Abstract
In Eucharistie Presence Robert Sokolowski mentions the thirty years of friendship and collegiality with Thomas Prufer who died a year before its publication. The blossoms of this friendship have blessed all of us who are here today and this dyad forms part of the sense of this great day which I am dubbing the “Sokofest.”
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Notes
Robert Sokolowski, Husserîian Meditations: How Words Present Things (hereafter HM) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 161.
Robert Sokolowski, “Ontological Possibilities in Phenomenology: The Dyad and the One,” Review of Metaphysics 29 (1976), 699; HM, 161–162.
Thomas Prufer, Recapitulations (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1992), 75
Prufer, see the note on p. 53.
Ibid.
SeeHM, §52.
HM, 134.
Prufer, 76.
Prufer, 76.
Edmund Husserl, Erste Philosophie II, Husserliana VIII (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1951), 412.
Prufer, 88.
Prufer, 87.
The topic of being becomes explicit in ch. 14 of Presence and Absence (hereafter PA) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 166.
Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 133–139 and 217.
Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution, 219.
Here I am reminded of Plotinus’ wrestling with the senses in which the One may be said to be conscious: a certain sense of being conscious, e.g., an explicit dualism, of knower and known, would destroy the divine simplicity. On the other hand, an unconscious divine source-point would seem less than divine. See the discussion of H.-R. Schwyzer, ‘“Bewussf und ‘Unbewussf bei Plotin,” in Entretiens, vol V, Les Sources de Plotin, (Geneva: Vandoeuvres, 1957), 363ff
Also J. M. Rist, The Road to Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), ch. 4.
Prufer, 88. An example of such a position is the following: “When we consider, finally, that the coming to presence of the essence of technology comes to pass in the granting that needs and uses man so that he may share in revealing… [it becomes clear] that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the presence of truth….” Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Basic Writings (New York: Harper, 1977), 314.
Heidegger’s claim is that Plato represents a fall from the interplay of presence and absence which results in Aristotle’s nous as a presence without absence and hiddenness. As Prufer has put it, Heidegger is in fact a (Gadamerian) Platonist and not a Heideggerian “Platonist.” The Indeterminate Dyad protects absence and hiddenness from being swallowed up in presence and display. Prufer, Scholium III, in Recapitulations, 110ff.
Cf. also the footnote on p. 218, The Formation of the Concept of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution.
See Prufer, 53.
Husserl, Erste Philosophie II, 412. An additional consideration which strengthens the sense in which the primal shining is some sense of mind is the consideration that it not only cannot “be begun or ended by us” (Prufer, 84), but it itself cannot begin and cease to be. See, e.g., Hua XI, 377–380. The text strengthens the Sokolowski-Prufer reading in as much as this is not a personal consciousness; nevertheless, as anomalous as it is, it is still a kind of consciousness. Cf. my “Phenomenological Time: Its Religious Significance,” in Religion and Time, ed. J. N. Mohanty and A. N. Baslev (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 18–45.
Cf., e.g., this text from “The Question Concerning Technology”: “Wherever man opens his eyes and ears, unlocks his heart and gives himself over to meditating and striving, shaping and working, entreating and thanking, he finds himself everywhere already brought into the unconcealed. The unconcealment of the unconcealed has already come to pass whenever it calls man forth into the modes of revealing allotted to him. When man, in his way, from within unconcealment reveals that which is present [das Anwesende], he merely responds to the call of unconcealment even when he contradicts it. Thus when man, investigating, observing, pursues nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.Modern technology, as a revealing which places an order, is thus no mere human doing. Therefore we must take that challenging, which sets upon man to place an order for the real as standing-reserve, in accordance with the way it shows itself. That challenging gathers man into placing an order. This gathering concentrates man upon ordering the real as standing-reserve.” Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, trans. D. Krell (New York: Harper, 1977), 300; translation slightly altered.
This is a blend of the Harder, Armstrong, and McKenna-Page translation of Enneads V. 4. 2, 11–12. For a good discussion, see J. M. Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), ch. 3.
Prufer, 90, cites the late Heidegger’s position that Lichtung and Licht have nothing to do with one another. Here Lichtung receives the sense of a free and open clear space which enables the interplay of presence and absence is held to be more fundamental than any sense of light and brightness.
Edmund Husserl, Hua XIV, 45–46; Briefwechsel, III, 461; C 3 VI, 17. For a symmetrical formulation in J. G. Fichte, where we find brought together, a sense of “primal light,” consciousness as the “from which” or anonymous source-point, and the source of “is,” see Wissenschaftslehre (1804) (Hamburg: Meiner, 1975), 206.
Ms. C 2 I, 1ff. I wish to thank Prof. Samuel Ijsseling, Head of the Husserl Archieves in Louvain, for permission to quote from the Nachlass texts.
The body of the text is more ample than the marginal note from which I cited: “In this sense it may also said to be not being, but the opposite (Gegenstück) of all being, not something ob-jective but rather something prior to all objectivity,(Urjecf). The I ought not properly be called I, indeed, it should not be named at all, because then it is already become objective. It is the nameless, beyond all that is graspable, and beyond all not as the standing, or hovering or existing, but as the ‘functioning,’ grasping, valuing.” L I20 (1917–1918), 4a; transc, 7–8.
We may recall that Heidegger, commenting on a draft of the article for the Encyclopedia Britannica, expresses agreement with Husserl that the entity which constitutes world cannot be explained by a being of the same kind. Heidegger goes on to say: ‘the constituting [entity] is not Nothing [Nichts], therefore something and being—although not in the sense of something positively existing [des Positiven]. See the letter to Husserl, in Edmund Husserl, Phänomenologische Psychologie (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 601–602.
Eugen Fink, VI Cartesianische Meditation, Teil I, Die Idee einer transzendentalen Methodenlehre, ed. Hans Ebeling, Jann Holl and Guy van Kerckhoven (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 184. In the draft of a foreword Fink speaks of his rendition of Husserl’s philosophy as “an anticipatory look at a meontic philosophy of absolute spirit;” see page 183. I am indebted to Ronald Bruzina for most of these “meontic passages” in Fink. See Bruzina’s introduction to his translation of Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: An Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), xlviii-lix. See also VI Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 2, Ergänzungsband, ed. Guy Von Kerckhoven (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 215.
Fink, VI Cartesianische Meditation, Teil I, 81 and 83.
Ibid., 82; see Fink, Nähe und Distanz (Freiburg: Alber, 1976), 42–43.
Fink, VI. Cartesianische Meditation, Teil 2,215.
“The universe of pre-given being (Seins) is the universe of what is given to me in the form of the final validation, i.e., of the abiding ‘relevance’ of what is constituted being for me. What goes beyond that, in the manner of constituting anonymity, in latency, is a meon; it is not a thesis, but rather a “presupposition” of being from out of a forgotten temporalization which is not yet the temporalization of an on. Thus it is something to be subsequently uncovered and recognized as necessary to the knowing function and as necessary for the very possibility of there being something existing (and thereby it is something to be made evident through a subsequent temporalization). From B III 3 (1931?), 30b; transcription p. 7.
I say “relatively diaphanous” because, again, Husserl does not hold that the primal presencing is utterly diaphanous, after the fashion, e.g., of H.-N. Castañeda’s theory of “Externus,” but rather the absolute flow appears to itself and thus there is a kind of “translucency.” According to Castañeda, the evidence of Externus takes the form of having been so absorbed in what I am conscious of “that I have not been conscious of being conscious of anything.” See, e.g., his “Philosophical Method and Direct Awareness of the Self,” in Grazer philosophische Studien 7/9 (1979), 10.
Husserl still uses the expression of absolute being as late as 1934. Here he speaks of it as the universal primal present in which “lies” all time and world in every sense. Hua XV, 668.
B IV 6, 165. Both Fichte (1804 Wissenschaftslehre) and Heidegger use this expression, Dasein, in a way in which the “da” refers to a kind of wakefulness to Sein; in each of them the “da” is derivative or less basic than Sein; in Husserl’s formulation, it is Sein which, as “rooted” in the absolute concretum of the primal presencing, is less original or basic than the root, the “da.” But in the later appropriation of the “roof-metaphor in Ideas (see the following discussion in text) transcendental subjectivity or consciousness is absolute being or the primal category of being in general in which being in all other senses is rooted. Cf. my discussion forthcoming in “Husserl and Fichte: With Special Regard to Husserl’s Lectures on Fichte’s Ideal of Humanity,” Husserl Studies 12 (1995): 135–63.
Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge, Husserliana I (The Hague: Martinus Nihjoff, 1963), 114 and 181; English translation: Cartesian Meditations, tr. Dorion Cairns (The Hague; Nijhoff, 1960), 155. Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität III, Husserliana XV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), 385.
For a start, see my “Entelechy in Transcendental Phenomenology,” Amercian Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66 (1992), 189–212.
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Hart, J.G. (1996). Being and Mind. In: Drummond, J.J., Hart, J.G. (eds) The Truthful and the Good. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1724-8_1
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