瓦登费斯教授

德国鲁尔大学
哲学研究所荣休教授

瓦登费斯教授生于一九三四年,曾于德国波恩大学、慕尼黑大学、奥地利因斯布鲁克大学修读哲学、心理学、古典文献学及历史学,一九五九年于慕尼黑大学取得哲 学博士学位。一九六零至六二年,瓦氏到巴黎索尔邦学院学习法国哲学,师从梅洛庞蒂与利科等大师。一九六七年,瓦氏于慕尼黑大学取得教授资格,并在该校任教。自一九七六年起,瓦氏出任德国波鸿鲁尔大学哲学系正教授。瓦登费斯教授现为鲁尔大学哲学研究所荣休教授。

瓦登费斯教授曾于多家大学出任访问教授,包括荷兰鹿特丹大学、法国巴黎大学、美国纽约大学、比利时新鲁汶大学、哥斯达黎加圣荷西大学、匈牙利德布勒森大学、捷克布拉格大学、那不勒斯意大利哲学研究所、奥地利维也纳大学、格鲁吉亚第比利斯大学等。瓦登费斯教授着作等身,以德文、法文、英文、意大利文和西班牙文发表了十八本专论及超过一百八十篇论文,其着作已收入十多部哲学文选,并被翻译成十多种语言,包括英文、法文、西班牙文、意大利文、塞尔维亚文、克罗地亚文、斯洛文尼亚文、捷克文、乌克兰文、波兰文、俄文、瑞典文、匈牙利文、保加利亚文、日文、中文、以及韩文。瓦氏是德国现象学学会创办人之一,曾于一九七零至七六年出任该会副会长,并于一九九四至九六年获选为该会会长。

瓦登费斯教授是多套重要哲学丛书或文选的主编,包括《现象学与马克思主义》(德文版四卷,1977-79;英译1984),以及有关古尔维奇 (Gurwitsch)和舒茨、梅洛庞蒂、傅柯、德里达哲学的文选。瓦氏亦翻译了梅洛庞蒂的《行为之结构》及其他作品,同时是德语哲学期刊 Philosophische Rundschau的编辑。

瓦登费斯教授的哲学定位在现代论与后现代论之间。他早年主要受胡塞尔的生活世界现象学、梅洛庞蒂的交织论哲学和肉身意义论影响,近期则注意法国的后结构主 义及后诠释论哲学。在其《生活世界的网络》一书中,瓦氏反对胡塞尔视生活世界为具有一「强制统一性」的看法,并强调生活世界在「矿野存在」的影响下,只能 被理解成为他者和陌生事物预留空间的未完成序列。瓦氏《曙光中的序列》一书是有关自然与文化之閾限的研究,而其《陌生者的刺》则探讨面对他人之际,怎样的 回应才是恰当的。瓦登费斯教授的思想最近成为一部专论的研究主题:M. Fischer, H.-D. Gondek, 与 B. Liebsch, Vernunft im Zeichen des Fremden: Zur Philosophie von Bernhard Waldenfels (《在陌生者的记号下的理性──瓦登费斯哲学研究》) (2001)。

作为本系第二位唐君毅访问教授,瓦登费斯教授除了作一场公开演讲外,并为会本系主持一个为期四周的、以<他者的问题>为主题的研究院研讨班,以及于本系的教职员研讨会中发表论文。在此之前,瓦登费斯教授曾于一九九六年四月到访本系,出席由本系主办之现象学国际学术会议。

Professor Emeritus
Institute for Philosophy, Ruhr University, Germany

Born in 1934, Professor Bernhard Waldenfels studied philosophy, psychology, classical philology, and history in Bonn, Innsbruck, and Munich, earning his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1959. From 1960–1962, he studied modern French philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris with Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur. In 1967, he obtained his Habilitation at Munich, where he taught until 1976, when he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Ruhr University in Bochum. He is now Professor Emeritus in the Institute for Philosophy at Ruhr University.

Professor Waldenfels has taught as a visiting professor in Rotterdam (1982), Paris (1984), New York (1987, 1999), Louvain-la-Neuve (1990), Costa Rica (1991), Hungary (1992), Prague (1993), Italy (1999), Vienna (2002), and Tbilisi, Georgia (2002, 2003). He is the author of eighteen books and over 150 journal articles in German, English, Italian, French, and Spanish. His work has been included in dozens of anthologies and translated into numerous languages, including English, French, Spanish, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Czech, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. A co-founder of the German Society for Phenomenological Research, he served as the society’s vice president from 1970–1976 and president from 1994–1996.

Professor Waldenfels has edited or co-edited several collections of essays, including Phanomenologie und Marxismus (4 volumes, 1977–79; English tr. 1984) and omnibus volumes on Gurwitsch and Schutz (1983), Merleau-Ponty (1986), Foucault (1991), and Derrida (1997). He has edited and translated several of Merleau-Ponty’s works and has been editor of the journal Philosophische Rundschau since 1975.

Waldenfels’s philosophy stands at the boundary between modernism and post-modernism. His main influences are Husserlian “lifeworld” phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of “chiasm” and “incarnate meaning,” and, more recently, French post-structuralism and post-hermeneutics. In his In the Web of the Lifeworld , he resists Husserl’s view of the lifeworld, with its “forced unity,” and argues instead that the impact of “brute being” forces us to view the lifeworld as an unfinished order with room for otherness and the uncanny. His Order at Twilight is a study of the threshold between nature and culture, and his The Thorn of the Strange concerns the question of a suitable response to “otherness”—the “thorn” which causes us to overstep the bounds of the personal and collective order. Waldenfels’s work is the subject of a recent study by M. Fischer, H.-D. Gondek, and B. Liebsch, Vernunft im Zeichen des Fremden: Zur Philosophie von Bernhard Waldenfels (Reason in the Sign of the Strange: On the Philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels ) (2001).

As the second holder of the Tang Chun-I Visiting Professorship, Professor Waldenfels will offer a public lecture, a four-week graduate seminar on “The Question of the Other,” and a staff seminar in the Department of Philosophy. This is Professor Waldenfels’s second visit to the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He came previously as an invited speaker at the International Conference on Phenomenology organized by the Department of Philosophy in April 1996.

暴力即侵犯

poster
二零零四年三月八日 (星期一)
下午4:30 – 6:30
香港中文大学行政楼祖尧堂

在展开以下有关暴力的反思前,我们首先必须澄清,我们不认为暴力是有其自身的本质的一回事,也不应假定暴力乃一些具有某一定意义和依循某一定法则而进行的 常态行为,宛如暴力根本便属于我们的世界中之存在一般。反过来,暴力似乎是奇特的。暴力与爱和恨这些渗透在不同生活领域中的现象相似,是某种冲击着我们、 却是难以掌握、无以解决、异乎寻常、质疑一切秩序、和没有自身位置的东西。暴力的特色可以从下列事实显现出来:在古希腊,暴力如kronos [时间]、eros [爱欲] 和thanatos [死亡]一样,都以神话的方式呈现。正因暴力没有自身的确定位置,因而衍生出特殊的疑难。借汉娜‧亚兰特的话来说,暴力令我们要面对「思考那不能被思考 者」的任务。倘若暴力真的被设想为一些根本地属于个体生命和民族生命的东西,则它亦只会像病毒那样影响着我们。思考暴力就是要对抗着暴力来思考。

处理这样困难的问题,需要以一种间接的方式去接近这现象,并指出我们要面对的疑难。因此,起初我会选取一些能把这现象钩划的课题,考虑不同的论点,并考察 相应的语言场域。尤其重要的是:要视暴力为一文化现象,不能把它转移到某种原始的自然上去。然而,我们的主要想法将设定暴力是关乎某种对人身的侵犯。这将 带出关于侵犯者的状态以及受害者的状态之进一步问题。关于前者,我们要问:从多大的范围来说,侵犯者可被视为需要负上责任?而对于后者,我们需要考虑受害 者的独一性,这独一性越出了常态化的不同轨道,如合法化、医疗化、道德化或历史化。最后,我们的反思将检验不同的合法化方式,它们似乎都捕捉不住暴力的奇 特性质。

「他者」的问题

二零零四年三月四至廿六日 (逢星期五)
下午2:30 – 5:15
香港中文大学润昌堂101室

The Power of Events

poster
March 5 – 26, 2004 (every Friday)
下午 4:30 – 6:30
香港中文大学冯景禧楼125室

It is strange to say, but there are terms which we generally do not miss as long as they do not exist, but which develop a special attraction as soon as they do appear. The term ‘event’ ( Ereignis , événement ) is one of these. Its origin seems to be quite inconspicuous, it is used in various ways. As far as I know, nothing like ‘eventism’ has come on the scene until now. Nevertheless, a watershed separates those kinds of thinking in which everything that pertains to the event plays a central role, and others in which all of this is almost completely lacking, apart from special considerations, pertaining to the theory of history or to formal ontology. This may depend on how experience is conceived and how much importance is attached to it. It is not my intention to make a contribution to the history of ideas, but it should be stressed that on the threshold between the 19th and the 20th century there were certain affinities between Husserl, Bergson and James which they all understood as a search for a non-empiricist philosophy of experience. Such a philosophy implies a strong concept of experience, i. e. a sort of experience which does not supply us with pure data, but organises, structures and forms itself without being governed by fixed laws. This explains its strong connection to the inventiveness of life which due to the recent victory of the bio-sciences and bio-technologies appears in a new light. What is at stake here is not only the attempt to avoid the stumbling blocks of rationalism and empiricism, taking and giving on both sides, but to question the assumption of a priori laws and a posteriori facts, looking for a happening which makes its own way and literally er-fährt something.

We may ask for the reasons why such a radicalisation of experience, giving rise to thought in terms of events, has had a much broader and deeper resonance in post-war France than in the English- and German-speaking countries. This seems to be all the more astonishing, the more we consider that the French thinkers concerned took and take different paths, but to be sure, almost none of them has remained completely untouched by Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s thinking of Being. In my own contribution I will restrict myself to describing those constellations due to which I started to use a new concept of event. It goes without saying that in my own efforts I frequent the German-French borderlands.

In what follows I first want to show the friction surfaces which allow us to ignite sparks on the concept of event. In doing so I shall inscribe this concept into a tetragram corresponding to the four central problems of order, self, others and time-space. Tackling the problem in this indirect way makes it easier to avoid the less satisfying alternative of minor events, which are rather trivial, and great events, which are too sublime.