Beyond the Phenomenology of the Inconspicuous

Abstract

How does spirit appear? In fact, it does not appear, and for this reason, we could refer to it, following Heidegger, as “inconspicuous” (unscheinbar). The Heideggerian path investigates this inconspicuous starting from the Husserlian method, and yet, this is not the only Phenomenology of the “Inconspicuous” Spirit: Hegel had already thematized it in 1807. It is thus possible to identify at least two Phenomenologies of the “Inconspicuous” spirit. These two phenomenologies, however, do not simply put forth distinct phenomenological methods, nor do they merely propose differing modes of spirit’s manifestation. In each of these phenomenologies, rather, what we call “spirit” manifests different traits: in one instance, it appears as absolute knowing, and, in the other, it manifests “from itself” as “phenomenon”. Yet how, exactly, does spirit manifest “starting from itself as phenomenon”? Certainly not in the mode of entities, but rather in the modality that historical phenomenology, which also includes Edmund Husserl’s work, has grasped. A question remains, however: is the inconspicuous coextensive with “spirit”? Certainly, spirit is inconspicuous, but it is not only spirit that is such. A certain phenomenological practice understood this well, a practice that several French authors have pushed. Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, and Jean-Louis Chrétien have all contributed, in a certain way, to the phenomenology of the inconspicuous. However, do these authors carry out a phenomenology of inconspicuous spirit? Perhaps what French phenomenology gives us today, after an itinerary that has discovered several senses of the inconspicuous, is precisely the return to spirit that is missing in, and was missed by, this tradition.