Sociology, Philosophy, History: A Dialogue

Social Imaginaries 2.1 (2016) 151-190

Sociology, Philosophy, History: A Dialogue Suzi Adams and Johann P. Arnason Abstract: The dialogue focuses on the sources, contexts, and configuration of Johann P. Arnason’s intellectual trajectory. It is broadly framed around the interplay of philosophy, sociology, and history in his thought. Its scope is wide ranging, spanning critical and normative theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics, and contemporary and classical sociology. It explores the importance of Castoriadis, Merleau-Ponty and Patočka for Arnason’s understanding of the human condition from a comparative civilizational perspective; his engagement with Habermas and Eisenstadt for the development of his hermeneutic of modernity and multiple modernities; his ongoing, albeit subterranean, dialogue with Charles Taylor; and concludes with a discussion of his recent focus on the religio-political nexus. Key Words: Culture — Phenomenology — Critical Theory — Hermeneutics — Castoriadis — Patočka — Merleau-Ponty — Weber — Marx — Durkheim — Civilizational Analysis — Modernity —History — Social Theory —Multiple Modernities — Charles Taylor

This dialogue originally took place in Johann Arnason’s apartment in Prague over the course of several afternoons in the northern autumn of 2010. In the succeeding years, Johann expanded on many of his responses via email, and answered Suzi’s follow up questions. In the wake of Johann’s recent interest in the religio-political nexus, Suzi composed some further questions in September, 2015, to which Johann replied. The dialogue reached its conclusion in February, 2016. Suzi Adams: You first studied philosophy and history in Prague, graduating in 1966 with a thesis entitled, Man and History: An Inquiry into the Ontological Foundations of Marxist Humanism.1 In retrospect, how would you interpret its lines of continuity—and discontinuity—with your mature work? Johann P. Arnason: Phenomenological Marxism is also about articulations of the world, even if not quite in the way I now see it. You might say that phenomenological Marxists, including the Czech ones in the 1960s, were

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(sometimes unconsciously) linking up with Marx’s suggestion (in the unfinished introduction to the Grundrisse, published long after his death) that there are different ways of ‘appropriating the world’—practical, aesthetic, religious and probably more, although Marx does not elaborate. That is still an idea worth developing. In this sense, there is a kind of basic affinity, a fundamental though not very clearly defined continuity, and I sometimes even have the feeling that in the recent years I have linked up with the work I was doing in Prague more directly than I did for a couple of decades before. SA: So, it sounds like you’re saying that the phenomenological problematic of the world was important to your thought even in the 1960s … JPA: I think so. But of course there is discontinuity too—with regard to Marx and Marxism. Even though I still think that in Marx there are certain correctives and counterweights, against the economic reductionism which you see elsewhere in his work I eventually came to the conclusion that a Marxian framework is simply not adequate, and you have to go beyond it. There are limits even to the least reductionist variety of Marxism. There are still people looking for some kind of sustainable Marxism, and that quest became a bit more popular after the great recession that began in 2007-2008; but I think it is a mirage. The positive side of the discontinuity, more important and complementary, has to do with my later engagement with the sociological classics. Of course I had some acquaintance with Weber and Durkheim during my Prague years, but I didn’t really engage intensively with their work. SA: Yes, because at that time you were doing philosophy. JPA: I was doing philosophy in Prague, and, although I then did sociology in Frankfurt, Weber and Durkheim seemed less important than some other things. So it wasn’t until the second half of the 1970s that I acquired a new understanding of the sociological classics, primarily Weber and Durkheim. And then I came to accept the fact that although their knowledge of Marx was limited, their critique of him was fundamentally correct—in the sense that they demolished all versions of the base-superstructure model. They insisted on a radical autonomy of culture and politics. That was simply not conceivable within a Marxian framework (that said, I should add that I still think the most conclusive critique of historical materialism, in general, and the base-superstructure model, in particular, was written by Castoriadis in the early 1960s). And going on from there I also discovered the civilizational perspective. SA: Would you say that your interest in civilization began to emerge in the 1980s? Or was it before then? JPA: A bit earlier, and it emerged very gradually. My first encounter with a civilizationist in the flesh, as it were, was Benjamin Nelson; I met him in Starnberg in 1975 when Habermas invited me to give a lecture, and Nelson was there for a few months. I found what he was doing and saying very interesting. I didn’t read much by him until later in Melbourne (after his

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death—he died very suddenly during a visit to Germany in 1977) and I very soon came to accept his thesis that the most important part of Max Weber is the comparative analysis of civilizations. But it took me quite some time to figure out the implications. And of course the later encounter with Eisenstadt was of fundamental importance. SA: You arrived in Melbourne in 1975 and remained there for more than three decades. The Melbourne years saw the completion of your shift from critical theory to hermeneutics. It emerged as your response to Habermas’s Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, and was most systematically elaborated in your book, Praxis und Interpretation, which was published in 1988.2 Your version of hermeneutics is distinctive in that it combines a novel reading of Weber’s early reflections on culture with a phenomenological emphasis on the world horizon. In turn, your interpretation of Weber reveals a Nietzschean sensibility, although an engagement with Nietzsche is not prominent in your published writings. In what way was your encounter with Nietzsche significant for your shift to hermeneutics? JPA: There are several questions here, and I have to backtrack a bit. Let’s start with Nietzsche. I think the expression “Nietzschean sensibility” may be a bit too strong. For me, Nietzsche was more a kind of bridge or mediator between other things. And the story probably starts with Adorno, because my interest and engagement with the Frankfurt School did not finish with the thesis. SA: When you say the thesis, you mean your Marcuse thesis? JPA: Yes, later published as Von Marcuse zu Marx.3 After I finished the doctorate in the summer of 1970, I reread Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. I had read it for the first time in Rome in 1967, shortly after it was published, and was not particularly taken by it. When I reread it in Frankfurt, I found there was much more to it than I had first thought. It dawned on me that Adorno was a more original and interesting thinker than Marcuse. I was especially interested in the critique of identitarian thought. There was a connection to Nietzsche because he was also a critic of identitarian thought and there is no doubt that he influenced Adorno. In Nietzsche’s critique of identitarian thought, it becomes clear that we are dealing with an interpretation. Identitarian thought is a mode of interpretation, as such it can be relativised, and you become more conscious of the inescapable pluralism of interpretations. In that sense I came to Nietzsche as to a primarily hermeneutical thinker. There are of course other authors who have also read him in that way SA: Johann Figl, for example—I remember you lent me his book, Interpretation als philosophisches Prinzip when I was doing my PhD…4 JPA: Johann Figl and Günter Abel are the two authors who particularly insisted on Nietzsche’s philosophy of interpretation. It is less common, I think, to link this to the question of Nietzsche’s influence on Weber. Those who have taken an interest in the Nietzsche/Weber connection have not been very

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interested in philosophy. But it seemed obvious to me, later on, when it came to an intensive reading of Weber that there was a connection. And that the Nietzsche who was important for Weber and who has been neglected by the neo-Kantian reading of Weber, well, that was the Nietzsche who practised interpretation and theorised about it. There is a formulation somewhere in Nietzsche’s posthumously published notes that is—I think I may have quoted it in Praxis und Interpretation—to the effect that the science that calls itself sociology should be replaced by a study of cultural complexes and power structures. Now I think that’s spot on and that is what Weber was doing. I don’t know whether he read this particular paragraph, but if he didn’t, he got its spirit from elsewhere in Nietzsche’s work. That connection I think is particularly important. And it raises further questions about hermeneutics. It has always seemed and still seems obvious to me that hermeneutics is more of a continuation of phenomenology than something fundamentally different from it. And I tend to agree with authors like, for example, Jean Grondin who argued that a hermeneutical shift was implicit in phenomenology from very early on, through the focus on meaning. And then it developed through different stages and in different directions. But I see hermeneutics very much as a branch or an offshoot of phenomenology in the broader sense. SA: Similarly, your intellectual roots lie in phenomenological Marxism and critical theory. Your hermeneutical turn in the 1980s signalled your “road beyond Marx”—but not beyond phenomenology. Your engagement with third and fourth generation phenomenologists is central to your work, but the influence of Heidegger and Husserl is more oblique. In what ways did your sustained encounter with phenomenological Marxism inform your later work, specifically Heidegger? JPA: Yes, there was a road beyond Marx. Of course, not the kind of road that would leave Marx behind once and for all. Notwithstanding the separation from the Marxian tradition, it still seems possible to return to specific aspects of Marx and learn something from him. In some ways his work may become more relevant again. His unfinished and ambiguous analysis of capitalism is still a source of insights. But there is no road beyond phenomenology, in the same sense. But my understanding of phenomenology has changed, and I would emphasize that it is a very broad intellectual movement. Husserl is, of course, a uniquely important founding figure, but it has been shown that phenomenology draws on other sources. And then there are the later metamorphoses of this tradition. Third and fourth generation phenomenologists, yes, by third generation you probably mean people like Merleau-Ponty and Patočka, if Heidegger and his contemporaries are the second generation. Yes, it’s true, I engage most directly with people at some distance from the founding fathers, who certainly are still important of course and one of the things I would like to do is to go back to Husserl and Heidegger, revisit questions that I was already thinking about in the ’60s.

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SA: Such as ….? JPA: Well, for one thing I think I still need to get a better understanding of Heidegger’s middle period—the least public one. I mean the transformation of the late 1930s documented mainly in Beiträge zur Philosophie. And I certainly need a closer look at the later Husserl. SA: I take it you don’t just mean the Crisis? JPA: Not so much the Crisis (which I had, of course, read in Prague). But there is a lot of material on the things around and after the Crisis. There’s also a lot of recent writing on Husserl that’s bound to change your understanding of him. As for the phenomenological Marxism that I encountered in Prague, it opened the way to a new understanding of Marx. But you can also treat it as an offshoot of phenomenology, and that is how I came to see it later. It seems to have begun with Herbert Marcuse in his pre-Frankfurt period, more precisely with his early 1920s essay on the concept of labour. SA: Do you want another glass of water or something? JPA: I still have one. Do you want one? SA: I’ve got a cup of tea …Your interpretative turn signalled amongst other things your farewell from critical theory which has sometimes been criticized, for example by Hans Joas, Gerard Delanty, and Wolfgang Knöbl, for not taking the normative dimension of social life into account. How has the critical impulse been reconfigured in your thought? JPA: There are several points at issue. First, a preliminary one about critical theory. If you mean the Frankfurt tradition (not a school really), I never identified with it, and I have certainly—since the late 1970s—moved further away from it, but I have been keenly interested in it since the 1960s, and still am. So let us talk about disagreement and divergence rather than a farewell. The contact with Habermas, during and after the work on my thesis, was very important. I was never convinced by his linguistic turn, but I learnt a lot from him, especially from reading the manuscript of the Theory of Communicative Action during my year in Starnberg in 1979. As for more recent developments in critical theory, such as Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition, I think civilizational analysis can relate to that idea. Civilizations are, among other things, frameworks of recognition, and we can point to interesting contrasts between them in that regard. Think, for example, about the Indian caste order, compared with the different forms of stratification and ideology that prevailed in China. Or, if you want an outlandish example, think of the access to life after death in ancient Egyptian civilization; it was gradually extended beyond a very narrow elite circle. Then there is the normative question—two of them really. One concerns the normative aspect of social life. I would not admit to any neglect of that. I have taken on board much of the criticism that has been levelled against an over-integrated concept of society, one that over-emphasizes normative integration. This is a legacy of the 1980s, represented by authors like Alain

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Touraine, Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann. The over-integrated conception is sometimes equated with a ‘Durkheimian-Parsonian’ tradition; in fact, important correctives can be found in Durkheim, whereas Parsons was more explicitly committed to the assumptions in question. In any case, the criticism is well founded, and has nothing to do with neglect, one of its implications is a clearer distinction between evaluations (rather than values, in order to highlight the active and orienting moment) and normative structures in the proper sense. That brings me to the other question: the normative commitments that can or ought to be built into theory. That’s a more difficult one. Now I admit I haven’t had all that much to say on this, because it has seemed to me more important to clarify the presuppositions and limits of normative commitments. To put it another way: how to approach and how not to approach the issue of normative implications? There are at least three kinds of limits to be emphasized. If you stress the importance or primacy of interpretation, that imposes limits on normative commitments. It is true that evaluations, especially the strong evaluations discussed in Charles Taylor’s work, are part and parcel of the cultural context in which all theorizing is enmeshed. On this point, Max Weber’s “objectivity essay”, written more than a century ago, is still useful. The story of its reception is a curious one: it has very often been read as a plaidoyer for Wertfreiheit, a value-free conception of the social or cultural sciences, but the other side, if anything more strongly emphasized, is Wertbeziehung, the constitutive relationship between the horizons of inquiry and those of evaluation. The long and the short of Weber’s argument is that reconciling the striving for Wertfreiheit with the reflexive awareness of Wertbeziehung is an unending task. But evaluations are open to interpretation and exposed to interpretive conflicts; they are not directly translated into norms, as Parsonian structural-functionalism would have it. Secondly, the specificity of cultures, properly appreciated, is bound to relativise the scope of normative theorizing. You need not go as far as to say that the claim to generality is always a fraudulent assimilation of the other to yourself. That’s actually a quotation from Spengler, but it’s more common to hear or read statements like that in the post-colonial intellectual environment today. The point is, rather, that taking the pluralism of cultures seriously means toning down the claims to universality; the only viable goal is what Merleau-Ponty called lateral universality, where the world horizon is gradually opened up and expanded through the confrontation and comparison of cultures. This becomes even more pronounced if we add a third consideration, relating to the world-making capacities of cultures, and especially of those macro-cultural formations which some of us call civilizations. Patterns of interpretive and evaluative orientations add up to worlds of meaning that call for comprehensive understanding. The question of an ultimate common or converging experience of the world can only be posed in connection with comparative analysis; it is tempting to adapt

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Patočka’s reflections on “Welterfahrung und Weltform der Erfahrung” and to speak of the experience of the world and the world-form of culture.5 To elaborate a bit on these points, it may be useful to compare some different approaches. At one end of the spectrum, you have Habermas, for whom social theory has a firm normative basis. It is a matter of strong, unambiguous and universal norms (a small number of them), built into the use of language; you might say that his universal pragmatics is an attempt to answer the question: what does it mean to speak in order to be understood? I was never convinced by this line of argument, and I criticized it in Praxis und Interpretation. At the other extreme, a notion of autonomy is central to Eisenstadt’s conception of modernity as a new civilization, but he does not introduce it as a normative concept (he seems to have taken the view that normative commitments should be kept out of historical sociology, which doesn’t mean that he had none). I think we can call it “meta-normative”, although Eisenstadt never used that expression; the modern upgrading of autonomy calls for normative interpretations, but they diverge, and their conflicts escalate into “antinomies of modernity”, to use Eisenstadt’s term. That said, he would probably have admitted that his own theorizing was moving within the horizon opened up by modern ideas of autonomy, and he might have added that the concept of axial civilizations, generalized beyond the historical limits of the axial age, and used—roughly speaking—to describe macro-cultural traditions capable of critical self-reflection in light of transcending world horizons, constitutes an even more fundamental presupposition. Axiality in the sense that Eisenstadt came to accept, belongs in Charles Taylor’s category of strong evaluations. I am less receptive to this idea than to the view of modernity as a new civilization; I prefer to retain the historical concept of the axial age, in fact to make it more historical. SA: Castoriadis’s understanding of the project of autonomy seems to contain a normative commitment, but you have taken this in a more interpretative direction. You don’t actually draw on the term autonomy very much, well, it hardly figures as an explicit question in your thought… JPA: It does figure in my work. Whenever I refer to the idea of modernity as a new civilization, which I have taken on board and want to develop further, I always underline the central meaning of autonomy, although I think it needs more philosophical elucidation than Eisenstadt was willing to enter into. Castoriadis has much more to say on that, and with three major qualifications, his concept of autonomy is acceptable. We must tone down the stark contrast between autonomous and heteronomous societies, and although there is a strong case to be made for Greek exceptionalism, it was less unique than Castoriadis wants to show; significant aspirations to autonomy can be found in other cultural traditions, sometimes in coexistence and in conflict with radical versions of heteronomy (e.g. Islam). In the modern context, the vision of autonomy is not as clearly distinguishable from the imaginary signification

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of rational mastery and its capitalist embodiment as Castoriadis argues; visions of autonomy enter into the capitalist imaginary, and capitalism has produced its specific versions of autonomy. Finally, I do not think it makes sense to speak of an autonomous society; projects of autonomy are never more than partial aspects of a more complex constellation, in some cases more radical and formative then in others, but never in full control. To round off these comments, I should add that civilizational analysis does not, in principle, exclude normative judgments. Charles Taylor is probably right when he argues that something like an intuitive recognition of the equality of cultures can be traced far back in history and across civilizational boundaries, but if we accept that there is a shared anthropological foundation, there is nothing implausible about the idea that some civilizations can in some respects achieve a more adequate or more appealing grasp of the human condition than others. They may do more justice to its complexity, be more open to dispute about it, provide more scope for self-determination, etc. But the ambiguity of such criteria should also be kept in mind; when Weber argued that the Occident had taken rationalization further and into more varied areas than other civilizations, he was not formulating an unequivocally positive value judgment—he was well aware of destructive and oppressive consequences of rationalization. SA: Nonetheless, it does seem to me that that the political project of autonomy in Castoriadis’s strong sense does not appear to animate your work in the same way that it did his. Your approach, in that it takes an interpretative and comparative perspective to the human condition at the macro-level of civilizations and world history, relativizes Castoriadis’s framework of autonomy, as you have discussed above—this also goes to the tension in his thought between autonomy as an imaginary signification and as an ongoing and explicit socio-political project. In that you tend to focus on the ‘metanormative’ rather than ‘normative’ implications of human life, strictly speaking, can something similar be said of your appropriation of autonomy? JPA: Castoriadis’s concept of autonomy was linked to a vision of radical democracy, so radical that he always thought of himself as a revolutionary. I abandoned that way of thinking back in the 1970s. With regard to the political implications of autonomy, I now feel much closer to Marcel Gauchet’s reflections on the successes and troubles of democracy. That is, of course, a reformist position. In his discussion with Alain Badiou, edited by two other persons under the somewhat inappropriate title What is to be done? (Que faire?—an allusion to Lenin), Gauchet speaks of the need to reinvent social democracy (not, of course, in the universally discredited Tony Blair fashion; by contrast, Badiou sticks to his Maoist guns, and makes some memorably aberrant statements in that vein).6 Amen to that; but he does not claim that he has a prescription. I also think there is quite a bit of truth in Wolfgang Streeck’s observation that contemporary democracy is decomposing into the

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rule of law and public entertainment. We might add that the vacuum thus emerging is being filled by something best described as plutocracy—a new fusion of economic and political power. In short, it is difficult to come up with any positive perspectives. The reformist left is everywhere on the defensive, if it exists at all; the global left is a fantasy; the ‘revolutionary’ left is irrelevant and sometimes off the planet. Let me add a few words on autonomy and liberalism. Those who want to reinvent or reinvigorate social democratic politics will usually insist on reaffirming its links to the liberal tradition. Habermas has sometimes referred to “basic elements of the liberal credo” (Grundelemente des liberalen Kredos—I remember him using this term back in 1968; it didn’t go down well with the more radical students), by which he means a public sphere built around basic liberties and providing space for rational deliberation. Gauchet speaks, variously, of a liberal fact or a liberal turn, definable in terms of three aspects: the emancipation of civil society, the emancipation of the individual members of this society, and the inversion of the relationship between power and collectivity.7 Liberalism as an ideology is then defined by the acceptance of this fact or turn as a complete and unsurpassable model of social and political life. Socialist responses to the liberal turn (there were several varieties) were, on this view, originally attempts to add correctives to this arrangement, or develop its potentialities in different directions; the idea of a radical break came later, with disastrous consequences. I think the insistence on a continuity with the liberal legacy makes good sense, but these approaches still seem a bit too foundationalist—we are dealing with a problematic rather than a fact or a set of principles, and new aspects of that problematic may come to the fore in changing situations; for one thing, there is the question of radical valuepluralism, in the English-speaking world most often associated with the work of Isaiah Berlin (and with John Gray’s very clear and convincing interpretation of it, resulting in the concept of agonistic liberalism), whereas the much less detailed but in principle more profound approach of Max Weber gets less attention. In short, we need to link the question of liberal democracy and liberalism as an ideological current (including its varieties and mutations) to the complexities and ambiguities of the vision of autonomy that is at the centre of modernity as a new civilization. And we can of course draw on Gauchet’s work to do just that. SA: Merleau-Ponty opened his classic text Phenomenology of Perception with the question: What is phenomenology? Your own approach to phenomenology tends to view it as a movement broader than its self-labelling turn with Husserl. Your work connects up with Hegel’s objective spirit, as well as what you term ‘post-transcendental’ currents, especially as they emerge from Levinas, Patočka and Merleau-Ponty, on the one hand, and thinkers such as Richir, Barbaras and Castoriadis, whom you characterize rather as ‘post-phenomenological’, on

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the other. What do you see as the difference between the two trends, and how would you characterize your own work? JPA: As we have noted, there are good reasons to conceive of phenomenology as a broad intellectual and cultural current. That can go even further than Merleau-Ponty did. Elias Canetti’s thought has, not unreasonably, been described as phenomenological—it is very much about intensifying our perception and understanding of elementary phenomena that have been neglected by the philosophers (whom Canetti tended to dismiss en bloc, with a very few exceptions). There is a book on the ‘phenomenology of Henry James’; and on a more conventionally philosophical level, Ortega y Gasset has been described as a phenomenologist. But within this very broad trend, we must distinguish more specific versions. The tradition that takes off from Husserl is indisputably the main current of phenomenology. But that observation leads to further distinctions. There were those who followed the early Husserl and rejected his transcendental turn; one of the most interesting representatives of this phenomenological realism was the Polish philosopher, Roman Ingarden, whose disciples are still active. A more productive turn came later, with the shift to post-transcendental phenomenology. SA: Could you clarify what you mean by the term ‘post-transcendental phenomenology’? JPA: Yes. The post-transcendental turn comes when you give up on Husserl’s attempt to redefine and vindicate the transcendental subject. Husserl never quite gave up on that; you can find ambiguous statements in his last writings, but he never quite gave up on the idea of radically constitutive subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’s essay on the philosopher and his shadow is in this regard a crucial text, spelling out the issues very clearly;8 but the post-transcendental turn is already taken in the Phenomenology of Perception. Patočka is a more complicated case. You might say that in his early writings, from the 1930s, three lines of thought intertwine and are not easily distinguishable: an effort to think through Husserl’s version of transcendental philosophy, an incipient post-transcendental turn, linked to the notion of the world that was to become a key theme of his work, and—as Filip Karfík has shown—a strong interest in the recovery of metaphysics, as well as an effort to rethink the philosophy of history.9 In the course of his intellectual trajectory, he left the first part of the programme behind and radicalized the others. In the end, he arrived at what he called asubjective phenomenology and an ontology of movement. So, in his case, I think you have a combination of, or an unfinished internal dialogue between, post-transcendental phenomenology (‘asubjective’ is a very emphatic version of that) with a way of thinking better described as postphenomenological. This latter term is, admittedly, more difficult to define than ‘posttranscendental.’ But it seems useful, and applicable to thinkers otherwise as different as Castoriadis, Derrida, Renaud Barbaras and Charles Taylor—even

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Niklas Luhmann, whose systems theory is—not least—an attempt to avoid the difficulties faced by the phenomenologists who tried to deduce society from intersubjectivity. All these authors draw on and engage with motives of the core phenomenological tradition, the one that takes off from Husserl and goes beyond him. But at the same time, there is some kind of ontological turn, along various lines (think of Barbaras’s philosophical cosmology and Castoriadis’s ontology of the social-historical), and (also an effort to ‘retrieve realism’, to quote the title of a text by Charles Taylor, published in a collection of papers on the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell, and now also adopted as the title of a book co-authored by Taylor and Dreyfus).10 Here I should perhaps add a brief comment on Levinas. Where does he belong in this picture? What I found most interesting about him is that he makes really pertinent observations in passing—like the one about the concept of horizon being for phenomenology what the concept was for German idealism. But otherwise I think Charles Taylor is right, I heard him say this in a conference once, that Levinas is a bit of an alien within the modern western tradition of philosophy, and that if you want to come to terms with him you need to face presuppositions that are extremely distant from the main universe of discourse. I’m not sure whether he belongs to the phenomenological tradition. He picked up phenomenology and used it for his own purposes. SA: So, would it be fair to say that your understanding of posttranscendental currents links them to what you are calling the core tradition of phenomenology, whereas the post-phenomenological currents actually link up more with this broader understanding of phenomenology? However, Castoriadis and Taylor don’t quite fit within that framework. JPA: I think the ‘family resemblances’—you can hardly use a stronger expression than that—between the thinkers whom I describe as postphenomenological are not just a matter of belonging to the broader current— there is a special relationship to the core tradition that goes back to Husserl. And in many cases the objective spirit becomes a key theme. I think Vincent Descombes may have been the first to point out the affinities between Hegel’s notion of the objective spirit and the Durkheimian problematic of collective representations; he would no doubt agree that Castoriadis’s notion of the collective anonymous, made up of imaginary significations, belongs to the same family of ideas. And you can take this further—it would, for example, be interesting to trace the similarities and the differences between Castoriadis’s and Taylor’s conception of social imaginaries. SA: And where would you situate your own work? JPA: In that line—post-phenomenological, and with a strong emphasis on the objective spirit. Because I accept the Durkheimian-Castoriadian idea that there are such things as constitutively societal meanings—instituted meanings, as Castoriadis calls them, irreducible to individual ones; instituted and individual meanings are interdependent, exist only in conjunction

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with each other. And I have no quarrel with the basic idea of the collective anonymous. SA: But would you consider your work post-transcendental in the narrow sense or more like Castoriadis; that is, more post-phenomenological (but with a stronger engagement with phenomenology than he)? JPA: In that sense, yes, the latter. SA: Your project elaborates a phenomenology of the world as a shared horizon of the human condition which requires both a philosophical hermeneutics and a comparative historical sociology to elucidate. MerleauPonty and Patočka, both for whom the world was a central theme, have been important for your work. How would you sum up the differences in the Merleau-Pontian and Patočkan approaches to the world and their respective significance for your own work? JPA: Yes, I think that the phenomenology of the world, if it is to be developed to a significant degree, needs to translate into a ‘cultural-historical sociology’. Merleau-Ponty and Patočka both have this idea of articulation of the world as the centre of the human condition. Neither of them developed it in a systematic way; rather, they approach and explore it from a variety of angles. As for the differences, I don’t know that anybody has so far done a detailed comparison of Merleau-Ponty and Patočka. That would certainly be worth doing. In fact, I can imagine a huge monograph on comparing those two important thinkers. There are, obviously, differences. As I have already noted, Patočka had a strong interest in what you might call a recovery of metaphysics—a new way of thinking through the concerns of metaphysics. For example, he reactivated the Aristotelian concept of movement and linked it to an analysis of human existence as a set of movements. There is nothing comparable in Merleau-Ponty. There was also, already in the 1930s a strong interest in the philosophy of history; it becomes very important in the later work all the way to the Heretical essays on the philosophy of history. Not that it is absent in Merleau-Ponty, who already in the ‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology of Perception talks about the dimensions of history … SA: Yes, he says ‘these are the dimensions of history’ in reference to civilizations as the objective spirit … JPA: Yes, he has some crucial things to say about civilisations. But he never developed the philosophy of history to the same extent as Patočka. That is perhaps the most salient difference. On the other hand, it is probably true— especially if we think of some formulations in the working notes for the Visible and the Invisible—that Merleau-Ponty was closer to the Weberian idea of multiple worlds corresponding to cultural spheres. SA: The trans-subjective field of culture is the focus of your work; it requires a hermeneutical approach. As part of this, you have noted the shift from subject or human centred faculties such as the imagination and reason, to a greater hermeneuticization, towards the imaginary and rationality as

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constitutive elements of culture. Although you take much from theories of action you do not dismiss structural approaches out of hand, for example you speak positively of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet as practitioners of structural hermeneutics. In your earlier work you have elaborated an understanding of the subject as situated between nature and society, but your hermeneutical turn and concomitant emphasis on the cultural field has seen the subject recede in importance. To what extent could your work be interpreted as a variant of hermeneutic structuralism? Especially as your emphasis on the trans-subjective field leave less space for traditional notions of the subject in action, even though you do continue to highlight the importance of human agency as social creativity. JPA: Well, it is true that there is a strong emphasis on the trans-subjective field of culture and society. And civilisations are particular configurations of that field. That has to do with the shift from imagination and reason to the imaginary and to rationality. Still, I wouldn’t want to discard all notions of subjectivity and agency. I would admit that so far I have said too little on this. The imbalance should be corrected. So it would be appropriate to come back to the questions of agency and subjectivity. SA: But would it be a question of subjectivity then rather than the subject? JPA: Yes: subjectivity rather than the subject. SA: And then an understanding of varieties of subjectivity becomes important… JPA: Yes, varieties of subjectivity, especially historical and civilizational varieties. I want to stay away from the strong notion of the subject that Alain Touraine, for example, ended up with, after he retreated from the original vision of social movements. That is too Sartrean (in fact, Touraine admitted a fundamental affinity with Sartre), and what I want instead is, in terms of French phenomenology, something more Merleau-Pontyan: a spectrum of subjectivity. SA: But this would still stay on the trans-subjective field, then, in a way… JPA: Well, it would be a complement to it I think. It certainly would not replace or overshadow it. I can’t quite bring myself to think of the field in terms of something a-subjective. You know that I have problems with Patočka’s terminology for this. Whether you go along with it may to some extent depend on where you want to go from there; if you take a cosmological turn, as Renaud Barbaras does, you can be asubjective, but if the next step is, as for Castoriadis, an ontology of the social-historical, you will prefer the term trans-subjective—you need to go beyond subjectivity, but it remains an integral part of the field. On structural hermeneutics or hermeneutical structuralism: these terms have been used by authors who have tried to bring two very different approaches to the human sciences together. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet are good examples. I think they did a very good job of

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incorporating Lévi-Strauss’s insights into an approach that is not structuralist in any restrictive sense; and that I see as fundamentally hermeneutical. They both also linked this to a good grasp of some specifics of ancient Greek civilization e.g. in Vidal-Naquet’s essay on Greece as a ‘civilisation de la parole politique’, I think they learnt from Lévi-Strauss while avoiding his blind alleys.11 Even so, I prefer not to talk about structuralist hermeneutics. SA: Is this because a structuralist approach, no matter how hermeneutic, does not allow enough room for agency? JPA: Yes, not enough agency, and more importantly, perhaps, I am keen on getting away from strong notions of structure. I tend to speak not of civilizational structures, but of civilizational patterns, configurations, articulations, constellations, etc. SA: As they are less determining? JPA: Yes, because they are less determining, more historical, more open to variety and contingency. And there is a whole range of concepts like those I have just quoted that help to avoid the rigidities of mainstream notions of structure and system; those two are over-represented in the human sciences. SA: In a similar vein, does your understanding of social creativity incorporate action as a dimension? I’m thinking here of the importance of Canetti and the crowd for your thought, but also spontaneous moments of social creativity and collective action that have been part of your historical life, such as the Prague Spring. Such instances of social creativity and collective action seem to be irreducible to social practices which, if I understand you correctly, is a term meant to capture the important aspects of action whilst ridding it of its individualist leanings. JPA: Yes, let’s start with social creativity. The locus classicus on that is Durkheim’s statement towards the end of the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, where he says that society possesses a creativity that is not equalled by any other observable being. Now this is not, among Durkheim’s ideas the one that was most strongly developed by the tradition that took off from him. But it did resurface, as we know, in Castoriadis‘s work, and in Alain Touraine’s, too. Touraine was obviously influenced by Castoriadis, and always admitted that, but he was also more explicitly conscious of the Durkheimian connection than was Castoriadis. SA: Wasn’t the original version of Praxis und Interpretation supposed to include a chapter on Durkheim? JPA: It was. SA: Was this the argument that you were developing in that chapter? JPA: My main point was—or was to be—that Durkheim’s first major work, The Division of Social Labour, presents a closed and finished image of society, but this image breaks down before the argument is completed— when it becomes clear that a new morality does not simply grow out of the structures of organic solidarity. The later work can then be understood as an

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unfinished, two-track journey beyond the original frame of reference. The two tracks were religion and politics, and on both levels, there was a gradual discovery of social creativity. If Durkheim had lived to complete this project and draw the threads together, he would presumably have given us an account of the transformations of human societies from primitive religion to democratic politics—which is what Marcel Gauchet did much later, but with inputs from Castoriadis, Lefort, Lévi-Strauss and Clastres, so that the whole model became very different. I could not finish this chapter in time for publication, and I later lost the manuscript, which was only a rough draft. But I still think that this interpretation of Durkheim makes sense. Briefly back to the question of creativity: the story is somewhat paradoxical. The emergence of sociology involves a glimpse of creativity, but also the formation of a whole set of concepts that obstruct the understanding of creativity and tend to reduce it to something else. SA: Such as … JPA: Well, such as social system; social evolution; the whole functionalist image of society. Such as the theory of action that one-sidedly emphasises normativity and teleology. So what you need is a rethinking of basic concepts in a way that would allow you to make more sense of social creativity. If you take creativity as the emergence of the new and more specifically of new meaning, then, if you take it seriously, you don’t collapse it into causal or logical sequences. There have been various attempts to rethink it. I think Hans Joas’s book on the creativity of action is very important. It puts creativity back into action and I really have no quarrel with his argument. What one would like to see is a stronger connection between this rethinking of action on the one hand and institutions and civilisations on the other. But then Hans of course went on to do very different things. I don’t think that he has really continued on the path opened in The Creativity of Action. Another attempt is of course Castoriadis’s ontology of the social-historical—that’s an attempt to rethink the social-historical form or level of being in a way that allows for creativity. Eisenstadt was doing the same thing with civilisation, although in a more diffuse way. He has said though, I think on more than one occasion, that his main intellectual concern has been to understand or make sense of the phenomenon of creativity. To make sense means to contextualize, not to explain in a traditional strong sense. But it can link up with the increasing emphasis on the contextuality of all explanations. In the philosophy of the social sciences. The other side of this paradox, the long coexistence of intermittent glimpses of creativity with ongoing use of concepts that obstruct its understanding, is that the theme of creativity has popped up elsewhere, and been taken up by people often at considerable distance from the mainstream of the social sciences. Like Canetti and the crowd. There is no doubt that the whole idea of the crowd, as invoked by Canetti, is an attempt to recapture social creativity at a very elementary level; and linking it to a reflection on power is

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by the same token a way of accounting for the ways it gets instrumentalized, suppressed, converted into its opposite. So, further reflection on the creativity of action would help to go beyond individualist conceptions of action towards a more institutionalist and civilizationist contextualization. SA: What about the idea of spontaneous kinds of collective action: are these not different from understandings of social practices? The notion of social practices seems to point more towards a notion of instituted rather than of instituting society, to use Castoriadis’s parlance. JPA: Yes, I think Durkheim was fundamentally right when he identified historical phases and periods of what he called collective effervescence. And there are crucial historical cases of that. SA: Such as in the Prague Spring? JPA: Yes, there was a bit of that in the Prague Spring, but there are much more spectacular cases. And you can go much further back in history, as Durkheim did. A certain irregular rhythm of creative transcending of established practices is part and parcel of history. SA: As we’ve been discussing, an elaboration of social creativity has been central to your reflections and offers an alternative to both evolutionary and functionalist approaches to society in history. Yet in a recent paper that you presented in Erfurt you acknowledge the existence of evolutionary trends in history.12 How does this relativise your emphasis on social creativity? JPA: Yes, I mean, of course, what I want is an alternative to evolutionary and functionalist approaches; that’s a concern I share with other theorists, like Alan Touraine and others. But since you make a reference to Erfurt let me begin with a quotation from Robert Bellah’s lecture in Erfurt.13 You may remember it, too. He said, somewhere at the beginning of his talk, that evolution is historical and history is evolutionary. Now I’d like to amend that and perhaps say that evolution is historical but history is only in part evolutionary. I mean that you can allow for evolutionary trends in history. And there are long term trends. There is an evolutionary side to technological progress and to the growth of knowledge. So I don’t think we need to drive evolution out of history. And I don’t think we need to deny either that when you look at major transformations like the axial age, there’s a bit of evolution in it. The important point of course is that this is never the whole story. There are always creative elaborations and openings that transcend those trends and contextualize them in a specific way. In the case of the axial age, you have the emergence of overall patterns that set civilizations apart from each other, and they are not deducible from evolutionary trends. So, let us not mistake evolutionary trends for an all-encompassing evolutionary logic, but I have no problem with admitting that in history there is an interaction and there are changing combinations and rhythms of evolutionary trends and creative innovations. What matters, I think, is not to subsume history under evolution, under a metahis-

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torical evolutionary logic, in the way that the great evolutionists, including Habermas, have done. SA: An increasing emphasis on history was integral to your shift to hermeneutics. Overall it can be said that your work tends to lie between historical sociology, the history of philosophy, and a non-Hegelian philosophy of history. What then is history and what is the study of history in your thought? JPA: The point I would perhaps first make is that history is the ongoing emergence of coexisting and successive human worlds. I mean human worlds not in the sense of worlds unilaterally created by human beings, but worlds in which humans situate themselves and in so doing make some sense of the world as an overarching horizon. That seems to me to be the most important point here. I would of course add that I fully accept Castoriadis’s argument about the social-historical. You need to have the two things together; history is the history of societies. And societies are historical. No quarrel with Castoriadis on this level. But when you say that the work tends to lie between historical sociology, the history of philosophy, and a non-Hegelian philosophy of history, I must object that I haven’t done anything much on the history of philosophy. SA: Well, haven’t you written those essays, the titles escape me at the moment: there was the one on Patočka … JPA: I have written four papers on Patočka: two in English, The idea of negative Platonism and Between the philosophy of history and the history of philosophy; and two in Czech, on the idea of super-civilization and on Patočka’s conception of Europe.14 And there is more to come. But so far I have said very little about his work on the history of philosophy, on which he wrote very extensively. SA: There was a further essay, ‘The Axial Conundrum: Between Historical Sociology and the Philosophy of History’…15 JPA: I have no quarrel with the claim that the general thrust of the work lies between historical sociology and the philosophy of history; I think it is very important for historical sociology to retain a link to questions traditionally posed by the philosophy of history. It is, of course, equally important to move the philosophy of history away from the Hegelian tradition—with which, quite misleadingly, some authors tend to equate it. This is not just a matter of not identifying history with progress. More generally, we need to get away from closed images of history and society. Assuming that we accept Castoriadis’s point about the unity of these two, the philosophy of history becomes a reflection on the social-historical. And I would also agree with Castoriadis that this is, to a very significant extent, a matter of deconstructing images or paradigms imported from elsewhere—from biology, linguistics, logic etc. But he does not deal with all the images that have played a role in this context. The individualist one is not given its due; and his critique of functionalism does not tackle the most complex versions of that paradigm.

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Moreover, if the forms of the social-historical are also patterns of the human condition, there will be an overlap with philosophical anthropology. All these philosophical dimensions are important for my understanding of civilizational analysis. SA: Your approach to hermeneutics is grounded in a theory of culture, the phenomenological problematic of the world as a shared horizon, and new approaches to the problematic of the ‘meaning of meaning’. Castoriadis’s link between the creative imagination and meaning has been influential for your account, as has Merleau-Ponty’s one on argument from the Preface of the Phenomenology of Perception that ‘because we are in the world we are condemned to meaning’. In Civilizations in Dispute, you argued that being-in-the-world is the most elementary form of meaning. Could you sum up the main features of your approach to meaning and how it differs from Castoriadis and Merleau-Ponty? JPA: Yes, you can talk about an approach to meaning or a conception of meaning. I think it’s difficult to have a theory or a definition of meaning, because meaning is something you presuppose when you think or theorise at all. And it was, I think, Castoriadis’s immersion in a certain problematic of meaning that made him so dismissive about the idea of theory. He preferred to talk about elucidation rather than theory. That said, I don’t think I have been developing any original conception of meaning. What I rather have been doing is pulling together various threads and lines of argument. I think I’ve been drawing primarily on four sources. Firstly, there is Merleau-Ponty, with the notion that meaning is simply the correlate or the other side of being in the world. Secondly, Gadamer’s idea that we live, act and think in the medium of understanding. Of course that understanding presupposes meaning, or meaning becomes the medium or the element of human life and historical existence. Then there is Castoriadis, of course, with his imaginary significations. I still think that the notion of imaginary significations is probably Castoriadis’s most important contribution to philosophy, because it opens up a whole new dimension to the problematic of meaning. It reinforces the idea of meaning as something that goes beyond empirical or rational foundations. It brings in the creative imagination. Last but not least there is Max Weber. Of course, I think Weber’s emphasis on meaning as the defining element of social life goes much further than his more restrictive methodological emphasis on the meanings intended by individual actors. That point of view prevails when he tries to bring meaning under control, so to speak, in his Basic Concepts of Sociology. What you get is a restrictive conception and an inadequate account of what he himself is doing elsewhere, when he analyses cultural worlds (Western, Chinese or Indian) patterned by meanings. This I think is justification for a hermeneutical reading of Weber, as against the neo-Kantian ones. You might say that this is an eclectic approach to meaning, but it has served well to spell out the idea of culture as articulation of the world.

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SA: In your approach to meaning, you tend to emphasise the figurative aspect more than Castoriadis has; he tended to highlight the signitive dimension of meaning. JPA: Yes, I think that’s probably true and that has to do with MerleauPonty. The strong emphasis on the figurative element in Merleau-Ponty. He says, somewhere in the working notes for The Visible and the Invisible: there is a figure on a ground, you can’t get beyond that.16 SA: Husserl articulated his notion of the lifeworld somewhat ambiguously. Succeeding interpretations of Husserl have variously tried to spell out more clearly an understanding of the lifeworld, per se, or have attempted to emphasise either life or the world. Your own work connects the concept of horizon to the elaboration of the world, and leaves the life aspect more or less to one side. Recent debates in French currents of phenomenology have tended to emphasise a phenomenology of life (or existence), especially Renaud Barbaras and Michel Henry. You have not systematically engaged with the focus on life. Could you summarise your response to the problematics they raise? JPA: Yes, in Husserl’s concept of the lifeworld there is a difference and a potential tension between the two components, life and world. I developed this idea in a chapter of Praxis und Interpretation. And I was of course more interested in the world than in life. And more interested in the current that went in that direction: Merleau-Ponty and Patočka, and, in a sense, Weber before them. That was the alternative that more easily links up with hermeneutics. But in the meantime you have a vigorous phenomenology of life especially in the work of French authors, such as Renaud Barbaras and Michel Henry and I think there is also a German reception of that. I haven’t really engaged with this, so there is hardly a response to be summarised. But it seems to me that life in this context is essentially a new term and perhaps a new interpretation of what used to be called existence. This phenomenology of life is definitely much closer to existentialism than to what was once called Lebensphilosophie. But to repeat, I am aware of this, but I have hardly engaged with it and it is simply something that is awaiting to be confronted. Possibly to be integrated into the kind of hermeneutical anthropology and culturology that I am envisaging. SA: Although your work can be understood as a philosophical anthropology it is always an historical anthropology and, to paraphrase Karl Lőwith, an anthropology under the condition of civilization, in that you contrast civilizational worlds to so-called primitive worlds. How does the recent incorporation of regions and empires into the realm of comparative analysis affect the analysis of civilizations and their encounters, not just with other civilizational constellations, but also so-called primitive societies as part of a broader elaboration of world histories? JPA: I think there are two questions here. One is about drawing the historical boundaries of civilizational analysis. In Civilizations in Dispute, and in

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what I have done since then, I opted for the position that it’s best to equate them with what archaeologists and prehistorians call the emergence of civilization. That is, with those early formations that you call Hochkulturen in German, where statehood, urbanisation and writing are understood as basic defining characteristics. The main reason for that was that here you get a new kind of interplay of culture and power. That seems to me to be central to the civilizational field. This is basically the standpoint adopted by Max Weber and Shmuel Eisenstadt. I would admit that there is more to be discussed here. The alternative is the position that follows Mauss in extending the concept of civilization back into the interminable history of primitive societies. I have, most recently, drawn a bit closer to it—to some extent in a paper on the religio-political nexus, but more extensively in an unpublished paper on Mauss (originally written for a conference on anthropology and civilizational analysis which I organized together with Chris Hann).17 I would not necessarily want to make the concept of civilization coextensive with human societies. But there is definitely a case for seeing the interplay of culture and power, more specifically of religion and the political, at work in pre-state societies. However, we need more discussion with anthropologists and archaeologists. Your other question is about what happens when you bring macro-formations like regions and empires into comparative history and comparative historical sociology. Both regions and empires are linked to civilizations, but not reducible to them. Take regions first. There are only a few regions that are more or less co-extensive with civilizations. For example, East Asia is a historical region, made up of three core countries, China, Korea and Japan, with Vietnam as a fourth and less clear-cut case—it lies across the boundary between East and Southeast Asia. This region is also a civilizational domain— the domain of what we can call Sinic rather than Chinese civilization. The French Sinologist Leon Vandermeersch described it as the region of Chinese characters, and the writing system carries with it a whole cultural tradition. This is a civilization that took shape in China, and then was reincarnated in variant forms in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. There are other regions, not at all unified in civilizational terms, but they have a long history of being crossroads, even battlegrounds of civilizations. Take South East Asia. It is perhaps the clearest case of that kind. There are regions also that seem to retain some kind of identity across civilizational boundaries in time. Take the region I am particularly interested in, East Central Europe, which originally develops as a regional offshoot of Western Christendom but retains some kind of regional identity in the new civilizational context of modernity. As for empires, they are now—after long neglect—becoming a favourite topic for comparative historians. But little has been done to bring it into contact with civilizational analysis. Eisenstadt wrote a big book on empires, but that was before his civilizational turn, and he never revisited this topic in any systematic way. There are different civilizational patterns of imperial

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ambitions and imperial powers. The civilizational characteristics of the Chinese empire are very different from the Byzantine or the early Islamic one. But empires also cross civilizational borders. The most important empires in history did that and became cross-civilizational formations of a particular kind. If there was, as I think, a Roman civilization, it cannot be seen as co-extensive with the Roman Empire. The empire integrated another very big and very important civilizational domain, the Greek one. There you have a kind of civilizational dualism. Some earlier ideas about the wholesale Hellenization of the Romans have been refuted. It also encompassed—although it did a much less perfect job of integrating—Jewish civilization. And so on. And what we call the Chinese Empire was at least in its last incarnation (under the Qing dynasty, after 1644) a combination of Chinese and Inner Asian traditions; and I do not think you can question the civilizational status of the latter. At the same time Sinic civilization extended into countries like Japan and Korea, where the empire had no sway (or lost control at a very early stage). SA: For the emphasis on diversity and interculturality in your work you share with Castoriadis a conviction of the importance of the Greek trajectory. How does this fit in with your comparative civilizational approach? Or, from another angle, how does this decentring of Eurocentric accounts of broad history militate against a cultural relativism? How does your version of contextualism counter this? JPA: First of all, I think it is going a bit too far to say that I share Castoriadis’s conviction because my idea of Ancient Greece makes it look less unique than Castoriadis would have it. If you think, as I do, that you have to allow for forms and visions of autonomy, even if on a more limited scale in other civilizations, then the Greeks begin to look less unique. That said, I think there is a case to be made for the exceptional originality of the Greek experience, an epoch-making political and cultural breakthrough, and I don’t think Christian Meier was wide off the mark when he talked about Ancient Greece as the needle’s eye of world history. Something very exceptional with very unusually far reaching consequences for all subsequent history did happen in the Greek polis. I think it is important to defend this understanding of Ancient Greece against the post-colonial aberrations that wanted to deny it altogether. Martin Bernal’s Black Athena may be a spent force (or a pricked balloon), but there are still strong currents in contemporary work that ideologise this question; all versions of the argument about Greek originality then appear as some kind of surreptitious defence of Western imperialism. I think it’s necessary to resist that. How does this fit in with a comparative civilizational approach? And I see no problem with that; a comparative civilizational approach can easily allow for exceptional creativity or originality of one civilization in specific regards. As in the case of the Greeks with politics and philosophy. On the critique of Eurocentrism: I do not deny that this critique is justified; in a text written in German but so far only published in a Czech translation, I

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distinguished three lines of criticism. They are as follows: There is an empirical one, about getting away from a traditional over-emphasis on the relative weight of Europe in universal history (but not, in my opinion about denying the very real Eurocentricity that prevailed during a certain epoch); a hermeneutical one, against interpreting other civilizations in terms of categories uncritically derived from the European experience; and a normative one, which is about criticizing the unilateral imposition of European value orientations. What one needs to add, I think is that this critique of Eurocentrism in all three respects is a matter of long-term work, rather than the instant adoption of a politically correct position. But in all three cases, this has got mixed up with what you can call a Euro-bashing industry. There is far too much of that in contemporary work. And rather than talking about it as militating against a cultural relativism, I’d rather see it as opening the door to a certain kind of cultural relativism, because very often it goes together with a simple affirmation of identities. Identities supposedly oppressed by Europeans, and therefore having the right to proclaim their vision of a universal history against the European one. On my version of contextualism—well, I wouldn’t make much of that term. It is a term sometimes used by authors like Habermas, or those who follow him—as a sort of levelling description of positions that do not accept a strong universalism. If there is a version of contextualism that I would subscribe to, it’s one that can live with the idea of lateral universals. I mean universals growing out of a context and further developing through encounters, and mutual influences of cultures. SA: You have used a particular quotation from Whitehead: ‘There is no civilization without metaphysics’, as the epigraph for Civilisations in Dispute. And you have also referred to it in your Patočka and negative Platonism essay from 2010. What is the significance of this idea for your thought? JPA: Whitehead’s formulation is of course a bit of a rhetorical overstatement. But it is the kind of rhetorical overstatement that draws attention to something fundamentally true. Metaphysics here perhaps should be understood by analogy with a theme in Castoriadis’s work: you have suggested that although he does not use these terms, he implicitly distinguishes between le philosophique and la philosophie—as he distinguishes between le politique and la politique. You might say, similarly, although Whitehead might not have accepted that formulation, that there is a distinction here between metaphysics and the metaphysical. There is a metaphysical dimension to civilizations, to the extent that they articulate the world and establish some kind of ultimate framework for making sense of the world. That is a metaphysical dimension of civilizations. It is only in some cases, perhaps only in Greco-Christian traditions, that this grows into explicit metaphysics. It’s a moot question here, I think, whether you can talk about metaphysics in India or China. But at least what we know as metaphysics in the West is a particularly powerful expression

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of this underlying dimension, to which I think Whitehead was drawing attention. And that’s all. I just thought that this was a good way to stress something that was important for my overall argument. SA: Patočka has become increasingly significant for your work. Unlike some commentators, you have linked his essay from 1953 on Negative Platonism to his broader project on the phenomenology of the world. Could you summarise your interpretation of this aspect of Patočka’s work—i.e. the negative Platonism—and its significance for your own, especially in light of your pursuit of a transformation of ontological currents of thought? Within that, would you see a reconsideration of Plato’s chora fitting into an elaboration of negative Platonism? JPA: Yes, Patočka has become increasingly significant. I think I discovered or rediscovered him several times. The first time was in Prague at the very end of my stay here, in ’66; a second time in Australia when I was working on Praxis und Interpretation; and the third time after going back to Europe. I sense a growing recognition especially among Czech philosophers of negative Platonism as a project of lasting significance and validity even if Patočka himself became a bit dismissive about it, on one occasion describing it as naïve, and not referring explicitly to it in later work. I still think it resonates there. It is a very distinctive programme for post-metaphysical thought, to use Habermas’s term. Interestingly, when I referred to Patočka in a lecture about the axial age, in Munich in 2008, Habermas—who introduced the lecture and took part in the discussion commented on this and said he could recognize Patočka—on the basis of what I had said about him—as a postmetaphysical thinker.18 Coming from him, this is of course a compliment. I would add that negative Platonism is a distinctive model of post-metaphysical thought—one with a strong emphasis on rethinking human freedom. Why did he choose this term, negative Platonism? Because in a way it involves going back to Plato with the insight that—as he says somewhere in the text— Plato would not have been Plato if he had not at the same time been more than Plato. It’s about extracting this ‘more’. It’s about linking up with Plato’s self-criticism. Now there have been quite a few attempts to find in Plato’s thought more than went into traditional Platonism. Sometimes it has been about upgrading the so-called unwritten doctrines. That’s not the case with Patočka’s negative Platonism. He became more interested in that later, in the 1964 book on Aristotle. SA: You mean the unwritten doctrines, yes? JPA: Yes. In the 1964 book, Aristotle, his predecessors and his successors, there is quite a lot about the unwritten doctrines where he largely, I think, takes on board work done by German scholars—the so-called Tübingen school—on that.19 But in the essay on Negative Platonism it seems to be more about showing that there is a not fully absorbed Socratic legacy in Plato’s thought, and that it is present in the dialogues. The idea of finding the other side of

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Plato in the dialogues has been taken up by others; I mean, for example work that Ivan Chvatík is doing at the moment. It’s difficult to go any further into this when one doesn’t read Greek. This becomes very much a matter of philological interpretation, and I lack the expertise to say anything more on that. What seems to me beyond doubt is that there are parts of Plato unassimilated or not fully assimilated by the tradition that claimed him as an ancestor, and they are relevant for those who want to break away from the metaphysical tradition and its kind of Platonism. SA: Would you distinguish between freedom in Patočka’s sense, and autonomy in Castoriadis’s? JPA: Well, there is an overlap, but also a distinction to be made, because what Patočka calls freedom in the essay on Negative Platonism relates more closely to metaphysics, and has a much less pronounced socio political dimension. Even so, it does have something in common with Castoriadis’s autonomy. And what it has in common is related to the step Patočka takes when he moves from transcendence to transcensus, understood as the primordial human relation to the world. Not that he applies this concept systematically in the text. But it is there. And it represents a significant shift. When you talk about transcensus, you talk about the act of transcending, the ability to transcend, the new dimensions opened up through transcending, rather than in the metaphysical style about a superior reality discovered through that act. I found it useful, for example, to apply the concept of transcensus to the axial age, and thus to get away from the notions of transcendence and the transcendental that Jaspers and Eisenstadt, respectively, were using. SA: Yes, elsewhere you have noted that Eisenstadt’s distinction between the transcendental and the mundane, and that it is already working within the metaphysical framework inherited from Plato. JPA: It has at least an unclarified relationship to that framework. But I think that Eisenstadt was generally very reluctant to go too far into the field of philosophical disputes. SA: Your culturological approach presents an alternative to, or perhaps transformation of, the ontological turn in recent phenomenology. You have most succinctly summed up your view of culture as the relationship between man and world, drawing here on Weber. Does this relationship have then no ontological bearing or implication? From another perspective and drawing on a recent debate in the journal Anthropological Theory, is ontology just another word for culture? JPA: I certainly would not suggest that ontology is just another word for culture. But the two approaches are not mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the emphasis on culture, and on imaginary significations as components of culture, is an extension of the ontology of the social-historical that Castoriadis set out to develop. On the other hand, you can use the term ‘cultural ontology’—I think it occurs in both Nelson’s and Eisenstadt’s writings—to describe

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articulations or interpretations. As for the anthropological debate that you mentioned, it is largely inspired by the work of Philippe Descola, with which I have yet to engage in a more sustained way—that is on the list of things I want to do in the very near future. But so far, it seems to me that Descola has some difficulty in avoiding the conclusion that every ontology is a cultural construct and nothing more than that. So the culturological approach if you can call it that, is strictly speaking neither an alternative to, nor a transformation of the ontological term in phenomenology. It starts from elsewhere and I think it for the time being at least keeps open the question of what you eventually can do and where you would go with regard to ontology. SA: Whilst on the subject of ontology, your central disagreement with Castoriadis concerns interpretation, creation, and their interconnection. Underlying this difference, however, are alternative approaches to the problematic of the world. Castoriadis takes an ontological approach and in his stronger statements at least conflates the creation of a particular social historical work with the world horizon in general. You take more of a phenomenologicalhermeneutical approach, and often write of the world as a shared horizon, which presumes an interpretative and intercultural perspective. Within your writings both Castoriadis and yourself, as well as Merleau-Ponty, seem to interpret being and world interchangeably. For phenomenology, is the question of being really reducible to the question of the world, or from a different angle, is the question of being reducible to questions of the world taken from a culturological perspective? JPA: This is a continuation of the previous question and it raises some difficult issues. I don’t think I would agree that both Castoriadis and MerleauPonty interpret being and world interchangeably. Their positions seem to be rather different. Merleau-Ponty, in the Visible and the Invisible, equivocates a bit but the general thrust of the argument there, I think, is to suggest that questions about being should at least for the time being be posed in terms of world. I mean the notion of the world and the philosophical task of its clarification is the very context where questions about being should be handled. Castoriadis is different. I think he takes what you might call an Aristotelian position, insisting on the polysemic character of being. And the meaning of being is different in different regions. The being of the social-historical is different from the being of the psyche or the organism. So there is a differential ontology. I mean there is an explicit, straightforward ambitious ontology in Castoriadis. There isn’t in Merleau-Ponty. I mean, he is much more cautious about this and talks about ontology necessarily being indirect and things like that. I think I’m closer to Merleau-Ponty on this but that’s another sort of provisional position. I mean, it’s for me at least a simply an open question, how far you can move from the problematic of the world in the direction of ontology. I think that’s an issue to be explored.

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As for the notion of the world in Castoriadis, I think we agree that it is a very underdeveloped theme, but it is there, and some formulations are very emphatic. SA: Can you pose the Seinsfrage within a culturological approach? JPA: Not in Heideggerian terms, I think. SA: No, but Castoriadis also poses it. JPA: But he poses it in post-Heideggerian terms. I mean he poses it with a very significant shift from Being to beings. I mean, he objects to Heidegger’s unilateral privileging of Being, as opposed to beings. He maintains that they are interconnected, and that the question must encompass both. SA: Yes. So there are varieties of the Seinsfrage maybe, but it remains, I think, an open question as to whether it can be fully posited within culturological terms. In Praxis und Interpretation, an elaboration of civilizations was in the background. The book’s focus, especially the second half, was the development of a hermeneutic of modernity. Yet during the 1980, that is, concurrent to the writing of Praxis, you were simultaneously elaborating civilizational themes in various essays. If anything the current focus of your work, in line with broader debates in the field, has shifted from modernity to civilizations and world history (or even: world histories). Now the question of modernity is generally dealt with in terms of the question of its civilizational status. Do you think Patočka’s notion of modernity as a supercivilization is helpful in this regard? How important is a hermeneutical modernity to your current thought? And how would you relate the cultural horizon of modernity which you have talked about in terms of competing notions of worldhood between the cultural currents of enlightenment and romanticism? … how would you relate this to varieties of modernities, such as the Japanese example, in particular, the enlightenment/ romanticism field of tensions that you have identified… JPA: That’s true, the civilizational shift isn’t there as such in Praxis und Interpretation—not even in the background. I think it’s implicit in what I write there for example about the Weberian conception of culture as articulation of the world. But there is a stronger emphasis on the hermeneutic of modernity. Conversely in later work there is a stronger emphasis on civilizational themes. But the hermeneutic of modernity is there in the background and I don’t think it has become less important for me. The reason why it’s not included as such in Civilisations in Dispute is simply that I ran out of space and time. I still think it’s very important to pursue this. As for Patočka and the idea of supercivilization. I would not propose to adopt that term. I think it’s rather unfortunate because the analogy with Nietzsche’s ‘superman’, of which Patočka was obviously aware, is not a good one. It is true that in the Czech word, nadcivilizace, the connotations of the first syllable are less extreme than those of super- in English. But the same preposition is used in the Czech translation of superman. But even if we have reservations about the term, there is no

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denying that behind it there is a very pioneering idea. And I think Patočka was the first ever to try to understand modernity as a kind of civilizational paradox, being both more and less than civilizations in the traditional sense. More because of its unprecedented ability to problematize and undermine the presuppositions of older civilizations, which of course in turn is linked to the more positive characteristic that it develops universalizing orientations: the pursuit of knowledge and freedom. It is less than traditional civilizations because it gives a less defining, less determinate answer to basic questions about the world and the human condition; which of course in turn means it then has to draw on all the traditions to confront those questions. This internal paradox gives rise to an internal conflict. A conflict, which, in the 1950s, when Patočka wrote this text, was most visibly embodied by, although not reducible to the conflict between the western world and the communist one. The idea of super-civilization was an attempt to make sense of communism, an attempt quite unique in its time, very different from the lines taken by supporters, fellow travellers, and critics of communism at the time. The idea was that communism represented a particularly extreme and for the time being effective version of a modern tradition going back to the radical Enlightenment: a tradition that tries in one way or another, to construct a model of reason that at the same time provides a comprehensive and definitive meaning of life. So I think where we should acknowledge him as the originator of what has become or at least should become an important theme in debates on modernity. The hermeneutic of modernity as I see it is concerned with this question. But it is also concerned with the broader spectrum of varieties of modernity than the one Patočka was talking about in the 1950s. And of course we now have to situate all these issues in relation to the problematic of multiple modernities. My general line on this is that you can only have multiple modernities— significant varieties of modernity—if you think of its basic components— economic, political, cultural—as internally open to alternatives; and that also means as characterised or beset by internal conflicts. One of which is the conflict between enlightenment and romanticism. And since you raise the question of Japan, which is a particularly interesting case of a distinctive and long-lived modern variety of modernity outside its original western context, well, then one of the things conducive to that was, I think, that in early modern Japanese thought that is during the Tokugawa period—from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century—prior to the decisive encounter with the West, you have a development of divergent currents that show some of the characteristics of enlightenment and romanticism. The opposition is more muted. But there is a basic affinity there I think. I’m talking about the currents commonly described as neo-Confucian on one side, some of which remind you of the enlightenment, and then the so-called nativist school of thought (kokugaku), which has very strong affinities with romanticism. So to sum up, it’s not, I think, the case that this question of civilizational themes has replaced

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or crowded out the hermeneutic of modernity. It is more a matter of laying the emphasis on one or the other. And these variations in emphasis are partly due to situational constraints, like the fact that I simply had neither the time nor the space to put a section on modernity into Civilizations in Dispute. And it’s explained in the preface that I propose to tackle that later although it’s taken me longer to get back to that than I anticipated then. SA: In your writings you have identified the specifically interpretative aspect of the world relation as the aspect that the hermeneutic tradition emphasises in order to put the difference between world and environment than the significance of this distinction for a specifically human relation to the world into the correct perspective. Yet Castoriadis’s later reconsideration of the creativity of nature in general and more specifically his rethinking of the living being allows that the world first appears as a horizon of at least protomeaning with the living being and not with the human condition. Does this expansion of the phenomenal field have implications for your own account? JPA: I think it’s true that there is a significant new departure in Castoriadis’s thought. He takes the question of meaning, and of meaning imputed to the world, into the realm of living beings as distinct from the social historical (it might, by the way, be interesting to compare him with Hans Jonas, but I haven’t gone into that). I haven’t followed him in that direction neither affirmatively nor critically and I don’t think I could do that without knowing a lot more about biology than I do, so I mean this to me is simply an issue on which I am at present not in a position to have a firm opinion. I think you’ve taken more interest in this aspect of Castoriadis than I have. But I am so far not convinced that this particular direction of his thought has direct implications for what I am doing about culture. SA: Inter-relatedly, as your hermeneutical term is gaining pace throughout the 1980s, it appeared as if you were confining the problematic of the world to modern horizons without positing it as a trans-historical phenomenon. Yet it now seems that you view the world as a trans-historical horizon. Could you elaborate this shift—if it is indeed thus—in your thought? JPA: I wrote that text on world interpretation and mutual comprehension, in the 1989 Habermas Festschrift, more than a quarter of a century ago.20 And in retrospect I would not understand it as arguing that the world horizon is an exclusively modern phenomenon. I think I was arguing that what modernity brings to this is a particular radicalization. I mean a particularly clear-cut position of the problem of the world. A phenomenological, hermeneutical problem of the world. That would not be to deny that there is a trans-historical horizon behind it. Its rather that with modern experience and modern thought you gain a new and more revealing access to this world historical horizon. SA: Three incipient trends in your recent work stand out. The first is an increasing emphasis on cultural memory that draws on Jan and Aleida Assmann’s work. Secondly an increasing interest in archaic civilizations. And

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the third, the idea of philosophies in inter-civilizational form. Could you comment on their significance for your thought? JPA: Yes, I’d say that all these problematics are related to my interest in the Axial Age, and to the work I have been doing on that since the Firenze workshop in 2001.21 Cultural memory, first; one very convincing conclusion, I think, from Jan Assmann’s book on cultural memory is that you need to bring this into interpretations of the Axial Age. In the end, I don’t agree with his levelling of that period, but he’s right to the extent that you can think of the different traditions crystallizing during the Axial Age—Greek, Jewish, Indian, Chinese—also as different cultures of memory. And that’s very important. That’s a dimension that doesn’t really appear in Eisenstadt’s account of the Axial Age. He is also right, I think, in insisting on the importance of writing, and on the gradual realisation of the potential inherent in writing, a potential for new kinds of tradition formation. He does it in a way that avoids any simplistic determinism of writing, in the style of Jack Goody. For Goody, writing as such explains these innovations, and imposes a new kind of rationality. Assmann doesn’t argue like that. There are different cultures of writing, Schriftkulturen, and you should be looking that rather than the supposedly linear implications of the technique of writing for human ways of thinking. The other side of this, though, is that if you take on board much of what the Assmanns have written on cultural memory, you are still left with a question: should this new concept of cultural memory replace the older concept of tradition, or should it rather be a starting point for reconstructing or elaborating a more complex concept of tradition? They don’t really confront this question, I think, and I prefer the second answer. Cultural memory is a key component of traditions. But it interacts with historical experience, and to elaborate on that you of course need the phenomenological and hermeneutical notion of experience. It interacts with interpretations of the world. It interacts also with the power structures. So, I think there is more work to be done on this, and the work of the Assmanns could be used to a greater extent than they have so far done, precisely to rethink the issue of tradition, and that means a tradition as a civilization seen from a certain point of view or in a certain context. Second, then, the archaic civilizations. I also became particularly interested in them because I came to think that the debate on the Axial Age has been suffering from an unhistorical and impoverished concept of archaic civilizations. I mean the older ones that preceded the first millennium BC and to some extent survived into it: Egypt, Mesopotamia in particular the more peripheral parts of the Near East, but also further afield—China and India. I think we need to analyse those archaic civilizations as the earliest phase of what Eisenstadt calls the becoming explicit of the civilizational dimension of human society. He doesn’t see it that way. He wants to make it begin with the axial age and I think that’s misleading. There’s a whole lot of historical dynamics and transformations going on within those archaic civilizations. Not only are

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they very different from each other, they also—each of them, but especially the two most prominent ones, Egypt and Mesopotamia, go through internal transformations. Third, the idea of philosophy as an inter-civilizational form, yes, this is in other words the idea of the three philosophical civilizations (put forward by the Israeli philosopher, Ben-Ami Scharfstein), i.e. the three civilizations that invented philosophy during the Axial Age: Greece, India and China. I think that’s a valid and valuable idea. And it means on one hand, of course, that you can contrast this common characteristic of three civilizations with the fourth one, namely Judaism, which invented something else altogether, namely monotheism, in a specific sense: not just the idea of one God (notions in that vein appear elsewhere too), but a god as creator and legislator—in other words, a divine sovereignty that relativizes the sovereignty of kings (Assmann has also done important work on this). And if you bring Ancient Iran back into the Axial Age, which now I think there is a growing tendency to do, there you have another culture that invents a new religion rather than philosophy. On the other hand, you can compare the three philosophical civilizations among themselves. Although I do think the term philosophy is justified in all three cases, it is articulated and developed in very different ways. So to sum up, in all three cases, you are looking at themes that do grow organically out of the debate on the Axial Age but once you take them up they lead you much further afield. SA: Would you want to limit philosophy to the three philosophical civilizations—China, India and Greece? I’m thinking of some contemporary debates where many proponents of so-called intercultural philosophy want to extend the idea of philosophy much further to include, for example, African philosophy. JPA: I’m not convinced by that. I mean, I simply think there is a different type of reflection and discourse at work in those three philosophical civilizations. And all the other cultures that have had philosophy are derivative from those. Be it the medieval European, be it the Islamic or the Tibetan (the Tibetans had a kind of philosophical tradition but it was derived from India). Or the Japanese, which is derived from China. I mean there are also people who have argued for an indigenous Japanese philosophy but I’m not convinced by that argument either. They got their philosophical civilization from China. I think there are only these three independent inventions. That’s not a Eurocentric idea because the Greeks are one of the three. SA: So you wouldn’t extend it to Africa? JPA: No. SA: You have written of the unfinished discussion between philosophy and sociology. Is there an intrinsic connection between the two? In what ways could you see contemporary discussions between the two disciplines enriched? JPA: Yes, I think here you have to start with the observation that the term ‘social theory’ which became current during the 1970s and 1980s …

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SA: As opposed to ‘sociological theory’… JPA: Yes. It was from the beginning meant to convey the meaning that there is an interface, there is a good deal of common ground between philosophy and sociology. Social theory has, all things considered, I think done a good job of establishing that point. So in that sense, there has been during the last three-four decades, there has been a great and productive border crossing between philosophy and sociology. It would be true to say that it has not affected the academic division of labour between philosophy and sociology as much as it should have. It’s also true, and I think it’s very important that you need to bring more history into this common domain, and into social theory as it is done today. Generally, I think it suffers more from a lack of history— and of comparative history—than from any sociological deficit. So, yes, let us have more of the same and with more history. That’s roughly what I would want to say on this now. That there is an intrinsic connection is now beyond doubt. It’s also, I think linked to the recognition, since the ’70s and ’80s, that the classical sociologists, the people first and foremost recognized as founding fathers of sociology were also philosophers, albeit of a somewhat particular kind. And Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel are philosophers with distinctive conceptions of the human condition and the human situation in the world, and of the relationship between man and history etc. SA: Your most recent work has taken up the religio-political nexus as central to what Eisenstadt has called “the civilizational dimension of human societies”, but also to the civilizational framework more generally. My questions here are interrelated. The first question (or series of questions) concerns the civilizational dimension of human societies, which broadly speaking involves the interplay of the cultural and institutional aspects. What is the meaning of the civilizational dimension, what makes it specifically ‘civilizational’ as opposed to ‘societal’, and how does your approach differ from Eisenstadt’s? JPA: The basic idea, I think, is that we should not start with the claim that there are such and such observable and given entities, and we will call them civilizations—that means neglecting the question of conceptual presuppositions, and is conducive to the idea of civilizations as self-contained wholes. We need a more analytical starting-point, and that is where Eisenstadt’s idea of the civilizational dimension comes in (You might of course say that it is conceived in the spirit of Parsons’s analytical realism, concepts isolating and pinpointing certain aspects of reality; and up to a point that is true; I would of course argue that if properly thought through, analytical realism turns into hermeneutical realism (Taylor et al.), but that is another story). That said, the question you raise—what is civilizational about the intertwining of ontological visions and institutional patterns?—is legitimate, and you are not the only one to raise it (Martin Fuchs also did, in a paper presented to a workshop on anthropology and civilizational analysis, in Halle).22 After all, Parsons theorized this interrelation, and we don’t regard

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him as a civilizational analyst—so what is new? In my opinion, an allround  opening and broadening of  the interrelation. Beginning with the notions of cosmological-ontological visions, they introduce the world dimension, which is—as such—absent from Parsons’s frame of reference. The visions are, in principle, compatible  with internal pluralism, tensions, even conflicts; in empirical  practice more or less characterized by such features. This aspect is to some extent obscured by Eisenstadt’s unfortunately frequent use of the term ‘cultural program’, inherited from Parsons, but if you take a closer look, he is talking about problematics rather than programs.  In Eisenstadt’s conception of the  civilizational dimension, at least as I understand it, the relationship between cultural visions of the world and institutional patterns (the latter always being configurations of social power) is an interplay, not a unilateral determination: power is always culturally defined, cultural meaning only becomes operative through power-supported interpretations. Moreover, the institutional patterns are made up of ‘arenas’, fundamentally the same thing as Max Weber’s Weltordnungen, with stronger emphasis on internal conflict; their plurality means that they do not develop in any pre-established systemic harmony (this theme is in fact prominent in Eisenstadt’s early criticism of modernization theory, well before his civilizational turn).  This multiple emphasis on openness can be seen as a rediscovery of the Weberian legacy. But then you need to add the Durkheimian-Maussian one. The cultural-institutional intertwining manifests itself on the level of families of societies, with the variety that can be expected on that level. In other words, the idea of the civilizational dimension has to be applied to large-scale and long-term formations. There will of course be cases where the relationship of a formative core or a local breakthrough to broader configurations is less straightforward, e.g. ancient Israel, a very small culture; but here you have to take into account both the background of the ancient Near East and the later pluralization of monotheism). That’s about it, I think. If somebody does not like the term civilization as a summing-up of this problematic, another word would have to be invented, and so far, that has not happened. I would not recommend returning to Weber’s ‘cultural worlds’—the formations in question are not only cultural, they are also political, not least geopolitical. SA: Can you sum up what you mean by the religio-political nexus? Whilst it clearly builds on your earlier theoretical work, such as the notions of cultural articulations of the world, social imaginaries as cultural projects of power, and the emergence of statehood, it also incorporates your recent interest in the geo-political, your most recent wave of engagement with anthropological debates, and the consideration of Castoriadis’s understanding of la politique and approach to power (especially as ground power) in a distinctive way. So far you have written two essays directly addressing this topic; one is in English, the

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other is in Czech. The latter incorporates a lengthy discussion of Durkheim, Gauchet, Weber and Lefort. Could you summarize your argument in that essay for the benefit of those who do not read Czech? JPA: The book that contains the Czech essay (edited by Milan Hanyš and myself ) discusses various theoretical, historical and contemporary aspects of the relationship between religion and politics.23 Issues of that kind have figured prominently in public and scholarly debates during the last quartercentury. A major reason for this growing interest is the upsurge of political Islam, in different shapes and with varying results, across and beyond the regions dominated by Islam as a religion. Another complex and contentious field is the political role of religion in post-Communist societies, much less uniform than the common background might have led us to aspect. Finally, the religious factor in American politics became more visible at the very moment when American power seemed to be reaching its historical zenith and pursuing the mirage of a unipolar world; crusading associations were not only invoked by America’s critics. All these challenges to received wisdom raised questions about broader contexts, most obviously about the long-assumed secularizing impact of modernity. Divergent paths to modernity, not least marked by different political experiences, are now seen to have resulted in widely varied cultural and institutional positions of religion. The very notion of a secular age is a matter of extensive debate, most decisively shaped by Charles Taylor’s work, and modern forms of the political are crucial to the subject. In a more general vein, new perspectives on religion and modernity reactivated the question of religious factors in the constitution of society and their interrelations with politics on that level. Problems posed but not satisfactorily solved by classical sociology have thus been reconsidered in light of another century of historical experience. The most sustained effort of this kind is to be found in the work of Marcel Gauchet, especially in his unfinished tetralogy on the trajectory of modern democracy and its confrontation with totalitarianism. As for my essay, it discusses the emerging but not yet fully developed idea of a religio-political nexus as a meta-institution shaping the context of more specific institutions; this conception, and the concomitant question of modern transformations, can be elucidated through a dialogue with classical sociology, especially Durkheim and Weber, and with more recent reformulation of its problems, notably by Marcel Gauchet. The section on Lefort can, I think, be condensed into three points. I first tried to spell out what is involved in Lefort’s distinction between mise en sens, mise en forme and mise en scène (as you will remember, he does not really spell it out). We have to take on board the concept of imaginary significations, which Lefort keeps—to say the least—at arm’s length, and also bring in the concept of the world; the mise en sens is the insertion of social life into world perspectives. As for the mise en forme, institutionalization properly

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speaking, it takes place through cultural definition of power structures, and this is not identical with legitimation: rather, the content of the cultural definitions determines the relative weight and the character of legitimacy. A further point is that institutionalization always involved impersonal as well as personal aspects—in a way, Weber knew that, but did not say it clearly enough. The personification of power is a mode of institutionalization— think of monarchy e.g. the most important of all monarchies, the imperial institution in  China. Mise en scène then involves the symbolic/ritual/iconic aspects of institutionalization. What then becomes of the concept of charisma? I don’t think we should throw it out, but it should be rescued from the confusion that surrounds it in Weber and from the uncontrollable proliferation which it is undergoing in some recent work. Briefly, I would reserve  it for cases of pronounced individualization of  power, which can affect all three of Lefort’s levels. (Individualization is a further twist, beyond mere personalization—e.g. the pope personifies religious power, but not all popes are charismatic—John XXIII and John Paul II  were, Pius XII most certainly wasn’t). This means, of course, that you always have to ask about the cultural and institutional premises of charisma. Two very extreme but not altogether incomparable cases were the prophet Muhammad and Comrade Stalin (by the way: Bronislaw Baczko’s Imaginaires sociaux, which I borrowed from the library soon after he came up in our correspondence, contains a very interesting paper on Stalin’s charisma—by far the best thing I have read on that subject, but apparently not widely known).24 I finish with some reflections on the particular role of religion within the modified version of Lefort’s scheme, but here I limit myself to comments on  the  religious part of mise en sens, and I consider three approaches. The notion of religion as a primordial grasp of the world as totality is a part of Durkheim’s argument (there is a projection of the social whole), and inherent in the idea of a meta-institution. But the world-horizon is an underlying part of human experience, not the result of a social projection; one can accept that a certain articulation of this horizon, not a grasp of the world as a whole, is achieved by primitive/archaic mythology, but I follow Rémi Brague in arguing that an explicit grasp of the world as a whole is a product of the Axial Age, primarily of Greek thought, and some versions of it are more religious than others. Then there is the more developed Durkheimian idea of a primordial division, between the sacred and the profane, plus variations on that theme (transcendence vs immanence, invisible vs visible—here Gauchet, uses a dichotomy that Merleau-Ponty had formulated for other purposes). I argue that we need the Durkheimian distinction—there can be no theory of religion without it—but it is not enough—we must follow Mauss in distinguishing a plurality of cultural/symbolic spheres—and that brings me to Camille Tarot

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and his work on the theories of religion; but further work on that is for the Social Imaginaries issue on religion.25 SA: What are the implications of the religio-political nexus for civilizational analysis, on the one hand, and for understandings of the human condition in modernity, on the other? JPA: The implications are complex and far-reaching, but for now, I’ll limit myself to three points. First, the focus on the religio-political nexus enables us to extend the civilizational perspective beyond traditional boundaries, into the realms of archaeology and anthropology. As I have come to think, one of the lessons we can learn from post-Lévi-Straussian French anthropology (and from Marcel Gauchet’s re-reading of it) is that the interrelations of religious and political aspects, although more visible when we are dealing with state structures and written traditions, are also crucially important in prehistorical and/or stateless societies. They have to do with the understanding, exercise and location of social power. Second, the question of religion and politics should be brought back into the debate on the Axial Age. In an early discussion of this subject (printed in a Daedalus issue in 1975), Louis Dumont argued that redefinitions of the relationship between political and religious spheres were the key developments of the period, but this idea has since then been unduly sidelined (I am not suggesting that it should be treated as the one and only defining charceristic of the Axial Age; we need a multi-dimensional approach).26 But Dumont’s characteristic can be taken further; for example, thanks to the historians who have been elaborating the concept of polis religion, it now seems clear that a very specific relationship between politics and religion should be ranked among the constitutive features of archaic and classical Greek civilization. And both sides to that relationship were important for the Greek intellectual breakthrough: to cut a long story short, Greek philosophy developed an increasingly autonomous dialogue with religion and politics. Castoriadis has analyzed the political connection in great detail; in his seminars on Ancient Greece, he notes in passing that much of Greek philosophical thought is about rational theology, but does not take that argument as far as we would wish. It might be added that in this case, the boundary between rational theology and speculative philosophy of nature is not easy to define. Finally, the question about modernity touches upon some very central issues. They are, in brief, related to the problematic of secularization and its discontents. There is a time-honoured notion of modernization as a secularizing process, a long-term weakening of religion as a social and cultural force, not least in the realm of politics. And there is a counter-claim, or at least a relativizing response, to the effect that a re-sacralizing trend is at work within the modern world, and more particularly in the domains apparently removed from the orbit of religion. Durkheim’s writings contain ideas in this vein, applied to the intellectual as well as the political sphere, and others have developed that line of argument, most extensively with regard to the political

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religions (otherwise known as totalitarian ideologies) of the twentieth century. But there is also further twist to the debate. At least two very important authors, Marcel Gauchet and Hans Blumenberg, have tried to show that a latent persistence of religious legacies can be understood without recurse to the notion of re-sacralization. For Gauchet, whose tetralogy in progress (the last volume is still unfinished) is the most systematic and sophisticated work on modern mutations of the religio-political nexus, the main point is the survival and reactivation of a religious mode of institutionalization, centred on ultimate unity and taken to new extremes by totalitarian regimes. For Blumenberg, the focus should be on questions left behind when the medieval theological answers to them lost credibility, questions regarding the world and the human situation in it that now have to be answered in new ways; the innovations thus brought about intertwined with the intellectual results of the modern scientific revolution. And to round off these comments, I should add that the controversy on limits and inherent counterweights to secularization also extends to the economic sphere. The question of capitalism as a religion has been raised by several contemporary authors, most incisively in several papers by Christoph Deutschmann. SA: In concluding this interview, it seems appropriate to return to the disciplinary triad that has shaped your intellectual trajectory: philosophy, sociology and history (although here I think we would need to also note the centrality of recurring encounters with anthropology for the development of your thought). Ultimately, the things themselves are inseparable from their historical context—and historical contexts require interpretative frameworks for their elucidation. Here we are in agreement. From a slightly different perspective, history, too, needs a corresponding (post-Hegelian) philosophy or theory of history. You have broached this problematic indirectly several times over the course of your trajectory—from an earlier essay on Agnes Heller in 1984, to more recent essays on Shmuel Eisenstadt and the connections between historical sociology and the philosophy of history (in 2005), and Jan Patočka’s approach to Negative Platonism as between the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history (in Czech in 2009, and a reworking of those themes in English in 2011), respectively.27 That being said, articulating a theory of history has not been one of your main concerns. In the mid-1990s, however, you addressed the thematic more directly. In ‘Theorising History and Questioning Reason’, you take up Castoriadis’s conceptually innovative notion of the socialhistorical as a way of countering Habermas’s understanding of history as nicht theoriefähig, and concomitant articulation of social evolution.28 Although Castoriadis’s critique of determinism and the rationalist principles underlying the dominant (mainly structural-functionalist) images of society, on the one hand, and his elucidation of the self-instituting and radically self-creating social-historical as that mode of being that eludes determinacy are notable, you detect a decontextualizing tendency on his part that removes him from

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engagement with a particular tradition and its idea of reason, to universalist categories. This decontextualization makes it unsuitable for comparative approaches, which is your main concern. In elucidating your own approach, you shift the terrain from the ontological notion of the social-historical to the more phenomenological (via Heidegger and Marcuse) inspired understanding of ‘historicity’, which, similarly to Castoriadis, you argue is a constitutive aspect of social reality. There you suggest to bring the notion of the socialhistorical into closer contact with debates on culture and power—or, more broadly, as social imaginary articulations of the world as cultural projects of power—in the configuration of historicity. Historical sociology has played a key role in highlighting the culture-power nexus in the formation of historicity and its radicalisation and/or suppression in different cultural and civilizational contexts. Nonetheless, to ‘theorize history’ still needs a ‘theory of history’, however implicit. How would you reflect on a ‘theory of history’ today? JPA: As you note, I was always unhappy with Habermas’s claim that history is “untheorizable”, all the more so since this was the first step towards a subsumption of history under a strong (though not deterministic) version of evolutionary theory. Conversely, my interest in theorizing history is linked to the anti-evolutionistic line that I have taken on questions of social theory. But let us first of all make some basic distinctions. It is often said that the philosophy of history belongs to the past; it is then reduced to some kind of teleological vision of history, with an origin and a goal (Jaspers), or a logic of self-realization, be it divine or human (Hegel or Marx). I think it makes more sense to accept that no study of or reflection on history can do without some basic assumptions relating to the patterns of historical events and processes and their significance for the human condition. On that view, we can neither bypass the philosophy of history nor leave it behind. The next step, at least on my road map, is to integrate the problematic of history with that of society— in other words, to develop an ontology of social-historical being, and this is of course the theme that Castoriadis pursued more vigorously than any other thinker. Is there, within this framework, place for a theory of history in a more specific sense? I think there might be, and that it should be closely linked to comparative perspectives. One of the more promising moves in this direction is the notion of ‘regimes of historicity’, proposed by the French historian François Hartog. What he has in mind are different ways of articulating the relationship between past, present and future, and since such frameworks are always linked to more complex interpretive ones, there is a connection to conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte, as its German pioneers called it). I’d like to see this whole dimension integrated into comparative civilizational analysis; so far, very little work has been done on that. One of the valid criticisms of Max Weber’s work is that he underestimated the historicity of non-European civilizations; but then the solution to that problem would be to trace their

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own specific regimes of historicity (for example the very significant differences between India and China), not to impose Western models on the whole field. SA: Although the interplay of sociology, philosophy, and history has defined your intellectual trajectory, it does seem that ultimately historical concerns— or, perhaps the interplay between ‘theorizing history’ and ‘historical’ analysis as ‘historicity’—have become the most important of the three disciplines to your thought. Would you agree? JPA: Yes, in a sense it all comes back to history—more precisely, a comparative history of socio-cultural patterns and their impact on the human condition. Let us end on that note.

Author Biographies Suzi Adams is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Flinders University. Address: Dr Suzi Adams, School of Social and Policy Studies, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA, 5001, Australia. Email: [email protected] Johann P. Arnason is emeritus professor of sociology at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and taught historical sociology at the Faculty of Human Studies, Charles University, Prague, from 2007 to 2015. E-mail: [email protected]

Acknowledgement We gratefully acknowledge George Sarantoulias’s invaluable assistance with the referencing and copy editing.

References Arnason, JP 1966, Člověk a dějiny: Ontologické základy marxistického humanismu, Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University, Prague. Arnason, JP 1971, Von Marcuse zu Marx — Prolegomena zu einer dialektischen Anthropologie, Luchterhand Verlag, Neuwied. Arnason, JP 1984, ‘Progress and Pluralism. Reflections on Agnes Heller’s Theory of History in Perspectives on Marxism II’, Praxis International, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 423-437. Arnason, JP 1988, Praxis und Interpretation: Sozialphilosophische Studien, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt. Arnason, JP 1996, ‘Theorising History and Questioning Reason’, Theoria, no. 87, pp. 1-20. Arnason, JP 2005, ‘The axial conundrum: Between historical sociology and the philosophy of history’, pp. 57-81, in: eds. E Ben-Rafael and Y Sternberg Comparing Modernities: Pluralism versus Homogeneity (Essays in Homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt), Brill, Leiden.

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Arnason, JP 2007, ‘The idea of negative Platonism: Jan Patočka’s critique and recovery of metaphysics’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 90, pp. 6-26. Arnason, JP 2011a, ‘Negative Platonism: Between the History of Philosophy and the Philosophy of History’, in eds. I Chvatik and E Abrams, Jan Patočka and the Heritage of Phenomenology: Centenary Papers, Springer, Dordrecht, London, New York. Arnason, JP 2011b, ‘Úvod: Myšlenkové a politické pozadí Patočkovy konfrontace s modernitou’ (Introduction: The intellectual and political background to Patočka’s confrontation with modernity), Dějinnost, (V, a 3), pp. 9-19. Arnason, JP 2011c, ‘Nadcivilizace a její různé podoby: Patočkova koncepce modernity ve světle dnešních diskusí’ (Super-civilization and its various shapes: Patočka’s conception of modernity in the light of contemporary discussions), Dějinnost (V, a 3), pp. 23-54. Arnason, JP 2014, ‘Patočkova Evropa: Kořeny, osudy a konce’ (Patočka’s Europe: Roots, destinies and endings), pp.75-87, in: ed. Petr Hlaváček, České vize Evropy? Manuál k naší evropské debatě (Czech Visions of Europe? A Manual for Our European Debate), Academia, Praha. Arnason JP and Hanyš M (eds) 2016, Mezi náboženstvím a politikou (Between religion and politics), Praha, Togga. Baczko, B 1984, Les imaginaires sociaux, Payot, Paris. Badiou, A and Gauchet, M 2015, What Is To Be Done?: A Dialogue on Communism, Capitalism, and the Future of Democracy, Polity, Cambridge, UK. Dreyfus, H and Taylor C 2015, Retrieving Realism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Dumont, L 1975, ‘On the Comparative Understanding of Non-modern Civilizations’, Daedalus, vol. 104, no. 2, pp. 153-172. Figl, J 1982, Interpretation als philosophisches Prinzip, W. de Gruyter, Berlin. Gauchet, M 2007, La crise du libéralisme, Gallimard, Paris. Karfik, F 2008, Unendlichwerden durch die Endlichkeit: Eine Lektüre der Philosophie Jan Patočka, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg. Merleau-Ponty, M 1964[1960], Signs, trans. R McCleary, Northwestern University Press, Evanston. Patočka, J 2000, Vom Erscheinen als solchem: Texte aus dem Nachlaβ, ed. BlaschekHahn, H, and Novotny, K, Karl Alber Verlag, Freiburg. Patočka, J 2011, Aristote, ses devanciers, ses successeurs, trans. E Abrams, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, Paris. Taylor, C 2013, ‘Retrieving Realism’ in Schear, JK (Ed) Mind, Reason and Being-inthe-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, London, New York: Routledge, Vidal-Naquet, P 1981, ‘Une civilisation de la parole politique’, pp. 21-35, in: P VidalNaquet, Le chasseur noir, F. Maspero, Paris.

Notes 1 Arnason (1966). 2 Arnason (1988).

190 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

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Arnason (1971). Figl (1982). Patočka (2000: 101-115). Badiou and Gauchet (2015). Gauchet (2007, p. 7). Merleau-Ponty (1964[1960]). Karfik (2008). Taylor (2013); see also, Dreyfus and Taylor (2015). Vidal-Naquet (1981). Arnason’s presentation was entitled ‘The Axial Age: One or Many? Bringing Politics and History Back in’, and was given at the conference organized by Hans Joas and Robert Bellah, and sponsored by the Templeton Foundation, entitled, ‘The Axial Age and its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present’, 3-5th July, Erfurt. A link to the conference website: https://www2.uni-erfurt. /maxwe/ axialage.html Bellah’s lecture was entitled ‘The Heritage of the Axial Age: Resource or Burden’: https://www2.uni-erfurt.de/maxwe/aktuelles/ss08/bellah.html Arnason (2007); (2011a); (2011b); (2011c); (2014). Arnason (2005). Merleau-Ponty (1968[1964]). The conference was called “Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis. Eurasian explorations” and took place on 28th June 2012. Arnason’s paper was entitled ‘Mauss Revisited: The birth of civilizational analysis from the spirit of anthropology’. Here is a link to the conference program: http://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/ termine-19557?language=en The lecture was given in Munich in February 2008, and was organized by the Siemens Foundation. This book has not yet been translated into English but has been published in French (Patočka, 2011). Arnason (1989). Arnason-Hanyš (2016). This is the same conference referred to in note 17 (above). Arnason (2016). Baczko (1984). Arnason is guest editing a special issue on ‘Approaches to Religion’ for Social Imaginaries. It will be published in 2017. Dumont (1975). Arnason (1984); Arnason (2005); Arnason (2011a). Arnason (1996).