This book attempts a special kind of eidetic reduction—a phenomenological effort that goes beyond the epistemic and affective content of thought toward the singularity of its essential-embodied movement. The suggestion is that such reduction constitutes a unique form of philosophical praxis inducing a trans-historical relation with all that is. Praxis here refers not to the transformation of cultural content in thinking but in bringing about an inward mirror to thought with regard to its structural movement. The thesis proceeds from the observation that thinking takes itself for granted, and, for the most part, is focused on outer phenomena, rarely interrogating its own origin and character. This self-disclosure is vital if thinking is to recover its true bearing and potential, freeing itself from the limitations and one-sidedness that has become attendant upon it through history. For the accomplishment of this philosophical task, together with the building of an observation point from where to scrutinize the process of what is called thinking , the book turns selectively to the works of four major thinkers namely Heidegger , Schelling , Goethe, and Heraclitus, across a vast expanse of time, to carve out the vision of a transformative praxis beyond historical totality. The thread that links the above thinkers is their skepticism with regard to the conventional operation of thought and its implicit taken-for-grantedness. Each in their own way discovers something that would challenge the basic pre-suppositions, dualities, and limits within which thought operates. Each attempts to free thought toward attaining its true potential . The book proposes the notion of philosophical bilingualism as a way to take into account what is disclosed regarding the ontological character of thought alongside its representational or symbolic content. The simultaneous consideration of these two aspects brings about within thought a new alignment with what is. Moreover, conditions press upon us to consider this not as an idle question but as an existentially urgent one, for thought in its conventional operation has brought about unending planetary crisis, even as it chanted of freedom, progress, and other talismanic incantations. Philosophy cannot remain silent to this spectacle, nor can it absolve itself of responsibility, since the problem of thought-made suffering must also be the central philosophical problem. It is against this mandate that the present attempt is made toward praxis .
“The alpha and omega of all philosophy is freedom .” Thus wrote Schelling in a letter to Hegel in 1795.1 The question immediately arises: Does the possibility of philosophical freedom , that is, attaining existential renewal by means of serious engagement in philosophy , still exist? Or has philosophy long been reduced to just another formal academic pursuit, recapitulating old debates or adding to scholarship in remote realms? Is there left to us a doing of philosophy , or rather, can philosophy do something with us? Some like Theodor Adorno seemed skeptical of the possibility. In the introduction to Negative Dialectics , Adorno wrote: “Philosophy remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed.”2 In other words, humanity failed to attain to philosophy at the very moment when it was ripe for existential and phenomenological realization . Now it merely lives on as a formal discourse, alive only because it did not come to fruition. However, assuming that Adorno was speaking from the standpoint of redemption , can the moment of realization of freedom be truly lost? For, must not freedom be implicitly understood as a blossoming free of the category of time ? If time as a category were allowed to interfere with freedom , then it would no longer remain free . If that be the case, then philosophy as the search for freedom is not permanently compromised, since the ontological ‘now’ cannot be lost in the temporal progression of history . To be free (of time ) is a ceaseless struggle; it is not some finally realized or realizable state. Moreover, by freedom we do not mean here something abstract and immensely generalized, but a concrete onto-phenomenological susceptibility that can be discovered corporeally by the subject through, and in spite of, the relentlessness of history . And the present book will argue that just as the Fall of Man, or the temptation of history , is a daily occurrence, the possibility of freedom is implicit in each existential moment.3 Freedom is thus trans-historical and it is ontological . It is not the attribute of something pre-existing, but the phenomenological composite awakened to its own temporal and spatial composition. It is not the mere product of social conditions or privileged epistemic content of thought, nor is it a function of the politics of time . The postulation here is that this redemption is realizable not as experience but as transpersonal turning-toward-being by anyone and no-one, implying that “anyone” who dares approach this becomes “no-one” in the process since s/he goes to the (spatio-temporal) root of experience itself. Thus is philosophical potential realizable in its most radical and acute form .
However, there is a dual necessity that attends upon such phenomenological inquiry into philosophical freedom since it is an active process: one must directly participate in it rather than see it in the mind ’s eye in a detached, representational manner. First, there has to be the willingness to question and set aside existing conceptual categories and organizing schemas. The inquiry into ontological freedom demands learning to think anew, and that means to sacrifice the existing entrenched image of thought. And second, the “thinker ” must be prepared to become phenomenologically the object of its own careful study in a no-holds barred manner. To clear a path for an approach to the realization of these goals is part of the aim of the present volume. A hermeneutics of thought is attempted that combs the process of thinking itself rather than the content of thinking .
But let us go to the beginning of the story briefly with respect to the present age in the West. We have to, prima facie, establish the connection between philosophy and freedom on our way to eidetic reduction. In what mode does freedom become the central philosophical problematic in the eyes of the moderns ?4 Let us turn to German Idealism and see how the problem begins to take shape within an opposition between subject and object . Schelling , for instance, along with much of modern Western philosophy , inherits the problem from Kant, or rather, derives it within the particular Kantian framing of our relationship with the world in which we find ourselves. But while Schelling breaks free of the Kantian schema and manages an incredible feat taking German Idealism beyond itself, much of Western philosophy remains contained within the hardness and definitude of the Kantian legacy. While Schelling breaks open the very opposition between Mind and Nature (subject and object ) that was taken for granted within idealist conception, the opposition becomes the key background assumption for much of Western thought. Returning to Kant, what follows in the next few paragraphs might seem to be something of a harsh and hasty assessment of Kant’s vision. But I beg the reader to bear with me as it becomes necessary to pay attention to the crucial phrases and turns in Kant’s argument that initially frames my problem here. To do otherwise is to let the thing off the hook amid an array of divergent positions within scholarly debate. Confrontation with Kant becomes inevitable in a project such as the present one which envisages the possibility of phenomenological transcendence, or thought going beyond itself. By no means is this the only confrontation—ultimately thinking must be made to confront itself from multiple directions, as we shall see. With due regard for Kant’s concern for what it means to be human, the choking off of the possibility of transcending or superseding a state that could plausibly be regarded as a transitory phase in the existential duration of a species being , and has been regarded as such in important traditions, is one of Kantian philosophy ’s limiting legacies. That humanity’s self-understanding as constituting an implicitly “arrived” state is...