Nicolas De Warren

The aim of this article is to develop a novel interpretation of the significance of trauma and substitution in Levinas’s ethical thinking in light of the problem of temporality, language, and the question of what it means to be a created being. With an emphasis on Levinas’s style of writing, the intersections of Derrida, Husserl, and Freud in his thinking, and the “two-times” of traumatic temporality, the argument of this article seeks to understand how responsibility for the other is crystallized through the trauma of the Goodness and expiation for the impossibility of enduring its unforgiving demand.

El artículo explora “la importancia de lo que nos preocupa” desde un ángulo fenomenológico, siguiendo el espíritu del ensayo seminal de Harry Frankfurt. El trabajo discute de manera algunos de sus conceptos y asuntos centrales dentro de un marco husserliano de análisis. Mi tesis general es que la distinción tripartita de Frankfurt –conocer, conducta ética, cuidado– es igual de central para la fenomenología de la razón de Husserl y, más directamente, subyace a la ética husserliana de los valores y la vocación que se desarrolla en sus manuscritos de Friburgo de las décadas de 1920 y 1930.

Long since forgotten, Walter Flex's war-time novel The Wanderer Between the Two Worlds was one of the most popular publications during the First World War and, indeed, one of the best selling German novels in the 20th-century. While Flex's novel contributed to the sacrificial and nationalistic discourse that dominated the spiritual mobilization of German writers and intellectuals during the war, the aim of this paper is to revisit Flex’s exemplary novel in order to outline a new matrix of intelligibility for an understanding of the discourse of sacrifice during the First World War. Although the focus here remains on Flex’s Der Wanderer and its German context of nationalism, this proposed analysis serves as a case-study of sacrificial discourse within the broader horizon of the relations between sacrificial discourse, the secular religious enterprise of nationalism, and the shaping of political affects. As this paper seeks to demonstrate, couched within an ideological mythologization of the experience of war, Flex’s novel nonetheless contains anthropological and cultural insights into the tenacity of sacrificial discourse for nationalism and modern social solidarity.

This paper develops a phenomenological approach to life after death on the basis of certain fragmentary insights proposed by Jan Patočka. Rather than consider the after-life in either metaphysical or religious terms, as the continued survival of the soul after death, this paper considers life after death in terms of how the dead still survives in the living and, likewise, of the living experience of one's own death with the passing of the Other. These complex ways in which ghosts of the dead inhabit and haunt the living are examined not just in terms of remembrance and memory, but through a more poignant form of presence in which the metaphysical quality – the meaningfulness of their existence – becomes manifest.

Although Levinas’s thinking has generated substantial attention for its emphasis on the irreducibility of alterity, an unconditional responsibility for others, and “ethics as first philosophy,” his accentuation of war and suffering, and hence “evil” in a capacious sense, as endemic to existence, has attracted less notice. In this paper, I explore the originality of Levinas’s reflections on evil in his essay “Transcendence and Evil” against the backdrop of his earlier identification of the “evil of being” and historical conceptions of evil as “privation of the Good” and theodicy. In shadowing the biblical Book of Job, Levinas’s insight into the “transcendence of evil,” with its tear in the fabric of being and disruption of subjectivity, represents, as explored in this paper, a striking departure from his previous considerations on evil and categorical rejection of theodicy, in its secular and theological forms, while nonetheless insisting on the redemptive breakthrough of the Good at the heart of darkness.

Understood historically, culturally, politically, geographically, or philosophically, the idea of Europe and notion of European identity conjure up as much controversy as consensus. The mapping of the relation between ideas of Europe and their philosophical articulation and contestation has never benefited from clear boundaries, and if it is to retain its relevance to the challenges now facing the world, it must become an evolving conceptual landscape of critical reflection. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Europe provides an outstanding reference work for the exploration of Europe in its manifold conceptions, narratives, institutions, and values. Comprising twenty-seven chapters by a group of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into three parts: • Europe of the Philosophers • Concepts and Controversies • Debates and Horizons Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, politics and European studies the Handbook will also be of interest to those in related disciplines such as sociology, religion, and European history and history of ideas. Darian Meacham is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Maastricht University, The Netherlands. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology and the co-editor of Thinking After Europe: Jan Patočka and Politics (2016) Nicolas de Warren is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University, USA. He is the author of Husserl and the Promise of Time (2010), A Momentary Breathlessness in the Sadness of Time (2018), and Original Forgiveness (2020).

It is a truism, that we are not self-created beings, that each of us has been singularly brought into the world by others, that we did not beget ourselves. From the Biblical image of the fall of humankind to Heidegger’s existential schema of the “fallenness” of human existence, what it is to be has been reflected upon in terms of what it is to have been not self-created. To have been marks our being, and yet, we only come to know, or realize, our own created existence belatedly, after the fact, in a sudden awareness that we have already been before we have been for ourselves. This realization of having been born is often experienced in a register of emotional shock, as the trauma of creation. As a trauma, it is structured by the disjointed time of what Freud called Nachträglichkeit. The “shock” of having been born is only experienced as an affect after the fact, even as this fact must have occurred before; the affect is disjointed from the shock even as the shock can only affect us afterwards. Through an exploration of the literary writings of Clarice Lispector, this paper examines the philosophical significance of the “emotional shock” of having been born. In contrast to Heidegger’s emphasis on the anxiety of “being towards death” or Sartre’s nausea, I argue for the originality of Lispector’s conception of createdness in the radiance of its realization, as expressed in the pithy formulation: “the pain of creation, yet without the creation.”

This paper re-examines the vexing issue of Husserl’s Cartesianism. Against the commonplace image of Descartes as the father of the modern turn to subjectivity or the introduction of “description from the first point of view”, this paper argues that Husserl’s orientation towards Descartes resides with his emphasis on the centrality of the problem of reason for transcendental phenomenological. Through a detailed discussion of the complex senses in which Husserl evokes Descartes in his Paris Lectures and in the Cartesian Meditations, this paper also reveals the political and cultural significance of phenomenology’s claim of Cartesianism in the aftermath of the First World War. Lastly, through a close treatment of Husserl’s critique of Descartes’ failure to fully exploit the transcendental potential of his Meditationes, this paper demonstrates how the problem of subjectivity for Husserl is firmly situated within the problem of reason; a phenomenological description of experience is not, contrary to a commonplace understanding, from the first person point of view, but more specifically, from the perspective of reason as an attitude towards human experience and knowing.

The aim of this paper is understand Husserl’s “Platonism” through an understanding of how the method of eidetic variation and a phenomenological conception of essences reformulates by means of a conceptual and historical translation Plato’s doctrine of essences. In arguing that a theory of essences and method for the discovery of essences proves indispensable to a proper conception of phenomenology, Husserl positions himself as a philosophical “friend of essences” without thereby adopting a Platonic conception of essences. In addition to a reconstruction of Husserl’s image of Plato and the historical tradition, this paper examines the pivotal role played by “variation” and “manifold” in Husserl’s distinctive understanding of essences.

The author undertakes the ambitious task of traversing the expanse of Husserl’s conception of transcendental subjectivity by investigating what is perhaps the central nerve of Husserl’s distinctive kind of transcendental idealism: the way in which transcendental consciousness is both an expression—worldly, embodied, historical, finite—and the origin—pure, a priori, infinite—of its world-constituting activity. Organized in nine chapters, Housset’s book is itself constructed like a spiraling movement of concentric circles, sweeps of reflection around the central question of the individuality of transcendental consciousness. For Husserl, the problem of individuation was central for understanding in what sense transcendental consciousness is not simply an abstract subject of knowledge. Transcendental subjectivity, Husserl continually argued, is first and foremost a person, the life of consciousness as reflected in the perspective it brings to itself through self-consciousness. Husserl broadly conceived of transcendental consciousness as an activity that lives through its experience of the world in advance of its own expression of living. Yet what mode of being is distinctive of transcendental consciousness as an experience, as encompassing life in its totality, and in its varied manifestations? The inner logic of Husserl’s radical movement of questioning leads directly to the issue of how transcendental subjectivity itself is given. Undoubtedly, this is the question that perplexed Heidegger about Husserlian phenomenology. Yet as Housset convincingly demonstrates, Heidegger did not awaken Husserl to this question. Instead, an investigation into the development of Husserl’s thought shows clearly that Husserl struggled throughout his career with this question. Indeed, the problem of the individuation of transcendental subjectivity can be seen as animating the entire project of phenomenological philosophy. If the constituting activity of transcendental consciousness is understood as an activity of Sinngebung, the giving of meaning, then in what sense is the singularity of transcendence given, the gift of its own meaningful life? On Housset’s reading, this mode of being turns out to be a kind of responsibility expressed in the self-consciousness of a task, to grasp life as a project of truth that life becomes for itself.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938Nicolas de WarrenRonald Bruzina. Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pp. xxvii + 627. Cloth, $45.00.Edmund Husserl defined a new field and method of philosophical research that required the employment of students in the pursuit of a rigorous and elusive science called transcendental phenomenology. Husserl's most famous student, Heidegger, quickly proved a disappointment to the phenomenological cause, and it is in the shadow of Heidegger's waywardness that Eugen Fink, known primarily as the author of spirited defenses of Husserl's thinking, developed a close intellectual relationship with Husserl as his assistant from 1928 until 1938. Fink's collaboration with Husserl and his metaphysical recasting of phenomenology are the principal themes of Bruzina's scrupulously researched study, largely based on Fink's unpublished writings.A first chapter presents a narrative of Fink's significant influence on Husserl's thinking and writing. In chapter two, "Orientation I: Phenomenology Beyond the Preliminary," Bruzina details how Fink further developed Husserl's phenomenology in a systematic and self-critical direction. Whereas Husserl cautiously argued that the noetic-noematic schema "runs through all levels of constitution," including the seemingly intractable level of absolute time-consciousness, Fink—under the influence of Heidegger—rejects the universality of the "apriori-correlation" and its attending "philosophy of reflection." Working out the "being of transcendental subjectivity" and its distinctive temporality is, for Fink, the "remaining task of phenomenology." Bruzina pursues the confrontation between Husserl and Heidegger in Fink's thinking in chapter three, "Orientation II: Whose Phenomenology?" According to Fink, Husserl remains "blind to transcendence," yet Heidegger remains blind to "constitution" (132). What emerges from this chapter, however, is the significance of Hegel as Fink recasts the difference between Husserl and Heidegger into a difference between a philosophy of reflection and a philosophy of Being. Against this backdrop, Bruzina signals Fink's proposal to re-think the concept of origin in a speculative register of the "meontic," that is, as "non-being."Before launching directly into Fink's "meontic" recasting of metaphysics, Bruzina presents three thematically defined chapters. In chapter four, "Fundamental Thematics I: The World," Bruzina discusses Fink's sublimation of Husserl's "natural attitude" into the concept of "world-captivation" and his charge that Husserl presupposes the horizon of the world as a whole. Chapter five, "Fundamental Thematics II: Time," examines Fink's writings on time-consciousness. A first set of writings speaks to the task of rendering Husserl's "Bernau Manuscripts" into a publishable form; a second set reflects Fink's intention to complete his own larger work on "Time and Temporalization." Both projects were abandoned, the later manuscript destroyed by Fink himself. Fink emphasizes the "special character of retention-protention intentionality as depresencing (Entgegenwärtigung), providing therein the basic consideration for addressing the question of finiteness in the stream of consciousness" (261). This insight allows Fink to propose a critique of Husserl's "presentialism" and his own thesis that "the Absolute is origin" in both a temporal and non-temporal sense, as the "excess/superabundance (Überschwang) of depresencing," further characterized the Plotinian idea of "emanation" (273). "Life" and "Spirit" are the final set of fundamental themes discussed by Bruzina in chapter six. For Fink, the essence of life is conceived as the "play of being," which he understands with a Nietzschean emphasis on "creation" (333). The "self-realization" of life in its creative self-performance delivers a "meontic" definition of the absolute; subjectivity is displaced (entstellt) in its self-performance such that it remains incomplete, a "metaphysical gap in the cosmos" (341).In chapter seven, we arrive at the "critical-systematic core" of Fink's "meontic" speculations. Here, much of Fink's pronouncements are a heady mixture of Heidegger and Plotinus. Bruzina admits that Fink "freely draws" from the traditions of Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism; yet a quick attempt to distance Fink from his sources remains unconvincing. The "radical difference between the One of ultimate origin and all else" (448) that Bruzina takes as the exceptional focus of Fink's thinking is also of metaphysical concern in...

This dissertation examines how and why Edmund Husserl's investigations of the consciousness of time compelled him to revise his early analysis of consciousness and conception of phenomenology. Husserl analyzes consciousness initially as part of a project of clarifying the conditions of a priori knowledge in his Logical Investigations of 1900, allegedly in abstraction from temporal considerations. The dissertation demonstrates, however, that Husserl's construal of intuition as the paradigm of modes of consciousness---or, in other words, as the fulfillment of stages of intentionality---effectively privileges a form of temporal presence. In this way the dissertation advances the thesis that time-consciousness plays a tacit and fundamental but unreflected role in Husserl's initial account of consciousness. Husserl begins to appreciate that role and the fundamentally temporal character of consciousness in his lectures on time-consciousness of 1905 as he criticizes Franz Brentano's psychological theory of time. By means of this criticism of his former mentor, Husserl discovers that the key to explaining how time can become an object of consciousness is to account for the presence of the past as a passing consciousness, not in an imaginative representation, but within the very consciousness of the present. The dissertation demonstrates how, with this discovery, Husserl comes to recognize that investigations of the origins of time-consciousness and consciousness itself coincide, and, consequently, that he must thoroughly rethink his earlier effort to analyze consciousness in abstraction from time. As evidenced by investigations of time-consciousness, repeatedly undertaken by Husserl from 1904--1911, he redresses his earlier position by showing the significance of "absences" for the constitution of temporal presence and, equivalently, for the presence of consciousness itself. Perhaps most importantly, Husserl uncovers how consciousness transcends itself precisely in retaining its past and, hence, must be defined, no longer simply in terms of self-presence, but also in terms of its self-transcending temporality. These considerations lead Husserl to usher in a new sort of investigation of consciousness, what he would eventually call a "genetic phenomenology" of subjective life, thereby confirming the central thesis of the dissertation that the investigation of time-consciousness holds the promise of phenomenology itself.

This essay proposes a general re-framing of the question of whether the First World War induced any significant change in philosophical thought. A central aim is to outline an original approach to this question based on the claim that the question of the war’s impact on philosophy does not have one general ”meaning’ and thus does not admit one kind of answer. Rather than propose a comprehensive view, this essay sketches different angles of approach that range over different philosophical traditions, problems, and thinkers.