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Contributions To Phenomenology 88

Dorothée Legrand
Dylan Trigg Editors

Unconsciousness
Between
Phenomenology
and
Psychoanalysis
Contributions To Phenomenology

In Cooperation with The Center


for Advanced Research in Phenomenology

Volume 88

Series Editors
Nicolas de Warren, KU Leuven, Belgium
Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Ireland

Editorial Board
Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA
Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium
David Carr, Emory University, GA, USA
Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University Hong Kong, China
James Dodd, New School University, NY, USA
Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, FL, USA
Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Italy
Burt Hopkins, Seattle University, WA, USA
José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University Hong Kong, China
Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Korea
Rosemary R.P. Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru
Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Germany
William R. McKenna, Miami University, OH, USA
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, OH, USA
J.N. Mohanty, Temple University, PA, USA
Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Japan
Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, TN, USA
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Germany
Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy
Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL, USA
Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Japan
Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA
Scope
The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological
research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other
fields of inquiry such as the social sciences and cognitive science. Since its
establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than
80 titles on diverse themes of phenomenological philosophy. In addition to
welcoming monographs and collections of papers in established areas of scholarship,
the series encourages original work in phenomenology. The breadth and depth of
the Series reflects the rich and varied significance of phenomenological thinking for
seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach
of phenomenological research.
The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in
Phenomenology.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811


Dorothée Legrand • Dylan Trigg
Editors

Unconsciousness Between
Phenomenology and
Psychoanalysis
Editors
Dorothée Legrand Dylan Trigg
Archives Husserl, CNRS, Ecole Normale School of Philosophy
Supérieure University College Dublin
Paris Sciences et Lettres Research Dublin, Ireland
University
Paris, France

ISSN 0923-9545     ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic)


Contributions To Phenomenology
ISBN 978-3-319-55516-4    ISBN 978-3-319-55518-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55518-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017939707

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017


This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of
the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,
broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information
storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the
editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors
or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims
in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Printed on acid-free paper

This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature


The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents

Part I Within the Husserlian Framework


1 Husserl’s Layered Concept of the Human Person: Conscious
and Unconscious....................................................................................... 3
Dermot Moran
2 Reflections on the Phenomenological Unconscious
in Generative Phenomenology................................................................ 25
Alexander Schnell

Part II From the Specific Perspective of Merleau-Ponty


3 Merleau-Ponty’s Conception of the Unconscious in the Late
Manuscripts.............................................................................................. 41
Emmanuel de Saint Aubert
4 Repression and Operative Unconsciousness in Phenomenology
of Perception.............................................................................................. 61
Timothy Mooney
5 Merleau-Ponty’s Nonverbal Unconscious.............................................. 75
James Phillips

Part III At the Limit of Phenomenology


6 Is There a Phenomenology of Unconsciousness? Being, Nature,
Otherness in Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas................................. 95
Dorothée Legrand
7 Phenomenology of the Inapparent......................................................... 113
François Raffoul

v
vi Contents

8 From the Night, the Spectre.................................................................... 133


Joseph Cohen
9 Phenomenology and the Problem of the Inhuman: Psychologism,
Correlationism, and the Ethics of Absolute Materiality...................... 141
Drew M. Dalton

Part IV With Phenomenology and Beyond


10 Hypnagogia, Anxiety, Depersonalization: A Phenomenological
Perspective................................................................................................ 163
Dylan Trigg
11 Merleau-Ponty’s Non-Exclusively-Verbal Unconscious:
Affect Figurability and Gender.............................................................. 181
Thamy Ayouch
12 The Unconscious and the Non-linguistic Mode of Thinking................ 209
Dieter Lohmar
13 A Broken Self-Possession: Responsive Agency in Habits..................... 223
Line Ryberg Ingerslev

Part V Beyond Phenomenology


14 Surprise as a Phenomenal Marker of Heart-Unconscious................... 239
Natalie Depraz
15 This Immense Fascination with the Unconscious:
Psychoanalysis and Surrealism............................................................... 261
Alphonso Lingis

Index.................................................................................................................. 279
Introduction

Context

What you are reading now is the fruit of an encounter not only between phenomenol-
ogy and psychoanalysis but also between the editors. Out of our encounter grew
something else, progressively – a friendship and now the book you are holding. If you
hold it now, it is because we had too many questions, more than the two of us could
unfold, more than we could even think of. We thus invited others to embark with us.
We first organized a conference, titled Is there a phenomenology of unconscious-
ness? Sponsored by both French and Irish institutions, the event took place at University
College Dublin in February 2014. We are gratified that each of the nine speakers for
the event has agreed to include their contributions in this volume. Alongside these
chapters, we have solicited further contributions from leading figures in the field,
expanding and strengthening our original scope. In bringing together thinkers from
diverse backgrounds and with divergent interests, we have sought to preserve the dif-
ferences between phenomenology and psychoanalysis rather than to efface or resolve
those differences. Our task from the outset was neither to render phenomenology psy-
choanalytical nor to render psychoanalysis phenomenological, but instead to locate the
shifting terrain in which each discipline appears and disappears. As Merleau-Ponty
noted at the end of his life, the relation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis is
not simply predicated on a mutual resistance to positivism. Much more than this, their
rapport is grounded in a shared orientation, a mutual latency.
Our initial plan was to be fair, if not exhaustive – what a plan! As if (academic,
linguistic, practical, conceptual, and so forth) frontiers could be easily crossed, we
sought to invite both philosophers and psychoanalysts, to discuss both philosophy
and psychoanalysis, and to cross these “fields” both theoretically and clinically.
Here already, an asymmetry imposed itself: namely, if there is no psychoanalysis
without patients, inversely, what is philosophy’s clinical practice? By this question
alone, our plan collapsed, not because there would be no philosophical practice,
even less because philosophy would be clinically irrelevant, but because this ques-
tion – is there a philosophical clinical practice? – if not heretical, is comparative. It

vii
viii Introduction

soon leads, indeed, to question what a clinical practice would be, if philosophically
relevant, by comparison with a clinical practice that would not be so and what a
philosophy would be, if clinically relevant, by comparison with a philosophy that
would not be so. In our own research, both of us work with “this and that” (here is
not the place to detail this and that), but our approach has never been comparative;
in this collective work, the same approach remains intact.
In particular, to work at once with philosophy and psychoanalysis does not impose
a comparison between – say – the concept of unconsciousness in philosophy and the
hypothesis of the unconscious in psychoanalysis. A comparison is rather sterile if it
offers only the detection of redundancies or incompatibilities. The power of a compari-
son comes notably from its ability to size the scope of a given thought within its own
field and in its primary context. In doing so, one ends up better understanding, for
example, the specificity of Freud’s unconscious, by comparing it with Merleau-Ponty’s.
But we aimed at something else: we proposed – to ourselves, to each other, to the con-
tributors of this book, and now to its reader – to work beyond borders, so to speak, or
between borders, rather. We didn’t aim at erasing borders nor to work without borders,
but proposed to displace borders, to displace a thought where it is not (yet) thought of
and to impregnate or contaminate a thought with what it does not (yet) think.
What does occur to philosophy, if it thinks the unconscious which psychoana-
lysts work with; what does happen to the psychoanalytic unconscious if it is thought
of by philosophy; what does occur to psychoanalysis if it is confronted with uncon-
sciousness as it is conceptualized philosophically; how is a philosophical uncon-
scious impacted if it is captured within a psychoanalytic frame? These are some of
the questions that arise, as soon as we started to put together in a single sentence the
words unconscious philosophy.
As we will not compare philosophy and psychoanalysis, so we will not launch
this non-comparative book by comparing comparative approaches. We will not, for
instance, list the manners in which, explicitly or not, philosophers may have dis-
cussed psychoanalysis, the manners in which philosophers may have made, toward
what would become or what was already named psychoanalysis, movements of
anticipation, foundation, integration, overshadowing, neglect, revelation, clarifica-
tion, plagiarism, diversion, deconstruction, differentiation, immersion, etc. Neither
“for” nor “against,” neither exactly “with” nor entirely “without,” neither “alike”
nor “dislike,” we here navigate “between” philosophy and psychoanalysis; for us,
this work is interstitial.
Even unpronounced, psychoanalysis is on every page of this book – as an explicit
or implicit reference to the split subject, to language, sex, others, dreams, ­symptoms,
and so forth. Philosophically, the explicit reference here is a method which has often
been abusively confused with a philosophy of consciousness, a philosophy which
has indeed championed the study of the structure of consciousness – phenomenol-
ogy. Within this background and because we hoped for a dialogue with philosophi-
cal thoughts which did not aim primarily to be practiced clinically, we do not do
here what should be done elsewhere: a dialogue between psychoanalysis and phe-
nomenological psychiatry, as clinical practices. For now, we just needed to pause a
moment and ask: what are we talking about when we talk about unconsciousness?
Introduction ix

This specific question arose from a strange realization: it is possible, or so it seems,


to work phenomenologically with psychoanalysis, without encountering unconscious-
ness – the concept, the hypothesis. Does that mean we can get rid of it, as detractors of
psychoanalysis think we should? Quite the contrary, we soon realized that unconscious-
ness, even if unpronounced, unnamed, and unthematized as such, has been unavoidable
for phenomenology, so unavoidable that we could not dispense from detailing the mul-
tiple conceptualizations of unconsciousness offered within phenomenology. To do so,
evidently, we could not retain unconsciousness imprisoned into psychoanalysis; we
could not aim at educating psychoanalysis and reshape it with a proper philosophical
logos; we could not purify the mind of its unconsciousness, immersing it into an
enlarged ring of consciousness. Our project has been more simple and more ambitious
too: to speak of “unconsciousness” as if the word could be said in more than one lan-
guage at once, as if it could be worked on in more than one framework at once.
The unconscious, says Freud, is a hypothesis. Our starting point here is that
unconsciousness is a concept. To conceive of unconsciousness as a concept is to be
able to conceive of it as independent from its originary context: if unconsciousness
is a concept, then it must be robust enough to be extracted from its native field, to
support exportation, if not deterritorialization, to be modified by its contact with
other concepts it didn’t touch initially, without losing its defining core. In other
terms, our project here is exterior to psychoanalysis, which does not mean that it is
independent from it. Exteriority allows us to violate some acknowledged interpreta-
tion of the hypothesis of the unconscious, to reveal other dimensions.
To reveal other dimensions is not to aim at revealing all of them – how could such
completeness ever be assessed? As our project does not aim at comparing a defini-
tion of unconsciousness against another, it does not aim either to capture uncon-
sciousness into an integrative definition, which would be total, totalizing, totalitarian.
If anything, unconsciousness is that which resists any complete definition, any firm
grasp in any given framework, any clear definition under any monochromatic light.
To do justice to unconsciousness as a complex, we preserve here disparate voices.
In the following (explicitly or not), all authors let themselves be informed by psy-
choanalysis and are oriented by phenomenology. But their manners to work with the
concept of unconsciousness have led them either to embrace the core of phenome-
nology, to mix the latter with other perspectives, to reach the defining limits of
phenomenology, to push them further, or to overpass them.

Outline of the Book

Within the Husserlian Framework

Unconsciousness Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis begins with Dermot


Moran’s reflections on the role of unconsciousness within Husserl’s phenomenology.
Following Fink, Moran argues that the starting point of any exploration of the
x Introduction

unconscious must be a rigorous exploration of consciousness (see also A. Schnell, E. de


Saint Aubert, F. Raffoul, D. Legrand). For such a project, phenomenology, and in par-
ticular Husserl’s phenomenology, is the most pertinent reference. If anything, Husserl
provides a fine-grained conception of consciousness where he details how the con-
scious ego is always bound to a horizon of non-I, including sensuous drives, undiffer-
entiated instincts, and parcels of animality which must be idiosyncratically domesticated
and owned, to therein participate to the “higher, spiritual” ego. Not unlike psychoanaly-
sis, Husserlian phenomenology pinpoints that it is necessary to “dismantle” the natural
attitude, in the aim of “uncovering” its sources; unlike psychoanalysis, however, phe-
nomenology conceives of the latter as moments of the transcendental ego – rendering
unconceivable a dynamic which could be at once mental and unconscious.
Alexander Schnell interrogates the notion of unconsciousness by embracing –
rather than challenging – a phenomenological framework, that is to say, he (re)
defines the notion(s) of unconsciousness by considering again the very structure of
consciousness (see also D. Moran, E. de Saint Aubert). If – as phenomenology
advocates – consciousness is not a given, then its very “dynamic” (a genetic and
homeostatic dynamic) may be best investigated as being (the) “unconscious.” In this
framework, the term “unconscious” may come to qualify the “transcendental condi-
tions” of consciousness, conditions which cannot be experienced consciously and
are thus “unconscious” in this sense. The unconscious here appears as the “para-
dox” of consciousness, i.e., as that without which consciousness would be inopera-
tive and as that without which consciousness would not be conscious – thus, the
phenomenological unconscious ends up being that which prevents consciousness to
be unconscious. What this approach to the unconscious demonstrates is that phe-
nomenology not only can but must consider unconsciousness if its reduction to a
merely descriptive approach to lived experience ought to be prevented.

From the Specific Perspective of Merleau-Ponty

Emmanuel de Saint Aubert embarks us on a journey through the evolutions of


Merleau-Ponty’s conceptions of unconsciousness. Doing so and relying notably on
unpublished notes, he demonstrates that, rather than “the unconscious,” the term
“unconsciousness” better suits the phenomenological conception of unconscious
dynamics vs. states. Here, it also appears clearly and explicitly that phenomenology’s
elaborations on unconsciousness are not only a critic or an appropriation of the psy-
choanalytic conception of the unconscious, but it rather grows in dialogue with but
independently of psychoanalysis, within what is strictly speaking a philosophical
project. Within phenomenology, in particular, Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on uncon-
sciousness evolve together with the developments of his own conceptions of con-
sciousness (see also D. Moran, A. Schnell). What surges in this framework is not an
unconscious structured via repression, but an anthropo-­ontological unconsciousness
as our primordial, archaic, pre-representational, pre-­objective, faithful bodily consent
to let Being be: “an initial yes” (see also D. Dalton). The challenge psychoanalysis is
Introduction xi

confronted with, here, is the conception of an “undivided” being (see also J. Phillips,
T. Mooney).
In fact, this is a challenge for phenomenology itself, and for Merleau-Ponty’s phe-
nomenology of unconsciousness in particular, as Tim Mooney’s chapter problematizes
explicitly by revisiting Merleau-Ponty’s key ideas under the notion of unconscious-
ness. The notions of body schema and motor intentionality are critical here, insofar as
they allow us to consider how one’s past is sedimented into one’s habitual body, in turn
shaping one’s horizon of capacities toward future projects (see also L. Ingerslev).
Although anonymous, in that one doesn’t decide on them, one’s bodily habits are
meant to preserve one’s psychic order and free one’s consciousness of the burden of
overplanning: it effortlessly effectuates one’s adherence with one’s familiar world.
Moreover, one’s anonymous bodily dynamics does not only impose a lack of transpar-
ency upon oneself; it also allows one’s attunement with others, insofar as one shares
with others a common embodiment, an anonymous intercorporeality. Altogether,
one’s body is a locus of integration (see also E. de Saint Aubert, J. Phillips), integration
of one’s past, of others, of sexuality and vitality into the whole of human’s existence,
integration which occurs in an admirably enabling and untroubling manner. What
appears here, after such reading of Merleau-­Ponty, is that unconsciousness could be
conceived of as a soothing process of integration, rather than disruption and tension.
Exploring Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy in yet another manner, thereby demon-
strating its fertility, James Phillips elaborates upon the nonverbal unconscious. Here,
what is emphasized is the unconscious as a prereflective structure of one’s being in
the world, generating the unity of subject and world (see also E. de Saint Aubert,
T. Mooney). Such structure is a silent impulse toward meaning, the invisible armature
(membrure) that supports one’s visual acquaintance with the world, the reversibility
and blending of the seeing/touching with the seen/touched. Together with the motive
of integration or even undividedness, which is present in Merleau-­Ponty’s work
throughout, one finds the idea that consciousness is never complete but presupposes
pre-reflectivity, vision is never total but presupposes invisibility, and expression is
never fully accomplished but presupposes silence. Pre-reflectivity, invisibility,
silence – these are other names for unconsciousness. Throughout these different nom-
inations, unconsciousness is structured as an unbridgeable “écart,” a non-represent-
able absence, an indefinite excess (see also E. de Saint Aubert). What surges here is
nothing like an unconscious as a container of representations hidden from conscious-
ness behind the thick wall of repression – no one really conceived of the unconscious
as such, phenomenologists even less than any others – rather, unconsciousness is “in
between,” as the glue tying together the subject and the world he is conscious of.

At the Limit of Phenomenology

Dorothée Legrand asks whether the phenomenological framework is suitable to


investigate unconsciousness and answers, after Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and
Levinas, that the inclusion of the notion of unconsciousness into phenomenology is
xii Introduction

paradoxical. On the one hand, unconsciousness is intrinsic to the phenomenological


investigation of consciousness since, as a philosophical method, phenomenology
aims at clearing the modes of manifestation of what does not manifest itself sponta-
neously and what does not manifest itself fully as it is, i.e., what is unconscious (see
also A. Schnell, F. Raffoul); on the other hand, unconsciousness pushes phenome-
nology beyond its defining limits by tying it irremediably to ontology and/or ethics,
i.e., to the radical otherness of Being and to the radical otherness of the other subject
(see also D. Dalton). Across the differences between the accounts proposed by
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, each time, the phenomenological investi-
gation of unconsciousness is revealed as involving an investigation into the modes
of revelation of what cannot be possibly objectified and represented intentionally
(see also J. Cohen). As such, a phenomenology of unconsciousness pushes both the
conception of the phenomenon and the conception of logos to their limits, or beyond.
François Raffoul pairs Heidegger with Levinas (see also D. Legrand) to uncover
how phenomenology does not and cannot dispense with unconsciousness. By
employing Heidegger’s account of a “phenomenology of the inapparent,” Raffoul
considers the different ways in which withdrawal from manifestation plays an
unsubstitutable role in phenomenology, if phenomenology is conceived of as a phil-
osophical investigation into appearing, a verb, rather than appearance, a noun.
Appearing does not appear in and of itself but is veiled by what appears: within
unconcealment, concealment operates; within consciousness, unconsciousness
operates. Importantly, however, concealment is not a process by which something
would be hidden and should be recovered (see also J. Cohen, D. Dalton); uncon-
sciousness is the coveredness of Being which cannot possibly be recovered. Hence,
phenomenology is haunted by an inner violence, a philosophical violence of inter-
pretation, description, and nomination, which works against the non-appearing
proper to Being, its manner of unceasingly throwing itself into manifested phenom-
ena. It is one’s unavoidable responsibility, however, to carry on this violent task of
responding to the call of the inappropriable Being: one cannot remain indifferent to
Being and to one’s own being – despite its resistance to becoming conscious, a
resistance one cannot overcome. It appears that the structure of Heidegger’s thought,
analyzed as it is here, is not foreign to the philosophy of Levinas, even though the
latter recurrently, explicitly, and virulently opposed Heideggerian ontological phe-
nomenology, placing ethics as first philosophy. What is claimed about Being
becomes, with Levinas, characteristics of one’s relation to others: others cannot be
reduced to any object of consciousness; they constitutively escape conscious mani-
festations; their face does not appear as a phenomenon, but indicates their very
otherness, their vulnerability to the violence of death and murder (see also
D. Dalton). The other is always susceptible to withdraw radically into the unknown,
and one’s unsubstitutable responsibility is to respond to what can never be captured
consciously: a secret.
Joseph Cohen questions the primacy of consciousness, the analysis of the uncon-
scious into the form(ation)s it inserts into consciousness; he questions the primacy
of the day, the reduction of the night to a day yet to come; he questions the primacy
of the ego and of the world, the primacy of the subject-object correlation that phe-
Introduction xiii

nomenology holds to (see also F. Raffoul). Could there be a phenomenology of the


night, a night which never promises that another day will come; could there be a
phenomenology of unconsciousness, an unconscious which would resist analysis;
could there be a phenomenology of what is not any world for any subject, of what
cannot be included within the indefinitely extensible horizon of all possible pres-
encing? Could there be a phenomenology of what cannot possibly come to con-
sciousness, a phenomenology of an irremediable loss (see also D. Dalton)? Such
phenomenology would have to be informed by the occurrence of an event that is not
present to consciousness but affects consciousness nonetheless, an event that dis-
possesses the subject from the possibility to respond to what occurs, an event that
inhabits the subject inaccessibly, which haunts the subject fascinated by that which
is both incomparably foreign and inseparable. Such event can be named the uncon-
scious: a spectral unconscious. Is it not together with this unconscious – the specter
of consciousness which irreducibly refrains phenomenalization – that phenomenol-
ogy can come to think subjectivity itself (see also A. Schnell)? Is it not by realizing
that an event has occurred that cannot possibly be correlated with the conscious
subject, an event that cannot possibly be present, an event through which absence
occurs, and is it not by realizing that death has occurred, i.e., is it not by mourning,
that one may come to interrogate the birth of subjectivity?
Drew Dalton aims at reconsidering the power of the phenomenological method
to access to the “thing” itself, as it would be thinkable outside of the transcendental
correlation between a subject of consciousness and its intentional objects (see also
J. Cohen, see also D. Trigg): what is it that may give to the human some access to
the inhuman? Does unconsciousness – understood here as that which may be given
to consciousness while exceeding it (see also E. de Saint Aubert, J. Phillips) – fun-
damentally challenge the Husserlian conception of phenomenology and of the
“thing” itself? Is such notion of unconsciousness in full contradiction with phenom-
enological ontology? While phenomenology has been challenged, since Frege up to
contemporary speculative realism, by critics firstly aiming at countering psycholo-
gism, the “inhuman” has been called upon, to rescue phenomenology from the risk
of falling into idealism, reducing the world to what is subjectively accessible. The
inhuman would be the absolute completely independent from the structure of con-
sciousness – an inhuman, asubjective unconsciousness (see also D. Legrand). It
may be thought that such inhuman unconsciousness may be humanly and c­ onsciously
accessed through the attestation of prehuman and/or post-human “things.” But more
than the death of humanity, the death of a human would here provide the paradigm
of what imposes itself to human subjectivity while being neither human nor subjec-
tive (see also J. Cohen). The dead body manifests itself as that which entertains no
links with the one experiencing it. The corpse traumatically confronts us to the
unavoidable: the recognition of something which appears to consciousness without
being constrained within its structures.
xiv Introduction

With Phenomenology and Beyond

Dylan Trigg folds the study of unconsciousness into the experience that “I am not
me,” not fully me, not me in any unified manner, not a “me” which a linear narrative
could encompass neatly. He takes up this experience through the idea of hypnagogic
states – transitional states between wakefulness and sleep that are best characterized
as liminal states between consciousness and unconsciousness, between self and
nonself. On the one hand, hypnagogic states require from the subject a receptivity,
an openness toward an ambivalent state of consciousness where one is both at once
present and absent (see also J. Cohen). On the other hand, anxiety may emerge
when a sense of loosening the ego surges uncontrollably. As seen in this way, anxi-
ety imposes upon the subject the sense of an unbearable disjunction between one’s
subjective presence and one’s disappearance from the subjective field. Here, a series
of tensions form. Hypnagogia opens the subject to the marvels of ambiguous states
of consciousness that exist independently of the ego (see also D. Dalton). At the
same time, anxiety violates the subject’s sense of being one, through the passage of
time, and rises as a defense against any ambiguity between self and nonself. In both
cases, what is revealed is a possible de-centering of the ego – be it in a relaxing or
terrifying experience. Whereas anxiety would deploy an existential distrust and
intolerance toward what does not belong to the conscious ego, hypnagogia would
allow loosening the barriers of consciousness against unconsciousness.
Thamy Ayouch does not explore the phenomenological unconscious through a
frontal confrontation with the term “unconscious” as used in phenomenology.
Rather, he explores key phenomenological notions to bring forth a phenomenologi-
cal unconscious, the latter being then put to work beyond phenomenology, to dis-
cuss with psychoanalysis and feminism about gender. With the nonrepresentational
framework proper to phenomenology, which intermingles subject and object; the
notion of intercorporeality which bridges the gap between self and others (see also
T. Mooney); the notion of institution, blurring the boundaries of the present, carry-
ing the traces of a sedimented past and the call for a unachievable future; the
Merleau-Pontian conception of language, tying together repetition and subversion;
the circularity between nature and culture, what emerges is a notion of an uncon-
scious that is not exclusively verbal but also affective (see also J. Phillips, N. Depraz).
The unconscious is not the product of a culturally loaded repression of natural
drives, but an instituted affectivity in quest for figurability: just like an affect
detached from its primary objects may be secondarily attached to another figure, as
it often occurs in dreams, a given gender assignment may be the figuration found by
the affect disconnected from one’s originary gender multiplicity. This conception of
the unconscious, it is argued, avoids imposing categories stretching beyond history
and culture and that could be applied universally (see also A. Lingis); in particular,
it allows considering, in a non-pathologizing manner, processes of non-binary gen-
der configurations and polymorphous sexuality.
Dieter Lohmar argues in favor of a nonlinguistic mode of thinking which, inves-
tigated from a perspective that is rooted into Husserlian phenomenology, creates the
Introduction xv

space for reevaluating phenomena which psychoanalysis takes as its (conceptual


and therapeutic) target: how can we both know and not know something; how does
neurotic displacement operate? What is at stake here is a phenomenological study
of the effectiveness of unconsciousness. Scenic phantasma are short-term visual
states akin to daydreams which may not be accessible to verbal consciousness, but
which nonetheless shape our present actions, our plans for the future, and our recol-
lection of past experiences (see also T. Mooney, L. Ingerslev). Through this nonver-
bal process (see also J. Phillips), one may play out possible life scenarios; one may
repeat an activity while slightly and progressively modifying the role one really
played in it, allowing for better planning and problem-solving; one may retain a
central lesson of a previous experience, avoiding further mistakes and building new
habits on that basis. This nonlinguistic process is akin to a sort of knowledge insofar
as it preserves experiences into types, hence transforming a unique experience into
a source of reproducible knowledge; and it is akin to an unconscious process insofar
as it remains opaque to the conscious report a subject may give about himself, his
choices, his actions. Such unconscious knowledge is nonpublic, it is solitary: its aim
is not communication, nor the search for a truth that could be shared with others;
pragmatically oriented, this thought process rather aims at guiding one’s life, off-­
line first, before plunging into the “real” world.
Line Ryberg Ingerslev engages with an overlooked topic: our everyday life. How
does unconsciousness infiltrate our mode of being in the world, through the way
habits restlessly shape our actions and our familiarity with the world? Because we
are habitual bodies, our actions – those very actions which we feel ownership for
and which we are responsible for – always originate before we can become con-
scious of them; they are always ahead of ourselves, and in this sense, we are always
behind ourselves: we always started already, from elsewhere than our conscious
will. Thus, habits prevent any self-familiarity, any self-unity: we never experience
ourselves as fully unified autonomous agents; self-possession is broken, constitu-
tively, i.e., unbrokeness has never been and will never be. Cutting out any nostalgia
or promise of wholeness, this view contrasts with the consideration of habits as only
smoothening the world as familiar (see also T. Mooney, D. Lohmar) and poses a
challenge to the notion of agency classically tied to the conception of a subject
capable of accounting for her action – meaningfully or even rationally. What’s left,
then, of the agentive subject? The subject, in this view, is responsive: he responds,
and most importantly, he has to respond to the habit he always already finds himself
caught into: if habits arise despite myself, they do not occur without me. Experiencing
one’s body is experiencing the urge, the necessity, the constraint to surrender to
one’s habitual body, thereby responding to the actions which habits always already
started before me. Rather than negating the dimensions of our everyday actions
which repeat themselves without being graspable consciously, responding to our
habits is dealing with one’s self-brokenness and assuming self-alienation without
reducing our action to mere reaction about which we could decline responsibility.
xvi Introduction

Beyond Phenomenology

Natalie Depraz pushes the investigation of unconsciousness beyond classical phe-


nomenology. She specifically investigates the “heart unconscious” which presents a
twofold structure: organic (the heart is a muscle) and lived (the heart is the intuitive
and sensitive location of one’s affectivity). Bypassing the “hard problem” of correlat-
ing third-personal (neuronal, behavioral) modes of accessing nonconscious pro-
cesses, together with first-personal modes of accessing conscious states,
“cardiophenomenology” evolves from neurophenomenology and ambitions to inte-
grate measures of emotions which are both at once objective (the modulation of one’s
heartbeats according to one’s emotional states) and subjective (the lived experience
of the rhythm of one’s heartbeats, which nonetheless runs without one’s control over
it). In particular, it is argued that the emotion of surprise (see also F. Raffoul) provides
a measurable revelator of the unconscious, together with symptoms or slips of the
tongue: one’s experience of surprise would be one’s micro-experience of disruptions
occurring along the ongoing flow of one’s conscious life. As cardiophenomenology
makes it accessible through the fine-grained measurement of surprise, the heart
unconscious is revealed as a dynamic, multi-phased, temporally extended process.
Alphonso Lingis contrasts the psychoanalytic unconscious with the surrealist
unconscious. By doing this, he puts into question the appropriation of the uncon-
scious by psychoanalysis, by pointing out that this particular conception of the
unconscious relies upon and reinforces “metaphysical subjectivism.” The psycho-
analytic unconscious is anthropomorphic, subjective; it is also ethnocentric.
Psychoanalysis – thus understood – operates a reduction of unconscious forces to
what is psychoanalytically theorized or, more generally, to what is humanly mean-
ingful. Certainly, a very different – more charitable – light can be cast upon psycho-
analysis, as a theory and as a method, but what is more important is that, in an
appropriation of the phenomenological method, Lingis asks whether the formations
of the unconscious would appear differently if psychoanalytical interpretations
were suspended. Without prejudicing who holds the “proper” conception of the
unconscious, what stands out here is the importance of thinking again what is pre-
supposed under this notion. Is the unconscious meaningful or meaningless? Is it
human? Is it organized or a chaotic field of random forces? Is it a causal force or is
it deprived of any causal power? Can it be fully integrated to one’s conscious field
or is it an irreducible alterity? Can it be fully analyzed or is it a place of inexhaust-
ible abundance? Can one’s relation to unconscious forces be nurtured at will? Can
and should one domesticate unconscious forces? Is it the uncovering of unconscious
forces which may have a therapeutic impact? Can the uncovering of unconscious
forces be exploited at will in a creative performance? Is uncovering unconscious
forces an act of liberation from cultural, social, religious, moral, and rational con-
straints? Is the unconscious subjective? Singular? Are there collective unconscious
forces? Universal ones? Is the human’s unconscious inhuman? Are unconscious
forces a source of sufferance or a site of marvels?
Introduction xvii

Needless to say, to all these questions, none of the authors writing in this book
provide any definitive answer, but we hope that, by posing them polyphonically, we
provide some material to better understand them and further work on them.

Acknowledgments

In closing, we wish to take this opportunity to thank all of the contributors to this
volume. It is only through their generosity that this volume exists in its current form,
as a collection of diverse but interconnected chapters. In addition, we wish to thank
those individuals and funding bodies that supported the conference, which led up to
this book. In particular, our thanks go to Dermot Moran for providing funding assis-
tance together with the usage of the Newman House, University College Dublin.
Our thanks also go to Hadrien Laroche, the cultural attaché at the French Embassy
in Dublin for providing financial support for the conference. Our thanks also go to
Dominique Pradelle, director of the Husserl Archives, Ecole Normale Supérieure,
Paris, for participating to the founding of the conference. Additional thanks to Helen
Kennedy (UCD), Margaret Brady (UCD), and Karima Argentin (ENS) for the
administrative support leading up to and beyond the conference. Thanks also to
Audrey Petit-Trigg for her translation work, both during the conference and for the
present volume. Dylan Trigg’s work on this collection was supported by a Marie
Curie grant (FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IOF 624968), which is herein gratefully acknowl-
edged. Dylan Trigg would like to also thank Dorothée Legrand for her friendship
and intellectual camaraderie, both during the preparation of this volume and beyond,
and Dorothée Legrand would like to flip this sentence around to thank Dylan Trigg.

Paris, France Dorothée Legrand


Dublin, Ireland Dylan Trigg
Part I
Within the Husserlian Framework
Chapter 1
Husserl’s Layered Concept of the Human
Person: Conscious and Unconscious

Dermot Moran

Abstract Husserl’s mature phenomenology offers a complex and multi-layered


account of the constitution of the human person through a developmental analysis
of different stages of constitution, from the constitution and integration of the lived
body upward to the full, free, rational functioning of the mature human person. The
mature human person is, for Husserl, in the fullest sense, a self-reflective Cartesian
cogito, a self-conscious rational agent exercising conscious “position-takings”,
judgings, desirings, and willings. At the same time, a person is an intersubjective
social being, a member of a family, a group, a community, a nation, a participant in
empathic interpersonal relations with others in the context of a social world, an
environment, and a life-world, what Husserl calls socius. But, for Husserl, the self
is also necessarily rooted in nature, and lives through its sensations, drives and ten-
dencies, affections, feelings, emotions and motor capacities and especially through
its voluntary movements and decisions (Husserl’s “I can”). The ego has moments of
wakeful alertness but can also be sunk in sleep or dreaming. It has dispositions,
habits, a hexis or habitus, which gives it a network of habitual actions, stances and
motivations. Husserl’s account is an extraordinarily rich phenomenological account
of the person that contains analyses comparable to psychoanalytic explorations of
the unconscious, with which Husserl was barely familiar. In this paper I shall chart
Husserl’s conception of the person and explore some tensions in it especially
between its unconscious and conscious dimensions.

Keywords Husserl • Phenomenology • Consciousness • Freud • Unconsciousness •


Memory • Passivity

I must lie down where all the ladders start


In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
William Butler Yeats, The Circus Animals Desertion

D. Moran (*)
School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 3


D. Legrand, D. Trigg (eds.), Unconsciousness Between Phenomenology and
Psychoanalysis, Contributions To Phenomenology 88,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-55518-8_1
4 D. Moran

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) were almost exact
contemporaries, both attended Franz Brentano’s lectures in Vienna,1 and both were
involved in the understanding of subjective life and its meaning. As a result, various
efforts have been made over the years to explore the relations between Husserlian
phenomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis, between the descriptive phenomeno-
logical exploration of experienced, conscious life, in all its modalities (including
memory, fantasy, emotion, habitual action), and the analytic uncovering of uncon-
scious processes (repression, sublimation) and their effects.2
For many years, the standard view has been that Husserl’s phenomenology deals
only with the conscious self-reflective ego (what Husserl calls, following Descartes,
cogito) and its ‘lived experiences’ (Erlebnisse) that can be accessed in conscious
reflection (or at best through some kind of reflective reconstruction), whereas
Freudian psychoanalysis identifies unconscious processes, forces and energies, acts
of repression and recurrences, that are not immediately (and may never become)
available to the conscious subject, but rather must be identified through the media-
tion of the psychoanalytic engagement with an analyst working through hints,
traces, slips, ruptures, resistances, and absences, that point to these underlying
forces at work.3 For Freud, the psychology of the unconscious was a ‘depth psychol-
ogy’ that entails a whole vision of human nature that portrayed humans as strug-
gling to balance instinctual drives (the pleasure principle, the death instinct) as ways
of coping with sex and aggression, albeit that Freud also had a generally
Enlightenment view of humans as capable of rationality, freedom and love.4

1
Freud attended Brentano’s lectures in Vienna as a young student from 1874 to 1876, whereas
Husserl attended Brentano’s lectures 10 years later from 1884 to 1886. See Philip Merlan,
‘Brentano and Freud’, Journal of the History of Ideas vol. 6, no. 3 (Jun., 1945), pp. 375–377. The
lectures appeared to have no lasting impression on the founder of psychoanalysis, but see Raymond
E. Fancher, ‘Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint and Freud’s Early
Metapsychology’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 13 no. 3 (July 1977),
pp. 207–227, who discusses some comparisons in their approaches.
2
For a thorough, recent discussion of the literature on the relations between phenomenology and
psychoanalysis, see Nicholas Smith, Towards a Phenomenology of Repression – A Husserlian
Reply to the Freudian Challenge, Stockholm Studies in Philosophy 34 (Stockholm: Stockholm
University, 2010), especially pp. 10–38. See also Gunnar Karlsson, ‘Phenomenology and
Psychoanalysis’, in his Psychoanalysis in a New Light (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010), pp. 1–20. See also Evelyne Grossmann, ‘Inconscient freudien, inconsient phénomé-
nologique’, Rue Descartes vol. 4 no. 4 (2010), pp. 106–112.
3
For an important discussion of psychoanalysis in relation to phenomenology, see Herbert
Spiegelberg, Phenomenology in Psychology and Psychiatry. A Historical Introduction (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1972), especially pp. 127ff. See also the work of Alphonse de
Waelhens, especially his, ‘Sur l’inconscient et la pensée philosophique’, in L’ Inconscient (Paris,
Desclée de Brouwer, 1966) and his ‘Réflections sur une problématique husserlienne de
l’inconscient, Husserl et Hegel’, in H. L. Van Breda and J. Taminiaux, eds, Edmund Husserl 1859–
1959. Recueil commemoratif publié à l’occasion de centenaire de la naissance du philosophe (The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1959). See also Herman Drüe, ‘Psychoanalysis’, in Lester Embree, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), pp. 568–572.
4
See Philip Rieff, Freud. The Mind of a Moralist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977),
p. 187.
1 Husserl’s Layered Concept of the Human Person: Conscious and Unconscious 5

In attempting to discuss the parallels between Husserl and Freud it is important


to recall that Husserl had a particularly narrow and limited view of Freud’s contri-
bution. Similarly, as I argue, Husserl’s thought is more complex than traditionally
conceived (in part the blame lay in Husserl’s explicit espousal of Cartesianism); and
so too is Freud’s but Freud – certainly in the early part of the twentieth century –
was conceived more narrowly (primarily on the basis of The Interpretation of
Dreams) and pessimistically than he is now viewed.5 Karl Jaspers, for instance, was
perhaps the most explicit philosophical critic of psychoanalysis in the 1920 revision
of his General Psychopathology.6 Ironically, both phenomenology and psychoanal-
ysis were denounced by the National Socialists in Germany after 1933 as “Jewish”
sciences. It was in fact, Eugen Fink who seemed to be particularly interested in the
relations between phenomenology and various forms of ‘depth psychology’. The
Frankfurt School, on the other hand, especially through the work of Horkheimer,
Adorno and Marcuse seemed to embrace Freud and psychoanalysis.7
Husserl’s exhaustively detailed exploration of the intentional structures and syn-
theses of the flow of experiential consciousness (Buwusstseinsstrom, Erlebnisstrom),
through disciplined methodological reflection, operating under the ‘bracketing’
(einklammern) and ‘suspension’ (epoché) of assumptions of actuality or ‘belief in
being’ (Seinsglaube), and deliberately cast in the language of Cartesian solipsism
(especially in Husserl’s Ideas I and Cartesian Meditations), seems at first glance to
rule out the positing of an inaccessible, unconscious domain and to be in principle
incapable of tracking unconscious states.
In addition, the mature Husserl’s explication of all ‘sense and being’ (Sinn und
Sein) of the entire world of experience as the intentional ‘achievement’ (Leistung)
of the transcendental ego seems, moreover, to bring all experience within the pur-
view of the ego and be at least in principle, available for conscious inspection.
Furthermore, it is often pointed out that what Husserl occasionally alludes to as
the ‘unconscious’ (das Unbewusste) is in fact what Freud would have called the

5
See Hannah S. Decker, “The Reception of Psychoanalysis in Germany,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History 24 no. 4 (1982), pp. 589–602; and her Freud in Germany: Revolution and
Reaction in Science 1893–1907 (New York: International Universities Press, 1977).
6
See Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and his Die geistige Situation der Zeit (1931), trans.
as Man in the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1957). Jaspers is increasingly critical of
psychoanalysis, see Matthias Bormuth, Life Conduct in Modern Times: Karl Jaspers and
Psychoanalysis (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), and his “Karl Jaspers as a Critic of Psychoanalysis A
Short Sketch of a Long Story,” Existenz. International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics,
and the Arts, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 1–10.
7
See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute
of Social Research, 1923–50 m(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973) and Rolf Wiggershaus, The
Frankfurt School. Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (London and Cambridge: Polity/
The MIT Press, 1994). See also Joel Whitebook, Joel, “Fantasy and critique: some thoughts on
Freud and the Frankfurt School,” in David M. Rasmussen (ed.), Handbook of Critical Theory.
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), pp. 287–304.
6 D. Moran

‘pre-conscious’,8 and, in reverse, standardly, phenomenologists tend to regard


Husserl’s transcendental approach as incompatible with what they regarded as
Freud’s mechanistic naturalism of the hidden ‘forces’ of the ‘id’ and their effects.
Finally, Husserl’s interest in the syntheses performed by agent consciousness appears
to contrast with Freud’s account of the primacy of repression as an unconscious
process.
Paul Ricoeur was one of the first phenomenologically trained thinkers, in his
1965 ground-breaking and comprehensive hermeneutical study of the whole of
Freud’s corpus, to explore in some detail the relations between Freud’s explorations
of the terrain of the unconscious and Husserl’s phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty
earlier also made some explorations in this regard). Ricoeur, in particular, links
Husserl’s passive synthesis and his concept of association with the Freudian uncon-
scious.9 He remarks that no other philosophy of reflection has come as close as
Husserl did to Freud’s concept of the unconscious.10 Others, too, have seen the close
proximity between Husserl’s and Freud’s investigations. Thus, the mathematician
and logician Kurt Gödel once remarked that ‘both Husserl and Freud considered –
in different ways – subconscious thinking’.11 Husserl does see the stream of con-
sciousness as broadly divided into ‘waking’ and ‘sleeping’ states, and waking states
as built around perception. Indeed, his most careful analyses focus on embodied
perception as that which provides our most basic, primitive and enduring contact
with others and with the world.
Typically, the best way to approach Husserl on the unconscious has been, follow-
ing Ricoeur’s suggestion, to explore his analyses of passive synthesis.12 Another inter-
esting way of approach, proposed by the phenomenologist and psychoanalyst
Rudolf Bernet, is to examine the complex relations that Husserl finds between the
experience of the living present and memory and fantasy.13 In a powerful and

8
This was indeed the view of Elmar Holenstein in his Husserls Phänomenologie der Assoziation.
Zu Struktur und Funktion eines Grundprinzips der passive Genesis bei Edmund Husserl (The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1972), see especially p. 322.
9
See Paul Ricoeur, De l’interprétation. Essai sur Sigmund Freud (Paris: LeSeuil, 1965), trans.
D. Savage Freud and Philosophy. An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University, 1970),
especially pp. 380 ff.
10
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, op. cit., p. 376. Ricoeur is particular is referring to Freud’s 1915
paper on ‘The Unconscious’.
11
See Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1996), p. 167.
12
See Edmund Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und
Forschungsmanuskripten, 1918–1926, Husserliana (hereafter ‘Hua’) XI, ed. M. Fleischer ( (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962); trans. Anthony J. Steinbock, as Analyses Concerning Passive and
Active Synthesis (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).
13
For a reading of Husserl’s phenomenology in relation to Freud, see Rudolf Bernet, ‘Le freudisme
de Husserl: une phénoménologie de la pulsion et des émotions’, in Jocelyt Benoist, ed., Husserl
(Paris: Cerf « Les cahiers d’histoire de la philosophie », 2008), pp. 125–147. See also Natalie
Depraz, ‘Pulsion, instinct, désir. Que. signifie Trieb cehz Husserl? À l’épreuve des perspectives de
Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Jonas et Scheler’, Alter 9 (2001), pp. 113–125; and Francesco S. Trincia,
1 Husserl’s Layered Concept of the Human Person: Conscious and Unconscious 7

i­lluminating discussion, Rudolf Bernet locates Husserl’s discussion of the unconscious


primarily in his account of ‘presentification’ or ‘presentation’ (Vergegenwärtigung), a
kind of representational or ‘making present’ consciousness found in different forms
in memory, fantasy, looking at photographs and pictures, and also in empathic experi-
ences of other people (present, past, real or fictional). Already in his early writings on
perception, imagination and image consciousness from around 1905, Husserl pro-
duced very careful accounts of fantasy, dream, and other representational states, and
indeed, had discussed how for instance real wishes (e.g. the desire to have a holiday)
can emerge within flights of daydream fantasy or in a dream.14
A present consciousness such as a perception, Bernet says, can comport itself
towards a non-present consciousness such as a fantasy.15 Indeed, perception and
fantasy are usually found intertwined. Fantasy depends or is founded on perception,
according to Husserl, but floats free in a specific way by not insisting on the present
givenness of the fantasized object. Bernet criticizes Husserl for the limitations in his
characterization of fantasy as such: Husserl always sees it as somehow grounded in
or based on perceptions or memories and is surrounded by a consciousness of the
world although not directly connected to it.16 Fantasy, for him, always amounts to a
diminished quasi-perception. Husserl, according to Bernet, had to make fantasy-­
experiences dependent on the experience of a contrast with present experienced
events. Bernet argues that the concept of the unconscious must be grounded in the
notion of presentification as a non-positing experience (in contrast to memory) that
may deal with events that may never have been actual.17 Fantasies in this sense can
have their own objects and trajectory without being anchored to actuality. Fantasy,
for Husserl, can enfold real feelings and wishes as well as fantasy feelings and
wishes (e.g. I may identify with a film characters desire to kill someone in a movie
but do not exit the movie theatre with a real desire to murder in my heart).
Husserl himself only very rarely refers to psychoanalysis in his work. In Ideas
II,18 Husserl discusses the domains of passivity, habituality and ‘sedimentation’,

‘Some Observations on Husserl and Freud’, in D. Lohmar and J. Brudzínska, eds, Founding
Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically, Phaenomenologica 199 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012),
pp. 235–242.
14
See E. Husserl, Phantasy, Image Consciousness and Memory (1895–1925), trans. John Brough,
Husserl Collected Works vol. XI (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 251–52.
15
Rudolf Bernet, ‘Unconscious Consciousness in Husserl and Freud’, Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences (2002), pp. 327–351; reprinted in Donn Welton, ed., The New Husserl. A
Critical Reader (Bloomington, IN: Indiana U. P. 2003), pp. 199–222, especially, p. 201.
16
Bernet, ‘Unconscious Consciousness in Husserl and Freud’, The New Husserl. A Critical Reader,
op. cit., p. 204.
17
See also Nicolas de Warren, ‘Time and the Double-Life of Subjectivity’, Journal of the British
Society for Phenomenology vol. 40 no. 2 (2009), pp. 155–169. De Warren sees Husserl as recog-
nizing the complex ways that consciousness can be split and doubled.
18
E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie.
Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Hrsg. Marly Biemel,
Husserliana IV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1952); trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer, Ideas pertaining
to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Husserl Collected
Works III (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989). Hereafter “Ideas II’.
8 D. Moran

experiences where the ego simply finds itself and does not quite know how it got
there. Thus, in Ideas II § 56 (b), he speaks about the domain of unnoticed or
unacknowledged motivations that ‘psychoanalysis’ (Psychoanalyse, Ideas II, p. 235:
Hua IV 222) might investigate further. Despite its focus on the unconscious, there
are just two brief references to Freud and psychoanalysis in the recently published
Husserliana volume of notes that the editors have entitled Limit Problems of
Phenomenology. Analyses of the Unconscious and of Instincts (2014).19
In Walter Biemel’s critical Husserliana edition of Husserl’s Crisis of the European
Sciences (1954),20 there is a reference to ‘depth psychology’ (Tiefenpsychologie,
Crisis p. 386; VI 473), by which presumably is meant Freudian psychoanalysis
(although possibly including Freud and Adler). This reference occurs in an
Appendix Husserl’s then assistant Eugen Fink, added to Husserl’s Crisis in 1936.21
This Appendix stresses that the exploration of the unconscious must begin from a
thorough study of ‘being conscious’ (Bewusstheit). Furthermore, Fink acknowledges
that one should not automatically assume that the ‘unconscious’ is equivalent to all
sorts of obscure awareness, after-effects of conscious states that can subsequently
be re-awakened, since the practitioners of depth psychology actually claim the
reverse, namely, that all conscious life is founded on the unconscious which is prior.
Fink claims that depth psychology itself takes unconscious phenomena as self-­
evident in their own way:
For the unconscious, too, as well as for consciousness, there exists the illusion of everyday,
given immediacy: we are all familiar, after all, with the phenomena of sleep, of fainting, of
being overtaken by obscure driving forces, creative states, and the like. (Crisis, p. 387; VI 474)

Fink rejects as “naïve” and “dogmatic” certain theoretical constructions (he means
Freud) that have been built on the recognition of the unconscious, e.g. those that
invoke the ‘naturalistic mechanism of the “libido”’ (Crisis, p. 386; VI 474) or some
kind of “dynamics” of instincts and drives. Fink claims that these discussions begin
from the naïve assumption that conscious life is immediately given and, as it were,
transparent, whereas in fact Husserlian intentional analysis has shown that con-
scious life is a very complex and multilayered structure. Only when ‘wakeful’ con-
sciousness as such is clarified can a proper discussion of the unconscious as such be
undertaken.22 Presumably Husserl and Fink discussed the problem of the Freudian

19
See E. Husserl, Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der
Instinkte. Metaphysik. Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1908–1937, ed. Rochus Sowa and
Thomas Vongehr, Husserliana XLII (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), especially pp. 113 and 126.
20
E. Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie.
Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie, ed.Walter Biemel, Husserliana Vol. VI
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954), substantially translated by David Carr as The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern U.P., 1970), with some supplements omitted. Hereafter Crisis, fol-
lowed by page number of English translation and Husserliana volume and page number.
21
Eugen Fink’s discussion of the unconscious was included by Walter Biemel as an Appendix in
his edition of the Crisis, pp. 385–87; Hua VI 473–75.
22
Husserl sometimes comment on the fact that the wakeful ego is punctuated by periods of sleep
and has to actively join itself to earlier states through acts of synthesis. Husserl leaves it an open
question as to whether there is ever pure ‘unconsciousness’ in the sense of there being no flicker of
1 Husserl’s Layered Concept of the Human Person: Conscious and Unconscious 9

unconscious on one or more of their daily walks in the hills above Freiburg and it is
undoubtedly the case that some of Husserl’s own students were interested in psy-
choanalysis. The mature Husserl regularly distinguishes between the ‘awake’ or
‘wakeful ego’ (das wache Ich) and the ego sunk in sleep or dream or other altered
states (e.g. intoxication). In Ideas II, for instance, he speaks of the ‘sleeping ego’
(das schlafende Ich) as sunk in what he calls ‘ego-matter’ (Ichmaterie, Ideas II § 58,
p. 264 IV 253) or hyle. In this state the ego is undifferentiated, it is ‘ego sunkenness’
(Ichversunkenheit). But Husserl was not clear on the best way of approaching these
‘dull’ (dumpf) conscious states (Ideas II § 26).
Aside from Eugen Fink’s remarks, it is accurate to state that Husserl’s phenom-
enology in Freiburg continued to develop more or less in parallel to Freudian psy-
choanalysis, without direct contact between the two disciplines (Freud himself
never refers by name to Husserl and indeed there are only a couple of generic refer-
ences to ‘psychological phenomenology’ in Freud’s works). In Husserl’s circle in
Göttingen, Max Scheler, who came to deliver public lectures, had a deep interest in
and critical understanding of Freud23 and discussed him in his The Essence of
Sympathy24 and elsewhere. Generally, speaking Scheler is critical of Freud’s natu-
ralism and his lack of appreciation that human beings can discriminate and choose
between values.25 But Scheler does find that Freud’s (albeit mistaken) views must
be discussed in any serious phenomenological exploration of the emotions, and
especially the nature of sexual love and shame (where Scheler is critical of Freud’s
postulations).26
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (especially in his unfinished Working Notes written in
1959 and 1960 and published posthumously in The Visible and the Invisible, 1964),27
does take Freudian psychoanalysis more seriously and indeed thinks that Freud’s
suspicion towards the lived experience as it presents itself is pre-eminently ‘philo-
sophical’ (VI, p. 181; 233). In fact, Merleau-Ponty is explicating a ­phenomenological
conception of the unconscious that is, I believe, close to that which Husserl would
have developed and which we can piece together from his scattered remarks.

consciousness at all. See Hanne Jacobs, ‘Towards a Phenomenological Account of Personal


Identity’, in Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, Filip Mattens, eds, Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences.
Essays in Commemoration of Edmund Husserl (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 333–362.
23
For a discussion of Max Scheler’s relation with Sigmund Freud, see Lou Andreas-Salome’s
reflections in her In der Schule bei Freud. Tagebuch eines Jahres 1912–1913 (Zurich: Max Niehans,
1958), pp. 197–203, trans. Stanley Leavey as The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salome (New
York: Basic Books, 1964).
24
See Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (London: Routledge and Kegal
Paul, I954), especially pp. 22–26 (on the nature of pathological identification in a discussion of
Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego); pp. 115–117 (for the critique of Freud’s
view of sexual love); and pp. 177–79 (for a discussion of the difference between libido and sexual
drive and the nature of repression and sublimation).
25
Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, op. cit., p. 115.
26
See Max Scheler, ‘Shame and Feelings of Modesty’ [1913], in M. Scheler, Person and Self-
Value. Three Essays, trans. Manfred S. Frings (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1987), especially pp. 31 ff.
27
M. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, texte établi par Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard,
1964), trans. A. Lingis, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston: Northwestern U.P., 1968).
Hereafter ‘VI’ followed by the page number of the English translation and the French original.
10 D. Moran

Dreams and other phenomena must be scrutinized critically in their apparent given-
ness, but, the late Merleau-Ponty thinks, the ambiguous existential structures and
processes in which we live in the world are not somehow ‘behind’ the phenomena
(as in Freud) but between them (VI, p. 232; 281). The flow of experiences that
Husserl described does not unfold solely in the present but in a landscape that is a
‘field of being’ (champ d’être, VI, p. 240; 289). As Merleau-Ponty puts it: ‘The
“associations” of psychoanalysis are in reality “rays” of time and of the world’
(VI, p. 240; 289). In his view the phenomenon of temporality – and the peculiar
indefinite pastness of the time of the unconscious – needs to be revisited (VI, p. 243;
291–92).
Following Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenologist and psychiatrist Thomas Fuchs
suggests that, if the unconscious is considered more as a horizon of conscious life
rather than as a depth below it, then the concept of the unconscious can be success-
fully accommodated within Husserlian phenomenology. In fact, Fuchs speaks of the
unconscious as a ‘horizontal dimension of the lived body, lived space and
intercorporeality’.28 This seems to be consistent with Husserl’s own approach. In
fact, Husserl considers his discovery of ‘horizon-intentionality’ to be one of his
most original contributions to consciousness studies.
In contrast to the writings of Husserl, Martin Heidegger’s work did directly stim-
ulate a vigorous encounter between hermeneutical phenomenology and psychoanal-
ysis, both in terms of the existential phenomenological psychology as well as in
terms of the Lacanian approach which is heavily dependent on Heidegger’s concep-
tion of language. Inspired by Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time in 1927, a new
existential phenomenological analysis – Daseinsanalyse – was developed by
Ludwig Binswanger (a life-long friend of Freud),29 Medard Boss,30 and others,
which emphasised human spatial and temporal locatedness, mood and attunement
(Stimmung) as part of an overall structure of ‘being-in-the-world’ (In-der-Welt-­
Sein). This form of analysis involved detailed exploration of phenomena such as
dream, anxiety, depression (melancholia), trauma, and so on, but within the context
of the person’s overall modality of existing in the world (including, crucially, the
manner in which the person experienced temporality).31 Ironically, Heidegger him-
self, much later, in his Zollikon seminars with Boss, criticized this Daseinsanalyse

28
Thomas Fuchs, ‘Body Memory and the Unconscious’, in Dieter Lohmar and Jagna Brudzínska,
eds, Founding Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically, Phaenomenologica 199 (Dordrecht: Springer,
2012), pp. 69–82.
29
See Ludwig Binswanger, Die Bedeutung der Daseinsanalytik Martin Heideggers für das
Selbstverständnis der Psychiatrie, in Carlos Estrada et al., eds, Martin Heideggers Einfluss auf die
Wissenschaften (Berne, 1949), pp. 58–72.
30
See Medard Boss, Psychoanalysis and Daseinsanalysis, trans. Ludwig Lefebre (New York:
Basic Books, 1982).
31
See Ludwig Binswanger, Melancholie und Manie: Phänomenologische Studien (Pfullingen:
Neske, 1960). See also Stefano Micali, Überschüsse der Erfahrung, Grenzdimensionen des Ich
nach Husserl (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008).
1 Husserl’s Layered Concept of the Human Person: Conscious and Unconscious 11

for focusing solely on being-in-the-world and ignoring the larger issue of the
‘understanding of Being’ (Seinsverständnis).32
In these seminars, Heidegger maintained a distance from the Freudian concept of
the unconscious and maintained that human concealment (the parallel of Freud’s
repression) is actually a form of manifestation and dwelling in the ‘clearing’ (die
Lichtung).33 In this regard, Heidegger’s position is not that different from Husserl’s
(and Fink’s). Heidegger, for instance, points out that although a child and an old
person may both live in the same present, their ‘presencing’ of that temporal present
is not the same. The child is more forward-facing and futural, whereas the old per-
son dwells in ‘having-been-ness’.34 These temporal differences are not immediately
obvious but can be disclosed. As Merleau-Ponty had also pointed out, the designa-
tion of events in the unconscious as somehow in a ‘past’ that was never present is
exceptionally problematic and needs careful reframing in terms of the ‘ecstatic’
character of human existence.
In post-war France, furthermore, the existential phenomenological descriptions
of human existence found in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre35 brought phenomenol-
ogy into dialogical confrontation with classical Freudian psychoanalysis Sartre
rejected the Freudian conception of the ‘id’, the ‘censor’ and what he regarded as
the mechanistic languages of hidden drives and affirmed human capacity for free-
dom. Sartre thought, however, that a new kind of existential psychoanalysis could
be developed that was based not on early sexual experiences and traumas but on
original choices (‘project’) made by individuals.36
Soon after, Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) integrated phenomenological insights
concerning the nature of language from the late Heidegger (and also Merleau-­
Ponty) into his revision of Freudian psychoanalysis (his retour à Freud) with his
famous pronouncement that the unconscious is structured like a language.37 In these

32
M. Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars. Protocols–Conversations–Letters, ed. Medard Boss, trans.
Fritz Mayr and Richard Askay (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001),
pp. 188–195.
33
M. Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, op. cit., pp. 182–83.
34
Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars, op. cit., p. 183.
35
Jean-Paul Sartre criticizes Freud’s conception of the censor and his mechanistic way of treating
self-deception or ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi) in L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénomé-
nologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), trans. Hazel Barnes, Being and Nothingness. An Essay on
Phenomenological Ontology (London: Routledge, 1995), see especially, p. 53. For Sartre, the
Freudian accounts involving the unconscious masks the genuine double-sidedness of conscious-
ness in bad faith. See Jerome Neu, ‘Divided Minds: Sartre’s “Bad Faith” Critique of Freud’, The
Review of Metaphysics Vol. 42, No. 1 (Sept., 1988), pp. 79–101 and Ivan Soll, ‘Sartre’s Rejection
of the Freudian Unconscious’, in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La
Salle, IL: Open Court, The Library of Living Philosophers, 1981), and Jonathan Webber, ‘Bad
Faith and the Unconscious’, The International Encyclopaedia of Ethics, ed. Hugh LaFolette, John
Diegh, and Sarah Stroud (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
36
See Jean-Paul Sartre, Existential Psychoanalysis, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1953).
37
For Merleau-Ponty’s relation to Jacques Lacan, see James Phillips, ‘Lacan and Merleau-Ponty:
The Confrontation of Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology’, in David Pettigrew and François
Raffoul, eds, Disseminating Lacan (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 69–106. For the
12 D. Moran

rich post-war explorations, the work of Edmund Husserl (apart from the scattered
musings in the late Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished Notes de cours that we have already
discussed), as opposed to Heidegger, was largely ignored.38
Of course, in classical Freudian psychoanalysis, as Eugen Fink had recognized,
the unconscious as such is not accessible in itself through conscious reflection, it is
‘latent’ in Freud’s term,39 and it is detected only as it manifests itself in its irruptions
in consciousness, in dreams, obsessions, repetitive actions, fixed attitudes, associa-
tions, neuroses, and so on. This led Freud to focus on phenomena in conscious life,
such as slips of the tongue, dreams, delusions, random associations, and regressive
phenomena, that somehow are revelatory of deeply buried suppressed trauma and
drives.40 It is true that the concept of anxiety (Angst) as explored in Heidegger’s
phenomenology – and the developments by Binswanger, Boss, and others – are
more usually associated with psychoanalytic explorations than with Husserlian phe-
nomenology. But there is plenty of scope within Husserl also for exploring the
region of the ‘unconscious’ (das Unbewusste) understood in part as encompassing
the horizons around the waking, conscious ego, as we shall now explore.
Consistent with Freud, Husserl sees life as involving a more or less unconscious,
instinctive ‘striving’ (Leben ist Streben is a familiar Husserlian refrain, cf. Hua XV
408)41 towards goals and the fulfilment of intentions. Both have a conception of
human life as the harmonization or balancing of conflicting forces. In agreement
with nineteenth-century biology, Husserl thinks that the most basic drive of
consciousness is towards living itself: ‘being is self-preservation’ (Sein ist
­

Heidegger/Lacan relation, see William Richardson, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Being-Question’, in


Interpreting Lacan, ed. Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1983). For the relation between Husserl and Lacan, see ‘Edmund Husserl and Jacques Lacan: An
Ethical Difference in Epistemology?’ in D. Lohmar and J. Brudzínska, eds, Founding
Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically, Phaenomenologica 199 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012),
pp. 133–147.
38
The focus has largely been on the relation between Merleau-Ponty and Lacan, see David Michael
Levin, ‘A Responsive Voice: Language without the Modern Subject’ Chiasmi International vol. 1
(1999), pp. 65–102, and Rudolf Bernet, ‘The Phenomenon of the Gaze in Merleau-Ponty and
Lacan’, Chiasmi International vol. 1 (1999), pp. 105–118.
39
See in particular, Sigmund Freud, ‘The Unconscious’ (1915), in Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud. Vol 14. On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on
Metapsychology and Other Works (1914–1916), trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 2001),
pp. 159–216. In this essay Freud discusses whether an unconscious presentation (Vorstellung) can
again become conscious under a new ‘registration’ from a conscious act, employing much the
same terminology (presentations, acts) as the school of Brentano.
40
Rudolf Bernet, ‘Unconscious Consciousness in Husserl and Freud’, Phenomenology and the
Cognitive Sciences (2002), pp. 327–351; reprinted in D. Welton, ed., The New Husserl. A Critical
Reader, op. cit, and idem, ‘The Unconscious Between Representation and Drive: Freud, Husserl,
and Schopenhauer’, in: John J. Drummond and James G. Hart, eds, The Truthful and the Good.
Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski, Contributions to Phenomenology 23 (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1996), pp. 81–95.
41
E. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass. Dritter Teil.
1929–1935, ed. Iso Kern, Husserliana XV (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973). Hereafter ‘Hua XV’ and
page number.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
johon loppusoinnuksi kelpasi melkein mikä pääte hyvänsä. Tämä
helppo ja mukava runomitta sopi kaikensävyisille runoille,
murheisille, leikkisille ja juhlallisille. Kokonaisen kokoelman
»kukkakimppuja», »seppeleitä» j.n.e. voisi poimia tämänaikuisten
runovihkojen nimistä. Kaikki lainaavat, kaikki elävät lainoista. Kieli on
vanhaa, ajatukset ja tunteet samoin. Täällä, kuten muuallakin,
epigooniajan epäitsenäisyys.

Voisi sanoa, että aika oli epäkiitollista taiteellisemmalle runoudelle,


että ajan ilmapiiri oli ahdas ja raskashenkinen. Eikä mikään
kapinoiva, vapauttava runous riko ajan rauhaa, ei mikään
mielikuvituksen väriräiske ajan harmautta. Jokainen aika tarjoo
aineksia runoudelle, niin tämäkin. Ne pari todellista runoilijaa, jotka
aika synnytti, eivät niitä käyttäneet, eivät olleet kyllin suuria niitä
käyttääkseen. Ajan ankara paine ei destilloi heistä sitä kypsää
katkeruutta tai uhmaa, joka tällaisenakin maata matavana aikana
voisi virittää korkean runouden inspiratsion. Koidulan isänmaallinen
uhrituli oli sammunut, persoonallisen, syvempiä tunnekerroksia
paljastavan runouden aika ei vielä ollut tullut, jäljelle jäi hiljainen,
jokapäiväisyyteen taipuva idylli, eleegisine pohjasävyineen. Siinä he
etsivät ja löysivät ilmaisumuotonsa.

Anna Haavan ja K.E. Söötin päämerkitys on siinä, että he ovat


ylläpitäneet taiteellisemman laulun traditsiota matalalauluisena
aikana. Heidän tasonsa on keskinkertaisuus, mutta sellainen hyvä,
kunnon keskinkertaisuus, joka voi olla ponnistusastimena
korkeammalle taiteelle. He eivät ole luoneet mitään varsinaisesti
uutta ei muotoon eikä sisällykseen nähden. Heiltä puuttuu kielellisen
mielikuvituksen kekseliäisyys, he tyytyivät kieleen, sellaisena kuin
sen tapasivat, se riitti heidän ilmaisukeinokseen semmoisenaan, niin
muokkaamaton kuin se todenteolla vielä oli. Heidän yksitoikkoista ja
yksinkertaista runomittaansa ei särje mikään vivahdusrikkaampaa
muotoa vaativa mieliala. Kumpainenkin on ihan viime aikoina
koittanut laajentaa runoutensa rajoja; vers libre on houkuttanut
molempia, tuomatta muuta kuin vieraan sävyn heidän runouteensa.

Lahjakkaampi heistä on epäilemättä Anna Haava, synt. v. 1864.


Hän on tähän saakka Viron ainoa eroottinen runoilija. Koidulan
rakkausrunot ovat kaavamaisia, myöhemmästä runoudesta on
Gustav Suitsin ihana »Inspiratsio» harvinaisuus hänen
tuotannossaan, paria sensualistista koetta lukuunottamatta, ja
Willem Grünthalin runollinen luonnonpalvelus ei salli muita jumalia.
Anna Haavan luonteenomaisimmat runot ovat juuri rakkausrunoja,
aito naisellisen tunne-elämän synnyttämiä, joskus veitikkamaisia,
joskus haaveksivia, täynnä alistumista ja rakastetun jumaloimista,
nöyryyttä ja naivisuutta. Niissä ei ole nimeksikään sensualismin
tuntua. Rakkaus on niissä olemassa-oloaan anteeksi anovaa,
ylimalkaista. Paitsi rakkausrunoissa onnistuu Anna Haava joskus
hiljaisen, melkein uskonnollisen kaipauksen täyttämissä runoissa,
jonkinlaisessa mailmallisuudesta pois halajavassa idealismissa,
jonka kypsin ilmaus on hänen kaunis runonsa Mägede põues
(Vuorten helmassa), jossa tätä ihanne- ja rauhan maata kuvitellaan
vuorten ympäröimänä järviseutuna. Yllätykseltä sensijaan vaikuttaa
Anna Haavan runoudessa joukko leikillisiä maalaiselämän
kuvauksia, raikkaan huumorin täyttämiä, hauskoja kyläakvarelleja
valoisissa väreissä.

Värittömämpi persoonallisuutena on K.E. Sööt, synt. 1862. Hänen


runoutensa muistuttaa Anna Haavan runoutta, mutta on kuivempaa
ja karumpaa. Hänellä on Anna Haavan runouden heikkoudet, mutta
ei kaikkia sen hyveitä. Parhaiten hänkin onnistuu eleegisen
tunnelman yhtyessä isänmaalliseen ajatukseen tai henkilökohtaiseen
muistelmaan ja mielialaan.

Seisahdusajoillakin voi olla salainen kehitysvieterinsä, joka


ulkonaisen painon poistuttua taas on valmis ponnahtamaan.
Kukoistuskausien edelläkävijöinä on niillä valmistava, energiaa
keräävä merkitys. Virossa, venäläistyttämistoimenpiteiden hiukankin
lauhduttua, alkaa kehitysilmapuntari taas nopeasti nousta. Mutta se
ei tapahdu enää kansallisen romantiikan kimmeltävien tunnustähtien
alla. Aika on ylöspäin pyrkivän, sitkeän ja karun realismin, joka
yhteiskunnallisessa järjestymisessä ja kansallisessa valistustyössä,
viime aikoina erittäin kansan aineellisessa vaurastumisessa näkee
korkeamman kulttuurin pohjan. Aika on yhteiskunnallisen työn eikä
taiteen. Saksalaisen vaikutuksen kanssa risteytyy venäläinen
vaikutus, joka kuitenkin ymppää virolaiseen henkiseen elämään
enimmäkseen venäläisen hengen kielteisiä puolia. Tähän asti
yhteisen kansallisuusaatteen yhdistämä kansa alkaa jakautua
luokka-eroituksen perustalla. Alkaa köyhälistön liike, joka yhtyy 1905
vuoden vallankumouksen valtaväylään.

Tämän virkeän yhteiskunnallisen nousu-ajan puitteissa,


yksilöllisine tarkoitusperineen tavallaan sen vastakohtana, mutta
samalla sen orgaanisena jatkona, alussa kulkien melkein
tasasuuntaa vasemmistoliikkeen keralla, myöhemmin siitä selvästi
eristyen, kohtaa meitä vallankumous-vuosien paikkeilla uusi ilmiö
Viron henkisen elämän alalla, Noor-Eestin kirjallis-taiteellinen liike,
joka puolestaan merkitsee kirjallista vallankumousta, tässä
tapauksessa oikeastaan vain teoreettisesti olemassa olevien
vanhain jumalain särkemistä. Noor-Eestillä ei ole ollut mitään
taiteellista suuruutta kukistettavanaan. Sen kriitillinen työ on ollut
välttämätöntä pikkuperkausta, ja etusijalle jäävät sen asettamat
uudet tarkoitusperät ja uudet kirjalliset ihanteet.

Noor-Eesti nimellisen ryhmän perusti kuusi vuotta takaperin joukko


nuoria kirjailijoita, — myöhemmin on liikkeeseen yhtynyt useita
kuvaamataiteilijoitakin — jotka olivat ottaneet tehtäväkseen
kirjallisuuden kohoittamisen taiteelliselle tasolle, ja vuorovaikutuksen
aikaansaamisen Länsi-Euroopan kulttuurin kanssa. Tarkoitusperiään
on ryhmä koettanut toteuttaa etupäässä julkaisemissaan albumeissa
Noor-Eesti I, II, III ja samannimisessä, viime vuodesta alkaen
ilmestyvässä kirjallistaiteellisessa aikakauskirjassa.

Uusi viini vaati uusia leilejä, uudet tunteet uusia ilmaisumuotoja.


Muoto tuli tunnussanaksi, kielen kaikenpuolinen hionta lähimmäksi
päämääräksi. Saksalaista ja venäläistä vaikutusta vastaan nousi
länsi-eurooppalainen, gallialainen vaikutus, joka vaati kiinteämpää
taiteellisuutta, ankarampaa valintaa. Yhteiskunnallisten tendenssien
vastakohdaksi kohosivat yksilölliset, yleistävän runouden sijaan
persoonallisen tunneilmaisun vaatimus. Modernismi, tässä
käsitettynä yksilöllisenä, eurooppalaisuuden ilmakehään pyrkivänä
taiteena, oli uloittunut Viroon.

Kielenviljelyksessä on Noor-Eestillä suuria ansioita. Hyvin


käsittäen, että runouden ensimäinen ehto on ilmaisuvälineen
täydellisyys, on Noor-Eesti tehnyt voitavansa rikastuttaakseen Viron
niin köyhää kirjakieltä. Se on kaivautunut kansanrunouden hetteisiin,
kutsunut avukseen murteet ja paikallissanastot, luonut uusia sanoja,
tosin valitettavasti myös raskauttaen uudistuspyrkimyksiään
vieraskielisten sanojen liian runsaalla painolastilla. Vasta Noor-
Eestin mukana on yksilöllinen tyyli päässyt Viron sekä
suorasanaiseen että laulurunouteen.
Noor-Eestin kirjailijat ovat kaikki vielä kehityksensä alussa, joskin
se jo useimmilla on itsetietoisesti viitoitettu. Yhteisestä
makusuunnasta ja taiteellisista tarkoitusperistä huolimatta, eristyvät
ryhmän eri kyvyt yhä selvemmiksi yksilöllisyyksiksi. Taiteellisesti
kypsimmät runoilija-persoonallisuudet tapaa laulurunouden alalla.
Gustav Suitsin ja Willem Grünthalin runous merkitsee virolaisessa
kirjallisuudessa aivan uusien sekä soinnullisten, runomitallisten että
aihepiirien valloitusta. Heistä alkaa nykyaikainen taiderunous.

Gustav Suitsin (synt. 1883) runokokoelma Elu tuli (Elon tuli) v.


1905 on kaikista heikkouksistaan huolimatta uran uurtavaa laatua.
Sen päätunnusmerkki on nuoruus. Sen laulut ovat yhtaikaa sekä
nuoren ajan että nuoren ijän runoja. Sekä sen voima että viat ovat
molemmat nuoruuden. Ennen-vallankumouksellinen mieliala, odotus,
uhma, oman voiman tunne, on luonut nämä nuoruudelle ja elon
tulelle viritetyt laulut, joitten poljennossa on nousu-ajan sotaista ja
taisteluun tahtovaa tahtia.

Ne ovat nuorekkaita sotajulistuksia, useat laadittuja Eino Leinon


aikaisemman runokauden tyyliin. Useat runot, kuten »Äikene»
(Ukkosilma) ovat vain kuin uhmailijan painiskelua vastahakoisen ja
kankean kielen kanssa, sen väkivaltaista aisoihin asettamista ja
voitonriemua, — mutta eivät myöskään mitään sen enempää.
Sanahelinä, jota yksilöllinen elämys vielä ei ole vapauttanut liian
koristeellisesta paatoksesta, on luonteenomaista tälle kokoelmalle.
On runoja, joitten sisällys supistuu vähiin muodon laulavuuden ja
soinnukkaisuuden rinnalla, ja joita lukiessa alituisen helinän
huumaamina unohdamme vaatia sanoilta syvempää sisällystä.

Ja kuitenkin on tämä kokoelma kaikesta nuorekkuudestaan ja


tunteen pintapuolisuudesta huolimatta käänteentekevä. Viron
runouteen vakiintuneet värittömät ja uinuttavan yksitoikkoiset
runomitat se särkee rohkeilla poljennoilla, rikkailla loppusoinnuilla,
mitä erinlaisimmilla ja aiheen itse valitsemilla runomitoilla. Kieli soi,
niinkuin se vielä tähän saakka koskaan ei ole soinut virolaisessa
runoudessa; koko kokoelma on kauttaaltaan kielellistä ja muoto-iloa
täynnä, ylitse vuotavaa, liiankin kukkeata, kuten sen kannattama
nuori paatoskin.

Suitsin runoilijatemperamentin pääominaisuudet ovat jo tässä


kokoelmassa edustettuina; niistä ovat muototaituruus ja loisteliaisuus
jo jokseenkin pitkälle kehitettyjä, sensijaan on taipumus traagilliseen
tunnelmaan, joka hänen myöhemmässä tuotannossaan yhä
vahvenee, tänä kehityskautena luonut vain pari runoa, synkän
Needmine (Kirous) ja tyyntä ennen myrskyä kuvastavan, ennen-
vallankumouksellisen Surnuaialaul (Hautuumaan laulu) joissa,
varsinkin ensimäisessä, ensi kertaa tuntuu tuleva pessimismi.

Suitsin myöhemmin kirjoittamat runot ovat toistaiseksi hajallaan


siellä täällä erinlaisissa julkaisuissa. Huolimatta niitten
vähälukuisuudesta — Suits ei muodosta poikkeusta virolaisten
kirjailijain pienestä produktiviteetista — voi niissä tarkoin seurata
runoilijan kehitystä.

Se on käynyt muodollisesti yhä plastillisempaan, sisällyksellisesti


yhä yksilöllisempään suuntaan.

Kielen liiallista runsautta on seurannut tarkoin punnitut, kuin


matemaattisesti arvioidut sointuvaikutukset, jotka yhä useammin
alkavat kiteytyä sonetin suppeaan ja viron vähän viljellyltä
runokieleltä paljon vaativaan muotoon. Ei erehtyne, jos tässä
muutoksessa on tuntevinaan romaanilaisten esikuvien vaikutusta.
Suitsin runotyylin kansanrunoudellinen rikkaus on käynyt kovan
romaanilaisen sulatusahjon läpi, se on yksinkertaistunut, tihentynyt,
silti kielellistä soinnullisuuttaan kadottamatta.

Melkein vielä muodollista muutosta suurempi on runojen sisäisen


äänilajin vaihdos. Taaskin ne uskollisesti heijastavat aikaa, joka on
vallankumouksen yliponnistusta seuranneen väsymyksen. Mutta ei
vain aika ole talttumuksen, lisäksi tulee yksilöllinen elämys,
kypsyneemmän ijän välttämätön resignatsio. Yhtä hillitty kuin
muotokin, yhtä hillitty on siihen puserrettu tunne. Milloin
isänmaalliset ja yleisaiheiset runot vielä ovat etusalalla, on niissä yhä
katkerammaksi kasvava pessimismi vallalla. Sellainen runo kuin Laul
Eestist (Laulu Eestistä) on kaukana kaikesta
korusisänmaallisuudesta. Mutta näitten runojen ohella ja niitä syrjään
työntäen alkaa kuulua yhä yksilöllisempiä sointuja, yhä
persoonallisemman tunteen pakkoa, jotka yhdessä mies hekkääseen
resignatsioon taipuvan mielialan keralla luovat Suitsin tähän asti
korkeimmat runo-ennätykset.

Täydellisen vastakohdan Suitsin runoudelle muodostaa toisen


Noor-Eestin runoilijan Willem Grünthalin (synt. 1885) kolme vuotta
myöhemmin julkaisema runokokoelma Laulud (Lauluja). Kun Suitsin
kirkas taide voi olla varma mahdollisimman laajasta kantavuudesta,
tulee Grünthalin runous sitävastoin jäämään vain harvojen
nautittavaksi.

Grünthalin runous kätkeytyy mitä vaikeatajuisimman kielen


varjoon. Grünthal on kielentutkija runoillessaankin. Harvinaisimmat,
vähimmin käytetyt kielen muodot houkuttavat häntä, hän kaivaa ne
esille sanakirjan unohduksesta tai murteitten muurin takaa, hänen
runoissaan vilisee outoja murre- ja paikallissanoja, joita
käyttäessään hän ei näytä välittävän niistä mykistä tai tyhjistä
kohdista, jotka muodostuvat, kun sana vaikenee eikä ilmaise mitään
lukijalle. Kuvaavaa kyllä, on runovihkon loppuun liitetty erityinen pieni
sanakirja.

Yhtä plastillista kuin Suitsin, yhtä maalailevaa on Grünthalin


runous. Adjektivi ja attributi ovat hänen runojensa tunnusmerkkejä,
hänen lauseensa ovat raskaita, usein ylenmäärinkin väreillä
kyllästettyjä, pienimpiin yksityiskohtiin saakka hiottuja, joskus
suuremmassa määrin teoreettisen työn tuloksilta tuntuvia kuin
välittömän inspiratsion luomia. Hän käyttää harvoin kevyitä
runomittoja, usein liikkuvat hänen runonsa antiikin mitoissa, josta
niitten hiukan juhlallinen, eristyvä luonne. Samoinkuin Suitsilla, on
Grünthalillakin runoja, jotka ovat kuin nuoren kulttuurikielen
itsetietoista prameilua, jonkunlaista sanasoinnullista urheilua. Paitsi
näitä liialliseen alkusoinnun käyttöön ja kuvaavien sanojen toinen
toisensa päälle kasaamiseen rakennettuja runoja, on Grünthalilla
niitten vastakohtina toisia, joissa runollista suggestiota on koetettu
aikaansaada yksityisten sanojen kerrolla, säkeitten putoillessa usein
vain yksisanaisina, josta taas on ollut seurauksena tunnelman ohuus
ja riittämätön kantavuus.

Grünthalin onnistuneimmat runot ovat ne, joissa hänen suuri ja


harvinainen kielitaituruutensa, vältettyään liikaan erikoisuuteen
pyrkimisen vaaran, yhtyy hänen yhtä harvinaiseen
luonnontuntemukseensa.

Grünthal on runoissaan yksinäinen luonnonkävijä. Suitsin


runoudessa on viimeisinä aikoina selvästi havaittava itsetietoinen
eristymispyrkimys, Grünthalilla on eristyminen synnynnäistä. Hänen
väri-ihailussaan, hänen antaumisessaan luonnontunnelmille alttiiksi
on jotain luonnonhurmiota. Hän on syvälle tunkeutunut siihen
salaiseen runouteen, joka kätkeytyy Saarenmaan ja sen lähisaarien
luonnon ja rantamaisemain näennäisen karuuden taakse. Suits
paikallistuttaa harvoin runonsa, Grünthal aina. Ei ole niissä mikä
meri hyvänsä, eivät mitkä rannat hyvänsä, — se on määrätty meri,
tietyt rannat. Grünthal tuntee kotisaarensa kaikkina vuodenaikoina,
kaikkina vuorokauden aikoina, hän tuntee sen lintumailman, sen
hietasärkät ja luodot ja valon sekä värien eri vivahdukset rannikolla.
Hänen parhaat runonsa ovat värikylläisiä saaristotauluja. Mutta tästä
tarkoin määrätystä realiteetista vauhtia ottaen kohoo Grünthalin
runous sen yli, luonnonnäkyjen avartamaan kaikkeuden tunteeseen.

Suitsin tai Grünthalin sävy on nykyään vallalla virolaisissa


runokokeissa, tietysti jäljittelijöitten käyttämänä johtaen maneeriin ja
usein suoraan karikatuuriin. Sitä suurempi arvo täytyy antaa niille
harvoille itsenäisyyden ja riippumattomuuden ilmauksille, jotka
ulkopuolella Noor-Eestin ryhmää ovat havaittavissa.

Sellaisia on Ernst Enno (synt. 1875), kiitettävällä sitkeydellä


omaperäisyyteen pyrkivä runoilija, joka ei koskaan ole uhrannut
yleisön makusuunnalle, vaan vähitellen runoutensa alkujaan sangen
aateraskaasta hämärästä kehittynyt selvämuotoisempaa
taiteellisuutta kohden. Vers libren ensimäisenä käyttäjänä Virossa
hän muodosti aikoinaan terveellisen oppositsion, joskin hän itse
myöhemmissä runokokoelmissaan on palannut sidottuihin mittoihin.
Teosofisen mailmankatsomuksen mystillisyys määrää hänen
runoutensa sävyn, joka yhä vieläkin on filosofisen raskasta,
rakenteeltaan taipuvaa jonkinlaiseen kaavamaisuuteen, usein
hämärää, joskus kuitenkin onnistuen puhkaisemaan mystillisyyden
kuoren ja saaden silloin omituisen kohtalokkaalta kaikuvan sävyn.
Yksinäinen ilmiö virolaisessa runoudessa on Juhan Liiv (synt.
1864). Alkujaan novellistina esiinnyttyään, on hän myöhemmin
vuosien kuluessa vaikeaa hermotautia sairastaessaan ryhtynyt
lyyrilliseen runoiluun. Hänen runoutensa on sairaitten aivojen
runoutta. Jo runoissa alituisesti uudistuvassa sanojen ja kokonaisten
säkeitten kerrossa tuntee ikäänkuin sairaalloisen idée fixen
kiduttavan takaa-ajon; kerran herännyt mielikuva uudistuu ja
kertautuu yhä väsyneitten aivojen ponnistuksesta huolimatta.
Samasta syystä on hänen runoillaan improvisatorinen luonne, hänen
sairaasta sielustaan kumpuaa hajanaisia, joskus synkkiä, joskus
kultaisia kuvia, jotka järjestyvät melkein satunnaisuudella säkeiksi,
ilman taiteellisen tietoisuuden ohjausta. Siitä Liivin runojen usein
naivi viehättävyys ja yllättävä leima ja niitten taiderunoudesta eroava
luonnonrunoilijan sävy sekä taiteelliseen arvoon nähden suuri
epätasaisuus. Hänen runonsa on Noor-Eesti erittäin taiteellisesti ja
koristeellisesti huolitellussa asussa julkaissut, Juhan Liivi Luuletused
(Juhan Liivin runot) v. 1910.

Viron kirjallisuus ja sitä myöten laulurunouskin on tällä hetkellä


virkeässä, joskaan ei erittäin nopeakulkuisessa kehityskaudessa.
Sen myöhempi kehitys on tietysti eroittamattomasti yhdistetty eri
kykyjen ja runoilijapersoonallisuuksien lopullisen kehityksen
mahdollisuuksiin. Toivoa täytyy, että Viron harvinaisen runsaat
henkiset ainehistot tulisivat runollisesti käsitellyiksi ja siten liittyisivät
elimellisenä osana yleisinhimilliseen taidepääomaan.

Lähteitä:

Oskar Kallas, Übersicht über das sammeln estnischer runen.

Gustav Suits: Die estnische Literatur y.m.


VANA KANNEL
LAULUN AIKA

Paras lauluaeg

Nyt on hetki helkytellä, viikko virttä vieritellä, ilta impien


ilota; viel' on aika vaiti jäädä, hetki laulujen levätä, kun on
kuollunna kuvolla, olkein päälle oikaistuna, vainajana
vuotehella, valkolautojen välissä.

Kun on alla mustan mullan, alla hiekan harmahtavan.


ÄIDIN HAUDALLA

Ema haual

Olen mieron orpolapsi, koito ilman kannen alla, ei ole


armon antajata, eikä pään silittäjätä, tuima tuuli armahteli,
päivän paiste pään silitti.

Pidot päätyi, juhlat joutui, toiset kulki kaupunkihin, luokse


tuttujen torilla. Minä minne mieron lapsi, kuhun astun
angervoinen?

Astun haudalle emoni, kalmistohon kantajani, itkuhuivinen


pivossa, huoliraidat huivisessa. »Nouse, nouse, äityeni,
neuvomahan nurmen alta, valmistele vakkaseni, kiinnitä
kapiokirstu!»

Emo haudasta havasi:

»Tytär, lieto lintuseni, matalainen marjueni! En voi nousta


nurmen alta, koivu kasvoi kaulalleni, silmille kukat siniset,
kulmilleni kulleroiset.»
»Nouse, nouse, äityeni! Tuon Virusta viikattehen, niitän
nurmet kummun päältä, heinät katkon haudan päältä, silmiltä
kukat siniset, kulmiltasi kulleroiset.»

»Tytär nuori! en voi nousta, mull' on suussa mullan tuntu,


rinnassani ristin tuntu, käsissäni kalman tuntu.

»Nouse, nouse, äityeni! Vien Viruhun vihtomahan, saatan


Suomen saunasehen, suusta huuhdon mullan tunnun,
käsistäsi kalman tunnun.»

»Tytär nuori! en voi nousta, mull' on kolme kaitsijata:


pieluksissa Tuonen poika, tyttö Tuonen jalkapäässä, välill' itse
vanha Tuoni. Pyydä haavalta hameita, leppäpuulta linnikoita»

Mailma sua suojatkohon, armas Luoja auttakohon!


VANHA POLVI VAINOPOLVI

Vana aeg oli vaenoaega

Vanha polvi vainopolvi, piinapolvi pitkällinen, orjapolvi


ohdakkeinen, angervoinen arpiaika, surullinen sorronaika.
Vaivasivat vainonhenget, papin helmet painelivat, riistivät rajut
ritarit, rosvoparvet ryöstelivät, mellastivat murhamiekat!

Pelto syötti saksalaista, laidun meille leivän tuotti,


kanervikko kasvatteli, avun antoivat akanat.
KYLLÄ TIEDÄN ORJAN KIUSAT

Minä tiijä orja elo

Siskoseni, sirkkuseni, matalainen marjueni! älä kuule orjan


kieltä, älä paimenen puhetta, tiedusta toki minulta, kysy multa
kullaiselta, — kyllä tiedän orjan kiusat, orjan kiusat, raukan
räähkät: orja orrella viruvi, orvon vuode vaajan päällä;
palkollisen parren päällä, kun tuo parsi painahtuvi, kiikkuvi
kiverä orsi, uni orjan on ohitse, rauha raatajan lopussa, orja
oitis hyörimähän, orpolapsi liikkumahan.
MITEN IMPYEN IHANUUS?

Kui pikk on neiu piduda?

Olkaa nopsat, neitiseni, rientäessänne ripeät, pian saapuu


syksyilmat, talvipilvet taivahalle.

Miten impyen ihanuus? kuinka kauan kauneutta? niinkuin


vihma virven päällä, kaste heinän helpehellä, ruoste ruohon
latvasessa; niinkuin on omenan onni, kaalinkukkasen
kukoistus, herneen hennon heilimöinti.

Niin on impyen ihanuus.


VÄKIVALLOIN SUUTELIJA

Suisa suud

Läksin luutoa lehosta vastaksia varvikosta, vaskiluutaa


vainiolta, tinaluutaa tien polulta.

Saavuin Sulevin mäelle,


Sulevin, Kalevin mäelle,
seisoi siellä Sulevpoika,

Sulevpoika, Kalevpoika, vaati se väkisin suuta, kysyi kättä


kiusaellen.

Suonut en väkisin suuta, enkä kättä kiusaellen.

Vedin veitseni terävän, puukon kirkkahan povesta, syöksin


miehen sydämehen, väkisin Sulevipojan, Kalevpojan
kiusaellen,

läpi vartensa verevän, läpi poskensa punaisen, tukan halki


tummahiuksen.

Itse itkien kotihin, kallotellen kartanolle.


Saapui maammo, saapui taatto, vastaan vanhukset
molemmat. Maammo kysyi mairitellen, taatto taitavin saneli:

»Mitä itket, neiti nuori?»

»Sitä itken taattoseni, sitä itken ja valitan, sitä itken, äiti


rukka, sitä, maammoni, valitan: läksin luutoa lehosta,
vastaksia varvikosta, vaskiluutaa vainiolta, tinaluutaa tien
polulta. Saavuin Sulevin mäelle, Sulevin, Kalevin mäelle,
seisoi siellä Sulevpoika Sulevpoika, Kalevpoika. Vaati se
väkisin suuta, kysyi kättä kiusaellen. Suonut en väkisin suuta,
enkä kättä kiusaellen, vedin veitseni terävän, puukon
kirkkahan povesta, syöksin miehen sydämehen, väkisin
Sulevipojan, Kalevpojan kiusaellen, läpi vartensa verevän,
läpi poskensa punasen, tukan halki tummahiuksen.»

Maammo varsin vastaeli:

»Terve sulle, neiti nuori! kaitsemastas kunniasi, suuren


koiran surmastas!»
KOLME ONNETONTA

Kolm vaest

Onpa kolme onnetonta, taivaan alla angervoa. Yksi on


emoton impi, toinen on isoton poika, kolmas koito leskivaimo.

Miks itki emoton impi?

Vakan itki vaalijata, kapioitten katsojata.

Miks itki isoton poika?

Auransa asettajata, auran kurjen kirjojata.

Miks valitti leskivaimo?

Itki suun sukostajata, kainalossa kantajata.

Kun itki emoton impi, siihen lähde läikähteli. Kun itki isoton
poika, siihen kaivo kumpueli, kun valitti leskivaimo, siihen
lammikko levisi, kasosi kalainen järvi.

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