Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | November/2023 |
Spalte: | 1113–1115 |
Kategorie: | Philosophie, Religionsphilosophie |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Waldenfels, Bernhard |
Titel/Untertitel: | Reisetagebuch eines Phänomenologen. Aus den Jahren 1978–2019. |
Verlag: | Baden-Baden: Ergon Verlag (Nomos) 2020. 496 S. = Studien zur Phänomenologie und Praktischen Philosophie, 52. Geb. EUR 49,00. ISBN 9783956507694. |
Rezensent: | Stefano Bancalari |
In this unusual book, Bernhard Waldenfels, the most authoritative figure of contemporary German phenomenology, takes up the lit-erary genre of travelogues and is accompanied by the reader in a forty-year exploration of the planet, spanning Europe, America, the Far East, and West Africa. The volume consists of an impressive col-lection of notes, taken on the occasion of cycles of conferences, conventions, visiting professorships, which outline vividly, and almost directly, places, situations, meetings, people. As one reads, more and less known cities, monuments, churches, mosques, temples, museums, university halls, private residences pass before the eyes, like through the window of a train; one attends concerts and theatrical performances, engages conversations with true philosophical celebrities (from Jacques Derrida to Arthur Danto) and obscure professors, with students, friends, ambassadors, taxi drivers, beggars, and occasional travel companions.
For those who are familiar, even if only by hearsay, with the author's philosophical work, it is not difficult to guess that behind what at first glance appears as a simple inventory of names, places, information, episodes – sometimes interesting, sometimes, to tell the truth, a bit boring – there lies a precise philosophical project, which we could define as that of a phenomenology in situation. Observing, for a phenomenologist, is not just any act, but a method, indeed the very method of philosophical practice. In this theoretical context, the gaze is never a spontaneous or natural gesture, but it needs to be educated, exercised, oriented in such a way as to make it receptive to embrace the phenomenon as it reveals itself, just as it shows itself. Place after place, year after year, the travel notes attest to W.’ continuous and admirable effort to submit to this discipline, practicing a constant vigilance that tries every time to put himself in consonance with what he encounters, to correspond to it: after all, his »responsive phenomenology« presupposes a fidelity to experience that is not a search for the extraordinary, but immersion in the »everyday«, a key concept of W.’ terminol-ogy, of which, from these pages, we even learn the Japanese equivalent. There is a paradigmatic episode of the attitude that W. tries by all means to resist: on the plane, returning from New York, he once happens to tell his seat neighbor about the strong impression he received participating in a service at a Baptist church in Harlem. The interlocutor reacts with an observation of disarming flatness: »Yes, there are many churches« (322). W. comments: »And so one travels through foreign regions without being touched by them, as in a zoo: everything that is dangerous is behind bars« (ibid.).
To undergo an experience does not mean merely recording data as if one were »disinterested spectators«, but rather to process, reconsider, and let oneself be questioned. Not by chance, from the very first page, W. explicitly declares to the reader that he intends to follow his own thoughts, except for specifying that thoughts are not something one simply »has«, as objects of one's property, but rather they »come and go« (13), phenomena themselves that also need to be allowed to speak: it is a »school of attention, which begins in the preconscious and in the unconscious, which observes what is inconspicuous and lets himself be prompted by what surprises us, frightens us or attracts us« (15). What encounter us becomes an opportunity for a philosophical question, and these pages are studded with questions in which one can easily recognize the fundamental themes of Waldenfelsian thought, which is, so to speak, caught in the bud in a sort of unprecedented attempt at genetic phenomenology. It is unprecedented not only because it has not actually been experienced before, but also and above all because instead of unfolding on the plane of time, as it would seem inevitable to do, it claims to organize itself on that of space. This raises a phenomenological problem of enormous significance, which lies at the heart of phenomenology in general and of that of W. in particular; a problem which, while not directly addressed in this book, which is not directly philosophical, nevertheless looms over it like an unsettling shadow.
W. starts from a warning by Seneca: »It is the soul you must change, not the sky«, because »you flee with yourself« (13). Seneca anticipates here Husserl’s phenomenology of space, variously taken up and reworked by W. throughout his work. Changing position under the sky does not really mean moving, because my conscience always remains the »zero point« of orientation, in such a way that one cannot really escape from oneself. The self is destined to remain immobile, unless it reveals itself in some way capable of encountering something that is, in a radical sense, »foreign« (fremd). It is a theme that the author of Topographie des Fremden (Suhrkamp 1997) has never ceased to question. Here the solution comes quickly, perhaps a little too soon, and is expressed in a reformulation of Seneca's words: »It is the soul that you must change together with the sky«, meaning that the crossing of space predisposes (is it a precondition? Necessary or sufficient?) to encounter a stranger capable of altering the perspective of one's conscience and giving rise to »intercultural chrono-topoi« (ibid.). It is a real challenge launched at the beginning of the book: it is up to the reader's patience to verify, 500 pages later, whether it can be considered won or not.
Without claiming to definitively close an issue that is too complex to be treated in the space of a review, I limit myself, in conclusion, to advance, as a reader, some perplexities. The first is that it is not always clear who is the author of the descriptions and analyses that are presented: while in W.’ philosophical books, it is obvious that it is the phenomenologist who is writing, here the status of the author remains suspended between the empirical person and the philosopher who philosophically reworks his own private experience. Phenomenologically speaking, it is not clear whether and to what extent the descriptions offered (of an environment, an encounter, an atmosphere) can aim for an eidetic status, and thus present themselves as potentially sharable on the level of transcendental intersubjectivity, or if they are simply private and seeking the complicity and curiosity of a non-philosopher reader. What weight should be given, for example, to judgments, sometimes even quite harsh ones, about thinkers met on a personal level, for whom no in-depth analysis is provided on a theoretical level? How to make sure that the proposed descriptions do not run into the stereotype? I confess, for example, that in reading the reports of W.’ many stays in Italy, sometimes I could not help but feel the artificial sound of clichés: in Rome you meet the Pope and people who gesture when they talk, in Naples you are robbed by criminals on mopeds, in Palermo there is the Mafia. I have, of course, no personal experience to know if something similar might also apply to W.’ descriptions of Korea or Colombia.
This does not mean that one does not come across phenomenologically refined descriptions and compelling philosophical questions, capable of arousing passionate interest in the reader. Even in this case, however, reading is hampered by two difficulties.
The first is that the choice of organizing the analyzed material topographically makes it practically impossible for the reader to orient himself. One could think, for instance, about the highly interesting analyses and reflections concerning religion, which lead W. to question the relationship between religion and politics, the meaning of cult practices that are difficult to interpret, the continuous oscillation of religion between its potential for social criticism and a superstitious and compliant attitude. These reflections are scattered throughout the entire book, and it would be extremely interesting to bring them together in some form of synthesis.
The second difficulty is that philosophical questions and insights remain at the level of hints and are not developed further. An example will suffice here. During a visit to Emmanuel Levinas, in which W. discusses with him the project of his Ordnung im Zwielicht, Levinas asks him a decisive question: »Where does Ordnung come from?« (26) W. merely emphasize that Levinas' strength consists in concentrating on a single point, the question of the Other. Which is right: but the relationship between Levinas' phenomenology of otherness and W.’ more nuanced notion of Ordnung remains unclear. This question runs throughout the book. But the reader, also in this case, is left unanswered and with the doubt of not being the real addressee of these pages. Pages which look too much like a soliloquy to do justice to the theoretical project of the author of Das Zwischenreich des Dialogs (Nijhoff, 1971).