SUNY series, Literature . . . in Theory

The Destruction of the Inalienable in the Age of the Holocaust

Rodolphe Gasché

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438471471
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In Storytelling, Rodolphe Gasché reexamines the muteness of Holocaust survivors, that is, their inability to tell their stories. This phenomenon has not been explained up to now without reducing the violence of the events to which survivors were subjected, on the one hand, and diminishing the specific harm that has been done to them as human beings, on the other. Distinguishing storytelling from testifying and providing information, Gasché asserts that the utter senselessness of the violence inflicted upon them is what inhibited survivors from making sense of their experience in the form of tellable stories. In a series of readings of major theories of storytelling by three thinkers—Wilhelm Schapp, whose work will be a welcome discovery to many English-speaking audiences, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt—Gasché systematically assesses the consequences of the loss of the storytelling faculty, considered by some an inalienable possession of the human, both for the victims' humanity and for philosophy.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to Knowledge Unlatched—an initiative that provides libraries and institutions with a centralized platform to support OA collections and from leading publishing houses and OA initiatives. Learn more at the Knowledge Unlatched website at: https://www.knowledgeunlatched.org/, and access the book online at the SUNY Open Access Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12648/7236.

1

ENTANGLEMENT IN STORIES

(Wilhelm Schapp)

BENJAMIN’S AND ARENDT’S INFLUENTIAL ELABORATIONS ON storytelling are well known. However, this is not the case with Schapp, especially since none of his works have been translated into English and are not really known beyond the German-speaking world.1 Hence, a short introduction may be warranted. Schapp studied law, but also philosophy in Freiburg under Heinrich Rickert and Georg Simmel. After becoming acquainted with Husserlian thought through Wilhelm Dilthey, he went to Göttingen where he studied with Edmund Husserl from 1905 to 1909. He was the second of Husserl’s students to write a dissertation under his supervision. It was published in 1910 under the title Beiträge zur Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung (Contributions to the Phenomenology of Perception). Despite being a work that both draws on and critically debates (though only implicitly so) Husserl’s Logical Investigations, which had appeared ten years earlier and which, even later, remained Schapp’s principal reference to phenomenology, his Beiträge are not simply a further development of phenomenological thought. The immediately striking features of this work are its almost complete lack of technical vocabulary, the radical refusal of all abstraction, the primary focus on sensible appearances and highly detailed descriptions of them, and, especially, its wholesale rejection of the idea of “general”—that is, eidetic objects. In other words, already in this early work Schapp departs from phenomenology as a philosophy of essences. Because of what Hermann Lübbe—in what is still one of the best discussions of Schapp’s later work, In Geschichten verstrickt—has thus termed “the declared end of phenomenological Platonism, that is, of phenomenology as ‘a philosophy of essence,’ ” Schapp’s approach to perception has been qualified by some as an original phenomenological realism.2 But Schapp’s Beiträge also already prepared for the departure from classical phenomenology’s understanding of perception as the prime experience, in which the encounter with what is given in propria persona takes place, to an experience of things exclusively within stories.3 In any event, in order to achieve the objective of describing what happens in perception if it is to be the originary place of the encounter with the things themselves (die Sachen selbst), the Beiträge perform a radical, independent, uncompromising, even an idiosyncratic appropriation of the early concept (that is, before its transcendental turn) of phenomenological description. Applied to the phenomenon of sensible perception, Schapp executes this methodological program without recourse to concepts that he holds to be foreign to this phenomenon with the aim of raising “the logos of the sensible world” to consciousness as a logos thoroughly distinct from the concern with essences of pure thought.4

Thoroughly situated in the movement of phenomenological inquiry, Schapp’s dissertation is, as I have already pointed out, not deferential to phenomenological thought as an academic discipline. It comes, therefore, as no surprise that he did not opt for a university career as a philosopher after having completed his dissertation. He pursued his training as a lawyer, which during his years in Göttingen already provided him with an independent income. Only after his retirement in the fifties of the past century, and the publication of numerous works on law-related matters, did Schapp return to his early interests. Incidentally, as he makes clear in his later books—particularly, in In Geschichten verstrickt (1953) and Philosophie der Geschichten (1959)—his primary concern in these works about stories and the philosophy of stories, which, as could be shown, continues his early phenomenological investigation into the logos of the aesthetic world, is fundamentally indebted to his practice as a jurist for whom each case is, indeed, a function of the stories that constitute it.5 As we will see, stories, even as they represent for Schapp the most originary phenomena, are anything but eidetical forms. They are intrinsically concrete and tangible formations (Gebilde), not only in general but also for each singular individual entangled in them. In his exploration of the human being’s entanglement in stories, Schapp undoubtedly has Husserl’s concerns with the lifeworld in mind. But the first part of In Geschichten verstrickt is devoted to an analysis of the Wozudinger—that is, of things that are created by humans for a specific purpose—in the production of which, “world” emerges.6 This analysis is a clear indication that Schapp’s work is above all a response to Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein in Being and Time, and more precisely, to the latter’s analysis of equipment, or rather, of useful things (Zeug). By taking as his starting point the structures of the creation of Wozudinger, Schapp argues that rather than being a preexisting frame for such creation, the “world” is formed as the surrounding world by this creation so as to subsequently manifest itself in the stories in which the human being finds him- or herself entangled. In other words, the world is a moment in stories, intelligible only through the unity that characterizes them, and is equi-original with the creation of Wozudinger.

More generally speaking, In Geschichten verstrickt takes aim at Heidegger’s reference in Being and Time to Plato’s Sophist and his demand not to engage “in telling a story” about Being, and Dasein’s way of being in the world.7 In contrast, Schapp argues that the analysis of Wozudinger shows that all these things are woven into contexts, frames, or horizons, and that it is impossible to experience or account for them independently of these relations. The intended point of the analyses of these contexts or horizons within which the Wozudinger created by humans are embedded, and which correspond to what Schapp understands by stories, is to show that such analyses never result in the discovery of general concepts—of the order of genres or species, for example—that could serve to account for them in general or ultimately, by way of a concept such as Being, but only in more stories. Although Heidegger’s name is not even once mentioned in the book, In Geschichten verstrickt seeks to counter Heidegger’s existential understanding of Dasein’s world in terms of the general question of the meaning of Being, holding that, in truth, the human being is, as the title suggests, entangled in stories, and that its world is one of stories. Stories, as Schapp understands them, are thus, as the reference to entanglement suggest, of the order of an existential condition of the human being, in advance of their potential linguistic articulation. Their being told is, as Paul Ricoeur remarks in a brief reference to Schapp in Time and Narrative, a “secondary process.”8 The very potentiality of a human being’s story to be told is thus rooted in the stories in which such a being finds him- or herself existentially entangled from the start. Such entanglement is, as Schapp notes, characterized by “internal silent speech,” which may be thought of as the mediating condition that makes it possible for the stories to be explicitly told.9 Not all stories are necessarily told, but qua the silent speech that accompanies them, they are governed by the telos of being told. Actual realization in the form of a told story is grounded in the silent speech that accompanies it and that presses it to be told, to be communicated. In the second part of the book, entitled “Verstricktsein in Geschichten und in Geschichte [Entanglement in Stories and in History],” Schapp goes one step further: “The tradition considers stories and history to be something in the world. By contrast, for us, the world and history in which we are entangled are the same. For us the world is only in history, or, at first, only in the stories, in which the individual is entangled or co-entangled.”10 Rather than situating the human being within the perspective of the history of Being—a history in the singular—the human being’s world, according to Schapp, is constituted by a plurality of histories or stories. Stories as told stories, but also history in the sense of historia, are verbal or literary formations that presuppose the human being’s entanglement in a world of stories—including those of others, which in being told are spun further through their narration. As Schapp writes, the one reason for narrating stories in which one is entangled is not that they are finished and may be passed on, but they “are stories that [as living stories] are driven forward, that should continue, that is, stories in which the place from which one starts [angegangene Stelle] should write, as it were, the continuation.”11 Certainly at first, the notion of entanglement suggests the passivity of the one who finds him- or herself in the midst of a story. But stories are not finished end products. Indeed, the seeming passivity of the entangled one is counterbalanced by the telling and retelling of his or her story, which makes the story actively move forward.12

For Schapp, what is fundamental is not the problematic of Being. Stories, by contrast, are of primary significance, and from them alone, humans, animals, things emerge, entangled in them. Entanglement (Verstrickung, though at times he also speaks of Verwicklung) is the very way in which one or something is, and that means, is within a story. As already mentioned, Schapp systematically avoids philosophical terminology and categorization. Thus, rather than “being-in” (In-Sein) which according to Heidegger is a fundamental existential structure of Dasein regarding its relation to the world, the notion of entanglement (Verstrickung), taken from ordinary language, serves him to describe, in accordance certainly with what Husserl had called the “natural view of the world,” one’s living relation to it. In English as well as in German the term has mostly negative connotations of being ensnarled, embroiled, imprisoned, or caught in something that hampers or obstructs—a lie, or contradictions, for example.13 In general the prefix Ver- serves to amplify the noun or verb that it precedes—as in the case of the noun Verstrickung, the state of being entangled—and such amplification potentially has a latent pejorative signification. But when it comes to being entangled in stories, “entanglement” has such negative connotations only if the stories that happen to a subject affect it from the outside, rather than from within.

Let us start out by noting that the primary meaning of the term “Verstrickung” refers to the operation of knitting, and it means to use or finish up the knitting yarn. As the prefix Ver- indicates, even in its figural sense of being entangled, “Verstrickung” designates the state of being within a knitted fabric and, in the case of Schapp’s use of the term, being within the texture or web of a story. Indeed, the expression of being “verstrickt” literally suggests finding oneself in a fabric, or a web of narration. And by the same token, what one is entangled in—namely, stories—are therefore of the order of a web or woven pattern. Schapp points out that “he uses the expression ‘entanglement’ in a broad sense, and that he wishes the term ‘the entangled one’ to refer to anyone to whom a story happens, who stands in its middle, or belongs to it.”14 The term thus suggests that the human being is not first an independent entity to whom stories happen subsequently, but that he or she is from the start within stories and is what he or she is only by being entangled in stories. A story never happens to oneself from the outside. One is always within stories. Entanglement thus means involvement-in, and it suggests, in particular, that one can never extricate or abstract oneself from what is fundamental—namely, being in stories—precisely because such fundamental entanglement in stories is the condition for being what one is, a human being. Since entanglement is not something provoked by some stories and not by others, but rather is what makes the story a story to begin with, it is impossible to exit from it. But such entanglement does not signify a form of divine natural necessity as personified by Ananke, who spins the fate of gods and men on her adamantine spindle. In no way does it suggest a fatalist lack of freedom by the one involved in it, not only because one is what one is to the extent only that one has a story, but also because one has not just one story but stories in the plural. As the titles of his works indicate, entanglement is a plurale tantum. By its nature entanglement is an involvement in always multiple stories. Indeed, as Marquard points out, “only he who participates in many stories, has—by way of the separation of those powers that are the stories—through the one story a freedom from the respective other story. He or she who has only one story does not possess this freedom.”15 Since the entanglement Schapp has in mind is one in multiple stories, it is also a condition of the human being’s freedom insofar as it frees him or her from a monolithic total and totalizing story.

A commentary on one passage in particular from In Geschichten verstrickt should help me bring into relief those characteristics of stories that in Schapp’s work might be pertinent to what interests me in this study. Schapp remarks,

[w]ith each story the one who is entangled in it or those who are entangled in it come into view (tauchen auf). The story stands for the man. It extends, or deepens itself without effort on our part, as it were, into the man depending on the weight inherent in the story. We also are of the opinion that the access to the man, to the human being, is accomplished only through stories, through only his stories, and that the corporeal appearance of the human being is also only an appearance of his stories; that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Preliminaries On Not Telling Stories
• Chapter 1 Entanglement in Stories (Wilhelm Schapp)
• Chapter 2 Storytelling (Walter Benjamin)
• Chapter 3 Surviving for Others (Hannah Arendt)
• Postliminaries Storytelling and World Loss
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover