









































διανοιαDIANOIA
The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Spring 2019
ISSUE VI



Editor-in-Chief: Peter Klapes 
Senior Managing Editor: Noah Valdez
Managing Editors: Weitao Liu, Ethan Yates
General Editors: Benjamin Dewhurst, Christopher Fahey, Jennifer Howard, Gregory Kacergis, Brian 
Kominick, Ana Luque, Elizabeth LoPreiato, Jacob Schick, Alexander Turney, Lauren White, Madeline 
Wolfe, Xinyu Zhou
External Reviewers: Jeremy Freudberg (Boston University), Justin Messmer (Boston University), Tristan 
St. Germain (Brown University), Alexander Stooshinoff (Concordia University)
Communications Editor: Jessica Flores
Graduate Advisor: Myles Casey
Faculty Advisor: Ronald Tacelli, S.J.

Cover designs courtesy of Gregory Kacergis. 
Featuring: 
Cézanne, Paul The Card Players. 1892-1893; obtained via Wikimedia Commons.

The materials herein represent the personal opinions of the individual authors and do not necessarily 
represent the views of Dianoia or Boston College.

If you have questions regarding the Journal, would like to submit your work for review, or if you’d be 
interested in joining next year’s staff, please contact the Journal at dianoia@bc.edu.

Dianoia
The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College 
Spring 2019 Issue VI
Boston College
140 Commonwealth Avenue
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/philosophy/undergraduate/dianoia.html
© 2019 The Trustees of Boston College

Printed by Progressive Print Solutions.



C
O

N
TE

N
TS  4 Acknowledgements  

 6 A Letter from the Editor 

 8  Merleau-Ponty and Barthes on Image Consciousness: 
Probing the (Im)possibility of Meaning

  Natasha Beaudin Pearson, McGill University

 19  The Horror of the Real: Filmic Form, The Century, and 
Fritz Lang's M

  Peter Gavaris, Boston College

 29  Phenomenological Reproduction in Thompson and 
Mailer's New Journalism

  Brendan Chambers, Boston College

 44  Cognition, Domination, and Complexity
  Ryan Cardoza, Stony Brook University

 61  Walter Benjamin's "Über den Begriff der Geschichte" 
and the Marxist Tradition

  Maxwell Wade, Rutgers University

 75  Patočka's Critique of Husserl: The Possibility of 
A-Subjective Phenomenology

  Gabriel Vidal,                                                           
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile

 91  Review of Discomfort and Moral Impediment
  Myles Casey , The Pennsylvania State University

 98 Contributors 



4

The Editorial Staff of Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston 
College would like to extend our sincerest thanks to the following individuals for 

their assistance in making this issue of Dianoia possible:

Nancy Adams, BC Libraries

Mary Crane, Institute for the Liberal Arts

Susan Dunn, Center for Centers

Gary Gurtler, S.J., Philosophy Department

Stephen Jarjoura, Information Technology Services

Peter Marino, Center for Centers

Cherie McGill, Philosophy Department

Sarah Melton, BC Libraries

Dermot Moran, Philosophy Department

John O'Connor, BC Libraries

Paula Perry, Philosophy Department

Sarah Smith, Philosophy Department

Christopher Soldt, Media Technology Services

Zachary Willcutt, Philosophy Department

We would also like to thank Dr. Ronald Tacelli, S.J., of the Boston College 
Philosophy Department, for his invaluable assistance as our advisor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS



5Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

δι
αν

οι
α



6

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Spring 2019
Dear Reader, 

With immense pleasure and honor, I have the opportunity to present to you, once 
again, the culmination of rigorous scholarship, collaboration, and generosity. Issue VI 
of Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College represents, indeed, 
the world’s finest undergraduate work in philosophy. We were delighted this year to 
have received over 150 submissions from around the world, and our published articles 
and book review are the fruits of Dianoia’s collaboration with scholars from North 
America, South America, and Europe. In fact, earlier this year, we were approached by 
Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK) to publish a review of the 
Argentine philosopher Julio Cabrera’s latest work on bioethics, Discomfort and Moral 
Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics, and Procreation. Our graduate 
advisor, Myles Casey, has kindly offered a thought-provoking explication and review of 
Cabrera’s work. 

Our publication mandate has remained: “Dianoia publishes the world’s finest 
and most thoughtful, original, and creative papers on any philosophical topic or 
idea.” The papers in our current issue accordingly present thoughtful and original 
philosophical work that engages with some of philosophy’s most revered fields of 
scholarship, including hermeneutics, phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, 
the philosophy of politics, as well as film theory, critical theory, and the philosophy 
of communication. In many ways, our selections this year represent our editorial 
staff’s training in a robust and dynamic department of philosophy, which has 
uniquely provided us with, among other things, world-class training in contemporary 
continental philosophy. I am certain that such training will continue to influence our 
annual review and will continue to keep us firmly in our position as a top journal of 
undergraduate work in philosophy. 

In many ways, the design of our front and back covers represents the ubiquity of 
the philosophical dialogue that Dianoia—and the journal’s name further suggests 
this—proudly features. The dialogue—such as that occurring on our front and back 
covers—transcends physical borders and enables, as it does in Cézanne’s work, its 
interlocutors to share a drink and a game of cards over philosophy. As you will see, our 
own choice of cover design, inspired by this issue’s piece on Roland Barthes, Maurice 
Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Cézanne, is already a manifestation of such a dialogical act. 
It is with bittersweet sentiments that I conclude my letter this year, as I will be 
stepping down from my post as Editor-in-Chief to focus on my graduate studies 
here at Boston College. Before I close, however, I would like to express my sincerest 
gratitude to those who have supported me during my editorial tenure. First and 
foremost, I would like to thank all Dianoia editors, past and present, whose 

6Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

A 
LE

TT
ER

 F
RO

M
 T

H
E 

ED
IT

O
R



7Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

 

philosophical expertise and keen eye have made the journal what it is today. My 
colleagues (and, above all, friends), Noah Valdez, Weitao Liu, and Ethan Yates, in 
Dianoia’s ‘upper-level management,’ as we call it, deserve my heartfelt thanks. I 
am greatly indebted to our faculty advisor, Fr. Ron Tacelli, for his generous words 
of encouragement and generous supply of dinner and snacks during our late-night 
editorial sessions. I thank the Boston College philosophy department and the Institute 
for the Liberal Arts, directed by Dr. Mary Crane, for the support, both in-kind and 
financial. Paula Perry, of the Boston College philosophy department, deserves a word 
of sincere thanks for her advocacy, support, expertise, and graciousness. I thank, also, 
Gregory Kacergis, of Boston College’s Media Technology Services for turning our 
philosophical review into a work of art—his patience, and above all, his friendship, 
does not go unnoticed. And, at this point, as I officially complete my undergraduate 
studies at Boston College, I would like to thank publicly my family, as well as those 
friends, colleagues, and supporters who have made this and many other endeavors 
possible. 

Happy reading! 
 
Sincerely,

 

Peter Klapes
Editor-in-Chief  



8

δι
αν

οι
α

MERLEAU-PONTY AND BARTHES ON 
IMAGE CONSCIOUSNESS:

Probing the (Im)possibility of Meaning

 NATASHA BEAUDIN PEARSON

For both Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Roland Barthes, images are not merely 
objects in space; they belong to the realm of the metaphysical. Paintings “move” 

us, according to Merleau-Ponty: their “quality, light, color, depth […] awaken an 
echo in our bod[y] and […] our body welcomes them.”1 To encounter a painting is 
to apprehend it through one’s body. We constitute “brute meaning” by drawing upon 
the “fabric of the world” in which our bodies are inextricably caught.2 Conversely, for 
Barthes, poignant photographs “wound” us: they contain an “element [the punctum] 
that rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces” us.3 Unlike 
Merleau-Ponty, Barthes believes that pictures resist meaning-making. They provoke 
an “internal agitation,” an “animation” in the viewer. Yet this “affect” cannot wholly 
be reduced or explained.4 Hence, I think the crux of Merleau-Ponty’s and Barthes’ 
disagreement about the ontology of image consciousness has to do with the possibility 
of meaning-making (or lack thereof ). While Merleau-Ponty believes that a painting 
can be meaningful and express the essential “indivisible whole[ness]” and “imperious 

1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen Johnson (Evanston, 
IL: Northwestern UP, 1993), 125.

2 Ibid., 123.
3 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26.
4 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 19-20.



9Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Merleau-Ponty and Barthes on Image Consciousness

unity” of the world,5  Barthes contends that “since every photograph is contingent 
(and thereby outside of meaning), photography cannot signify (aim at a generality) 
except by assuming a mask.”6 In this paper, I outline Barthes’ critique of Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology of painting—and his phenomenology more generally—and 
propose how we might explain the two philosophers’ disagreements on the subject. 

For Merleau-Ponty, paintings do more than just depict the world: they “attempt” to 
become “a piece of nature.”7 Phenomenology, the philosophical current Merleau-
Ponty belonged to, posits that as humans, we are embodied subjects living in the 
world, which we experience through our sensations (our perception). One’s body 
is not merely “a chunk of space or a bundle of functions” distinct from one’s 
consciousness; rather, one’s body is one’s consciousness.8 The soul “thinks according 
to the body, not according to itself ” because the body is what grounds all cognition. 
It is the “degree zero of spatiality” from which I see the world around me.9 In other 
words, it is impossible to understand the world “from the exterior” because I am 
“immersed” in it; I live it “from the inside.”10 The meaning that I give to the world 
is thus fundamentally informed by how I perceive it through my body. Paintings, 
Merleau-Ponty contends, are the repositories of the meaning given to the painter 
through her vision and movement. The painter’s eye “is an instrument that moves 
itself, a means which invents its own ends; it is that which has been moved by some 
impact of the world, which it then restores to the visible through the traces of a 
hand.”11 For this reason, when we view a landscape painting by Paul Cézanne, we 
see how Cézanne translated onto the canvas the sensations that he experienced when 
he laid eyes on a particular landscape.12 Cézanne’s body was moved by the landscape 
that his eyes perceived, and this movement was transformed into the movement of 
his hands painting the landscape onto the canvas.13 As viewers, we see the painted 
landscape and are ourselves moved by it. Thereby we imbue the painting with our 
own meaning(s). Thus, the painting allows us not only to see as Cézanne saw, but 
also to impart on it the countless other meanings that we may choose to give to it.

For Merleau-Ponty, paintings are indeed inherently and endlessly meaningful. A 
person unfamiliar with the work of Vincent van Gogh might look at his painting 
Wheatfield with Crows (figure 1) and simply see a bright ochre wheat field under an 
inky blue sky. Individuals who know that this was (supposedly) the last painting van 
Gogh completed before committing suicide will likely add an extra layer of meaning 

5 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen Johnson (Evanston, 
IL: Northwestern UP, 1993), 65. 

6 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 34.
7 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 62
8 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 124.
9 Ibid., 138.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 127.
12 Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 63.
13 Ibid.



10

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

onto this first interpretation: they may see the artwork as an evocation of death 
(symbolized by the dark sky) looming over and encroaching upon life (symbolized 
by the vibrant wheat field). Alternatively, an art historian might look at this painting 
and instead understand it through the lens of Western art historical scholarship: she 
might take the flatness of the pictorial elements and the visibility of the brushstrokes 
as evidence that van Gogh’s art foreshadowed modernism. A person who grew up on 
a farm and spent his childhood ploughing wheat fields may, upon viewing Wheatfield 
with Crows, be flooded with memories of his early years (such memories may include 
the first time his father showed him how to mount a horse, or the memory of running 
around the fields with his friends, or of how the fields smelled after the first snowfall). 
In each of these cases, individuals bestow onto van Gogh’s painting meaning(s) 
that are informed by—but not limited to—her personal lived experience. Giving 
meaning(s) to a painting, Merleau-Ponty argues, is an infinite act of interpretation: 
it is a hermeneutic.14  It is interpersonal and timeless; in fact, one person may give 
Wheatfield with Crows multiple different layers of meaning at different moments in 
her life. This shows that the process of meaning-making is never sterile nor static, but, 
instead, rich, fertile, and bound to never be fully complete.15 

Barthes’ account of meaning-making in photographs is markedly different. Much like 
Merleau-Ponty, Barthes thinks that pictures have the ability to “move” us (to borrow 
Merleau-Ponty’s language): they provoke a “pathos,” an “affect” in the “Spectator 
[the viewer].”16 He pinpoints the source of affect as a detail he calls the “punctum,” 
which is present in every “attractive” photograph.17 On a mission to “formulate the 
fundamental feature, the universal without which there would be no Photography,” 
Barthes employs a “cynical phenomenology”18  in his analysis of photographs, which 
ultimately leads him to the conclusion that every compelling photo contains both 
a “studium” and a “punctum.”19 The studium, Barthes posits, consists in “a kind of 
general, enthusiastic commitment […] without special acuity” that every photograph 
possesses.20 Meaning “study” in Latin, studium designates both a vague disinterest in 
the consumption of certain cultural products and a “kind of education” that allows 
one “to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to 
disapprove of them, but always to understand them, to argue them within myself for 
culture (from which the studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and 
consumers.”21 The photographer (“Operator”) communicates her intended meaning 
by using visual codes that are universal and can thus be deciphered by Spectators.22 
Barthes uses William Klein’s photo, “Mayday, 1959,” as an example. In this picture, 

14 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 149.
15 Ibid.
16 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 21.
17 Ibid, 27.
18 Ibid., 9.
19 Ibid., 26.
20 Ibid.
21 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 27-28.
22 Ibid., 28.



11Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Merleau-Ponty and Barthes on Image Consciousness

the studium would be the fact that I can make sense of the subject of the photo, and 
that I can learn certain ethnographical and historical details by examining it.23 I can 
discern a black and white photograph of an old woman with a suspicious glance, 
who is surrounded by a few men of different ages. I notice that one boy is wearing a 
blazer, that another has a youthful haircut, and that the old woman is wearing a scarf 
around her head, for instance. The photograph “teaches me how Russians dress” in 
Moscow in 1959.24 In other words, I recognize this picture as a “good [coherent and 
identifiable] historical scene.”25 

However, without searching for it, there is an “element” in this photograph that “rises 
from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.”26 Barthes names this 
element the punctum and defines it as “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises 
me, is poignant to me).”27 He claims that the punctum is usually a small detail that 
was not strictly intended by the Operator. Its “wounding” quality cannot be analyzed 
or studied, but is instead “given right there on the page” and resonates with the 
Spectator.28  Barthes seems to imply that a photograph’s punctum may differ from one 
Spectator to another when he says that “to give examples of punctum is, in a certain 
fashion, to give myself up.”29 If we accept this and grant that a punctum is subjective, 
then we may posit that what “wounds” an individual depends on that individual’s 
past lived experiences. Nevertheless, if one tests this out phenomenologically, one 
quickly finds that what wounds someone does not always directly map onto that 
person’s past memories, and thus cannot be easily explained. For example, in James 
van der Zee’s “Family Portrait” (figure 3), Barthes identifies the punctum as the “belt 
worn low” by, and the “strapped pumps”30 of, the woman standing behind the chair. 
Barthes is baffled by the fact that this detail strikes him: “(Mary Janes – why does 
this dated fashion touch me? I mean: to what date does it refer me?).”31 Personally, 
when I look at this picture, the detail I identify as the punctum is the seated woman’s 
right hand. When I try to understand why this element in particular “pricks” me, I 
can only say that the way in which the hand curves awkwardly over the armrest, and 
how one finger seems abnormally long, makes me uncomfortable, or “creeps me out.” 
This, however, is not a satisfying answer. What exactly bothers me about this woman’s 
hand? Why do the strapped pumps arouse “great sympathy [and] almost a kind of 
tenderness” in Barthes?32

23 Ibid., 30.
24 Ibid., 30.
25 Ibid., 26.
26 Ibid.
27 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26.
28 Ibid., 43.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 43



12

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

The punctum significantly impacts one’s understanding of the photograph: it 
“lashe[s]” the order and facile meaning of the studium and “changes my reading [of 
the photograph]”, “mark[ing] [it] in my eyes with a higher value.”33 Ever since the 
woman’s right hand in James van der Zee’s “Family Portrait” “punctured” me, the 
only thing I can see when I look at that photograph is that gnarled hand. As Barthes 
succinctly puts it, the punctum suddenly—and paradoxically—“while remaining a 
‘detail,’ fills the whole picture.”34 Yet, as Barthes asks, why is this the case? Why must 
I disturb the “unity of composition” that was found in the studium that constituted 
“Family Portrait” before the punctum wounded me?35 After all, “whether or not [the 
punctum] is triggered, it is an addition. It is what I add to the photograph and what 
is nonetheless already there.”36 Why must this addition—this newfound meaning I 
give to “Family Portrait”—be made? Why must the facile meaning of its studium 
(which allows me to understand the picture in historical/ethnographical terms, 
as a family portrait of an African American family living in Harlem in 1926) be 
supplanted by the deeply disturbing and incomplete meaning engendered by the 
punctum, which reduces the entire photograph to the creepy hand? Moreover, why do 
I choose to impart meaning to something that seems irreducible, that seems to resist 
it?37 I continue to ask: why do I think the woman’s hand is creepy? If this persistent 
uncertainty tells me anything, it is that “the incapacity to name is a good symptom 
of disturbance.”38

Attempting to answer these questions, Barthes draws on certain notions of 
psychoanalytic theory. He introduces the concept of heimlich39 (German for 
“familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home”), which closely relates to its opposite 
notion, unheimlich (German for “uncanny”), an idea that is discussed in Freud’s essay, 
“The Uncanny.”40 Freud defines “the uncanny” as “an experience of tension” that 
belongs to “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known 
to us, once very familiar.”41 Freud uses “the double” as an example of the uncanny: 
having connections with “reflections in mirrors, with shadows, spirits, with the belief 
in the soul and the fear of death,” seeing one’s doppelgänger (for instance, when I 
look at a picture of myself or catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror) “arouses dread 
and creeping horror.”42 Though uncanny situations occur in real life, Freud argues 
that the uncanny is also “an aesthetic category”: the feeling can emerge when we 
consume literature, songs, movies, and other art forms.43 Personally, one of the first 

33 Ibid., 42.
34 Ibid., 45.
35 Ibid., 41.
36 Ibid., 55.
37 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 21.
38 Ibid., 51.
39 Ibid., 40.
40 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” 2, accessed 2 December 2017, http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf.
41 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 2.
42 Ibid., 10.
43 Ibid., 2.



13Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Merleau-Ponty and Barthes on Image Consciousness

artworks that comes to mind when I think of the uncanny is Lars von Trier’s film 
Breaking the Waves (1996) (figure 4), which tells the story of Bess, an unusual woman 
who is in love with her husband Jan, an oil rig worker who asks her to have sex with 
other men after he is gravely injured in a work accident. It is a dark, tragic story 
of sexual debasement, religious paranoia and death. These are certainly disturbing 
themes, but I do not know exactly why Breaking the Waves disturbs me more than 
most horror movies, which deal with similarly frightening topics such as murder, 
torture, and ghosts. This inability to explain fully my uneasiness or to give meaning 
to my experience is precisely what constitutes the uncanny, according to Freud: “We, 
with the superiority of rational minds, are able to detect the sober truth; and yet this 
knowledge does not lessen the impression of uncanniness in the least degree.”44

In photographs, what is uncanny is the punctum, which, as we have said, is the detail in 
the photo that pricks me, that disrupts the studium’s harmony, order, and identifiable 
meaning. To make sense of the punctum and of the uncanny, we may turn to Freud’s 
“Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In his 1920 essay, he postulates the existence of 
two fundamental principles that drive human behavior: the pleasure principle and 
the “death instinct.”45 The pleasure principle states that our bodies (and minds) are 
designed to rid themselves of tension (what Freud calls “unpleasure”; this includes 
hunger, thirst, and sexual desire), such that all of our actions are motivated by “a 
lowering of that tension – that is, […] an avoidance of unpleasure or a production 
of pleasure.”46 This drive is productive and life-sustaining, as it seeks to restore our 
constitution to a state of balance and harmony. At first glance, this seems intuitive 
and accurate. Yet, upon treating numerous patients who suffered from post-traumatic 
stress disorder, Freud realized that the pleasure principle offered an incomplete 
account of human behaviour. His patients, most of whom had fought in World War 
I, would constantly recall their most painful memories (consciously, in therapy and 
unconsciously, in dreams), “reviv[ing] them with the greatest ingenuity.”47 But this 
repetition is stale, unproductive, and contradicts the pleasure principle: instead of 
releasing tension, this “compulsion to repeat” only heightens tension, only disturbs 
our constitution, and only generates imbalance and chaos.48 Freud cannot explain 
these “mysterious masochistic trends of the ego” that all humans seem to bear, but 
nonetheless we cannot deny their existence.49 This leads him to posit the existence of 
a second fundamental drive that opposes the pleasure principle and seeks to negate 
it: the “death instinct.”50

44 Freud, “The Uncanny,” 7.
45 Sigmund Freud, Salman Akhtar, and Mary K. O'Neil, On Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (London: 

Karnac Books, 2011), 55.
46 Freud et al., “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 13.
47 Freud et al., “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 27.
48 Ibid., 25.
49 Ibid., 19.
50 Ibid., 55.



14

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Freud’s account of these two antagonistic—but intertwined—drives maps onto 
Barthes’ theory of photography. The pleasure principle (or “Eros”) corresponds to the 
studium: both embody harmony, order, balance, cohesion, and meaning. Meanwhile, 
the death instinct is analogous to the punctum. Both the death instinct and the 
punctum disturb the harmony and meaning of the pleasure principle and the studium, 
respectively. This meaning is intelligible: James van der Zee’s “Family Portrait” is the 
picture of an African-American family living in Harlem in 1926. The woman’s eerie 
hand becomes such a fixation to me that I ignore all of the other elements present 
in “Family Portrait”; the death instinct causes traumatic war memories to repeatedly 
resurface in Freud’s patients’ minds, thereby shattering all semblance of serenity, 
harmony, or meaning. Both cases indeed resist meaning: nothing can fully capture 
what makes the contorted hand creepy to me, and nothing can explain why this 
particular detail resonates within me but not necessarily within every other Spectator. 
Likewise, the veterans’ stale repetition of painful memories cannot be contextualized 
by any philosophical or scientific system; it refuses to be understood within the 
organized, satisfying framework of the pleasure principle.

Thus, Barthes’ main disagreement with Merleau-Ponty has to do with the latter’s 
belief that images (and especially paintings) are endlessly meaningful. According to 
Barthes, pictures have a limited semiology: “all we can say is that the [photograph] 
speaks, it induces us, vaguely to think.”51 The photograph’s meaning is evident and 
restrained: it can be recognized by any Spectator. Indeed, anyone who looks at 
William Klein’s “Mayday, 1959” will say that it is a picture of an old woman with a 
scarf wrapped around her head, gazing menacingly at the lens, and surrounded by 
seven men of varying ages. More specifically, the work’s title informs us that these 
people are in Moscow in 1959. This is the definite subject of “Mayday, 1959”: the 
photo will never be about tulips in seventeenth century Amsterdam, or fishermen 
in nineteenth century Brazil. Thus, even though an image may provoke different 
emotions in viewers, the image’s meaning will always be contingent, circumscribed, 
and “a closed field of forces.”52 It is therefore incorrect to claim, as Merleau-Ponty 
would, that “Mayday, 1959” can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways. 
Spectators might be wounded by different punctums, which are, as Barthes puts it, 
“outside of meaning.”53 However, for all viewers the photo’s studium, which “aim[s] 
at generality […] by assuming a mask,” is the same.54

Barthes challenges Merleau-Ponty’s contention that paintings “come to life” and 
make visible “the overtaking, the overlapping, the metamorphosis […] of time.”55 
Instead, Barthes claims, they freeze time: they capture a moment that is dead and that 
is bound never to happen again. Barthes indeed believes that Death “is the eidos” (the 
51 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 38.
52 Ibid., 13.
53 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 34. 
54 Ibid.
55 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 145.



15Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Merleau-Ponty and Barthes on Image Consciousness

essence) of Photography.56  To view a photo capturing a moment that one has lived 
is to be reminded of the fleetingness of one’s life and of the inevitability of death. 
Many photographs—especially ones dating back to a time when sitters had to pose 
for several hours when they had their picture taken—possess a haunting, “deathly” 
quality. (“Family Portrait” is the perfect example of this phenomenon: the figures 
appear to be spectral—far from “life-like.”) Barthes argues that the experience of being 
photographed is also like death: the photographer’s “target” (subject) experiences “a 
micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter, […] Death in 
person.”57 This is because I feel like I am being transformed from a “subject into [an] 
object”: whenever someone takes my picture, I feel a strange sense of inauthenticity, 
for I perceive my “real” self being misrepresented—distorted even—by the camera 
lens.58 Conscious that I am being watched (and “captured” by another person), I 
pose and change my behaviour in a “cunning dissociation of consciousness from 
identity.”59 Moreover, when I look at a portrait of myself, I feel alienated, for my deep 
“self ” “never coincides with my image”: while I am “light,” moving, and alive, my 
image is “heavy [and] motionless”—in short, dead.60 It is no coincidence then that 
Barthes relates photography to Freud’s “death instinct.” Death punctures life much 
like the punctum disrupts the studium and the death drive obstructs the pleasure 
principle. Life is not intrinsically meaningful; rather, we bestow meaning onto it 
because our existence would seem pointless otherwise. By extension, paintings can 
never be “alive” or meaningful in the way that Merleau-Ponty claims they are.

Hence, Merleau-Ponty and Barthes appear to be in a stalemate on the question 
of meaning-making in image consciousness. Merleau-Ponty offers a convincing 
argument for the hermeneutic possibilities of painting, but his theory does not 
consider the death instinct. Moreover, while both philosophers agree that images 
have the ability to affect us (whether by wounding us or by moving us), Barthes’ 
concepts of the studium and the punctum do not easily map onto Merleau-Ponty’s 
theory. This makes comparing both accounts tricky. Added to this is the fact that they 
focus on different visual mediums: Barthes mostly talks about photography, whereas 
Merleau-Ponty only discusses painting. The two thus seem to approach the same 
question with a different set of considerations, and this might be why they arrive at 
radically different conclusions. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty crystallizes the conundrum 
best: “ambiguity is the essence of human existence, and everything we live or think 
has always several meanings,”—including meaninglessness.61 ◆

56 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 15.
57 Barthes, 14.
58 Ibid., 13.
59 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 12.
60 Ibid.
61  Richard Askay and Jensen Farquhar, Apprehending the Inaccessible: Freudian Psychoanalysis and Existential 

Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 296.



16

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Figure 1: Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows, 1890. 50.2 cm × 103 cm (19.9 
in × 40.6 in). Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

Figure 2: William Klein, “Mayday, 1959”. Moscow, 1959.



17Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Merleau-Ponty and Barthes on Image Consciousness

Figure 3: James van der Zee, “Family Portrait”. Harlem, 1926.

Figure 4: Lars von Trier, Breaking the Waves (1996).



18

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Askay, Richard, and Jensen Farquhar. Apprehending the Inaccessible: Freudian 
Psychoanalysis and Existential Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern 
University Press, 2006. 

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and 
Wang, 1981.

Freud, Sigmund, Salman Akhtar, and Mary K. O'Neil. On Freud's "Beyond the 
Pleasure Principle." London: Karnac Books, 2011.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Accessed 2 December 2017. http://web.mit.edu/
allanmc/www/freud1.pdf. 

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cézanne’s Doubt.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 
59-75. Edited by Galen Johnson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1993.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind”. In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 
121-149. Edited by Galen Johnson. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1993.



19Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

δι
αν

οι
α

THE HORROR OF THE REAL: 
Filmic Form, The Century, and Fritz Lang's M

PETER GAVARIS

Near the end of The Century, Alain Badiou comes to the conclusion that “the art 
of the century inscribed itself paradigmatically between dance and cinema.”1 

He never explains this development explicitly, though it can be reasoned that he 
arrived at this conclusion through a consideration of the immediacy inherent to 
the nature of both forms. Evidently, dance and cinema share a fixation on dynamic 
movement, and for Badiou, this distinguishes them from everything that came 
before, especially since the century “violently declares the present of art.”2 In what 
follows, I will focus specifically on cinema and the cinematic role as the essential art 
form of Badiou’s century. I will begin by considering why film has been taken up by 
so many contemporary theorists, examining why the medium (seemingly defined by 
its constitutional conundrums) lends itself so easily to analysis, and conclude with 
a consideration of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), a film that embodies many of the central 
ideas presented in The Century. 

Cinema, from its conception at the end of the nineteenth century, differentiated 
itself first and foremost by the way it was to be consumed. Unlike reading a book 
or looking at a painting, the act of watching a film always involves something of a 

1 Badiou, Alain. The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano. Malden: Polity, 2008, p. 160.
2 Badiou, The Century, 135



20

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

power dynamic in the way that it strips the viewer of autonomy. We cede all control 
when we enter the dark room, look up at the bright screen, and gaze as images 
unremittingly flash before us until the credits roll. Conversely, we choose the pace at 
which to read a book; we can deliberate over certain words, re-read pages, and put 
the book down whenever we want. The same could be said of looking at a painting, 
since the act still leaves us with our autonomy. We can look away whenever we want, 
and the canvas is fundamentally static. Given this essential difference, cinema aligns 
itself much more obviously with theatre, performance art, and dance, as Badiou 
points out. These art forms originate from movements in a setting that requires us to 
relinquish control and from the construction of resemblance to our lives. This act of 
replication, whether it be naturalistic, expressionistic, or anything in between, is just 
that. Apart from being far more democratic than theater or dance, film differentiates 
itself from these other forms in that its replication of life has greater potential for 
resembling life as it is, and duly, bears greater potential for abstraction. Rather than 
watching the action play out in front of us with the naked eye—as is the case with 
these other forms of performance—cinema necessitates further layers of construction 
(and artifice) that are communicated by a director’s shot selection, the editing of 
scenes, among other things. When writing on film, Walter Benjamin observes: “The 
camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions 
and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The 
camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious 
impulses.”3

These “unconscious optics,” as Benjamin puts it, come about through the dissonance 
between cinema’s base artificiality and its potential for capturing life in motion. 
Consider the early Lumière films that attempted to do just this. The Arrival of a 
Train (1896) is simply what its title implies (see Figure 1). Yet, it is much more than 
just that, since, as Benjamin put it, “filmed behavior lends itself more readily to 
analysis because of its incomparably more precise statements of the situation […] 
it can be isolated more easily.”4 The same cannot be said for any other artistic form, 
even those that are movement-based, because it is the camera that imbues an image 
with meaning by subtracting something from it. Life is at once imitated, and thusly, 
removed (indeed, Benjamin would likely argue that “the aura” is that which is being 
removed). Even in shooting life as it is (say, a train arriving at a station), the camera 
adds an unquantifiable number of variables to the equation: the shot angle, the shot 
length, the exposure, to name a few. These variables create a specific, irreplicable 
image for the camera frame. It is the frame itself that further complicates things. In 
many ways, shooting a film is an act of profound exclusion, since a shot is defined 
not only by what is in the frame, but also by what is excluded. A shot of a train 

3 Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001: 1181.
4 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1180-1181.



21Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

The Horror of the Real

arriving at a station implicitly asks us to consider what is occurring outside of the 
frame. Therefore, the frame is at once finite—and infinite—and this constitutive 
contradiction lies at the heart of the medium, which makes film the definitive art 
form of the century, and an object of curiosity for theorists like Benjamin and Badiou.

 

Figure 1

Badiou takes up Cinema’s infinite finitude in his chapter on “The infinite.” For him, 
cinema is almost deceitfully deceptive in its promise of showing us life as it is, and the 
harsh reality that the medium’s replication of life is wholly artificial. After all, what is 
cinema other than a series of still images flashed quickly before us in such a way as to 
imply movement? In any case, Badiou’s conception of the Real, which he correlates 
to the infinite, can never be replicated in art, including cinema: “The torment of 
contemporary art in the face of the infinite situates it between a programmatic 
forcing that announces the return of romantic pathos, on the one hand, and a 
nihilistic iconoclasm, on the other.”5 Cinema is situated nicely at this crossroads, 
as I’ve explained, because it seems almost to hold these two conflicting ideals (a 
“romantic pathos” and a “nihilistic iconoclasm”) at once, in that its infinite quality 
only comes about in its shear finitude. Every shot is utterly unique and cannot be 
replicated perfectly; yet, the shot’s artificial construction allows for said uniqueness. 
Consciously or otherwise, every film carries with it this inherent contradictory, 
romantic promise of the infinite, which arises from its own formal limitations, as 
Badiou acknowledges: “The infinite is not captured in form; it transits through form 
[…] finite form can be equivalent to an infinite opening.”6 Since the film’s form 
loudly announces its own ineptitude, we are pointed to this infinite opening more 
frequently than when engaging with other artistic forms.

5 Badiou, The Century, p. 155.
6 Ibid., p. 155.



22

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

In exploring the dichotomy between art’s “romantic pathos” and “nihilistic 
iconoclasm,” Badiou spends noticeably more time addressing the latter, focusing on 
how the “art of subtraction” renders the medium inoperative. (This exemplified by 
his lengthy analysis of Malevich's White on White.) Admittedly, art can function as 
a study of surfaces, critiquing its own medium while also incorporating narrative 
elements and interiority. As discussed, cinema intrinsically seems able to hold these 
two contradictory elements at once. Badiou’s reluctance to take up film as an “art of 
subtraction” that does not inherently eschew interiority is somewhat disappointing. 
With that, this essay will henceforth attempt to amend this fact by applying a 
Badiousian reading to M (1931), a film that succinctly embodies much of the theory 
presented in The Century. 

A far cry from the early cinema of the Lumière Brothers, Fritz Lang’s M is one 
of heightened drama and hyperstylization, featuring exquisite sets, ostentatious 
camerawork, and dynamic performances. M’s formal qualities belong to the German 
Expressionist movement. Founded on the basis that abstraction could better emulate 
a sense of interiority than strict, naturalistic representation, expressionism draws 
attention to itself as artificial (and it makes perfect sense that a form predicated 
on artificiality would take up abstraction in such a way as to carve out a greater 
opening for the Badiousian Real to transit through). M’s expressionism seems far 
from the art of subtraction that Badiou discusses in The Century, and yet, it arrives at 
a similar impasse. Expressionism and film go hand in hand precisely because cinema 
is expressionistic in nature, and Lang’s film embodies this synthesis, as the apparent, 
meticulous construction of its images gives way to a newfound interiority. 

Wedged between two world wars, M appears to present itself as a procedural, almost 
rudimentary, crime thriller about a string of child murders, before revealing itself 
to be an eerily prophetic critique of a society ready to embrace totalitarianism. The 
mystery of the story is not so much about the identity of the killer—who we learn 
early on is Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre)—but is rather about the lengths to which 
the residents of Berlin will go to capture him. Lang commits to highlighting the 
interconnectedness of the “society of the century,” showing how seemingly everybody 
(from the police force, to the crime bosses, and even the beggars) is working to 
get this man for a smattering of different and self-serving reasons. By the end, the 
crime bosses, helped by regular residents who form a sort of citizens’ tribunal, capture 
Beckert. They conduct an unfair trial and commit to killing him before the authorities 
rush in to break up the party. All this comes after Beckert gives a rousing monologue 
as the tortured killer, expressing in between shrieks and screams the compulsivity 
of his actions in a surprisingly affecting call for sympathy. This climactic sequence 
of the citizens’ trial and Beckert’s pleading marks a key moment in the film where 
Lang pulls the wool from our eyes and turns the table on the residents of Berlin (see 
Figures 2 & 3). Badiou argues that war and extreme violence in the century come as 



23Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

The Horror of the Real

a result of passion for the Real: a stark idealism that requires violence before peace. 
In what will follow, I aim to argue that this passion for the Real is not manifested 
in Beckert’s compulsive kills, but is rather embodied in the citizens’ desire to “put 
[him] out of commission.”7 For the film’s residents of Berlin, the Real can only be 
actualized by exterminating this evil from within their own society. When outlining 
his method for approaching The Century, Badiou explains that he wants to examine 
“how the century thought its own thought.”8 I wish to do the same by considering 
Lang’s film as an artifact of the century, a work of profound self-diagnosis that will 
provide further insight into how the century thought of itself. 

 

In The Century, Badiou seemingly co-opts the Lacanian Real to refer to that which 
is unsignifyable: “representation is a symptom (to be read or deciphered) of a Real 
that it subjectively localizes in the guise of misrecognition.”9 The Real, as conceived 
of, and explained by, Badiou, refers to a plane of perfection that is perpetually 
out of reach, separated from us by a gap. Nonetheless, this passion for the Real 
inspires the destruction, subtraction, and formalization that seem only to manifest in 
either art or violence. Idealism, more than anything else, becomes the driving force 
behind this passion for the Real since the passion itself comes from a belief that the 
gap between semblance and Real can be transcended. Badiou explains this idea in 
relation to Nazi thought before concluding that “passion for the Real is devoid of 
morality […] extreme violence is therefore the correlate of extreme enthusiasm.”10 
It, therefore, becomes paramount to acknowledge that Nazism, or any other form of 
oppressive regime, bears an ideology. As horrific as it may sound, it is a fundamental 
optimism—that of attaining the Real—that accounts for so much violence in the 
century that Badiou claims is defined by its passion: “Bad violence must be followed 

7 Lang, M.
8 Badiou, The Century, p. 3. 
9 Ibid., p. 49.
10 Ibid., p. 63.

Figure 2  Figure 3  



24

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

by good violence, which is legitimated by the former […] the good war will put 
an end to the bad war.”11 In turn, it makes perfect sense to view Berlin’s residents’ 
totalitarian, self-serving desire to kill Beckert as a passion for the Real.

Surely, the perversity of the situation manifests itself in the simple fact that the 
residents of Berlin are acting reasonably—at least initially—when it comes to their 
desire to catch Beckert (since he represents a legitimate threat to their society). Their 
crusade, their “just war,” is justifiable up until the point at which society collectively 
decides that Beckert is less than human and undeserving of justice. This almost casual 
change in mindset has profound consequences, as Badiou explains, in that it accounts 
for much of the violence of the century: “the century's Real problem is to be located 
in the linkage between ‘democracies’ and that which, after the fact, they designate 
as their Other […] What needs to be undone is precisely this discursive procedure 
of absolution.”12 The film’s title refers to the chalk letter “M” (for murderer) slapped 
onto Beckert’s back at one point in the film (see Figure 4). This moment holds 
significant import in that it represents the moment when Beckert is explicitly made 
to be Other; he becomes the target. The citizens, in turn, find no issue in making 
Beckert the ostensive Other in accordance with the belief that his elimination will 
allow for a lasting peace: “The twentieth century's idea of war is that of the decisive 
war, of the last war.”13 It is this stark optimism—and an inability to see beyond the 
present moment and situation—that allows for this sort of barbarous, ideological 
collective consciousness to take shape. 

 

      

11 Ibid., p. 30.
12 Ibid., p. 5.
13 Ibid., p. 34.

Figure 4  



25Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

The Horror of the Real

Lang effortlessly makes us aware of this shifting subjectivity through the use of 
cinematic techniques that informs our internalization of the narrative. Notice, 
for instance, the way most of the action is staged throughout the film. The scenes 
where Beckert is being chased through the streets are shot using high-angle long 
shots (see Figure 5). Shots of this kind emphasize the smallness of these characters, 
making them appear almost like pawns in a game as they chase each other down 
corridors and dark alleys. The camera shoots them at a distance to represent the 
metaphorical distance established between these characters and the viewer. By the 
film’s conclusion, Lang closes this distance, through his use of close-ups, in order to 
evoke our sympathy for this character. If the long shots before were meant to imply 
distance, then these close-ups, like the famous one of Beckert pleading (see Figure 
6), are meant to elicit empathy and imply interiority. Writing on the close-up shot, 
Benjamin concludes: “With the close-up, space expands […] the enlargement of a 
snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though 
unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations on the subject.”14 Surely, the 
power of the film’s ending comes in our acknowledgement of the newly discovered 
structural formations of Beckert’s character. Notable, too, is the fact that we can 
only collapse this emotional distance as Lang does in film: live performance cannot 
replicate the cinematic freedom that comes with using a camera. 

 

        

Adding to the novelty of M is the fact that the crime bosses, and not the police, 
mastermind the plan to capture and to try Beckert’s. We come to realize that the 
heightened police activity—brought about by Beckert’s killings—thwarts the city’s 
criminal activity. In laying down this groundwork, Lang sets up a strange sort of 
hierarchy wherein the police hold power over the criminals and the criminals hold 
power over Beckert. They resort to a dangerous kind of absolution in the end, which 

14 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 1181.

Figure 5  Figure 6  



26

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Badiou vehemently warns against when writing on Nazi ideology. He disapproves 
of those who simply consider Nazism unthinkably evil, since this inability to 
acknowledge ideology (or interiority) often results in even more violence and 
horror. Badiou explains: “To maintain that Nazism is not a form of thought, or, 
more generally, that barbarism does not think, is to abet a process of surreptitious 
absolution.”15 We see this surreptitious absolution in the sheer cruelty of the criminals 
and other residents of Berlin who put Beckert on trial, and who laugh and jeer at 
the killer as he begs for his life. In a strange way, Lang’s directorial method asks us 
to consider this killer’s thought—that is, to assume a basic sort of interiority. Badiou 
writes of wanting to know how the century thinks of itself, and Lang’s film almost 
seems to want to achieve the same thing. M not only thinks about the century, but it 
also goes further to criticize it in the midst of its happening. 

The “surreptitious absolution” taken up by the residents of Berlin represents how 
ideology becomes collective, and, evidently, political. In M, passion for the Real 
is addressed and brought to life by groups of smarmy men in smoke-filled rooms: 
the crime bosses, and also the police chiefs (see Figure 7). Ideology, under the 
guise of politics, forms amidst the few before it is promulgated to the masses. The 
central dichotomy, that between the thinking, ideologically protected residents and 
the barbarous Beckert, is achieved through this absolution and enforced by the 
simple, undeniable fact that politics thinks itself just. A lone killer cannot have an 
ideology—or any sort of interiority—whereby a group of likeminded residents must 
be justified in their thinking since there are so many of them. Badiou confirms this 
very suspicion: “Politics, when it exists, grounds its own principle regarding the Real, 
and is thus in need of nothing, save itself.”16 Evidently, passion for the Real acts both 
as a justification for a genuinely barbarous ideology, and as a way to self-legitimatize 
that which wields power. Politics is self-serving, and this point is made explicit by the 
fact that those condemning Beckert are, themselves, criminals too! 

This propensity of politics to “save itself ” calls to mind Giorgio Agamben’s theory of 
‘bare life,’ whereby a sovereign-power must exclude—deem worthless—some other 
form of life in order to maintain its own hegemony: “[the] living being who, though 
being human, is excluded–and through this exclusion, included–in humanity, so that 
human beings can have a human life, which is to say a political life.”17 Though, it’s 
unclear if Agamben’s exclusive inclusivity of the sovereign-power/bare-life dichotomy 
requires bare-life to exist. Is Beckert ‘bare life’ if he is to be killed? Even in death, does 
he live on as an emblem of the Agambenian homo sacer for the politically minded 
residents of Berlin? History mournfully reminds us that many of these same Germans 
would find a new form of ‘sovereign power’ in the decade to follow. Either way, in 

15 Badiou, 4.
16 Ibid., p. 6.
17 Agamben, Giorgio. The Use of Bodies. Edited by Werner Hamacher. Translated by Adam Kotsko, Stanford
University Press, 2016, p. 23.



27Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

The Horror of the Real

attempting to synthesize Agambenian and Badiousian theory, looking at Lang’s film 
through the lens of both, I extrapolate a few notable points. First, I argue that this 
passion for the Real is a justification—a kind of moral imperative—for Agambenian 
‘bare life.’ We can also determine that the specifics of ‘bare life’ as described by 
Agamben, life whose biological existence is considered worthless, applies to Badiou’s 
thoughts on politics. Do all politics and ideologies subsist on rendering the Other 
as homo sacer?  

Badiou surely overlooked M because its expressionist sensibility flies in the face of 
the ‘art of subtraction’ that he champions in The Century. And while his points on 
subtraction (the art of auto-interrogation) are made clear in the text, there remains 
something to be said about more mainstream art that still manages to interrogate 
these aspects of society. The closest M gets to modernism is in its jagged construction, 
which comes from its constantly shifting perspective, oscillating from the crime 
bosses, to the beggars, to Beckert, to the police, and back again. Take that as you may, 
but there is something tragic about the fact that Lang’s film was widely seen—largely 
championed—and yet, failed to make the country of its origin aware of its demons. If 
Badiou is correct in postulating that passion for the Real manifests in the disjunctive 
synthesis between art and violence, than M proves, more than anything else, that this 
violence may overpower its artistic correlate. ◆

Figure 7  



28

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio. The Use of Bodies. Edited by Werner Hamacher. Translated by 
Adam Kotsko, Stanford University Press, 2016.

Badiou, Alain. The Century. Translated by Alberto Toscano, Polity, 2008.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The 
Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, W. W. 
Norton & Company, Inc., 2001, pp. 1166–1186. 

Lang, Fritz, director. M. Nero-Film A-G, 1931.



29Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

δι
αν

οι
α

PHENOMENOLOGICAL REPRODUCTION
in Thompson and Mailer's New Journalism

BRENDAN CHAMBERS

“The truth is no more nor no less than what one feels at each instant in the perpetual 
climax of the present.” – Norman Mailer, “The White Negro”

In his classic essay, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of 
Organizing Experience,” David Eason sought to distance interpretations of New 

Journalism from what he saw as the facile, superficial description of its resemblance 
to novelistic writing, and to create a more complex conception of the relationship 
between style, culture, and consciousness. He argued that the widespread view of 
New Journalism as literary journalism (particularly as propounded by Tom Wolfe) 
“abstracts the reports from their cultural contexts [… giving] only passing attention to 
the experiential contradictions represented in many of the reports.”1 Within his own 
formulation, Eason proposed instead that we think of two countervailing subdivisions 
within this body of work, each reflecting a different approach to conceptualizing the 
relationship of reporter to the cultural fragmentation of the 1960’s and 1970’s. In 
so doing, Eason established categories that influence critical discussion to this day.2 

Eason called the first of these approaches “ethnographic realism.”3 This mode aims 
to enter a group and “constitute the subculture as an object of display,” from whence 
“the reporter and reader, whose values are assumed and not explored, are conjoined 

1 Eason, David L. “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience” in Critical 
Studies in Mass Communication (1984), 52.

2 For instance, Robert Alexander’s analysis of Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ role in the history of 
narrative journalism, or Norman K. Denzin’s work describing performance ethnography.

3 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 51.



30

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

in the act of observing,” work “to reinvent textually the consensus which cultural 
fragmentation had called into question.”4 This approach, exemplified by the work of 
Tom Wolfe, effectively places the reporter and his reader outside of a given event (or 
cultural moment, as Eason was more wont to describe it), and in the passive role of 
bystander, observing without participating. By unifying them in this role, the text 
positions both reader and reporter within a shared culture and value system, often 
appropriating obsolete codes of understanding to do so. Scenes and subcultures are 
made accessible to the reader only by depicting him in relation to the (assumed) shared 
dominant cultural framework. Positioned in that way, the journalist then penetrates 
the world of the Other, affording the reader with a passage into its hidden reality. In 
Eason’s view, ethnographic realism, at its core, largely sought to assuage the fears of 
mainstream audiences about the fracturing of society by comparing what appeared to 
be new and frightening cultural changes to supposedly similar movements of the past: 
in Wolfe’s case, for instance, linking the worryingly impenetrable symbolic world of 
Ken Kesey’s ‘Merry Pranksters’ to the base human religious impulse. To Eason, this 
explanatory role also disguised an unequal power dynamic between reporter and 
reader. Though they are unified in the assumed shared cultural understanding, writer 
and reader are often simultaneously placed on uneven ground, with the reporter in a 
paternal role, guiding the reader from ignorance to understanding.5

Eason terms his second variant of New Journalism—the one that will interest me 
in the following pages— “cultural phenomenology.” This approach takes in some 
ways an entirely opposite angle in addressing cultural fragmentation. It not only 
acknowledges, but also embraces the mindset that “there is no consensus about a 
frame of reference to explain ‘what it all means.’”6 It equivocates on calling any one 
experience “reality,” instead sitting with the “experiential contradictions represented in 
many of the reports.”7 Finally, it joins together reporter and reader in the co-creation 
of a reality, engaging in a “multi-level interrogation, including that between writer 
and reader.”8 In contrast to ethnographic realism, this collaborative construction by 
reader and author puts both on a more equal footing, reflecting the cultural values 
of the time period that produced it. While ethnographic realism can exist at any 
time, cultural phenomenology is representative of a specific cultural moment; it is a 
manifestation and product of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, a time when “the doctrine 
of representation had crumpled [and] the center which separated image and reality 
were not holding.”9 Each approach reflects a methodology of understanding, a means 
to the end of reckoning with an unrecognizable world.

4 Ibid., 52.
5 Ibid., 54.
6 Ibid., 52.
7 Ibid., 52.
8 Ibid., 52.
9 Ibid., 51.



31Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Phenomenological Reproduction

As Eason suggests, the divergent means of “coming to terms with disorder” in 
the rapidly changing media world are reflected in the meta-analyses that crop up 
in each style.10 As Mas’ud Zavarzadeh explains in his Mythopoeic Reality, given the 
expansion and diversification of mainstream news media in the 1960s, readers grew 
to be wary of any text that sought to totalize experience, which presented a singular, 
universal understanding of events, as both traditional literature and reportage had. 
In Zavarzadeh’s telling, they began to eschew anything that presented a single, solid 
“harmonizing principle behind manifold reality.”11 Instead, readers often sought 
what New Journalism offers: a self-conscious, self-aware approach to representation, 
which recognizes the limitations of individual experience and makes explicit 
reference to them, so as to most accurately present information to the reader. More 
traditional forms of ethnographic realism attempted to keep pace with these changes, 
though it often left little room for the reader to decide whether the journalist’s 
representation was accurate, taking that truth-claim as a given. Ethnographic realism 
often creates the illusion that the processes of its creation could produce nothing 
other than an objective representation of reality, despite the sculpting necessarily 
done by matters of selection, point of view, and so on. I see Eason’s conception of 
cultural phenomenology as the opposing approach, calling attention to the inherent 
limitations of its form and method. It is not only cognizant of these limitations, but 
it also makes use of them in order to investigate, in conjunction with the reader, the 
possibilities available to construct a world “rooted in the interaction of ‘images of 
reality’ and ‘the reality of images.’”12 

If asked to distill the distinction between the two styles to a single phrase, I nominate 
authorial self-reflexivity. Cultural phenomenology recognizes the existence and 
effects of this liminal image-world13 on writing itself and any attempts, therefore, to 
represent such a world. By taking stock of the contemporary cultural moment, and 
the effects of the proliferation and dissemination of media, writers using a cultural-
phenomenological approach are careful to track the effects that the image-world have 
on their own actions and the events that they attempt to report. This reciprocity 
within Eason’s second model—which is quite similar, as he acknowledges, to what 
Zavarzadeh terms a “testimonial” approach to nonfiction novel writing—even shapes 
the decisions of the journalist as he is writing.14 If, for example, Norman Mailer 
changes his behavior to conform to, or to challenge, the constructed media image of 
Norman Mailer, then that image influences his account of “the real.” In this way, the 
author serves as a vehicle to represent our new lives simultaneously in the world, and 

10 Ibid., 54.
11 Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel. (University of Illinois Press, 

1976)
12 Eason ““The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 55.
13 For the purposes of this paper, the image-world is “a realm which blurs the distinctions between fantasy and 

reality,” one which challenges the traditional dichotomy of image and real, instead imagining “a world in which 
image and reality are ecologically intertwined” (Eason 54, 53).  In practice, this is the conception of reality, 
formed through the consumption of media and experience, which exists in the collective consciousness of society. 

14 Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel, 128.



32

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

outside of it, in the image-world. The distinction between the two—to this historical 
point well-established—has, in response to reality’s conceptual fragmentation, 
become blurred. Understandings of reality influence understandings of the self; thus, 
the self must now be understood to be similarly fractured, or lost in the liminal space 
that our “technotronic society” has opened between the image and the real.15  

I will now examine how Eason’s phenomenological method and Zevarzadeh’s 
testimonial approach16  are manifested in the works of Hunter S. Thompson and 
Norman Mailer. I will examine how Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and 
Mailer’s Armies of the Night conform to—and/or complicate—the categories that 
Eason postulates. I am interested in the reciprocal manipulation of artistic practice 
and public image in both writers, as well as the relation of that manipulation to 
each authors’ claims regarding epistemological authority. Additionally, I will explore 
both authors’ use of writing as a reconstitution of self, using the lens of Eason’s 
conception of cultural fragmentation as a point of departure. This question is critical 
to reckoning with the full scope of their works, as the centrality of self is an inherent 
characteristic of subjective reportage.

Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas embodies Eason’s description 
of cultural phenomenology as a “symbolic quest for significance in a fragmenting 
society.”17 Las Vegas’s image-world increasingly fractures the supposed object of his 
quest—an “American Dream” now irreparably divided into bike racers at the Mint 
400, the police at the National Conference of District Attorneys, or the various 
outcasts and addicts who populate the city’s casinos and fringe—making the search 
for concrete, universal truth increasingly more suspect and improbable. The actual 
quest thus becomes Thompson’s own struggle—and, at times, a fruitless quest—to 
establish new avenues for epistemological authority by constantly shifting stylistic 
modes and journalistic strategies. Thompson’s “savage dream” both exposes and 
displays the inconsistencies inherent in his own storytelling so as to construct more 
truthfully a new, fragile and even “failed” reality with his reader.18   

It is impossible to say definitively whether Thompson intended the process for this 
work as a rhetorical strategy, that is to say, understood the impossibility of finding a 
universal framework through which to unify his subjects. But what is certain—or, at 
least, what most critics believe19—is that Thompson embraces this disunity, working 
to document “what it feels like to live in a world in which there is no consensus about 

15 Zavarzadeh, 1.
16 The testimonial nonfiction novel, as Zavarzadeh terms it, “assumes that the only authority on appearance 

and existence is the witness himself.”  In other words, that the author’s epistemological authority derives from 
presence at an event, and that the only information that can be conveyed with absolute authority is that which 
was registered by “one’s participating senses” (128). 

17 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 52.
18 In his “Jacket Copy to Fear and Loathing to Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream,” 

Thompson describes the work as a “failed experiment in Gonzo Journalism.”
19 See, for instance, Hollowell, John. Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel. (University of 

North Carolina Press, 1977), 11.



33Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Phenomenological Reproduction

a frame of reference to explain ‘what it all means.’”20;21 Because of this, he makes forays 
into a variety of avenues for authority, seeking a method of communication that can 
convey experience. Thus on a diegetic and conceptual level, Fear and Loathing in Las 
Vegas serves simultaneously as a representation of the new “supramodern” world and 
as a documentation of Thompson’s attempts at recording it.22 

Thompson’s ultimate task, of course, is to establish the disunity of American society 
in the ’60s and ’70s and to articulate the absence of a unifying cultural framework 
(represented in FLLV by the American Dream). After eating at Terry’s Taco Stand, 
near the end of their ostensible quest, Duke and Gonzo reach what is left of the 
club they think is called the American Dream, finding only “a huge slab of cracked, 
scorched concrete in a vacant lot full of weeds,” and are informed that “the place had 
‘burned down about three years ago,’” leaving little interpretation necessary for the 
reader.23 It is not by accident that Thompson chose Las Vegas as the backdrop for 
this tale of fragmentation. The city is the preeminent example of what Eason calls 
“the marketing of worlds of experience,” and, therefore, is the ideal place to bring 
into question “the relativity of all worlds, including one’s own.”24 Las Vegas is also a 
perfect example of the bidirectional influence of the image-world, where “image and 
reality are ecologically intertwined.”25 Full of neon lights, unsavory spectacles, and 
uninhibited hedonism, Las Vegas is the “vortex” of the American Dream, a grotesque 
paradise and a world of its own.26 These excesses of Las Vegas of course influence its 
image, but to the same degree the collective perception of the city as a haven for vice 
and excess forces it to cater to this conception, the reality thus changing to conform 
to the image.

The same transformative process occurs through Thompson’s strategy of internalizing 
the image-world into a distorted caricature of his own identity. Raoul Duke is 
famously a rum-guzzling, drug-frenzied maniac: the “Gonzo” journalist.  Even 
Thompson’s so-called “biographies” document a self that has morphed into that 
Gonzo identity, as Thompson and his constructed image became inseparable.27 

20 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was originally serialized in two parts in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971 and 1972.  
As Thompson describes it, he intended to travel to Las Vegas and cover the Mint 400, “to buy a fat notebook and 
record the whole thing, as it happened, then send in the notebook for publication—without editing.”  Instead, 
he laid the foundation for the work during “about 36 straight hours in [his] room at the Mint Hotel…writing 
feverishly in a notebook about a nasty situation that I thought I might not get away from” which was then 
compiled over the next six months at the behest of his editor, and put into print later that year.

21 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 52.
22 Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: The Postwar American Nonfiction Novel, 1.
23 Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream. 

(Random House, 1998), 168.
24 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 51.
25 Ibid., 53.
26 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream, 47
27 The biography written by E. Jean Carroll, for example, opens with a schedule of Thompson’s daily drug use, 

beginning:
3:00 p.m. rise
3:05 Chivas Regal with the morning papers, Dunhills
3:45 cocaine



34

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

This image is constructed to a strategic end, however. By suffusing his writing with 
alternating mania and introspection, Thompson places himself in the tradition of 
the blind prophet, a strategy that stretches back to Tiresias, one who ostensibly 
cannot see, but who, in fact, “sees” better than most. Visionary hallucinations afford 
the opportunity to place the symbolic in the real without straying too far into the 
realm of the fictional: a hotel lounge full of humanoid lizards cannibalizing one 
another stand as a report of Thompson’s true lived experience, while simultaneously 
representing an allegorical understanding of Las Vegas’ patrons.  

In Thompson’s visionary brand of New Journalism, therefore, individual experience 
remains the highest source of epistemological authority, even as its hallucinatory style 
testifies to the author’s refusal to attempt a supposedly “objective” representation of 
reality. He eschews presenting a “harmonizing principle behind manifold reality,” 
instead working constantly to remind the reader of the constructedness of the very 
identity that bears witness to a surreal narrative.28 Throughout Fear and Loathing, for 
example, Thompson inserts small tags that allude to his process of creating the story, 
but they are themselves documents of immersion, chaos, haste and disorder: they are 
the notes from which he constructs his account, scribbled on “a pocketful of keno cards 
and cocktail napkins,” or on the handful of ink splotches splattered throughout the 
text, as if the pages the reader holds were torn straight from Thompson’s handwritten 
journal.29 Likewise, he includes qualifiers such as “As I recall” and “Memories of this 
night are extremely hazy,” so as to be candid with readers about his state of perception 
in a way that both qualifies and authenticates his report.30   

Perhaps the most revealing moment is the one in which Fear and Loathing claims 
to offer the rendering of an event from Thompson’s own notebook, sans edits; the 
section entitled “Breakdown on Paradise Boulevard” is presented as simply the 
transcript of the conversation between Duke and Gonzo.  The editor’s note, which 
heads the section, states:

At this point in the chronology, Dr. Duke appears to have broken down 
completely; the original manuscript is so splintered that we were forced to 
seek out the original tape recording and transcribe it verbatim.  We made 
no attempt to edit the section, and Dr. Duke refused even to read it […] In 

3:50 another glass of Chivas, Dunhill
4:05 first cup of coffee, Dunhill
4:15 cocaine
4:16 orange juice, Dunhill
4:30 cocaine
4:54 cocaine
5:05 cocaine

28 Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: the Postwar American Nonfiction Novel, 8.
29 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream, 41.
30 Thompson, 37, 41.



35Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Phenomenological Reproduction

the interests of journalistic purity, we are publishing the following section 
just as it came off the tape.31 

In this section, we might say, Thompson operates somewhere between Zavarzadeh’s 
testimonial and notational modes, complicating their distinction in his process of 
searching for avenues to authority. While the testimonial mode, Zavarzedeh writes, 
derives epistemological authority from presence during an event, the notational 
mode typically does so through the direct, unedited nature of the work, where the 
author serves only to record the event verbatim for the reader and to reproduce it 
exactly. Thompson intended Fear and Loathing to toe the line between the two. He 
sees “the eye & mind of the journalist […] functioning as a camera,” and wants 
the material to be unedited once recorded, but also recognizes that “the writing 
would be selective & necessarily interpretive,” since it is filtered through the lens 
of the author’s experience.32 The above section exemplifies Thompson’s operation in 
this liminal space: it is supposedly a direct recording of the events as they occurred, 
transcribed from “the original tape recording,” but given that it exists in a work that 
makes editorial decisions in other sections means, by necessity, that its inclusion is 
an editorial decision. In this way, Thompson operates in both modes simultaneously, 
notationally including verbatim recordings while testimonially shaping the narrative 
through decisions that most accurately represent his subjective experience. Though 
Thompson writes off this moment by judging the work “a victim of its own 
conceptual schizophrenia,” he tempers his own dismissal with a coda, claiming it as 
“a first, gimped effort in a direction that Tom Wolfe calls ‘The New Journalism’ has 
been flirting with for almost a decade.”33 

Perhaps most importantly, these moments of narrative discontinuity—from reminders 
of narrative construction to sudden style changes—execute a sort of Brechtian 
fourth-wall break, bringing readers out of an essentially immersive narrative and 
forcing them to evaluate their active participation in a more distanced, critical way. 
Through this, such readers are inoculated against taking the work as representative 
of the world, but rather shown that it is a world in a multitude of worlds. In Eason’s 
formulation, Thompson invites the reader to engage in a “multi-layered interrogation 
of communication […] between the writer and the reader, as a way of constructing 
reality.”34 Readers are empowered to reconstitute their own understanding of the 
reality presented to them—given the ostensibly unqualified facts of the experience 
and its conveyance—and thereby accept or reject its truth. 

Norman Mailer was as, if not more, aware than Thompson of the image-world, and has 
worked to complicate, engage, and interrogate traditional modes of representation. 
The first page of Armies of the Night opens with a selection from Time portraying 

31 Ibid., 120.
32 Ibid., 120.
33 Thompson, Hunter S. The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time. (Picador, 2012), 123, 122.
34 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 52.



36

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

him as an uncontrolled drunk, “slurping liquor from a coffee mug” and expounding 
upon the lack of bathroom facilities in the theater where he is speaking.35 But just 
as for Thompson, Mailer’s constructed image is part contrivance in the moment (a 
construct next to the liberal but respectable Robert Lowell) and partly the result 
of a retrospective literary self-fashioning, as John Hollowell sees it, into “a kind of 
psychic president, a moral leader” for the contemporary cultural moment.36 He is 
“semi-distinguished and semi-notorious,” “the modern everyday fellow,” and “the 
wild man.”37 By crafting a complex, dipolar, and at times paradoxical self-caricature, 
he can implicitly criticize the media processes that would claim singular objective 
construction of his image while only selectively including observations from the 
event.  

In Armies of the Night, Mailer operates in two distinct modes: Novelist and Historian. 
As Novelist, Mailer performs two roles. First, the Novelist documents reality as it 
happened to him; he is, in Mailer’s words, the “narrative vehicle for the March 
on the Pentagon.”38 However, this experiential record is not entirely forthright or 
trustworthy. Of course, it includes retrospective revisions, as memory, especially since 
one apparently so often drunk as Mailer cannot be trusted to be entirely faithful 
to original perception. This leads to the second role of the Novelist, which is to 
construct as truthful an image of Mailer as possible, by which the reader can correct 
the effects of his biases on the narrative. In this way, the image of the Novelist is a 
tool, an “instrument to view our facts and conceivably study them in that field of 
light” that his construction of Mailer has produced.39 Having established this critical 
lens, as Historian, Mailer seeks to accurately “elucidate the mysterious character of 
that quintessentially American event,” the March on the Pentagon.40 In this way, 
Armies of the Night serves both as an implicit treatise on behalf of the New Journalism 
and as an explicit criticism of the old, demonstrating Mailer’s belief that reporting 
“intensity and wholeness of perceptions more closely approaches the truth, or the 
most important truth, of the thing perceived than objective reporting.”41 

By choosing an event whose literal occurrence maps onto his view of the Vietnam 
War, Mailer creates, as John Hollowell describes it in his Fact and Fiction, an 
“impressionistic history as seen through the lens of participant-observer.”42 Mailer 
presents the two sides of the literal-figurative war through a series of representative 
images, relying on connotative understandings to bolster his depictions: “healthy 
Marines, state troopers, professional athletes, movie stars, rednecks, sensuous life-

35 Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History. (Plume, 2017), 3.
36 Hollowell, Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel, 39.
37 Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, 13, 15.
38 Ibid., 54.
39 Ibid., 216.
40 Ibid.
41 Begiebing, Robert J. Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer. (University of 

Missouri Press, 1980), 135.
42 Hollowell, Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel, 90.



37Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Phenomenological Reproduction

loving Mafia, cops [etc.] Arrayed against…the Freud-ridden embers of Marxism, 
good old American anxiety strata—the urban middle class with their proliferated 
monumental adenoidal resentments.”43 Rather than maintaining a strict focus on the 
events that he is reporting on, Mailer often chooses instead to move into exegetical 
commentary. In this way, like Thompson, he complicates Zavarzadeh’s categories of 
‘nonfiction novel,’ using them as shifting modes of representation. Though Mailer 
seems to operate in the testimonial mode, absorbing and regurgitating events 
as “witness-participant-narrator,” just so often, he shifts to “a private interpretive 
scheme to reorder the seemingly random incidents into […] ‘a significant form.’” 
This is more in line with Zavarzadeh’s exegetical mode44, as, for instance, when Mailer 
moves from a debate with Lowell and Macdonald about the relative merits of being 
arrested, to an encompassing diatribe on the history of ideological changes of the Left 
over the course of a paragraph.45 In the testimonial mode, he operates as Novelist: a 
vehicle for experience. In the exegetical mode, he is Historian, providing interpretive 
commentary tempered by the reader’s use of his constructed image.

Diversions characterize Mailer’s work; he is even willing to concede the inaccuracy of 
his perceptions, recording his experience with inconsistencies included. At the height 
of the March’s frenzy, for example, Mailer notes that despite the literal erroneousness 
of his perception, he experienced a “superimposition of vision,” seeing real men fleeing 
and carrying an N.L.F. flag chased by phantom MP’s and policemen.46 Though he 
experienced that vision, he also acknowledges that his perception ran contrary to 
what other participants reported. In this way, he implicitly acknowledges Eason’s 
premise that phenomenological works are a representation of a world among worlds, 
each bearing the weight of epistemological authority over itself, but no other.47

Perhaps the most distinctive element of Mailer’s craft is the voice through which he 
expresses his ideas. In Armies, he creates the feel of a novel by having an unnamed 
narrator describe the events that occur to Mailer (of course, the author) as character. 
In this way, Mailer is able to split his presence and voice, paradoxically laying claim 
to both omniscience and subjectivity. Mailer the writer is omniscient because of his 
unfettered access to the thoughts and motivations of Mailer the character. However, 
he also simultaneously claims epistemological authority through documentation of 
his subjective experience of the event. Clearly, this technique seems to transcend 
both Eason’s categories as well as Zavarzadeh’s. Though Eason asserts that Mailer is 
operating in the phenomenological mode, third person narration typically creates a 
voice that mediates experience between recorder and consumer, and thus falls more 
neatly under the umbrella of ethnographic realism. Mailer wants his narrator to be 
“an eyewitness who is a participant but not a vested partisan,” and indeed often 

43 Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, 34.
44 Zavarzadeh, The Mythopoeic Reality: the Postwar American Nonfiction Novel, 129, 93.
45 Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, 85.
46 Ibid., 127.
47 Eason, “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of Organizing Experience,” 51.



38

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

maintains a strong commitment to unfiltered communication of the experience. 
In other moments, however, he does interpretive work for his readers, presenting 
them with a rather clean, uncomplicated understanding of events’ relationship and 
meaning.48 In this way, Mailer actually sits in a more intermediate space between 
phenomenology and ethnography, as well as between testimony and exegesis, since he 
is both the active communicator of participatory experience and passive commenter 
on the significance of events. Mailer in fact comments on this tension explicitly, 
explaining that the central figure of his story must, by necessity, be ambiguous, 
“to recapture the precise feel of the ambiguity of the event and its monumental 
disproportions.”49 

A telling example of Mailer’s complication of traditional media’s objectivity in Armies 
is his account of the evening at the Ambassador Theater. Whereas Time portrays 
Mailer “stumbling” about the auditorium, incoherently spewing a “scatological solo,” 
the novel delves into Mailer’s reactions to his audience, and the power struggles 
between the authors on the stage, which would have been invisible to anyone not 
participating in them. By placing his retrospective account in conversation with 
Time, a proxy for supposedly trustworthy news coverage, Mailer positions himself 
as the epistemological authority on this event. From the opening pages of the work, 
Mailer is playing with twin conceptions of “time,” both in its manifestation as 
representative of traditional news media as a whole, and in its distorting effects of 
retrospection on storytelling. The novel is framed as an attempt to supersede both 
of these impediments to understanding, working to “leave Time in order to find 
out what happened.”50 With his intimate knowledge of what occurred, and, more 
importantly, his very dispensing with a claim to objectivity, he invites readers to place 
their trust in the authority of his experience, placing (as Mailer writes) “adjectives” 
and especially “adverbs” (that is, qualifications of perception) beyond the authority 
of traditional reporting.51 

Collaterally, he is then well-positioned to expound his own views. Unlike Thompson, 
for whom creation of image is not the stated aim, but a byproduct of his writing, 
Mailer presents himself as setting out with the explicit intention of recreating himself 
in the image-world in the first half of the work, so as to provide the reader with a 
metric against which they can measure his report in the second half. Through what he 
alerts readers to—“our intimacy with the master builder” of the narrative itself—the 
reader can account for whatever limits they perceive in Mailer’s own ability to report 
accurately.52 During the early stages of the March, for example, Lowell and Mailer 
arrive to the sound of music, which the author initially notes “was being played by the 
Fugs,” but which Mailer quickly qualifies (being “scrupulously phenomenological”). 

48 Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, 53.
49 Ibid., 53.
50 Ibid., 4.
51 Ibid., 282.
52 Ibid., 218.



39Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Phenomenological Reproduction

As per usual, Mailer places himself in the third person: “Mailer heard the music 
first, then noticed the musicians and their costumes, then recognized […] it was the 
Fugs.”53 By comically highlighting the issue of phenomenology, Mailer demonstrates 
an awareness of the audience’s concerns, and preempts their questions before they 
even have them.

Thompson and Mailer thus adopt somewhat divergent strategies. By grounding 
himself in the first-person, Thompson plays on the epistemological authority 
of experience to give weight to his account; he then crafts his argument through 
the symbolic representations that largely appear through hallucination. Mailer, 
on the other hand, constructs his argument through a multifaceted approach to 
documentation, which addresses the weaknesses of both subjective and objective 
reporting so as to craft the truest retelling possible. “The History as Novel” contains 
both the strengths and weaknesses of subjectivity, strong in its documentation of the 
“history of himself ”—the story of an individual experience—and yet, it is weak in 
its necessarily limited scope.54 “The Novel as History” is in turn the embodiment of 
objectivity, with strength in its far-reaching account of events, and weakness in its 
necessarily biased universalization. As Begeibing comments in his Acts of Regeneration, 
Mailer responds to traditional objective journalism by “fusing the personal truths 
of the experience with the events themselves” and sits with the understanding that 
“neither kind of truth is exclusive to either book.”55 By operating in both modes, 
Mailer is able to account for the flaws of both the Novelist and the Historian, using 
the strengths of each to balance out the weaknesses of the Other. 

The central event in Armies of the Night, the March on the Pentagon, exemplifies 
Mailer’s skill at hewing metaphorical meaning from literal events. He considers the 
purpose of the March itself “to wound [the Pentagon] symbolically,” extending the 
ideas that he had developed as far back as “The White Negro.”56 In that essay, he 
suggested that hipsters, who (as he saw it) in Armies make up the shock troops of 
the March, seek to live not within the world, but outside of it, in a life and reality 
of their own creation. They interact with the world through energy and vibrations, 
where every interaction ends in either an increase or decrease in the energy that one 
possesses, and thus one’s ability to perceive the world. Mailer sketches the mindset of 
the marchers in the same terms, as they seek not military victory, but instead “new 
kinds of victories [that] increase one’s power for new kinds of perception.”57 Through 
this language of perception and energy, Mailer is able to construct a retelling of the 
event, which operates simultaneously on the literal and figurative level. He re-forms 
the march into symbolic civil war while simultaneously portraying the reality of what 
occurred.

53 Ibid., 119.
54 Ibid., 215.
55 Begeibing, Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of Norman Mailer, 141.
56 Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. (Penguin Books, 2018), 54
57 Mailer, 76.



40

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Upon arrival at this climactic scene, the first detail that Mailer notes is the chaotic 
mix of cymbals, chanting, and spoken word played by the Fugs. Throughout the 
beginning of the Pentagon episode, much of Mailer’s attention is focused on the 
Fugs’ role in the Yuppie army’s attempt to raise the Pentagon “three hundred feet,” 
where it would then “turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled this 
levitation.”58 Through his description of their production, Mailer implicitly draws a 
parallel between the intention of the Fugs’s artistic performance and his own:

The exorcism would proceed, and the Fugs were to serve as a theatrical 
medium…While the Indian triangle and the cymbal sounded, while a 
trumpet offered a mournful subterranean wail, full of sobs, and mahogany 
shadows of sorrow, and all sour groans from hell’s dungeon, while finger 
bells tinkled and drums beat, so did [Ed Sanders, lead vocalist of the Fugs’] 
solemn voice speak something approximate to this.59 

Mailer then goes on to describe Sanders’ extended meditation on the evils of the 
war in Vietnam. Here, in their role as “theatrical medium” the Fugs act as both 
representative of, and conduit for, experience, as their music simultaneously reflects 
and feeds the energy of the crowd. Meanwhile, Mailer does the same, recording the 
event while he participates in it, chanting along with the crowd. He describes a paper 
passed around in the terms of mutual co-construction of experience: “By the act of 
reading this paper, you are engaged in the Holy Exorcism,” a collective understanding 
of what the event is and yet also how a common vision means to transform it.60 

At the same time, the phenomenological information that Mailer conveys is 
permeated by a tone that matches the strangely serious and absurd approach of the 
protest itself. While the Fugs chant about the Pentagon’s first grope-in for peace, for 
instance, Mailer finds himself musing about how his “three divorces and four wives” 
have forced him to concede “the absolute existence of witches.”61 Though the protest 
of the Pentagon is deeply serious—addressing, after all, the horrors of war in general 
and the Vietnam War in particular—neither Mailer nor his Yippie shock troops 
can seem to broach the subject without a bent towards the ridiculous, or even the 
irreverent. Thus, by jumping back and forth between documentary and experiential 
modes, from straining “to see what was going on at the head of the column,” over 
to the Fugs playing “Out, demons, out!” to the people “streaming […] to see what 
the attack had developed,” Mailer mimics the head-turning hysteria of the March.62    

Yet, as Mailer’s participation in the event comes to its conclusion, his narration snaps 
back into the Novelist’s sharp focus on minute detail and reader-absorption.  After 

58 Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History, 120.
59 Ibid., 120-121. 
60 Ibid., 121.
61 Ibid., 122, 123.
62 Ibid., 126.



41Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Phenomenological Reproduction

stepping past the rope meant to separate the marchers from the Pentagon, what 
occurs next is illustrated in stark relief, and in a coherent, logical order:

The MP’s stood in two widely spaced ranks.  The first rank was ten yards 
behind the rope, and each MP in that row was close to twenty feet from 
the next man.  The second rank, similarly spaced, was ten yards behind the 
first rank and perhaps thirty yards behind them a cluster appeared, every 
fifty yards or so, of two or three U. S. Marshals in white helmets and dark 
blue suits…He made a point of stepping neatly and decisively over the low 
rope.  Then he headed across the grass to the nearest MP he saw.  It was as 
if the air had changed, or the light had altered; he felt immediately much 
more alive—yes, bathed in air—and yet disembodied from himself, as if 
indeed he were watching himself in a film where this action was taking 
place.  He could feel the eyes of the people behind the rope watching him, 
could feel the intensity of their existence as spectators.63 

Mailer takes time to describe the smallest details, from his augmented perception 
of the light, to his feeling of being watched, to the “naked stricken lucidity” of 
the military police as he strides towards them.64 He also returns to an extended 
meditation, making attempts at recreating the interiority of the MP in front of him, 
wondering whether he quivered from a “desire to strike [Mailer], or secret military 
wonder […] now possessed of a moral force which implanted terror in the arms of 
young soldiers.”65 Throughout this sequence, he refers back to the air quality, calling 
it “mountain air,” though Washington sits firmly near sea level. He ceases referring 
to it as such only when he is finally brought away from the crowd and is placed out 
of view.66 In doing so, Mailer sets apart those moments at which his image is being 
created—when he is on display—not only for the people present, but also for those 
who will watch the BBC footage later on. Mailer writes of having felt—in a variation 
on Thompson’s claim, quoted earlier—at once “more alive […] and yet disembodied 
from himself, as if indeed he were watching himself in a film where this action was 
taking place.”67 Mailer paints himself as aware, in the moment of experience, of the 
simultaneity of the real and the image. He feels that his actions were being recorded, 
whether on video or in memory, shaping his conception in the public consciousness.

Though Eason’s separation of ethnographic realism and cultural phenomenology 
offers a critically important approach to New Journalism, Thompson and Mailer 
both illustrate that the distinction is not as dichotomous as Eason might suggest. 
For Thompson, representation of reality is not consistently an active, co-constructive 
act in conjunction for the reader, as Eason’s categorization of Thompson as cultural 
phenomenologist might suggest. Though Thompson often qualifies the faithfulness 

63 Ibid., 129-130.
64 Ibid., 130.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 130, 138.
67 Ibid., 129. (Emphasis mine)



42

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

of his account in “Breakdown on Paradise Boulevard,” he presents the report to the 
reader as patently representative of what occurred, taken “verbatim” for the sake 
of “journalistic purity.”68 This sort of ostensible straightforwardness strays toward 
the realm of ethnographic realism in that it assumes a shared perception with the 
reader, namely that verbatim recordings are a “purer” representation of reality than 
memory or perceptual experience. However, the section also has elements of cultural 
phenomenology: it cedes the fragmentary nature of reality (indeed, the manuscript is 
“splintered,” acknowledging the inability to communicate that perceptual experience). 
These sorts of paradoxical, intermediate moments expose the weaknesses of Eason’s 
categories. Though they are at times not as strictly separate as one might wish, 
they still prove useful in the framework that they provide to describe the reciprocal 
interaction of the image-world and reality in these pieces, and how Thompson and 
Mailer’s understanding of that relationship shapes their reconstruction of self.

In spite of the fact that the world appears irreparably fractured, into brutish factions 
that populate Washington and Las Vegas, Mailer and Thompson both use the image-
world as a tool to construct a more stable, cohesive self. The March, for Mailer, is 
an almost incommunicably chaotic event; however, by placing himself at the center 
of it in his retelling, he builds an image of Norman Mailer which, though at times 
confusing and complex, is nonetheless solid. This reconstitution of the self comes as a 
result of the interplay of reality, in his actions, and the image-world, in his book and 
other representations. By this self-reflexive recreation, he puts forth an addendum to 
Eason’s categories, whereby the journalist is able both to penetrate the image to reveal 
the reality (for example in his rebuttal of the Time depiction) and to understand 
the implication and mutualistic relationship of the image on reality, and vice versa. 
Through these complications, we see how each journalist simultaneously supports 
and undermines Eason’s distinctions. By bringing each category into question, and 
the two into conversation with one another, we can then most fully explore these 
modes of representation. ◆

68 Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart of the American Dream, 161.



43Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Phenomenological Reproduction

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Begiebing, Robert J. Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Works of 
Norman Mailer. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980. 

Eason, David L. “The New Journalism and the Image-World: Two Modes of 
Organizing Experience.” In Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1984.

Hollowell, John. Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel. Chapel 
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. 

Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History. 
Plume, 2017. 

Mailer, Norman. Advertisements for Myself. London: Penguin Books, 2018. 

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey into the Heart 
of the American Dream. New York: Random House, 1998. 

Thompson, Hunter S. The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time. 
London: Picador, 2012. 

Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud. The Mythopoeic Reality: the Postwar American Nonfiction Novel. 
Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1976. 



44

δι
αν

οι
α

COGNITION, DOMINATION AND 
COMPLEXITY:

A Speculative Outline of Intersections Between 
Cognitive Activity and Structures of Control, and  

Their Relation to Dynamics of Complexity and 
Simplicity

RYAN CARDOZA

“Organization is suppression.” 1

 

“Life is founded upon the premise of a belief in enduring and regularly recurring things; 
the more powerful life is, the wider must be the knowable world to which we, as it were, 
attribute being.” 2 

“Morality of truthfulness in the herd. ‘You shall be knowable, express your inner nature by 
clear and constant signs—otherwise you are dangerous: and if you are evil, your ability to 
dissimulate is the worst thing for the herd. We despise the secret and unrecognizable.—’” 3 

1 Land, Nick, interview by James Flint. Organization is Suppression (February 1997)
2 Nietzsche, Friedrich. "Will to Power." In Will to Power, by Friedrich Nietzsche, 298. New York: Random House 

Inc., 1968.
3 Nietzsche, Friedrich. "Will to Power." In Will to Power, by Friedrich Nietzsche, 158. New York: Random House 

Inc., 1968.



45Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Cognition, Domination and Complexity

1) Introduction

Cognition and control are like two intertwined vectors of domination. To identify 
something is to bring it into one’s own order, so that it may become knowable—
so that it may be suppressed into boundaries which facilitate a clear and unified 
apprehension of it. To implement a law of nature is to organize phenomena into 
something apprehensible; to conceptualize something is to integrate it into 
parameters of explication, and, thus, into the order of the knowable. The Human, 
which is unaware of its fate as being doomed to want to know—being doomed to 
need to make knowable—gives names and systems to nature so that it might bring 
phenomena into its order of identification, thereby dominating them. A system of 
sovereignty is no different; an Empire that expands inevitably makes territories and 
peoples known to it; the State makes its territory knowable by imposing categories of 
representation onto geographical spaces, making its citizenry knowable by bringing it 
into its order of domination—into its realm of identification, so that it might know 
it. Functions of control and functions of cognition intersect in the sense that both 
employ techniques of domination, identification being but one of these techniques, 
albeit a very important one. The eyeball, which observes physical phenomena, and 
the eye of a surveillance camera, are both products of the same drive—they express 
the command “make knowable!”

Conquest is a word that commonly describes the trajectory of Empires or States, but 
the order of knowledge, too, has a conquest: a trajectory of cognitive-intellectual 
imperialism. If it is observable to us, then it is not immune from systematization 
and integration into something cognizable. Not even the stars are out of reach from 
the cold hands of knowledge, which bring them into the realm of identification, and 
which systematize their organizations, giving them names, and applying laws to their 
behavior. 

The story of control on earth is one whose trajectory is guided by concepts, which 
have a relative autonomy in the sense that the power of the concept is the power of 
the particular control system that incarnates it and that is guided by it. Internal to 
every regime of domination is a cohesive conceptual structure that determines the 
way it operates and functions. A critical reconfiguration of a concept necessitates a 
substantial reconfiguration of the control structure that envelops it.

I start with the following points, which will be expounded upon in what follows: 

1) Cognition and control converge at the point of the integration of 
materials into organized aggregates, the partitioning of matter into distinct 
categories of representation, and the selection out of what is not capable of being 
schematized. 



46

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

2) Higher-level operations of unification and integration—whether 
operations of a regime or operations of mind—are conditioned by the 
possibility of very high degrees of stratification at the level of structural 
organization. 

3) Stratification is not only a condition, but is also a shared tendency 
between cognition and control; the double-helix of control and cognition 
are connected by a bridge of stratification. Functions at the level of the 
mind and mechanisms at the level of political control integrate, systematize, 
and identify (which necessarily implies a form of stratification).

4) Structures of political control have as their internal mechanisms relatively 
autonomous concepts. Relative autonomy is established in contradistinction 
to absolute autonomy, in the sense that concepts are not unconditioned 
Platonic Ideas, but are rather relatively autonomous, since the concept 
guides the functioning of the regime, and the totality of the conceptual 
structure functions independently of any individual subject thinking or 
apprehending it.

5) Concepts and materiality interact with one another through relations of 
feedback and interpenetration. 

2) Stratification

In this paper, I will be using the definition of stratification provided by Gilles Deleuze 
and Félix Guattari, wherein Stratification “consist[s] of giving form to matters, of 
imprisoning intensities or locking singularities into systems of resonance and 
redundancy, of producing upon the body of the earth molecules large and small and 
organizing them into molar aggregates. Strata are acts of capture; they are like ‘black 
holes’ or occlusions striving to seize whatever comes within their reach.”4 Stratification 
(when considered at the level of materiality) is the suppression and imprisonment 
of primary intensive matter. Stratification at this level is the process whereby the 
indeterminacy and disparate potentialities of intensive material flux are suppressed 
into more rigidified and complex forms of determinate organization. When one 
refers to something that is stratified, he speaks about something that can also be said 
to have some degree of sophistication, which necessarily implies order. Stratification 
will be a useful concept, because we can use it to talk about the convergence of certain 
tendencies two different levels of matter without equivocating between levels. The 
two levels at which stratification occur are 1) the level of human cognition/cognitive 
activity in general, and 2) the level of materiality. While stratification extends to both 
levels, the precise nature of stratification implemented at one level is not reducible to 

4 Guattari, Gilles Deleuze and Felix. "A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia ." In A Thousand 
Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 40. Minneapolis : University of 
Minnesota Press, 1987.



47Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Cognition, Domination and Complexity

the nature of stratification at the other level; there is no equivocation between levels, 
only an “isomorphism without correspondence”5 between the two.

3) Scientific Conceptualization; Physics

In his Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche writes that “Thinking in primitive conditions 
(pre-organic) is the crystallization of forms, as in the case of a crystal.—In our 
thought, the essential feature is fitting new  material into old schemas (=Procrustes’ 
bed), making equal what is new.”6 According to Nietzsche, when we refer to human 
thought, we undertake a process of integration and equalization. If we look at certain 
disciplines of human knowledge, we can see this tendency of “making equal what is 
new”7 in a very potent and effective register. Physics is a practice that often proceeds 
by integrating different lines of information (different causal chains) into simple and 
unified schemata that explain these phenomena.8 In the case of Isaac Newton, the 
law of universal gravitational attraction is such a schema in the sense that it is meant 
to explain highly diverse phenomena. Yet, the law itself is a mathematical simplicity 
of sorts—the inverse square law.9 The simplicity of the law integrates the phenomena 
it is meant to explain into a unified system of understanding. The parameters of a 
scientific law are imposed onto phenomena in order to facilitate a conceptual 
understanding that can be further built upon, and the application of a law forms 
a schema through which the particular phenomenon in question is translated and 
codified, in the hope that the schema itself can also continue to be engaged with 
as science develops. Phenomena hitherto not understood by us become dominated; 
occurrences in nature are colonized and partitioned into territories that now belong 
to the sovereignty of knowledge. 

What’s interesting, however, about this integration of phenomena into unified 
understandings is that, in observing the materials upon which these laws are 
imposed—such as the relations of the planets in orbit—there is nothing that 
suggests an essential simplicity that is absolutely independent of human cognition or 
perception. Moreover, why is it that humans come to understand relatively diverse 
phenomena as implicitly capable of being integrated into a unified scientific or 
mathematical schema? We agree with Nietzsche that the reason for this has to do 
with processes of integration and equalization as tendencies of cognitive functioning. 
The desire for more knowledge is the desire to integrate what is new into a schema 
that is further utilizable, and which can continue to be built upon. It is simply taken 
as a given that physical phenomena can be subjected to this process.

5 A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
6 Nietzsche, Friedrich. "Will to Power." In Will to Power, by Friedrich Nietzsche, 273. New York : Random House 

Inc., 1968.
7 Ibid.
8 For more on the relation between scientific laws and different causal chains, see Stewart, Jack Cohen and Ian. 

"Collapse of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World ." In Collapse of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in 
a Complex World, by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, 13-14. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. 

9 Ibid.



48

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

4) Identification

 a) Partitioning

At a level that is further removed from specificity of scientific conceptualization, 
there is the act of identification in general. To speak of identification is to speak of a 
connection between points; the connection between the agent who identifies and the 
matter that comes to be identified as a thing. Identification is the mechanism that 
bestows thinghood onto matter. Identification is also an example of stratification at 
the level of human cognition; to the extent that identification integrates in the same 
way that processes of stratification integrate indeterminate matter into a determinate 
form. Identification is an action that selects out; the bestowing of thinghood onto 
matter implies the partitioning and selection out of any difference that would disrupt 
the simple continuities involved in the apprehension of a thing as a particular thing. 
That which is different—or that primary intensive materiality which would overturn 
thinghood as a category coextensive with representation – is partitioned outside of 
the territory of identification. Any particular instance of identification effectuates 
a partition at two different levels: 1) At the level of things; in the sense that to 
identify a thing or an aggregate of things is to select out other things, which are not 
part of that particular occurrence of identification, and, 2) at the level of primary 
intensive materiality; in the sense that what is primary at a material level is made to 
be something of the Outside. To be more precise, it is made to be of a transcendental 
delimitation that relegates it to a territory that cannot be seen or spoken of—primary 
materiality is encased within the parameters of a distinction whereby it becomes 
delimited to an “in-itself ” on the side of a transcendental barrier that is across from 
thinghood. To impose this type of inside/outside distinction is precisely to enact a 
partition onto matter. 

According to Immanuel Kant, “pure reason” is a faculty that makes a similar 
partition. (This, indeed, is dependent on the extent to which we take Kant to be 
saying that the phenomena/noumena distinction itself is an ‘Idea of Pure Reason’.)10 
The phenomena/noumena dichotomy is not a concept given through the categories 
of the Understanding; rather, it indexes a point at which Reason encounters a 
critical limit and produces this distinction in its striving to grasp an Idea of which 
there cannot be knowledge. The Idea in question is a world independent of our 
experience of it. In trying to conceive of this Idea, thought becomes determined 
under such significant constraints that try to explicate the problem, which descends 
into deep conceptual rabbit holes. If it is true that we cannot know the things in 
themselves, then how can one speak in terms of a world completely independent of 
our experience, when to speak of a world is to speak within the parameters of our 
mechanisms of representation? And, as Arthur Schopenhauer (perhaps gratuitously) 

10 For a more comprehensive and rigorous account of this partition and its implications, see Kant, Immanuel. 
Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.



49Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Cognition, Domination and Complexity

pointed out, how can one speak of things-in-themselves when to speak of things is to 
imply multiple objects (the conditions for which are the inner intuitions of space and 
time)?11 A world independent of our experience would not contain multiple things 
that we cannot know—it would simply be unknowable altogether. But to follow 
this line of questioning is to miss the point completely. To speak about the problem 
strictly in terms of “we can/cannot know the things in themselves,” and to point out 
contradictions in the words being used to articulate it (like in Schopenhauer’s case) 
wades into the pitfalls engendered by ‘Dialectical Reason.’12 (I. Kant, Transcendental 
Dialectic, First Book, On the concepts of pure reason 1998) (I. Kant, Second Book 
of the Transcendental Dialectic, First Chapter, The paralogisms of pure reason 1998)
One could consider Schopenhauer’s criticism: “how can you say thing in itself when 
even thinghood is something conditioned by out interaction with the world?” But 
this contradiction bespeaks the nature of the problem.  It is precisely due to the nature 
of the possible pitfalls produced by this problem that Kant knows to say very little 
about things-in-themselves or a world independent of our experience—he simply 
says that you may think it, but that you cannot cognize it. In this paper, I do not aim 
to take an extreme position on one side of the very famous and inflated philosophical 
divide that this problem precipitates. In fact, if Kant were indeed correct, and if he 
were indeed saying what we take him to be saying, many of the philosophers who 
have fiercely articulated opposing positions of this divide have merely been bickering 
from two dyads of an antinomy of Pure Reason. Instead, I am of the opinion that 
this Idea of Pure Reason is a compelling example of partitioning at a transcendental 
level, which appears to be of something that has an extremely significant purchase on 
tendencies of thought. We do not take the fact that this inside/outside distinction is 
an Idea of Pure Reason to mean that we cannot talk about processes that implicate 
such a partition; rather, we understand it to be a powerful example of this tendency 
that lends itself to the point that we are trying to make about the significance of 
partitioning as a feature of cognition. 

 b) Unification/Complexity 

A thing is a type of simple unity that can be further integrated into other unified 
schemata of representation. If I am to identify an object that is in front of me, I can 
apprehend that object as a simplicity to the extent that it is totalizable in thought. I 
can integrate this object into a whole of compared and connected representations – a 
cognition, in the Kantian sense of the word.13 Not only does identification facilitate 

11 Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. New York: Dover Publishing, 1969.
12 See Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, specifically the 

sections; "Transcendental Dialectic, First Book, On the concepts of pure reason." In Critique of Pure Reason, by 
Immanuel Kant, 394-95. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998., "Second Book of the Transcendental 
Dialectic, First Chapter, The paralogisms of pure reason." In Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant, 438-39. 
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998., and the section "Transcendental Dialectic." In Critique of Pure 
Reason, by Immanuel Kant. in general, wherein illusion and fallacious inference of unrestricted pure reason is 
termed “dialectical.”

13 Ibid.



50

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

more sophisticated operations of connecting and comparing representations, but the 
act of identification itself implicates the apprehension of simplicity to the extent that 
a thing is a unified simplicity. Even if I can analyze and break down a thing into many 
different parts (or even different things), I will never stray outside the category of 
thinghood, and I cannot venture into the wilderness which identification partitions 
out without losing all semblance of thinghood and representation. Underneath, 
however, the operations of simplicity lies a dense complexity that bears no 
resemblance to the identity of thinghood. Contemporaneous with the apprehension 
of a simple identity such as thinghood are highly complex processes and firings at 
the molecular level of the brain. Additionally, the brain itself is a highly complex 
structure with more densely layered intricacies in functioning than the most robust 
computer (currently, at least), and the brain is nested within the larger—but still 
highly complex—structure of the human body, which is far from short of coexisting 
and comingling systems of organization. The dense material complexity of the 
body is an example of a highly stratified structure, which functions as the productive 
conditioning for “higher-level” operations (in this case, operations of identification, 
cognition, representation) without resembling them.

5) Conceptual Regimes; Societies of Control

In a short essay entitled “Postscript on the Societies of Control,”14 Deleuze 
identifies two distinct conceptual structures that accord with two distinct regimes 
of domination. At the time of writing the essay, according to Deleuze, society 
was standing on a precipice that faces an auspicious horizon: the arrival of a new 
regime—control societies. The regime that Michel Foucault called the “disciplinary 
society” is progressively being phased out in favor of a regime with an essentially 
different conceptual structure.15 Deleuze compares the structures of the two regimes 
and indexes distinctions that concern a difference of concepts. Each of the two 
societies incarnates a distinct conceptual structure, and domination is effectuated 
in accordance to the structure of each particular concept. I believe that Deleuze’s 
analysis and theoretical approach lend themselves to a concrete example of what 
we have been referring to as “conceptual regimes,” or regimes that are guided by 
concepts.  The two concepts in question are not only a way to describe either regime, 
but they are also something that is said of each regime in a significant sense. Below, 
we will briefly outline some of the structural differences that Deleuze indexes in each 
regime. His allusion to the increasing level of complexity in the new regime also 
gives us another example of the dynamic between high degrees of stratification and 
simplicity. The distinctions between the two regimes discussed in the essay will be 
referenced in terms of identification, territory, and complexity. 

14 Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October, 1992: 3-7. 
15 Ibid. “… a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be. We are in a 

generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure – prison, hospital, factory, school, family.”



51Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Cognition, Domination and Complexity

Identification: The precise manner in which each regime brings a citizenry into 
its order of identification presents two distinct cases. Under the mechanisms of 
disciplinary societies, citizens are placed on one side of an individual/group partition, 
and are defined and identified by the regime in accordance with these limitations. 
The individual is determined in contradistinction to the group. But the workings of 
control societies facilitate an identification that is more abstract: “We no longer find 
ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” 
and masses, samples, data, markets or ‘banks.’”16 The aforementioned individual/
group partition no longer has a place in the primary conceptual mechanisms of 
control societies—operations of quantitative abstraction act on the populace such 
that they primarily become identified as abstract mathematical aggregates. 

Territory: The spaces of disciplinary societies are analogically connected enclosures or 
molds. Each enclosure is an independent variable that starts from zero. The individual 
is at school, now at work, now with the family; one “never stops starting” from zero.17 
Disciplinary societies consist in spaces in which the individual always starts from a 
blank slate in learning a new discipline (work, schooling, family). In contrast with 
this, societies of control are characterized by the continuous modulation of metastable 
states; one is always undergoing more training, preparation or schooling.18 The 
closures of disciplinary societies dissipate, opening wide onto a complicated, 
seemingly un-partitioned space of flux, continuity, and relationality that give 
themselves to power; there is no longer a political space because everything is now 
political; there is no space in which privacy exists to the extent that mechanisms of 
surveillance only become more and more sophisticated. The ‘public sphere’ is no 
longer a distinct, purely physical space, but rather becomes inverted and enmeshed 
with certain pockets of cyberspace.  

Complexity/Stratification and Identity: The arrival of control societies at the impending 
end of the twentieth century bespeaks an omen which envisions a labyrinthine 
entanglement of connected serpent tails and cryptic vapors which conceal molecules 
of venom. The change from disciplinary societies to control societies indexes a distinct 
increase in complexity.19 (“The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the 
burrows of a molehill.”) The (conceptual) structure of the control regime is far more 
complex than the structure of the disciplinary regime it supersedes. This is also to 
say that control societies are more rigorously stratified than disciplinary societies. 
And it is none other than this dense level of stratification in terms of complex 
structural organization that facilitates the emergence of unified simplicities. A degree 
of stratification which is adequate to an idea of rigorous complexity is the condition for 
the possibility of emergent simplicities. In the particular case of a conceptual regime, 

16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 “The coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill.” Ibid.



52

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

high complexity facilitates unifications and simplicities at the surface level of its 
functioning and instantiation. For, in fact, a corporation or a datum is nothing more 
than one of these mysterious, “emergent” simplicities?20 And to the extent that it 
becomes a function of political tactics that are currently deployed within control 
societies, is identity not one of these simplicities? The current tactical use of identity 
in American political spaces is extremely ubiquitous, from racial identitarianism 
on the right, to identity as a compartmentalizing mechanism for groups which are 
purported to require activist assistance on the left. Meanwhile, many people who 
claim they would like to move away from “identity politics” have no problem 
appealing to the abstract identity of the country, the equalizing power of which is 
apparently sufficient in subsuming any and all adversarial relations between groups. 
Identity has become widespread as a political tool because the current parameters of 
domination under which we are determined facilitate the intensified instantiation of 
this vaporous simplicity. Obviously, identity is an illusion that has long had a formal 
reality contemporaneous with the abstract and material processes of the brain. It just 
so happens that the complexity of the current regime determines its effectiveness as 
a political tool. This is not something that was present when Deleuze was analyzing 
the characteristics of control societies. Perhaps even this highly complex regime has 
reached its critical point of saturation. 

6) Complexity - The Body

Another complex structure, which facilitates the ‘functioning of unities’ like 
identity, is the Human. Humans are highly stratified organisms. It is this high degree 
of stratification at the material level—in this case, at the level of the body—that 
facilitates the capacity to identify and stratify at the level of cognition. In general, highly 
stratified systems have the capacity to produce sophisticated schemata of unified and 
simple understandings. The high level of material stratification in the body as a whole 
also facilitates abstract functions like identity, concepts, and conceptualization. The 
human body is a highly complex machine, even within just the eye/brain connection 
alone. In a procedure that requires a high amount of processing power, the brain 
creates the illusory experience of looking “through” one’s eyes. In reality, however, 
the retina—which is at the back of the eye—stops all light, and what appears as 
a continuity of colors and shade are in fact “pictures” or “frames” that are discretely 
captured and transmitted as electrical impulses by the retina’s nerve cells (and then 
sent to the brain).21 In the 1960s, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel proved that about 
half of the nerves that connect the eye to the brain are not simply passive receptors of 
light input, and that some fibers in the optic nerve actually convey highly complex 

20 Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October, 1992: 3-7. “… but in a society of control, the 
corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas.”

21 Stewart, Jack Cohen and Ian. "Collapse of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World." In Collapse 
of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, 155. New York: Penguin 
Books, 1994.



53Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Cognition, Domination and Complexity

messages to the brain in the form of electrical impulses.22 We see in three dimensional 
dimensions, even though our eyes only receive input from two. This is because both 
halves of the optic tectum (also known as the Superior colliculus in the literature, a 
structure common to the mammalian midbrain, which contains the neuronal visual 
pathways of both eyes) receive information from each eye—the right side of each 
retina sends its information to the left side of the tectum, and vice versa.23 The ear 
is another very complex organic device; the extremely small hair cells (of which 
humans have 15,000) on the basilar membrane are tuned to specific frequencies 
so that particular pitches are sensed at different positions along the cochlea.24 The 
cochlea is a “tuned receptor” that converts frequencies from vibrations of the eardrum 
to corresponding positions of vibration in the basilar membrane.25 The brain itself 
is an organ that also has a deeply intricate “structure.” The cerebrum consists of 
two cerebral hemispheres, and each hemisphere is connected to the other by thick 
bands of nerve fibers, with one larger fiber known as the corpus callosum.26 Each 
hemisphere has approximately three layers; the first and outer layer (i.e.  the cerebral 
cortex), the second and central layer, which is made up of white matter, and the 
third and deepest layer (also known as the basila ganglia), which is made up of gray 
matter.27 If we look deeper into the brain, we find other structures such as the thalamus 
or the hypothalamus. Each sub-structure of the brain has its own intricate internal 
organization, and different sections of the brain correspond to different aspects of 
cognitive function.28 The body is certainly replete with order and organization, and 
to this extent, qualifies as a very stratified aggregate of matter. 

7) Concepts and Materiality

Concepts are not precluded from interacting with materiality by virtue of their 
abstract level/function. This notion presupposes a framing of the distinction between 
the abstract and the concrete, which is unsustainable to the extent that it implies a 
relation of strict separation between the two. In reality, the abstract and the concrete 
are enmeshed within each other, and thinking is both a locus of convergence and 
an interpenetration between the two levels. I do not wish to imply that the abstract 
and that the concrete are not distinct or different from one another. Rather, we are 
calling into question the precise nature of their separation. They can be thought of 

22 Stewart, Jack Cohen and Ian. "Collapse of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World." In Collapse 
of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, 156. New York: Penguin 
Books, 1994.

23 Ibid.
24 Stewart, Jack Cohen and Ian. "Collapse of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World." In Collapse 

of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, 158. New York: Penguin 
Books, 1994.

25 Ibid.
26 Stewart, Jack Cohen and Ian. "Collapse of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World." In Collapse of 

Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, 170-171. New York: Penguin 
Books, 1994. 

27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.



54

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

as two different and distinct levels, each with its own distinctive order and dynamic. 
Additionally, the concrete and the abstract can also be understood as levels that are 
significantly interconnected and always in relations of mutual interaction. There is a 
widely discussed phenomenon in science that can give us examples of how different 
levels of matter can, while remaining distinct and disparate, be internally connected 
to one another. This is what is typically referred to as emergence. For example; the 
gas laws, which are indexed by statistical properties, are determined by dynamics at 
a micro-level (which is to say a non-statistical level);29 pressure is measured by the 
average number of molecules in a given region of gas; temperature is the average 
kinetic energy of the gas molecules.30The simple apprehensible averages constitutive 
of the gas laws are produced by dynamics at a level of matter that is different in 
nature from the “emergent” level of statistical features. A complex molecular 
dynamic (in this case, the interactions and dynamics of the gas molecules) produces 
molar simplicities (the averages which constitute the gas laws).31 Another popular 
example of emergence is the case of the Mandelbrot set, in which a high degree 
of geometrical complexity is generated by “simple” dynamical rules that bear no 
resemblance to what they produce. There is no apparent connection between the 
dense intricacies of the Mandelbrot fractal and the terse simplicity of the rules for 
making the Mandelbrot set. These examples are meant to demonstrate scientifically 
observable instances of feedback and resonance between disparate levels of matter. 
The contention is merely that a similar relation between levels exists in the case of 
the abstract-concrete distinction, not that this instance is fundamentally the same in 
nature as these scientific examples.

If we accept that there are disparate levels of matter that are nevertheless in a 
relation, then we can establish the two most relevant levels to the problem of the 
abstract/concrete distinction. There is a conceptual level—an order of matter purely 
concerned with concepts—and an explicitly material level of matter. The former 
corresponds to what one might think of as the abstract and the latter as the concrete. 
The cognitive activity of a human brain (material/concrete level) imposes partitions 
onto concepts, which transforms and reconfigures said concepts (conceptual/abstract 
level) until the reconfiguration of the concept affects activity at the material level of 
matter. There exists a counter-effectuation of concept and materiality; the cognitive 
activity of humans entails conceptual re-configurations, implemented partitions, 
and transformations at the purely conceptual level. These transformations make a 
difference, insofar as that cognition imposes partitions that entail a distinct change in 
what thought is interacting with (thought engages with a re-configured concept), as 

29 Ibid.
30 Stewart, Jack Cohen and Ian. "Collapse of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World." In Collapse of 

Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, 233-234. New York: Penguin 
Books, 1994.

31 For various thorough conceptualizations of relations between “molecular” and “molar”, see A Thousand Plateaus; 
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987., and Anti-Oedipus; Capitalism 
and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.



55Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Cognition, Domination and Complexity

well as in how it is functioning. Thinking a transformed concept, as well as thinking 
the transformation of a concept, exacerbates different tendencies and intensities of 
thought. A concept always corresponds to a degree of intensity—or an intensive 
zone—to the extent that the concept is grasped within thought. To provide a rough 
mathematic sequence of what occurs, a reconfiguration in the concept = a change in 
intensity = thought traverses a new zone of intensity. To the extent that thought is 
something that occurs in the brain, a material difference made in thought necessitates 
a difference made in materiality in general. The difference is made not only at a 
molecular level—the material processes that occur in the brain—but also at a molar 
level; differences made in thought can cause people to take different actions, and 
to react differently to stimuli than they otherwise would have. To re-encapsulate 
the dynamic, thought subsists in materiality and in material processes (thought 
subsists in a brain). Thought enacts transformations at the level of concepts, the 
transformation of concepts, and enacts a new difference in thought, which effectuates 
change at molecular and molar levels of materiality. 

Outlining this dynamic of abstract and concrete levels and their relation to thought 
also sheds light on the precise nature of thought’s position. That is, thought is a point of 
convergence and interpenetration between the two levels. What is abstract is immediately 
apprehensible to thought and is cognizable a priori. Mathematical universals are the 
best example of this: a right angle, a straight line, an equilateral triangle, all of which 
are perfectly cognizable a priori. These things are immediately apprehensible and 
graspable in thought, and they have their own order of necessity. I am perfectly 
capable of cognizing a straight line a priori, and the essence of the straight line is such 
that if I imagine three straight lines congruent with one another, they each form an 
equilateral triangle. However, one never encounters in experience (i.e. ‘the concrete’) a 
perfectly straight line. What is ‘concrete,’ on the other hand, is clearly and immediately 
grasped by mechanisms of perception. Yet, there are things encountered in experience 
that are clearly not cognizable a priori (or, at least, not as easily as our straight-line 
example). The example that Aristotle gives is “the snub nose.”32 A misshaped nose 
is something immediately perceived; however, we cannot grasp it in thought with 
the same efficacy as we do with mathematical universals. The abstract is concrete in 
thought, but the concrete is abstract to thought. If we relate this configuration of the 
abstract/concrete distinction regarding thought to our discussion of conceptual/
material orders of matter, we can also view the interaction of the two orders (concepts 
and materiality) in another equally valid way; concepts are something abstract, and 
engage, and deal with, the concrete abstractly, or by virtue of abstract connections. 
The cognition of an object is an action that is enmeshed within the territory of the 
concrete, but the activity of cognition entails the powers and aspects of the abstract, 
abstract faculties, and the powers of abstraction.(I am tentatively defining abstraction 

32 For a similar distinction between differences in accessibility of the Abstract and the Concrete, see Aristotle’s 
Metaphysics.



56

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

here as the apprehension of abstract properties [the straight/straight line], which are 
coextensive with the cognition and experience of a concrete object.)

8) The Implementation of Concepts in a Regime

 In order that a regime effectively realize the concept that is said about it, concepts 
must be configured and interacted within a particular way. This can be understood 
in terms of the conceptual-materiality circuit. The material order and the conceptual 
order must interact in order to implement conceptual structures into material 
structures of control.  A partitioning and value distribution process must occur in 
terms of concepts in order for this to happen. This is something that is necessary 
for the regime to employ, since concepts apprehended at a purely abstract level are 
not sufficient for political instantiation. Take something like equality: even though 
a dichotomous relation can be said of purely conceptual articulations of equality—
to the extent that equal/unequal is an abstract conceptual principle—articulations 
that are exclusively of the conceptual level are obviously not insufficient for politics. 
The order of the abstract on its own is too cold for political dynamics; heat must be 
applied in order to set things in motion. A partition must be applied to the concept, 
and values must be distributed according to the partition. At the conceptual level, a 
stricter partition must be applied to equality; the partition is imposed as an overlay 
to the purely conceptual dichotomy (equality/inequality), and different values are 
distributed to the two sides of the instantiated partition. In accordance with the 
relation of feedback between levels, the implementation of this partition functions 
on the part of those material institutions that conceive of it, who, in turn, determine 
the concept of equality in a certain way. The determination of this concept effectuates 
how the political program carries out that conception, and in what manner it does so 
at the actual/concrete level.  It might be objected that the aforementioned dichotomy 
of equal/unequal already invokes a type of conceptual partition, even though we are 
talking about it as if it is something different in kind from the partitioning process. 
This type of dichotomy exists completely a priori, so even if a partition is said about it, 
it is a partition that occurs at a level irrelevant/distinct from the political instantiation 
of concepts. Pairs of a priori conceptual differences, such as straight/curved, discrete/
continuous, or equality/inequality, are not deliberate partitions on the part of any 
given subject or regime. It would be more accurate to say that they are conceptual 
dichotomies that incarnate tendencies and internal limitations in thought. 

9) Conclusion; Complexity–The Order of Knowledge and 
Nihilism

If we are told that the arrow of time necessarily corresponds to an increase in disorder, 
then the trajectories of both control structures and the domain of human knowledge 
would exemplify a tendency that does not accord with this postulate. The arrow of 
time that follows the trajectories of our control-cognition double helix also appears 



57Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Cognition, Domination and Complexity

to correspond with a progressive increase of order rather than disorder over time. 
Deleuze’s example of control societies alludes to this—political domination begins 
to become more complex, more sophisticated. Even before the control society, the 
modern State in general appeared to index something particularly sophisticated 
and abstract. What exactly is the State? It is not completely physical since many of 
its important functions (such as law and rights) are not concrete. Yet, despite not 
being completely physical, it clearly exists, and disobeying the injunctions of this 
thing that is not completely physical still has concrete material consequences (such 
as going to jail or paying a fine). On the other side of the double helix, the body of 
human knowledge becomes extremely saturated with systems and sub-systems of 
organization. Knowledge considered as a total body is not only a system of information, 
preservation, and organization. It is also like a gigantic complex of interlocking and 
communicating systems. Different intellectual disciplines communicate and interact 
with one another, often forming new sub-disciplines. Sometimes there is even a 
synthesis that produces a completely novel field. Even as older schemata become 
phased out or invalidated by new discoveries, archaic systems or ideas sometimes 
resonate with newer scientific projects, and can be re-integrated and updated into 
contemporary scientific practices. The order of knowledge is like an expanding but 
increasingly detailed web whose parallel lines resonate and communicate with one 
another. Different sections of the web are sometimes folded into and connected to 
other parts of the web, yet, the structural totality retains its distinct parts, and the 
entire thing continues to increase in size and detail. 

However, as this web becomes more and more detailed, a corresponding dynamic 
arises that is different from the other dynamics contemporaneous with complexity 
that we touched upon earlier. This web of knowledge possesses within it unified 
simplicities, but there is no higher-level simplicity that emerges on behalf of this 
sprawling structure of complexity. In the complexity of the human body/brain, 
we have something like identity, as well as abstract operations of identification 
and cognition. In the practice of science, which is an activity within the body of 
knowledge, we have the conceptualization and unification of phenomena under 
laws of nature. With the increased complexity of control societies, we witness the 
emergent function of certain mechanisms like corporations, data sets, and code. 
Where is the level of unification that corresponds to this highly stratified body of 
knowledge? There does not appear to be a connected level of unified simplicities 
and/or abstractions that corresponds to this complex web. However, this does not 
mean that there is no a corresponding dynamic related to the increasing order in 
the body of knowledge. As knowledge becomes more saturated with order, another 
tendency intensifies in connection with the former dynamic. If one looks up for a 
corresponding process of unification at a higher level, it looks like nothing is there. 
But if one looks down below, he will find that there is nothing. There seems to be a 
flattening effect; something becomes liquidated, something is increasingly becoming 



58

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

leveled. The progressive acquisition and articulation of abstract universals on behalf 
of knowledge causes the implementation of a concrete universal of disenchantment 
among those organisms that are supposed to be its inheritors. The more about the 
world that is rigorously explicated and systematized on behalf of knowledge, the 
more that we seem to feel as if something that once deeply belonged to us is being 
expropriated from us before our very eyes. In fact, there seems to be almost no limit 
to what can be expropriated from our most cherished, personal intuitions about 
ourselves as they become articulated and codified into the colder, more impersonal 
territory of knowledge. This is because processes of knowledge and intelligence 
disintegrate, and what is being disintegrated are the givens upon which we have 
constructed very useful fortresses of illusion and ignorance that keep us sheltered 
from the Outside. Rather than producing a corresponding dynamic of unification, 
the trajectory of knowledge effectuates a dynamic of the intensified disintegration 
and destruction of unities —the destruction of givens which knowledge finds to have 
never existed in the first place. The liquidation of the ‘given’ opens humanity up to the 
absolute indifference of a universe that does not consider humankind to be nearly 
as important as it finds itself. Looking to a universe that operates with complete 
autonomy (but with no knowledge), we find ourselves on the other side of that 
chiasmus, as something endowed with knowledge, but with little to no autonomy. 
In understanding itself to be determined by impersonal and autonomous processes 
which lack knowledge, something which possesses knowledge apprehends its own lack 
of autonomy. Paradoxically, the condition of possibility for cognizing such a disparity 
is a condition that is produced by the autonomous—by a blind god. As the structure 
of knowledge becomes more saturated with order and detail, nihility coagulates and 
rises from the core of the Earth, oozing through the cracks in the surface, melting the 
ground below us. But there is nowhere to go but further down. ◆



59Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Cognition, Domination and Complexity

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October, 1992: 3-7.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. "A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and 
Schizophrenia ." In A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles 
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 40. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 
1987.

—. A Thousand Plateaus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1987.

—. Anti-Oedipus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press, 1983.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Cambridge University Press, 
1998.

Kant, Immanuel. "Second Book of the Transcendental Dialectic, First Chapter, The 
paralogisms of pure reason ." In Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant, 438-
39. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Kant, Immanuel. "Transcendental Dialectic ." In Critique of Pure Reason, by 
Immanuel Kant.

Kant, Immanuel. "Transcendental Dialectic, First Book, On the concepts of pure 
reason ." In Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant, 394-95. New York: 
Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Land, Nick, interview by James Flint. Organization is Suppression (February 1997).

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Will to Power. New York: Random House Inc, 1968.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. New York: Dover 
Publishing, 1969.

Stewart, Jack Cohen and Ian. "Collapse of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a 
Complex World ." In Collapse of Chaos; Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, 
by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.



60

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College



61Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

δι
αν

οι
α

61

WALTER BENJAMIN'S [ÜBER DEN BEGRIFF 
DER GESCHICHTE] 

and the Marxist Tradition

MAXWELL WADE

Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” has long puzzled readers due to 
its eclectic and novel theses that call into question orthodox understandings 

of religion, Marxism, and historical progress. Many readings have emphasized the 
feeling of rupture throughout the text, treating it as an intense break with his prior 
intellectual commitments,1 a political and theoretical “dark night of the soul” at the 
end of Benjamin’s life. Elements of the text certainly support this reading, and many 
interpreters, such as Gershom Scholem,2 take this text as a clear-cut rejection of 
Benjamin’s prior Marxism. In what follows, I aim to push back against this trend 
in scholarship and argue that “On the Concept of History” can be understood as 
an attempt to move Benjamin’s thought in a new direction, while still remaining 
faithful to radical political traditions and much of his earlier thought. I will begin by 
looking at various attempts to make sense of Benjamin that fall short of adequately 
dealing with the nuances of the text. I will then analyze the theses themselves in an 
attempt to read them in tandem with other key texts from the Marxist tradition, and 
will use that method to make sense of the political implications of “On the Concept 
of History.” 

1 Wilde, Marc de. “Benjamin's Politics of Remembrance: A Reading of ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’.” A 
Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin. Ed. Rolf J. Goebel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. 177.

2 Beiner, Ronald. "Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of History." Political Theory 12, no. 3 (1984): 423-434.



62

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Perhaps one of the most basic difficulties in Benjamin scholarship with “On the 
Concept of History” is the plethora of interpretations around it, many of which 
contradict each other. Scholars frequently reach radically different conclusions about 
the meaning of the work and its place within Benjamin’s thought, and consensus 
on this issue seems impossible. Part of this difficulty, I believe, is rooted in an 
understanding of Marxism and religion as intrinsically opposed or adversarial (it is 
no wonder Benjamin’s audience would be left scratching its head at such a strange 
blending of Jewish mysticism and radical politics). Rainer Nägele, for example, thinks 
that “Benjamin was compelled to make a paradoxical turn, or Umschlag, from politics 
to religion and this had to do with his psychology.”3 But it is not clear to me where 
the paradox lies in this turn, unless we are to take it that religion and politics are 
like oil and water, absolutely incapable of intermixing. Others have even considered 
this text to represent a kind of melancholic neurosis in Benjamin’s psyche,4 thereby 
completely domesticating, under the pretense of psychologism, many complicated or 
challenging insights in the text. 

Being charitable, one might say that these psychological readings are able to give 
some insight into the conflicts and tensions that gave rise to such a unique and 
polarizing text. But they neglect the implications of the text itself, merely treating its 
content as such a theoretical oddity that it must be filed away under the category of 
“paradox” or “neurosis.” Other interpretive frameworks for the theses seem to fare no 
better. As Marc de Wilde explains:

The metaphor of the dwarf in the chess machine, which identifies the 
relation between historical materialism and theology as among the main 
philosophical stakes of Benjamin’s theses, has prompted a debate between, 
on the one hand, scholars inspired by Marxism who, in the wake of Bertolt 
Brecht’s observation that “the small work is clear and illuminating (despite 
its metaphors and Judaisms),” emphasize the importance of historical 
materialism at the expense of theology, and, on the other hand, cultural 
theorists who, following in the footsteps of Gershom Scholem, emphasize 
the work’s “deep connections with theology,” claiming that “[often] 
nothing remains of historical materialism but the word.”5

Both interpretative camps end up pursuing a certain method in their reading that 
emphasizes one aspect of the text at the expense of another. Either Marxism is given 
centrality while theology is pushed aside, or the opposite happens, and theology 
becomes the only relevant theme in the text. I agree with Wilde’s assessment that 
“these interpretations, though not untrue, are one-sided.”6 They are founded on 
the same theoretical premise that axiomatically positions religion and Marxism as 

3 Rapaport, Herman. "Benjamin as historian." Clio 36, no. 3 (2007): 396.
4 Ibid., 397.
5 Wilde, “Remembrance,” 180.
6 Ibid., 181.



63Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Walter Benjamin's [Über den Begriff der Geschichte]

intrinsically opposed, with the coexistence of these two intellectual currents being 
taken as an oddity or abnormality. If Marxism and mysticism are being talked about 
together in such a way that they are influencing or supplementing each other, the 
orthodox critic—either Jewish or Marxist—reacts immunologically against the 
“contamination” of their tradition by an outside influence. The Orthodox Marxist 
readers, à la Brecht, are forced to jump through hoops to explain away the dominant 
messianic themes as either incidental or mere parables.7 The “cultural theorists,” 
conversely, take this text as an expression of Jewish religiosity that only incidentally 
has similarities to radical political thought. These readings place ideological purity 
over textual fidelity to the point of incoherence, and in doing so, distort Benjamin’s 
message that these theses “[do] not designate the precedence of one of these concepts 
over the other but rather points to their independence.”8 Benjamin challenges his 
readers to rethink the relationship between Marxism and religion, and unfortunately 
it seems that many have failed to live up to this task. 

Of course, I speak to more than just the interplay between Marxism and religion. 
Readers have rightly pointed out from the start that Benjamin’s reconceptualization 
of time and his subsequent rejection of progress, as well as his messianism and 
notions of redeeming the past, are all generally anathema to what is normally taken 
as the standard premises of Marxist thought. If progressive teleology, future-oriented 
history, and a rejection of religious sentiment all constitute the theoretical core 
of Marxism,9 then perhaps it is true that Benjamin here is making a break with 
tradition. However, a close examination of both “On the Concept of History” and 
selections from Marx and Engels will serve to complicate this picture, showing how 
Benjamin is engaged in a project that seeks to bring back to the foreground certain 
elements in Marx’s work that were glossed over by later readers in favor of a simpler, 
more “systematic” and uncomplicated Marxism. 

First and foremost, we must turn our attention to Benjamin’s reconceptualization of 
time. Time is an overarching theme throughout the text and remains a crucial point 
of focus for Benjamin’s attack. The metaphysics of time—how we conceptualize 
our place within history, and how time is treated politically are all intertwined, and 

7 “According to Tiedemann, even explicitly theological concepts in Benjamin’s theses, such as ‘the Messiah, 
redemption, the angel, and the Antichrist,’ are thus merely to be taken as ‘images, analogies, and parables, and 
not in their real form.’” Ibid.

8 Ibid.
9 The label of “Marxism” itself has a complicated and interesting history, especially since Marx himself famously 

rejected the “Marxism” of his contemporaries, saying “what is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist.” The 
philologist Michael Heinrich takes this to mean Marx was engaged in a constantly changing critical project, 
rather than a “rigid science” found in later Leninist-inspired readers. This makes it quite difficult to pin down 
an “essence” of Marxism or Marxist thought, especially given the theoretical nuances of Marx’s writing. A main 
point of this paper will be to problematize the notion of a singular or unified “Marxism,” and instead look to see 
the ways in which Benjamin, like other “unorthodox” thinkers, can still work within the tradition. See Heinrich, 
Michael. “Je ne suis pas marxiste.” Neues Deutschland, January 24, 2015. Accessed December 11, 2018. https://
www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/959492.je-ne-suis-pas-marxiste.html. Full English translation available at 
https://libcom.org/library/%E2%80%9Eje-ne-suis-pas-marxiste%E2%80%9C. 



64

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

“On the Concept of History” —starts by interrogating a certain unifying concept 
of time that is dominant in our present historical epoch. The common notion of 
time in the modern capitalist era is one of “progression through a homogenous, 
empty time,”10 which is the primary mode of thought that serves as the basic 
conceptual framework of the past, present, and future. Formally articulated by 
“positivist historians” like Eduard Meyer,11 this way of thinking about history rose 
to dominate the academic study of history and reflects the material changes that 
have occurred under capitalism. Tied in with the development of new technologies 
used to subjugate both humanity and nature, this shift in thinking about time is a 
new development in consciousness (though it is surely one that has “corrupted the 
German working class” more than anything else).12 Yet, unlike his earlier works in 
which historical or technological development would at least open up a new space of 
freedom, this progressivist historicism seems like pure illusion, an ideological dead-
end. For example, the innovation of the photograph is “the first truly revolutionary 
means of reproduction […which] for the first time in world history, technological 
reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual.” 
13

This apparent break with the dialectical understanding of technological progress that 
guided his historical work would surely constitute a break with Benjamin’s prior 
Marxism if it were the case. However, dialectical tensions are still deeply present 
within the theses. For all of the polemics against the universal history of historicism, 
Benjamin also admits that “universal histories are not inevitably reactionary. A 
universal history without a structural [konstruktiv] principle is reactionary. The 
structural principle of universal history allows it to be presented in partial histories.”14 
Universal history “has no theoretical armature”15—no structure that lets it express the 
historical particular—and because of this it will produce reactionary tendencies. In 
this sense, universal history is an unmoored idealistic fantasy: “a kind of Esperanto.”16 
So, while it is true that “historicism rightly culminates in universal history,”17 it is not 
universal history that is itself the problem. In fact, it seems that the development of a 
universal history is a partial movement, one that is as of yet unfulfilled by bourgeois 
positivism. A true universal history is messianic in nature, as “the messianic world 
is the world of universal and integral actuality. Only in the messianic realm does a 

10 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940. Edited by 
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge [MA] and London: Belknap Press (2003), 395.

11 Ibid., 401.
12 Ibid., 393.
13 Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility” (1936-1939), in Benjamin, Walter. 

Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge [MA] 
and London: Belknap Press (2003), 256. A similar example is film, which “enriched our field of perception…
by its use of close ups, by its accentuation of hidden details in familiar objects, and by its exploration of 
commonplace milieux through the ingenious guidance of the camera.” Ibid., 265.

14 Benjamin, “History,” 404.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 396



65Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Walter Benjamin's [Über den Begriff der Geschichte]

universal history exist.”18 Universal history “comes too early” and does not tether 
itself to the historical materialist framework that can properly give it meaning. 

This ambivalent dialectical tension within universal history indicates that Benjamin 
fully recognizes that there is a glimmer of freedom being opened up within 
progressivism. Yes, it is woefully destructive, but within that destruction is an 
element that points toward a redemptive, utopian vision. Here, a natural parallel to 
Marx emerges: 

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all 
feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations…In one word, for exploitation, veiled 
by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, 
direct brutal exploitation…All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is 
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real 
conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.19

Marx, like Benjamin, is no stranger to the horrors of progress, yet the horror likewise 
opens up a new clarity and vision of an unalienated world. Like the change in the 
structure of experience that allows for humanity to be able to “face with sober senses” 
the exploitation they experience, the change in our historical understanding of time 
and the past compels one to rethink universal history in a genuine, messianic light.20 

Much like the previous case of universal history, Benjamin’s idea of messianic time 
has also confounded many scholars (and not just due to its intentionally religious 
language). In Thesis A, Benjamin speaks about historicism as “content[ing] itself with 
establishing a causal nexus among various moments in history […] the historian who 
proceeds from this consideration […] tell[s] the sequence of events like the beads 
of a rosary,” i.e., one after the other.21 Benjamin critiques this precisely because it 
fails to grasp history as a meaning-giving endeavor: “no state of affairs having causal 
significance is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as 
it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.”22 The 
historicist wrongly treats history as a series of events, and, in doing so, fails to realize 
that events only become historical in retrospect when we reflect upon them and 
situate their significance in world history. 

18 Ibid., 404.
19 Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in: The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: 

Norton, 1972) 473-474.
20 It seems reasonable as well to draw a parallel here with the “change in the structure of experience” Benjamin 

speaks about in his essay on Baudelaire. Here too there is a loss, a death of a certain aesthetic style, but in this 
experience of loss there is a new distance created with which one can view history, or in this case, poetry, in a 
new light. See Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), in Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 
4, 1938-1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge [MA] and London: Belknap 
Press (2003), 313-55.

21 Benjamin, “History,” 397.
22 Ibid.



66

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

This was not a point lost on Marx. In his preface of the Contribution to the Critique 
of Political Economy, Marx writes that:

The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the 
social process of production – antagonistic not in the sense of individual 
antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' 
social conditions of existence – but the productive forces developing 
within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution 
of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with 
this social formation.23

This passage begins with the standard Marxian understanding of capitalism as that 
which generates its own conditions of abolition from within. Indeed, though the 
final portion of the quote is the most noteworthy: all of human “history” is mere 
prehistory up to and including the present. We are living in a prehistorical epoch and 
only with communism can history truly begin. This is a radically Benjaminian point, 
to put it in an intentionally anachronistic way, as the past only gains its meaning 
when viewed through the lens of the utopian messianic time—a time so radically 
different that it cannot be on the same historical continuum as that which came 
before. One can likewise read this passage together with another thesis by Benjamin: 

Only when the course of historical events runs through the historian’s 
hands smoothly, like a thread, can one speak of progress. If, however, it 
is a frayed bundle unraveling into a thousand strands that hang down like 
unplaited hair, none of them has a definite place until they are all gathered 
up and braided into a coiffure.24

Mapping Marx’s schema onto this passage, we can speak of human “prehistory,” (i.e., 
all hitherto existing class societies) as the “frayed bundle unreeling into a thousand 
strands,” a mismatched collection of disparate events without meaning or cohesion. 
However, the communist moment is that which gathers up these historical strands 
and unifies them into a universal history. Only then can we speak of progress or of 
genuine history.25 

This discussion is valuable because it us can help make sense of Benjamin’s call to 
redeem the past and how it can relate to Marxism. Simply stated, communism is the 
movement to redeem the past and set history right. Benjamin openly and explicitly 
explores this theme, first with the idea that “there is a secret agreement between past 

23 Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya. (Moscow: 
Progress, 1977). Accessed from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/index.
htm. Italics added

24 Benjamin, “History,” 403.
25 Some interpreters may contest this reading of Benjamin on the grounds that this passage from New Theses C is 

arguing for the structural impossibility of history to run smoothly, therefore indicating the ultimate impossibility 
of progress. In this case, the comparison with Marx is invalid. However, given Benjamin’s other comments on the 
messianic nature of a (true) universal history, it seems quite coherent to suggest that a redeemed history is one in 
which time can finally progress without catastrophe or fragmentation.



67Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Walter Benjamin's [Über den Begriff der Geschichte]

generations and the present one” that “endowed [us] with a weak messianic power.”26  
This connection between the past and present establishes a historical continuity in 
which messianic power is importantly not something that comes from the outside, 
as in more orthodox theological conceptions, but rather is something possessed by 
humanity. Mankind has the power to redeem itself—to “succeed in ridding itself 
of all the muck of ages”27—thereby transforming the past. The past is transformed 
precisely because, as Benjamin puts it, class struggle “has effects that reach far back 
into the past. They constantly call into question every victory, past and present, of 
the rulers.”28 A successful communist revolution means that the blood and suffering 
of past revolutions were not in vain and that the lives of all revolutionaries, past and 
present, have contributed to the same final goal. 

Benjamin recognizes that this has been at work within the more radical strands of 
Marxism, as the proletariat is “the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the 
name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence 
in the Spartacist League, has always been objectionable to Social Democrats.”29 The 
choice of the name of the Spartacist League is of course not incidental, but is rather 
a form of remembrance and continuity that reaches back into the past. The revolting 
proletarians in Germany share the same lineage and connection with the slave revolts 
of Ancient Rome, in the same way that “to Robespierre, ancient Rome was a past 
charged with now-time, a past which he blasted out of the continuum of history. 
The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate.”30 Benjamin rightly points 
out the ways in which truly radical movements have challenged oppression precisely 
through their shared identification with past struggles, rather than an attempt to 
redeem future generations.31 

Redemption of the past is intrinsically tied to historical memory and a sense of 
shared struggle with prior movements, and this, too, existed in the works of Marx 
and Engels. Perhaps the best and most striking example of this comes from Engels’ 
The Peasant War in Germany, in which he examines the peasant revolts of the 16th 
century not merely as a discrete and isolated historical event, but as something that 
still bears connections and inspiration for revolutionary movements of his time. He 
writes with great admiration for the radical mystic Thomas Müntzer: 

Only in the teachings of Muenzer did these communist notions find 
expression as the desires of a vital section of society. Through him they 
were formulated with a certain definiteness, and were afterwards found in 
every great convulsion of the people, until gradually they merged with the 

26 Ibid., 390.
27 Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in: The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972) 

193.
28 Benjamin, “History,” 390.
29 Ibid., 394.
30 Ibid., 395.
31 Ibid., 394.



68

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

modern proletarian movement…his political programme touched upon 
communism, and there is more than one communist sect of modern times 
which, on the eve of the February Revolution, did not possess a theoretical 
equipment as rich as that of Muenzer of the Sixteenth Century.32

This passage may surprise some readers, as the stereotype of Marx and Engels as 
militant atheist arch-materialists still persists. Yet, the identification with religious 
mysticism as a revolutionary force runs throughout the text, and Engels sees the 
revolutionary movements of the Medieval period as being fundamentally of the 
same nature as proletarian movements in his time.33 Another example of this is how 
“[Marx and Engels] shared Hegel's high esteem for the sixteenth century German 
mystic and heretic Jacob Boehme, saluted by Marx in the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842 
as ‘a great philosopher.’”34 Here, too, we see the positive appraisal of mysticism by 
Marx and Engels, particularly in the sense that mystical thinkers were able to glean 
great insights into politics and philosophy, perhaps even to the extent that “secular” 
thinkers were not capable of. 

Finding these themes in Marx requires a little more digging; his job as a journalist 
often meant that most of his time was spent writing about the present, not just past 
revolutions in antiquity. In recent decades, however, more attention has been paid 
to Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks, and scholars like Franklin Rosemont and Kevin 
Anderson have sought to explore the ways in which Marx saw revolutionary potential 
in premodern and non-Western social arrangements. Additionally, Marx was 
fascinated throughout his life by past societies and their relevance for communism, 
developing a deep fascination with the Iroquois Confederacy and the ways in which 
this society serves as an alternative mode of life to capitalism. His anthropological 
notes reveal that “it was not only Iroquois social organization, however, that appealed 
to him, but rather a whole way of life sharply counter-posed, all along the line, to 
modern industrial civilization.”35 Another example of this can be found in his studies 
of Russia, which focus on the ways in which the communal lifestyle of the peasantry 
can provide an alternative pathway than capitalism. In his letter to Zasulich, Marx 
writes that “his recent studies of Russian society had ‘convinced me that the commune 
is the fulcrum for a social regeneration in Russia.’”36 Equally relevant is his comment 
in the preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, wherein he posits 

32 Engels, Friedrich. The Peasant War in Germany. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969). 30, 37.
33 Likewise, it is important to note how Engels admired utopian religious communities as excellent examples of 

communism. For example, “In 1844 we find Engels writing sympathetically of American Shaker communities, 
which he argued, proved that ‘communism... is not only possible but has actually already been realized.’” 
Rosemont, Franklin. Karl Marx & the Iroquois. (Red Balloon Collective, 1992). 5.

34 Ibid., 6.
35 Ibid., 14.
36 Anderson, Kevin B., "Marx's Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies and Gender," in 

Rethinking Marxism 14, no. 4 (2002): 89.



69Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Walter Benjamin's [Über den Begriff der Geschichte]

that “Russia’s peasant communal land-ownership may serve as the point of departure 
for a communist development.”37 

These passages are illuminating precisely because they point to a strand of Marx’s 
thinking that emphatically rejects the blind progressivism that Benjamin is critiquing 
in his theses. Marx is neither shrugging off the suffering caused by capitalism as a 
historical inevitability nor is he treating communism as a far-off world of the future. 
Rather, he is searching for alternative developmental paths for the world to take and 
looking at ways in which communal, egalitarian lifestyles are present in the world at 
the time of his writing. The great irony is that

At the very moment that his Russian "disciples" - those "admirers of 
capitalism," as he ironically tagged them - were loudly proclaiming that 
the laws of historical development set forth in the first volume of Capital 
were universally mandatory, Marx himself was diving headlong into the 
study of (for him) new experiences of resistance and revolt against oppression - 
by North American Indians, Australian aborigines, Egyptians and Russian 
peasants.38

This leaves us with new view of Marx that is more in line with Benjamin’s perspective. 
Not only are Marx and Engels deeply interested in the historical continuity between 
their struggle and past movements, but they also engage with many of the same 
philosophical issues as well. Challenging simplistic notions of historical progress, as 
well as grounding communism as an immanent human reality, results in a Marxism 
that harmonizes—rather than clash—with Benjamin’s most radical theses.39  

This understanding can also help shed light on the notorious passage from Thesis 
XVIIa, in which Benjamin writes that “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive 
of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an 
attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the 
emergency brake.”40 On the face of it, this seems radically conservative, rather than 
revolutionary, intimating that the point of revolution is an attempt to stop history 
where it is and bring things to a standstill, presumably to prevent further decay. Yet, 
it seems quite plausible to read Marxian strands here, despite the openly critical 
attitude Benjamin takes toward him in this section. Reading the two together, one 
can take the idea that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class 

37 Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. "Preface to the Manifesto of the Communist Party." Marxist Internet Archive. 
Accessed December 13, 2018. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
preface.htm.

38 Rosemont, “Iroquois,” 30.
39 It is important to note, of course, that it is unlikely (or in some cases, impossible) that Benjamin had read all of 

these texts from Marx and Engels’ corpus. In many ways, their philosophical convergence on some of the same 
issues and themes points toward the fact that all three thinkers were dealing with many of the same philosophical 
dilemmas and reached similar conclusions.

40 Benjamin, “History,” 402.



70

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

struggles”41 is the locomotive of what Benjamin calls “world history.” This world 
history is mere prehistory for Marx, however, as genuine history has not yet begun, 
and communist society with its abolition of the division of labor42 will bring about 
history in earnest. Therefore, if class struggle is the locomotive of (pre)history, then 
it is perfectly coherent to speak about communist revolution as an emergency brake: 
with the abolition of class society, there is no more “motor” to drive history and 
“world history” is brought to an end. Benjamin expresses this end of history as a 
messianic time, a wholly new state of consciousness, and Marx, too, understands 
communism as a vision in which mankind reaches a new, unalienated consciousness. 

In his reading of this passage, the contemporary philosopher Benjamin Noys proposes 
a reading that reaches similar conclusions: 

The conclusion is that the emergency brake is not merely calling to a halt 
for the sake of it, some static stopping at a particular point in capitalist 
history (say Swedish Social Democracy – which the American Republican 
Right now takes as the true horror of ‘socialism’). Neither is it a return 
back to some utopian pre-capitalist moment, which would fall foul of 
Marx and Engels’s anathemas against ‘feudal socialism’. Rather, Benjamin 
argues that: ‘Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress 
but its frequently miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.’ 
We interrupt to prevent catastrophe, we destroy the tracks to prevent the 
greater destruction of acceleration.43

This analysis is particularly apt in the way that it recognizes that the pulling of the 
emergency brake signals not only a rethinking of the kind of historical progression 
that we are experiencing, but also a radical attempt to break with the whole history 
of class society. Noys likewise focuses in on a clever double-entendre with break/
brake, as “Benjamin’s interruption suggests a more definitive break (or brake) with 
the aim of production. The stopping of the angelic locomotive tries to jump the 
tracks of history, or jump out of the vision of history as infinite waiting for the 
revolutionary situation.”44 This “jump” out of history is, after all, “the dialectical leap 
Marx understood as revolution.”45

In fact, even within this same thesis (XVIIa), Benjamin acknowledges the insight 
made by Marx in this regard. He begins by saying that “in the idea of classless society, 
Marx secularized the idea of messianic time. And that was a good thing.”46 He is, in 
a very clear way, acknowledging his intellectual indebtedness to Marx—something 
not really plausible when one considers this text his “break” with Marxism—and sees 

41 Marx, Manifesto, 473. Italics added.
42 Marx, German Ideology, 160.
43 Noys, Benjamin. Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism. (Lanham: John Hunt Publishing, 2014) 63.
44 Ibid. 
45 Benjamin, “History,” 395.
46 Ibid., 401. 



71Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Walter Benjamin's [Über den Begriff der Geschichte]

the error as rooted in the Social Democrats’ elevation of this to an abstract, idealistic 
principle.47 Not only does this emphasize that the problem only began with the 
Social Democrats (not Marx, who therefore has a correct, or at least unproblematic, 
understanding of classless society), but he also indicates the ways in which Benjamin 
remains loyal to a materialist outlook that rejects elevating one’s political goals into 
an unreachable “infinite task.” This move toward abstraction is closely tied with 
the “empty and homogenous time” spoken of earlier, as “once the classless society 
had been transformed into an infinite task, the empty and homogenous time was 
transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence 
of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity.”48 

Returning to Marx, we again can see two resonant parallels between the two thinkers. 
The simplistic, reductionist (but unfortunately commonplace) reading of Marx 
would take him as placing communism in a far-off and distant future, maintaining 
that future-oriented stance that Benjamin so aggressively critiques in this text. 
Likewise, another common misreading of Marx takes communism as yet another 
political ideology, an idealistic framework that needs to be imposed on society from 
the outside. Yet, Marx explicitly states otherwise in The German Ideology, wherein 
he famously writes that “communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be 
established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism 
the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”49 The abstract as a 
political goal is rejected precisely because it forces reality to conform to it and is, 
therefore, an arbitrary and alien imposition on the world that is unmoored from 
its material conditions. Like Benjamin, there is a rejection of the future tense: 
the misunderstandings of communism are both that which is “to be,” while true 
communism is squarely focused on the present state of things. It is focused on the 
here and now, and its power lies precisely in its immanence to the world as it is. 
Communism is not external or foreign, but rather is “the real movement,” i.e., the 
movement that actually exists in the world as it is right now. 

When Benjamin speaks about classless society as “frequently miscarried,”50 it still 
means the world is still “pregnant” with communism, much in the same way that 
Marx sees “the conditions of [the] movement result[ing] from the premises now in 
existence.”51 This immanence is even more clearly explicated in his notion of messianic 
time, which shoots the present moment like splinters.52 Likewise, “every second 
was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter.”53 These 
numerous passages all point toward a conception of utopia that is radically immanent 

47 “It was only when the Social Democrats elevated this idea to an ‘ideal’ that the trouble began.” Ibid.
48 Ibid., 402.
49 Marx, German Ideology, 162.
50 Benjamin, “History,” 402.
51 Marx, German Ideology, 162.
52 Benjamin, “History,” 397.
53 Ibid.



72

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

in its temporality, framing the revolutionary break as something that can happen at 
any time, which is not contingent upon some sort of “historical development” that 
justifies the exploitation and suffering leading up to it. 

Therefore, we can take “On the Concept of History” as representing an attempt 
to synthesize the systematic and utopian tendencies within Marxism and bring it 
together into a unified whole. Historical materialism, as a rational and systematic 
historical framework, understands the role of class struggle and revolution, while 
messianism, as the utopian dream of redemption and salvation, recognizes the 
immanence of this radical change and the need to redeem the past from its suffering. 
Both serve as meaning-giving structures that help one understand the past and 
present, but not in such a way that resorts back to bourgeois historicism and positivist 
historiography. The two elements not only complement each other, but they also 
exert mutual influence in their coexistence, working together to provide a proper 
political program that can bring about this shattering of time and redemption of the 
world that Benjamin writes about. 

Ultimately, the text should be understood neither as a rejection of the Marxist 
tradition, nor as an attempt to add a seemingly foreign element—religion—into 
the theoretical mixture. Rather, Benjamin is drawing on what is already latent in the 
text, and casts it in a new light, in order to draw attention to it and to cause readers 
to reevaluate their ossified, overly rigid notions of Marxism and revolution. It is a 
corrective measure against the failings and shortcomings of the Social Democrats that 
have ruined the workers’ movement and have let fascism triumph. It is precisely for 
this reason that this text needs to be understood in continuity with what has come 
before. Benjamin is working to redeem Marxism and salvage the messianic sparks 
hidden within, all while remaining loyal to what has come before. ◆



73Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Walter Benjamin's [Über den Begriff der Geschichte]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Kevin B., "Marx's Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist 
Societies and Gender," in Rethinking Marxism 14, no. 4 (2002).

Beiner, Ronald. "Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of History." Political Theory 12, no. 3 
(1984): 423-434.

Benjamin, Andrew. Walter Benjamin and History. A&C Black, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History,” in Benjamin, Walter. Selected 
Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. 
Jennings. Cambridge [MA] and London: Belknap Press (2003). 

Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), in Benjamin, Walter. 
Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. 
Jennings. Cambridge [MA] and London: Belknap Press (2003)

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility” 
(1936-1939), in Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940. Edited 
by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge [MA] and London: 
Belknap Press (2003)

Engels, Friedrich. The Peasant War in Germany. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969.

Heinrich, Michael. “Je ne suis pas marxiste.” Neues Deutschland, January 24, 2015. 
Accessed December 11, 2018.

Löwy, Michael. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's ‘On the Concept of History’. 
Verso, 2005.

Löwy, Michael. "Fire Alarm: Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Technology." In 
Democratic Theory and Technological Society, pp. 271-279. Routledge, 2017.

Löwy, Michael. "Walter Benjamin and Marxism." Monthly Review 46, no. 9 (1995): 
11-20.

Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W. 
Ryazanskaya. Moscow: Progress, 1977.

Marx, Karl. The German Ideology, in: The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker. 
New York: Norton, 1972.

Marx, Karl. Manifesto of the Communist Party, in: The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert 
C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1972.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. "Preface to the Manifesto of the Communist 
Party." Marxist Internet Archive. Accessed December 13, 2018. 

Noys, Benjamin. Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism. Lanham: John 
Hunt Publishing, 2014.



74

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Rapaport, Herman. "Benjamin as Historian." Clio 36, no. 3 (2007): 391-409.

Rosemont, Franklin. “Karl Marx & the Iroquois”. Red Balloon Collective, 1992.

Smith, Chadwick. "Walter Benjamin: Images, the Creaturely, and the Holy." (2013).

Smith, Cyril. Karl Marx and the Future of the Human. Lexington Books, 2005.

Steinberg, Michael P., ed. Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Cornell 
University Press, 1996.

Wilde, Marc de. “Benjamin's Politics of Remembrance: A Reading of ‘Über den 
Begriff der Geschichte’.” A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin. Ed. Rolf J. 
Goebel. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009.



75Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

δι
αν

οι
α

PATOČKA'S CRITIQUE OF HUSSERL: 
The Possibility of A-Subjective Phenomenology1

GABRIEL VIDAL

Phenomenology embodies the project of founding a new philosophical departure, 
one detached, if possible, from the mistakes—and especially of the biases—of 

former traditions and serves as a proper philosophical foundation.2 The founder of 
this tradition, Edmund Husserl, proposes breaking with the subjective excesses of 
idealism and the naïve schemes of realism. This implies the task of debunking two 
theses: on one hand, the idea that the subject is the creator of the objects that appear 
to him and, on the other, the idea of the absolute independence of objects, or the 
thesis of the thing in itself.3 The path taken by Husserl in order to debunk both theses 
aims to restore the connection between the two dimensions at stake—subjectivity, 
and objectivity—by putting at the forefront their correlation. To do this, we must 
abstain ourselves from anticipating any unproven thesis in our investigation and 
exclusively refer back to the description of appearances in themselves. This is because 
everything that has the slight possibility of entering into our consideration does so 

1 This article contains quotes that are originally in Spanish. All translations have been made by me in this case.
2 David Woodruff Smith, “Phenomenology,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 

Summer 2018 (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
sum2018/entries/phenomenology/.

3 This mainly refers to Kant’s Thesis as outlined in Critique of pure reason Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure 
Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). However, It 
does not only refer to Kant’s interpretation, but to whatever doctrine that considers the object as completely 
independent of a subject’s knowledge or experience.



76

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

insofar as it appears, and thus only the ways things appear will bring light to the 
mentioned correlation. Phenomenology asks us to attend exclusively to what is given 
in our description of it. Staying in this dimension of primitive donation4 of content is 
what gives phenomenology its rigor, to which Husserl remains faithful in the creation 
of this new science. 

Nonetheless, many posterior phenomenologists have criticized Husserl for 
overemphasizing one of the two poles of the correlation—namely, the subjective—
and so accusations of subjectivism became commonplace in transcendental 
phenomenology.5 The appearance seems to be constantly described in terms of a 
donation towards and made by the consciousness of a subject, and the acts by which 
the subject point to objects, but not the other way around.6 The problem is that 
most of the successors have simply disregarded Husserl’s point of view, and have 
restarted the task from mostly different considerations without taking into account 
his foundational concerns. Jan Patočka is one of the few authors who has revised the 
foundational problem of phenomenology from a properly Husserlian approach to 
mind. 

If we agree on the fact that Husserl was successful in setting the foundations of 
phenomenology, then we could claim that, if those foundations are incorrect, then 
further developments of phenomenology are completely misguided. However, 
if we can correct Husserlian phenomenology from its mistakes while keeping the 
foundation unaffected, then we can be reassured of phenomenology’s future. This 
is why the possibility of phenomenology itself may be at stake under Patočka’s 
criticism. If phenomenology, since its inception, already carried a bias in favor of 
subjectivism, then it was doomed to be a failed attempt at a new departure from 
former tradition. Patočka’s intention is, indeed, to correct this misguided inclination 
towards subjectivism in Husserl’s account, while keeping the fundamental features of 
phenomenology that allow us to recognize it as unaffected. 

I will proceed in showing the most important elements of Husserl’s phenomenology: 
constitution, epoché and reduction, the Husserlian description of perception, and 
the noesis/noema scheme. Then, I will show Patočka’s attacks to the previously 
mentioned points and how these critiques reveal a subjectivist tendency in Husserl, 
specifically in the gesture of reduction. Finally, I will demonstrate Patočka’s proposal 
of an a-subjective phenomenology that dispenses with reduction and explores a 
world-horizon as the a priori background of appearances. 

4 The original word is “donación”. It means something like “to be given as it is”. When a content is given to 
consciousness, or makes its presence into it, that’s a donation or (donación).

5 Robert J. Dostal, “Subjectivism, Philosophical Reflection and the Husserlian Phenomenological Account 
of Time,” in Phenomenology on Kant, German Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic: Philosphical Essays in Honor 
of Thomas M. Seebohm, ed. O. K. Wiegand et al. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2000), 53, https://doi.
org/10.1007/978-94-015-9446-2_4.

6 George Alfred Schrader, “Philosophy and Reflection: Beyond Phenomenology,” The Review of Metaphysics 15, no. 
1 (1961): 92.



77Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Patočka's Critique of Husserl

II. Husserl’s Phenomenology

The necessity of showing the correlation is first seen in Logical Investigations,7 where 
Husserl engages in a critique of psychologism, which he claims reduces the logical 
dimension to that of empirical psychology, and completely disregards its apodictic 
and ideal character.8 In order to elucidate this issue, Husserl traces a distinction 
between the acts, which allows thoughts about content, and the contents themselves, 
whereas psychologism reduces all logic only to the acts.9 In this way, he shows that 
the same content can be conceived of, by employing completely different acts of 
thought (for example, the number “5” can be given to consciousness from conceiving 
five points as well as five lines). This demonstrates that in order to elucidate the 
issue of both the ideality and empirical reality of math and logic, it is necessary to 
pay attention to the correlation of contents and acts in a completely unbiased way, 
without advancing any thesis about it. Therefore, the inquiry will be about how it is 
possible that these ideal entities appear in consciousness, or how the apodictic can 
make its way “inside” something that is singular and contingent. The issue is solved 
when it is realized that, although ideal entities make their way into consciousness by 
means of acts, “the subject cannot constitute whatever signification, so constituent 
acts depend on the essence of the objects in consideration.”10 

Here, the concept of constitution is discovered. That is, contents appear; they are not 
constructed, but are rather brought into presence. Constituent acts are “what makes 
the object representable” and “do not entail anything else but the act of going out 
to encounter the entity, in such a way that this entity, in the same act by which it is 
encountered, can announce itself.”11

This way of conceiving the donation of objects makes Husserl think of consciousness 
differently. Consciousness is always a consciousness of something, such that the content 
of its consideration always accompanies it.12 It is not a closed-in-itself structure 
that is then filled with contents, but it is in itself the pointing towards the object. 
That activity defines consciousness’ essence. This is pure direction of consciousness 
towards the object—or intentionality—is the only thing that we can properly affirm 
about consciousness.13 This allows Husserl to affirm that constitution does not equal 
the construction of the object: the act is not, in some way, the absorption of the 
object inside a closed in consciousness, but is rather the appearance of the object to 

7 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations (Routledge, 2013).
8 Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford University Press, 2003), 8–9.
9 Robert Hanna, “Husserl’s Arguments against Logical Psychologism,” Edmund Husserl: Logische Untersuchungen, 

2008, 78.
10 Walter Biemel, “Las Fases Decisivas En El Desarrollo de La Filosofía de Husserl,” in Husserl. Tercer Coloquio 

Filosófico de Royaumont (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 1968), 46.
11 Ibid., 47.
12 Carlo Ierna, “Making the Humanities Scientific: Brentano’s Project of Philosophy as Science,” in The Making of 

the Humanities. Volume III: The Making of the Modern Humanities, ed. Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn 
(Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 547.

13 A. David Smith, “Husserl and Externalism,” Synthese 160, no. 3 (2008): 319–20.



78

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

an intentional consciousness (the object is pointed by intentionality and makes its 
presence). 

I have said that in order to describe ‘appearance as such,’ one must attend to what 
is given, refraining from fabricating conjectures outside that pure donation. This 
motivates Husserl, in Ideas I,14 to pin down what this refraining attitude consists in. 
He calls this the epoché, and by means of this epoché, we can: 

Put out of action the general thesis which belongs to the essence of the 
natural standpoint, we place in brackets whatever it includes respecting the 
nature of Being: this entire natural world therefore which is continuously 
‘there for us”, ‘present to our hand’, and will ever remain there, is a ‘fact-
world’ of which we continue to be conscious, even though it pleases us to 
put it in brackets.15

This does not imply the denial of the existence of the world, but implies, rather, its 
independence as a reality in itself. In this case, it would be possible for the world to be 
independent of any constituent act. Denying this thesis, then, allows one to make the 
world appear to an intentional consciousness instead of speculating about it without 
evidence. What appears to the intentional consciousness constitutes evidence,16 and 
what does not appear to it is just subjective construction. So, one can see that the 
epoché not only implies a suspension of the thesis of the independence of the world, 
but that it also implies a reduction to the intentional field of consciousness.17 In fact, 
everything that appears into our consideration does so insofar as it is assessed by this 
intentional field, which the epoché only takes out of its anonymity. By being faithful 
to this epoché, we do not make conjectures about what appears; we only describe 
what appears before the intentional field through constituent acts. If anything is to 
possess phenomenological validity, then a constituent act is required. This is what 
commitment to the epoché means: being faithful to the phenomenological reduction 
by always asking for the constituent act of the object in question.18

Later in his endeavor, Husserl again describes perception under the new concepts 
reviewed in the section above. After we commit to epoché, we develop a consciousness 
that points to objects in a completely equal correlation, where the object is neither 
created by the subject nor exists in a partial transcendence. Therefore, now the 
description of perception, reduced to the intentional field of consciousness, no 
longer risks becoming either subjectivism or realism. Therefore, perception will be 
constituted by three stages: hyletic, noetic and noematic. The hyletical stage refers 
to hylé as the basic matter of perception; namely, the pure sensation that makes no 

14 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Routledge, 2014).
15 Ibid., 110.
16 Ülker Öktem, “Husserl’s Evidence Problem,” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 9, no. 1 (May 1, 2009): 3, 

https://doi.org/10.1080/20797222.2009.11433986. 
17 Steven Crowell, “Phenomenological Immanence, Normativity, and Semantic Externalism,” Synthese 160, no. 3 

(2008): 339.
18 Husserl, Ideas, 364.



79Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Patočka's Critique of Husserl

reference to any object whatsoever, in the purely experienced sensation.19 In this 
sense, it consists of a cogitatio that is a mere ingredient of consciousness, where the 
ingredient is what makes the private current20 of the subject’s experiences. This purely 
immanent hylé is later animated by noesis, which is the stage in which the purely 
experienced becomes a trait of a thing.21 For example, the pure green becomes the 
green of a leaf. In this stage hylé no longer makes reference to itself, but instead 
points towards an object. In this stage, intentionality starts operating and allows 
consciousness to get outside of itself. Finally, noesis allows the noema to enter, which 
is the pointed object donated by an intuition.22 In the noetical moment, we point to 
the object, which by means of intuition, then allows the object to make itself present 
in the noematical stage. We can even describe falsity and truth within this schema: 
I can point noetically towards something that does not present itself noematically. 
In other words, I prepend a signification that does not correspond to the given 
intuition. Only when the signification is filled with a corresponding intuition does 
the constitution of the object become successful.23

Although the former description underlies an effort to attribute equal importance 
to the subject and object roles respectively, it probably seems that the object is given 
only by means of acts of consciousness. Thus, it becomes dubious if things that 
appear to the subject are transcendent to it. There is a chance that everything will be 
components of consciousness. Husserl solves the issue by introducing the concept 
of foreshortening.24 There’s a substantial difference between merely immanent 
experiences and proper perceptions. Immanent experiences are given in a completely 
adequate way to the subject; they are conceived in a completely transparent way.25 
In other words, the thing is immediately and completely ended in all its possibilities 
of being perceived by the subject. Perceptions, on the other hand, are always only 
shown partially; one can never end all the possible perspectives that the object has to 
offer.26 This means that perceptions are given inadequately. This foreshortened way 
of being brought into presence guarantees its exteriority since “an experience is only 
possible as a living experience but not as anything spatial.”27

19 Patrick Whitehead, “Phenomenology Without Correlationism: Husserl’s Hyletic Material,” Indo-Pacific Journal of 
Phenomenology 15, no. 2 (October 26, 2015): 6, https://doi.org/10.1080/20797222.2015.1101830.

20 By ‘private current’ I mean the subject’s own flow of consciousness that is available only to himself. His thoughts, 
emotions, mental images and other things in motion constitute this private current.

21 Kenneth Williford, “Husserl’s Hyletic Data and Phenomenal Consciousness,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive 
Sciences 12, no. 3 (September 1, 2013): 502, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9297-z.

22 Ibid.
23 Lambert Zuidervaart, “Synthetic Evidence and Objective Identity: The Contemporary Significance of Early 

Husserl’s Conception of Truth,” European Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2018): 125, https://doi.org/10.1111/
ejop.12192.

24 The original term for this mode of appearance is Abschattung, and it refers to things that are given as not showing 
all of its sides. The reference painting tries to portray the idea of an unfinished sketch or perspective. Renaud 
Barbaras, Introducción a una fenomenología de la vida: intencionalidad y deseo (Encuentro, 2013), 43.

25 Juha Himanka, “Husserl’s Two Truths: Adequate and Apodictic Evidence,” Phänomenologische Forschungen, 2005, 
93.

26 María Paredes, “Percepción y Atención. Una Aproximación Fenomenológica,” Azafea: Revista de Filosofía; Vol. 14 
(2012), 2014, 84–85, http://revistas.usal.es/index.php/0213-3563/article/view/11680.

27 Husserl, Ideas, 41.



80

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Here, the distinction between acts and contents is raised again: even though the 
thing is given through multiple and different foreshortenings, it nevertheless points 
towards a unique object. Perception is already accompanied by the realization 
that the perspectives refer to the same object. We do not need to complete all the 
possible perspectives, nor do we need the mediation of a secondary abstraction 
or to provide a metaphysical explanation for this realization. In other words, the 
unity of the object is already given in perception by the many perspectives. This 
is called apprehension unity.28 Both the possibility of the unity of the object and 
the foreshortened exteriority guarantee that things are not created by the subject. 
However, this is not a completely transcendent transcendence29 in the sense that does 
not imply the independent existence of a world, but, rather, it implies exteriority for 
the intentional consciousness. In this sense, the external constitutes a transcendence 
inside immanence,30 which is verified thanks to unprejudiced scrutiny of appearance 
that, therefore, it is inclined neither towards the subjectivist idealist thesis nor the 
realism of things in themselves.

III. Patočka’s Critique

We must emphasize that, for Husserl, in the act of perception, only experiences 
are components of consciousness. Perception as such, however, including the 
foreshortenings and apprehension of unity, has an objective character. This betrays, 
according to Patočka, the explanation that Husserl himself proposed as a distinction 
for experiences and perception. Husserl says that the foreshortened donation of 
things guarantees the external character, and, so, everything that is given adequately 
constitutes consciousness’ components. Indeed, foreshortenings are given to the 
subject as empirical data, which lacks signification. But in the case of what is also 
supposed to be given as objective—namely the apprehension of unity—the donation 
is neither forefronted nor empirical data, “but apprehension itself is affirmed; it is 
not any affluence of new sensations, but it has the character of an act, a mode of 
consciousness or a state of the spirit.”31 Since apprehension itself does not correspond 
to any proper intuition and is nothing empirical, one must conclude that constitutes 
signification itself. As such, it has the character of being an act of the subject and 
appears with the same apodictic evidence that is characteristic of the subjective 
experience. Therefore, apprehension taken as such corresponds to an adequate 

28 Smith, “Husserl and Externalism” 326.
29 By ‘transcendent transcendence,’ I mean that the objectivity or externality of the thing has to resort to something 

that is beyond (or outside of ) consciousness. This is why it is a ‘transcendent transcendence’, and is directly 
opposed to ‘immanent transcendence’ (a Husserlian notion), which assures the externality of the thing without 
resorting to something beyond consciousness.

30 Dermot Moran, “Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and 
Karl Jaspers,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, May 1, 2008, 268, https://doi.org/10.5840/
acpq20088224.

31 Jan Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana (Encuentro, 2004), 103.



81Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Patočka's Critique of Husserl

experience (not a foreshortened one) so that there is nothing indicating its external 
or objective character:

To summarize: sensations and the acts that apprehend them or perceive 
them are lived, but they do not appear objectively; they are not seen, heard 
or perceived with any «sensory faculty». We have before our eyes Husserl’s 
subjectivism in germinal state.32

These critiques demystify the supposedly objective character of apprehension of unity 
and, therefore, it loses its status as a perception, since apprehension is not an intuition 
of anything, but an act of signification, void of any empirical content. In light of this, 
apprehension enters the field of what constitutes consciousness, assuming we are 
faithful to Husserl’s own explanation:

Subjective being does not foreshorten, it merely shows itself as what it is. 
Therefore, in the first place, the phenomenical sphere is divided into two 
stages: what appears in its modes of being given, on one hand, and the 
supposed subjective basis of this appearance, on the other hand.33 

In his project, Husserl restarts the former conception of consciousness, which is 
characterized by considering the subjective modes of being as intramental and the 
objective as extramental—or, in Husserlian terms, what is component and what 
is spatiotemporal. Though Patočka doesn’t explicitly elucidate how this critique 
affects the noema/noesis schema, it can be easily understood. Noesis as such is not 
empirical; it is an animation of data that imbues noema/noesis with the capacity 
to have a direction towards an object. Due to this lack of empirical data—and 
the possibility of being foreshortened—one concludes that noesis is an adequate 
experience, a component. Noesis, thus, takes the side of the subjective (and noema of 
the objective), and the appearing process splits in two again. Finally, this confusion 
irradiates to hyletical data, since one cannot determine if they are components or 
foreshortenings. There are two equally probable answers: hyletical data are either 
foreshortened perspectives that acquire signification thanks to noesis, or they are 
components of consciousness that become externally directed thanks to noesis.

The aforementioned misunderstandings and contradictions rest, however, in a more 
fundamental mistake, according to Patočka. The great achievement of Husserl is, 
indeed, the discovery of the “phenomenological field” and the birth of describing the 
appearance as such in that field, but: 

It is true here that Husserl has not abandoned the fundamental idea 
of a general correlation between appearances and what appears, he has 
even reinforced and elevated the entire philosophical endeavor to the 
methodical. However, a curious combination of Cartesian and Kantian 
ideas alongside the original idea of an intuitive foundation of knowledge 

32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 105.



82

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

that transcends argumentation lead here to the idea of a phenomenological 
reduction to the pure immanence of consciousness.34

Indeed, Husserl tries to attend to appearances as such and to correlation, but when 
he tries to constitute this knowledge as a rigorous science, “he attempts, in a curious 
analogy with the cartesian concern with doubt, to methodically highlight and secure 
this dimension.”35

The procedure chosen to do this, for Descartes, implies remitting to the apodictic 
dimension of the subject. In other words, the reduction to pure immanence is 
fundamentally an alternative term for the subjective, since it relies on an equal 
correlation of subject and object, and is thereby accompanied by the additional claim 
because it is an intentional field. But as was aforementioned, claiming its intentional 
nature does not solve the problem—the correlation of subject and object is always 
marked by the objectifying acts of the subject. This means that intentionality is only 
directed from the subject to the object, but not vice versa. All things considered, 
we find that the classical bifurcation of the world is accidentally replicated, now in 
the distinction between what is component and what is spatiotemporal. This is a 
dichotomy that intentionality alone cannot dissolve—it merely transports it. 

One could say that in order the prevent the claim of an in-itself world,  Husserl 
constantly refers to the appearance of the former only for a consciousness, but this has 
resulted in reducing appearances to the subjective experience, without considering 
the possibility that admitting that the autonomy of the phenomenical field is not 
equivalent to restarting the thesis of the thing in itself. The merely methodological 
commitment of evading the thing in itself started to slip into more serious claims of 
subjectivism.

Husserl, in fact, tries to describe appearances as such, and is aware that in order to 
describe the universal a priori of correlation, it is not possible to reduce appearances as 
such to any of the entities that appear in this field. That would imply the absurd claim 
that the appearance itself depends on the things that this field produces. However, 
in order to evade the thesis of the thing in itself, Husserl relies excessively on the 
dimension of immanent consciousness, in which he finds that there is complete and 
indubitable evidence. So he ends up relying completely on the self:

The intention points, therefore, to appearances as such, to the phenomenical 
sphere. But this intent is sketched in terms that come from the sphere 
of the subjective: he tries to speak about a reduction to pure immanence 
instead of putting on display the field of appearances as such.36

Even though its initial motivation is always to stay true to the correlation, objectivity 
ends up being defined as “something that appears in living and is transcendent to 
34 Ibid., 114.
35 Ibid., 106.
36 Ibid.



83Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Patočka's Critique of Husserl

the ingredient stream of experiences.”37 In this way, the constitution of things—
which claims to debunk that objects are created by consciousness or that things in 
themselves exist independently—is impossible if we do it from the presupposition 
that everything is put under the assessment of the immanence of intentional 
consciousness. It can be said, then, that this “transcendence inside immanence” fails:

Ultimately, the whole problem of constitution is irresolvable. How can 
‘living as such’, as it is originally given in reflection, start to make something 
an objective, transcendent appearance? One cannot have intellectual 
evidence about it—it can only be accepted as a brute fact. Nothing should 
be questioned about it if it were not, in fact, an ultimately intuitable fact, 
but rather, an authentic fact, and not a construction.38 

Indeed, Husserl’s conjecture that the psychic is internal comes, according to Patočka, 
from Brentano’s interpretation of Cartesianism:

If the intentional object is not immanent but precisely transcendent 
to the subject, and the Brentanian apprehension of the psychic as an 
internal object remains, then it follows, necessarily, that the fundamental 
distinction is between lived experience and phenomena. Living experience 
does not appear, but is already there as a component that flows through 
time and causes the appearance of things. By virtue of living experiences 
transcendences appear.39

This means that the subjective (psychic) is not one of the many kinds of entities that 
appear by means of the appearance as such, but, rather, is a privileged dimension that 
is the cause of the appearance in general. By this mistake, the procedure of epoché is 
also misunderstood because it is presupposed that epoché implies a “reduction” to the 
immanence of the subject. This is based on the misguided belief that if consciousness 
is intentional, then it is no longer closed in itself because is only direction towards 
the object. However, this is not possible if the psychic/internal mode of conceiving 
it is not abandoned. If not abandoned, the transcendent and immanent restart the 
intramental/extramental distinction that it purports to overcome.40

IV. Patočka’s proposal

From the critique previously sketched, it is clear that the main attack resides in the 
understanding of the investigation of appearance as reduced to the immanence of 
consciousness. This produces all the problems that, in the end, are attributed to 
subjectivism. However, it is true that the investigation of appearances requires a 

37 Ibid., 107.
38 Ibid., 108.
39 Ibid., 124.
40 Husserl pretended to demonstrate that sources of knowledge for phenomenology were not internal nor external 

Biagio G. Tassone, “The Relevance of Husserl’s Phenomenological Exploration of Interiority to Contemporary 
Epistemology,” Palgrave Communications 3 (July 11, 2017): 8.



84

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

disconnect from any possible thesis about the world41 and must remain faithful only 
to describing appearance as such:  

[…] Phenomenology itself should be a science: an a priori science of the 
essential legalities that govern the appearance process of what appears as 
such […] it is not an argumentative basis that resorts to the self as the 
ultimate explicative concept, but a revealing foundation that legitimizes 
the idea of foundation as such.42

If phenomenology is supposed to be given the task of describing appearances as such, 
then this appearance cannot be based on one of the entities that appear, since that 
would require what is needed for explanation to reside within the explanation. From 
this point of view, both the subjective and the objective are things that made its 
presence in the phenomenological field as any other. This phenomenical field is, 
therefore, autonomous,43 it is the condition of possibility for the apparition of every 
entity, but this field itself is no entity. Husserl’s mistake is reducing it to one of the 
entities that appear:

There is a phenomenological field, a phenomenological being itself, which 
cannot be reduced to any entity that appears within it. Therefore, it can 
never be explained by the entity, even if this is objective, as in nature, or 
subjective, as in the self.44

It follows that in order to describe appearances as such without biases, one must 
abstain from positing any thesis that we had with respect to appearance. That is 
precisely the role of the epoché, which “[…] claims that a thesis is neither attempted 
nor purported, but that one only experiences the freedom to use it or not to use 
it.”45 It does not follow, however, from this abstention, that one should commit to a 
“reduction”; this requirement is added by Husserl in order to bring himself back to 
an indubitable sphere. In this sense, the reduction to the sphere of the self should 
actually be one of the theses that we should abstain ourselves from positing. Thanks 
to this way of thinking about the epoché, Patočka considers the possibility of posing 
a new question: “What would happen if the epoché did not stop before the thesis 
of the own self, but was understood as completely universal?”46 If epoché becomes 
completely universal now, it can open the way for ‘appearance itself ’ to make its 
appearance, without the obstacles of taking it as being originated from the self. In 
fact, “maybe the immediacy of the donation of the self is not a prejudice and the 
experience of one’s own self, just as the experience of external things, has its a priori, 

41 Oded Balaban, “Epoché: Meaning, Object, and Existence in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology World-
Wide: Foundations — Expanding Dynamics — Life-Engagements. A Guide for Research and Study, ed. A. Ales Bello 
et al. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002), 111, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0473-2_10.

42 Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana, 113.
43 Dušan Hruška, “Patočka and English Sensualism and Its Place in Modern Philosophy,” Folia Philosophica 37, no. 

0 (July 4, 2016): 28, http://www.journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/FOLIA/article/view/4732.
44 Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana, 129.
45 Ibid., 244.
46 Ibid., 247.



85Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Patočka's Critique of Husserl

an a priori that allows the appearance of the self.”47 So, if we make epoché universal, 
we gain two things at once: freeing ‘appearances as such’ from the chains of the self 
and, by doing so, revealing the authentic essence of this previously misunderstood 
self. If we want to unfold this a priori, which is a condition for the possibility of the 
subjective as well as the objective, then we must universalize epoché in such a way that 
“it is a phenomenology void of reduction, but not without the epoché.”48 In other 
words, it is an a-subjective phenomenology.

This renouncement of reduction now allows us to open the phenomenological field 
as such, as an autonomous a priori, to whom objects and subjects appear on the same 
grounds: “We arrive in this way to the conditions of possibility of the appearance 
of what already appears; we do not remain quiet before what appears, but we allow 
appearance to make its appearance.”49 This phenomenological field is no longer a 
mere stream of experiences, but a world-background, a vast horizon of meaning that 
only manifests, shows and bring things to presence:

A universal structure of appearance that is not reducible to what appears, in 
its singular being, is what we call world, which we have the right to name, 
since it is found in the epoché. However, it is neither negated nor doubted 
by the epoché, but brought into the light, and out of anonymity, by it.50

Thanks to an epoché void of reduction, appearances as such can be unfolded, 
showing itself as a proto-horizon of the world “in an infinity that cannot be updated. 
Perception does not flow in a sequence of more and more perceptual donations, 
but, from the beginning, it rests on a totality that is present even when is not being 
perceived.”51 In other words, a particular actualization of that horizon of totality 
does not account, on its own, for the fact that there is something. This, however, 
is already manifested by the fact that “the universal totality of what appears, which 
Patočka sometimes calls ‘unapparent immensity,’ belongs to the own structure of 
appearance, which means that every appearance is necessarily a co-appearance of that 
totality.”52 Every particular appearance presupposes this infinite world background as 
the condition of its possibility in such a way that one must conclude that this world 
is neither objective nor subjective, but a-subjective. 

This way of conceiving the world allows Patočka to formulate an original conception 
of the subject. Patočka points to Descartes as the discoverer of the cogito, which is the 
subject revealed to itself by means of its own acts, through its existence.53 Descartes 

47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., 249.
49 Ibid., 247.
50 Ibid., 248.
51 Ibid., 29.
52 Barbaras, Introducción a una fenomenología de la vida, 139.
53 Jan Patočka, “The Natural World and Phenomenology,” in Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings (Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press, 1989), 247.



86

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

attempts to add a thing-like essence (a thing that acts, thinks, and wants),54 in such 
a way that constitutes a special thing between other things that lack a self or ego. 
This introspectionalist55 way of conceiving the object motivates him to consider the 
subject as something internal, a closed-in-itself ego to which external objects oppose 
is inherited by Brentano,56 and, finally, by Husserl. Instead of this ego, Patočka will 
emphasize the cogito:

Without a doubt, the ‘ego’ as ‘ego cogito’ is proven to be immediately true. 
But this certainty lacks any content, except for this: it is that which appears 
that makes its appearance. The phenomenological field appears before this 
ego.57

This does not mean, however, that the cogito is the foundational entity of appearance, 
because as we have already said, appearance cannot be reduced to any entity. What 
Patočka is trying to say is that the subject acts only as an organizational center58 of this 
protohorizon of world. The subject is, in some way, the indexical of appearance—the 
‘here’ of appearance.59 It indicates the direction of the appearance, but appearance 
always ontologically precedes the subject and presents itself before him, not through 
him:

Showing itself in him is no human doing: man neither produces nor shows 
its own being (its own ‘light’) or its own transparency, the interest for it 
or its own comprehension. In one’s own being, being in general is already 
in action.60

 Now, the essential features of the subject become available through phenomenological 
description. By means of this, we discover that the subject is an entity in the world 
whose fundamental ontological feature is that it “cares for its being and exists through 
time and in movement. This points even beyond the sphere of the self.”61 This entity 
lives within the possibilities of appearance and clings to them in its existence, in such 
a way that its being is explained by the phenomenical field, but not the other way 
around.62

Thanks to this conception of the subject and appearance, now Patočka can replace 
the Husserlian account of perception with his own corrections. In Patočka’s account, 
it is not the case that different perspectives appear and then are unified by an act of 

54 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies (OUP Oxford, 
2008), 20.

55 Ibid., 97-98.
56 Dermot Moran, “The Inaugural Address: Brentano’s Thesis,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary 

Volumes 70 (1996): 2.
57 Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana, 129. 
58 Ibid., 248.
59 Indexicals are terms that have a demonstrative function, namely, they indicate direction, place, position, 

etc, relative to a context or point of reference. Paradigmatic cases are “here” and “now”. David Kaplan, 
“Demonstratives,” in Themes From Kaplan, ed. Joseph Almog, John Perry, and Howard Wettstein (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 1989), 490.

60 Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana, 110.
61 Ibid., 111.
62 Barbaras, Introducción a una fenomenología de la vida, 157.



87Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Patočka's Critique of Husserl

consciousness. What is actually the case is that before me appear characteristics that 
“I attribute to the thing itself as its own notes and others that, although they are also 
there, they are not there as belonging to the thing, but, in some way, as helping the 
thing appear.”63 Some of the data exist as a property of the thing and belongs, and 
the rest of the data lack reference to that thing, which is not a property of the thing 
itself. This means that two types of data, which are equally objective, appear to me, 
at least in the sense that they are different to me. However, some of it appears with 
confusing traits, or lacks reference to its object. Characters that appear as belonging 
to a thing are thing-like traits, and the ones that lack reference to its object are non-
thing-like traits. Thing-like and non-thing-like traits are just as objective, and for 
non-thing-like characters to become thing-like characters, an act of the subject is 
not necessary. Patočka compares this to the image of awakening from a dream, in 
which even “before what is being lived shows contours of things to me, sensations 
overwhelm me as I am passively taken by them. Does not something very different 
to things appear there; namely, a chaos, a fog, but all of that in an objective way?”64

Finally, the noesis/noema scheme is also corrected. As we saw before, this scheme 
implies putting beforehand an empty signification (noesis) that needs to be 
corresponded by an intuition (noema). The mistake here is to consider this empty 
signification as an act of the subject, instead of as a structure of a-subjective appearance. 
What is actually the case is that there is a universal structure of emptiness/fulfillment 
that is not limited only to perception, and is not an act of any subject, but always 
operates every time a negative meaning is asking to be completed: “it can also happen 
that any object, existent thing, or thing-like process fails to appear.”65

Conclusion

I have demonstrated that Patočka’s critique (and many of the subjectivist accusations 
made towards Husserl) can be held, since they reveal many presuppositions that 
operate in the background of Husserlian theories of appearance. The fundamental 
conclusion from this critique is that the epoché does not imply reduction. Thus, 
we can envision an a-subjective phenomenology that reveals the independence of a 
world-horizon without restarting the natural attitude towards the world. 

Nonetheless, this correction to Husserl’s project is not a mere disregarding, but is, 
rather, a correction that keeps and shows the true aspect of many of Husserl’s theories. 
In a certain way, we can see Patočka as an inheritor who critically continues the task 
started by the first phenomenologist. Patočka expresses this intent, saying that: 

63 Patočka, El movimiento de la existencia humana, 126.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 132.



88

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Maybe the last will of the creator of phenomenology should be considered: 
effecting the catharsis of the phenomenological and giving back to 
phenomenology its original sense of an investigation of appearances-as-
such.66 ◆

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Balaban, Oded. “Epoché: Meaning, Object, and Existence in Husserl’s 
phenomenology .” In Phenomenology World-Wide: Foundations — Expanding 
Dynamics — Life-Engagements. A Guide for Research and Study, edited by A. 
Ales Bello, M. Antonelli, G. Backhaus, O. Balaban, G. Baptist, J. Bengtsson, 
J. Benoist, et al., 103–14. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002. https://doi.
org/10.1007/978-94-007-0473-2_10.

Barbaras, Renaud. Introducción a una fenomenología de la vida: intencionalidad y deseo. 
Encuentro, 2013.

Biemel, Walter. “Las Fases Decisivas En El Desarrollo de La Filosofía de Husserl.” 
In Husserl. Tercer Coloquio Filosófico de Royaumont, 35–57. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 
1968.

Crowell, Steven. “Phenomenological Immanence, Normativity, and Semantic 
Externalism.” Synthese 160, no. 3 (2008): 335–54.

Descartes, René. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections 
and Replies. OUP Oxford, 2008.

Dostal, Robert J. “Subjectivism, Philosophical Reflection and the Husserlian 
Phenomenological Account of Time.” In Phenomenology on Kant, German 
Idealism, Hermeneutics and Logic: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Thomas M. 
Seebohm, edited by O. K. Wiegand, R. J. Dostal, L. Embree, J. Kockelmans, 
and J. N. Mohanty, 53–65. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2000. https://doi.
org/10.1007/978-94-015-9446-2_4.

Hanna, Robert. “Husserl’s Arguments against Logical Psychologism.” Edmund 
Husserl: Logische Untersuchungen, 2008, 27–42.

Himanka, Juha. “Husserl’s Two Truths: Adequate and Apodictic Evidence.” 
Phänomenologische Forschungen, 2005, 93–112.

Hruška, Dušan. “Patočka and English Sensualism and Its Place in Modern 
Philosophy.” Folia Philosophica 37, no. 0 (July 4, 2016). http://www.journals.
us.edu.pl/index.php/FOLIA/article/view/4732.

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Routledge, 
2014.

66 Ibid., 109.



89Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Patočka's Critique of Husserl

———. Logical Investigations. Routledge, 2013.

Ierna, Carlo. “Making the Humanities Scientific: Brentano’s Project of Philosophy as 
Science.” In The Making of the Humanities. Volume III: The Making of the Modern 
Humanities, edited by Rens Bod, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, 543–554. 
Amsterdam University Press, 2014.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Kaplan, David. “Demonstratives.” In Themes From Kaplan, edited by Joseph Almog, 
John Perry, and Howard Wettstein, 481–563. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
1989.

Moran, Dermot. “Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund 
Husserl, Edith Stein, and Karl Jaspers.” American Catholic Philosophical 
Quarterly, May 1, 2008. https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq20088224.

———. “The Inaugural Address: Brentano’s Thesis.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian 
Society, Supplementary Volumes 70 (1996): 1–27.

Öktem, Ülker. “Husserl’s Evidence Problem.” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 9, 
no. 1 (May 1, 2009): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/20797222.2009.11433986.

Paredes, María. “Percepción y Atención. Una Aproximación Fenomenológica.” 
Azafea: Revista de Filosofía; Vol. 14 (2012), 2014. http://revistas.usal.es/index.
php/0213-3563/article/view/11680.

Patočka, Jan. El Movimiento de la existencia humana. Encuentro, 2004.

———. “The Natural World and Phenomenology.” In Jan Patočka: Philosophy and 
Selected Writings, 239–74. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Schrader, George Alfred. “Philosophy and Reflection: Beyond Phenomenology.” The 
Review of Metaphysics 15, no. 1 (1961): 81–107.

Smith, A. David. “Husserl and Externalism.” Synthese 160, no. 3 (2008): 313–33.

Smith, David Woodruff. “Phenomenology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of 
Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Summer 2018. Metaphysics Research Lab, 
Stanford University, 2018. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/
phenomenology/.

Tassone, Biagio G. “The Relevance of Husserl’s Phenomenological Exploration of 
Interiority to Contemporary Epistemology.” Palgrave Communications 3 (July 11, 
2017): 17066.

Whitehead, Patrick. “Phenomenology Without Correlationism: Husserl’s Hyletic 
Material.” Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 15, no. 2 (October 26, 2015): 
1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/20797222.2015.1101830.



90

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Williford, Kenneth. “Husserl’s Hyletic Data and Phenomenal Consciousness.” 
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 12, no. 3 (September 1, 2013): 501–19. 
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-013-9297-z.

Zahavi, Dan. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford University Press, 2003.

Zuidervaart, Lambert. “Synthetic Evidence and Objective Identity: The 
Contemporary Significance of Early Husserl’s Conception of Truth.” European 
Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 1 (2018): 122–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/
ejop.12192.



91Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

δι
αν

οι
α

REVIEW OF DISCOMFORT AND MORAL 
IMPEDIMENT (JULIO CABRERA)1 

MYLES CASEY, PH.D. STUDENT
THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

Julio Cabrera opens Discomfort and Moral Impediment by announcing his intention 
to cohere into a single philosophical system two regions of investigation that are 

often sequestered from one another in ethical treatises: a structural analysis of the 
human situation within the world, and the investigation into “the very possibility of 
morality and of a morality of procreation in particular,” these investigations informing, 
respectively, Cabrera’s bifurcation of the book (viii). The first part presents a structural 
and ontological framework, out of which Cabrera can derive, and ground, the practical 
and moral conclusions that he defends in the second. Cabrera believes that this move 
places his articulation of antinatalism on surer footing than those of other antinatalist 
authors—in particular, David Benatar—and as being more capable of responding 
to objections from both pro-natalist and “affirmative-ethical” theorists. Cabrera’s 
overarching project throughout the book is to dislodge procreation from what he 
claims to be “its usual position as a mere ‘natural act,’ or as an obviously ethical act, or 
even as the most ethical of all acts” (ibid). 

Methodologically, Cabrera freely utilizes various aspects of the “Continental” and 
“analytical” traditions of Western philosophy. From just a cursory glance at the book: in 
the first part’s structural analysis of the human situation, Cabrera draws on Heidegger, 
Schopenhauer, Sartre, and Nietzsche, placing them into dialogue with the Hispanophone 

1 Julio Cabrera, Discomfort and Moral Impediment: The Human Situation, Radical Bioethics, and Procreation, 
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 280pp., £61.99(hbk), IBSN 9781527518035.



92

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

philosophers, José Ortega y Gasset, Enrique Dussel, and Fernando Savater. Throughout 
his work, Cabrera manages to tactfully appropriate these existential arguments within 
an unmistakably “analytic” organizational structure, making use of “informal logic” 
(as Cabrera, himself, remarks) in deducing his ontological and normative conclusions. 
These conclusions are, in turn, in contradiction to those of Benatar, Kant, Singer, 
Dworkin, Tooley, and Nagel (to name just a few). 

Thematically, Part I begins with a brief outline of what Cabrera contends to be the 
most basic principle of traditional ethics, the “minimal ethical articulation (MEA).” 
The MEA is operative as the most basic, yet ultimately non-binding, aspect of the 
traditional ethics and acts as a “minimal demand” to consider, in the planning of our 
own life projects, the interests, feelings, and life projects of others, only insofar as theses 
others, too, consider the interests, feelings, and projects of others (2-3). This demand 
of the MEA, Cabrera argues, has priority over respecting the autonomy of others, 
helping, and refraining from harming others because we may encounter another whose 
interests, feelings, and projects are such that we should not respect their autonomy and 
should actively impeded the fulfillment of their projects (4-5). Cabrera then turns to 
more ontological considerations of human being, in chapters 2 and 3, to articulate his 
concept of “negative ethics,” the question of discomfort, and the status of “value” in 
human life.

The concept of “negative ethics,” in contradistinction to what he calls the “affirmative 
ethics” of traditional moral philosophy, is integral to Cabrera’s book, and this distinction 
is concomitantly developed alongside his structural arguments regarding the human 
situation in the first part, and presented as an alternative ethical framework in his 
arguments against procreation in the second. Cabrera’s articulation of “negative ethics” 
in chapter 2 serves as a prolegomenon to his antinatalist theses throughout Part II, and 
contends that it cannot be taken as self-evidently true that there is inherent value to 
human life—its truthfulness can only be established through a “slow and careful process 
of argumentation” (10). If it is not self-evidentially true, and has not been defended 
through rigorous argumentation, Cabrera argues that he is licensed to advance the 
opposite thesis: “[…] human life carries something like an initial structural disadvantage 
[…]that human life initially presents a valueless character or a ‘lack of value,’ not in the 
agnostic sense of not being ‘good or bad’ but in the sense of carrying from the outset an 
adverse value” (10-11).  The remainder of the second chapter presents a series of easily 
refutable, foil arguments in support of the adverse value of human.2  

The inconclusiveness of these approaches necessitates Cabrera’s ontological framing 
arguments in chapters 3-5. At the beginning of the third chapter, Cabrera presents 

2 In brief, the five non-structural arguments are the following: [1] that people suffer on a daily basis, both in 
mundane (e.g., a heartburn) and severe (e.g., torture) ways; [2] that many in the history of philosophy have 
portrayed the human life and the world as something degenerate that, through moral struggle, we can restore 
or overcome; [3] that humans, through metaphysics and religion, have often imagined an idyllic world to make 
suffering their current one bearable; [4] that a human life is not irreplaceable and that we can, in time, ‘forget’ 
about a deceased loved one; [5] that humans, generally, need the value and recognition of others in order to have 
a sense of self-worth, rather than produce it endogenously, demonstrates only an extrinsic value to life, and not 
an intrinsic one (11-21).



93Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Review of Discomfort and Moral Impediment (Julio Cabrera)

human being as having a non-exhaustive trifold structure—[a] human life, from birth 
has a “decaying” structure that can end at any point; [b] human life’s decaying-being 
is characterized by three kinds of “frictions’—physical pain, discouragement (i.e., the 
possibility of “lacking the will” to continue to be), and “exposure to the aggressions of 
other humans”; [c] the ability to react against the two aforementioned structural aspects 
by “positive value creation” (23). Cabrera calls this trifold structure of human being the 
“Terminality of Being” (24). 

In support of his concept of the “Terminality of Being,” Cabrera formulates what he 
terms the “Ser/Estar Distinction”: both are Spanish infinitives for the verb, ‘to be,’ the 
former, however, denoting a more ‘essential,’ structural, permanent sense of ‘to be,’ 
pertaining to “the being of life,” whereas the former denotes the more particularized, 
impermanent, and circumstantially contingent ways of being within the ‘overarching’ 
structure of life (27-28). At this point, one would not be remiss to immediately call 
to mind Heidegger’s Ontological Difference, which Cabrera does reference, but 
subsequently attempts to differentiate from his ser/estar by citing the incongruity 
between the Spanish and German words for being (ibid). Cabrera’s insistence that the 
ser/estar distinction is not Heidegger’s Ontological Difference is, however, specious. 
In his discussion of the role of death, Cabrera formulates the dual concepts of “death-
estar” and “death-ser” that serve functions to Heidegger’s ontical and ontological death 
(30).3 Further, in chapter 4, Cabrera conceptualizes the “intra-structural” (i.e., estar) 
“reactive” creation of positive values (35), which he later describes as a type of “flight” 
from the Terminality of Being (140), mirrors Heidegger’s analysis of the existential 
mode of Dasein’s being-in-the-world as “falling prey” or as “entanglement” [Verfallen] in 
§38 of Being and Time.4  The ser/estar distinction is, for Cabrera, a necessary condition 
for the structural discomfort argument, and for much of the remainder of the book. 
It allows him to maintain that, on the structural level of the being of human life (ser), 
there can be an “adverse value” to life, i.e., no positive value whatsoever, and yet, on 
the individuated level of estar, a human being can actively create positive values—a 
phenomenon that Cabrera describes as “living a double life” (30). Every activity and 
thing that does, or can, appear as valuable to a human being is only on account of this 
reactive activity of positive value creation on the estar-level of life. 

Turning to consider ethics within this structural framework, Cabrera defines, in chapter 
5, “moral impediment” as “the structural impossibility of acting in the world without 
harming or manipulating someone at some given moment (not, of course, everyone 
at every moment)” (52). He offers three classification types of moral impediment, 
but, most importantly, all forms of moral impediment are structured according to a 

3 Cabrera describes death-estar as “the kind of death that happens to us on a certain date from which we ‘cease to 
exist’,” and death-ser as “more directly tied to birth,” and as “a kind of ‘structural death,’ the gradual death that 
encompasses our ‘lives,’ the structural decaying due to frictions (pain, discouragement, moral impediment), and 
finally DE [death-estar]” (30). Compare this with the Heidegger’s analysis of ontological death in relation to 
Dasein’s care, angst, being-toward-death, and finite transcendence and the parallelism becomes apparent.

4 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, ed. Dennis Schmidt (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), 
p. 169 [S.Z., 175]: “Idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity characterize the way in which Dasein is its ‘there,’ the 
disclosedness of being-in-the-world, in an everyday way. As existential determines, these characteristics are not 
objectively present in Dasein; they constitute its being. In them and in the connectedness of their being, a basic 
kind of the being of everydayness reveals itself, which we call the entanglement [Verfallen] of Dasein.”



94

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

complex, enmeshed web of actions wherein “many [ethical] wrongdoings are reactions 
to previous moral impediments within a web” and therefore cannot be taken in isolation 
(56-57). The Moral Impediment Thesis, perhaps the most significant argument of 
Part I, articulates the structural analysis of the Terminality of Being and the ser/estar 
distinction within the project of negative ethics. In brief, any act of positive value 
creation, at the estar ‘level’ of human being, is never an isolated activity but one whose 
situation is always enmeshed within a larger complex of other human actions, thereby 
making it impossible to consider all of the feelings, interests, and projects of every other 
(61). Therefore, Cabrera concludes, the human situation is structured such that moral 
impediment is not accidental, but necessary with respect to all intra-structural actions 
(62). 

In Part II, Cabrera works to extend and apply the ontological work of Part I to the 
realm of normative ethics regarding the morality (or lack thereof ) of procreation, 
childhood education, sexuality, abortion, and suicide. Though each chapter is thought-
provoking, I will only focus on the question of procreation (in chapters 9-12), which 
Cabrera describes as “the primary ethical question,” due to its centrality, both within 
this book and Cabrera’s wider corpus of work (118). In defense of even calling to 
question the morality of procreation, Cabrera frames the issue being “deeply motivated 
by a very strong and responsible concern for potential children, and for the risk that 
their emergence into being is the consequence of constraining and aggressive actions 
against defenseless human beings” (ibid). The act of procreation, Cabrera maintains, is 
for the sake of the parents, and not the child, in order to give the parents some ‘good’—
i.e., the joy, pleasure, or happiness of parenthood—which he describes as a mere act 
of the progenitor’s positive value creation, and one this is morally irresponsible given 
the aforementioned structures of the Terminality of Being and the Moral Impediment 
Thesis (120). 

In chapters 10-12, Cabrera develops what his calls the “PROC Thesis,” by recourse to 
two “minimal demands” of the MEA. Cabrera finds traditional ethical theory to contain 
the “do No Harm Demand” (NHD) and the “do Not Manipulate Demand” (NMD) 
(126).5 Cabrera’s PROC Thesis argues that, if the NHD and the NMD are indeed 
ethical demands, then procreation, as an intentional or unintentional act, is not ethically 
justifiable as it violates both the NHD and the NMD (121). He argues, first, that 
procreation is a manipulative activity, because procreation is an act of the progenitors’ 
creation of positive value, wherein the child is a means for that act’s satisfaction (129-
130). Cabrera then argues that procreation is an inherently harmful act because: [1] 
the structure of life is terminal, and therefore birth is a structural “disadvantage;” [2] 
in flight from the terminal structure of their beings, humans inevitably cause harm to 
others in order to survive; and [3] there is no structural guarantor of successful reactive 
value creation, and, in fact, many humans fail in this endeavor (139-140). 

5 Roughly, Cabrera explains the NHD and NMD as: Assuming the reciprocity of consideration under the MEA, 
we ought to pursue our projects, feelings, and interests only insofar as they do not harm any other, obstruct 
another’s own projects, or place any other in a situation of possible harm or constraint—when possible, we 
should actively try to rescue others from their situations of harm and constraint. Further, we should not 
manipulate any other in service of our own ends.



95Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

Review of Discomfort and Moral Impediment (Julio Cabrera)

Cabrera considers a variety of objections to the PROC thesis, but directs most of 
his argumentative force against the position advocating an intrinsic value to life. 
Here, again, he invokes the ser/estar distinction, arguing that the majority of these 
“affirmative” arguments “forget” this very distinction, and consequently mistake estar-
level value in human life to be demonstrative of structural, ser-level value to human life 
(143-151). Further, Cabrera argues that these same objectors erroneously conclude, 
from the impetus for survival driving the process of positive value creation, that there 
is a structural vitality to human being, rather than regarding it as “a mere question 
of animal impulse” (147). Thirdly, even for “sensitive progenitors”—i.e., those who 
are cognizant of human life’s terminality, yet decide to have a child, in hopes that 
their child succeeds in positively resisting terminality(149-150)—procreation remains 
“one of the most powerful mechanisms of intra-world value creation, and therefore 
of postponing and distancing the terminal structure of being” (155). This, Cabrera 
concludes, raises the fundamental question for ethics: Do we have the right to procreate 
for the sake of our own resistance to our own inevitable decay of being (156)? 

Though Cabrera’s arguments in Part I, and what has been discussed of Part II may 
appear to be formally valid, the project as a whole appears to be contingent upon the 
success of, or the reader’s assent to, the structural argument for the Terminality of Being 
and the incommensurability of positive value on the ‘estar-status’ to its ‘ser-status.’ At 
least as how I understand it, it would seem that the possibility for positive value creation 
at the level of a particularized human being is not operative at the structural level, and 
is therefore created ex nihilo in all individuated human beings. In the development 
of his PROC Thesis, Cabrera states that he “agree[s] substantially” with the approach 
of “existential metaphysics,” in the tradition of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre, and 
Heidegger, only insofar as they endorse the “idea that there are constant and regular 
structures of human life, and that it is not true that every human birth begins from 
nothing” (152). Yet, here, there seems to be an explicit structural irregularity, or, at 
least, incongruity between the ser and estar designations of human being: how could 
it be the case that every human being is “forced” to engage in the creation of positive 
values without having any structural condition for the possibility of valuation, at all. 

On this question, Heidegger, whose ontological work features prominently all 
throughout Cabrera’s text, examines the fundamentally holistic being of human-being 
through its inseparable and non-distinct “multiplicity of constitutive structural factors,” 
which he calls “existentials.”6 Above, I indicated the similarity between Cabrera’s 
analysis of positive value creation and Heidegger’s existential of falling prey [Verfallen]. 
However, falling prey is the ontical modality of (i.e., estar-level), and presupposes, 
Dasein’s ontological structure of Sein-bei, translated as either “being together with” or 
“rendering things meaningfully present” in the world.7 In order to commit ourselves 
to the project of intra-structural (or innerworldly) positive value creation, there must 
first be, ontologically, the structural ability to encounter any-thing within the world 

6 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 53-54 [pp.53-54].
7 The former translation appears in the Stambaugh translation of Being and Time, whereas Thomas Sheehan offers 

the latter. See Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift, (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield Pub., 
2014), p. 150.



96

Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

as something that has been made meaningfully present to us, before we are able to 
appropriate these innerworldly beings into our projects. Cabrera, in discussing the ser/
estar distinction, defined a third term, “estanes,” as the “beings that ‘are there’ (material 
things, ideas, films, animals, institutions or numbers),” that we use for the purposes of 
positive value creation (27). 

Cabrera did not, however, locate the ontological possibility of our having these 
estantes as something meaningfully present and available to us, in the first place, 
nor, presupposing their meaningful presence, did he discuss why these estantes are 
even taken up within the process of positive value creation. On this account, then, it 
seems particularly odd that Cabrera dismisses human being’s “animal desire” to live 
as something wholly incidental in relation to the structural determination of human 
being, and therefore lacking in any intrinsic value (161). On further consideration, 
this “animal desire” appears to be the only possible way of reconciling the problematic 
spontaneous generation of human being’s entire familiarity with the notion of “value” 
and relevance at the estar-level. Yet this would cut against Cabrera’s thesis that life 
is structurally valueless by admitting of an apparent structural regularity of organic 
vitality. If admitted, this structural feature would ground the human capacity for 
positive value creation in an original, value-laden relation that one has toward the 
being of one’s own life, which, therefore, hardly appears to be intrinsically valueless. 
This, however, appears to challenge Cabrera’s original thesis—viz., that no thorough 
argumentation has been offered in support of the intrinsic value of human life—insofar 
as, now, the being of human life is the principle of value, or in other words, human life 
is structurally en-valuation, on which all consequent acts of particular value creation 
are contingent. Thus, given the ontological structure of Cabrera’s negative ethics, the 
aforementioned questions likely problematize Cabrera’s normative ethical conclusions 
about procreation, without, of course, amounting to complete rejection thereof. ◆



97Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

δι
αν

οι
α



98

C
O

N
TR

IB
U

TO
RS NATASHA BEAUDIN PEARSON

McGill University
Natasha Beaudin Pearson is a soon-to-be graduate of McGill University, where she 
completed a joint honours B.A. in philosophy and art history. While her philosophical 
interests are wide-ranging, she has a particular fondness for the continental tradition, 
especially phenomenology, existentialism, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic theory. 
For her philosophy thesis, Natasha examined Freud’s seminal paper “Mourning and 
Melancholia” through the lens of existential anxiety, as it is conceived by Heidegger 
in Being and Time. The aim of her essay was to problematize the reasons Freud 
gives for positing a clear ontological distinction between “normal” mourning and 
“pathological” melancholia (the old term for clinical depression). In doing so, she 
sought to interrogate the bases on which our conceptions of mental health (and 
mental illness) are founded. A proud Montrealer, she is currently having the time of 
her life travelling across Argentina and Chile.

PETER GAVARIS
Boston College
Peter Gavaris is a senior at Boston College finishing up a B.A. in English with a minor 
in film studies. Over the course of his studies, his primary focus has been on modernist 
thought and expression across visual and literary arts, and accompanying critical theory 
from the likes of Benjamin, Agamben, and Derrida. He has, likewise, developed an 
interest in cinema, with a particular infatuation with the films of Abbas Kiarostami. 
Peter contributes regularly as the film critic for The Heights, the independent student 
newspaper of Boston College, and he supplements his journalistic endeavors with 
significant coursework on non-fiction writing and literature. This past summer, he 
worked with filmmaker Rachel Boynton on the production of a documentary on 
how the Civil War and Reconstruction are taught in American schools. He continues 
to remain interested in the role of aesthetic representation in both narrative and 
nonfiction works. 

BRENDAN CHAMBERS
Boston College
Brendan Chambers is currently a senior at Boston College studying English and 
Secondary Education. His focus is in twentieth century American literature, and he 
is particularly interested in its intersection with philosophy and linguistics. He has 
recently completed a thesis that investigates how Jack Kerouac’s development and 
implementation of the spontaneous prose method laid the ideological foundation 
for the New Journalism as a movement. Brendan will be attending the University of 
North Carolina Chapel Hill in pursuit of his PhD in English in the fall, looking to 
continue and deepen his studies at the nexus of the language and philosophy.



99Issue VI ◆ Spring 2019

RYAN CARDOZA
Stony Brook University
Ryan Cardoza is a junior studying philosophy at Stony Brook University. His 
philosophical areas of interest include the appearance/reality distinction (its condition 
of possibility and conceptual consequences), speculative metaphysics and the possibility 
thereof, and the problem of nihilism and its relation to knowledge. Philosophers whom 
he finds particularly interesting and relevant to these problems include Nietzsche, 
Deleuze, Kant, and Plato. He is also interested in contemporary developments in 
realism and rationalism in Continental philosophy, especially those influenced by 
Deleuze. Science is an interest as well, especially, but not limited to, the areas of Chaos 
Theory and Complex Systems. He is also a musician.

MAXWELL WADE
Rutgers University
Max Wade is an undergraduate senior at Rutgers University graduating in May 2019 
with a BA in philosophy and political science. His research interests include Marxism 
and communization theory, history of philosophy, and philosophy of religion with 
a specific focus on Jewish and Christian mysticism. His thesis was on the historical 
reception and interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return from Heidegger to the 
present. After graduation he plans to pursue a PhD in philosophy at Boston College.

GABRIEL VIDAL
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Gabriel Vidal Quinones is a student at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He 
began his academic career with an interest in living beings, i.e., biology. However, his 
interests have shifted from the empirical to the conceptual. Yet, he stays within a realm 
of interconnected themes—his interests include the metaphysics of individuation, 
mereology, ontology, and the epistemology of bioethics (especially relating to 
environmental issues and technology), and phenomenology. He is at work on a 
dissertation on the thought of Arne Naess, the father of Deep Ecology and Spinoza. 
Specifically, he is investigating how the metaphysics and epistemology of the latter 
influenced the former—a work that encompasses well Gabriel’s wide-ranging interests.



Dianoia fosters open philosophical discussion and writing 
among undergraduate students. The journal is committed to 

providing the opportunity for intellectual reflection that bridges 
the academic disciplines in pursuit of holistic understanding.

The ancient Greek word ‘διανοια’ translates as ‘thought’ but 
connotes a discursive direction or search for a higher form of 
knowledge. We thus hope to direct philosophical discourse toward 

an intellectually rigorous level of thinking.

Dianoia is sponsored by

The Institute for the Liberal Arts and the
Philosophy Department of Boston College


