of resisting analytical philosophy and the accompanying tendency to lower a positive, determined, naturalistic, ceiling over the world, with technological society — according to this view — being one of the results. Among phenomenology's accomplishments, as it struggles against what some of its proponents call the "thingification" of the world, can be counted a strong comeback staged by the Subject while avoiding the pitfall of relativism, as well as some open and useful philosophical debates between religious believers and non-believers, and, last but not least, the development of a critical and ethical outlook on the social sciences and their big questions.

Matthieu Villemot is a young and skilled phenomenologist who manages to write both clearly and deeply on difficult subjects. His aim in this book is to develop the notion of empathy and "inter-subjectivity" as an important form of solidarity and answer to the question: how should we act in the world? Suspecting that the beginning of the answer lies in the beginning-again which is the heart of the phenomenological method, Villemot chooses to accompany two philosophers as they go back to Descartes and start over: Husserl, considered the founder of phenomenology, and Michel Henry, probably the most outwardly confessional (Christian) of phenomenologists. Husserl first made the pilgrimage back to Descartes' famous cogito starting point in an attempt to re-found philosophy and by extension science on irrefutably solid ground. In his keenly-felt mission to link the conscious subject to the objective fact in some satisfactory way, he discovered to his dismay that retracing cartesian doubt back to that luminous point of consciousness was in fact an act to be repeated continually, each time achieving results a bit more precise. If not, the philosopher is condemned to repeat the cartesian fix-it solution: separating mind and body and making the cogito into a kind of mathematics-like first axiom. Amidst the ruins of his dream of once-for-all re-foundation of scientific knowing, Husserl comes to see the beginning point as the way itself, as the only way to avoid the naturalistic error.

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The Roots of European Subjectivity

Timothy Carlson — 2008-07-21T09:42:40Z

A review of
Geneologies of the Subject: From Saint Anselm to Malebranche
("Généalogies du sujet - De saint Anselme à Malebranche")
by Olivier Boulnois et al.; Vrin, 2007

This review in French at Parutions.com

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How did the "I" of common discourse, as it flourished on European soil, come to think of itself as a "subject", complete with an autonomous sphere, and even more as the substance par excellence, more knowable than any other and without which the existence of the world would not itself be knowable?

"It's Descartes' fault" would say Kant and Hegel. But the question is more complex than that; even Descartes himself did not talk about a "subject". To trace this obscure family tree, the researchers brought together by Olivier Boulnois in this book take up the story at the beginning, with Saint-Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century and the philosophical world he inhabited composed of Greek concepts (essence, substance, accidens) reworked in Latin by the likes of Boetius and Saint Augustine.

The first surprise encountered by a reader of Saint Anselm (father of the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God) is that the subject does not exist. The I is clearly a substance (as are all individuals and not simply God) but conceptually resembles an essence rather than being simply a substrate on which are grafted accidents (Aristotle's non-essential properties). In this way the subject as a set of properties is meaningless, explains Kristell Trego, in the face of the primacy of word and of action in determining what is this entity that is acting and thinking. The I is an intellectual construct which brings qualities or properties together rather than a framework to which they are attached. Will and thought are therefore as external to us as are our actions, and the "subject" that unites all of this is for the most part indeterminate. Even in the ethical realm this subject does not gain any consistence (as opposed to what Kant tried to establish); since it has no direct relation to the will it has no more control over it than it does over external acts. This conception can be can be traced back to the ancient Greek predilection for a fundamentally passive notion of the I.

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The NIB

I Think Therefore We Are

The Roots of European Subjectivity