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Florin LobonĹŁ

Mind, Philosophy, History, and Psychoanalysis Essays on historical understanding

Editori: SILVIU DRAGOMIR VASILE DEM. ZAMFIRESCU Director editorial: MAGDALENA MĂRCULESCU Director producţie: CRISTIAN CLAUDIU COBAN

Descrierea CIP a Bibliotecii Naţionale a României LOBONȚ, FLORIN Mind, Philosophy, History, and Psychoanalysis : Essays on historical understanding / Florin Lobonț. ‑ Bucureşti : Editura Trei, 2014 Bibliogr.

ISBN 978-973-707-950-3 159.9

Copyright © Editura Trei, 2014 pentru prezenta ediţie O.P. 16, Ghișeul 1, C.P. 0490, București Tel.: +4 021 300 60 90 ; Fax: +4 0372 25 20 20 e‑mail: comenzi@edituratrei.ro www.edituratrei.ro

ISBN 978-973-707-950-3

For my friend Dan Stone, who inspired me and others to unfinalise solutions

Contents

Introduction. Historical thinking, from conceptualism to counterrationality ................................................................................ 7 ‘Conceptual idealism’ and historical thought...................................... 12 History, historiography and their philosophy, before the inconceivability of radical horror ....................................................... 40 Modernity, trauma and the crisis of speculative historicism................ 62 ‘Thinking with the blood’: psychoanalysis and modern genocide................................................ 110 The past as future possibility: sanitizing the Holocaust memory in postcommunist Europe ................................................. 134 Bibliography..................................................................................... 188 Appendix.......................................................................................... 207

INTRODUCTION

HISTORICAL THINKING, FROM CONCEPTUALISM TO COUNTERRATIONALITY

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he essays assembled in this book are responses to long-lasting personal concerns and urges. One is that expressed over forty years ago by Haskell Fain, when he rightly remarked that philosophy of history can consist of something more than leftovers from philosophy of science, and that the insufficient contact between philosophy and history is detrimental to both of them.1 If in case of history it is widely accepted that its accounts rely more or less implicitly on philosophical underpinnings, a lot fewer people believe that philosophy has a lot to do with the historical circumstances in which it is written. But, if this connection might pass unnoticed in peaceful times, when it comes to extreme, destructive exterminatory actions, such as the mass scale murder of the Holocaust, we must ask how the events in Germany (and, mutatis mutandis, the horrific atrocities in other parts of the world) should force a re-examination of the philosophical categories that accommodated such options into the modern frame of mind. By examining philosophically the connections between ideas and acts that defy the rules of conceivability and representability, the essays try to show how the extreme character of such events Haskell Fain, Between Philosophy and History: The Resurrection of Speculative Philosophy of History Within the Analytic Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. vii, 3, 4, 207-210.

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poses a limit-situation and a challenge to the very meaning of our civilization, disclosing a level of dehumanization that made Hannah Arendt call the Holocaust ‘an organized attempt to eradicate the concept of human being.’

Another concern addressed in the following pages regards the inconsistencies of the implicit speculative philosophical projections still deeply embedded in the historiographical thought, which fails to realize that the historian’s ‘truth’ is not an unchanging metaphysical entity, but an a priori idea that does not exist by itself, but through every historical expression that combines the historians’ conceptual frameworks and the events filtered through them. Here I fully agree with Dan Stone’s observation that ‘the Holocaust historiography illustrates most strikingly how the “substantialist” placing of neat, conceptually familiar accounts’ of extreme exterminatory events ‘under the over-arching teleologies of uninterrupted Progress and ascendant History,’ from barbarism to civilization, ‘have implicitly over-domesticated, “normalized,” and “sanitized” the genocidal violence.’2 The essays (especially ‘History, Historiography and their Philosophy…’ also touch on the related issue of relativism, cast on history and historiography by the poststructuralist-deconstructivist attacks such as Derrida’s and Lyotard’s, who insisted on the ‘impossibility of finding historical truth, not merely in its transcendental philosophical sense, but also in the possibility of a material and historical referent.’3 As a response that examines the epistemological implications of these powerful influences on historical thinking, and the ‘discovery’ of Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust: A Study in Historiography (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), p. 1.

3 Eric Berlatsky, ‘Memory as Forgetting: The Problem of the Postmodern in Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Spiegelman’s Maus’, Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 101.

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the absence of transcendental (ontological) grounds of historical truth, the aforementioned essay suggests, backing Stone, that the postmodernist claim about the inexistence of historical ‘truth’ should be read as ‘a statement about meaning in history, not about [factual] accuracy’ and that postmodernism has the merit of ‘making us aware that all history is necessarily constructed … and that the past does not exist outside of its representations.’4 This idea explicitly places the analysis in agreement with Reinhart Koselleck’s crucial argument that the conceptual structures dictate the structures of meaning,5 which will reinforce the book’s tenet that the historiography of events is as much as a part of history as the events described. From this perspective, it would be very difficult to find a historical complex of events able to make us more aware of the problematic nature of the concept of historicity itself than the Holocaust. To say the least, it questions extremely powerfully the modern historiographical division between history as the past and history as it is written, with all its philosophical and epistemological consequences.

Taking the above into account in order to contribute to the rapprochement between historiography and history, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other, the essay ‘Conceptual idealism and historical thought’ suggests a philosophy of history based on the mutual reinforcement of the histori(ographi)cal and philosophical modes of thinking. As starting point and assumed (albeit loosely) philosophical position, the essay draws its inspiration from the somewhat sui generis ‘conceptual idealism,’ (whose emblematic figures are Nicholas Rescher and, arguably, R.G. 4 5

Stone, pp. xvii-xviii.

Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Engl. tr. K. Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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Collingwood), with its basic tenet that reality is mind-correlative, not created by the mind. Following these philosophers’ concern with equipping historical thought with a realist ground for its possibility and with an epistemological foundation for historical construction, I am pointing at the openings created by this variety of idealism, whose privileging of the conceptualizing role of the mind does justice both to the existence of the ‘pluralist reality of the world of difference,’ and to the mental operations constituting the ’mode-and-manner-determining categories’ in terms of which we conceive (or construct) this world.

Finally, after showing how ‘normal’ historical understanding is put under serious threat by a limit event like the Holocaust through what Dan Diner calls its essentially ‘counterrational,’ character (which he describes as a ‘very fractured rationality’—not irrationality—‘embedded in the overriding logic of mass-extermination’6), the book sketches, through the essay ‘Thinking with the blood’: psychoanalysis and modern genocide,’ one of the alternatives to the established epistemological paths of historical reconstruction, namely psychoanalysis, which only relatively recently has begun to contribute significantly to the understanding of psychology of genocide. The survey presents a part of these authors and researchers’ attempts to deepen and diversify our understanding of social ‘decontamination’ phenomena, whose extreme forms have been regarded by many as incomprehensible. Such a goal requires the rethinking of modern genocide and mass murder, firstly by moving them from the space of exception, into the very fabric of modern societies’ ethos and cultural frameworks.

As one of its recurrent motifs, the book examines the place of memory and memorialization within the process of historical reconstruction 6

Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 136, 137.

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and, in case of extremely traumatic events, their undermining of historicism. The analysis follows Hannah Arendt’s profound suggestion that ‘the function of memory is to “present”’ – in the true sense of ‘making present — the past, depriving it of its definitely bygone character,’ und thus ‘to undo it.’ The essays repeatedly point out that, to the speculative historicist, Arendt’s conclusion that ‘memory transforms the past into a future possibility,’7 can only be deeply discomforting.

Last, but far from least, to the perplexities of historicists (whose worldviews are still structured by a strong, often implicit, teleological belief in the uninterrupted Progress of History), caused by post-Enlightenment, modern ‘atavistic’ outbursts, the book responds (mainly in the essay ‘Modernity, trauma and the crisis of speculative historicism’) by pointing at the non-contradictory cohabitation, and even mutual reinforcement, of ‘modernity’ and ‘barbarism.’ Backing the new philosophy of historiography so consistently advocated by historians-philosophers like Stone, one of the main stresses of the book is on the need to keep the past open to ‘re-construction,’ un-routinised, available for continual questioning, and ‘incomplete,’ incompatible with a worrying ‘final historiographical solution.’

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Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), pp. 158-162.

‘CONCEPTUAL IDEALISM’ AND HISTORICAL THOUGHT1

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he main philosophical disputes of today are not anymore those which oppose analyticism to intuitionism, but those which oppose objectivism to subjectivism, or realism to relativism.

A realist philosophical position differs from a relativist perspective in terms of its implied conceptions regarding the physical, biological, psychological, and social realities, and of those perspectives regarding the existence or non-existence of a unique reality beyond phenomena, and the pluralism of possible worlds. Especially relativism places the epistemological dimension of philosophy within the world of changing values, by relating it to historical backgrounds and contexts, but realism does not exclude references to normative aspects either.

According to Philip Pettit, ‘realism is the doctrine that certain entities allegedly associated with [a certain] ... area [of reality], are indeed real.’

Common-sense realism, sometimes called ‘realism’ without qualification – ‘says that ordinary things, like trees and people are real ... [Generally speaking, t]he realist in any area insists on the reality of the entities in question in the discourse.’2

This essay is a further development of my article ‘Conceptual idealism and reformed metaphysical method,’ published in Philosophy Today, 2(2013): 142-9.

2 Philip Pettit, ‘Realism’, in Jonathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa (eds.), A Companion to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 440.

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Among the ‘isms’ that grounded the recent philosophies of history, realism seems to have come most intensely under fire from the relativist attacks of postmodernism. Many highly regarded structuralist-deconstructivist voices (such as Derrida and Lyotard) came to stress the ‘impossibility of finding truth, not merely in its transcendental philosophical sense, but also in the possibility of a material and historical referent.’3 Commenting on the epistemological implications of these powerful influences on historical thinking, Dan Stone argues that the discovery of the absence of transcendental (ontological) grounds of historical truth means that ‘historians cannot appeal to such notions in order to back up their assertions.’ But, this in no way invalidates the basic empirical work. In fact, Stone rightly remarks, the postmodernist claim about the inexistence of historical ‘truth’ should be read as ‘a statement about meaning in history, not about [factual] accuracy … [O]ne thing that postmodernism has done is make us aware that all history is necessarily constructed … and that the past does not exist outside of its representations.’4 Among the historically-minded philosophers concerned with equipping historical thought with a realist ground for its possibility and an epistemological foundation for historical construction, I will throw some light on the contribution of the so-called ‘conceptual idealists,’ whose tenet about the conceptualizing role of the mind does justice both to the existence of the ‘pluralist reality of the world of difference’ and to the mental operations constituting the ’mode-and-manner-determining categories’ in Eric Berlatsky, ‘Memory as Forgetting: The Problem of the Postmodern in Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Spiegelman’s Maus’, Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 101.

4 Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust: A Study in Historiography (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), pp. xvii-xviii.

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terms of which we conceive (or construct) this world. The philosopher whose name is connected most explicitly with this variety of idealism, is Nicholas Rescher. For example, in an article published in 1991, he wrote: Idealism, broadly speaking, is the doctrine that reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated. However, the specifically conceptual idealism … stands in contrast to an ontological doctrine to the effect that mind somehow constitutes or produces the world’s matter. Instead, it maintains that an adequate descriptive characterization of physical (‘material’) reality must make implicit reference to mental operations—that some commerce with mental characteristics and operations is involved in explanatory exposition of what is at issue ‘the real world.’ 5 Rescher conceives the human reason as already shaped by inherited stances, assumptions, values and received knowledge, at varying levels of attributed significance. In this context, notes the theologian Paul D. Murray, for Rescher ‘the rational thing to do is to take one’s situatedness seriously whilst continually opening it out to testing against what else there is and what else comes to light.’ Consequently, Murray concludes, Truth is something that we can legitimately assume ourselves to be articulating in part but which inevitably eludes us in toto and towards which, therefore, we need to understand ourselves as being orientated in the mode of 5

Nicholas Rescher, ‘Conceptual Idealism Revisited,’ The Review of Metaphysics 44 (March 1991), p. 495.

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aspiration rather than possession, or arrival … Rescher’s thinking … evinces a commitment to acknowledging the pluralist reality of the world of difference in which we exist and the need to negotiate this appropriately.6 The fact that Rescher ‘formulates and defends a form of idealism, in the tradition of Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, Royce, McTaggart’7 brings him closer to a rich British idealist tradition, which is arguably most quintessentially represented by R.G. Collingwood. This framework of conceptual idealism outlined by Rescher some thirty years after Collingwood accommodates very well the latter’s previous dismissal of commonsense realism. The definition Collingwood gave to (commonsense) realism—in his unpublished text ‘Realism and Idealism’—reads: ‘[For the realist, t] he object makes no difference to the knowing, so that knowing … is a single absolutely … undifferentiated activity’ and is based on the realist’s assumption that reality consists in ‘two radically self-contained worlds: the objective world of things known and the subjective world of cognitive activity’8 whereas for Collingwood the mind itself is a compositum of cognitive activities and their object. The commonsense realism’s assumption that things exist ‘independently of our thought’ or ‘mind’ is criticized by the conceptual idealist thinkers—whose voices find an unifying echo in Collingwood’s analyses—for its failure to realize that the real condition for such a claim is the thought itself, so that the things considered as exist Paul D. Murray, ‘Receptive Ecumenism and Catholic Learning: Establishing the Agenda’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 7.4, (2007), p. 284.

7 Robert E. Innes, review of Conceptual Idealism by Nicholas Rescher, Foundations of Language, 14.2 (Mar., 1976), p. 287.

8 R. G. Collingwood, ‘Realism and Idealism’ (1936), Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford, Dep. Collingwood 20, 26.

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ing ‘outside our thought’ or mind are in fact included in it once we think of them as being ‘external to our thought’. Similarly, the things which are claimed to exist independently of thought cannot otherwise be asserted as existent but by an act of thought.9 As inheritor of a powerful British idealist tradition represented, Collingwood was accompanied in the 20th century, by important fellow thinkers such as Henry Jones, Clement Charles Julian Webb, Alfred Ernest Taylor or Michael Foster.

Nowadays, Stephen Toulmin writes, ‘Collingwood’s philosophical arguments speak to us more directly and forcefully than they did to his Oxford contemporaries. The ‘realist’ positions put forward by John Cook Wilson at Oxford, Ernst Mach in Vienna and G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell at Cambridge… turned the philosophical clock back before Kant, and revived the earlier traditions of British empiricism. Collingwood was one of the first philosophers in England to see that this could not be done’10. In his Metaphysics, he brings an argument in favour of the historical perspective that aims at consolidating the project of revised metaphysics which, in its turn, could consolidate (from transcendental-epistemological point of view) the project of revised history11. According to Guido Vanhesvijck, this difficult task of rehabilitating metaphysics was directed mainly against Ayer’s devastating attack against it: Ayer showed the impossibility of metaphysics by indicating that metaphysical propositions are neither empirically See Florin Lobonţ, Noua metafizică engleză, o regretabilă necunoscută (Bucureşti: Editura Trei, 2002), p. 155.

10 Stephen Toulmin, Introduction to An Autobiography by R.G. Collingwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. xiii.

11 Ibid., p. xiv.

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verifiable nor analytic. Collingwood reacts by giving a transcendental-epistemological justification of metaphysics… [arguing that] metaphysics—the study of being—is only possible as a description of absolute presuppositions that change historically.12 However, Collingwood was aware that unqualified realism is untenable; he rejected Kant’s attempt to ground metaphysics on an ‘ontology of appearances’ and on the one and only transcendental subjectivity, for, to him, it seemed impossible to ground a universally valid knowledge only on the cognitive structure of the knowing subject. On the other hand, the essential feature in humans which makes knowledge of the ever-changing reality possible, is the historicity of our mind. He understood that the ancient Greeks’ metaphysical thought was in fact designed to ultimately provide meanings to the sublunary world of changes with which the Greeks were deeply preoccupied.13 How does this stand in connection with the philosophical concepts of ‘truth’, ‘reality’, ‘thought’ and ‘history’ itself? As a consequence, metaphysics had to be revised, in order to retrieve the reality, via its reflection in human ‘historical’ thinking about it.

In relation to the question of truth, the ‘reformed’ (that is, ‘historical’) metaphysician knows that the truth is not to be found on the empirical, verifiable level, nor on that of analysis of concepts. Only through description of historically changing absolute presuppositions the mystery Guido Vanheeswijck, ‘Afterword: Metaphysics as a Historical[ly Based] Discipline: The Relevance of Collingwood’s Reformed Metaphysics,’ unpublished manuscript (undated, most probably written at the beginning of 1990s), Collingwood Society Archives, Swansea, p. ii.

13 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Ch. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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of reality can be spoken of; in this, rationality shows both its possibilities, and its boundaries; for the pure being cannot be studied independently of thinking. That was Collingwood’s objection against the commonsense realism.14 In the same vein, Rescher stresses the active role of thinking: Our [idealism] is a conceptual idealism in holding that nature, as we standardly conceive it, is conceived by us in terms of reference to the characteristically mental processes like imagining, supposing, and the like. On this view, what the mind ’makes’ is not nature itself, but the mode-andmanner-determining categories in terms of which we conceive it ... The constitutive role of the mind, therefore, is to be thought of in neither ontological nor causal terms, but in conceptual ones.15 On the other hand, as Evandro Agazzi convincingly observed, idealism itself can become naïve when its correct claim that no discrepancy can be assumed between reality and thought is driven to the extreme of claiming total identity between them. Although opposed to commonsense realism, this naivety shares with its adversary a common root consisting in an ‘epistemological dualism’ originating in modern philosophy16. According to this view, what we know are our representations, our sensory impressions, our ‘ideas’, not the things as they are in themselves so that we have to look both for a guarantee for the real existence of things and for their Ibid., pp. vii-viii.

Nicholas Rescher, Conceptual Idealism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), p. 3.

16 Evandro Agazzi, Realismul naiv şi antirealismul naiv, Rom. tr. Rodica Croitoru, ed. A. Botez (Bucureşti: Editura DAR, 1993), p. 35.

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accurate representation performed at the level of our internal ‘ideas’. And, Agazzi concludes, the impossibility of solving this problem was clearly emphasized by Kant, who demonstrated that, in fact, ‘the problem is insoluble because it is a pseudo-problem. Of course, we have neither evidence, nor arguments for claiming that what we actually know are rather our ideas than the things in themselves within our ideas.’17 Thus, this ‘fantasy’—in which things are conceived as situated ‘beyond’ appearances and outside our thoughts—compelled philosophers who shared it, ‘to assume the impossible task of “reaching” the things through surpassing the very limits of our thought. What Berkeley tried to do has been accomplished by the German classic transcendental Idealism—especially by Fichte and Hegel—and by the “absolute Idealism” of Giovanni Gentile’. These efforts led to an ambivalent result: ‘on the one hand, they brilliantly managed to eliminate any kind of dualism or difference between reality and thought, and, on the other hand, they denied, in a reductionistic manner, any difference between reality and thought, reducing in fact all reality to thought.’18 At this point, a small number of general aspects of Kant’s philosophy are worth bringing into light, in order to suggest his influence upon Collingwood’s view on the nature of ‘reformed’ metaphysical knowledge.

In order to sketch this argument, I will briefly follow Viorel Colţescu’s clarifying interpretation of Kant’s view on metaphysics and its implications. This perspective holds that the German philosopher has rejected only the traditional, rationalist-dogmatic, metaphysics; at the same time, he acknowledged the great merits of its representatives, especially Leibniz and Wolff. According to Kant, metaphysics as a science of the supersensi17 18

Ibid.

Ibid.

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ble is not possible: Due to its a priori forms, our knowledge is inevitably confined to phenomena as given in experience19 without being able to extend itself to the transphenomenal reality, to the thing-in-itself. But the thing-in-itself really exists: in this context, Alois Riehl’s inspired sentence ‘The Critique of Pure Reason asserts the metaphysical, but denies metaphysics’20 can be properly understood.

In other words, the Kantian denial does not regard metaphysics in general, but a certain type of metaphysics, namely the dogmatic one. This restriction itself raises the following problem: which is the other type of metaphysics Kant could have in mind? Certain formulations from the Critique of Pure Reason seem to indicate that the legitimate metaphysics is a systematisation of the pure concepts of thought, to which criticism offers only the main joints and the ‘leading thread.’21 Thus, in the Preface to the first edition, Kant tells us that metaphysics ‘is nothing but the inventory, systematically arranged, of all we possess through pure reason’ (A XX).

As regards Collingwood, his view seems to us to follow this Kantian idea that science as knowledge of the parts is grounded on a priori principles, that is, on presuppositions which implicitly assume the unity of the world (and hence, of the mind).

In a number of Kantian writings, metaphysics seems to be identified

by Kant with criticism itself; and the defending of the latter against the With respect to this point, Collingwood wrote that ‘Kant did not deny a priori knowledge: but he came to the conclusion that it could not be explained on the basis of objectivity’ (R.G. Collingwood, ‘Lectures on the Ontological Proof of the Existence of God. Written December 1919 for delivery Hilary Term 1920.’ Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Dep. Collingwood 2, 31).

20 Alois Riehl, Der philosophische Kritizismus. Geschichte und System, Band I: Geschichte des philosophischen Kritizismus, 2. Aufl., (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1908), p. 584.

21 Viorel Colţescu, Immanuel Kant (Timişoara: Tipografia Universităţii de Vest, 1996), p. 118.

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Wolffians’ attacks and against the distortions made by Kant’s own disciples becomes, during his final creative period, his main preoccupation on which, he believed, even the destiny of metaphysics depended. This idea essentially converges with Collingwood’s assertion that philosophy is not only the critical attitude in general, but criticism specifically directed inward; self-criticism is the mark of rationality. ‘It is true’, the English philosopher writes, ‘that philosophy does not arise in vacuo: but its relation to its presuppositions is not dogmatic, but critical.’22 As Colţescu suggestively points out, the Kantian equation of metaphysics with criticism might be puzzling and could determine one to suspect that the end is illegitimately identified with the means. Yet, only this context permits the real understanding of the value and significance of one of the most interesting—but also controversial—interpretations of Kantian philosophy of this century, namely Heidegger’s, made in his famous book Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.23 According to Heidegger, the Critique of Pure Reason truly proposes a new metaphysics. This novelty is radical and consists in the re-orientation of metaphysics from the transcendent towards the transcendental. This re-orientation of philosophical research could, as often happens, be interpreted as an abandonment of metaphysics in favor of the theory of knowledge. Such an understanding is only possible if we preserve the old concept of metaphysics and do not take the change Kant has introduced in this very concept into account.

According to Heidegger, the Critique of Pure Reason has nothing to do with the theory of knowledge.24 It represents a grounding of metaphysics Collingwood, ‘Lectures on the Ontological Proof,’ p. 9.

Martin Heidegger, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann), 1929.

24 Ibid., p. 25.

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