© Günter Figal and Figure/Ground

Dr. Figal was interviewed by Laureano Ralón and Mario Teorodo Ramírez. August 18th, 2015.

Günter Figal received his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1976, and in 1987, after his Habilitation, his appointment as Privatdozent. Among his teachers were Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dieter Henrich, Michael Theunissen, and Ernst Tugendhat. From 1989 till 2001 he was professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen. Since 2001 he has been professor of philosophy (chair) at the university of Freiburg. Since 1995 he is a regular member of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum. He is the editor of the International Yearbook for Hermeneutics (Internationales Jahrbuch für Hermeneutik) and, between 2003 and 2015, the president of the Martin-Heidegger-Society. Figal held distinguished visiting professor positions in Berlin (Humboldt University), Nishinomiya (Kwansei Gakuin University), Rome (University La Sapienza), Aarhus (Aarhus University), Leuven (Kardinal Mercier Chair), and Boston (Gadamer Distinguished Visiting Professor, Boston College). In 2009 / 2010 he was Internal Senior Fellow of FRIAS. Since 2013 he is the second speaker the Freiburg research center SFB 2015 (Muße. Konzepte, Räume, Figuren). In the same year he was elected as member of the board of trustees of the foundation Humanismus Heute.

How did you become a university professor?

After I received my doctoral degree from the University of Heidelberg, I had the chance to teach at the Heidelberg philosophy department, and I enjoyed teaching very much. I soon discovered that my own research projects and my preparatory work for the classes I taught complemented each other well, and also that I learned a lot from discussions with participants in my seminars. So the combination of philosophical research and teaching appeared as almost ideal to me, and accordingly academic work became more and more what I would most like to do. During the eighties, I wrote my second book, and together with my ‘Habilitation’, I received my ‘venia legendi’, that is, the license to teach as a ‘Privatdozent’. I was happy to have a position at the philosophy department in Heidelberg during those years, and even more to get an offer from the University of Tübingen in 1989. I accepted the offer with great pleasure, and so I became a full-time university professor.

Who were some of your mentors in graduate school – what did you learn from them?

During my years as a student at the University of Heidelberg the philosophy department was one of the best in Germany, arguably even the best. Hans-Georg Gadamer was still very much present, even though he had retired in 1968. Also his younger colleagues, Dieter Henrich, Ernst Tugendhat and Michael Theunissen, were excellent teachers. All four of them were not only professors of philosophy but true philosophers. So we students had the chance to experience philosophy and not only to learn something about it. Gadamer’s project of philosophical hermeneutics was (and still is) particularly familiar to me. From Henrich, I first of all learned how to understand and how to reconstruct philosophical conceptions in their wholeness as well as in detail. Theunissen, a distinguished Kierkegaard scholar, had a less constructive and more existential approach to philosophy. When Theunissen came to Heidelberg he had started with phenomenology, but soon, like Henrich, he concentrated on Hegel. Gadamer also worked on Hegel those years. Only Tugendhat represented a kind of Wittgensteinian counterpoint to the Hegelian dominance in the seminar. He was not convinced about dialectics at all, and more and more I found his skepticism plausible.

What attracted you to philosophy generally and phenomenology specifically? How did they shape your perception of the world?

I had read philosophical books already at school – some chapters from Heidegger’s Being and Time as well as Sartre and Camus. But when I went to Heidelberg as a student I had decided to study literature and not philosophy. During my first semester, however, my attention was drawn to Gadamer’s hermeneutics. I read Truth and Method and doing so I was struck by Gadamer’s subtle reflections on what I, as a student of literature, was doing. This kind of reflection fascinated me, in the long run even more than philological work on poetical texts. I have never ceased to passionately read novels and poetry, and likewise I never lost a certain philological passion. But it was philosophy that really interested me, particularly because in philosophy one has the chance to concentrate on the subject matter of a text instead of being tributary to the text as such.

As for phenomenology, I had worked intensely on Husserl as a participant of Theunissen’s seminars. I re-read Heidegger, this time more extensively, and I also realized that Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics could be regarded as a specification of phenomenology. During my years as a doctoral student, however, phenomenological thinking was not a priority to me. I was all too deeply involved in Hegelian and post-Hegelian dialectics as it was practiced in Heidelberg. Along with my growing skepticism concerning the abstractions of dialectics, however, I slowly began to look for other, more descriptive, more down-to-earth ways of philosophizing. I found what I was looking for in Heidegger’s Being and Time. So it was my work on Heidegger, which resulted in my second book, Martin Heidegger: Phänomenologie der Freiheit, which really brought me to phenomenology. I was lucky to be supported by Gadamer during those years. Gadamer had shown interest in my project, and the many conversations with him, which eventually led to his offer to supervise my work, were of invaluable importance. These conversations went on for many years after the book was finished. They were the foundation of my philosophical education.

Is phenomenology still relevant in this age of information and digital interactive media?

Yes, it is, in my opinion, and not less than before. We can conceive medial information as what it is only if we reflect and describe it, and such a description very likely will have to refer to immediate personal interaction as described in classical phenomenology. Only if we reflect what it is like to talk to someone else face to face, can we realize the modification of dialogue as effected by phone, e-mail or Facebook. When we give someone else a phone call, the other person is present only as a voice, whereas someone we correspond with has no bodily presence for us at all. To write a letter, however, and to post it via traditional mail is different from sending it as e-mail, since an e-mail is delivered in a moment so that we can expect an immediate answer. At least very often, writing e-mails is written conversation between persons bodily absent for each other. These considerations may illustrate how mutual bodily presence proves to be the measure for describing its medial modifications. Despite the so-called digital revolution human life and the world it takes place in have not completely changed; in many respects they are very much the same as before. Accordingly, I cannot see why we should be in need of completely different kinds of philosophy.

You have relied on Heidegger’s philosophy quite a bit in order to develop your own thinking; in fact, some of your colleagues even consider you a heideggerian of sorts. However, you also seem very conscious about Heidegger’s politics and highly critical of his ties with Nazism. Not long ago, you resigned to the Chair of the German Heidegger Society following your discovery of anti-semitic passages in the “Black Notebooks”. This is obviously a very delicate issue: is Heidegger’s philosophy intrinsically fascist, in your view?

Being deeply influenced by Gadamer, I could never be a heideggerian. Gadamer’s philosophical style, his liberal and humanistic attitude, which became exemplary for me, was so different from Heidegger’s radicalism and his revolutionary longing for new beginnings. Nevertheless, I have always admired Heidegger’s extraordinary interpretative skills as well as his capacity for conceptual description. Especially in his Marburg lecture courses, but also in essays like the one on the Aristotelian concept of Physis, Heidegger has set new standards for how to read classical texts of philosophy; he has taught us what philosophical close reading really is. And Being and Time, as an integrative conceptual description of ‘our’ way of being, is and will remain one of the most important books in modern philosophy. As regards more specific subject matters, I was mostly intrigued by Heidegger’s attempt to conceive freedom not primarily as freedom of action or as freedom of the will, but as ‘free space’ (‘Freiraum’ or ‘Spielraum’), as the openness of possibilities, which as such makes free actions and free decisions possible. Such considerations eventually led me to the question of how to conceive and describe openness more concretely and in more detail than Heidegger himself did. I came to suspect that such a description could be achieved by understanding openness as space. As a result, I elaborated a conception of spatial phenomenology, which is the topic of a book published earlier this year: Unscheinbarkeit. Der Raum der Phänomenologie.

My esteem for Heidegger as a philosopher never included his thinking of the thirties. I have always disagreed with his conception of philosophy as a particular national historical duty of the German people, and I have always regarded his attempt to understand the takeover of the National Socialists in 1933 as a chance for a new philosophical beginning without any apologetic impulse: simply as erroneous. Following, however, Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Heidegger’s political affair as an ‘episode’, I assumed that after resigning as Rektor of the University of Freiburg Heidegger had practiced a kind of ‘inner emigration’ – relying on Hölderlin and no longer on Hitler. The so-called ‘Black Notebooks’, however, offer another tableau. When I read them, I was especially shocked by Heidegger’s aggressive anti-Semitism, and, after the publication of his post-war notes, by his total ignorance of Germany’s responsibility and guilt. Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was the main reason for my resignation as president of the Heidegger Society. I was no longer able to represent Heidegger as a person, and I had also realized that an uncompromisingly critical discussion of Heidegger’s ideological position inside the Heidegger Society was not possible.

I would refuse, however, to characterize Heidegger a ‘fascist thinker’. Otherwise, I would have to agree with the idea that Gadamer, Arendt, Löwith as well as Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault and many others were influenced by fascist philosophy, and this appears simply absurd to me. Not even all of Heidegger’s thoughts from the thirties and forties can be regarded as being dependent on his ideological convictions. His discussion of modern science and technology is what it is independently of his crazy association of science and technology with his anti-Semitic resentments. Nevertheless, after the publication of the Black Notebooks, Heidegger’s thinking from the early thirties on appears differently. What we read in the Black Notebooks is a strange mixture of philosophy and ideology, and not always, not in every respect, can philosophical thought be neatly separated from ideological assumptions. This is a challenge for Heidegger research in the years to come. We have to face the two sides of Heidegger, the philosophical and the ideological one, and we have to discuss to which degree his philosophical thoughts have ideological implications, i.e., whether they can be understood without referring to ideological assumptions or not. This may be quite easy in some respects and very difficult in others. In any case, we already know that it has become completely impossible to be a ‘heideggerian’, i.e. to affirm Heidegger’s thinking on the whole and to accept his work as such as philosophical truth. I regard this end of heideggerianism as a step back to philosophical normality. Philosophy is not in need of gurus; philosophy as founded by Socrates and Plato is critical examination, led by the assumption that every philosophical argument has to stand a critical test in order to prove to be valid. Philosophy is dialogue, not monologue; and Heidegger, at least from the early thirties on, is a very monological thinker.

Your attitude towards Heidegger contrasts quite significantly with your reappraisal of Kant. Indeed, you have offered us a very different Kant: a Kant who is beyond epistemology and praxis, and whose concerns revolve around aesthetic speculation, as opposed to the formal conditions of possibility of knowledge. This Kant – with his emphasis on “free formations” and irreducible aesthetic ideas – already seems to contain some of the seeds of phenomenology and existential philosophy. Is Kant back in the game? If so, what could this mean for phenomenology, hermeneutics and post-kantian philosophies in general?

Your question as I understand it refers mainly to my book Erscheinungsdinge, translated into English as Aesthetics as Phenomenology. In that book, I argue for a philosophical discussion of art that lets art be art instead of reducing it to philosophical truths of whatsoever kind. No truth becomes manifest in art, but rather, as I try to show, art is a manifestation of the beautiful. For such an understanding Kant is much more helpful than Heidegger – but also more helpful than Gadamer, Adorno or Hegel. Kant has discovered the beautiful as what I call decentered order, i.e., as an order which cannot once and for all be determined conceptually, but only interpreted again and again. It is an order that is essentially perceptible and this perceptibility cannot be exhausted by particular conceptual determinations. With art, there is always more to perceive than to understand. Unlike Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer and Adorno, Kant also does not have a rigid canonical understanding of beautiful things – as if only paintings, sculptures, poems or pieces of music could be such things and thereby artworks. Kant also speaks of wall paper patterns as being beautiful; he has such an open understanding of the beautiful that his conception could also encompass so-called ‘abstract’ painting, pieces of music the structure of which is partly contingent, but also Japanese tea bowls or Zen gardens. Aesthetics in the line of Kant’s is more modern and less centered on Western culture than Hegel’s, Heidegger’s, Gadamer’s and Adorno’s philosophy of art. That’s what I have found interesting about it. But though I am very sympathetic with the discussion of the beautiful in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, I would not ascribe to him an especially prominent role for my philosophical work. In my recent book on spatial phenomenology there are only a few references to Kant, but many to Plato, Husserl, Heidegger, Valéry and Hans Blumenberg, a philosopher who deserves much more attention.

Nevertheless, thinkers such as Steven Shaviro have argued that the aesthetic Kant already overcomes the humanist logic of phenomenology, having special resonances with process philosophers such as Whitehead and Deleuze. What do you make of this claim?

I would not dispute that Kant’s third critique can be read in the light of Whitehead or Deleuze, though this would not be my reading. I am not inclined to give up the ‘humanist logic of phenomenology’, providing that this logic is meant as including the indispensability of human perspectives. As I think we should not try to describe the world without taking into account that we are the ones who describe it. And in the world as we experience it there are – at least relatively – stable objects that cannot be reduced to processes of whatsoever kind. Without objectivity our communication would become difficult if not impossible, since we would not know what to refer to and to talk about.

But isn’t precisely here where the aesthetic Kant becomes so important? You’ve written a great deal about aesthetics not as the production and valuation of art, but as a form of contact which – in the spirit of phenomenology – can let things show themselves from themselves. Doesn’t aesthetics, conceived as a form of disinterested experience, as a contact at a distance, a sort of touching without touching, provide a third alternative to processes and products?

Yes, I agree. Aesthetics in Kant’s sense, and even more phenomenologically revised, provides a paradigm for a conceptive description of life and world, which overestimates neither the dependence of reality on production or construction nor the independence of reality from its experience. Disinterested aesthetical experience, which can also be described as non-philosophical experience in epoché and thus as an aesthetical complement to phenomenology, opens up an objectivity that can neither be reduced to its formation nor just be stated as a matter of fact. It is phenomenal objectivity, that is, objectivity that shows itself as such in experience, and not least in different perspectives of experience. Objectivity in this sense is primordial objectivity; it is prior to production or conceptual determination, insofar as it allows and enables productive or determinative access. In aesthetical experience this primordial objectivity is reflectively discovered and allowed to come to explicit appearance.

Allow me to reformulate the previous question form a slightly different angle. In his interview with Figure/Ground, philosopher Dermot Moran declared that the human person is neither a contemplative Robocop who finds its way around by informationally projecting a set of mathematical coordinates upon the world, nor a Frankenstein that is mindlessly fused with the world, that is, reduced to an ethic of the appropriate response or an attunement to worldly solicitations. Doesn’t aesthetic contact provide a hopeful corridor between disinterested theory and mindless praxis? If so, what kind of subjectivity awaits at the end of the tunnel?

May be a kind of subjectivity that is no longer what the term ‘subject’ originally indicates, namely the underlying basis for cognition and practice – Descartes’ fundamentum inconcussum. The term ‘subjectivity’ then would be only a preliminary name for the very nature of living beings, including persons who experience the world as ‘their’ world but also are involved in the world they experience. I will try to explain that: Everything I experience belongs to ‘me’; it is the content of my experience and thus centered on my capacities. But as soon as I try to find out who I am, I cannot avoid referring to other persons, other living beings, and also to things, buildings and environments – with one word: to the world I belong to. Without the world I live in, I would be nobody. Living beings as I understand them cannot be adequately described without taking into account these two sides, which, as I have pointed out in Unscheinbarkeit, should be conceived as two aspects of spatial life essentially complementing each other.

Your work on aesthetics also bring you somewhat close to the new forms of realism and materialism that have emerged in recent years with thinkers such as Quentin Meillassoux, Markus Gabriel and Graham Harman. When you speak of artworks as originary, for instance – that is, of artworks which do not belong to an overarching context but which open up their own contexts – you appear to have made a decisive step in the direction of a non-correlationist type of thinking. Is this an accurate portrayal?

My answer to this question is in line with my remarks concerning objectivity previously made. Yes, I agree that my description of artworks in Aesthetics as Phenomenology stresses their autonomy. Artworks are no constructions established in aesthetic experience. Rather they originate aesthetic experience, perceptive as well as interpretative; they are eminent phenomenal things, showing themselves more intensely than everything else. But just in their appearing they are related to us who experience them. So I would not call my version of philosophical realism ‘non-correlationist’. What I am arguing for is phenomenological realism or realistic phenomenology. We as experiencing living beings are correlated with reality; though for us reality is only there in experience, what is there in experience is reality. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain why different references to the same are possible, and accordingly we could only communicate to each other our references without being able to say what we refer to. My experience of, let us say a painting by Barnett Newman is more or less different from yours. But undoubtedly we both refer to this particular painting by Barnett Newman.

Among other things, the new realists argue that “correlationism” leads to relationism; and that phenomenology and hermeneutics, in particular, lead to postmodern relativism. Do you agree with these claims? From your own perspective, is it possible to overcome relativism? If so, how?

In my opinion so-called postmodern versions of hermeneutics try to conceive interpretation without something interpreted. Following Nietzsche’s considerations in his essay On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense they wish to reduce the content of interpretation to interpretation as such, and in doing so they ignore that everything interpreted can only be understood as such if we know that it can also be interpreted otherwise and thus is independent from particular interpretations. As a consequence such versions of hermeneutics are not ‘relational’ since they do not take into account something interpretation can be related to. They are not even ‘relative’, since only something the appearance of objective can be regarded as relative to particular interpretations and to the potential they are enabled by. Accordingly relation and correlation are no anti-realistic, but realistic terms. Though I sympathize with ‘New Realism’ in many respects, I cannot agree with its anti-phenomenological intentions.

Merleau-Ponty is an odd figure among phenomenologists. In his philosophy, there is a concern for the experience of the real beyond human access – “the thing ignores us”, he writes in the Phenomenology of Perception. The problem of space is also a central concern of his philosophy. What influences has Merleau-Ponty had in your thinking?

I read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception already as a student, but I rediscovered or, more precisely, really discovered his work in the nineties when I again worked more extensively on art and especially on painting. Merleau-Ponty’s essay on Cézanne was a kind of revelation to me, and still today I would count his latest work Eye and Mind among the most beautiful books in modern philosophy. Reading these texts, I learned to conceive perception, especially visual perception as experience sui generis, which must not be subordinated to theoretical or practical understanding – as if perception would need concepts in order to be structured. With respect to Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty has shown very clearly that perceptional experience has its own evidence. I also have been deeply impressed by Merleau-Ponty’s critical discussion of Husserl’s phenomenology in his essay The Philosopher and His Shadow, especially by his argument that the distinction between ‘natural attitude’ and phenomenological attitude as Husserl draws it is problematic. On the other hand, however, I have serious difficulties with Merleau-Ponty’s conception of ‘flesh’, which results in a strange kind of panpsychism. In his later works Merleau-Ponty has forgotten that ‘the thing ignores’ us, but rather assumes that things regard us. I do not believe that, and, in general, I do not believe that everything we experience is like us.

Do you think philosophy can contribute to the resolution of concrete problems – social, environmental, etc. – in our complex geo-political world?

I am very reluctant about this. Philosophers are always in danger to loose their philosophical credibility as soon as they subordinate philosophical insight to practical intentions of whatsoever kind. This does not mean, however, that philosophy must be ineffective. But its effects are most authentic and powerful if they are involuntary, just a consequence of insight, which, only because of its independency from practical intentions, can be, what it is supposed to be. In this respect philosophy is like art; artworks subordinated to practical intentions are less art than works that are allowed to be simply art.

What are you currently working on?

My books Gegenständlichkeit (translated into English as Objectivity), Erscheinungsdinge (Aesthetics as Phenomenology) and Unscheinbarkeit (translation under progress) form a kind of trilogy devoted to realistic phenomenology, the first book being a contribution to phenomenological hermeneutics, the second one being a contribution to phenomenological aesthetics, and the third one being an attempt to clarify the very idea of phenomenology as such. What I am interested in now is the question of how to live a realistic life – a live that does justice to the autonomy of things and, first of all, to space that correlates us to things and also to each other. The book I have began to work on will not just be the forth in a series, which accordingly would be a tetralogy. Rather it will be a separate complement to the three books, including the topics of all of them in a normative view. Its preliminary title is ‘On the Good’.

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Suggested citation:

Ralon, L. & Ramírez, M. (2015). “Interview with Günter Figal,” Figure/Ground. August 18th.

< http://figureground.org/fg/interview-with-gunter-figal/ >

Questions? Contact Laureano Ralón at ralonlaureano@gmail.com