Marie Antonios Sassine

Hannah Arendt refused the title of philosopher, preferring to be considered a political theorist. Her insistence, though, on rehabilitating the importance of political life is rooted in a phenomenology of appearance. She speaks of “the value of surface” (borrowing the term from the zoologist, Adolf Portmann) in an effort to overturn the philosophical priority of the invisible over the visible. Appearance, according to Arendt, is the site of maximum expression and diversity, whereas the inner is commonplace and indistinguishable. Metaphors drawn from the outer world light up inner experience, but this activity is not reversible. Metaphors arising from inner experience tell us nothing about the world. Drawing largely on Arendt’s final work, The Life of the Mind, this paper explores her phenomenological approach to the world of appearance and its relation to inner experience. It suggests that her phenomenology of appearance and metaphor is related to her project of disentangling meaning from truth. Meaning, according to Arendt, is revealed, for example, when spectators of the appearing world withdraw into themselves to form free judgements, while remaining plural in recognizing that they share an event from multiple perspectives. She reverses the traditional philosophical hierarchy, since Parmenides and enshrined by Plato, that places truth above meaning. Meaning for her is intimately concerned with the rich variety of appearance. Metaphor, she tells us, reveals the primacy of surface and bridges “the abyss between inward and invisible mental activities and the world of appearances” [Arendt (The Life of the Mind. Mary McCarthy. Harcourt, 1978, 105)].

The paper will examine the incarnation of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment as a model for political judgment, notably in Hannah Arendt’s interpretation. It will highlight the elements in Kant’s analysis of the judgment of the beautiful that have served to nourish some contemporary notions of political deliberation. The pitfalls and potential promise of transposing an aesthetic appreciation to the political realm will also be considered.In Kant’s view, aesthetic judgment is profoundly subjective, grounded in the feeling of pleasure or displeasure. Taste is a personal matter. It is, however, communicable since it arises from a form of judgment. In judgments of taste, pleasure and displeasure are not pure sensation; they are reflected feelings. The judgment of the beautiful has the distinct particularity, according to Kant, of including others in the very judgment. The perception is never purely solitary; it accounts for others in how the object is viewed. Absent any possibility of defining beauty objectively, this underlying and implicit dimension is what renders the experience of beauty communicable. One might say that the private experience of pleasure through the faculty of judgment is immediately also potentially inter-subjective as well as communicable. It is precisely these specific features, the inter-subjective experience and its communicability, that have inspired contemporary political thought in thinkers such as Arendt, Habermas, and others. Whether the genesis and finality of these features reside in judgments of taste or in cognition remains contested and open to question.

This edited volume investigates a much-needed exploration of women phenomenologists, past and present, in particular, Hannah Arendt, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Edith Stein, and Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. The sections covered are devoted to the phenomenological exploration of autobiography, subjectivism, and posthumanism as dealing with modalities of the real and art (poetry and music, in particular). This volume includes, among others, a study of the autobiography of Husserl, a phenomenological analysis of an immigrant experience, a poetic autobiography, and a phenomenological recollection of emotions through artistic media. Chapters also explore the notions of empathy, certain aspects of mental illness and trauma, and the experience of patients. This book appeals to students and researchers working in applied phenomenology.

The paper is an exploration of the phenomenology of the creative imagination as a site of encounter and transformation in Philo and Ibn ‘Arabi. The encounter, we suggest, is one with the infinite source of language, and with a specific form of language—Logos, speech, naming.In some ways this phenomenology anticipates two related ideas found in Lacan—that speech (la parole) is a gift from language, and, further, that the ‘parole’ is always seeking a response from the other, that it calls out to the other a name which may or may not be assumed.Philo and Ibn ‘Arabi lived at the crossroads of pluralistic and complex cultures. Part of the value of looking at the question of the infinite in their work is that it may tell us something about how they achieved an inclusiveness in their views, while firmly remaining committed to philosophical and theological truth. Our suggestion is that in their phenomenology of the creative imagination, and the ever fresh way that new and transformative speech continues to arise from an infinite source, there is room for multiple readings and a variety of possible worlds.

The paper suggests that while the body is the impassable frontier between us and the Other, it is at the same time a privileged means for recognizing our own and the Other’s vulnerability and fragility. The body, however, is growing more solitary in the post human times that we are entering. Interactions with others rely less and less on corporeal presence. Abstract mediated contact is becoming the norm and is frequently favoured as a more convenient and liberating form of sociability. But are there fundamental differences between these modalities of presence—the virtual one and the full physical presence—that deserve attention? This paper argues, drawing on phenomenological analyses by Husserl and Patočka and on insights from Nietzsche, that a growing ‘solitude of the body’ is reverberating into a gradual absence of the Other and that this phenomenon is translating into narrower and more subjectively defined notions of community and common world. The suggestion here is that Patočka’s call for a phenomenology of corporeity is ever more pressing and relevant.

Much of our experience today is mediated through mathematical constructs that escape our immediate intuitions, social media being a primary example. Understanding the proliferation of these constructs may help us see how they are destabilizing ethical judgment. Since its inception with Husserl, phenomenology has set out a sustained critique of the philosophical sources that led to the mathematization of nature. It has also been alert to the dangers that this mathematization presented. Husserl argued that the life-world was being transformed with a gradual substitution of the abstract object for the authentic phenomenon. This paper looks at what I consider to be a contemporary form of Husserl’s critique, largely through the lens offered by the Belgian philosopher, Jean Ladrière. In line with Husserl, Ladrière argues that we are witnessing the prevalence of a specific scientific rationality of construct that is populating the life-world with its products, its artifacts. The artifacts represent fragments of reality—ones constructed on the basis of mathematical ideals, of a reduced and formal grasp the real. The consequence, according to Ladrière, is a destabilization of ethical judgment. Hermeneutic phenomenology, he suggests, offers the elements of a potential response, essentially constituted by a hermeneutic of the artificial.