Research in Phenomenology

Research in Phenomenology 39 (2009) 309325

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On the Renewal and Reconguration of Modern Philosophical Practice Romano Mdera and Luigi Vero Tarca. Philosophy as Life Path: An Introduction to Philosophical Practices. Milan: IPOC Press, 2007. 200 pp. Where does philosophy nd itself today? In what way is the long-documented desire for wisdom unfolding itself, if at all? Such is the primary question posed by Philosophy as Life Path: An Introduction to Philosophical Practices, a book recently translated into English from Italian, co-authored by Romano Mdera and Luigi Vero Tarca, with an insightful preface for the English edition by Claudia Baracchi. As one might guess, Mdera and Tarcas assessment of the state of the practice of philosophy is not terribly armative, given that what shows itself as professional philosophical discourse is, for the most part, little more than what our authors call self-referential and institutionally insular cultural philology. Wisdomand the stated goal of gathering students around us to cultivate itin the model of the ancient schools, is certainly no longer an admitted goal of most, if any, professional philosophers. Each of our authors, in unique and original ways, separately diagnoses the source of the decay of the pursuit of wisdom as emerging from a certain universalizing conception of truth, a truth that is the project and product of wisdom in the history of philosophical practice. Seeking to rehabilitate and renew what we call truth and, consequently, wisdom, our authors present an original theory of philosophical practice that they name biographical ecumenism; it is around this new practice and the unique way it becomes employed by both Mdera and Tarca that my review will circulate. Mdera begins his essay, Philosophy as Exercise and as Conversation, with a claim that the comportment toward wisdom is precisely a desire, and as such, a desire can only emerge in a lived and embodied world: the desire for [wisdom] is born in the worlds passions, behaviors, techniques, sciences and arts (38). Thus, we might ask: in what world do we live in which the desire for wisdom may or may not develop as a goal among participants in such a world? Mdera situates the decline in our desire for wisdom in the combined reigning cultural shapes of the pragmatic drive toward capitalistic accumulation that he calls the longing-law1 and the governing ideal of the
1)

I take longing-law to be a phenomenon similar to that of the Greek , the

DOI: 10.1163/156916408X389695

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009

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1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. While these two concepts are structurally opposed, Mdera argues that they both result in a kind of relativism to which the pursuit of wisdom is also reduced. On the one hand, the phenomenon of global capitalistic accumulation emerges out of a failure and abandonment of the myths of the modern, unreachable truths that have become relegated to the museum of the spirit (39). Every search for meaning, which we might say belongs to the desire for wisdom most of all, is consequently merely adornment and perfume: economic accumulation acts as center, motor, end and means of communication[,] and search for knowledge . . . has made all other ethical and spiritual choices interchangeable and nally irrelevant (39). For Mdera, the central concept animating human action on a global scale, the practical measure by which we are said to live well, is economic accumulationall meaning, including wisdom, is consequently measured and achieved against this standard. In contrast to the phenomenon of the reduction of the philosophical search for meaning to the practice of global materialistic accumulation, Mdera places the metaphysical ideal represented by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For Mdera, this greatest value of the contemporary age, the true ideal apparent in the Declaration, becomes relativized by the fact that the human who bears Universal Human Rights is conceived on the model of a modern, liberal individual, quite divorced from the historical and relational conditions by which she exists as having meaning at all. As such, the theoretical ethical concepts that animate her are also relegated to an innite, relativized status that cannot possibly hold for anyone but herself. This great divide between our ethical/theoretical search for meaning and our practice of accumulating capital on a global level must be bridged, thinks Mdera: this is the fundamental task of philosophical renovatio he writes, escaping the death sentence that hegemonic culture assigns to every search for meaning, condemning it to the vanity of make-up on the disgured face of humanity (40). The way that Mdera sees toward a renewed philosophical search for meaning is in the method that he calls biographical ecumenism. As a preliminary introduction to this central term of the text, we can say that the method proposed seeks to give voice in a biographical/autobiographical fashion to
phenomenon of never satised, ever-increasing desire for material accumulation that Mdera thinks is a guiding condition for the possibility of global capitalistic accumulation. The Italian term, licitazionismo, also suggests that longing itself becomes law, literally founds the extent and meaning of the licit, ultimately makes everything legitimate.

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individual participants from dierent philosophical perspectives within a community, individual participants that each share their dierent autobiographical articulations on topics that animate and guide their communal discussion. The focus on the dierence in each participants biographical account, rather than the opposition between each of the articulated positions, remains central to the pedagogical and theoretical goals of our authors (24). Taking his inspiration from (especially Jungian) psychoanalysis, Mdera developed this method in an eort to achieve a biographical style of knowledge (33) and a style of discourse other than the style of argumentation so often experienced in academic settings: that of proving and, perhaps even more commonly in philosophical circles, of disproving. As such, argumentation lends itself to opposition, to negation, to inimical and even hostile orientations in the most common settings in which so-called philosophical discourse takes place (in journals and conferences, for instance). On the contrary, biographical ecumenism seeks to highlight every personal dierence (my 25; italics) and thrives on the dierential not the oppositional (24), as Tarca writes. In practice, Mdera has modeled the community and space that can give rise to this kind of biographical truth upon the ancient schoolsin fact, the reader will clearly intuit an inspirational thread connecting this book to Pierre Hadots work in ancient philosophy, an author who is quoted quite often over the course of the two essays. However, for Mdera, the work performed in the ancient schools must be dierentiated from any new methodology and philosophical practice, given the conceptual constraints that have shaped the modern/postmodern era. [Our] conditions have changed greatly [from the ancients]. The innite possible worlds that have opened up to our gaze make it improbable, or only apparently practicable, that we will be able to re-use exemplary models to give form to the characters of souls in search of justice and the good (46). As with the ancient schools, the . . . purpose, writes Mdera, is to unite philosophical discourse with philosophical exercises, understood as instruments for converting ones own life into philosophy, in order thus to reinforce philosophy as a path to life (35). However, there is a basic and signal dierence: the projects [and the philosophical communitys] unity does not derive from the dogma of a particular school, but from reference to rules of biographico-solidary communication (35). In other words, the community is not shaped by a particular dogma or orthodoxy but, rather, derives its structure from the rules of communication that have been agreed upon in an egalitarian fashion by the community as a whole. In fact, Mdera writes that what he calls biographical ecumenism excludes no orthodoxy, but welcomes any orthodoxy that recognizes the equal dignity of other doctrines

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in the life circumstances of other people (35). The rules of communication form a scaolding that bestows a kind of order onto the group but also allows for the biographical dierences to emerge in a way that is instructive and fruitful for raising questions about ones own presuppositions inherent in the orthodoxy that shapes ones philosophical practice and thinking. Of course, the term autobiography probably inspires a certain amount of trepidation for those of us who have exhausted untold energies steering our students away from the autobiographical in their writing. However, Mdera insists that his conception of biography is not the biography of the solipsistic, liberal individual mentioned above, but is rather the biography of an individual that gathers into a very special unity the richness of his or her social, and broadly cultural, determination (41). The focus of his method of biographical ecumenism is of course the articulation of truth in our search for meaning, but not the universal truth that forcefully holds for everyone at all times; Mdera revisions truth as a truth that gathers everyones truth (41). As such there is an attempt to give voice to the plurality of the uniquely individual experience animating each and every articulation of truth and concept: it is precisely our respect for this special, individual quality which makes us look suspiciously upon a return to the notion of truth that smacks of forced approval, upon anything that holds for everyone, and therefore for no one (41). As such, we do not do away with the experience and uniqueness of biographical detail in the articulation of meaning but wakefully orient ourselves to its dierential, its unique perspective. At the same time, we do not lose the meaningfulness with which truth speaks to us as a community of discussants; rather this revised truth, for Mdera, is a shape that contains a diversity of biographical presentations surrounding a specic topic and, consequently, remains structured by the universals that are themselves animating the discourse while also maintaining the particularity of the experience of each of the participants. In this way, Mdera and Tarca think that it is possible in todays global world for our actions to conform to truth. . . . it is possible to elude evil (29). As mentioned above, given the insistence on the sharing of biographical experience, it is perhaps not surprising to the reader to discover that Mdera has modeled his method on psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, he writes, tends toward a search for biographically experienced meaning (52), insofar as it presses reason to attempt to disclose to itself something that remains hidden from reason but that nevertheless motivates and animates it. However, he wants to carefully distinguish biographical ecumenism from anything like a psychological subjectivity (53). To be sure, thinking must indeed be carefully

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attuned to its own social and cultural debts, as we have shown already. In fact, we might even call a discursive contribution via biographical ecumenism socio-psycho-analysis. In addition to disclosing to reason its hidden anchors, psychoanalysis helps one to question the relation between lived life and discourse (53); it shows us that, in philosophy, it is our life that is at stake; we are not disinterested or neutral observers in our biographical discourses (54). At the beginning of Luigi Vero Tarcas essay, entitled Philosophy and Existence Today: Philosophical Practices between Epistm and Sophia, he asks the question, Why are there no true philosophers today? (117). Tarca believes that this gulf that exists between philosophy as a path to life, on the one hand, and the life lived in academia, on the other, depends upon a particular reigning conception of wisdom and knowledge, of sophia and epistm, that has animated philosophy since the ancients. On Tarcas reading, wisdom has been connected with scientic knowledge; sophia equals epistm: wisdomor that which guides people, who are constantly threatened by evil (the negative), towards the good (the positive), and so to salvationcoincides with thought, and more precisely with scientic thought: wisdom implies sticking to the true knowledge of epistm (118). Through the cultivation of the knowledge of the exact sciences, human beings have believed themselves capable of developing a power against the hostile forces of nature and even the inimical orientations of other human beings. Wisdom has, consequently, been conceived as the possession of such knowledge, the knowledge to oppose evil in nature and in the polis. However, as Tarca suggests, this infallible foresight requires rst and foremost a complete grasp of the system of laws of realitya system that holds universally and innitely. Through epistm, it has been conceived, we achieve a certain meta-physical vision of ourselves and the world in which we live, insofar as this knowledge allows us to transcend our original nitude (123). Freeing us from the confusion of dierent perspectives and dierent experiences inherent in our individuality and our nitude, scientic knowledge has been conceived as oering us emancipation (124). However, in order to be a genuine sophia in the model of epistm, the system must be complete, a condition that, because of our nitude, Tarca suggests can never be met (131). For Tarca, this latter consequence is derived from a logical phenomenon inherent in the scientic project of philosophy, a logic he calls the negation of negation (140), an orientation in philosophical discourse that he feels needs urgent elucidation and attention; indeed, Tarca writes that it results from a bad theoretical upbringing (158). The basic thought behind this fundamental orientation he sees subtending Western philosophy is that the

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objective universality that guides the search for sophia as epistemic necessity is grounded upon a negative conception of knowledge rather than a positive one. Indeed, the positive armation of epistm is achieved, writes Tarca, as a negation of some negative: This circumstance can be highlighted more formally if we begin by considering that un-deniable necessity coincides with a particular yet essential feature of the positive, which consists precisely in being the negation of the negative, and thus the guarantee that the positive occurs (126). In epistemic universality, the negation of the negative is an essential feature of the [epistemic] positive: Is health, which is positive, not necessarily the negation of illness, which is negative? Is knowledge not nonignorance, wealth not non-poverty, and so on? Is good not generally speaking the exclusionand hence in some sense the negationof evil (127)? Each of these assertions, claims Tarca, makes a genuinely universal positivity impossible. In this way, Tarca thinks that Western philosophy, beginning with Aristotles principle of non-contradiction (144), has grounded itself upon a structure of double negativity. To elucidate this point, Tarca tracks the development from Aristotle, through Anselm, into Descartes formulation of the cogito, and the latters re-appropriation by Kant. In the exclusion of the existential/ personal, the object of epistm has become something that, at its best, is incontrastable or something that cannot be discussed or contrasted. Of course, discussion and contrast are forms of the dialogically phenomenal and they depend upon a certain personal, biographical, existential well-spring. All of this, epistm must negate in order to achieve its universality by which it can command universal agreement; indeed, epistms salvic value depends upon the exclusion/negation of the particular and the personal. In other words, it must deny existential considerations (128). Indeed, individuality and dierential experience are signs of failure and lack of wisdom. For Tarca, as a consequence of the equation of sophia with epistm, philosophy now stands in a situation of relativistic nihilism. Western culture has so often turned sophia, which is meant to guarantee the greatest positive, towards negative phenomena, which has today led to a radical nihilism (144). We have found ourselves in a situation where the negative task of epistemic wisdom has itself been negated as something radically other than our phenomenal/existential life. Contemporary philosophy (from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein, from Heidegger to hermeneutics and positivism) has attacked the foundations of the ideal of a philosophical, epistemic knowledge (147). Tracing the nihilistic reaction to epistemic negation through these more recent philosophical gures, Tarca concludes that sophia has been attacked from all sides as impossible, as unachievable. Indeed, today, everything is deniable

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(147), every truth is relative (148); we stand in a culture that attacks undeniability and leads us to a relativization of necessity (147). For Tarca, we must search for a way to pursue philosophical discourse in a way in which meaning arises not in opposition to every other meaning, but in a way that diers positively from all other meanings (142). The way that Tarca seeks to achieve this transformation of meaning from the negation of the negative into meaning secured through dierence is by what he calls full-edged philosophy (158) and also com-position (157). In the rst case, he argues that full-edged philosophy is a kind of discourse that distinguishes itself from every negative perspective, i.e., from every perspective that sees opposition as originary and unavoidable, and for which determining amounts to negating (158). Rather than dening in accordance with negation, in which the positive is disclosed in opposition to the negative, full-edged philosophical speech arms and does so philosophically, or by speaking of the universal and of all that is connected to it. But it speaks positively, and is thus an armation that diers from any negation (158). One can immediately intuit the necessity for a kind of communitarian approach in Tarcas vision of philosophical discourse. If one is going to speak positively, then in order for meaning to arise out of the dierences, one needs a variety of speakers, a variety of perspectives. It is this communal discourse surrounding a universal or laweach participant asserting a positive account without competitionthat Tarca has in mind with the term com-position. On my reading, com-position is the setting in which philosophical determination takes place for him, a gathering of positions; com-position shows itself as Tarcas answer to the question about what truth can look like in philosophy today. Each participant contributes perspective, their experience, to the discourse surrounding the universal. As such, the meaning is com-posed out of dierence, not negation or opposition. As the reader can grasp from these descriptions, the work that both essays seek to perform is a renewal of philosophical practice of wisdom and truth. Even though they each undertake this task from dierent starting points and from dierent, unique perspectives, each author contributes (in and through their dierences) to what they take to be a new way of performing philosophy, a way which embodies the strange and irreducible space between the public and the private, between the universal and the particular, between the individual and the communal. Russell Winslow St. Johns College, Santa Fe.