By Kyril Wolfe
From October 28-30 of 2024, the Society gathered together in Pittsburgh for an exploratory workshop. Our organizers were our fearless Society president, Olga Louchakova-Schwartz, who was, as usual, gracious and effective in running the event; and Jeff McCurry, Director of the Simon Silverman Center for Phenomenology at Duquesne University, our helpful and generous host, who shared many riches of the center and its archives with us during the event. Our topic of the workshop was “Experience and Non-Objects: Towards a Phenomenology of the Indiscernible,” and across all three days, we spent time on philosophy’s great paradoxical mission: discerning the indiscernible, and formalizing what cannot be objectified. What follows here are some of my impressions from the exploratory workshop, the thoughts and questions that are moving me these past weeks, since we met altogether.
The world of religious experience: Where are we when we have religious experiences?
One of the first talks given at the workshop was delivered by Michael Barber, who discussed Religious experience within a Schutzian framework. The primary thrust of his talk was to begin delineating the finite province of meaning within which religious experience arises, and according to the structures of which we are able to identify the religious aspect of experiences. His talk, in relation to my own experiences outside and inside the workshop, was timely. It seems to me that people more and more are questioning the underlying scientism that belies the Anglophone conversation on God, His Existence, etc. It is high time we sought to broaden our understanding of religious experience and of the world in which it arises. It is high time we sought, all the more earnestly, the unique modes of presentation, of evidence, and of truth of religious experience, which are not simply the same as the modes of presentation, evidence, and truth for objects. Kengo Myazono’s talk was likewise timely, especially as he highlighted that what is present to us in experience need not be present to the senses to be taken as truly there.
Yet where is the world of religious experience, and how do we find it? Elsewhere is certainly a possibility, one with which many sympathize. Yet, how would we explain the religiosity that can arise in everyday experience? How can we say that what we often feel as here and now is elsewhere? Perhaps more pointedly, what prevents the elsewhere from becoming the nowhere at all? Can there be more than our world of objects?
But perhaps we do not need another world, another where. As Martin Nitsche’s talk discussed in depth, there are many aspects of our world which we often overlook, hidden or invisible dimensions in which, when we pay attention, we find new possibilities of experience and of meaning. Additionally, as Felix O’ Murchadha observed, we cannot objectify the world in which we find ourselves, especially as the background to every experiencing; and yet we cannot make sense of any object at all without the world opening a horizon that makes possible our perception and our personal openness as subjects. Therefore, we perhaps do not need more than our world, but more of our world. Perhaps, we need not ask, “Where is the religious world?” but instead, “Where are we?”
The Subject in Context
There was a beautiful flow between the talks at many points of the workshop, and many strands seemed interwoven before we even spoke of them, listened to them. Interwoven deeply into the conversation about the world, for example, was also the question of the subject’s place in it. Neal De Roo and Peter Costello, presenting back to back, was something remarkable in this way. For on the one hand, the subject is never outside of context, and as De Roo pointed out, even when these contexts are not themselves the content of an experience, they are nevertheless forming and informing the experience at a fundamental level. Peter Costello, for his part, highlighted the bilaterality, the mutuality of all experiencing; how intentionality grants and recognizes the agency of things to affect us; and how things ultimately come to us in our image, our likeness. At the end of the workshop, Olga Louchakova-Schwartz’s talk on Embodied Inwardness discussed the interplay between the mind, the flesh and the ego in consciousness of the world; how we often find the pole of our subjectivity reversed from the mind to the body in experience; and how this establishes a deeper connectivity between the subject and objects through their ability to be sensed, felt, connected with by the flesh which is not an object, but my self.
It seems, then, that the provenance of subjectivity is not only the self, but also the world, and objects and others in the world have a say in how we experience things, even as we have a say in how they are experienced by us. We are, to paraphrase Jean Yves Lacoste, moving beyond the question of realism and idealism as dogmatized positions in philosophy, and instead embracing the great connection and dynamism between the world and the self, and between all things in general. And, perhaps best of all, at this workshop and elsewhere, we are beginning to constructively critique the “natural attitude,” so as to understand it rather than trying to overcome it. After all, phenomenology is, in the final analysis, is not the critique of experience, but the critical study of experience.
The Discrete, The Continuous, and the Ship of Theseus
We were fortunate to be joined remotely by two philosophers whose work and views could be understood almost as polar opposites. On the one end, we were joined by Graham Harman, one of the leaders of object-oriented ontology. Graham gave us an account of how, in speaking of substances and accidents, modern philosophy has tended to objectify or reify accidents into objects. Yet this cannot be so, since only a substance can properly be said to be an object. On the other end, we were also joined by Michel Bitbol, one of the founders of microphenomenology. Michel gave a talk on how, in quantum mechanics, it is impossible to re-identify the particles in quantum fields, leading many to suggest that we cannot properly speak of objects or substances in quantum mechanics since we cannot establish identity.
In both of these talks, and in the subsequent discussion between the two philosophers, a thought struck me which seemed to me important for the discussion. One the one hand, it seemed that the two philosophers were actually discussing two different dichotomies: Harman was discussing the substance/accident distinction, while Bitbol was discussing something more like the whole/parts distinction. And so it seems to me that what is more real, more substantial in Bitbol’s view is the field that gives rise to particles, and less the particles themselves. And this, it seems, is not so contrary to Harman’s concern with object-substances; indeed, it may be better for us to examine the quantum field as substance and the particle as part-accident, and not the particle as substance and the quantum field as relation-accident. Rather it seems to me, in granting greater substantiality to the quantum field rather than the particle, that we are returning to Plato and Aristotle, to a place where what is more real is that which is more certain in itself, yet less evident to us. Where that leaves us, however, with our bodies, that I cannot even guess at in these reflections.
On the other hand, it seemed to me that in many ways, we were renewing—in a discussion of particles, quantum fields, substances and accidents—the Ship of Theseus paradox. It seems to me, in response to this discussion, that we need a mereological reduction to address the relationship between quantum fields and particles. Such a mereological reduction seems to me possible given the findings in biology about organisms and their cells; far from the whole being simply the sum of the parts, the body of the living organism is indeed not only something distinct from the sum of its parts, but also what gives rise to the parts, the cells themselves. A similar reduction may be helpful in relation to the nature of quantum fields and the particles that are instantiations of the field.
Duquesne, the Archive, and the Tasks of Philosophers Today
I will close with some more personal reflections mixed in with the scholarly.
I drove up to the workshop from where I now live in Florida. I had no regrets about the distance or the time spent driving; I used to live near Pittsburgh when I was doing my theology degree. I was glad to be received by the familiar sights of the Ohio River valley, the Appalachian mountains, and southwestern Pennsylvania as I came into town. Duquesne itself is a beautiful campus, and a breath of fresh air in the midst of downtown Pittsburgh. The university has somehow achieved the incredible feat of being built quite tall (several stories, in fact) while nevertheless still being a beautiful and wide enough space for a genuine sense of community and connection.
The workshop was based out of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at the Gumberg Library. The Silverman Center contains some special collections of the University library: we were surrounded by decades of the history of phenomenology, including (but certainly not limited to) the personal collections of several phenomenologists, an official branch of the Husserl Archive at KU Leuven, and the archives for many phenomenological institutions. Our plenaries were all given in the presence of not only the workshop attendees, but also in the presence of the history of our philosophical enterprise.
One of the major themes of the workshop, and I think this was perhaps its greatest underlying current, was the historical dimension of its presentations. Our discussions were wide-ranging in terms of history and disciplines. We discussed historically overlooked figures of philosophy, like Conrad-Martius and Peirce; architecture, literature and art both old and new; the philosophical and theological forerunners of contemporary thinkers, like Hildegard of Bingen; how old structures that formalize and objectify experience can obstruct our view of subjective religious experiences in our time; and how contemporary thinkers like Henry and Marion relate to the past. It was fitting, then, that we be in a library and archive for much of our time together; it was a reminder, and a grounding experience, to think of the past as what gives rise to our present.
Yet there is more to this historical dimension than simply recovery or ressourcement. I feel that we are on the search for something, and that something will be the answer to the troubles facing philosophy and theology in our time. Philosophers and theologians have built up so many structures and schools of thought and institutions, and we (rightly, for the most part) prided ourselves on our accomplishments. But our time is now defined, both inside and outside the academy, by a loss of trust in what we have built up. We are now in the position of Alexander when he met Diogenes, coming with great wealth of ideas and riches, only to find ourselves blocking the sun, and being humbled for it.
Philosophy and Theology are making a return to the history and sources of their thought, a return which, I believe, is also an attempt to return to the ground and the primordial experiences that are the foundation of what we have built up. We seek the ground, and we seek the unobstructed view of the horizon and the sun, so that we may understand better the place of the great edifices of our thought. And such is also a strength of phenomenology: be it Husserl’s return to the things themselves, Heidegger’s return to the question of Being itself, or the projects of other and ever more phenomenological thinkers, we have always sought to make this return. Now, more than ever before, we find ourselves hoping to do just that.
May our work be fruitful and successful in that. And Happy New Year.
-Kyril Wolfe