(Re)Thinking about the Dynamic Experience and Meaning of the Other(ness)
Carmen Cozma
“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, Romania
e-mail: carmen.cozma@uaic.ro
AGATHOS, Volume 2, Issue 2 (3): 153-157
© www.agathos-international-review.com CC BY NC 2011
Anton Adămuţ. Fenomenologia celuilalt. (Cazul Platon – „Banchetul”). Bucharest: Romanian Academy Publishing House, 2011. Pp. 256
Being touched by the symbolistics of an eminent personality of the world-wide history of culture, namely that of Socrates with his primordial occupation of thinking à l’infini, Anton Adămuţ comes with his most recent published work and offers an impressive exercise of (re)thinking – certainly, connected to an adequate understanding-explanation-interpretation – about the habitual, but so difficult to be grasped, situation of human living as permanent dialogue / openness to the ‘other’. Actually, the other(ness), scrutinized like the in-depth inner, concomitantly the manifested outer, is at stake, in the space of a personal reasoning and expression put in act by the member of the professoriate of “Al.I.Cuza” University of Jassy.
The author leads us on a broad swath of issues covering fundamental interrogations that have been seriously considered by the first Greeks, among which the question of the other(ness) is outlining.
In the attempt to decipher more from the meaningfulness experience of the ‘other’, Anton Adămuţ draws on a polyvalent investigation inside and outside the structure and functionality of the other(ness), focusing his analysis upon Socrates - the archetypal personality for the entire Western philosophy. The wise thinker and educator of the antiquity, with his acknowledged paradoxical wording: “I am worth nothing with respect to wisdom”, seeing that he used to state his own ignorance, by reiterating that “I know that I do not know”, Socrates appears like an authentic impetus agency for the Romanian philosopher; his remarkable learning seems to be the main pretext for this book generated by and applied, precisely, to the significant resonance of the Platonic dialogue Symposium, so alive over the centuries.
The quest for spirituality, love, knowledge, truth and virtue, for human and divine delineates the thought emerging out the insight of the self-and-the-other movement.
A dense book is offered us with suggestively named pivots: “The ideology of the servant or the upside down world”; “Socrates: the Athenian pa(n)tient”; “Around the various Greek sorts of love”; “Eros and education within the philosophy of Dialogues – case study: Symposium”; “Socrates and Mephistopheles via Faust”. These are five well done sequences of the entitling topic, that of the “phenomenology of the ‘other’”.
The continuous resumption of the philosophizing process is challenged by the “frame of mind” with which Socrates is identified: Socrates, the “impossible and contradictory” character; the carrier of the whole virtue, manifesting in agôn, that was the best ‘place’ in practicing the virtues; Socrates, the eternal inquiring, almost a spying as concerns the Truth, the Good and the Beauty; activating a peculiar irony, one that creates the interval. “Socrates-frame-of-mind” is unfolded around the avowed interest of our author for the “face” of the great teacher of Athens. Respectively, the interest is for “Socrates, as prosopon / the mask of Plato”, at the same time activating the maieutical art and the procedure of the dialectical apory, as he is revealing throughout Theaetetus, Symposium, Phaedo, Apology, Meno, The Republic, by priority; but, no less, through Protagoras, Euthydemos, Laches, and Parmenides. Exploring the philosophical and theological languages, Anton Adămuţ brings out the difference between prosopon, hypostasis and enhypostasis, trying to illuminate the old question of general and particular, of nature and individual, regarding Socrates-the-symbol (pp.15-44).
Tackling the text of Symposium by Plato, the key thread is love – “the eldest of all gods”. The personality of Socrates encompasses the position of the supreme lover: the philosopher, endowing the pattern of “the prophet of the celestial eros”.
The core problem underpinning the book is the modulation of thinking about “individual-citizen-person triptych, doubled by phylia-eros-agape” (p.50). Inevitably, the author proceeds to approaching double games – enlightening the meanings of the ‘other’ in the experience of life, in the assumed context of the ancient Athens -, like: crowd and person, man and woman, beloved and lover, state and family, public and private, paideia and paiderasteia. Some connected aspects concerning the marriage institution, the sexuality, the courtesan status, the problem of possession or that of homosexuality, the education system, the proper laws, etc. are considered, too. Especially, the conceptual binomial eromenos-erastes is discussed in the horizon of understanding the particularities of the Greek erotic relationship and the pedagogical dimension of it. Under the auspices of the Socratic seduction, Anton Adămuţ features: „Socrates knew very well to distinguish between eros and sexual desire; moreover, eros is in opposition with such a desire; so, paiderasteiadoesn’t mean pathological sexual relations; not at all” (p.80).
An apart place is dedicated to the “paiderastical symmetry” wanted by the “beautiful poetess Sappho” with the very own passion and the artistic and physical education made in the “house of Muses disciples” - that has enjoyed Eros as patron, beside Muses and Athena goddess (pp.86-94).
The attention is mostly paid to a large commentary upon the cult of love, and consequently the fitted education, on the ground of the herein selected Platonic dialogue: Symposium. Thus, the third chapter of the present book (pp.102-245) unveils itself like a polyphonic score where the voices are skillfully leading by a composer who is perfectly aware of the importance of each of them, and no less of their harmonization for a persuasive interpretation of the eros, finally.
Keeping the accuracy of ideas displayed by Anton Adămuţ, we resume to emphasize the main paragraphs which are eloquently for the steps the author follows in his hermeneutic clearing up work: 1.„About the subject and theme, the love and respect”; 2.„Testamentary interlude facing the logic and the ideology”; 3.”Paiderasteia – social licit homoerotics”; 4.”Extended paideia – philosophical licit homoerotics”; 5.„The extended paideia principle – chastity (knightly and romantic consequences)”; 6.„Erotical folly”; 7.„On the pleasures of love and the practice of pleasure”; 8. „Erotics – the well-considered art of love”; 9.„Prolegomena: the Platonic theory of love (swinging) from Lysis to Phaedrus”; 10.”Case study – Symposium (about seduction as censorship territory)”.
The rich network of levels and planes in highlighting the phenomenological approach of love as the greatest lived experience of sense-bestowing for human being, overarching the unity: potentiality-action, up-down, celestial-terrestrial, pleasure-duty, being(ness)-thinking and so forth, finishes by running the metaphysical journey to the ingenious pair of the professionals in irony: Socrates and Mephistopheles. The sublime Faust by Goethe enters the stage. The reflections generated by the above thematization deserve to be found and appropriated without any kind of intermediary.
Undoubtedly, Phenomenology of the Other claims a careful reading, bearing a complex perspective; one nurtured from an interdisciplinary positioning of its author. Moving in different registers, in history of philosophy, metaphysics, theology, literature, using and ranging referential works of some outstanding writers like Plato and Aristotle, Saint Augustine and Toma Aquinas, eminent Christian commentators, continuing with Marsilio Ficino, Voltaire, Hegel and Kierkegaard, coming until Léon Robin, Karl Jaspers, Constantin Noica, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Dumitru Stăniloae and Gregory Vlastos, the book we dwelled on this short presentation is a thorough writing about the inquiring philosophical consciousness and the mission of its subject.
Starting from the question about the phenomenology of other(ness), Anton Adămuţ reaches to designing a constant demonstration of the philosophical thinking / (re)thinking in its opportunities of transforming the experience into a viable challenge, highly significant for the humanness in its plenitude. By placing the topic within a dynamic conversation that engages an overview of real beacons in interpretating the other(ness) along the perpetual development of the lucide examiner thinking, the author achieves a solid contribution to contemporary philosophizing area, under the inspiration of the dominant Socratic style.