От одного чувственного к другому (к метафизическому значению чувственных восприятий) Часть I Ж. Бенуа

Abstract

Jocelyn Benoist is a well-known French philosopher working at the junction of continental and analytical traditions, and the author of two dozen books and more than a hundred articles. A critic of phenomenology and “new realisms”, he is the originator of the concept of “contextual realism”. Contextual realism is de­veloped by him in the books “Concepts” (2011), “Eléments de philosophie réaliste” (2011), “Le bruit sensible” (2013), “La logique du phénomène” (2016), “L’adresse du réel” (2017), “Toward a contextual realism” (2021), and “Von der Phänomenologie zum Realismus” (2022). The published text is the first part of the talk given by J. Benoist at the meeting of the French Philosophical Society on the 20th of March, 2021. In contemporary philosophy, despite a return of metaphysics, there is a forgetting of its Platonistic dimension, a decline of the craving for overcoming the limits of the sensible, a loss of understanding of the suprasensible and, simultaneously, a desensitization, a derealization of the sensible itself. In this sense, Q. Meillassoux’s speculative realism is a symp­tom. Placing the sensible under the yoke of truth, trying to tame it, Platonism at the same time took the sensible seriously. However, the understanding of the sensible as a phenomenon has led to its derealization in phenomenology, which is a kind of Platonism in reverse. Phenomenology, which absolutizes the concept of a phenomenon, overlooks the sensible itself, thinking not about the sensible but about the phenomenon. Nietzsche showed that as a result of the destruction of Plato’s true world, the sensible world of appearances (phenom­ena) also disappears, not only as a world of appearances, but also as a world. The concepts of “truth” and “appearance”, “truth” and “world” cannot be sepa­rated. Rejecting, on the one hand, phenomenology and Nietzsche’s radical per­spectivism and its development in M. Gabriel’s “neutral realism”, Benoist offers, on the other hand, an interpretation according to which as a result of the destruc­tion of the true world we are left with only the sensible as such, of which it makes no sense to say whether it is true or false. We remain simply with reality. Returning to Plato does not mean accepting a metaphysical theory of two worlds that substantiates the suprasensible as a result of a literal understanding of Pla­tonic metaphors. But concepts are also not exhausted metaphors, as Derrida be­lieved, and nor are they their negation, as Ricoeur thought. The ideal and the real have their own existence. We are talking about two different categories, a kind of categorical dualism: concepts, norms are ideal; the sensible is real. The return to Plato is a return to a truly metaphysical use of a metaphor, allowing to overcome the sensible.