THE CRISIS OF PHILOSOPHY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF CRISIS
© 1992 by Eiichi Shimomissé
Preface.
Philosophy has experienced many crises. When for instance Sophists threatened the possibility of wisdom (=knowledge for its own sake), Socrates, Plato and Aristotle responded to that threat with their philosophy of crisis. When the possibility of new knowledge of nature was threatened by the tradition, René Descartes came with his universal doubt and philosophy of consciousness. When David Hume threatened the objective validity of physics and mathematics as sciences, Immanuel Kant responded with his transcendental philosophy. When Schelling and Hegel were editing die kiritische Journal der Philosophie in Jena, both felt a call from fate to overcome the problem of the philosophy of reflection. When insatiable desire and selfish greed were rampant in the 5th century B.C. in China, this critical darkness called for Lao Tzu’s philosophy. When social disorder and political chaos threatened the foundation of morality and government, Confucius responded the situation with his moral philosophy. When rhetoric and disputation were common place, it was Chuang Tzu who responded the crisis with his clear vision for freedom.
I.
In the history of Western philosophy, the great philosophers never failed to have an explicit self-consciousness of crisis of the day. By the self-consciousness of crisis, we mean the self-awareness that, to that philosopher, the traditional or current prevailing philosophical approach to and comprehension of reality clearly could no longer is tenable and thus would go nowhere. They felt a strong urgency to do something about it and had an acute awareness of one’s own responsibility to overcome the crisis that they had faced.
However, the crisis of philosophy in the post-Hegelian era, i.e., since the middle of the 19th century, is of an entirely different kind from the crises of philosophy in the past. How radical the confrontations of these thinkers with their preceding tradition may have been, there was always an unbroken continuity. This continuity is, in short, the unchallengeable faith in Western Reason as the principle of reality and the ultimate criterion for philosophical inquiry.
European Nihilism in the 19th century was no other than the explicit cry for the despair in the futility of Western Reason. In the 19th century in Europe, the basis on which Western history had developed for thousand of years, i.e., the foundation of culture, religion, philosophy and arts, was collapsing. The ground on which the human existence depended was totally shaken and the being of our own existence became hopelessly questionable. The Crisis was indeed about Western Reason.
It was Hegel who noted that reality was in dynamic, perpetual change through the struggle of the opposing principles and their reconciliations, and that reality was the name for the totality of historical process of human’s interactions with nature, other humans, nations as well as arts, religion and philosophy. Hegel was the philosopher who was able to show that by virtue of negation (and thus mediation), not Understanding (i.e., discursive thinking), but “Reason” in Hegel’s unique sense alone was capable of grasping the dynamic reality in process of change.
Very hew know that, at the end of Preface to the second edition of his Die Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic), Hegel wrote, expressing his serious doubt about the possibility of being occupied with “the passionless calmness in the sole pursuit of cognitive thinking.” A week later, that is, on 14. November, 1831, Hegel died by cholera. This sadden death of Hegel is a very symbolic event for the further development of Western philosophy.
Indeed, in Hegel’s philosophy, the preceding history of the Western philosophy, namely the history of Western Philosophy which had consistently held Reason to be the sole and most fundamental principle for knowledge and reality, supposed to come to an end.
It came to an end in one sense that Hegel’s philosophy is an completion (die Vollendung) of the history of Western Philosophies in actualizing Parmenides’ thesis of the identity of Reason and Being, Knowledge and Reality, in the most concrete and accommodating manner. By the process of this actualization, therefore, Hegel’s notion of Reason is no longer the discursive one, but came to encompass both the Rational and the Irrational elements of reality at the same time and to mediate them by negation to an elevated, articulated unity.
On the other hand, Hegel’s system was also the finale of Western philosophy in the sense that Hegel’s philosophy was the eschatological whole which integrated the entire development of its preceding philosophies in the West. It is indeed ironical that, at the moment when the unity of the European spirit was actualized in Hegel’s philosophy, that very unity stood right next to its own collapse.
According to Löwith, Hegel and Goethe were the last two giants of European cultural integration of the belle époche. Interestingly enough both of them towards the end of their lives keenly felt that they stood at the turning point of the ending of the good age of the totally reconciled harmony to the anticipation of an entirely new era.
The new era of Europe arrived precisely at the “spiritual situation” where neither ideal of culture, purpose, unity, nor meaning in life could be found any longer. It was European Nihilism which Nietzsche named the Logic of Decay and Disruption.
Feuerbach wrote in Preface to “Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit” which was published anonymously in Nürnberg in 1830, that Europe stood at the critical turning point from the end of the existent human history to the start of a new life and disclosed the self alienation of human from oneself through the traditional metaphysics of Christianity and advocated that philosophical anthropology would recover the human existence from its selfalienation on the basis of love in “Das Wesen des Christentums”(1841).
Bruno Bauer indicated in his “Die Russen und das Germanische Volk”(1853) that the demise of philosophy, the meaninglessness of the academic life, the destruction of theology were everywhere, and anything which could claim a place in world history had its place taken by sciences and technologies, technical trade school, political and economic enslavement, hopelessness for the future vision, and the absence of morality.
Proudhon predicted the proletarian hegemony in Qu’est-ce-que la Propriété? (1840) .
Marx parted himself from Hegel’s speculative thinking by the name of Social Praxis, as did Kierkegaard by the name of Ethical Action. It was Marx who pointed out that the bourgeois truth lacks passionate commitment. In the face of the rule and exploitation of the world by means of the progress of technologies and inventions, Marx saw as necessary consequences of the control of Western Reason the self alienation of human from oneself in the mass industrialization. By shifting the eschatological completion of Western history to tomorrow’s communistic society, however, Marx attempted to give hope and vision for the exploited proletariat and, by giving the metaphysical, politico-economic theorization for the proletarian revolution, he attempted to show the possibility towards communism as being necessary and inevitable. We had to wait, however, more than one and a half centuries to see what a grand illusion Marx’ vision for the Proletarian Revolution was as the sole means of liberation of human self-alienation and exploitation of humanity.
European Nihilism began to be “fashionable” in the middle of the 19th century in France by Flaubert (e.g. the planned novel Bourvard et Pecuchet) and Baudelaire (the planned poems titled Le Fin du Monde).
According to M. Pecuchet, Europe will be overwhelmed by American Materialism and by the degraded rule of the stupid masses, while M. Bourvard maintains that Europe will be rejuvenated by Asia through new sciences and technologies and humanity will ultimately consume all the resources on Planet Earth and so migrate to another planet.
The world would come to an end, so describes Baudelaire; we are going to be destroyed by the Progress of Modern Civilization that we believed that we had lived for. We are discovering only a great illusion and annui in the past and finding no hope for the future. We can create an artificial heaven in order to thoroughly enjoy decadent pleasures.
The genealogy of European Nihilism continues with Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. They made clear their categorical rejections of historical consequences of Western History and Civilization, which often accompanied a critical attempt to create new visions for the fundamental reform of human destiny.
Although Kierkegaard had little impact among philosophers of his days until Jaspers and Heidegger rediscovered his merits, Kierkegaard faced the outcome of Hegel’s philosophy and challenged Reason in Western Philosophy. It was obvious to Kierkegaard that Western Reason was the cause of the deceitful and decadent bourgeois protestant society. His philosophical thinking centered around the individual’s naked existence that stands alone in front of God and “elevated the absolute negativity of the Romantic irony to the desperate leap of faith!”
In Author’s Diaries, Dostoyevsky mocked in 1890 a Europhite Russian who maintained that Russia should imitate Western Europe for the sake of the technological progress, while the latter, according to Dostoyevsky, hadn’t solved any of its own problems and stood a step before the collapse.
In 1910, Tolstoy radically criticized European Civilization for not only destroying itself but joyously poisoning Africa, India, China and Japan through its sciences and technologies of Western Reason.
At the beginning of the 20th century, in the form of criticism, irony and skepsis, Nihilism confronting and denying Western Reason with its History, became the only real “faith” possible for European intellectuals.
Through creative imagination, to construct the genuine world of the humanity by writing a grand roman was no longer feasible by European writers: They are now only capable of analyzing struggles of Intellect, reactions of Spirit, social discord and despair.
In stead of building a meaningful universe of humanity, Proust, Gide, Thomas Mann, Huxley, Marleaux, Lawrence, Joyce etc. could only mediate the desperate truth about nothingness and void of values. The same Nihilism can be seen in the plastic art movements in the first half of the 20th century such as Dadaism, Expressionism, Fauvism and Cubism. All of them were clear expressions in defiance of European Reason and its traditional values.
Nietzsche occupied a unique place in the history of Western Civilization as well as among the Nihilists of the 19th and the 20th centuries. He was the first European philosopher who actively appraised and radically confronted Western Reason and its entire History of Western culture. Nietzsche’s Nihilism is to be taken as the positively heightened subjective spirit of the authentic philosophical search in that its task is to actively overcome nothingness that was born out of the Crisis of the Death of the Christian God.
Precisely because he possessed penetrating insights into the Nothingness of the values, the Meaninglessness of human existence, and the Death of God as the consequences of the decay of Western History and Culture, Nietzsche was able to affirmatively assert “the Will to Power” as the Transvaluation of all Values and called Zarathustra as the Conqueror of Nothingness and God, namely as the Conqueror of European Nihilism.
Authentic Nihilism may be defined as the Logic which penetrates through the ultimate value of Christian morality with an affectionate acceptance of all those which are deceitful, false and nihil. Nietzsche’s Nihilism is to create a new set of values in the face of the total loss of the old values. From the tentative and sole truth of this radical Nihilism as the demise of the faith in God and morality, it comes out that “nothing is true, so everything is allowed!”
This Freedom to Everything and of Nothing is the Will to desire everything and abandon everything at the same time. Here we find an extremely suggestive clue to the new solution to our problems, which will be discussed at the end.
II.
World War I was the final struggle and the settlement of the Traditional Western Reason against the Nihilistic philosophies of Le-Fin-de-Ciecle and was the settlement of the latter, too. According to Max Scheler in “Der Genius des Krieges” (1915), World War I was either the beginning of a new order or the beginning of the Death of Europe, and nothing else. Nevertheless, it was Scheler’s conclusion that such a guardian (i.e., an organization) to create and maintain a new order of European Culture was nowhere to be found. It is certain al least that the World War I functioned as the division between the two periods.
Those philosophers who had adhered to traditional Western Reason and had made it their serious business to investigate the foundation of the other sciences were forced to admit to themselves and to others (like their students) the powerlessness and absurdity of their pursuit. Philosophy of sciences and linguistic analysis well serve as the models for this. (Also for example, Roger Martin du Gard’s Les Thibeaux.)
Contrary to those, there was a group of philosophers who shared the same attitude in doing philosophy. Their approach was called Phenomenology and their aim was to approach reality as it really is. The major figures were Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger. Husserl and Scheler were senior, while Heidegger was the youngest and could be called “their follower” at least at the early stage in the development of this movement. Among Heidegger’s contemporaries, Karl Jaspers was another philosopher of the same concern who approached philosophy from psychopathology and was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and van Gogh. While Husserl was less affected, both Scheler and Heidegger were deeply influenced by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the molding of their philosophies. Further Hölderlin, van Gogh, and Rilke had profound impact on Heidegger. There were also theologians who seriously took the challenges raised by Nietzsche and his philosophy and they stood under the influence of by Kierkegaard. Those revolutionary theologians were Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich.
Almost all of them had the first hand experience of the World War I as their primordial experience. With keen sensitivity and deep comprehension, they were explicitly aware of the crises of the Western Reason and Culture and took their stand towards those crises in various manners. Husserl’s The Crisis, Scheler’s Der Genius des Krieges and Vom Umsturze der Werte, Heidegger’s Being and Time, Jaspers’ Die Geistige Situation der Zeit, to name a few, were clear subjective expressions of those philosophers’ reactions to the crises. The thematic focus common to all these philosophers’ and theologians’ pursuits was, how varied they might be, clearly affected by their concerns about the meaning of concrete individual human existence and its fate in the face of these crises.
Husserl felt it unavoidable to confront himself with the tyranny of Western Reason in philosophy, sciences, technologies and industries since Galileo. It has created the one-sided, abstract, and distorted representation of reality through numerical measurement and has alienated the human from the concrete, life world. Furthermore, the historical development of the Western Reason hinders us from experiencing the actual life world. Despite Husserl’s claim for transcendental phenomenology as the telos of Western Reason to overcome the aporia, it is ironical that Husserl’s assiduous attempts to further radically return to even more primordial reality continued to disclose new horizons in which transcendental subjectivity failed to completely reveal itself and is instead expose itself as unclarifiable by Reason. This breakdown (Scheitern) of Husserl’s approach symbolized the destiny of Western Reason in the 20th century. While Scheler attempted his Transvaluation of Value and he ended up not going any further than simply providing the groundwork of ethics for Catholic theology probably due to his early death. Jaspers was led to building a metaphysical system of das Umgreifende (Encompassing).
Martin Heidegger was well aware of this problem of Husserl’s approach by Reason and of the limitation of Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness and he sought the ontological status of this transcendental subjectivity as the ultimate ground for all in the temporality (i.e. nothingness) of concrete human existence and went on developing the fundamental ontology. However, apart from this philosophical question, Heidegger was apparently drawn to this nothingness of being rather primarily from his personal, primordial experience of the situation in and after the World War I. According to Karl Löwith, a student of Heidegger, whom Heidegger sent a letter in 1923, in which Heidegger wrote,
For several semesters,the following words of van Gogh have been haunting me,
“I felt with all my power that the history of humanity is just like a grain of wheat. What would be the matter even if that grain were not planted to grow and bloom? It will be grounded and will become bread.”
The very one that is not to be grounded is pitiful!”
Heidegger was supposed to further write,
…it is necessary that, in the midst of the world of total destruction, we obtain for ourselves unshakable faith in “one necessary thing,” disregarding the words and deeds of the people who are clever in measuring time by the chronometer and so industrious…
Heidegger was also explicitly conscious of the fate of Western Reason, that lead him later to return to the Pre-Socratics. On the other hand, out of his own notion of fate in relation to existence, decision and the German situation, it was perhaps an inevitable consequence that Heidegger found his own obligation in the National Socialism. Heidegger’s existential philosophy, surely radical and innovative, stopped short of revealing an approach to the world, as it really is.
World War II ended with two atomic bombs blasting in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as if they were the ghosts of Western Reason. Through the devastation of the German cities and culture and the universities closed, the French philosophers who followed in the step of phenomenology and existential philosophy appeared more active in the world of philosophy.
The three class mates at l’ecole normal superior, Maurice Merleau -Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simonne de Beauvoir pursued phenomenology under the influences of Hegel-Marx, Husserl and Heidegger. In the French philosophy just as in Japanese philosophy, body and embodiment became the theme of phenomenological inquiries and this preoccupation overshadowed the problem of how to deal with Western Reason and its destiny, although the question of body could have provided a breakthrough in a thematic approach to the tyranny of Reason.
In the 1960s we discover in Michel Foucault the Nihilism of Reason to Western History. Following Nietzsche, Foucault’s approach to philosophy as the conjecture of Positivism and Nihilism took the sophists’ guise. It came to achieve the destruction of history and the disclosure of Reason through its shadow at the same time.
Through the finesse of the strategy of “deconstruction,” Derrida attempts to “escape” the cunning and mastery control of Western Reason or logos in Western thinking through ambiguously deferring. In order to escape the principle of the identity (=Reason) we have to radicalize phenomenology in such a way that everything is being in other, i.e., being in itself must be eliminated and that the same is the other, thus if we may borrow a Hegelian expression, one sees oneself only on the face of the other. By so doing, we are lead to the perspectivism in which for example the image on the mirror can be recognizable insofar as the image is the mirror and the mirror is the image. Thus the original of the image is not, but it is no other than the image.
These French Nietzscheans’ endeavor to overcome European Nihilism was within the framework of their own language and historical tradition. If this should be the sole and possible consequence of the History of Western Culture, the philosophy of crisis would still remain the philosophy in crisis. Their intentions are indeed noble, and yet what they are doing as the philosophy of crisis is very little beyond the sophistry in an attempt to overcome the tyranny of Western Reason.
III.
We must therefore continue searching for our philosophy of crisis, an alternative to and beyond the attempts of the French post-modernists. Instead of avoiding, we are to philosophically confront and overcome the tyranny of Reason which we have seen manifested in those philosophical reactions as Nihilism.
When during Renaissance, we in the West discovered the Rational Way to measure and control nature (our environment) by mathematical devices, the so-called hé techné, i.e., our implement for our existence, was able to become technology. As the Enlightenment Movement stipulated Reason and validated its potential in the pursuit of knowledge (rÿ ð rÿS) as mere practical means to control nature, this has been allowing us to create the mass production machine to indefinitely duplicate the sophisticated tools for the masses. The more we have devised to duplicate them, the more we have stimulated our artificial desire and greed in order to consume them.
To innovatively device the more efficient implement has been the main aim of Western Reason (which goes back to one of the Enlightenment’s leitmotives). By means of the overwhelming power of Reason, we were destined to refine the language solely in exploitation of reality as the most useful implement for our livelihood and convenience.
Since Renaissance, the universe, i.e., the reality, has been regarded as being closed. As searchers of knowledge (philo-sophers in the original sense) of nature, we must use Reason and to “decipher the symbols of that Book,” as Galileo said. In this pursuit, our Rationally devised language alone could disclose reality merely as the gigantic tool.
The grand illusion of European Reason was to have us all believe that objectivity is the reality as it really is. Some sensitive philosophers of the 17th century like Pascal, Liebniz and even Berkeley were, however, already conscious of this danger and pointed out that the ultimate cause (explanation) of causality had to be teleological. Clearly recognizing the limitation of Reason, Pascal invented the binary calculator, which, against his will, later paved the way to the Rationalization of reality without reservation. Those non- and anti-Rational approach, however, never became mainstream Western philosophy in its search for reality. The deciding point came at Enlightenment in the 18th century in France and Germany. Despite Rousseau’s outcry, Reason was enshrined as the sole sovereignty to approach reality.
Nevertheless, that tradition of anti-Rationalism remained alive in the West. At the turning of the 20th century, Henri Bergson and Max Scheler appeared as contenders of this unauthodox tradition of philosophy in the West.
Against objectification and materialization of reality, Bergson saw the genuine reality in time and fought against Reason by de-spacing time to have the primordial reality reveal itself to us. His philosophy was quite well-received at one time and even exercised profound influence on Marcel Proust and other writers of the West.
Scheler saw that reality is not closed (geschlossen) or an object of hatred (Welthaß), but it is indeed open by its own being. It is our attitude, according to Scheler, by means of which, through layers of veil of Reason, reality is covered and closed to us. Scheler’s phenomenology was the appeal to all of us who were blind-folded by language, modern sciences and philosophy of Reason that we are to be awaken to authentically open, primordial reality. Scheler’s approach inaugurated Martin Heidegger’s eye to the potential of overcoming Husserl’s philosophy of consciousness (this was why Heidegger dedicated his Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik to Max Scheler) and yet Heidegger was once again trapped in the abyss of language by the hermeneutics of Being (Die Hermeneutik des Seins, as Heidegger called it). Probably due to the overwhelming power of Reason and its History, Scheler, too, was not able to actually pursue this nobel revelation to its full potential in order to overcome European Nihilism.
IV.
It is meaningless and even futile to completely deny or ignore Western Reason. And yet probably the most important of all our tasks as philosophers today is to explore a philosophical approach that will liberate us from the tyranny of Western Reason by containing it in its appropriate function and allows us to be in tune with primordial reality. How would this be possible?
Such a mere “rebellion” against Western Reason as the French postmodernists attempted is doubtlessly not our concern. We must search a horizon, or “Great Understanding” as Chuang Tzu called, in which Reason need not be employed to “experience and be in tune with” primordial reality whereby it will discover its own place and role.
On the one hand, we are able to unearth many insights that we need for our inquiry in the philosophies of this “heretic” tradition of the West.
On the other hand, we find a potential model for our philosophical dedication to the open reality in the approach of Zen in the East. Let me explain.
It was Parmenides that proposed the famous Identity of Being and Knowing. The only positive outcome of Western Reason and its History was Hegel’s Dialectic which accomplished this ultimate goal of philosophy by mediating various one-sided understandings into the aufgehobene (sublated) unity. It was the assumption of European Reason that Reality and Knowledge were separated and were to be brought together into a unity. Or more precisely, because it was European Reason that occupied the “space” between Reality and Knowledge by conceiving itself as a special way of Knowing, Being and Knowing were to appear separated.
The concept of “Object” or “Gegenstand” inevitably implies that of “Subject,” as an object always is an object to a certain subject. Therefore, it is easy to see that after all, objectivity necessarily is the intersubjective agreement among all the subjects. Instead of Being itself, as soon as the concept of “Object” was introduced to grasp Being, Subject had to be introduced as the agent of knowing, which is to be different from Being itself. This agent is called “Self” which is in opposition to the Object to manipulate and control it. It is precisely Reason ( ÿðÿs which distinguishes and thus manipulates, thereby the language or name ( lS) must play the role of dominant means. Once it is distinguished, it is to be unified. No wonder it was necessary to have mediation after mediation, as Hegel ultimately achieved.
How can we “bracket” the Object-Subject, all those mediation and ultimately Reason itself?
For Scheler, it was the phenomenological reduction that is the process to achieve the metamorphosis of our attitude by drawing us away from relating ourselves to reality through layers of mediating mundane and philosophical prejudices of Western Reason to immediately evidencing open reality as it actually is.
For Zen, to crack the nutshell of Reason, often a kô-an is employed. The kô-an is a question which Reason can in no way figure out an answer for. The most well-known kô-an in the West is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Zen denies the language which is solely limited to our mundane, practical use. The language in this sense is the origin of distinction and the source of our desire and attachment. It is the language that creates Self and its Object and makes Self desire and attach to it at the same time.
In stead of theoretical comprehension, Zen demands practice, i.e., Zen mediation. Since our birth, or even through many rebirths for that matter, we are forced to cultivate distinction and desires of Self. The most severe discipline of Zen mediation, how artificial it may appear, can be an effective way to counteract against all those learning. To liberate us from these bandages of culture and intellect, our mundane practical long accustomed way of discourses through layers of mediation with reality is the aim and the process of Zen meditation.
The satori experience or Zen awakening is a glimpse into reality without such mediation. It is the experience in which no reality is concealed in closure, but it reveals itself in open disclosure, SÿœÿÿS. The satori experience is the awareness where there is neither Subject nor Object. On the contrary, it is the truly im-mediate and pure experience in which reality unveils itself as it actually is.
Primordially reality has been and is open and ready to reveal itself as it actually is. And we were an integral part of this reality. However, it is we, the humans, that created rift and distinctions and produced mediation. It is we that devised implements and technologies to alienate ourselves from ourselves. It is our Egos that drove us to that Nihilism and to despair.
It is our misconception that reality must be an Entity. As Scheler said, it is our Fear of Chaos that wanted to impose an order and structure in reality. It is our Fear of Nothing that postulated an Entity with distinctions. When we realized that knowledge was power (in Ancient Greece), we impregnated instrumentality into Knowing. Thus distinctions became absolute and reality was ordered ( ðl s). We cannot remember that it is we, the humans, that thrust distinctions. it is clear that the primordial reality is Nothing.
However, our approach to reality does not demand eradication of distinctions. For in our approach, distinctions being “bracketed” are powerless. Only in our mundaneity, distinction is of practical use. Thus in stead of mediation, we are to once again experience reality, as it actually is. Nihilism was resulted from distinctions and from mistaking Nothing for Being.
As long as correlation between seeing and the visible, hearing and the audible, grasping and the tangible, remains absolute, as long as our attachment to Ego persists, as long as Reason is the sole means to approach reality, there remains Nihilism. As long as metaphysics remains ontology, we continue haunted by the void of values and controlled by Reason. However, once we are able to “see the invisible, hear the inaudible, grasp the intangible,” as Lao Tzu indicated, and finally once we dis-learn to “control,” and learn to let everything go in our questioning search, metaphysics becomes mé-ontology (the study of Nothing). Instead of Nihilism, genuine Philosophy of Nothing emerges as soon as we start learning to “fast our minds,” as Chuang Tzu said and experiencing ourselves as one with reality.
December 12, 1992