Consummate Phenomena: Oskar Becker’s “Hyperontological” Aesthetics

ABSTRACT

This essay reconstructs Oskar Becker’s idiosyncratic conception of aesthetics and its importance for phenomenology. For Becker, the aesthetic is not simply one type of phenomenon among others; rather, it occupies a privileged position as, first, that phenomenon which is itself “wholly phenomenal,” and, second, that phenomenon which discloses the ontological structure of phenomenality itself (and is thus what he calls “hyperontological”). The paper first reconstructs Becker’s descriptive phenomenology of the aesthetic (which he restricts to the realm of masterpieces of fine art). For Becker, the key characteristic for understanding the givenness of beauty is its sense of fragility, which he uses to reveal a complicated interweaving of temporality and modality at the heart of the aesthetic. This essay then shows how this is rooted in Becker’s larger ontological project of developing a phenomenology of the non-historical in dialogue with Heidegger’s early work, a project which began in 1927 with the publication of his magnum opus Mathematical Existence.

KEYWORDS:

• Oskar Becker
• aesthetics
• phenomenology
• ontology
• paraontology
• Martin Heidegger

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. According to Otto Pöggeler, Becker’s 1929 essay is a further elaboration of his 1922 habilitation lecture. Pöggeler, “Epoche,” 29.

2. Becker, Grundprobleme, 161.

3. For a comparison of Becker’s aesthetic theory with those of Husserl, Fink, and Ingarden, see Sepp, “Die Ästhetik Oskar Beckers,” 110–5.

4. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 22fn1. Becker says this claim comes from Husserl but gives no citation, simply attributing it to “lectures and such.”

5. Though this essay will limit itself to a reconstruction of Oskar Becker’s aesthetics, it bears mentioning that such a reconstruction is of particular interest at present, especially since the only writings on Becker’s aesthetics that exist in English are either too brief (Ophälders) or riddled with errors (Agamben). Thanks to a recent surge of interest in the link between Becker’s later, explicitly racist project of “paraontology” and the reappearance of that term within black critical thought, Becker’s non-mathematical writings are the subject of renewed interest. Though the 1929 essay does not broach the question of race explicitly, the “para-” language is coined there. A closer look at Becker’s aesthetics will give those debates a clearer picture of how the question of race fits into Becker’s larger project. Given limitations of space and the demands of clarity, I will not be able to address these points in detail here. I have, however, written elsewhere at length about Becker’s philosophy of race (See Brewer, “paraontology”), and I will use endnotes to indicate the moments of intersection between his aesthetics and his philosophy of race.

6. We should note here that Becker has a rather restrictive understanding of what is aesthetic that limits it not only to works of art but to those works of art that strike us as perfect, as masterpieces (we will have to follow his argument further to get a sense of his vaguely articulated criteria for such perfection). To speak of the “beauty” of a flower is, for Becker, not terminologically rigorous, and he classifies such experiences as pre-aesthetic rather than aesthetic experiences proper (19). Accordingly, he will argue that it is misleading to speak of the beauty of a person as “natural” since “in truth the beauty even of a striking face [Characterkopf] is not at all purely bodily, and no beauty at all is purely natural” (16fn1). The reasons for this are the focus of the second part of this essay.

7. Becker, “Abenteuerlichkeit,” 108.

8. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit des Schönen,” 11–12, emphasis in original.

9. Ibid., 12. The Lukács essay to which Becker refers is “Die Subjekt-Objekt-Beziehung in der Ästhetik.” The essay dates to 1917, prior to the more familiarly Marxist writings of Lukács. As Becker correctly points out, these early aesthetic writings of Lukács show the influence of neo-Kantianism in general and the work of Heinrich Rickert in particular. Accordingly, the idea of “normative experience” is an attempt to deal with the question of value (Wert) and its relation to the sensible as an approach to the aesthetic. Reinach Rochlitz, in an article on Lukács’s influence on Heidegger, argues that Becker’s article was an “event” which solidified Lukács as an important (if sometimes polemical) point of reference for Freiburg phenomenology (Rochlitz, “Lukács et Heidegger,” 91).

10. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 15. Schelling is introduced later in the essay, and Becker is far less explicit about taking his distance from Schelling. As we will see, the ontology of Schelling’s early and middle periods, according to which being is ab initio “polarized” by two tendencies is quite close to Becker’s. Becker would probably also have felt affinity to Schelling, both as a defender of the necessity of Naturphilosophie and as an overshadowed schoolmate of a vastly more influential thinker (i.e. Heidegger, in the case of Becker, Hegel, in the case of Schelling) with whose thinking he would wrestle throughout his career.

11. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 12. Interestingly, the last philosophical essay that Becker published during his life was a defense of the Platonic theory of the forms against Heidegger’s criticism of it as a foundational moment in the forgetting of ontological difference. See Becker, “Platonische Idee.”

12. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 68/ Being and Time, 67–68. In the explicit context of aesthetics, see “Ursprung des Kunstwerks,” 5–25/1–18.

13. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 25n1. For a general introduction to Geiger’s aesthetics, see Moritz Geiger, The Significance of Art: A Phenomenological Approach to Aesthetics.

14. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 22.

15. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 11. Becker mentions that the phrase comes from Solger but does not provide the citation. Though the idea can be found both in Solger’s Lectures on Aesthetics and his Erwin dialogues, the exact quote comes from the first of the Lectures. See Solger, Vorlesungen, 75.

16. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 12.

17. Ibid., 17.

18. Ibid., 13.

19. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 18/18: “Even the ‘atemporal’ and ‘supertemporal’ is ‘temporal’ with respect to its being.” The second half of Becker’s Mathematische Existenz is dedicated to arguing that mathematical knowledge, as a factical possibility of Dasein, indicates that, in addition to the ecstatic time of historicity, there is an eternally recurring “natural time.” This will be discussed further below. See Becker, Mathematische Existenz, 181–307.

20. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 13.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 17.

23. Ibid., 13. Emphasis mine.

24. Ibid.

25. See Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, 29–56; and for a brief overview of Ingarden’s understanding of the “stratified” ontology of the work of art, see “On Philosophical Aesthetics” in Selected Papers, 19–20.

26. Ibid., 14.

27. Solger, Erwin, 387.

28. Ibid., 22.

29. Becker, “Letter,” 254.

30. Becker also plays on the antiquated verbal use of wesen, and its use a suffix to designate collective nouns is also a propos. For a more thorough elaboration of the word’s polysemy in Becker, see my translator’s introduction to “Transcendence and Paratranscendence. Brewer, “Translator’s Introduction,” 250.

31. Gadamer, Wahrheit, 102fn188/Truth, 105fn188.

32. Becker’s philosophy of race, which has become an object of interest thanks to the reemergence of the term “paraontology” in black studies, departs from the assumption that racial identity must be understood as part of this paraontological Wesen, i.e. as something natural, unchanging, and radically unindividuated. I have written at length about Becker’s philosophy of race elsewhere (see Brewer, “paraontology”), as have Robert Bernasconi (see “Race and Earth”) and R. A. Judy, (See Sentient Flesh). In Becker’s writings, see “Transcendence and Paratranscendence,” “Para-Existenz,” and “Nordische Metaphysik.” According to Karl Löwith, Becker was greatly impressed and influenced by the work of fellow Husserl student Ludwig Fredinand Clauß, specifically his 1932 work Die Nordische Seele (Löwith, Mein Leben, 53—Becker is the friend that Löwith refers to throughout as “B”). Clauß also has an essay on aesthetics in the 1929 Festschrift for Husserl’s 70^th birthday, titled “The Understanding of the Linguistic Work of Art.” For more on Clauß, see Bernasconi, “Ludwig Ferdinand Clauß and Racialization.”

33. Becker, Mathematische Existenz, 320.

34. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 331/316.

35. See note 33 above.

36. Becker, “Abenteuerlichkeit,” 103.

37. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 24. As Markus Ophälders points out, the obvious forebearer in the philosophical tradition for such a view is the idealism of F. W. J. Schelling, and Becker himself acknowledges this affinity and cites Schelling extensively in the second half of the “Hinfälligkeit” essay. Ophälders, “Oskar Becker,” 45.

38. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 36fn1. It is important to note, since it is probably the most widely read recent engagement with the “Frailty” essay, that Giorgio Agamben’s equation of the “para-existenial” and the “hyperontological” is patently incorrect. It is the tension between the existential and the para-existential (or the ontological and the para-ontological) that makes the aesthetic “hyperontological.” See Agamben, Use of Bodies, 189–90. Agamben makes several such errors in his brief summary of Becker’s essay.

39. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 26. He insists, however, that “creation and reception are undifferentiated in their ultimate root precisely in the aesthetic ‘sphere:’ each adequate reception is a recreation of the work, and each genuine creation is ‘vision’.”

40. Ibid., 30. Emphasis in original.

41. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 30–31. Emphasis in original.

42. Ibid. Emphasis in original. Becker seems to be using emphasis to draw the reader’s attention to the relation between “history” (Geschichte) and “happening” (Geschehen), an etymological connection that Heidegger will sometimes affirm and other times contest, insisting instead on the relation of Geschichte to destiny (Geschick). In a 1960 essay on Pythagoras first published in a Festschrift for Gadamer, Becker cites this latter understanding of “history” as “destiny.” Becker, “Aktualität,” 152.

43. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 32.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid., 33. In defining genius in relation to nature, Becker argues that he is placing himself in line with both Kant and Schelling.

47. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 33. See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 179/172.

48. The resonances between being borne and being born exist in German as well, and they point to the turn that Becker’s thinking will take in the years after the 1929 essay, namely the turn toward using the para-existential schema to accommodate an explicitly and resolutely National Socialist account of race as “blood and soil.” See, for instance, the passages on “natality” in “Transcendence and Paratranscendence.” Becker, “Transcendence,” 255–56.

49. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 36.

50. Ibid.

51. Heidegger, Germania, 164/149.

52. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 35. I have translated “Mensch” as “man” here because Becker is quite clear in his later writings like “Transcendence and Paratranscendence” and “Para-Existenz” that he does not think that women are as “spiritual” as men. Indeed, in a 1938 essay fittingly titled “Nordische Metaphysik” and fittingly published in the Nazi journal Rasse, Becker will specify that it is Nordic man, and presumably thus only “Nordic” artists, in whom nature and spirit fully interpenetrate. Rather than bring Becker’s quotations into line with contemporary English and thereby make him sound more ecumenical than he is, I have opted to keep the language of “Mensch” and its corresponding pronouns masculine.

53. Becker, “Hinfälligkeit,” 35–6.

54. Ibid., 40.

55. Ibid.

56. Ibid.

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Benjamin Brewer

Benjamin Brewer is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto (St. George). He works in 19^th and 20^th century continental philosophy, with a focus on the ontology and politics of time, identity, and difference. His work as appeared in Philosophy Today, Critical Philosophy of Race, Symposium, and Oxford Literary Review.