Gabriel Motzkin, Iser's Anthropological Reception of the Philosophical Tradition (2000)

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Iser's Anthropological Reception of the Philosophical TraditionAuthor(s): Gabriel MotzkinSource: New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, On the Writings of Wolfgang Iser (Winter,2000), pp. 163-174Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057592

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Iser's Anthropological Reception of the

Philosophical Tradition

Gabriel Motzkin

I

In PREMODERN philosophy all relations to another world were

conceived in terms of transcendence. The world that is another

than the one we are in is transcendent to it. The way we get from this

world to that one is through transcending this one. And the presence,

however conceived, of the other world in this one is the presenceof

somethingin this world that is transcendent to it.

In reading Wolfgang Iser's The Fictive and theImaginary, it became clear

to me for the first time what iswrong with this conception. It is not a

priorierroneous to

suppose that some other world than this one, with

other laws, exists. Nor is it a

priori

erroneous to

suppose

that we

conceive of this other world in terms of laws that do not properly belongto our world. Nor even is it a

priorierroneous to

suppose that we

conceive of one world in terms of laws that do notproperly belong to it,

but that have their origin elsewhere.

The philosophical tradition's basic error was to presuppose that

absolute transcendence, the act oftranscending,

and transcendence-in

immanence, are all the samething,

or indeed that they belong together.If one substitutes the imaginary for the absolutely transcendent,

whether as dream orreality, the fictionalizing

act for the act of

transcending, or of boundary crossing, and the synthesis of absence and

presence,of exclusion and inclusion, of

imaginary objectand real

object, for the three phenomena labelled transcendence, then instead

of transcendence, one obtains the imaginary, the fictive, and the

synthesis of consciousness and object. While these may belong together,there is no reason to

suppose thatthey

have a commonorigin,

or are

similarphenomena.

Iserpoints

out that the source of aphenomenon,

or the reason for it, and the phenomenon itself, are not the samething.

He does not goas far as Hans Blumenberg, for whom the connection

between aplace

vacated for aphenomenon

and thatphenomenon may

be quite happenstance. There is for Iser an inherent link between the

fictive and the imaginary, but it does not derive from anontological

identity.

New LiteraryHistory, 2000, 31: 163-174



164 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

In my language, that means not only that the path out of the worldand the place whither we are

going, while related, are different. The

relations of constitution between them are also different. Iser'spolemic

is directed against those who would derive the fictive from the real. No

less, however, does his polemic work against those who would derive the

fictive from the imaginary. The transcendent world, the substitute world

of a"reality" beyond itself does not emerge from this one.1 Nor, however,

was this one createdthrough

aprocession

from another one. It is the

main point of the text that world-making takes place between worlds, in

the cross between them, and it is therefore the fictionalizing act that

must be shown in its world-creating order. Instead of immanence in

transcendence, or absolute transcendence, thetranscending

act be

comes central.

However, thetranscending

act becomes central in another way than it

does in most modern philosophy,or indeed in traditional religion. For

thistranscending act, Iser's

fictionalizing act, is not a self-transcendence,

a self-invention, or a self-creation, but rather a world-creation. Nowhere

does the self go along entirely with the transcending act. While in Iser's

model, the self is preservedeven while it is annulled in another world,

there is no final

synthesis

of the real, the fictive, and the

imaginary.Inopting for this plurality of modes, Iser clearly sides against

a

traditional philosophical view that was current even at the beginning of

this century. However, by refusing the evisceration of the distinction

between the imaginary and the real, Iser seeks a way out of that late

twentieth-century sophism which would derive the identity of both from

the imaginary.At the beginning of this century, German Idealist philosophy dis

solved in (at least) three distinct ways. Iser is obligatedto two of them

directly, and to a third indirectly. These three ways aresignified by the

names Emil Lask, Hans Vaihinger, and Edmund Husserl. Lask appearsin Iser's work in the guise of Constantine Castoriadis, who, like Lucien

Goldmann and Martin Heidegger,was affected by his modern Neo

platonism. Vaihinger appearsas

Vaihinger,a second-rate

philosopher

who happened upon, malgr? lui, a very interesting theory which has

continued to serve as a referencepoint.

Husserl israrely

discussed

explicitly in Iser's work, but it is unclear how Iser's work could have been

written without presupposing Husserl.

As neo-Kantians, Lask and Vaihinger both began with an ideal of a

logic of knowledge that would provideaccess to laws which could

account for the phenomena that appear to consciousness as indicating

objects that can be presumedto exist in a world that is transcendent to

consciousness. Neither was able tomaintain Kant's equilibrium between

the intuition and the understanding. However, neither replicated the



ISER'S ANTHROPOLOGICAL RECEPTION 165

consequent development from Kant to Hegel. Instead, Lask opted for a

hyperrealism, presupposinga

primordial world in which all real and

logical statements really exist.2 Whereas Bernard Bolzano had also

believed in such a transcendence of truth to consciousness, he, like

Husserl, did not qualify this transcendent world with the predicate of

existence. For Lask, the two worlds of material being and logical validity

exist independently of the mind, including all the negations that they

contain.Negations

have the sameontological

status aspositions,

to

which theyare conjoined. The mind crosses this boundary in a

negative

fashion: in searching for the positions and affirmations, the true

statements, it breaks them off from the false statements, and in that way

destroys the primordial harmony between validity and being. It then, in

aquasi-transcendent act, seeks to reunite these worlds. However, it

cannot do so, for it cannot penetrate back to the world from which it has

extracted true statements, and therefore it creates a world of its own, a

quasi-transcendentrealm that Lask

qualifiesas the realm of sense. In

this philosophy there exist two worlds. In each world, the excluded and

negative exists primordiallyas the included and positive. Excluded by

consciousness, it then resurfaces in apale, ectypical way in a world that

is created by a boundary-crossing subjectivity. This subjectivity cannot besaid to create an

imaginary world, or even a fictional one, but the world

of sense ormeaning with which it then surrounds itself is clearly

different from the primordial world. And this ontological difference

between meaning and primordial Being in turn signifiesa fundamental

disjunction orheterogeneity between the activity of the mind and the

world, one which the mind seeks to destroy. This destructive search for

identitythen creates a second, virtual world. Castoriadis is a Laskian

romantic: he has substituted the imaginary for the primordial, and Iser

has accepted this notion of the primordial nature of the imaginary,a

second potential world lying alongside a real one. For Iser, however, the

point is that this second world is onlya

potential world: itmust first be

awakened throughan act such as the fictionalizing act.

IfLask stretched Kantianism in the direction of realism, then Vaihingertook it in the opposite direction. Faced with the Idealist problem of the

reality of Kantian appearances and representations, Vaihinger drew the

conclusion that all worlds areonly

accessible to consciousnessthrough

virtual acts, because theonly way for consciousness to obtain access to a

world is?not to take the real world as if itwere fictional?but rather to

take the fictional world as if it were real while at the same time

maintaining the consciousness of its fictionality. In this way, Vaihingercame up with a variation of the theme that both Lask and Husserl

confronted: if for Lask the output of sense is only quasi-existent, that is,

nonexistent, just because a real world exists, forVaihinger the




transformation of the input is such that we treat it as if it exists, but the

hiatus between sense and construct is such that we cannotsay that the

construct is a consequence of elements that exist for the original feelingthat we had of the existence of something.

In this way, Vaihingerwas

able todevelop much more thoroughly than Lask the possibility of a

simultaneouslydouble consciousness, one of Iser's central motifs, that is,

a consciousness that istransgressive precisely

because it can be at two

aspectsor

points of view at the same time. While Lask had some

primitive suggestions to make in this regard, he was much more

interested in the

decomposition

and

recomposition

of consciousness.

If Lask surfaces as Castoriadis in The Fictive and the Imaginary, Husserl

surfaces as Sartre. A move from Sartre should then have been like a

move to Heidegger, but Iser notes that Castoriadis explicitly rejects this

Heideggerianmove

precisely because he values the primordialmore

highly than Heidegger (FI209). What does itmean, however, to say that

Husserl surfaces as Sartre? Husserl also believed in the essential neces

sityof nonexistent frameworks in order to

penetrate,or even in his later

philosophy, in order to constitute reality. However, Husserl locates

nonexistence in a different place than either Lask orVaihinger, and he

thus firmly betrays his sources in the anti-Idealist tradition stemmingfrom Bolzano.

Namely,Husserl does not

suggesteither the nonexistence

of the input, of the subjectiveact of cognition,

nor of the output, of the

world that the subjectcreates as a heuristic frame for knowing, but

rather locates his nonexistence in the middle. Entities of sense are not

the objects that are intended: consciousness intends real objects, but in

order to makemeaningful truth-statements, consciousness must traverse

an ideal but nonexistent realm of ideal meaningsso that out of this

certain realm the probabilisticnature of the real, transcendent world

becomesapparent.

Thisphenomenon

of nonexistence is what makes

bracketing out the real world possible, since by leaving out what is really

intended, the process of constituting what is intended first becomes

visible. In the sameway, what consciousness does is to create noemata,

schemata of the object that organize the pixels that areappresented

to

sensation. Every object has in it inherentlya moment of ideal nonexist

ence, and it is through this ideal nonexistence that consciousness

constitutes the objects with which it deals in the world.

For Husserl, however, this ideal spherecan never exist: one cannot

make areality from a noema. What consciousness does then is to enter

the ideal

sphere

in search of the real one: all that consciousness adds to

this world as for both the others and for Iser as well is an act; there is no

special sphereor

being belonging to consciousness. However, this act is

not animaginary act, not for Husserl, not for Vaihinger,

not for Lask,

and certainly not for Iser. The fantastic makes-believe that the act of




consciousness is imaginary, but Iser's discussion of the fantastic showshis rejection of this possibility implied by Kant's discussion of the

imagination. Reality, instead of being in the world, or in the mind, is in

the act itself. And if this act is afictionalizing act, then that act is as real

in this actual sense asany other act. If we were to

map Iser'sterminology

onto Husserl, we would say that the fictionalizingact enters the

imaginary in search of the real, and from out of the imaginary composes

its access to the real. Now this is not at all what Iser says, but its familyresemblance is

apparent.

However, all three philosophers succumb to what could be called the

philosopher's temptation, from which Iser saves himself. Namely, theyare unable to distinguish ontologically between the act of consciousness

and its creation. For Lask, adecomposing

consciousness extracts truth

particles from the world-mine, and then builds itsmeaning-edifice from

thosetruth-particles:

there is no difference between consciousness'

quest for truth and the truth that consciousness makes or fails tomake.

ForVaihinger,

the as-if nature ofreality

can never be transcended: there

is no consciousness that does not have an as-if dimension; the not-as-if

functionsonly

as animpassable boundary-condition.

"DasDing

an sich

ist keineHypothese,

sondern eine Fiktion"["The thing

in itself is not a

hypothesis, it is rather a fiction"].3While Lask believed that conscious

nessprovides

a distorted picture of the world, Vaihinger believed that

the purpose of consciousness is not torepresent

the world, but rather to

providea

practicalorientation within it; representations

are an instru

ment of this purposiveness (22-23). Whereas the world as such is

inaccessible to arepresentational consciousness, in the

sphereof that

representation,there can be no distinction between consciousness and

itsrepresentations.

For Husserl, an intentional consciousness confronts

theheterogeneous experience

of sensationby creating

intentional ob

jects, rather than representational objects, in order to organize itssensations. These intentional objects of consciousness in turn make the

world accessible.

Both Heidegger and Derrida criticize the philosophical tradition for

its preference for apresentist philosophy of identity. I think that this

cursory examination shows that the objection iswell-taken ifwe under

stand identity asmeaning homogeneity, that is, the denial of the

experience of heterogeneityas

being itself afounding experience of

consciousness. For aphilosophy

thataccepts heterogeneity, however,

there can be nogood-faith investigation of the ways in which the mind

transforms its inputs in order to know them because such aphilosophy

would have to deny the possibility that thingscan be known through

their homogeneous transformations. Heidegger appeared to accept

heterogeneity, but the heterogeneity he had inmind wasultimately not




the Husserlian one between a thinking consciousness and the things youcan touch or bite, but rather between time-things

asbeing

now and me

as never now. In the end, he was in our sense also a traditional

philosopher, because the world of the now-things isultimately swallowed

up in my world, the apparently nonexisting but actually only existing

world. Nonexistence and existence converge. Heidegger had a different

theory of subjectivity from all the others, including Iser, who also

believes in aweakly cognitive subjectivity, but he could not accept that

the world is composed of different structures that can never add up.

Derrida has quite accurately recognized this problem, but he wishes to

conserveHeidegger's

nihilism in aheterogeneous world-scheme, a

nihilism that is unnecessary for Iser because of what philosophers would

view as Iser's essential lack of seriousness. The question that should be

posed following Iser is not if the procedure he outlines applies only to

literary texts, as he seems to think it does, but rather whether thegood

faith positionmust be that all acts function like his fictionalizing acts,

but some arequalified

as thetic or doxic, or whatever. However, in that

case the question arises of whether the imaginary only exists for the

fictionalizing act, or forexample

whether a doxicimaginary

exists as

well. One couldargue

that all acts draw from the sameimaginary.

I do

not think that this is Iser's position. One could argue that what the

doxic, the act of belief, confronts, is quite different from what the

fictionalizing confronts, so different that it cannot at all be called

imaginary. Finallyone could argue that there are different imaginarles

that make themselves available to different acts, justas there are

different possible worlds, and that following Iser we have to understand

these as different ontological worlds. We thus find ourselves in a limitless

set of different ontological worlds all the time.

II

Iser is concerned to retain one element of traditional philosophy

which both Lask and Heidegger deny: the possibility of observability,or

at the extreme, of self-observability. Inmodern philosophy, this problem

ofself-observability

reveals afundamentally

aestheticconception

of

observability, namely that observability is linked to the problemof

whether the observer is part of the same world together with what is

observed. Can I look at apicture, and then observe myself looking

at the

picture? I can, if I either assume that I am performing two acts at the

same time that are very different, because looking at apicture and

looking at myself lookingat a

picture take place in different worlds; or if

I assume that I can look at myself lookingat the picture either by




asserting that there is no world-difference between the picture and

myself, in either direction: either I say that lookingat the picture is like

looking at anything else, assuming I can look atmyself like looking

at

anything else. Or I can say that inlooking

at apicture I enter the world

of the picture and then look atmyself in and through the picture, since

I am now part of the picture. Or, finally, I can say that observabilitycan

take placeas a

boundary crossing, that I can look at myself lookingat the

picture in and through the picture because I canactually

see from one

world to another, and even see from the other world back into this one.

In other words, I can assert that

perception

is not a

sign

of immanence,

but rather of transcendence. But ifmy aim is self-observability, I have to

assert some sort of homology between perception and self-perception,for otherwise Iwould have to assert some other kind of link between the

two, and then Iwould have to find a way of grounding self-perception,

assuming that self-perception is possible, in something other than

perception. In that case, if I think that both are foundational acts, I

would have todevelop

atheory of double constitution, for I have then

denied the common origin of perception andself-perception.

In traditional philosophy, this problem is a central issue because the

aim of philosophy is not only the legitimation of the knowledge of theexternal world, but the acquisition of such knowledge

as anindispens

able correlative toself-knowledge. Kant argued that self-knowledge and

knowledgeof the external world

belongto

separaterealms. Since self

knowledgehas no

bearingon existence, therefore, the rules of

percep

tion for knowledge and for self-knowledgeare different: knowledge is

perspectival, since objectscan only be viewed through aspects, but self

knowledge is notperspectival, since we must know the whole being from

all sides, and therefore self-knowledge cannot be based onself-perception.

If there is any pointon which the German Idealists disagreed with

Kant, itwas that one. Johann Gottlieb Fichte begins philosophy with the

possibility of self-representation, that is, self-perception becomes a

necessary foundingelement of self-constitution and hence of world

constitution. Hegel also believed in the necessity for self-perceptionboth in the encounter with the external world, and finally

as an

indispensable part of the truth process. Nineteenth-century theories of

edification through literature as well aspsychological theories all

believed in the possibility of self-perception, although Ernst Mach

revealed his doubts preciselyon this point.4

None of thetwentieth-century philosophers

we have mentioned

believed in the possibility of aself-perception that is founded on

externalperception and that is then arrived at

through introspection. In

Downcast Eyes, Martin Jay has argued that twentieth-century culture is

characterized by the denigration of vision as the basic metaphor for the




human relation to the external world.51 believe that this is not quite

precise: there is agreat deal of counter-evidence. But certainly very few

twentieth-century thinkers have argued for the possibility o?self-perception

based on external observation. A behaviorist would argue for such a

possibility, but then the self-observation in question is as external as were

HermannEbbinghaus's memory-experiments.

Lask engaged in alengthy polemic against the possibility of arriving

at

truththrough the logic of reflection, through self-reflection, indeed

through any kind of introspection. Vaihinger thought that onlya limited

kind of self-observation is possible,a self-observation that recognizes the

fictional nature of the as-if sphere, and then fictionally posits external

reality by fictionally doubling the sensations that are the basis for as-if

representations (FI 144). Husserl believed that consciousness could

make itself into its ownobject, but only through the double procedure

of focussingon itself as its object and at the same time bracketing

out

the question of its existence. One should note that this is not the way in

which Husserl thought external objectsare constituted. External objects

are constitutedthrough

noemata.Bracketing

out the externalobjects

makes the noemata visible. But here the object in question is itself the

noema.

Normally

in order to constitute the noema, I first have to focus

on someobject, and then extract the noema from it. There is no blank

noema. Therefore consciousness, while a consciousness ofobjects,

cannot be anobject. If consciousness is not an

object, then it cannot be

perceived in the same way. Husserl actually sought to avoid this

conclusion, especiallyin his later

writings.The consequence, however,

was, that like the Idealists, he then had to argue for the possibility of

deducing perception from self-perception and notself-perception from

perception. However, he did notreally believe that we

perceivecon

sciousness. The sense of external time is founded in the sense of internal

time, but the sense of internal time can only be visible throughextraction from a process that is itself not just time, such as

listeningto

amelody. Thus self-perception is actually not deduced from perception

at all, but rather from some other act, and a hiatus isrequired

for self

perception. Husserl is then forced to conclude that there really exist two

quite different kinds of external perception, sense-perception and

object-perception. Self-perception would then be an act between the

two. In that case, itmust be modally different from external perception.Hence perception cannot be self-perception, but, unlike Kantian and

Hegelian perception,must be able to cross the world-boundaries,

especially the world-boundary between inside and outside.

Heidegger believed that there is onlyone world and that in that world

wesimply

can neverperceive

ourselves. He concluded that we cannot

perceive ourselves because there is no inside, no distinction between self




and world, no position outside of the picture. In the picture we cannot

perceive ourselves because we cannotperceive the horizon of the world

inwhich we are, in his case, the temporal horizon. Heidegger must have

believed that ifwe could perceive the limit of the world, then, throughan act of refraction, we could perceive ourselves, but that this is preciselywhat is not

given.We therefore then have no

position from which to

look back. Our relation to the past ismuch more one of bringing the

past into the present than the specular relation that is assumed by

believing in a past that belongs to an external world.

What does Wolfgang Iser believe? He believes, like Husserl, and

unlikeanybody

else on this list, thatperception

can cross world

boundaries. Moreover, he also believes thatperception always

crosses

world-boundaries, since the act of perceptionmust

alwaysassume the

nonexistence of the excluded, and by that act have already taken

account of that exclusion. He does notreally believe that the fictionaliz

ingact brackets out existence in some Husserlian way, since the realm

that is activated by the fictionalizingact is the imaginary, and on all

accounts the imaginary is distinguished by its own kind of existence. So

far he would seem to be closest to Lask. But that is not his positionat all.

The reason isthat

Husserl did notbelieve that

we cantake up

apoint

of view that is outside our world. Starting from anexisting point of view,

wego through

a nonexistent world toget

at the real one. However, Iser

does believe that we can take up a virtual position. He does not believe

like Vaihinger that all positions are virtual. Rather we can look out from

the picture into the world, and therefore I can look from the fictional

me into the real me. I cannot look from the real me to the real me. Now

here there arises aproblem.

For while it becomes clear that all

perceptions are boundary crossings, and that therefore reality requiresthe imaginary, does the imaginary require reality in the same way as the

real requires the imaginary? In other words, does an imaginary me needto enter the real in order to look at the

imaginary me? Is the imaginaryof equal

status with the real asworld-constituting? I believe that the

answer is no, theimaginary

does not need to enter the real. However,

that does not mean, as Lask thought, that all imaginary worlds are of

equal ontological order, that therefore the imaginary world is a closed

world of homogeneous actions, that in the imaginary world I can look at

myself, since both the imagined ego and its imagined objectsare

imagined. Iser would reply that animaginary

me is bound by the same

reality-rulesas the real me, even when it appears

to violate those rules. In

other words, the imaginary me, inseeing itself, looks at an infinite series

of mirrors. For animaginary

me to see animaginary me, it must go

througha

fictionalizingact of the same kind, and therefore construct an

imaginary world of second degree througha

fictionalizingact of second




degree. Moreover, that second-degree world is only called by us an

imaginary world because we characterize it throughan act of the first

degree, but it is quite different. I imaginea fictional me who certainly

believes in the existence of God. A first-order fictionalization creates a

second-order doxic context.

From this, two conclusions emerge. First, the fictionalizingact is

directional: it is away from the given.A return to the given from the

imaginary is simplya

boundary transgression from that world. For the

movie characters in The Purple Rose of Cairo itmust be the real viewers

who arebeyond the line. The real self becomes the dream self of the

other. This directionality cannot be changed: there is no towards in the

fictionalizing act; it must always be away. Is that then true of all

perceptions,or

only of literature? I am not sure. Second, there can be

no closure. Oscillation cannot be transcended, since there is noway

to

synthesize the real and the imaginary. In other words, forWolfgang Iser,

it is the fact that boundaries areconstantly being crossed that makes it

certain that worlds can never collide ormerge together.

Thus self

perception is always possible, but only through the admission of its

virtuality.

In what way is that different from Kant? Namely the following: forKant the rules of perception

are different in the two cases of perception

andself-perception. Normally

this has been taken to mean that we can

never know theobject

as it is, since we can never see it from all sides. On

the other hand, the reverse must also be true:namely

that we can never

see a moralobject perspectivally,

for the moment we do so, it ceases to

be a moralobject.

There can be no moral science. Therefore we cannot

study moralityor social behavior. Something is lost by giving up the idea

of the goodas an

object,as

something that we can look at and admire.

Iser has no suchproblem,

since he does not base his distinction

between worlds on the kind of vision that is in play, on the difference in

the way that weperceive

one world and thenperceive

the other world.

Therefore there is no discussion of a difference in the way of seeing in

the real world and in the imaginaryone. In this, he learns from Husserl.

Virtuality confirms the rules of vision rather than defeats them.

What is it then that we see when we view perceptionas

boundary

crossing? How is that different from aperception that is immanent to

our worlds? Must I conclude that all vision is perspectival, all vision

follows the rules of Piero della Francesca and Albrecht D?rer, that I see

objects

as if theywere part of paintings?

What does itmean however to look at anobject

as part of apainting?

Surely, it means the abilityto see the painting

as finite, ashaving

borders. Perhapsone cannot see a work by Christo in this way, because

it is sobig,

so that the border has to be imputed. But when one sees a




Christo work, one is actually seeing part of the border at each moment,

althoughone can never see the whole border. In the same

way when we

see the world, we see it enframed so that it has a border. However in

seeing the real world, I assume that the real world has no border, that my

sense of a border atthirty-seven degrees and twenty-eight degrees is an

illusion;6 whereas through the fictionalizing act we make the border

explicit. No, that iswrong: we accord truth-value to the border which we

denied to the border of perception in the real world.

However, there can be no closure because while we can hold both

contradictory beliefs simultaneously, we cannot make them dialectically

into one and the same belief: I can believe that I can see the border, the

frame, the closure of a work of art, while I also believe that it has no

border, and that I also do not see the border of my perception of this

room, while also believing that this border of perception is really there,

but I cannot believe that there is any way in which these two quitedistinct doxic imputations

are identical. In reading this paper, I can both

be conscious ofmyself

andmyself-reading-this-paper,

and moreover be

conscious of an identity between the two, but this identity is not a strict

identity and can never be one. Therefore the border crossing it takes to

be able to read thispaper

means that I can see

myselfboth

perspectivallyand aperspectivally,but I cannot believe, as Kant did, that there is some

point of view which totalizes all perspectives, that all points of view seek

unity. Hence Iser turns to the philosophy of play, for everything is to and

fro. Anthropology emerges from the recognition of difference. It

assumes theability

to take on anotherpoint

of view, but it also assumes

that Bali will never be Konstanz.

There is aquite banal danger here, and I think a clear one:

abandoninga

faculty theory of human capabilitiesmeans that there can

be nofaculty theory

of human nature. We are not alike because we are

possessed of similar faculties. All men are not created equal. If they are tobe viewed as

equal, it must be on some other basis than alogic of

participation in a common essence. I think that there is a solution to this

problem in the concept of the fictionalizing act: it is not because we

possesscommon faculties, nor because we hold the same

imaginary

absolutes, that a commonhumanity is to be desired, but rather because

of the quite universal capability of fictionalizing, that is, ofseeing aspects

from different worlds. Derrida, following Husserl, is quite right that that

is notenough.

Husserl wanted to limn a consciousness that is the same

in God, humans, and animals, with no difference?and the Jewish

convert quite religiously believed in his Protestant God. Derrida accuses

Heidegger of not having thought of the problem of animals in Being and

Time. Any anthropology raises this kind of question, for indenying the

possibility of a universal perspective, it must affirm the universal




possibility of boundary crossing. But then the question to be addressedto any postmodernity must be the one of the desirability of difference,

not of its facticity.

Hebrew University ofJerusalem

NOTES

1Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (Baltimore,

1993), p. 3; hereafter cited in text as FI.

2 Lask's main works are collected in Emil Lask, Gesammelte Schriften, ed.

Eugen Herrigel(T?bingen, 1923).

3 Hans Vaihinger, Die Philosophie des Als Ob. Systemder theoretischen, praktischen

undreligi?sen

Fiktionen derMenschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus, 8th ed. (Leipzig, 1922), p.

109; hereafter cited in text; in Englishas The Philosophy of "As If":

A System of the Theoretical,

Practical andReligious Fictions ofMankind, tr. C. K. Ogden (London, 1968).

4 Manfred Sommer, Evidenz im Augenblick.Eine Ph?nomenologie

der reinenEmpfinding

(Frankfurt, 1987).

5 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes:The

Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century FrenchThought

(Berkeley, 1993).

6 For a discussion of the issue of the borders of the visual field see Michael Kubovy, The

Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 104-11.

Documents

Gabriel Motzkin, Iser's Anthropological Reception of the Philosophical Tradition (2000)