another quick example of retrieval

This will be a quick additional example at the end of a long day. I mentioned Leibniz and Cézanne as examples of “retrievers,” in the sense that rather than simply extrapolating from an existing radical principle, they were able to adapt something lost by the previous round of innovations and make it work in the new context. This is often mistake for “reaction,” but it’s not. Reaction is when you simply bring back the old content and pretend that it’s still relevant in the new context. (I should also say that of course there are times when the radical move is an effective one– Fichte following Kant, for instance. That’s why in my Amsterdam lecture on Meillassoux last March, I said that every step forward in philosophy is either a radicalization or a reversal. By reversal I meant retrieval, if we’re speaking McLuhanese.)

The even more obvious example, in the context of my own work, would be the Husserl/Heidegger relation. I’ve written about this at length and will limit it to a quick summary here. Husserlians already take too much flak and should be left in peace for awhile to tend and protect their truly valuable and currently underrated garden. But one place where they’re never very helpful is on the realism question. They tend to complicate Husserl’s position on realism way beyond what the situation warrants. Husserl flattens the real into the phenomenal, period. All the stuff about consciousness always already being outside itself in intending some object, etc., doesn’t give us a real object. Intentionality means immanent objectivity, and that’s simply not the only kind of objectivity there is. Husserl takes us down the wrong path on that particular question (though only on that particular question, I would say; he’s so good on so many other questions– one must be able to see multiple sides of a problem simultaneously).

So, the real is flattened into the phenomenal. What did Heidegger do, radicalize that procedure even more and become an ultra-ultra-idealist? No. Instead, did he react against phenomenology and re-privilege the natural world, as anti-Husserlians love to do today? Also no. Those are the reactionaries. Heidegger may have been a political reactionary, true, but as a thinker he was anything but. As a thinker, he was a retriever.

Like some Cézanne of phenomenology, Heidegger sensed a great loss in the flattening of the world into a phenomenal surface. He preserved that surface, of course, but redefined it as Vorhandenheit, even while giving this presence-at-hand a broader population than Husserl had allowed to the phenomenal (Heidegger puts physical matter there as well, though for the wrong reasons).

Voilà. Instead of bringing back the natural world as what still remained, unconquered by the phenomenal, Heidegger gave us Sein. And in so doing, he linked his own duel with phenomenology to concerns found in philosophy since the dawn of Ancient Greece.

I hadn’t thought of it until tonight, but in a sense, Heidegger can be thought of as the Cézanne of phenomenology. The analogy has its limits, but is also helpful in other important ways.