Bernhard Waldenfels
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.
Violence as Violation
Neither are our following reflections based on the assumption that violence is something which has its own essence, nor do they presuppose that there are normal acts of violence which have a certain meaning and follow certain rules, as if violence simply belongs to our being in the world. On the contrary, violence seems to be something strange. It resembles phenomena such as love and death, phenomena traversing various domains of life, striking us as something ungraspable, insoluble, extraordinary, questioning all order, something with no proper place. The peculiarity of violence is shown by the fact that in antiquity it appears in a mythical form as do Kronos, Eros and Thanatos. With no secure place of its own, it gives rise to peculiar aporias. In Hannah Arendt’s words, violence confronts us with the task “of thinking the unthinkable.” If violence could be conceived as something which simply belongs to the life of individuals and peoples, it would affect us like a virus. To think violence means to think against it.
Such a difficult issue requires a proceeding which approximates the phenomenon in an indirect way, marking the aporias we are confronted with. Hence, I shall begin with a selection of topics which encircle the phenomenon, taking into consideration various points of view and taking a look into the corresponding linguistic field. What seems to be especially important is to see that violence is a cultural phenomenon which cannot be transposed to some kind of brute nature. However, the leading idea will consist in the assumption that violence has to do with a violation that befalls somebody. This leads us to further questions concerning the state of the perpetrator and the state of the victim. As to the first we have to ask to what extent the actor can be regarded as responsible, and as to the latter we have to take into account a sort of singularity which exceeds the different paths of normalisation such as legalisation, medicalisation, moralisation or historisation. Our reflections will end by testing different ways of legitimisation which all seem to miss the strange character of violence.
The Question of the Other
- Experience of the Other
- Response to the Other
- Otherness of Our Body
- Between Here and Elsewhere
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.
The Power of Events
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.