Anna Yampolskaya

The aim of this article is to explore the influence that Koyré’s early work on history of religion had on the development of French phenomenology, with focus on Emmanuel Levinas and Michel Henry. Although Koyré’s affiliation to the phenomenological movement is debatable, his thought owes much to Husserl’s phenomenological method. In his books on St. Anselm and Descartes, Koyré focuses on the idea of God and the idea of the infinite. I trace the influence of Koyré’s analysis of the infinite in its relation to the finite on the development of the idea of the infinite in Levinas. I also show that Levinassian approach to the idea of God as “the idea of the Infinite in me” goes back to Koyré’s interpretation of the ontological proof of St. Anselm. Next, I explore the influence of Koyré’s book on Böhme on the philosophy of Michel Henry. Koyré’s reading of Böhme makes Böhme essentially a precursor of German idealism describing the Absolute that wishes to manifest itself and distinguishing between the manifestation and what is made manifest in this manifestation. Henry applies this approach to phenomena in general, which leads him to a criticism of intentionality loss of a cosmological dimension. I would like to argue in favour of a more balanced phenomenology that wants to be not only prescriptive but also descriptive and sensitive to a certain scientific dimension.

In this paper I argue that conscience is a phenomenon that takes place on two different architectonic levels: the sedimented level of intentional consciousness and the pre-intentional level of sense-formation and intersubjective perceptive phantasiai. On this pre-intentional level, one does not clearly distinguish between what is alien and what is one’s own: the lived experiences are not yet ascribed to an already constituted self but can be qualified as “nomadic.” This architectonic level is the locus of one’s openness to the Other and their embodied life, be it ethical or aesthetic openness. This is why pre-intentional conscience is lived through as a silent call. This call, on the one hand, affects and destabilizes the recipient and compels them to a certain understanding, and, on the other hand, it is marked by an essential ambiguity regarding the identity of the caller and/or the transferred message. This call becomes manifest in the response, when it gradually acquires a well-defined shape and is subsequently identified as the voice of my authentic self, or the voice or the gaze of the Other in need, or the voice of a universal law, or the voice of God. The recipient of the call of conscience becomes a kind of “translator” or “spokesperson” who lends their own flesh with its bodily and mental habits to the caller, translating the silent call into a practical judgement of conscience.

Frangeskou’s point of departure in his juxtaposition of Levinas and Kant is the problem of transcenden- tal schematism but not the tension between autonomy and heteronomy as it is common for most of the published literature. Thus, the middle ground between Levinas and Kant is occupied by Heidegger, but also by Franz Rosenzweig with his “biblical” version of ecstatic temporality. Levinassian diachrony is described by Frangeskou as a new form of ecstatic temporality, different from the interpretations given by Heidegger and Rosenzweig. It is analogous to transcendental schematism of reason. We briefly com- pare Frangeskou’s interpretation with Marc Richir’s notion of transcendental schematism which also goes back to Levinassian diachronic temporality. Richir’s schematism functions as a medium joining together heterogenous elements such as the layer of “phenomenological”, i.e., the unstable and flick- ering sense, and the layer of “symbolic”, i.e., the organised and stabilised sense. In a similar way, for Frangeskou, diachronic temporality provides a synthesis (though, not a synchronisation) of God, the world and a man.

We investigate the parallelism between aesthetic experience and the practice of phenomenology using Viktor Shklovsky’s theory of “estrangement”. In his letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Husserl claims that aesthetic and phenomenological experiences are similar; in the perception of a work of art we change our attitude in order to concentrate on how the things appear to us instead of what they are. A work of art “forces us into” the aesthetic attitude in the same way as the phenomenological epoché drives us into the phenomenological one. The change of attitudes is a condition of possibility of aesthetic and/or phenomenological experience. Estrangement is an artistic device that breaks the routinized forms of perception: one sees the thing as new and does not just “recognize” it automatically. Shklovsky insists that it is possible if one experiences or feels the form of the work of art—in an affective and even sensuous way. We claim that this is similar to the phenomenological seeing, or intuition, which, according to Husserl, should be devoid of all understanding. Phenomenological epoché can also be described as a philosophical technique that aims to arrest the “ready-made,” “taken for granted,” “pre-given” meanings in order to access a new meaning which is not yet stabilized, the “meaning-in-formation.” It is not enough to turn from what appears to how it appears; one has to oscillate between these conflicting attitudes, or rather to keep them both at the same time thus gaining a kind of a 3D-vision of meaning in its becoming. This double life in two different attitudes can be clarified in terms of Roman Jakobson’s theory of antinomic coexistence between the poetic and communicative functions of language. The notion of “double life in two attitudes” uncovers the role that ostranenie can play in the philosophical transformation of the subject based on variety and essential mobility of the affective components involved. Proposing a phenomenological interpretation of a passage from Samuel Beckett we show how the radicalization of ostranenie can lead even to “meta-estrangement”: to estrangement of the everyday “lack of estrangement.” We conclude with a remark on the productivity of this form of estrangement in the phenomenological context.

In this paper I compare how Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney interpret Kandinsky’s heritage. Henry’s phenomenology is based on a distinction between two main modes of manifestation: the ordinary one, that is, the manifestation of the world, and the “manifestation of life.” For him, Kandinsky’s work provides a paradigmatic example of the second, more original mode of manifestation, which is free from all forms of self-alienation. Henry claims that this living through the work of art is transformative; it is akin to ascetic practice or mystical experience that goes beyond the distinction of the subject and the object. Maldiney acknowledges Kandinsky’s work as an attempt to provide access to an a-cosmic and ahistoric experience of one’s inner self; yet for him this is not a positive characteristic. For Maldiney, the key distinction is not between modes of phenomenalisation, but between the dimensions of meaning. For him there is no radical self-transformation which is not a transformation of one’s being-in-the-world and one’s meaning of the world, and so Kandinsky’s a-cosmic paintings cannot induce a true transformation of the self. I conclude that the disagreement of Henry and Maldiney on Kandinsky does not unfold on the level of phenomenological description of concrete aesthetic experience, but on the level of metaphysics.