References
- Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1986.
- See my “Completing the Recovery of Language as an Existential Project”, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Volume 21, Number 2 (May 1990), pp. 175–184.
- Calvin O. Schrag, Existence and Freedom, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1961, pp. 21–2.
- It is interesting to note that Schrag has here embarked upon the pursuit of an existentialist ontology contemporaneous with Merleau-Ponty's efforts just prior to his untimely demise.
- EF., p. 24. It may be objected that the relation between Dasein and world is not best thought of as a “correlation”; but the lineage described here is the important point.
- EF., p. 24.
- Ibid., my emphasis.
- Ibid., pp. 24–5.
- Calvin O. Schrag, Experience and Being, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1969, p. 127.
- EB., p. 191.
- Despite the critical nature of some of the remarks which follow it is important to remember that this middle-ground is not abstract. Cf. CP, p. 110 (footnote): “…the question of Being needs to be raised somewhat more obliquely and circuitously as one weaves one's way through the global anticipations and solicitations of experience within the discourse and action of communicative praxis. One does not begin with the Being-question; one backs into it through an exploration of the forms of communicative praxis.” I am indebted to Carl G. Vaught for the phrasing I have adopted above of the middle-ground.
- Cp., p. 120.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 125.
- Ibid., p. 136.
- Ibid., p. 137. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” in his Primacy of Perception [ed: James M. Edie], Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1964, pp. 159–190. In this final pre-posthumous publication, he discusses an overlapping or doubling over which was coincidental with the development of an ontological principle of reversibility in his The Visible and the Invisible [tr.: Alphonso Lingis], Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1968. Cf. also VI, p. 154. Once again. Schrag parallels Merleau-Ponty's thought.
- Schrag's contributions to the existential-phenomenological movement are enormous. His work has yet to receive the attention it deserves. When the owl of Minerva flies, perhaps Schrag will be seen as spearheading the existential-phenomenological movement in America.
- It is important to note that Stimmung is not a psychological term for Heidegger. Cf. SZ, p. 172: “Prior to all psychology of moods, a field which in any case still lies fallow, it is necessary to see this phenomenon as a fundamental existentiale, and to outline its structure.”
- Though I cannot pursue it at length here, an account must be given of the responsibility and communicative parapraxis in terms of communicating subjectivity and its corresponding notion of the communion of language as care. It may be that the communion of language in Schrag's account of communicative praxis neglects the demands put upon us by parapraxes. Parapraxis is a moment of disclosure which may not be best accounted for in terms of the pre-reflective intentionality of feeling and volition. Furthermore, the hermeneutic implicature subtended by this intentionality delimits a space of subjectivity which relies on intersubjectively co-constituting meaning. Language is the disclosure of meaning, and it has an intentional texture in that disclosure. Psychotic language, with its rather striking example of parapraxis, threatens us precisely insofar as it appears to be bereft of meaning. It presents us with demands which do not appear to be best understood in the terms of communicative praxis in the same manner that Freud's account of the function of psychoanalysis to provide a translation of psychotic speech in terms of “normal” speech offers an impoverished account.
- Schrag makes it abundantly clear even in EB that he is beyond a psychological inquiry insofar as he was seeking there to develop an “ontology of human finitude”. Suffice it to say that Schrag was sensitive to the issue in CP, and attempted to remedy this locution which previously may have invited readers to misconstrue his position.
- Cf. my “Completing the Recovery of Language as an Existential Project”, (op. cit.).
- Cf. Martin C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1988.
- Cf. the relation between reversibility and transcendence in my “Reversible Subjectivity: The Problem of Transcendence and Language”, in Martin C. Dillon (ed.), Merleau-Ponty Vivant, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1991, p. 45, n.36: “The transcendence to which I refer here…is picturesquely described as écart, dehiscence, or non-coincidence…In short, transcendence is lived reversibility. Reversible subjectivity was described as a moment of shared divergence which it partially determines…The potential for this divergence is reversibility. The divergence itself, within the lived context of human praxis, is transcendence.”
- Cp., pp. 64–7. Merleau-Ponty maintains that this essentialistic Hegel to which Kierkegaard reacts and of which the common textbook caricature is borne is the latter Hegel [circa 1827]; but that the earlier Hegel [up to and including the Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807] can be read as an existentialist of sorts. Cf. “Hegel's Existentialism”, in S&NS, pp. 63–70.
- Cp., p. 60; cf. CP, p. 66. Ideality is restricted to a transcendental ideality in the analytic of Dasein, insofar as the care structure of Dasein is the condition for the possibility of any experiences ideality. Sorge is defined as indifferent.
- Cp., pp. 109–110, n.21, and p. 137. [Cf. VI, p. 138.].
- It ought to be noted from the beginning that language is not the only human activity appropriate as subject matter for the interrogation of transcendence. I am not advocating any sort of linguistic idealism. Nonetheless, owing to the malignant, if not pervasive, nature of language within human existence, a phenomenological examination of language provides an excellent starting-point—not the only one—for a philosophical inquiry into transcendence. As Martin Dillon notes correctly in his provocative study which stresses the importance of transcendence in understanding the whole of Merleau-Ponty's written corpus, “…it is a mistake to put language in the place of the world as the ultimate theme of philosophical interrogation.” [Martin C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1988, p. 177.].
- That is, the idea of language must be re-thought; or, as the term dis-pensed with indicates, the traditional preconceptions of language must be un-thought.
- See my “Completing the Recovery of Language as an Existential Project”, (op. cit.).
- Since the domains of language and human existence are not mutually exclusive, the oblique account of care as communion in language is both anticipatory and ancillary to the account for which this essay is a propaedeutic.
- Levinas might charge that the account of transcendence adumbrated here is not radical enough to be true transcendence, and that instead what is described here is merely transcendence within immanence. [Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 1969, pp. 33–52.].
- Yet the notion of care I appeal to here is not a totalizing term. As I have already indicated, it is not a comprehensive metaphysical substrate within which transcendence is accomplished. Secondly, any more radical notion of transcendence such that we are said to escape a transcendence within immanence effectively prohibits any talk of communion in existential terms. Finally, transcendence such as I have outlined it here bespeaks our dialectical situation in our world such that we collaborate in the creation of ideals. This relation between transcendence, it seems to me, is more radical than being reduced to mute adoration of ideals which are always already given.