The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction by J. Aaron Simmons, Bruce Ellis Benson (review)

In an essay published by Éditions de l’éclat (Combas) in 1991, Dominique Janicaud polemically diagnosed what he saw as, in the words of the title, ‘le tournant théologique de la phénoménologie française’. Under this he grouped a number of French philosophers — Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jean-Louis Chrétien — whom he accused of ‘turning’ the phenomenological tradition inaugurated by Husserl and Heidegger, then pursued atheistically by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, now in favour of faith, towards the authority of theology. The figures Janicaud identified — but also comprising Derrida, whose early work, the authors remind us, engaged with Husserl — form the ‘family’ of phenomenologists discussed in The New Phenomenology. J. Aaron Simmons and Bruce Ellis Benson, however, take issue with Janicaud, arguing instead that the ‘turn’ remains properly philosophical and is, in fact, inherent to the logic of phenomenology as it is first broached by Husserl, and subsequently both extended and deepened by Heidegger. Crudely, if phenomenological method for Husserl involved an attention not to the knowledge of the world but to the world in so far as it is experienced, this was seen by Heidegger as limited to the appearance of objects, rather than to the very fact of appearing or of being, which itself does not appear. Heidegger’s ‘turn’ is towards a ‘phenomenology of the unapparent’, towards the constitutive ontological givenness of phenomena. For Simmons and Benson, this provides a lens through which to work through an important thread of twentieth-century and predominantly post-war French philosophy. Throughout their informative introductory discussions of the philosophers in question a recurrent gesture emerges: if Husserl seeks to overcome a Kantian focus on the transcendental subject as structuring the frame in which phenomena are apprehended through an attention to things ‘as such’, the consciousness of the subject remains the starting point. In Heidegger’s account of the claim of Being upon us or Levinas’s insistence on the ontological primacy of the Other, phenomenological heresy (or orthodoxy, depending on one’s point of view) involves at the least pushing at the limits of the subject and at most a reversal of phenomenological method, a shift from what appears to Me, and towards what is given (Marion) or manifested (Henry) by what is other from Me. The extent to which this ‘call’ of alterity is attributed to God, or to which religion thereby claims an explicit or implicit authority over the account of how the world is experienced, sets out the stakes of The New Phenomenology. In this context the discussions of Derrida and Levinas may be more familiar, redundant even, to readers reasonably well versed in post-war French thought, while those that focus on Henry, Marion, and Chrétien will be a useful exploration of a less familiar seam of contemporary French philosophy, an exploration that does indeed involve extensive discussion of ‘The Existence and Nature of God’ (Chapter 5) and ‘The Call, Prayer, and Christian Philosophy’ (Chapter 6), thus rather confirming Janicaud’s argument.