A well-known anecdote of Heraclides of Pontus suggests that Pythagoras was the first Greek thinker who called himself a "philosopher." The main passage, whose authenticity has been a subject of controversy until today, is the following: "Few are those who have received the gift to contemplate the most beautiful things. These humans are called ‘philosophers’ (philosophoi) and not ‘wise men’ (sophoi), for nobody is wise besides God." Does Pythagoras speak here, as Robert Joly suggests,1 or an anonymous Platonist, as Werner Jaeger2  and Walter Burkert think?3  In fact, there exists a strange familiarity between this statement and similar passages in Platon, for instance the following: "Among the gods, no one endeavours to philosophize (philosopheî), no one wants to become wise (sophos), because he is already wise."4 This statement echoes the definition of the philosopher we read in the dialogue Phaedron: "To call him wise," says Socrates, "is, at least in my opinion, excessive which suits only a god. But to call him ‘philosopher’ (philosophos) . . . would suit him better and be more in the right tone."5 

Even if we do not yet explicitly know anything at all about philosophy, we are already within philosophy, because philosophy is within us and is a part of ourselves insofar as we philosophize from the beginning of our life . . . to be there (Dasein) as humans, means to philosophize. The animal cannot philosophize, God does not need to philosophize. A god who would philosophize would not be a god, because the essence of philosophy is to be a finite possibility of a finite being.6

 

In a similar way, Martha Nussbaum,7  Pierre Hadot,8  and André-Jean Voelke9  have recently endeavoured to rehabilitate the idea that philosophizing is a lifestyle to which one is initiated by means of a certain number of "spiritual exercises" (askësis). Following this line, Hellenistic philosophers have developed the idea that philosophy is a therapy of the soul. Of course, one can only attribute "therapeutic" virtues to the act of philosophizing if one takes it to be a specific "experience."

If we read Jean-Pierre Changeux’s book, L’homme neuronal, and the positions he defends in his dialogue with Paul Ricoeur, we discover that a new breed of "medical materialism" begins to spread out under the banner of the so-called "neuro-sciences." It could be an exciting thought-experience to imagine a discussion between James and Changeux about their interpretation of the mystical ecstasies of Teresa of Avila. What would have been James’ answer to Changeux’s claim that the so-called "positone camera" enables the neurologist "to see ‘more’ than the psychiatrist or the psychologist."10  by deciphering directly in the brain our subjective states of mind, whether they are really felt or just illusionary? Changeux illustrates his thesis through the following example: "Until now, one could only understand these hallucinations through the individual’s discourse about them. If one had put Saint Teresa of Avila’s head in the positone camera during her mystic ecstasies, one would have been able to tell whether she had hallucinations or not, whether she was subject to epileptic crisis or not."11  James’ answer to this kind of argument can be found on the first pages of his book, where he makes a plea in favor of what I would call phenomenological fairness. "Let us play fair in this whole matter."12 This means that we must apply to religious experience the three fundamental criteria of spiritual judgment regarding spiritual matters, whether their psychological background is pathological or not: "immediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, moral helpfulness." Regarding the kind of reductionism we find in Changeux, we have indeed good reason to ponder anew upon James’ words: even if Saint Teresa had a nervous system as solid as that of the most placid cow, this would not save the validity of her experience if it did not satisfy these three criteria!

Significantly enough, in the year 1922, when Heidegger began to use the word "phenomenological destruction" in his lectures, William James, together with Natorp, Dilthey, and Münsterberg, is one of the four authors whom Heidegger claims to deconstruct.13  For reasons I have exposed in my book, L’arbre de vie et l’arbre du savoir, Heidegger did not have the time to fulfill his claim regarding James. The following reflections are an attempt to find out under which circumstances this gap can be filled.

"We do not have a wrong idea of things: it is the truth of the things themselves all over the centuries, which is strangely featured. Far from being the plainest realistic experience, truth is the most historical of all experiences,"14 says Paul Veyne in his book, Les Grecsont-ils cru à leurs mythes? ("Did the Greek believe in their myths?"). Nietzsche as well as Heidegger would agree fully to this statement, because each one of them has told us their story of the history of truth. These stories, or better these "genealogies," do not consist of mere semantical inquiries, but they highlight the historical or epochal experiences of truth itself.

In one of my articles, I have compared Nietzsche’s genealogical reading of the history of truth with Heidegger’s interpretation (not forgetting Jacques Derrida’s intervention related to the same topic).15 Both thinkers read the history of truth as that of a decline or a de-generation, an eclipse, or even a falsification.16 Without going back to this enormous question, I simply recall one point directly related to the problems we deal with during this conference.

Independently of this mythological context and an archaic theology (which is rather a "theogony"), the Greek tragic had an insight into the true meaning of the word experience. When, for example, Aeschylos says that one "learns through suffering" (tô pathei mathos),17 the ordeal of suffering becomes the key to an understanding that is inaccessible elsewhere. In his description of hermeneutical experience, Hans-Georg Gadamer quotes this maxim in order to show that Hegel’s description of experience in the Phenomenology of the Spirit focuses too exclusively on the capacity of human consciousness to return to itself in the act of reflection. The black spot in this teleological concept of experience is that it does not take into account the fact that every true experience deceives our previous expectations.18

It is exactly this point that Heidegger stressed in his early lectures when he spelled the verb erfahren with a hyphen: er-fahren. It is what one discovers through the itinerary of a whole life.19  Regarding the status of religious experience, this use could be illustrated by Saint Bonaventure’s beautiful title: Itinerarium mentis in Deum. This is also what Stanislas Breton stressed in a public lecture he gave at the Faculté de Philosophie of the Institut Catholique de Paris, on the occasion of the 16th centenary of the conversion of Saint Augustin on the topic: "The subject of religious experience.."20  Breton recalled that where the moderns speak of experience, Meister Eckhart, among many other medieval thinkers, prefers to speak of an itinerarium, an itinerary.

Modern philosophy implies a new way of dealing with experiences in which "experimental" sciences and what A. Koyré calls "experimental dialogue with nature" play an ever more important role. Kant is, of course, one of the thinkers who have helped us best to understand the philosophical implications of this new concept of experience. In his book La Fable mystique, Michel de Certeau has shown that the modern mystics use the word experience also in a new way.21  As to the status of philosophical theology, it is at the same time that the former viae become proofs of the existence of God.

Besides Kant, Hegel has reflected upon the consequences of the empiricist concept of experience, which go far beyond modern science. His Phenomenology of the Spirit must be read as a Wissenschaft der Erfahrung des Bewussteins, a "science of the experience of consciousness." In my opinion, what Hegel says in ß 7 of his Encyclopaedia is especially interesting: "The principle of experience contains the infinitely important determination according to which in order to admit a content and to hold it for true, one must be there oneself; more precisely: one must find that such a content is unified and totally united to the certainty one has of oneself. One must be there oneself, either with one’s exterior senses, or with one’s deepest spirit, with the essential consciousness of oneself."22 

This fourth stage in our genealogical reconstruction of the notion of experience, which is now reduced to psychic or mental states of mind, has important consequences, to which Gadamer has drawn our attention in the first part of Truth and Method.23  Experimental or descriptive psychology, dealing with mental states, seems now to have become the queen of all sciences. Of course William James’ study on the varieties of religious experience belongs to the same stage. At one moment, even the logicians were caught in the trap of "psychologism," despite Frege’s and Husserl’s warnings.

Under this respect, his most remarkable thesis is that there exists a paradoxical link between the rise of universal fabrication and manipulation, which he calls Machenschaft, and the rise of a pseudo-interiority, which needs ever more strong and exciting feelings, in order to ascertain that one is still alive. "Now that the beings have been abandoned by Being itself, anything serves as a pretext to the shallowest ‘sentimentality.’ " It is only now that everything must be an object of a "lived experience" and that all undertakings and manifestations are dripping with "lived experiences." It is this frantic quest of lived experiences that shows that in the present times the human being has lost his Being and that he has become the prey of his chase after lived experiences.24 

Mimicking Nietzsche and Heidegger, I have constructed my geneological story as one of irreversible degeneration. I am well aware that in Nietzsche as well as in Heidegger, its counterpart is the exigency of a totally new beginning. Being unable to subscribe to their exigency, let me explore another path that leads to the kind of hermeneutical phenomenology I have tried to work out in my recent books, following in the footsteps of Paul Ricoeur. I will try to clarify the hermeneutical status of the notion of experience through a critical discussion with Claude Romano, one of the most promising representatives of the youngest generation of French phenomenologists. In his two books, L’événement et le monde, L’ événement et le temps,125  he asks himself under which conditions one can develop a truly phenomenological concept of experience. This question is not surprising if we remember that Husserl claimed in contrast to the empiricist’s understanding of the word, that "We phenomenologists are the better empiricists!" He means that a "transcendental empiricism" is more faithful to the giveness of experience than the empiricist approach that focuses mainly on exterior observation.

Contrary to the empiricist concept of experience, which deals only with intramundane facts accessible to empirical observation, Romano develops what he calls a "herméneutique événementiale" (evenemential hermeneutics). He defines experience as "the necessarily unique and irrepeatable ordeal in which I myself am at stake and through which I am always deeply changed. The important thing here is not the idea of a habitus, but on the contrary that of undergoing an ordeal which is at the same time a transformation."26  This explains why Romano spells the word "ex-pér-ience" with two hyphens: This allows him to rediscover the idea of a perilous crossing. If we take the word experience in its primordial phenomenological meaning, "it is fundamentally the experience of an event."27  Classical empirism works with a concept of experience that takes its contents to be possessed by the subject and that can always be repeated. Under this presupposition, nobody "makes" an experience, because nothing happens to someone. The fundamental rule of all experimentation is that the experimentator must not interfere with the data of his experiment. Therefore, this kind of experience possesses no world of its own. Even if we take the word "event" in the weak meaning of an intra-mundane fact, we work with another understanding of experience.

Why do I speak of a hermeneutics of experience in this context? Because experience taken in this sense, is nothing else than the evenemential dimension of understanding itself. But in Romano’s opinion, neither Heidegger nor Gadamer have been able to give a full account of the fact that "‘ex-per-ience" in its primordial phenomenological meaning is the milieu of all understanding, insofar it has to deal with events.’28 Both thinkers did not pay enough attention to the fact that "to understand oneself in the evenemential sense of the word, means always understanding oneself as another whom I have become."29

This modifies profoundly Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s description of the "hermeneutical circle." Instead of defining the finitude of all understanding exclusively in reference to Dasein’s "being-toward-death" (Sein zum Tode), we should first reflect upon the facticity of our birth. This implies that Dasein (which Romano suggests baptizing "advenant") is characterized by a "primordial lateness," which explains why the background of all efforts of understanding "is a primordial and fundamental lack of understanding."30 

The positive counterpart of this "lack of foundation" which "manifests itself as an inextinguishable source of misunder-standings"31 is that our existence is open to infinite possibilities of interpretation that even the experience of death can not close definitely: "Right from the inaugural event of our birth, the human adventure appears open to an infinity of meanings of which I am not the origin – an infinite which is not only inextinguishable in fact, but also in principle."32 

Perhaps this thesis sheds also a new light on the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus about the impossible possibility of "being reborne" (a motif that plays an important role in James’ descriptions of religious experience) and on the theme of misunderstanding in the Gospel of John. If the disciples have such difficulties in grasping the meaning of the words of Jesus, it is not because they are too stupid or too short-sighted, it is because his words confront them with events and possibilities that transcend intramundane facts and that put into question (krisis!) their familiar understanding of the world. The hermeneutical maxim inviting us to a "better understanding" receives thus a meaning that goes far beyond all psychologism: "I can only understand ‘better’ if I accept that I will never understand everything."33 If "all understanding is conquered against a misunderstanding," instead of being rooted in a "preliminary understanding" (Vorverständnis), it is because every understanding and misunderstanding has its roots "in the fact that every meaning ultimately exceeds all appropriation through understanding."34

Taken in this primordial sense, experience means "becoming alien by and through the ordeal of an event."35  If we have reasons to speak of an "experience of truth," truth itself must be understood as an event. This implies rehabilitating a certain kind of transcendantalism, which brings us back to the original way in which Husserl broke with the empirism. Romano proposes an interesting hermeneutical equivalent of Husserl’s transcendantal empiricism: "In fact, as the ex-per-ience can not be understood and determinated in reference to intramundane facts, its only reference is the transcendantal itself, which escapes in principle all possibilities of empirical experimentation and all the empirical in general, namely the event insofar it configures a world."36

If we look at his distinction between speech-acts in the sense of Austin or Searle and the event of speech (echoing Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s Sprachereignis), we understand even better the difference between the ordinary (empirical) concept of experience and the transcendental or hermeneutical concept: Instead of expressing a meaning we have already understood, "speaking means an ordeal of understanding, insofar all understanding cannot at all become actualized as such before its becoming an adventure and an event through speakin."37

This phenomenological and hermeneutic description of the event of language profoundly upsets the current representations and theories of ‘communication." Taken in the strong sense of the word, the structuring events of human experience—suffering, dying, loving, maybe praying or believing—are "incommunicable," which does not at all mean that we lack the words to express them. This can be verified a contrario by the example of the events which the mass media present daily to us on our televisions or in the newspapers. Events are scoops: their meaning consists in nothing more than in their exciting novelty. But let us not forget that Heidegger’s description of inauthentic modes of existing has nevertheless a positive, ontological meaning. In the same way, I would claim that even the caricature of meaningful events that journalism presents to us day by day (Romano describes them through such phenomenological hallmarks as: "new, actual, vanishing, far-away, spectacular, anonymous")38 reminds us paradoxically of the fact that there exist other events through which each life becomes an unique adventure.

If we take the word experience in this phenomenological and hermeneutical sense, we should also have a close look upon its temporal structure. This is the aim of Romano’s second book entitled: L’événement et le temps. He characterizes the event as being "1/ absolutly new; 2/ having an immemorial self-evidence; 3/ whose ultimate meaning is not yet determinated once and for all."39  He tries to replace Heidegger’s description of the "extatic and horizontal" structures of care by other "dimensional structures of time"40  better fitted to his understanding of events. In this context, he introduces the beautiful expression of "temporal escapings"41  that liberate us from the traps of the image of horizontality.

His analysis of these temporal dimensions can be read against the background of Saint Augustin’s description of a "threefold present": that of the past (reminiscing), that of the future (expectation),and that of the present (attention). A hermeneutic understanding of events leads to a new understanding of each of these "presents." Regarding our relation to the past, Romano distinguishes sharply a phenomenology of reminiscence and a phenomenology of memories. Memories are images of former states of matter: The true reminiscence does not deal with the factual past, but only with "possibilities."42  Thus "memory is first of all the ordeal of events: they and they alone open up the dimension of that which deserves being memorized as such. Therefore memory is not the subjective ability to conserve and to select memories."43 

This remarkable description has also consequences regarding our relationship to the future. Taken in the strong sense of the word, events cannot be foreseen. Each one takes us by surprise. This is why Romano distinguishes between "expectation" and "readiness" ("disponibilité"). An expectation, however indeterminate it may be, neutralizes the surprise of the event, whereas openness is the originary experience of the future.44  I am not sure to what extent I can subscribe to this distinction. Did the Messianic expectations of the Jews neutralize the surprise constituted by the appearance and behaviour of Jesus Christ? The example of John the Baptist asking Jesus a question full of anxiety: "Are you the One who must come?" while he was in the prison of Herod, expecting his death, suggests the contrary.

Romano would probably reply to my objection that even in this case we still have to do with a weak meaning of the notion of surprise, a meaning he assimilates to a "deceived expectation."45  He himself postulates a hyperbolic concept of being surprised. This happens only when the human being (whom he calls consequently "advenant") ‘is confronted with the primordial ordeal of his inability to understand when his world is vacillating.46 It is precisely on such occasions that we discover an openess consisting of an "expectation," which is open to everything because it expects nothing and which can accept everything because it aims at nothing, at no fact whatever.47

Only in this attitude, which is neither expecting nor projecting, are we really open to the future as such and ready for all coming events.48  Although Romano stresses that there is a fundamental difference between his hermeneutics which focuses on events in this strong sense of the word and Heidegger’s Daseinsanalytik,49 we should not forget that in his later texts (for instance in Gelassenheit) Heidegger makes a similar distinction between Warten and Erwarten. Romano himself ends his inquiry with an apologia of the attitude of serenity! In my opinion, we should probably ask Romano the same question I addressed to Heidegger’s thinking 20 years ago, and which I had also in mind during the Cerisy la-Salle decade dedicated in 1995 to Professor Jean Ladrière: To what extent can a "hermeneutics of events" help us to answer Kant’s question: "What am I allowed to hope?"

This does not prevent me from agreeing totally with Romano’s critical remarks regarding Heidegger’s understanding of "resoluteness," to which he opposes his thesis that the Augustinian "present of the present" means being constantly open to the possibility of a transformation that has its roots in the possibility that constitutes the event as such.50

Understood in this way, the future, the present, and the past appear to constitute the fundamental conditions of appearance of each event and every "ex-per-ience" in the phenomenological sense of the word, an experience that cannot be understood as a mode of a constant presence.51

Those who feel a bit startled by Romano’s project of an "herméneutique événementiale" could ponder upon the categories of space of experience and horizon of expectation introduced by Reinhart Koselleck,52  which play an important role in Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of historicity. In his opinion, they are "meta-historical categories on the level of a philosophical anthropology,"53 "true transcendantals which help us to understand the essence of history."54

Perhaps they help us also to better understand the experience of truth by different cultures. Each culture relies upon its own space of experience and has its specific horizon of expectation. The important thing is their absence of symmetry: "Experiences aim at integration, expectations aim at opening perspectives."55 This is how Ricoeur glosses Koselleck’s thesis: "Gehegte Erwartungen sind¸berholbar, gemachte Erfahrungen werden gesammelt," which I suggest translating literally by: "The expectations we have nourished can be surmounted, the experiences we have made must be brought together."

Ricoeur draws the following "permanent ethical and political consequences."56 "Our task is to prevent the tension between these two opposite poles becoming a schism," which leads to two complementary maxims: "resisting the seduction of purely utopic expectations,"57  and "resisting the narrowing of the space of experience."58  If we follow Ricoeur in rejecting the idea "that the future is totally open and contingent and that the past is definitely closed and necessary," we are invited to "make our expectations more determinate and our experiences more indeterminate."59 Does not this twofold maxim apply also to all intercultural dialogue dealing with the historical experiences of truth?

At the end of these exploratory reflections, some words taken from Paul Celan’s discourse The Meridian come to mind. Echoing the exclamation of Büchner’s Danton: "Oh, Art!," Celan says that these words can be understood with different accentuations: "the acute of today, the gravis of history . . . the circumflex—the sign of extension—of the Eternal."60  I would say something similar of the exclamation: "Oh, Truth!" According to the experiences we are involved in, it must be understood with the circumflex of Eternity, the gravis of historicity, and, above all, the acute accent of responsibility.

  1Robert Joly, Platon ou Pythagore ? Héraclide Pontique, fr. 87-88 Wehrli in: Hommage à Marie Delcourt, Collection Latomus 114 (Bruxelles: Latomus, 1970), pp. 136-148.

 2Werner Jaeger, "Über Ursprung und Kreislauf des philosophischen Lebensideals," in: Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse (1928), pp. 390-421.

 3Walter Burkert, "Platon oder Pythagoras. Zum Ursprung des Wortes ‘Philosophie,’" in: Hermes 88 (1960), pp. 159-177.

  4Banquet 204 a.

  5Phèdre 278 d.

  6Martin Heidegger, Einleitung in die Philosophie, Ga 27, p. 5.

  7Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire. Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

 8Pierre Hadot, Qu’est-ce que philosophie antique ? (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), folio-essais; id, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique (Paris: Bibliothèque des Etudes augustiniennes, 2 1992).

 9André-Jean Voelke, La philosophie comme thérapie de l’âme. Etudes de philosophie hellénistique (Paris-Fribourg: Ed. du Cerf, 1994).

  10Jean-Pierre Changeux/Paul Ricoeur, Ce qui nous fait penser. La nature et la règle (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1998), p. 69.

  11Ibid., p. 71-72.

  12William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature, Longmans/Green, London, 102, p. 15.

 13Cf. Martin Heidegger, Ga 59, 96. Pour une analyse plus détaillée du programme heideggérien de " déconstruction phénoménologique ", dans le contexte de son " herméneutique de la vie facticielle ", je renvoie à mon ouvrage L’arbre de vie et l’arbre du savoir. Les racines phénoménologiques de l’herméneutique heideggérienne, Paris, Ed. du Cerf, 2000, p. 97-110.

 14Paul Veyne, Les Grecs ont-ils cru à leurs mythes ?, Paris, Ed. du Seuil, 1983, p. 11.

 15Jacques Derrida, Eperons. Styles de Nietzsche, Paris, Flammarion,

 16"La déesse Vérité. Histoire du plus long oubli " in : Jean Greisch (éd.), La Vérité, Paris, Ed. Beauchêne,1983, p. 43-60.

 17Agamemnon, 177.

 18Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Warheit und Methode, G.S. 1, p. 361-362, trad. fr. Vérité et Méthode, p. 378-379.

 19"er-fahren" - auf der Fahrt des Lebens erringen" (Ga 58, 67).

  20"L’itinéraire spirituel de Maître Eckhart" in : Revue de l’Institut Catholique n° 28 (ocotbre-décembre 1988) 65-81.

 21Michel de Certeau, La Fable mystique. XVIe-XVIIe siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 1982.

  22G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopédie des sciences philosophiques, § 7 Remarque cf. § 38, remarque.

 23Wahrheit und Methode, G.S. I, 66-76 pour le concept d’Erlebnis ; G.S. I, 352-366 pour le concept d’Erfahrung.

  24Ga 65, p. 123-124.

  25Pour la détermination du concept d’expérience, voir notamment : L’événement et le monde, Paris, P.U.F., 1998, p. 193-288.

  26L’événement et le monde, op. cit. p. 194-195.

  27Ibid., p. 198.

 28Ibid., p. 218.

 29Ibid., p. 200.

  30Ibid., p. 208.

 31Id.

 32Ibid., p. 209.

  33Ibid., p. 210.

  34Id.

  35Ibid., p. 211.

  36Ibid., p. 219.

 37Ibid., p. 220.

 38Ibid., p. 282.

 39L’événement et le temps, p. 179.

 40Ibid., p. 185.

 41Ibid., p. 200.

 42Ibid., p. 205.

 43Ibid., p. 208.

 44Ibid., § 14, p. 221-238.

 45Ibid., p. 223.

  46Ibid., p. 225.

  47Ibid., p. 226.

  48Ibid., p. 234.

  49Ibid., p. 229.

  50Ibid., p. 247.

  51Ibid., p. 270.

  52Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979).

 53Paul Ricoeur, Temps et Récit III (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1983), p. 309.

 54Ibid., p. 310.

 55Ibid., p. 302.

 56Ibid., p. 310

  57Ibid., p. 312.

 58Ibid., p. 313.

 59Id.

 60Paul Celan, Le méridien, trad. André du Bouchet, fata morgana (1995), p. 14.