A brief history of continental realism
Lee Braver
� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
Abstract This paper explains the nature and origin of what I am calling Trans-
gressive Realism, a middle path between realism and anti-realism which tries to
combine their strengths while avoiding their weaknesses. Kierkegaard created the
position by merging Hegel’s insistence that we must have some kind of contact with
anything we can call real (thus rejecting noumena), with Kant’s belief that reality
fundamentally exceeds our understanding; human reason should not be the criterion
of the real. The result is the idea that our most vivid encounters with reality come in
experiences that shatter our categories, the way God’s commandment to kill Isaac
irreconcilably clashes with the best understanding of ethics we are capable of. I
explain the genesis of this idea, and then show it at work in Heidegger and Levinas’
thought. Understanding this position illuminates important aspects of the history of
continental philosophy and offers a new perspective on realism.
Keywords Realism � Kierkegaard � Heidegger � Levinas � Kant � Hegel
Debates about realism have offered the somewhat peculiar spectacle of opponents
boasting about who has the greater humility. Realists, on the one hand, claim the
title of greater modesty since they allow reality to exceed what we do, will, and even
can know about it. Surely, they argue, it is the anti-realists who perpetrate
staggering, metaphysical hubris in cutting reality down to the sliver we have access
to.1 There is more in heaven and earth, goes the battle cry of the realists, than is
L. Braver (&)
Department of Philosophy, Hiram College, P.O. Box 67, Hiram, OH 44234, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
1 Critics accuse anti-realism of mistaking features of our epistemological limits for metaphysical features of
reality (Alston 2002, p. 27; McCormick 1996, p. 138, 173). This ‘‘solution to skepticism’’ is often criticized
for surrendering even more to the enemy than Kant did (Kulp 1997, p. 109; Searle 1995, pp. 167–168). See
Cooper (2002, p. 11–17) for a helpful survey of various discussions of humility and realism.
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DOI 10.1007/s11007-012-9220-2
dreamt of in your philosophy. Anti-realists, on the other hand, insist that theirposition is the one that genuinely respects reality by refusing to say anything about
it beyond, well, what we can say about it. As Hegel and early Wittgenstein argue,
grasping a limit thereby transgresses it, so the mere act of positing the existence of a
transcendent reality compromises its transcendence. Anti-realism should not be read
as raising doubts about the world’s independent existence or making claims about
the true nature of reality, i.e., that it actually is, and is no more than, the way we
experience it. On this reading, anti-realism is the almost tautological recognition of
the fact that our ways of conceiving reality are just that—our ways—from which we
lack the distance needed to purify them of our idiosyncrasies. The realists are the
ones who brazenly extend our all-too-human ways of thinking to reality independent
of our thoughts; even just saying that it exists applies our conception of existence.
Perhaps the paradigm of this mistake is Kant’s insistence that some kind of things
exist beyond our experience and knowledge of them, a claim that employs concepts
such as existence and substance that are supposed to apply only to phenomena.
I want to see if there might be a middle path between these views, perhaps one
that captures the best of each while avoiding the pitfalls of both. Surely, as the
realists assert, our understanding does not exhaust reality; if it did, how could we
discover anything new? Yet, with the anti-realists, I am wary of even modest claims
about a reality that entirely escapes our grasp, claims which seem immodest by their
very nature. In A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, I
spent some 500 pages showing that a number of important continental philosophers
have made a protracted defense, development, and deployment of anti-realism a
central element of their work. In this paper I want to argue, somewhat more briefly,
that an important strand of continental philosophy can be seen as an exploration and
extension of realism, albeit of a moderate and somewhat unusual sort. Let me
explain.
1 The history of continental realism in three steps
1.1 Step one: Kant and active mind
We can trace the development of Continental Realism through three basic steps,
each correlated with a particular thinker, beginning with Kant. On this topic, as on
so many, we are all his heirs, continuously squabbling over our rich, if problematic,
inheritance. Traditionally, epistemology has required the mind to be purely passive
in perception and knowledge, that it may reflect the world accurately without
introducing any distortions. Empiricism offers a straightforward example of this
idea—think of Locke’s blank paper on which experience writes—but some version
of the idea that interference prevents the mind from capturing reality as it really is
has been taken as self-evident by the vast majority of philosophers throughout
history.
Until Kant, that is. His Copernican Revolution inverts this model by changing an
unfortunate side-effect into the only possible foundation for true knowledge. Since,
as Hume shows, dependence on experience necessarily yields radical contingency,
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Kant frees us from this empiricist servility to nature.2 Only that which we put into
each experience can we be certain we will find in all experience.3 The problem of
mental meddling turns out to be the long sought for solution to skepticism. Let’s call
this first step Active Mind. This is not complete idealism, as Kant repeatedly insists;
he clings to the metaphysical modesty of noumena as an independent aspect of
reality4 which forms the external source of sensory data.5 This bulwark against
idealism progressively crumbles over the next century.
1.2 Step two: Hegel and objective idealism
As so often happens, a brilliant solution to a difficult problem soon sprouts problems
of its own. Fixing the difficulties that the Copernican Revolution brings in its wake
became the job of German Idealism, which I will examine via Hegel’s work
(a distortive telescoping, I know). While Hegel admires Kant immensely, he feels
that Kant stopped short of the true conclusion of his thought, disastrously short, in
fact. Kant founds, and founders on, what Hegel calls ‘‘subjective idealism’’ which
secures phenomenal knowledge at the price of a deeper, more secure skepticism that
places reality in-itself forever beyond our ken.6 For what shall it profit a
philosopher, if he shall gain the whole world of phenomena, and lose reality in-
itself? The knowledge Kant purchased turns out to be counterfeit: We can circulate
this phenomenal currency amongst ourselves, but there is no way to cash it in for
anything of true value.7 The desire to reach reality as it really is—the only goal
worthy of philosophy—stands condemned as the source of metaphysical illusions.
The better conclusion, for Hegel, is to reject the very idea of noumena by
showing that the conceptual framework that makes it seem sensible is in fact
incoherent. As some have felt upon concluding Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, if we
really cannot speak of these matters, then shouldn’t we pass over them in complete
silence? Saying anything about them—e.g., that they are not spatial or temporal,
that they are the source of empirical data, or even that they exist—goes too far.
Positing a transcendent realm violates the stricture against saying anything about it,
which was part of its transcendence in the first place.8 Once we have rid ourselves of
2 Hume’s ‘‘empirical derivation… cannot be reconciled with the scientific a priori knowledge which we
do actually possess, namely pure mathematics and general science of nature; and this fact therefore
suffices to disprove such derivation.’’ Kant (1965, p. B128).3 Kant (1965, pp. Bxii, Bxviii, Bxx, A122, A125, A177/B220, A196/B241).4 Kant (1965, pp. Bxxvi, A288/B344–5, A827/B855).5 Kant (1965, pp. A190/B235, A288/B344).6 Hegel (1969, pp. 44, 155–156, 587–593, 742, 842; 1977b, p. 144/§238; 1977a, p. 115; 1975, pp. 65/
§40, 256/§192R, 284/§226).7 ‘‘Objectivity of thought, in Kant’s sense, is again to a certain extent subjective. Thoughts, according to
Kant, although universal and necessary categories, are only our thoughts—separated by an impassable
gulf from the thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge.’’ Hegel (1975, p. 67/§41R2, see also Ibid.,
pp. 35/§22R, 93–94/§60R1; 1977a, 81, 96–97, 187; 2002, pp. 26/§13S, 45/§44, 117/§140, 209/§272;
1969, pp. 45, 62, 163, 327, 507, 756, 593, 779–780, 785; 1977b, pp. 47/§73, 72/§44, 88–89/§146, 145/
§238, 162/§112).8 ‘‘It argues an utter want of consistency to say, on the one hand, that the understanding only knows
phenomena, and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this knowledge, by such statements as
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the ‘‘really real’’ reality that supplies an invidious contrast, we are free to consider
the world we encounter as the world full stop, as Nietzsche argues in his famous
‘‘How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable.’’9 This is less a metaphysical or
epistemological point than a conceptual one: Removing one side of a contrast
fundamentally alters the meaning of the remaining side, up to and including the idea
that it is a side. Dismantling the way Kant sets up the issue removes the conceptual
resources that demote the reality we experience to ‘‘just’’ for-us. As Heidegger says
of ‘‘mere appearance:’’ ‘‘probably no word has caused as much havoc and confusion
in philosophy.’’10
In fact, the status of empirical data in Kant’s system is highly problematic. It
balances precariously on a knife’s edge: In one direction, its entrance into the mind
ab extra moves it close to noumena; the other side (which surfaces in the fact that
the sensible manifold must have certain features just to be amenable to the mind’s
organizing of it)11 seems to bring raw sensory data into the system of experience
which ‘‘cooks’’ them, turning the in-itself into an in-itself-for-us. Subjective
idealism, when thought through all the way, undermines itself and turns into
Objective Idealism which admits no absolute transcendence. The historical journey
of consciousness is the progressive ‘‘en-souling’’ (the spiritual counterpart to
‘‘incorporation’’) of reality, whereby Geist assimilates everything that initially
appears to be outside of us, cancelling its apparent independence while raising it to a
higher, spiritual level.12 Kant’s Copernican Revolution exposed the activity of
consciousness in scientific knowledge; Hegel extends this involvement to every
aspect of experience and knowledge, which eliminates all lingering noumenal
residue.13 Ultimately, the project brings Geist to the realization that it has been
realizing itself all along, culminating in this very realization. If, for Kant, Hume
woke up scientific and mathematical knowledge, Hegel aims at nothing less than
awakening all of reality to itself, to its true inner nature.14 Let’s call this second step
Objective Idealism.
The current of history for Hegel takes up what initially appear to be mere natural
facts in various dimensions of life and progressively invests them with meaning,
Footnote 8 continued
‘Cognition can go no further’; ‘Here is the natural and absolute limit of human knowledge.’… No one
knows, or even feels, that anything is a limit or defect, until he is at the same time above and beyond it.’’
Hegel (1975, pp. 91–92/§60).9 ‘‘The true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no!
With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.’’ Nietzsche (1954, p. 486, italics in
original). For Hegel’s version, see Hegel (1969, pp. 36, 49, 62–63, 69, 76, 531, 639, 756; 1977b, 98/§159,
151/§249, 246/§409; 1975, pp. 185/§128R–129, 223/§160, 226/§162, 261/§194R2, 274/§212, 275/§213,
291/§234R).10 Heidegger (1992, p. 81).11 Kant (1965, pp. B160n.a, A654/B682).12 ‘‘Spirit insinuates itself into worldliness in all respects.’’ Hegel (2002, p. 215/§274, see also 1977b,
p. 102/§164).13 Hegel (1969, p. 605; 2002, p. 263/§360; 1975, pp. 34–35/§22R–§23, 284/§226R, 290/§232R; 1977b,
pp. 21/§37, 37/§60, 55/§87, 71–72/§118, 79/§132, 101/§163, 102/§164).14 Hegel (1969, pp. 586, 607–608, 843; 1975, pp. 15/§11, 292–293/§237R; 1977b 49/§77).
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turning brute givens into civilized establishments: Education and socialization turn
mere homo sapiens into persons,15 funeral ceremonies change death from a natural
to a cultural event,16 property rights make inert physical objects into bearers of
abstract meanings such as ownership and rights,17 marriage introduces the state and
the church into mere breeding,18 founding a state allows a herd of animals to
become a self-governing nation,19 and so on. Collectively, these processes raise
humanity from a species to a people, retroactively assimilating the natural state and
raw sensory data that initially got the whole thing going, thus accepting the idealist
horn of Kant’s dilemma.20 Geist encrusts cultural significance onto natural events or
processes, like an oyster encasing a foreign fragment in layer after layer of pearl
until the gritty sand dissolves, leaving just pearl within pearl. Our long, bloody past
has actually been ‘‘the incorporation of reason into reality; this has been the labor of
all world history;’’21 all this seemingly random, useless suffering turns out to be the
labor pains of Geist’s protracted birth. At bottom, history is the cultivation of
culture, the civilizing of brute facts, the spiritual transubstantiation of the entire
universe.
Hegel is, in many ways, the first philosopher to incorporate time and history into
philosophy as positive elements rather than unfortunate accidents. The flow of
temporal events no longer represents a lower realm we have stumbled into,
searching mournfully for traces of our true home while looking to escape to a higher
reality; he proclaims this as the only reality that merits the name. Where Kant
argues that the only knowledge we can have is that which results from our own
faculties’ organization, Hegel believes that we can only live in a world we have over
time made into our home.22 However, this entire process is packed in potentia into
its beginning point.23 While many details are left to happenstance, history’s broad
outline unfurls a pre-determined pattern, the way a monad’s perceptions just
15 Hegel (2002, p. 53/§57, see also Ibid., pp. 40/§35, 65/§71, 112/§139, 130/§151, 130/§151–153, 141/
§174, 158/§200, 241/§308; 1953, p. 50n. 13).16 Hegel (1977b, pp. 270–271/§452, 459/§759, 475/§784; 2002, p. 64/§70).17 Hegel (2002, pp. 55/§58, 84/§101).18 Hegel (2002, pp. 132/§158, 133/§161, 135/§164; 1977b, 273/§456).19 ‘‘The state is spirit standing within the world and consciously realizing itself therein, whereas in nature
it actualizes itself only as its own other, only as sleeping spirit.’’ Hegel (2002, p. 192/§258, see also Ibid.,
p. 260/§349; 1977b p. 270/§451).20 ‘‘Consciousness, however, as essence is this whole process itself, of passing out of itself as simple
category… into the object, and of contemplating this process in the object, nullifying the object as distinct
[from it], appropriating it as its own, and proclaiming itself as this certainty of being all reality, of being
both itself and its object.’’ Hegel (1977b, p. 144/§237, see also Ibid., p. 102/§164; 2002, pp. 142/§175,
150–151/§187, 260/§352; 1969, pp. 39, 60, 536, 587, 597, 611, 732–733, 755, 801, 823; 1975, pp. 65/§40,
66/§41).21 Hegel (2002, p. 201/§270, see also Ibid., pp. 210/§272, 259/§346; 1977b, pp. 16/§28, 214/§352; 1953,
pp. 11, 23, 31.22 Hegel (1953, pp. 51, 69, 90; 1975, p. 199/§140R; 1977b, p. 10/§18).23 Hegel (1969, pp. 71, 74, 330, 835; 1975, pp. 43–45/§24R3, 221/§159, 224/§161R, 276/§213R; 1977b,
pp. 16/§28, 32–33/§53, 479–480/§798, 485/§797, 491/§806). This process culminates in consciousness
becoming in actuality what it has been potentially. Hegel (1977b, pp. 14/§25, 487/§802; 1969, pp. 536,
748).
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unspool the range of its defining function. Hegel includes time in thought and reality
but only after it has been domesticated, confining all change within rational guard-
rails that eliminate the possibility of deep surprise or unforeseeable novelty. In other
words, the Phenomenology as a whole represents an Aufhebung of time itself,
canceling it while preserving a higher, more rational and controlled form of it. If
time, for Plato, is a moving image of eternity, Hegel’s eternity is the mere image of
time, robbed of all movement.24
1.3 Step three: Kierkegaard and transgressive realism
By jettisoning the very idea of noumena, Hegel’s Objective Idealism takes the scare
quotes off of Kant’s phenomenal ‘‘knowledge,’’ and it does so without resorting to a
God’s-eye view. Without even the conceptual possibility of a world beyond this
world, a meta-physis realm, this becomes the only one that can sensibly be
considered the world, turning knowledge of it into knowledge simpliciter. And this
is where the third step of continental philosophy begins, born of Kierkegaard’s
bottomless outrage. While Hegel does not inflate the knower to fill the role formerly
occupied by an omniscient God, his deflation of the known and the knowable to
what fits our grasp represents the flip side of this pre-critical hubris.
A product of our unchanging transcendental faculties,25 Kant’s phenomenal
world can never genuinely surprise us, not in any deep sense. We may have to find
out the particular size of a planet on the far side of the galaxy empirically, but
armchair astronomy assures us that it will conform to Euclidean geometry. Its basic
structure anticipated in advance, new information can never rise above superficial
novelty.26 Noumena may harbor qualities that would stun our thoughts but, for that
very reason, they never will27; intuition and understanding make our experience
intelligible and, simultaneously, shear off all that cannot be incorporated into the
lawful regularity of nature.28
24 Hegel (1977b, pp. 27–28/§47). Hegel often uses the trope of a circle to capture this idea (1969, pp. 71,
149, 537, 569, 842; 1977b, pp. 10/§18, 488/§802; 1975, p. 23/§17).25 Securing the complete set of forms of intuition concepts of understanding and is very important to
Kant. He regards his enterprise as ‘‘the only one of all the sciences which dare promise that through a
small but concentrated effort it will attain… such completion as will leave no task to our successors…without their being able to add anything whatsoever to its content. For it is nothing but the inventory of all
our possessions through pure reason, systematically arranged. In this field nothing can escape us. What
reason produces entirely out of itself cannot be concealed.’’ Kant (1965, p. Axx, see also Ibid., pp. Bxxiii–
xxiv, Bxxxviii, Axiv, B23, A13/B27, A64/B90, B79, A83/B109, A148/B187–8, A338/B396, A403,
A462/B490, A591/B619, A676/B704, A805/B833, A847/B875).26 ‘‘Sensation is just that element which cannot be anticipated. On the other hand, we might very well
entitle the pure determinations in space and time… anticipations of appearances, since they represent
a priori that which may always be given a posteriori in experience.’’ Kant (1965, p. A167/B209, see also
Ibid., pp. A217/B264, A246/B303, A762/B790, A767/B795).27 See Kant (1965, pp. A253/B309, A770/B799). Kant says that God does not tell us the great mysteries
of the universe ‘‘for such knowledge cannot inhere in us at all because our understanding is by nature
unsuited to it.’’ Kant (1960, p. 135n., see also Ibid., p. 159).28 ‘‘That all events in the sensible world stand in thorough-going connection in accordance with
unchangeable laws of nature is an established principle of the Transcendental Analytic, and allows of no
exception.’’ Kant (1965, p. A536/B564, see also Ibid., pp. A216/B263, A227/B280, A419/B446n. b;
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Hegel’s historical development of Geist loosens Kant’s insistence that there be
only one set of forms and concepts for all humans, allowing thought and reality to
evolve into new shapes. When surveyed as a whole, however, this apparent variety
snaps together into a circle which hermetically seals in the set of all possible ways
of thinking as tightly as Kant’s single set. By eliminating even the possibility of
objects and facts that escape us, Hegel insures that the world and the good are and
can only be what we can and will understand them to be. In principle, nothing can
escape our reach except towards a future grasping. Applying this view to ethics
yields Hegel’s belief that there is no great difficulty in knowing the right thing to do,
labeling Kierkegaardian anguish self-indulgent histrionics avant la existentialiste.29
If you want to know how you should act, simply examine the laws of your
government and the mores of your community, as they represent the highest form of
Geist available at any time.30
Like the realists, Kierkegaard objects to the way this view reduces the universe to
human-sized proportions. While Kant believes in noumena, our inability to know
anything about them renders them ‘‘nothing to us.’’31 Anything that we can know
anything about must make contact with us via intuition,32 which phenomenalizes it.
Hegel calls Geist’s final stage ‘‘absolute’’ knowing not because it is omniscient, but
because at that point, having traversed the length and breadth of history, the mind
has freed itself of relations to anything truly external (ab solus) or, perhaps more
accurately, of the illusion that it ever was related to anything truly external:
‘‘Thought is always in its own sphere: its relations are with itself, and it is its own
object.’’33 Consciousness begins its journey ‘‘infected with otherness,’’34 but its
Footnote 28 continued
1995, pp. 29/412, 73/455). Indeed, removing potentially disruptive issues such as God, freedom, and
immortality from empirical scientific investigation is an important part of the project (Kant (1965, pp.
Bxxx, A255/B310–1)).29 ‘‘It became the habit some time ago… to heap every kind of slander on the Notion, on what is supreme
in thought, while the incomprehensible and non-comprehension are, on the contrary, regarded as the
pinnacle of science and morality.’’ Hegel (1969, p. 583, see also Ibid., p. 648). Some have seen
premonitions of Kierkegaard in ‘‘The Unhappy Consciousness’’ sections of Hegel (1977b, pp. §207–230,
see also 2002, pp. 5–6, 128/§149).30 Hegel’s position is somewhat more sophisticated than this. Up to the final one, each stage of Geist’sdevelopment is flawed, which continually spurs it on to higher realizations of truth and goodness. World-
historical individuals are right to violate contemporary standards because their breaking the contemporary
rules is what allows in the next, better phase. However, these individuals are extremely rare and, as
Kierkegaard points out, one can only know whether one is a Napoleon or an Al Capone retrospectively,
which is of no help at the moment of decision. Therefore, the only standards available to the vast majority
of people reside in their community’s accepted facts and norms, draining the search for truth of all
melodrama and controversy. ‘‘What special course of action is good or not, right or wrong, is determined,
for the ordinary circumstances of private life, by the laws and customs of a state. It is not too difficult to
know them.’’ Hegel (1953, p. 37, see also Ibid., pp. 53, 87; 2002, p. 128/§150).31 Kant (1965, p. A105, see also Ibid., pp. A42/B59, A251–2, A370–1, A287–8/B344, A383).32 ‘‘If knowledge is to have objective reality, that is, to relate to an object, and is to acquire meaning and
significance in relation to it, the object must be capable of being in some manner given.’’ Kant (1965, p.
A155/B194, see also Ibid., p. A492/B520).33 Hegel (1975, p. 49/§28R, see also 1977a, pp. 96–97, 101, 112; 1969, p. 158).34 Hegel (1969, p. 395).
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odyssey progressively cures it of this affliction, turning Geist into a cosmic solipsist
somewhat like Aristotle’s thought thinking itself except that, for Hegel, thinking
absorbs the objects thought into the thinker. Kant and Hegel tame otherness,
scrupulously confining all of thought’s excursions within strict boundaries. They
domesticate free-range thinking in order to prevent transcendental illusions and bad
infinities, leaving us with ‘‘an otherness which is superseded in the act of grasping
it,’’ which really means that ‘‘otherness as an intrinsic being vanishes.’’35
In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard36 frames his critique of these ideas
by distinguishing the Platonic epistemological model from the Christian. Most
philosophers adhere to the Platonic definition of knowledge as an explicit
re-cognition of what we already implicitly know.37 Kant and Hegel certainly
subscribe to this recollective model: Kant articulates the intellectual structures we
are always already employing unconsciously,38 while Hegel portrays the phenom-
enological journey as an instance of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny on the grand
scale, whereby we go over for-us or explicitly what Geist has already undergone
in-itself without self-awareness.39 Indeed, like Socrates’ eliciting geometric
reasoning from an uneducated slave, Hegel argues that his book could neither be
written nor understood unless Geist had already completed its first lap around the
track. Depending on his readers’ comprehension of his writings as proof of their
validity is not the safest of bets, to be sure, but then Hegel never suffered from an
excess of caution.
Kierkegaard contrasts this Platonic approach with what he considers to be
Christianity’s implicit epistemology: God entered history to deliver insights
precisely because we could not acquire them by our own resources. Platonic
teachers give only maieutic aid, serving as midwife to help interlocutors give birth
to knowledge already conceived within them, which matches the etymological
35 Hegel (1977b, pp. 143/§237, 140/§233, see also Ibid., pp. 21–22/§36–7, 56–57§89, 100/§162, 236/
§394, 481/§791, 491/§805; 2002, p. 19/§4; 1975, pp. 37/§24R1, 70/§42R3, 114/§80R, 186/§131, 201/
§142R, 228/§163R2, 273/§212; 1969, p. 390).36 I am, for the purposes of this paper, ignoring the problems involved in Kierkegaard’s use of
pseudonyms and will attribute views in the pseudonymous works to ‘‘Kierkegaard.’’ I am examining the
views in these works and whether or not the historical person held them is immaterial to my paper.37 ‘‘All learning and inquiry is interpreted as a kind of remembering; one who is ignorant needs only a
reminder to help him come to himself in the consciousness of what he knows. Thus the Truth is not
introduced into the individual from without, but was within him.’’ Kierkegaard (1962, p. 11).38 ‘‘A great, perhaps the greatest, part of the business of our reason consists in analysis of the concepts
which we already have of objects. This analysis supplies us with a considerable body of knowledge,
which, while nothing but explanation or elucidation of what has already been thought in our concepts,
though in a confused manner, is yet prized as being, at least as regards its form, new insight.’’ Kant (1965,
p. A5–6/B9, see also Ibid., pp. A313/B370ff.; 1993, 148/141). Since religion is fundamentally based on
morality which is in turn based on ‘‘reason alone,’’ even on topics like eternal life, ‘‘the teacher’s
exposition is only the occasion for [the learner] to develop them out of his reason’’ (Kant 1996, p. 263/
7:37, see also 1960, pp. 95, 142n.).39 ‘‘This is the complete, self-closing movement which has arrived at that which constituted the
beginning; what arises is the same as that from which the movement began, that is, the finite is restored; it
has therefore united with itself, has in its beyond only found itself again.’’ Hegel (1969, p. 147, see also
Ibid., pp. 701, 731, 759, 824; 2002, pp. 260–261/§352; 1977b, pp. 100/§162, 102/§164, 140–141/§233,
479–480/§798). Hegel sometimes uses the term ‘‘erinnert’’ to express Geist’s simultaneous recollection
and internalization (1969, p. 389).
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meaning of ‘‘educate’’ as ‘‘to draw out of.’’40 The Christian teacher on the other
hand brings us something we not only lack, but which we lack the ability to attain,
perhaps even to understand or become aware of. Rather than Hegel’s canceled and
incorporated otherness, these lessons represent ‘‘the different, the absolutely
different,’’41 which so exceeds our capacities that we cannot grasp it without a
profound change, undergoing something like a conversion rather than merely
acquiring a new fact. Socrates gives us conscious possession of what we already had
without realizing it, thereby helping us become who we are; God, on the other hand,
gives us a ‘‘New Birth.’’42 God’s momentous entrance into time, space, and womb
would hardly be warranted were it just to tell us something we already know or
could learn on our own. In direct contrast to Kant, Kierkegaard acknowledges
religion beyond the limits of reason alone.
Kierkegaard’s best known discussion of this kind of disruptive learning comes in
his analysis of Abraham and Isaac. While Hegel remains Kierkegaard’s arch-enemy,
Fear and Trembling apparently targets Kant’s necessary and universal morality
which lays down laws that cover everyone at all times, as opposed to Hegel’s moral
laws that change to some degree throughout history. If moral truths are perfectly
reasonable, then they lie within the reach of all rational creatures; this universal
access allows Kant to hold all rational agents responsible for complying with them,
whether their upbringing happened to expose them to the right rules or not.43 The
ethical sphere views the understandable as coterminous with the world or, as Hegel
puts it, the real is rational and the rational is real. We can no more face an insoluble
moral dilemma than we can perceive a non-Euclidean shape. At one point Kant
quotes Philippians 2:12 about working for salvation ‘‘with fear and trembling,’’ but
he advises readers to moderate their indulgence in these feelings lest they end up
‘‘driving a man to the blackest fanaticism.’’44 Furthermore, autonomy requires us to
come up with ethical laws on our own to avoid reliance on or obedience to an
40 Kierkegaard (1962, pp. 13, 64, 75).41 Kierkegaard (1962, p. 55, see also Ibid., pp. 16–17, 76, 80).42 Kierkegaard (1962, p. 23; see also 1992, p. 576). Interestingly, Kant uses similar language in ReligionWithin the Limits of Reason Alone, although the book’s title tells you how much tamer his analysis will be
(1960, pp. 43, 68, 71, 108, 119n.).43 Kant (1993, pp. 19/20–21, 24/25; 1995, pp. 5/389, 24/408, 26/410 n., 42/426, 59/442). Jesus’ birth
would seem to compromise universal access by unfairly depriving virtuous people who had the
misfortune of living before God’s historical manifestation. Kant gets around this by arguing that Jesus
represents only the archetype of a perfectly moral human. Morality is contained within us; ‘‘we need,
therefore, no empirical example to make the idea of a person morally well-pleasing to God our archetype;
this idea as an archetype is already present in our reason.’’ Kant (1960, p. 56, see also Ibid., pp. 57, 94,
100, 109–110, 123, 143–4, 150, see footnote 36 above). In a proto-Hegelian move, Kant states that over
time, religion purifies itself of all contingent, empirical appendages of tradition in favor of what each can
know by reason (Ibid., p. 112). Disarming this threat to universality by making the entire event gratuitous
including, as Kierkegaard reminds us, the passion and suffering of Christ, seems rather like throwing the
Baby Jesus out with the baptismal water.44 Kant (1960, p. 62, see also Ibid., pp. 79, 143, 147). Kant argues that what we may call ‘‘bounded
omniscience’’ applies to all transcendental questions. Kant (1965, pp. A477/B505, A695/B723, A763/
B791).
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external will.45 Thus, Kierkegaard’s analysis of this view is that for it, ‘‘the whole of
human existence is in that case entirely self-enclosed, as a sphere, and the ethical is
at once the limit and completion.’’46
The problem is that God commands Abraham to murder his son. Yes, He
reprieves Isaac at the last moment but—and Kierkegaard warns us against jumping
to the end of the story—He still subjects His most faithful subject to profoundly
cruel psychological abuse in order to test his faith, an experiment one would think
rendered gratuitous by omniscience, not to mention common decency. The ethical
sphere requires us to judge all actions, even His, by the standard of the universal law
discovered by our own faculties and, if He falls short, we are morally obligated to
condemn His action and disobey His commandment, a sacrilegious bullet that Kant
bites.47 The religious sphere, on the other hand, accepts and even emphasizes the
limitations of our comprehension, recognizing that a great deal surpasses our
understanding. Whereas Kant and Hegel place morality entirely within our reach,
Kierkegaard insists that we dare not claim to know all that morality is and can be. In
short, ethics and reason acquire an outside.48
Not only is there an outside, as Hegel denies, but we can encounter it, as Kant
denies; these encounters are in fact far more important than what we can come up
with on our own. The most important ideas are those that genuinely surprise us, not
in the superficial sense of discovering which one out of a determinate set of options
is correct, as the Kantian model allows, but by violating our most fundamental
beliefs and rupturing our basic categories. God doesn’t insert new content into
Abraham’s mental template, but shatters the categories of right and wrong as he had
understood them up to then, indeed as our most thorough investigations could
discover. Even if this one act could be isolated from all other actions—which it
can’t; this commandment changes Abraham’s usual obligations to explain and
justify his actions to others—the particular heinousness of the act God commands,
45 Kant explicitly compares the two: the mind’s structuring of experience into lawful nature without
‘‘appealing to the hyperphysical’’ (Kant (1965, p. A773/B801)) resembles the necessity ‘‘to discover the
principles of morality without depending for this discovery upon alien sources.’’ Kant (1965, p. A472/
B500, see also pp. A752/B780, A772/B800–A773/B801, A795/B824; 1993, pp. 132–133/126, 135–136/
129; 1995, pp. 52–53/435–436; 1960, pp. 3, 90).46 Kierkegaard (1985, p. 96, see also Ibid., p. 83).47 ‘‘Even the Holy One of the Gospel must be compared with our idea of moral perfection before He is
recognized as such.’’ Kant (1995, p. 24/408, see also Ibid., p. 60/443; 1965, pp. A583–4/B611–12,
A818–9/B846–7; 1960, pp. 81–82, 101n., 102–103, 131–134n., 142–143, 146, 157n., 174–175; 1985,
pp. 60, 85, 98). At times, Kant applies the Humean argument (concerning the possibility of miracles
breaking natural laws) to apparently divine immoral commands: no evidence that they actually come from
God could be strong enough to counteract our absolute, a priori knowledge of morality. It always makes
more sense to attribute the command to errors in the telling and copying of the ‘‘fact’’ in question like a
scriptural game of Telephone, or demons disguising themselves as divine agents (Kant 1960, pp. 91n.,
100–101, 175). Kant applies this argument specifically to the story of Abraham and Isaac (Ibid.,
pp. 81–82,175). At one point, Kant takes the uncompromising precedence of our morality over revelation
to mean that ‘‘every man creates a God for himself’’ since we must decide whether or not to recognize the
divinity of any deity empirically presented to us, with only our moral code to guide us (Ibid., p. 157n.).
Incidentally, Sartre uses the same argument to prove the futility of bad faith: even the attempt to
heteronomously submit to another’s will is freely chosen.48 ‘‘If this duty [to God—LB] is absolute the ethical is reduced to the relative.’’ Kierkegaard (1985,
p. 98).
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and the fact that there is no rational way to account for it, indicates that there is
something profoundly lacking in our understanding of good and evil as a whole. On
a Kantian universal ethics, a single exception would ruin ethics as a whole; we
would not simply be able to reinstate unchanged, say, the proscription of murder
after just one justified killing. ‘‘Here we see the need for a new category for
understanding Abraham’’49 since what makes him important is precisely the fact
that he doesn’t fit traditional models. The knight of faith must ‘‘bear the martyrdom
of unintelligibility:’’ Communication requires common categories, which are
precisely what the paradox of faith fractures.50 Humble acceptance of our finitude
entails accepting not just unknown facts, but the possibility of ideas that cannot fit
into the conceptual scheme that structures our most basic ways of thinking, thoughts
that exceed our thinking. Let us call this third step Transgressive Realism.
2 Relations among the steps
Having examined all three historical steps, we can now investigate more closely
how they relate to each other conceptually. Interestingly, while each step criticizes
the one before it, none rejects its predecessor tout court but rather develops certain
aspects of it in a kind of Aufhebung. In the first transition, Hegel insists that we
incorporate Kant’s insights, but by taking them beyond where Kant left them.
Specifically, Hegel retains Kant’s Active Mind while multiplying Kant’s single set
of transcendental faculties into the various moments or shapes of Geist and
removing noumena. Whereas Kant uses the contrast between organized phenomena
and untouched noumena to indicate the mind’s activity, Hegel points to the
historical variety of ways of thinking (correlated with ways the world appears) as
evidence of Geist’s activity. As I have argued in A Thing of This World, most
continental philosophers follow Hegel in rejecting noumena.
Kierkegaard’s Transgressive Realism accepts Hegel’s multiplication of Kant’s
single scheme, changing Hegel’s historical moments into an individual’s Stages on
Life’s Way or Spheres of Existence that shape all of her thoughts and values.
However, Kierkegaard infinitely increases the division between them, replacing
Hegel’s rational internal development with passionate leaps among ways of life so
incommensurable that no rational account of the transitions among them can be
given. What’s distinctive about this third step is that, while limiting our
comprehension, like Kant, it does not rely on a metaphysical reality cut off from
our awareness in principle to do so. Kierkegaard’s transcendence does not repose in
undisturbed isolation, but makes contact with us. This experience is not squeezed
into our mental structures but violates them, overloading and reshaping our
categories. This violation is a sign of their externality since everything we can
conceive remains the offspring of our concepts and so retains a family resemblance.
49 Kierkegaard (1983, p. 88).50 Kierkegaard (1985, p. 107). By contrast, ‘‘the Hegelian philosophy assumes there is no justified
concealment, no justified incommensurability.’’ Kierkegaard (1985, p. 109, see also Ibid., pp. 55, 89, 99,
137–139).
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Rather than the wholly independent noumenal realm that Hegel rightly rejects, these
are experiences that shatter our ways of understanding experience, exceeding our
comprehension but not escaping our awareness. Thus, Kierkegaard’s view combines
Kant’s admission of limitations on our (metaphysical) understanding with Hegel’s
rejection of noumena, without thereby falling into the latter’s arrogant anti-realism.
As I mentioned in my opening, realists and anti-realists fight over who is more
humble. The realist acceptance of non-epistemic truths, i.e., facts that transcend our
knowledge in principle, represents one way of acknowledging our limitations,
refusing the anti-realists’ attempt to purchase omniscience on the cheap by denying
anything outstripping our faculties. Anti-realists object that realists make claims
about that which transcends us, even just to assert its existence and inaccessibility,
thus overstepping the very epistemological limitations they are trying to draw; true
humility swears off all talk of the beyond.
Transgressive Realism, I am arguing, offers a via media, a way to have our
ineffable cake and eff it too. It gives us a reality that transcends our ways of
thinking, but not all access to it. These aporetic experiences enter our awareness not
through pathways prepared by our Active Minds but in spite of them, short-
circuiting our anticipatory thought processes and violating the recollective model of
learning that has haunted philosophy since Meno’s slave learned a little math.
Sometimes these strange ideas transform our very way of thinking, reshaping our
categories around their non-Euclidean shapes, but the ‘‘best’’ permanently escape
attempts to classify them. These are the wild thoughts that continue to buck all
domestication, escaping stable categories; these are the ideas prized by so many
continental thinkers, which helps explain what may look like willful obfuscation
and thumbing their nose at basic rational principles. Many of these figures do
cultivate the irrational in a sense, but for eminently sensible reasons, once the full
conceptual context has been laid out.
3 Transgressive realism and some philosophers
Now I want to, with criminal brevity, show how two prominent continental
philosophers adopt and adapt Kierkegaard’s Transgressive Realism by developing a
heterodox form of phenomenology. My intention here is to apply the template I
have sketched out above to a couple of examples in order to demonstrate its
hermeneutic worth.51 Hopefully, my scheme will clarify how these diverse thinkers,
prone to inventing entirely new vocabularies, relate to each other, and perhaps
justify their oft-reviled tendency to dwell on ideas that break standard rules.
We will start with Heidegger who, in addition to being the indispensable
continental thinker, presents a particularly interesting case. His early work employs
the Kantian and Hegelian moves, while his later thought embraces Kierkegaard’s, so
that his Kehre or change from early to later work reenacts the move from Objective
51 In the book I am presently writing on this topic, I will discuss, at a somewhat less culpable length,
other philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Marion, Nancy, Speculative Realists and Quentin
Meillassoux, as well as horror literature and avant-garde theatre.
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Idealism to Transgressive Realism. To be clear, I am not claiming that his turn was
inspired by Kierkegaard; his early work does borrow, if not steal a number of ideas
from Kierkegaard and, to the extent he was capable, Heidegger acknowledges the
debt,52 whereas Kierkegaard seems absent from his later work. Rather, I am arguing
that Heidegger’s thought follows a development similar to the latter two steps
outlined above, and so can be understood as embodying a form of Transgressive
Realism.
3.1 Heidegger and being’s questionable sendings
Being and Time’s analysis of Dasein as the foundation of all ontology repeats the
first Critique’s basic strategy of accounting for our knowledge by appealing to our
transcendental faculties. Heidegger broadens the range of what needs to be
accounted for beyond math and science to include, and arguably prioritize, our
everyday interactions with mundane equipment and other people, and changes
transcendental faculties into existentialia, but the plan is basically the same.53
Heidegger never tires of insisting that we are able to encounter and interact
appropriately with various kinds of beings—specifically, tools, inert objects, and
people—in virtue of our tacit grasp of the ways such beings are. This implicit or
‘‘pre-ontological’’ sense of what it means to be a certain kind of entity guides all of
our particular or ‘‘ontic’’ expectations of and interactions with those entities so that,
e.g., I ask my wife’s permission before taking some of her cash, but I do not do so to
an ATM. These ontologies collectively constitute our overall understanding of being
in the sense of being proficient at living a human life.54 All Dasein possess this
know-how because our being-in-the-world involves constant dealings with these
diverse kinds of beings; Oliver Sacks’ patients notwithstanding, we rarely mistake
people for tools or vice versa. Like Kant’s a priori forms and concepts, a similarity
Heidegger notes,55 these understandings of being logically precede encounters with
particular entities because they make such encounters possible; we could never
empirically derive categories from experience because, without the categories, we
would not perceive them as types of beings to examine and generalize from in the
first place.
Heidegger points to the way altering our attitude from absorbed coping to
disengaged observation induces a correlative change-over in the being’s mode of
being from ready-to-hand tool to present-at-hand object as evidence of Active Mind.
His background in phenomenology, which equates beings with phenomena and
being with appearing or manifesting, places him squarely among the enemies of
noumena. Phenomenology’s implicit ontology, which Heidegger considers the only
legitimate ontology, agrees with Objective Idealism in restricting reality to what we
can encounter, which means the kinds of beings that fit our pre-ontological
52 Heidegger (1962, pp. 492n. iv, 494n. vi, 497 n. iii).53 I discuss this point and show where it can be found in the primary and secondary literature in Braver
(2007, pp. 176–181, 187, 221–225, 273–275, 284, 502–504, 508, 532n9).54 Heidegger (1962, p. 183/143).55 Heidegger (1962, pp. 54–55/31).
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understanding of being.56 Moreover, Being and Time limits the role of history to
offering new roles that can be taken up into Dasein’s apparently unchanging
structure. There is no sign that Dasein could undergo any profound change that
would alter its basic makeup, nor does it seem that we could discover new modes of
being.
In his later work, however, Heidegger worries about this encompassing formal
anticipation, which he now sees as pervasive in modern culture and which he often
links to the scientific attitude and the essence of technology. Science is reductive in
that it sifts through the wide variety of qualities we experience for those that lend
themselves to scientific control; those features are then dubbed real while the rest
are consigned to the ontological graveyard of subjective consciousness. ‘‘Science
always encounters only what its kind of representation has admitted beforehand as
an object possible for science.’’57
Like many others, Heidegger lays much of the blame at Descartes’ feet for
distinguishing primary from secondary qualities by the criterion of quantifiability
since this kind of measurability is what enables scientific control.58 In a lecture
course on Kant, Heidegger says that mathematics are just one subset of the Greek
mathemata, which he defines in terms of the recollective model as ‘‘the things
insofar as we take cognizance of them as what we already know them to be in
advance, the body as the bodily, the plant-like of the plant…. This genuine learning
is therefore an extremely peculiar taking, a taking where one who takes only takes
what he actually already has.’’59 Descartes’ technological and epistemological
aspirations dictate his ontology, fitting experience onto the Procrustean bed of utility
and refusing to acknowledge anything else as real, precisely what Transgressive
Realism accuses Objective Idealism of.
We can find Heidegger’s objection to this approach in the two implicit criticisms
‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’ levels at Being and Time. First, as discussed
above, Being and Time only recognizes two modes of being in addition to
Dasein’s—ready-to-hand tools and present-at-hand objects. The important first
section of ‘‘Origin,’’ which usually gets overlooked, consists in a series of attempts
to analyze artworks in terms of each of these two categories as well as a blend of the
two, only to discover that each category smuggles in assumptions from ontological
regions foreign to art. When he actually looks at an artwork, however, it teaches him
a new and unique way of being that can neither be reduced to nor constructed out of
56 Heidegger (1962, pp. 60/35–6, 193/152, 228/183, 251/207, 255–256/212, 269/226, 414/362).57 Heidegger (1971, p. 170; see also 2003, pp. 72, 75; 1991, pp. 27, 59; 2002a, p. 155; 1977, p. 127; 2001,
pp. 25, 80, 94, 110; 1968, p. 62).58 ‘‘Today a world dominates in which the decisive question runs: How do I have to represent nature in
the sequence of its appearances to myself, so that I am in a position to make secure predictions about all
and everything? The answer to this question is that it is compulsory to represent nature as a totality of
energy particles of existing mass, the reciprocal movements of which are to be mathematically calculable.
Descartes already says to the piece of wax that he holds before his eyes: ‘You are nothing other than an
extended, flexible, and mutable thing,’ and thus I proclaim myself to know everything about you that
there is to know of you.’’ Heidegger (2003, p. 8, see also 1993, pp. 129, 153; 1998, p. 235).59 Heidegger (1993, p. 275).
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any others.60 Where his early work rejects the possibility of empirical derivations of
understandings of being, since the understanding must first be in place in order to
orient any examination of beings, now ‘‘granting the thing, as it were, a free field to
display its thingly character directly’’61 allows entities to surprise us not just
ontically but ontologically, i.e., to teach us entirely new categories rather than just
facts that fit our initial understanding. Whereas the early work absolutely privileges
the ontological over the ontic, he now thinks that ‘‘when understood historically, the
relationship between ontic interpretation and ontology is always a correlative
relationship insofar as new existentialia are discovered from ontic experience.’’62
This method now applies the hermeneutic circle to the ontological level.63
The second objection emerges from the way artworks instigate a strife between
world and earth. Explaining this in detail would take me well beyond the bounds of
this essay so I will focus on earth, the component most relevant to our present
concerns.64 While versions of world and strife appear in his early writings, earth is a
new idea, and a highly peculiar one at that. His early work locates nature within the
complex of readiness-to-hand as raw material,65 but later he attacks this idea as part
of a new mode of being called Bestand, i.e., things presenting themselves as nothing
more than resources for our convenience. Ultimately, ‘‘nature becomes a gigantic
gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology.’’66 Earth is defined as that
which resists all use, including conceptually defining it. It represents the brute facts
of our existence which can neither be reduced nor explained without eliminating
their bruteness. The scientific definition of heat as molecular motion, for example,
helps us measure and manipulate temperature, but only by leaving out the
experiential character of hotness. Scientific reduction equals phenomenological
extermination. Like Objective Idealism, technology reduces reality to the scale of
James’ human serpent, in addition to eliminating whatever proves resistant to our
desires.
The only way to remain faithful to these qualities is, paradoxically, to capture
them as uncapturable.
When we analyze [color] in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is
gone. It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained. Earth
thus shatters every attempt to penetrate it. It causes every merely calculating
importunity upon it to turn into a destruction…. The earth appears openly
60 For more on this topic, see Braver (2009, pp. 39–46).61 Heidegger (1993, p. 151, see also Ibid., pp. 125, 157, 170).62 Heidegger (2001, p. 207).63 Heidegger (1972, p. 35; 2003, pp. 6, 80; 1991, p. 86; 1993, pp. 151, 156–157, 170, 194; 2001, pp. 62,
71; 1999, p. 316/§262.64 For a more thorough discussion of this topic, see Braver (2009, pp. 50–56).65 Heidegger (1962, pp. 100/70–1). This passage distinguishes nature qua raw materials from nature qua
subject of a landscape painting, but the latter receives no discussion of its own.66 Heidegger (1966, p. 50; see also 1993, pp. 321–322, 326; 1998, p. 313; 1968, p. 135). Heidegger’s
later description of the Rhine River harnessed by a hydroelectric plant (1993, p. 321) retunes Being andTime’s discussion of ‘‘the wood is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock; the river is water-
power’’ (1962, p. 100/70) into a minor key.
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cleared as itself only when it is perceived and preserved as that which is
essentially undisclosable.67
Preserving it in its essential unknowability is the only way to know it. More
aggressive attempts at understanding extinguish that which is to be understood, the
way an Active Mind’s attempt to perceive a noumenon eradicates its noumenality,
leaving only pre-digested phenomena.
Criticizing this reductionism and coming up with ways to resist it form one of the
leitmotifs of Heidegger’s later work, where he constantly comes up with new ways
to achieve this rather tricky goal. One device is to forge new terminology drawn
from careful, open-minded descriptions of the things themselves in order to prevent
ideas derived from other phenomena from contaminating the thing being studied.
The purest way to respect beings’ uniqueness is to import no external terminology at
all which, taken to its logical conclusion, restricts one to tautologous statements
such as ‘‘the world worlds,’’ ‘‘speech speaks,’’68 or ‘‘propriation propriates.’’69
These phrases extend his early method of ‘‘formal indications,’’ i.e., using relatively
empty descriptions to point towards a phenomenon instead of trying to capture it.
Heidegger’s later work rejects the Kantian Active Mind and Hegel’s closed circle
of Objective Idealism in favor of an epistemological humility on a grand scale.
Whereas Hegel’s new shapes of consciousness grow rationally out of previous ones,
Heidegger sides with Kierkegaard’s non-linear leaps, which he fashions into
incommensurable epochal understandings of being lurching through a Hegelian
history with its head cut off, without goal or rationality.70 He also explicitly rejects
existential voluntarism; indeed, one of the main goals of Heidegger’s later work is
to dismantle modern notions of autonomy and freedom, which are incoherent and
which obstruct profound change. Understandings are ‘‘sent’’ to us by being rather
than being constructed or chosen by us, since any attempt to create a new way of
thinking necessarily takes place on the basis of the contemporary way, thereby
limiting its divergence; in other words, attempts to change our mentality merely
perpetuate it.71 This is what his (in)famous statement—‘‘only a god can save us
67 Heidegger (1993, p. 172, see also Ibid., pp. 135–136, 223, 448; 1971, pp. 170, 224; 1977, p. 45; 1998,
p. 310).68 ‘‘We can no longer root about for general notions… under which we might subsume language as a
particular instance of this or that universal. Instead of explaining language as this or that, and thus fleeing
from it, the way to language wants to let language be experienced as language. True, in the essence of
language, language is grasped conceptually; but it is caught in the grip of something other than itself.’’
Heidegger (1993, p. 406).69 ‘‘There is nothing else to which propriation reverts, nothing in terms of which it might even be
explained…. The propriation that rules in the saying is something we can name only if we say: It—
propriation—owns.’’ Heidegger (1993, p. 415, see also 1971, pp. 179–180; 1968, pp. 153, 172).70 Heidegger is recorded in a late seminar as saying, ‘‘for Hegel, there rules in history necessity which is
at the same time freedom. For him, both are one in and through the dialectical movement as the essence of
the Spirit exists. For Heidegger, on the other hand, one cannot speak of a ‘why.’ Only the ‘that’—that the
history of Being is in such a way—can be said.’’ Heidegger (1972, p. 52).71 ‘‘By itself and on its own, no human calculation and design can bring forth a turning in the world’s
present condition. Especially not, because human design is already formed by this very condition of the
world…. How then could it [human design] still gain control over it [the world’s condition]?’’ Heidegger
(2001, p. 266, see also 1968, p. 65; 1993, p. 324; 2002a, pp. 192–193).
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now’’—means. Quietism as waiting for a solution instead of rolling up our sleeves
and hammering one out actually constitutes the beginning of a solution by altering
the way we think about solving problems.
Heidegger’s point is that the new, if it is to be truly new, must take us by surprise;
it must fall upon us like inspiration rather than emerging from conscious planning
since any planning would employ the very concepts and approach we are trying to
get beyond. We must dismantle the idea of the modern subject in complete control
of itself and autonomous, a view reinforced by technologically organizing the
natural world around our desires as well as the ideas behind Active Mind and
Objective Idealism.72
The way out of this trap is to realize how completely we depend on
heteronomous impositions, even for our very drive towards autonomy.73 Cultivating
a phenomenological openness could help bring about a profound change in our form
of subjectivity by showing how all of our actions and thoughts are actually reactions
to the way the world shows itself to us.74 Anything that resists our understanding,
like earth, highlights the limitations of our mastery, both over ourselves as self-
sufficient subjects and as ‘‘lords and masters’’ over the world as Bestand, opening
cracks through which we might catch a glimpse of alternatives.75
One reason for Heidegger’s inexhaustible fascination with being is how fully it
evades technology’s demands: It gives no information, yields no practical utility,
and cannot be captured by categories or explanations. As long as we allow
‘‘Being to reign in all its questionableness’’76 rather than letting it settle down
into a known element like most things,77 it serves as a constant reminder of our
limitations. The later work, like the early, portrays our understanding of being as
inconspicuous or ‘‘pre-ontological,’’ which leads to the recollective project of
explicitly grasping our epoch’s implicit views.78 But the goal is no longer Beingand Time’s Nietzschean active appropriation of what has been handed down
to us, but rather seeing its deep contingency in light of other possible
72 ‘‘Human willing too can be in the mode of self-assertion only by forcing everything under its dominion
from the start, even before it can survey it. To such a willing, everything, beforehand and thus
subsequently, turns irresistibly into material for self-assertive production. The earth and its atmosphere
become raw material for self-assertive production.’’ Heidegger (1971, p. 111; see also 1977, pp. 84, 100;
1993, pp. 172, 228–289).73 Heidegger (1993, p. 332; 2003, p. 63; 1998, p. 307).74 ‘‘Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery… grant us the possibility of dwelling in the
world in a totally different way.’’ Heidegger (1966, p. 55, see also 1993, p. 324; 1971, p. 171; 2002b,
p. 34; 1999, p. 163/§118; 1998, p. 308; 1968, p. 121; 1991, p. 86; 1972, p. 23).75 ‘‘Where beings are not very familiar to man and are scarcely and only roughly known by science, the
openedness of beings as a whole can prevail more essentially than it can where the familiar and well-
known has become boundless, and nothing is any longer able to withstand the business of knowing, since
technical mastery over things bears itself without limit.’’ Heidegger (1993, p. 129, see also 1999, pp. 11/
§5, 32/§17, 272/§243; 2003, p. 11; 1991, p. 56; 2002b, p. 40; 1971, p. 112).76 Heidegger (1982, p. 201, see also 1999, p. 242/§222; 1993, p. 211; 1972, pp. 6, 33, 52).77 Heidegger (2002a, pp. 184, 242; 1966, p. 56; 1991, p. 68).78 Heidegger (1977, pp. 44–45, 180; 1993, pp. 181, 445; 2002a, p. 217; 1971, p. 190).
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understandings of being, the shocking, awe-ful realization that ours is just one
possibility out of many.79 Becoming aware of our awareness is not undertaken to
become what we are, but to open the door to becoming what we are not, to
thinking and becoming what is virtually unthinkable today, much as medievals
would have been hard pressed to conceive of our secular technology as a live
option for leading a life.
Heidegger further argues that the technological attitude leads to nihilism. If
qualities like good, noble, and worthy are merely subjective projections, then we
can project them as we like. This is how Nietzsche’s Ubermensch overcomes (weak)
nihilism, but Heidegger considers the cure to be a more virulent strain of the
disease. Such projects ultimately reduce all goodness to the will willing itself since
there can be, ex hypothesi, no obligations upon it that it does not itself ratify which
eliminates the very notion of obligation.80 Whereas his early work followed an
adapted version of Kant’s ethics,81 he now believes that autonomously laying down
the law for ourselves undermines the essential sense of responsibility to something
beyond ourselves, an authority that can make laws authoritative. This metaphysical
self-reliance closes down the possibility of such virtues as gratitude,82 wonder,83
and obligation: ‘‘Only so far as man, ek-sisting into the truth of Being, belongs to
Being can there come from Being itself the assignment of those directives that must
become law and rule for man…. Otherwise all law remains merely something
fabricated by human reason.’’84 Rather than marching traditional ideas before the
tribunal of reason to be inspected before we deign to adopt them, we need to take
root in what precedes and exceeds us if we are to lead a grounded life.85 Only a
groundless ground genuinely grounds.86
79 ‘‘In principle the objectness in which at any given time nature, man, history, language, exhibit
themselves always itself remains only one kind of presencing, in which indeed that which presences can
appear, but never absolutely must appear.’’ Heidegger (1977, p. 176).80 Heidegger (1993, pp. 251, 295–296; 1977, pp. 102–3, 134; 1982, pp. 102, 203).81 Compare Kant’s claim that the moral law legitimately ‘‘interests us because it is valid for us as men,
inasmuch as it has arisen from our will as intelligence and hence our proper self’’ (1995, p. 79/461, see
also Ibid., pp. 48/431, 75/457) with Heidegger’s view that ‘‘resoluteness constitutes the loyalty of
existence to its own Self…. This loyalty is at the same time a possible way of revering the sole authority
which a free existing can have.’’ Heidegger (1962, p. 443/391, see also Ibid., p. 320/275).82 ‘‘The things for which we owe thanks are not things we have from ourselves…. But the thing given to
us… is thinking…. How can we give thanks for this endowment, the gift of being able to think?’’
Heidegger (1968, pp. 142–143).83 Heidegger (1993, pp. 126, 187, 263, 448; 2002a, p. 209; 1999, p. 180/§136).84 Heidegger (1993, p. 262, see also 1999, pp. 348–349/§274; 2002a, p. 17; 1977, p. 77; 1991, pp. 30–31,
1966, pp. 48–49).85 ‘‘The unique unleashing of the demand to render reasons threatens everything of humans’ being-at-
home and robs them of the roots of their subsistence.’’ Heidegger (1991, p. 30, see also 1966, pp. 48–49;
2002a, p. 145).86 Heidegger (1982, p. 193; 2002a, p. 6; 1971, p. 180; 1998, p. 232). For a full discussion of this topic in
Heidegger as well as Wittgenstein, see Braver (2012, especially Chapter 5 and Conclusion).
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3.2 Levinas: the traumatism of astonishment
Levinas is perhaps the figure most associated with the kind of radical otherness
characteristic of Transgressive Realism. Whereas Hegel and Kant serve as
Kierkegaard’s foils, and Descartes Heidegger’s, Levinas begins exploring these
ideas in his analysis of his teacher, Husserl. Husserlian phenomenology follows
Kant’s Active Mind in claiming that experience and knowledge take place on the
basis of acts of consciousness, which Husserl calls noeses and early Heidegger pre-
ontological understandings of being.87 Experience or intuition either fulfills or
confounds my tacit expectations or ‘‘empty intentions’’ of how certain types of
objects will continue presenting themselves to me, for instance, my general sense of
what this apple’s backside will look like when I turn it around or how it will feel
when I bite into it. Checking evidence to confirm or refute anticipations constitutes
the fundamental experience—and hence the basis of any phenomenological
theory—of truth,88 and this process requires the intention and the intuition to refer
to the same object in the same way, else prediction and result pass by each other
without contact. In other words, to successfully disagree, they must agree on what
they are disagreeing about.89
This structure has important consequences for what Levinas takes, under the
influence of Heidegger, to be at the center of Husserl’s thought: his conception of
being.90 This conception is what enables Husserl to reject naturalism’s reductionist
recognition of only the kind of existence possessed by physical objects, namely,
occupying spatial–temporal points and interacting causally with other physical
objects. Whatever does not fit this model gets dismissed as merely subjective
appearance,91 which leads to the psychologism Husserl attacks at the very beginning
of his career. Levinas, as Sartre will do after him in his wonderful essay
‘‘Intentionality,’’ praises Husserl for welcoming these subjective refugees back into
the world, granting denizens of the various heterogeneous regions of being full
citizenship.92
Despite this promising beginning, Husserl reproduces the Objective Idealist move
by reducing being to that which appears to consciousness. With noumena’s claim to
true reality annulled, phenomena inherit the status of the really real, which makes
87 ‘‘If the existence of an object may become accessible to us it can only be through the knowledge of
what this existence means for us.’’ Levinas (1995, p. 5, see also Ibid., p. 134; see Levinas (1969,
pp. 45–47), for the corresponding analysis of Heidegger).88 Levinas (1995, pp. 69, 73–74, 84, 88–89, 135–136; 1978, p. 98; 1998a, pp. 61–63; 1998b, p. 126). This
is quite similar to Heidegger’s early description of the way ‘‘truth become[s] phenomenally explicit in
knowledge itself.’’ Heidegger (1962, p. 260/217).89 Levinas (1995, p. 74).90 Levinas (1985, p. 39; 1995, p. 154).91 ‘‘If to be means to exist in the way nature does, then everything which is given as refractory to the
categories and to the mode of existence of nature will, as such, have no objectivity and will be, a priori
and unavoidably, reduced to purely subjective phenomena which, with their multifarious structure, are the
products of natural causality.’’ Levinas (1995, p. 17, see also Ibid., pp. 9, 114, 130; 1998a, pp. 72,
131–132). This is strongly reminiscent of Heidegger’s many objections to scientism, both early and late
(1962, pp. 128–130/95–98, 150/114–115, 198/156; 2001, pp. 94, 110).92 Levinas (1995, pp. 44–45, 53; 1998a, pp. 36, 68, 86).
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what is real coextensive with what presents itself to us.93 Now, it is certainly true that
objects present themselves as existing beyond any, and independent of all,
presentations to us,94 a phenomenological fact acknowledged in Husserl’s notion
of adumbrations. While I can only see part of a physical object at any particular time,
I can always turn it around to examine its other sides, although these sides now
occlude the previously visible ones. No single perception can exhaust an object’s
being, nor can any group, no matter how thorough. Every thing has endless aspects or
faces, forever outrunning in principle any catalogue I could make of them.95 But,
importantly, each facet can be perceived, else it is not a genuine part of the object,
and they must cohere with each other in the horizon of expectations set by the
object’s ontological region, else it may lose its status as a genuine object. If new
aspects surface that fundamentally clash with the series of adumbrations underway or
with my general expectations for the kind of thing I’m taking it to be, this would
force me to drastically revise my understanding of what it is I am experiencing, up to
and including the possibility that I had completely misidentified the object, or even
that I was not having a veridical experience of a real entity after all. A sufficiently
discordant perception shatters the sense of the item I had been constructing, requiring
a new identity that can accommodate the disruptive experience.
While this infinite overflow seems to place the entity beyond my consciousness,
Levinas argues that Husserl’s fundamental idealism rules out true transcendence. ‘‘A
thing is relative to consciousness—to say that it exists is to say that it meets
consciousness.’’96 The reality of Reality remains a meaning we bestow upon it, and one
of the conditions for earning this status is the entity’s compliance with our protentional
horizon, i.e., our basic sense of how things of that type act. Things must behave
properly, they must live up to our expectations if they want to retain their ontological
standing. This requirement of coherence among experiences, along with the intention-
fulfillment structure described above, rule out radical surprise in principle; instead of
attesting to ontological independence, sufficiently shocking appearances actually shut
down the entire enterprise of apprehending a world. ‘‘The experience of an object
always fulfills a thought, and hence… reality never fazes thought.’’97
On the one hand, Husserlian intentionality turns the traditional conception of
subjectivity as self-sufficient substance inside-out by rendering it essentiallyincomplete, intrinsically external since it is related to the world by its very nature.
On the other hand, this move towards its exterior always takes place on the subject’s
terms, thus recouping the gesture towards transcendence and, thereby, undermining
its very meaning. Thus, for Levinas, Husserl fits what I am calling Objective
93 ‘‘Being is nothing other than the correlate of our intuitive life…. This thesis is obviously directed
against any realism or idealism which admits to a thing in itself behind the phenomena.’’ Levinas (1995,
p. 92, see also Ibid., pp. 62, 131–132, 139, 149). The existence of unperceived entities resides in their
possible perception (Ibid., p. 21), that of ideal objects in their possible appearance to a non-empirical
intuition (Ibid., p. 102).94 Levinas (1995, p. 121).95 Levinas (1995, pp. 21–23, 136; 1998a, pp. 65, 73, 82, 92–93).96 Levinas (1995, p. 22, see also Ibid., pp. 39, 101, 125, 131–132, 153–154; 1969, p. 125; 1998a, pp. 59,
84–85, 96, 102).97 Levinas (1998a, p. 124).
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Idealism and its recollective epistemology: ‘‘Focusing on being, [thought] is outside
itself, but remains marvelously within itself, or returns to itself. The exteriority or
otherness of the self is recaptured in immanence…. One learns only what one
already knows.’’98 Phenomenology brackets the external reality of experience to
concentrate entirely on noema or objects qua experienced, and then examines the
various ways our minds relate to them, the noeses. In line with the Active Mind
approach, Husserl sifts through experience for our unwitting contributions, the ways
we constitute objects out of noema, stitching together unitary entities out of series of
adumbrations and then pinning the label ‘‘real’’ onto them. Since it is we who are
autonomically doing this constituting, we are indeed seeking what we already know.
According to Levinas, while Husserl’s tolerance for ontological diversity enables
him to overcome naturalism’s reductionism, his phenomenological approach reinstates
a more fundamental reduction of the real to the presentations of coherent sets of
anticipatable experience to us. ‘‘Husserl’s idealism is the affirmation that every object,
the pole of a synthesis of identifications, is permeable to the mind; or, conversely, that
the mind can encounter nothing without comprehending it. Being can never shock the
mind…. Nothing in the world could be absolutely foreign to the subject.’’99
Phenomenological consciousness inherited Kant’s allergy to radical alterity.
However, to borrow Heidegger’s invocation of Holderlin, the saving power can be
found where the danger grows or, to employ one of Derrida’s favorite undecidable
terms, the poison is also the remedy. Phenomenology’s commitment to the things
themselves as they appear means that we must take our experience as it presents itself,
with no attempts to make it conform to how we believe it ought to be; this is the
meaning of the phenomenological battle cry, ‘‘to the things themselves!’’ Applying
this dictum rigorously—more rigorously than its founder did—Levinas finds a
subversion of Husserl’s idealism within experience itself, the highest authority for
phenomenology, specifically in experiences that violate our concepts and expecta-
tions. If successful, this disruption of phenomenology would be internal, arising from
its uncompromising practice. In Levinas’ nimble hands, phenomenology overcomes
itself in an almost Hegelian way: Its steadfast obligation to what presents itself to us
will come across phenomena that cancel its commitment to the structure of
anticipatory intentions.100 We only find these trans-phenomena by adhering
98 Levinas (1998b, p. 125, see also 1995, pp. 43, 88, 125, 150). Levinas seizes on intentionality for his
own thought but, instead of interpreting it in terms of fulfilling empty intuitions, he prizes it as something
that can never be sated: ‘‘what was taken as an imperfection of human knowledge measured by a certain
ideal of self-evidence and certitude becomes a positive characteristic of the approach of a certain type of
reality that would not be what it is if it were revealed in another way.’’ Levinas (1998a, p. 68, see also
Ibid., pp. 93–94; 1998b, p. 71).99 Levinas (1998a, pp. 68–69, see also Ibid., pp. 74, 106; Levinas 1987, pp. 64n. 39, 133; 1969,
pp. 123–124).100 ‘‘I have attempted a ‘phenomenology’ of sociality starting from the face of the other person.’’ Levinas
(1985, p. 109). Levinas often says that, since it defies the standard understanding of experience, this
encounter is in that sense beyond experience, and hence beyond phenomenology (1985, pp. 54, 78, 92, 107;
2001, p. 63). Like Heidegger (1962, pp. 62–63/38), Levinas can be seen as a disciple of Husserl who
followed the spirit of the philosophy against the letter of the philosopher: ‘‘there is here a Husserlian
possibility which can be developed beyond what Husserl himself said on the ethical problem and on the
relationship with the Other…. The relationship with the Other can be sought as an irreducible
intentionality, even if one must end by seeing that it ruptures intentionality.’’ Levinas (1985, p. 32, see also
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fastidiously to phenomenology’s own method. Faithfully following it out to its logical
conclusion ends up altering the very notion of experience that started the search.
Levinas’ poster child for Transgressive Realism’s horizon-bursting phenomenon
is, of course, the Other.101 Another person, especially her face, represents an
experience that exceeds and overloads expectations, one that cannot be anticipated
or contained within the boundaries of a concept. As with Heidegger’s earth,
recognition and classification compromise her otherness; to know another is to
efface her. ‘‘When the Other enters into the horizon of knowledge, it already
renounces alterity…. It infinitely overflows the bounds of knowledge.’’102 Whereas
Husserl’s endless facets harmonize within a region’s horizons, Levinas’ infinite face
ruptures classifications.
Following Kierkegaard’s analysis of the Socratic/recollective model of knowl-
edge, Levinas identifies the paradigmatic moment of philosophy, and even reason
itself, as ‘‘suppressing or transmuting the alterity of all that is Other.’’103 Like
Heidegger, Levinas portrays this structure as a kind of epistemological solitude or
even solipsism, since we never get beyond ourselves: ‘‘The alleged sovereignty of
objectifying thought… in fact imprisons the thinker within himself and his
categories.’’104 He considers this the essence of knowledge, even of Heidegger’s
clearing, since it ‘‘implies that the contours of being fit into the human scale and the
measures of thought.’’105 Levinas sometimes calls this paradigmatic form of thought
‘‘totality’’ since, like Hegel’s phenomenology, it recaptures all that tries to escape.106
Footnote 100 continued
Ibid., p. 30; 1996, pp. 153, 158; 1998b, pp. 66, 123, 197, 199, 227; 1969, p. 28). He specifically
challenges Husserl’s account of intersubjectivity: ‘‘I think that through the phenomenology of the other
person—perhaps not quite in the sense in which it is carried out presently—there is a way to get outside
the subject…. What I have not seen is the other person whose alterity would consist in being ‘more’ than
me…. But all this is not in Husserl’s phenomenology.’’ Levinas (1998a, p. 109, see also 1995,
pp. 150–151).101 ‘‘The absolutely Other is the human Other.’’ Levinas (1996, p. 17, see also Ibid., pp. 6–7, 10 72, 103;
1985, pp. 77, 86–87; 1987, p. 136; 2001, p. 96; 1969, pp. 24–25, 39, 71).102 Levinas (1996, p. 12). ‘‘The unique is the other in an eminent way: he doesn’t belong to a genus or
doesn’t remain within his genus’’ Levinas (1998b, p. 205). Hilary Putnam, one of the central figures in
analytic discussions of realism, insightfully identifies Levinas’ version of realism (2008, pp. 78–79).103 Levinas (1996, p. 11, see also Ibid., pp. 18, 153; 1985, pp. 28, 60, 75, 91; 1987, pp. 41, 99, 125; 1969,
pp. 42, 124–125; 1998a, pp. 113, 120, 127, 165). ‘‘Knowledge is a relation of the Same with the Other in
which the Other is reduced to the Same and divested of its strangeness;… the other is already
appropriated, already mine.’’ Levinas (1996, p. 151).104 Levinas (1987, p. 65). For Husserl, ‘‘there exists no knowing but of oneself…. Nothing can enter it,
everything comes from it…. In its inner recesses, the subject can account for the universe…. The
subject’s coexistence with something other, before being a commerce, is a relation of intellection…. The
ego controls all the levels of reality…. To say that the subject is a monad is in sum to deny the existence
of the irrational.’’ Levinas (1998a, p. 82, see also Ibid., pp. 85, 129).105 Levinas (1996, p. 13, see also Ibid., 36, 67, 74, 99, 154; 1987, 64–65, 70; 2001, 85–86; 1969, 28, 64,
125; 1998a, p. 127; 1998b, pp. 126, 198, 200).106 ‘‘The breaks in the order reenter the order whose weave lasts unendingly, a weave these breaks
manifest, and which is a totality…. The apparent interference of the Other in the Same has been settled
beforehand…. Everything is understood, justified, pardoned. And what of the surprise of that face behind
the door? That surprise will be denied.’’ Levinas (1996, p. 68, see also Ibid., pp. 101, 111; 1985, p. 75;
1987, p. 90; 2001, p. 93; 1969, pp. 21–22, 35–36; 1998b, p. 55).
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Also like Kierkegaard, Levinas denounces Hegel’s reconciliation of opposi-
tions107; genuine realism involves phenomena that disrupt one’s self-identity by
exposing it to what it can neither master nor comprehend.108 Unlike Husserl’s docile
harmonious aspects, Levinasian infinity overflows all conceptual anticipation and
mastery.
For Transgressive Realism, the confounding phenomenon must be given within
experience rather than posited in splendid noumenal isolation, leading to paradoxes
which these thinkers face head-on. ‘‘The noema is perfectly outlined in the noesis.
The idea of the infinite consists precisely and paradoxically in thinking more than
what I thought while nevertheless conserving it in its excessive relation to thought.
The idea of the infinite consists in grasping the ungraspable while nevertheless
guaranteeing its status as ungraspable.’’109 Levinas discusses a number of
transgressive phenomena: infinity,110 trace,111 enigma,112 height,113 transcen-
dence,114 and, of course, the face.115 All of these clash with the recollective model
according to which ‘‘one only learns what one already knows… nothing absolutely
new, nothing other, nothing strange, nothing transcendent, could either affect or truly
enlarge a mind.’’116 Instead, ‘‘the marvel of the symbol can explain itself only
through the overturning of intentionality—by the fact that contrary to the perfect
mastery of the object by the subject in intentionality, the Infinite unseats its idea. This
overturning consists in the fact that the I receives absolutely and learns absolutely
(though not in the Socratic sense) a signification that it has not itself given.’’117 Like
107 Levinas (1985, p. 66; 1987, pp. 42, 126–127; 1969, pp. 53, 102, 133; 1998a, pp. 168, 171; 1998b,
pp. 126, 137).108 Levinas (1996, pp. 15, 17, 21, 76, 102; 1985, p. 52; 2001, pp. 85–86; 1969, p. 81).109 Levinas (1996, p. 19, see also Ibid., pp. 67–70, 76–77; 1985, pp. 62, 77, 107–108; 1987, pp. 87, 117,
102–103, 132, 134; 1998b, pp. 57–58, 69–70; 1969, pp. 69, 101). Notice how closely this resembles
Heidegger’s description of earth (see also Levinas’ strikingly similar account of material in artworks at
2001, p. 51). ‘‘The void that breaks the totality can be maintained against an inevitably totalizing and
synoptic thought only if thought finds itself faced with an other refractory to categories.’’ Levinas (1969,
p. 40).110 Levinas (1998b, p. 57; 1996, pp. 75–76, 103, 136, 156–158; 1985, pp. 92, 106; 1987, p. 117; 1969,
pp. 22–25, 50, 61–62, 102). Levinas praises Descartes’ proof of God on the basis of finding the idea of
infinity which he could not have thought up with the resources of his mind. Levinas (1998b, pp. 200,
219–220; 1996, p. 12).111 Levinas (1996, pp. 62, 69).112 Levinas (1996, pp. 70, 73–74, 76).113 Levinas (1996, pp. 12, 20, 57, 130).114 Levinas (1996, pp. 107, 158; 2001, p. 100; 1969, p. 41).115 Levinas (1996, pp. 10, 69, 77; 1985, pp. 77, 86–87; 1987, pp. 78–79; 1969, pp. 50–51).116 Levinas (1996, p. 151, see also Ibid., p. 14; 1987, p. 68; 2001, p. 38; 1969, p. 44). At times, Levinas
opposes this philosophical model directly: ‘‘Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the
exterior and brings me more than I can contain.’’ Levinas (1969, p. 51, see also Ibid., pp. 67, 69, 73; 1985,
pp. 91–92). He refers to the discussion of the ‘‘wholly other’’ in Philosophical Fragments (1996, p. 15), to
‘‘the Kierkegaardian God’’ of Fear and Trembling (1996, pp. 71, 105), and Kierkegaard’s conception of
subjectivity (1996, p. 76).117 Levinas (1996, p. 19, see also Ibid., p. 75).
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Abraham’s encounter with God, this confrontational resistance, rather than Husserl’s
placidly cooperative facets, is the mark of genuine otherness, and hence the
foundation of realism.
4 Concluding remarks
Let me summarize the distinctive features of Transgressive Realism so that you can
spot it in the wild. It begins with Hegel’s (Objective Idealism) advance over Kant
(Active Mind): Whereas Kant uses the contrast between phenomena and noumena
to indicate the mind’s organizing activity, Hegel refuses to go beyond possible
experience. Certainly, we posit an objective world containing much still to be
discovered, but it is precisely that—our posit. The only coherent repository for an
unknown reality lies not in an unknowable transcendent realm but in future
discoveries, else the word ‘‘real’’ loses all meaning for us. As Levinas says, this
appears virtually tautological—we can only experience and talk about that which we
can experience and talk about.118
This identification of the real with the rational, the claim that all that is real is in
principle knowable and all that is fundamentally unknowable cannot be considered
real, worries some. Without a noumenal reserve, the universal application to all
phenomena that Kant secured for scientific laws covers all of reality, making logic
equivalent to metaphysics for Hegel; the way we think is the way being is.119 On the
one hand, Hegel is right to reject talk of an in-itself-in-itself in favor of an in-itself-
for-us. On the other hand, realists are right to object that Hegel’s absolute
knowledge, even when distinguished from its misinterpretation as omniscience,
short-changes reality. The world not only out-strips our grasp accidentally and
temporarily, concealing hidden folds which will someday unfold; it exceeds our
most basic ways of grasping it.
The great innovation of Transgressive Realism is to accommodate ontological
humility without appealing to a reality lying beyond our comprehension in
principle, an appeal that, as anti-realists object, betrays the very modesty it tries to
express. Kierkegaard achieves this through the paradox of an experience that
transcends the horizons of experience. Instead of restricting experience to
encounters with beings already organized, prepared, illuminated, or identified by
concepts, noeses, or understandings of being, certain experiences impose them-
selves upon us by violating our anticipatory horizons. Transgressive thinkers are not
positing an inchoate chaos howling outside the borders of thought or rumbling
118 ‘‘Idealism imposes itself like a tautology: what appears as being—appears, and consequently is found
directly or indirectly within the limits of consciousness. What exceeds the limits of consciousness is
absolutely nothing for that consciousness.’’ Levinas (1998a, p. 127).119 Kant’s ‘‘highest principle of all synthetic judgments… that the conditions of the possibility ofexperience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience’’ (1965, p.
A158/B197) becomes, in Hegel’s hands: ‘‘logic therefore coincides with Metaphysics.’’ Hegel (1975,
p. 36, §24). Early Heidegger makes the same move when he argues that ‘‘only as phenomenology, isontology possible’’ (1962, p. 60/35) because ‘‘our investigation… asks about Being itself in so far as
Being enters into the intelligibility of Dasein’’ (Ibid., p. 193/152).
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beneath the floorboards of experience, as Nietzsche’s will-to-power sometimes
seems to be. Rather, that which exceeds our grasp strikes us precisely by exceeding
it, stretching previous categories until they rip, leaving us with conceptual tatters
which get sewn into motley paradoxical categories of the uncategorizable.
Kierkegaard appeals to a duty imposed upon us which violates all reasonable rules
of conduct, all that we do and can understand about goodness. For Levinas, this duty
issues from the other’s face, an other who appears as exceeding all possible
appearance. For Heidegger, true phenomenology means letting things teach us new
categories, and some of these phenomena, like artworks and being, perpetually resist
categorization. Indeed, these are the most important ones, for they induce a wonder
that gets stamped out in comprehension.120
For these thinkers, reason insatiably assimilates and neutralizes all strangeness,
thus perpetrating a kind of violence. This worry about reason represents one of the
aspects of continental thought that, I think, analytic philosophers often find
particularly puzzling, and not infrequently abhorrent. But this is no simple
misology. These thinkers are not advocating the abandonment of reason; indeed, it
is hard to even imagine what that might be like. Rather, they council caution and
careful examination of what may appear wholly innocuous; reason’s unchallenged
hegemony may conceal worrisome motivations and consequences. Indeed, jingoistic
fidelity to reason compromises reason’s own demand for critical analysis. Surely,
investigating reason’s grounds and limits, the obligations it places upon us and the
kinds of ideas and actions it leads to, represents a more faithful adherence to the
ideals of the Enlightenment than unquestioning adherence.121 Continental realism
admits a reality that exceeds not just our present epistemic access, but reason itself.
These thinkers emphasize what Heidegger calls thrownness: the ‘‘passive’’
reception of our ways of thinking as well as the very ability to think at all. Modern
movements such as Kantian autonomy, Hegel’s phenomenology, and Nietzsche’s
amor fati seek to overcome this essential always alreadiness by incorporating it,
retroactively willing it; Heidegger’s early notion of authenticity seems to do the
same, albeit qualified. But were our conceptual scheme of our own making, we
could never transcend it; we may extend or apply it to new situations, but never
overturn it. This is why later Heidegger insists that being sends schemes to us,122
and Levinas that we are opened up to the outside by suffering a kind of wound, what
120 Levinas also connects wonder with ‘‘the experience of something absolutely foreign, a pure
‘knowledge’ or ‘experience,’ a traumatism of astonishment.’’ Levinas (1969, p. 73, see also 1998b, p. 69).121 Derrida sums up this point in his debate with hostile critics: ‘‘who is more faithful to reason’s call,
who hears it with a keener ear, who better sees the difference, the one who offers questions in return and
tries to think through the possibility of that summons, or the one who does not want to hear any question
about the reason of reason?’’ Derrida (2004, p. 138, see also Ibid., pp. 147–148).122 ‘‘That Being itself and how Being itself concerns our thinking does not depend upon our thinking
alone. That Being itself, and the manner in which Being itself, strikes a particular thinking, lets such
thinking spring forth in springing from Being itself in such a way as to respond to Being as such.’’
Heidegger (1998, p. 279, see also 2001, p. 266; 1999, p. 169/§122; 1993, pp. 217, 324, 330, 372, 384;
1968, p. 115; 1991, p. 53; 1971, pp. 6, 171).
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he calls ‘‘a passivity more passive still than all passivity.’’123 Philosophers of the
third step reverse the traditional emphasis of activity over passivity, originality over
inheritance, projection over thrownness, arguing that the latter member of each pair
makes the former possible. They also argue that the very idea of obligation requires
that it be imposed upon us rather than chosen by us.124
There are a number of phenomena that, as paradigms of what we cannot
overcome or assimilate, frequently arise in Transgressive discussions; here I will
briefly look at death. The cunning of Hegel’s reason incorporates death into his
system, turning it into a productive force that can reap a harvest from graves: One
becomes master by facing death in combat with the other, and war-spilt blood is
sometimes needed to nourish spirit’s growth.125 Christ’s resurrection symbolizes
spirit’s overcoming of death by putting it to work, a temporary investment of
suffering paying infinite dividends of absolution. For the Transgressive Realists,
death always exceeds thoughts about death, always outruns and throws our projects
into disarray. Where Hegel’s theodicy demands that all sacrifices and sufferings be
recompensed, that they mean something, Kierkegaard insists that ‘‘God can require
everything of every human being, everything and for nothing.’’126 Many decisions
are either-or, and the roads not taken close up behind us like a scar on time, never to
123 Levinas (1996, p. 90). ‘‘Pure reflection cannot have the first word: how could it arise in the dogmatic
spontaneity of a force which moves by itself? Reflection must be put into question from without.
Reflection needs a certain kind of heteronomy.’’ Levinas (1996, p. 21, see also 1998a, p. 121).124 Levinas repeatedly criticizes Husserlian phenomenology’s commitment to freedom, since the epocheseparates us from all involvements. Levinas (1998a, pp. 75, 83–84). Clinging to this constant escape hatch
from responsibilities constitutes an immoral abdication of morality as the obligation to respond to the
Other, to cry out ‘‘here I am’’ even though it opens us to uncontrollable demands, even to the sacrifice of
that which is most dear. Echoing Kierkegaard, Levinas calls this the religious: ‘‘everything I wish to say
comes from this situation of responsibility which is religious insofar as the I cannot elude it…. You find
yourself before a responsibility from which you cannot steal away. You are not at all in the situation of a
reflective consciousness, which, in reflection, already withdraws and hides itself…. It is this exceptional
situation, where you are always in the face of the Other, where there is no privacy, that I would call the
religious situation.’’ Levinas (1996, p. 29, see also Ibid., p. 7; 1969, p. 40; 1998b, p. 131). Like
Heidegger’s discussion of values, Levinas considers traditional views of the self to be incompatible with
ethical responsibility: ‘‘human subjectivity, interpreted as consciousness, is always activity. I can always
assume what is imposed on me…. Everything happens as if I were at the beginning; except at the
approach of my fellowman. I am recalled to a responsibility never contracted, inscribed in the face of an
Other. Nothing is more passive than this priori questioning of all freedom…. It is an event that strips
consciousness of its initiative.’’ Levinas (1998b, p. 58, see also Ibid., p. 92; 2001, p. 8). This is why he
talks about the trace as a past that was never and can never become present. Levinas praises Heidegger’s
advance over Husserl in acknowledging our thrownness (1998a, pp. 84–87, 117–118).125 ‘‘War is not to be regarded as an absolute evil and as a purely external contingency, which itself
therefore has some accidental cause…. Here as elsewhere, the point of view from which things seem
purely contingent vanishes if we look at them in the light of the concept and of philosophy, because
philosophy knows contingency as a semblance, and sees in it its essence—necessity…. Within the ethical
substance, the state, nature is robbed of this might, and the necessity is exalted to be the work of freedom,
to be something ethical. The transience of the finite becomes a willed passing away.’’ Hegel (2002,
p. 250/§324, see also 1953, pp. 18, 27, 47; 1969, pp. 336, 580, 840).126 Kierkegaard (1992, p. 136). Compare Derrida’s analysis: ‘‘God doesn’t give his reasons…. Otherwise
he wouldn’t be God, we wouldn’t be dealing with the Other as God or with God as wholly other. If the
other were to share his reasons with us by explaining them to us, if we were to speak to us all the time
without any secrets, he wouldn’t be the other’’ (2007, p. 57).
L. Braver
123
be revisited or recuperated. Decisions, for Kierkegaard, represent absolute risk with
no reassurance whatsoever, underwritten only by an abyss of 70,000 fathoms of
water. ‘‘The point is absolutely to venture everything, absolutely to stake
everything…. This renunciation of everything is nothing if it is supposed to merit
the highest good.’’127
I have always found Being and Time problematic on this point. On the one hand,
death represents projection’s end, the end of self which shatters all illusions of self-
creation. On the other hand, Heidegger offers a way to overcome this meaning-
stopping event by investing it with meaning. Anticipating death enables Dasein to
blow off all frittering dispersed preoccupations, leaving only the pure cleansed
essence of being-there which we can appropriate and, finally for the first time,
become who we are. Our powerlessness before death inverts into the power to
become authentic, to claim ownership over our lives which had been ‘‘taken away
by the Others.’’128 Levinas criticizes Heidegger for this, in addition to mistakenly
rejecting the death of the other as a genuine experience.129
One of the benefits of studying the history of philosophy is seeing how familiar
figures whose views have long been settled shuffle about when a new question is put
to them; as far as the history of philosophy goes, one never knows what will have
happened. Kierkegaard figures prominently in my narrative as pioneering a central
objection and alternative to Kant and Hegel’s versions of anti-realism, one which
gets adopted and adapted by many later philosophers. Indeed, as I plan to argue
elsewhere, most of the important French philosophers of the second half of the
twentieth century pursue this line of thought. Interestingly, although Kant’s
limitations began this discussion, a retrospective glance outfitted with this lens finds
two anticipations of Transgressive Realism in his work. The first is his notion of the
sublime, i.e., a perception that overwhelms and short-circuits our perceptual and
conceptual apparatus. However, like Heidegger’s early treatment of death, Kant
retracts the more radical implications of this idea by restoring our command as
127 Kierkegaard (1992, pp. 404–405). Kierkegaard uses the metaphor of economies to contrast the ethical
individual who ‘‘will act prudently in life like those capitalists who invest their capital in every kind of
security so as to gain on the one what they lose on the other’’ with the knight of faith who concentrates his
heart entirely on one thing, for which he will ‘‘risk everything.’’ Kierkegaard (1985, pp. 71–72). Derrida
uses this metaphor in comparing Hegel with Bataille (1978, Chapter 9), as well as in his analysis of
various aporiai such as the gift or hospitality.128 Heidegger (1962, p. 164/126, see also Ibid., pp. 312/268, 434–436/382–385). Heidegger’s
phenomenological method commits his early work to the Objective Idealist treatment of death ‘‘in so
far as it Interprets that phenomenon merely in the way in which it enters into any particular Dasein as a
possibility of its Being’’ (Ibid., p. 292/248).129 ‘‘The unknown of death signifies that the very relationship with death cannot take place in the light,
that the subject is in relationship with what does not come from itself…. This way death has of
announcing itself in suffering, outside all light, is an experience of the passivity of the subject, which until
then had been active…. In knowledge all passivity is activity through the intermediary of light. The object
that I encounter is understood and, on the whole, constructed by me, even though death announces an
event over which the subject is not master…. Death in Heidegger is an event of freedom, whereas for me
the subject seems to reach the limit of the possible in suffering. It finds itself enchained, overwhelmed,
and in some way passive. Death is in this sense the limit of idealism.’’ Levinas (1987, pp. 70–71, see also
Ibid., pp. 74, 82; 1969, p. 41; 1985, p. 76; 1998b, p. 131). See Simon Critchley’s illuminating Levinasian
critique. Levine (2008, pp. 143–147).
A brief history of continental realism
123
mastering, or at least withstanding, the threatened overpowering. As free moral
beings, we can rise above any external conditions, even the most extreme, to remain
moral and hence retain autonomy. Second is the aesthetic experience, which
presents us with something that defies categorization, somewhat similar to Levinas’
ethical experience: ‘‘In conscience I have an experience that is not commensurate
with any a priori framework—a conceptless experience.’’130
Acknowledgments I want to thank Jon Cogburn, Fabio Gironi, and Anthony Steinbock for their help.
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