瓦登費斯教授

德國魯爾大學
哲學研究所榮休教授

瓦登費斯教授生於一九三四年,曾於德國波恩大學、慕尼黑大學、奧地利因斯布魯克大學修讀哲學、心理學、古典文獻學及歷史學,一九五九年於慕尼黑大學取得哲 學博士學位。一九六零至六二年,瓦氏到巴黎索爾邦學院學習法國哲學,師從梅洛龐蒂與利科等大師。一九六七年,瓦氏於慕尼黑大學取得教授資格,並在該校任教。自一九七六年起,瓦氏出任德國波鴻魯爾大學哲學系正教授。瓦登費斯教授現為魯爾大學哲學研究所榮休教授。

瓦登費斯教授曾於多家大學出任訪問教授,包括荷蘭鹿特丹大學、法國巴黎大學、美國紐約大學、比利時新魯汶大學、哥斯達黎加聖荷西大學、匈牙利德布勒森大學、捷克布拉格大學、那不勒斯意大利哲學研究所、奧地利維也納大學、格魯吉亞第比利斯大學等。瓦登費斯教授著作等身,以德文、法文、英文、意大利文和西班牙文發表了十八本專論及超過一百八十篇論文,其著作已收入十多部哲學文選,並被翻譯成十多種語言,包括英文、法文、西班牙文、意大利文、塞爾維亞文、克羅地亞文、斯洛文尼亞文、捷克文、烏克蘭文、波蘭文、俄文、瑞典文、匈牙利文、保加利亞文、日文、中文、以及韓文。瓦氏是德國現象學學會創辦人之一,曾於一九七零至七六年出任該會副會長,並於一九九四至九六年獲選為該會會長。

瓦登費斯教授是多套重要哲學叢書或文選的主編,包括《現象學與馬克思主義》(德文版四卷,1977-79;英譯1984),以及有關古爾維奇 (Gurwitsch)和舒茨、梅洛龐蒂、傅柯、德里達哲學的文選。瓦氏亦翻譯了梅洛龐蒂的《行為之結構》及其他作品,同時是德語哲學期刊 Philosophische Rundschau的編輯。

瓦登費斯教授的哲學定位在現代論與後現代論之間。他早年主要受胡塞爾的生活世界現象學、梅洛龐蒂的交織論哲學和肉身意義論影響,近期則注意法國的後結構主 義及後詮釋論哲學。在其《生活世界的網絡》一書中,瓦氏反對胡塞爾視生活世界為具有一「強制統一性」的看法,並強調生活世界在「礦野存在」的影響下,只能 被理解成為他者和陌生事物預留空間的未完成序列。瓦氏《曙光中的序列》一書是有關自然與文化之閾限的研究,而其《陌生者的刺》則探討面對他人之際,怎樣的 回應才是恰當的。瓦登費斯教授的思想最近成為一部專論的研究主題:M. Fischer, H.-D. Gondek, 與 B. Liebsch, Vernunft im Zeichen des Fremden: Zur Philosophie von Bernhard Waldenfels (《在陌生者的記號下的理性──瓦登費斯哲學研究》) (2001)。

作為本系第二位唐君毅訪問教授,瓦登費斯教授除了作一場公開演講外,並為會本系主持一個為期四週的、以<他者的問題>為主題的研究院研討班,以及於本系的教職員研討會中發表論文。在此之前,瓦登費斯教授曾於一九九六年四月到訪本系,出席由本系主辦之現象學國際學術會議。

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
香港中文大學行政樓祖堯堂

在展開以下有關暴力的反思前,我們首先必須澄清,我們不認為暴力是有其自身的本質的一回事,也不應假定暴力乃一些具有某一定意義和依循某一定法則而進行的 常態行為,宛如暴力根本便屬於我們的世界中之存在一般。反過來,暴力似乎是奇特的。暴力與愛和恨這些滲透在不同生活領域中的現象相似,是某種衝擊著我們、 卻是難以掌握、無以解決、異乎尋常、質疑一切秩序、和沒有自身位置的東西。暴力的特色可以從下列事實顯現出來:在古希臘,暴力如kronos [時間]、eros [愛慾] 和thanatos [死亡]一樣,都以神話的方式呈現。正因暴力沒有自身的確定位置,因而衍生出特殊的疑難。借漢娜‧亞蘭特的話來說,暴力令我們要面對「思考那不能被思考 者」的任務。倘若暴力真的被設想為一些根本地屬於個體生命和民族生命的東西,則它亦只會像病毒那樣影響著我們。思考暴力就是要對抗著暴力來思考。

處理這樣困難的問題,需要以一種間接的方式去接近這現象,並指出我們要面對的疑難。因此,起初我會選取一些能把這現象鉤劃的課題,考慮不同的論點,並考察 相應的語言場域。尤其重要的是:要視暴力為一文化現象,不能把它轉移到某種原始的自然上去。然而,我們的主要想法將設定暴力是關乎某種對人身的侵犯。這將 帶出關於侵犯者的狀態以及受害者的狀態之進一步問題。關於前者,我們要問:從多大的範圍來說,侵犯者可被視為需要負上責任?而對於後者,我們需要考慮受害 者的獨一性,這獨一性越出了常態化的不同軌道,如合法化、醫療化、道德化或歷史化。最後,我們的反思將檢驗不同的合法化方式,它們似乎都捕捉不住暴力的奇 特性質。

「他者」的問題

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

The Power of Events

poster
March 5 – 26, 2004 (every Friday)
下午 4:30 – 6:30
香港中文大學馮景禧樓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.