Renaud Barbaras

Francisco Varela: A new idea of perception and life

Connections among Varelas theory of enactive cognition , his evolutionary theory of natural drift, and his concept of autopoiesis are made clear. Two questions are posed in relation to Varelas conception of perception, and the tension that exists in his thought between the formal level of organization and the Jonasian notion of the organism.

The Subject’s Life and the Life of Manifestation: Towards a Privative Biology

AbstractThe universal a priori of the correlation between transcendental being and its subjective modes of givenness constitutes the minimal framework for any phenomenological approach. The proper object of phenomenology is then to characterize both the exact nature of the correlation and the sense of being of the terms in relation, that is to say, of subject and world. It involves demonstrating that a rigorous analysis of the correlation unfolds necessarily on three levels and that phenomenology is thus destined to move beyond itself towards a cosmology and metaphysics. The phenomenological correlation that we will establish is essentially a relation between a subject that is desire and a world that is pure transcendence and assumes their common belonging to a φύσίς whose description stems from a cosmology. But the difference of the subject, without which there is no correlation, refers itself to a more originary split that affects the very process of the manifestation and opens the space of metaphysics.

Sauver d'une réification de la conscience la tâche de la phénoménologie

L’acces a ce qui constitue l’objet propre de la phenomenologie, a savoir l’apparaitre comme tel, suppose une epoche radicalisee. Celle-ci conduit a caracteriser le sens d’etre des deux poles de la correlation phenomenologique – l’apparaissant transcendant et la conscience – en echappant a toute forme de reification. Or, une telle methode, loin de fonder un principe de cloture pour la phenomenologie, permet au contraire de mettre en evidence un necessaire autodepassement de la phenomenologie, a la fois vers une cosmologie et une metaphysique.

Phenomenology and Henology

In Broken Hegemonies, Rainer Schurmann rereads Neoplatonism while distinguishing between two versions of the ontological difference. One is traced back to a foundation of being: this is the metaphysical difference. The other brings to light the One as the very condition of being: this is the henological difference, but it can also be termed phenomenological, since the One is the transcendental condition of appearing. I propose to show that such is precisely Patocka’s position and that his phenomenology is, therefore, a henology. The demonstration includes three stages: (1) the question of Being is to be approached on the basis of the question of appearing: ontology makes sense only as phenomenology; (2) appearing as such cannot be understood if it is referred to something appearing, whatever that may be: the phenomenological difference cannot be a metaphysical difference; and (3) there is a surpassing of beings (of appearance) toward their appearing only as the making evident of their submission to a condition of unity: the phenomenological difference makes sense only as henological difference.

The Failure of Bergsonism

A long discussion of the phenomenologies that either directly or indirectly confront the question of life has clarified our initial problem. Our starting point was the a priori of the correlation and the question of the meaning of being of the subject as a condition of appearance. We concluded from the analysis of the correlation’s own constraints that the subject’s meaning of being must be sought in what we have characterized as living, emphasizing the indistinctness or positive ambiguity of the term, which refers both to being alive and the capacity to undergo, to sense, and to perceive. This meant that what defines the subject consists in the fact that its vitality envelops a dimension of openness to the exterior, and moreover, that the subject’s perceptual relation to the world cannot be thought outside of vital activity. But it was not a matter of returning to the naive evidence that claims that one must first be alive in order to know what vital activity is, the perceptual activity being the prerogative of certain living beings that are said to be ‘superior’ on account of the configuration of their nervous system. The concern was rather to affirm, more radically, that the subject is both a subject of the world, and, in virtue of its life, the condition of its appearance, and that as such, its life as such is an opening to the world or knowledge. Accordingly, the concern was to recognize that all experience and all activity of knowledge remains a vital activity, and the question we confront now is ultimately that of knowing how perception raises itself up from life, or of knowing in what way, in what sense of life, perception is a vital activity.

L'unité originaire de la perception et du langage chez Jan Patocka

This article explores some indications in the texts of Patocka that point towards a concept of language which no longer takes it to be a derived layer of an original perceptive basis: he disassociates intuition from origin, and establishes a co-origin of language and perception. It is this co-origin whose meaning and limits this article seeks to determine.

L'être et la manifestation : Sur la phénoménologie de Jan Patocka

En subordonnant le probleme de l’etre a la question de l’apparaitre et en pensant celui-ci a l’aide du concept d’unite, c’est-a-dire comme apparaitre d’un monde, Patocˇka parvient a penser la distinction de l’etre et de l’etant apparaissant a partir de leur unite dans l’apparition, a subordonner la difference ontologique meme a l’unite phenomenologique de l’apparaitre. Si l’apparaitre est bien par essence apparaitre dans l’unite, a savoir apparaitre du monde, il comporte une dimension d’inaccomplissement ou de voilement, et l’etre ne nomme rien d’autre que cette distance interieure constitutive de l’apparaitre.