Ser errático. Una ontología crítica de la
sociedad
by Luis Sáez Rueda
Madrid:
Editorial Trotta, 2009
Reviewed by María G. Navarro
In the work Ser errático (Erratic Being) Luis
Sáez Rueda proposes a Critical ontology
of society in which the author analyses some of the most salient
philosophical questions relating to different philosophical traditions,
especially to phenomenology, in which he is a specialist. However, it must be
said that the essay Erratic Being
stands out as a clear exercise in philosophical and literary creativity.
Ser errático is an essay arranged in four chapters: Phenomenology of everyday life; Erratic
being, discordant being; Dimensions of the event; and The life of the thought. This set of chapters sums up very simply
the fundamental theses maintained by the author. Sáez Rueda also introduces
into this critical ontology of society certain texts with the structure of
dialogues. In these, the imagined conversation between two people renders the
arguments put forward by the specialist, by the philosopher - only in a more
informal register, yet without being less critical and demanding from the
theoretical point of view. This literary device is clearly a nod at common
sense and its ways of calling into question the most speculative assertions.
Thanks to
the insertion of these brief dialogues, reading Ser errático becomes an immediate experience, rooted in the
dialogue of collective life and oral communication. This literary device
connects with the particular vision the Spanish philosopher has of the troubled
gaze with which mankind finds in every seemingly solid foothold a shifting
reality, a journey of exploration. Sáez Rueda admits to being obliged to make
use of this device because a stormy table companion brusquely interrupts “his
grandiloquent prattling and demands explanations” (p. 3).
Man’s
condition is erratic. The erratic being of
the human being arises from having a world to inhabit, which implies the
possibility of placing oneself eccentrically towards one’s surroundings. Sáez
Rueda adds to the Heideggerian ontology the idea that authenticity of existence
does not depend only upon the dedication with which every human being inhabits
her own world and devotes herself to her own existence, but also upon a
movement of displacement and eccentricity the author calls erratic being. In this sense, the ontology proposed in this book
is a critical ontology of society, as the author considers present society to
be stationary, that is, it organises its emptiness in a ceaseless movement.
The erratic
condition produces a potential space of discrepancy that is the core of the
philosophy of events proposed in Ser errático,
because it also forms part of the pre-reflective level of the world of life. If
we examine ourselves attentively, we find ourselves in specific situations that
engulf us but, in Sáez Rueda’s opinion, we must add to that centrality the
experience of being at the same time outside, that is, eccentrically placed.
Although different authors have described this experience, perhaps more than in
any other author it is present in the philosophy of Derrida when he states that
the experience of meaning belongs to linked contexts with no anchorage points.
However, in
this work, the concepts of eccentricity and centricity are connected to the
human condition of our times in a much more explicit and determinate way than
in Derrida’s philosophy, in the sense that they reveal man as an erratic being
and, at the same time, allow us to consider ontology as a critique of the
present stationary society. Musil’s Man
Without Qualities is much more eloquent. We find ourselves in societies in
which the term “eccentricity” is understood only in its relation to the world
as it is administered in a broad sense, with its mediated and instrumentalised
space; whereas the centricity of a person’s life is understood in our societies
apart from the demands of real life, that is, as a de-centred centricity with
respect to the world.
Sáez
Rueda’s book owes its first formulation to Helmuth Plessner. Plessner compares
human and non-human organisms in their relation with the place each inhabits.
The comparison showed her that the human being enjoys a different organism
because in the natural environment she has an eccentric position. By this,
Plessner wanted to point out that, in contrast to other living organisms, the
human being is not tied to the natural context she inhabits. In other words,
she is a “being weighed down by indeterminacy, condemned to make up for the
lack of natural imperative by means of that complex, doubting, fragile medium
that is intelligence” (p. 41). Thus, the concepts of centricity and
eccentricity are co-originary. Although there are differences between the final
position of Plessner (whose contribution should be included within the field of
anthropology) and that of Sáez Rueda, the distinction between these two
concepts is fundamental to the latter’s critical ontology. The position the
author maintains regarding the meaning and scope of ontology as discourse is
one of the clearest questions in the book: ontology is a form of thought that
inquires into the understanding of that which we consider real – underlying
both the praxis and the form in which we conceptualise in general.
One of the
relations of the conceptual pair “centricity-eccentricity” stems from the fact
that the human being belongs in situations, in contexts. We human beings do not
possess any specific place precisely because we are not to be found anchored
anywhere in an essential way. The author refers to this when he states that the
distance interposed with respect to the immediate opens up a world for us, but
the same circumstance acts by expelling us beyond any world, ejecting us from
it. The author refers to this outstanding aspect of human life when he states
that all of us have a place, topos;
but at the same time we are not anywhere: “the same order of things we
establish is familiar and strange (exotic). We are rooted and at the heart of
our rootedness we feel obscurely exiled too. Man is an erratic being” (p. 54).
The
critique of the stationary society consists of describing it as a world in
which the erratic spirit, as this is defined by the author, is limited and
muzzled. In the stationary society, paths are generated that, socially and
culturally, govern the complex relation between centricity and eccentricity
that makes up the erratic being of man. With this poetic understanding of human
action par excellence, Sáez Rueda
challenges pragmatist conceptions in which man is situated in social,
historical or cultural circumstances and described without the slightest
problem. This Phenomenology of everyday
life gives rise to one of the book’s most striking chapters - not only from
the philosophical but also from the literary viewpoint: Erratic being, discordant being. In this chapter Martin Heidegger’s
thought is subjected to a clear critique with regard to the notion of event.
Sáez Rueda
mounts a defence of man’s erratic condition, of borderline life and the absence
of belonging in relation to any sort of property. One of the most interesting
arguments is found in the figure of Don Quixote. According to the author,
Heidegger deserves the same reply Don Quixote gave to Sancho Panza when the
latter forgot the joys of the erratic adventure that united them, simply
because they did not achieve any real conquests. Then Don Quixote replied that
it is precisely the unrootedness of knights-errant, that is, their lack of a
world, which allows them to listen to the call of the other regardless of their
world or their condition. It is precisely the fact that Don Quixote is an
eccentric figure that best sums up his eccentricity with respect to any form of
world, thus he is a being excluded by the world he comes from and escapes from.
So, according to the author, Heidegger had forgotten the intrinsic value of this
form of errancy that endows the human adventure with true value and which, in
the case of Don Quixote, as Michel Foucault also saw, makes the Don Quixote a figure
who speaks to us of the luck possessed by the fool, the outcast, the other -
who, nevertheless, is present in each of us. Sáez Rueda’s fundamental criticism
of Heidegger is that the German philosopher presented a notion of “event” under
which the real existence of the human being fails to be clarified with true
profundity. Sáez Rueda’s thesis consists in calling attention to the fact that
for Heidegger and, in a certain sense, also for H.-G. Gadamer and Peter
Sloterdijk, estrangement towards the world forms part of the modus cognoscendi of being, but is not
an integral part of its modus essendi.
Luis Sáez Rueda
has been outstanding for his contributions to modern and contemporary
philosophy, and also for his interpretation of the thought of Karl Otto Apel,
about whom he published, in 1995, the book entitled La reilustración filosófica de K.-O. Apel. Equally well-received
and fully relevant are his books El
conflicto entre continentales y analíticos (2002), and Movimientos filosóficos actuales (which appeared in 2001 and was
re-edited in 2003 and 2009). The
author undertook much of his early work at the Freie Universität of Berlin
No comments:
Post a Comment