Recherche – Detailansicht

Ausgabe:

November/2016

Spalte:

1251–1252

Kategorie:

Philosophie, Religionsphilosophie

Autor/Hrsg.:

Figal, Günter

Titel/Untertitel:

Unscheinbarkeit. Der Raum der Phänomenologie.

Verlag:

Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2015. XII, 297 S. Lw. EUR 74,00. ISBN 978-3-16-153711-0; unveränd. Studienausgabe 2016. Kart. EUR 39,00. ISBN 978-3-16-154346-3.

Rezensent:

George Pattison

We are frequently hearing that astro-physicists now believe that the universe as we know it is only a small fraction of all that is and that ›behind‹ the world known to physics is a vaster realm of so-called dark matter. What this might be is, it seems, not unknow-able in absolute terms but is, as yet, unexplored territory. Günter Figal’s Unscheinbarkeit perhaps invites comparison with this scenario, since, he argues, we can only know what appears by virtue of its location within what does not and cannot itself ever appear. Nevertheless, like the physicists now pushing their enquiries into the realms of dark matter, F. does not believe this to entail having to keep silent in the face of that whereof we cannot speak. In this work, therefore, he investigates just how we might start to speak of what doesn’t appear and how awareness of this realm of non-appearance affects what we say about what does appear and about how we say it. Especially he believes that, contra Heidegger, it is space ( Raum) rather than time that offers the furthest-reaching insights into the domain of the non-appearing.
Heidegger is, unsurprisingly, a major presence in this work, and whilst much of the argument is framed as a contestation of basic Heideggerian claims, there are also many points of constructive engagement. The point is, clearly, not simply to disagree with Heidegger, but, drawing on the best that Heidegger can offer, to re-visit or to take further the most relevant insights from that ›Master from Germany‹. In these terms, this is a genuinely phenomenolog-ical study, consistently and tenaciously aiming at die Sachen selbst rather than (like so much post-Heideggerian philosophy) making a show of ›going further‹. Heidegger appears when he is needed to help focus or develop the investigation, but the work also draws on a deep and authoritative engagement with sources in classical philosophy (primarily Plato and Aristotle) and with the phenomenological tradition (in addition to Heidegger, especially Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Blumenberg), whilst Wittgenstein is also a significant, if oc-casional, contributor to the conversation. Outside philosophy, im­portant roles are also played by Valéry, by architecture (especially Peter Zumthor and Frank Lloyd Wright), and the Japanese ceramic bowl that is the subject of F.’s own earlier book, Simplicity.
The crux of the argument is that when phenomenology chooses to focus on what appears (das Erscheinende) as that is given in its appearing (Erscheinen) and within the twofold structure of intentionality (therefore without reference to any supposed ›subject‹ or ›object‹ outwith this event), we are nevertheless confronted with something that is seen along with such a event of appearance and that is an essential abiding and accompanying condition of this event. It is this for which F. chooses the term Raum. As he puts it on p. 49: »Der Gedanke, dass der Raum ›mitgesehen‹ werde, trifft das Wesentliche«. In a sense, the book is simply the unfolding of what this could mean, developing it through such familiar philosophical topics as the Platonic chōra, the thing (where Valéry’s fictional Socrates, playing with a stone found on the beach, provides a kind of Leitmotiv), life, and, since humans do not just live but ›dwell‹ in their world, building. Finally the enquiry turns to concepts that are interpreted less in terms of ›grasping‹ (as the German Begriff is often glossed in English) but the opening of the very possibility of a room or space within which thinking might occur. Concepts, in this sense, are not directly experienced (as if they were mental ›things‹) but are what makes thinking possible and, like the open space that they qualify, are experienced ›with‹ all that we do thematically experience. In a final move, F. returns to Plato and to the Platonic sun. Yet whilst the sun offers illumination to all that is laid open to visibility by its light, there is (F. says) a sense in which even the sun is not the final source of illumination but is itself manifest by virtue of a light that never appears tied to a single or complex source: »Bevor man auf Anfänge, Prinzipien kam, war das Sehen und Denken zusammen mit dem Sichtbaren und Denkbaren in seiner es ermöglichenden Un­scheinbarkeit immer schon da. Damit ist auch gesagt, was für das Sehen und Denken verbindlich, weil ermöglichend ist: einfache Weite, freier Raum, einfaches Hier« (278).
As even this briefest of sketches has, I hope, shown, the development of the argument is complex, subtle, yet ever purposive. And whilst I think the term ›argument‹ appropriate (there are definite theses being advanced and defended), the style is meditative rather than argumentative. It is in the nature of the case that F. cannot simply show us what it is he is talking about – it is and remains »unscheinbar« – but by the time we have reached the end, the three terms with which he concludes (»einfache Weite, freier Raum, einfaches Hier«) are by no means empty words but have been filled with a significant network of connotations. Not least, the work contributes to further animating the significance of possibility as a basic philosophical (can we say ›metaphysical‹) term that does more than either the Aristotelian or existentialist versions of possibility allow.
Precisely because this is not a polemical work, it perhaps inevitably leaves a number of questionable points hanging in the air. One that troubled this reader is simply why, given that the en-quiry moves us into a realm that is beyond space and time in any conventional sense (Cartesian or Kantian, for example), F. insists on asserting the primacy of space over time. Is it really implausible that that which is prior to all experience and phenomenalization might be as much temporal as spatial whilst also being neither? Is the inversion of Heidegger that this prioritization effects ulti mately too one-sided? If we are inevitably in a domain where language is at best analogous, do not each of space and time need the other as their complement and corrective?
Although this is a work that does not directly engage theology, it certainly does engage topics that have concerned theologians since the beginnings of philosophical theology (viz., the idea of the Good) and more recently (chōra). Implicitly, it would not be hard to bring what is being said into dialogue with such theological topics as, e. g., Rahner’s (or Marcel’s) mystery of being – although whether the philosopher and theologian were ultimately saying the same thing here would require extensive teasing out. But perhaps the work comes closer to Buddhist than to Christian metaphysics, as suggested by the theme of die Leere (the empty), and its proximity to Buddhist accounts of dependent co-origination came to mind at a number of points – indeed East Asian meditation is at one point (85) mentioned as giving access to a realm in which the world is no longer experienced as an array or complex of objects but as ground­-ed in emptiness.
Yet the importance of philosophy to Christian theology is not only in its capacity for delivering the kinds of metaphysical, epistemological, or grammatical theses and clarifications with which we have become familiar. No less important, I suggest, is its potential for developing a certain habit of mind close to what Heidegger called »the piety of thinking« and without which we cannot expect basic religious truths to yield their mysteries to us. In this regard, this new work by a major scholar offers a rigorous yet often beautifully written training in just such a »piety of thinking« as it takes us through fundamental and abiding questions of phenomeno-logical method.