D’un sensible l’autre (sur la signification métaphysique des sensibles) Part II Joсelyn Benoist

Abstract

The second part of the talk, given by J. Benoist at the meeting of the Société philosophique française on 20.03.2021 (the translation of the previous part is published in No. 7), continues the theme of Plato’s metaphor, transferring from the visible to the invisible. Trying to get rid of the metaphors as such, modern philosophy seeks the non-metaphorical sense of the invisible. This, in particular, is the task set by Merleau-Ponty. The goal of “demetaphorization” is to free the sensible from the tutelage of the invisible. But in fact, it was Platonism that in­vented the sensible in opposition to the intelligible, the suprasensible. Plato’s metaphysics is a project of taming the sensible and at the same time a way of liv­ing with it. Furthermore, Plato’s thirst for the suprasensible made the sensible resonate, gave saturation to what is in this world beyond the truth. The rejection of metaphysics in the Platonic sense led to a loss of address of the sensible, an anesthesia characteristic of our era. The critique of the optical model, the at­tempts made to get out of the metaphysical construction of the sensible as the visible did not lead to the liberation of the other senses. For modern philoso­phers, the nature of perception is initially neither exclusively nor even essentially sensible. Heidegger’s hermeneutic conception of understanding questions the metaphorical constitution of metaphysics and destroys the partition between the sensible and the intelligible, in its own way it repeats the unification of the senses, abandoning synecdoche and thus not implementing the instrumentaliza­tion of the sensible. For Heidegger there is no proper sense of perception: seeing is always more than seeing, and hearing more than hearing. The result is a loss of receptivity to the distinction between the senses. The elimination of the supposed inner divisions of the sensible contributes to the erasure of the diversity of the senses in the proper sense of the word in favor of the truth of being, in relation to which the senses are mere means. This approach is opposed to the practice of po­etic intervention, which consists in playing with the multiplicity of modalities of the sensible. Benoist gives two answers to the question of what to do with the sensible after the end of metaphysics. The first is the rehabilitation of the metaphor in the sense of realizing it as an act of discourse, revealing the sensible in order to use it and in this use to go beyond the sensible to the intelligible. The second is the liberation of other possibilities for the use of the variety of the senses, the possibilities associated with metonymy. According to Benoist, to­day the Platonic excess in relation to the sensible, which has discovered and con­stituted the sensible itself, allows us to see that the “sensible” is not a given, and is subject to reconstruction.

Translated from the text provided by the speaker.