Claude Romano: Evential Hermeneutics

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Claude Romano
Evential hermeneutics
On the opening page of L'événement et le monde, the first instalment in a phenomenological triptych continued by the next year's 1999 publication of L'événement et le temps and completed with the 2003 Il y a: essais de la phénoménologie, Claude Romano sketches a vignette worthy of our reproducing it here in full. He writes:
Outside, it is night. It rains, and the rain steps up its violence, dully hammering the ground, in sad litanies or staccato bursts, at times raging and querulous, at times pacified and pacifying, smelling like a flower blooming in the middle of its somber light, far away and yet beside us, submerging everything in its sweetness. Suddenly, in the time without duration of an instant, lightning flashes: a scrawled flourish of light that is extinguished straightaway and soon followed by thunder. A window slams and the storm has played itself out: a blank, inarticulate cry in the electric heat, with its mute warnings, its mad and impossible calls, the implacable battering of an invisible army on the march or a torrent that leaves the earth exhausted, worked over, inert.1
This account of the lightning storm is remarkable, not simply because of the striking lyricism with which Romano captures it (the style is reminiscent of the American novelists Fitzgerald and Faulkner), but, no doubt more importantly, because it identifies a phenomenon—one he will name the "event"—that phenomenology must, but has not yet, squarely addressed. To see the phenomenon and understand why it has been overlooked, it will do to consider further the scene. Lightning flashes across the night sky. What, Romano asks, has precisely happened? Certainly, we have just witnessed a change of some sort (of that there can be no doubt), but in what does that change consist? Is there a subject of the change, an "ontic substrate" (here the lightning itself) that has passed from one state to another? Or, rather than saying the flashing is the attribute of a subsisting entity whose properties have been altered, should we not say instead, as Romano's phenomenology of the event will go on to encourage, that the flashing just is the change itself? In short: is not the lightning above all else, and before anything else, neither an entity or being, but an event?
The example of lightning might call to mind the ancient Stoic account of causality and grammar, one Romano recounts at the beginning of his analysis in Event and World, for it sets the stage for an analysis of the event, albeit perhaps somewhat indirectly, by locating it in respect to traditional metaphysical ontology—Romano's own work on the event is formally indicated, however tacitly, all the way back in ancient ontology's analyses of substance and causality. For those without any prior acquaintance with the phenomenological account of the event (but who are familiar with analytic or ancient philosophy), it will accordingly do to begin with a more traditional analysis—one centering on ancient ontology and the philosophy of language. Doing so serves as a propaedeutic to Romano's explication of the event, which is neither a being nor a thing in the traditional ontological sense of those terms. No doubt many will find the very idea that something can be neither a being nor an entity or object dubious. A review of the idea from the Stoic perspective not only undermines that prejudice, it at the same time locates our inquiry in a familiar historical horizon from which to commence our review of Romano.
How does the lightning challenge the history of philosophy's predominant understanding of ontology, which, since Aristotle, has with rare exception taken reality to consist in a closed system of entities that are causally determined? Beings are (in part) what they are owing to what causes them; the reason for their occurrence is the first clue to what makes them the kind of thing they are. To know something's causes is to know the thing. On this way of thinking, reality is seen to consist in beings that are comprehensible in light of the natural laws comprising the overarching explanatory framework of cause and effect by which we comprehend the entities governed by those laws. Yet here, in the case of the lightning, we are faced with a mode of appearing whose manifestation seems to defy this causal ontology. As Romano will note with the Stoics (and perhaps Nietzsche), in the case of the lightning, we are confronted by something that appears, not as an entity whose properties undergo a change, but as a pure change without a substrate. Because what appears is a happening, it is a matter of events, and not beings. In fact, if we take the situation at face value, paying careful attention to how what took place takes place, it is reasonable to suspect, as Romano will go on to confirm, that the traditional ontological conception of beings cannot accommodate such events. Traditional ontology, it thus seems, must supplant beings with events. And if so, it will fall to phenomenology to accomplish that substitution. How does Romano propose to do so?
Lingering further on our lightning vignette, we can ask: with the thunder clap and lightning flash, do we encounter an ontic substrate that has undergone a change in its attributes, or, on the contrary, is there no such substrate at all, but merely pure change, an unbridled process that bears no attributes aside from the remarkable characteristic that, in appearing, it bears within itself only the impression of its own appearing? To countenance with Romano the possibility that reality—following the language of Husserlian phenomenology, a milieu he will term the "lifeworld" (Lebenswelt)—is irreducible to an ontology of beings (and hence the laws of cause and effect or the principle of sufficient reason) is to reawaken our attention to the sense in which events admit of no "ontic" explanation. Events like the lightning strike take place without any causal analysis sufficiently explaining how or why. Like Angelus Silesius's rose that simply blooms because it blooms, events are without why. Transcending entirely the realm of "innerworldly facts" defined by the causal laws governing ordinary temporal succession, events appear at their own initiative, preceded without the least premonition or expectation on any observer's part, and thus without any assignment in a causal nexus by which we might comprehend their occurrence as we would a mundane fact. This by no means is to claim they exhibit pure chaos. To say events are without a sufficient reason is not equivalent to contending they are unintelligible; it is to note, as Romano himself will, that their intelligibility exceeds what any typical causal aetiology can conceptualize.2 We are not naming an absence of intelligibility, but an excess of it. As Romano says, when the question is the event's intelligibility, our comprehension of it is not one of causal explanation, but of meaning. It calls not for causal explanation, but for interpretation. Thus, it will fall to a distinctly hermeneutic phenomenology to trace the event's terrain of paradoxical phenomenality, a mode of manifestation whose contours will demand, as we shall highlight, a systematic reappraisal, not just of the subject and time, but also some of historical phenomenology's own central presuppositions. What is at stake for Romano, thus, is the very status of reason itself, a new phenomenological conception of what lies at the heart of reason. To come to terms with the true ontological status of events and the mode of phenomenality by which they appear calls for a reappraisal of phenomenology's aspirations, and how it pursues them. To think the event, then, is not only to take up the question of a distinctive but marginal phenomenon. It is to lay the foundation for a total reconfiguration of phenomenology and its place in the history of philosophy. Such is the daunting task Romano assigns his "evential hermeneutics."
Events epitomized by the lightning strike demand a shift in phenomenological framework from transcendental phenomenology and existential ontology, to a view that leaves that "Kantian framework" behind. The phenomenology of the event, as L'événement et le monde and L'événement et le temps aim to explain, transforms the phenomenological method, and with it, the focus of that gaze. How so? Insofar as phenomenology has as yet missed it, evential hermeneutics will deepen our understanding of how things manifest themselves, and, with it, the very one to whom those things are presented.3 Just as it reconfigures our conception of what appears, so it alters our understanding of the "subject." No longer is the self said to be the transcendental ego or even Dasein; Romano will coin the term "advenant" to designate the one who understands himself as open to events, to be the one who is able to undergo and respond to the realm of meaning configured by the possibilities they address to him. Hence, the advenant is not someone who constitutes a world (the ego), nor the one who finds himself always already thrown into it (as Dasein), but more primordially, someone who negotiates the meaning of that existence in light of the ability to experience a radical upheaval in what the world is. Romano remarks,
As pure reconfiguration of possibilities, an event transcends any innerworldly fact and eludes any causal explanation. Neither causing anything itself nor being caused by anything, it is simply the origin of the world. Origin inaccessible for any explanatory archaeology and accessible only for an understanding that reveals meaning.4
To note that the event frustrates a causal explanation is to observe that it strikes the world as a whole and at its foundations. It reconfigures the entire face of the world. With the event, it is the world itself that changes. "What," Romano asks,
is the relation between events and the world if it is one and the same world that trembles on its foundations, that both collapses and is built up, is it not the very meaning of world that is modified through this trembling?5
As a result of recognizing that the event fundamentally alters our conception of the meaning of the world and ourselves, what then are we to say about their relation? Both are in a process of becoming in strict correlation to the other. As one changes, so does the other. When an event dashes my world to pieces, overturning what I had come to accept as customary, I must reorient myself to new possibilities impinging on me. In the death of a close friend, or the loss of a spouse, or the news of an unexpected terminal illness, our habitual grip on the world is loosened. The capacity to undergo and respond to such a change (Romano calls it "availability"), is precisely what it is to be advenant: "The world no longer appears as the factual context for any innerworldly understanding, but as the articulated totality of possibilities from which an advenant shapes himself in the course of his adventure."6
Hence, Romano's version of hermeneutic phenomenology breaks with some of the most longstanding commitments of Husserl's and Heidegger's thought—no longer are we the ones who constitute or project a world for ourselves. Rather, it is we who must respond to it. But despite this essential difference regarding the precise nature of what it means to be who we are, and though that difference must always be kept in mind, there is nevertheless broad agreement between Romano and those he critiques that phenomenology is a descriptive discipline distinct from the explanatory sciences. Phenomenology takes on the phenomenon of meaning, whereas other inquiries—anthropology or psychology or biology or physics, say—consign themselves (deliberately or not) to the level of fact and thus the regime of cause and effect. The fundamental ontological distinction between "innerworldly facts" and events corresponds, Romano notes, to what differentiates phenomenology from other disciplines:
Precisely in that this difference is itself that which separates innerworldly "sciences," on the one hand, disciplines that operate at the level of facts and their causes, endeavouring to understand the former in light of the latter, and, on the other hand, a "discipline" that aims only at illuminating events as origin, which asks about the origin of meaning as it comes about in the human adventure starting from events.7
The sciences (humanistic and natural alike) concern themselves with causal explanation; but phenomenology, in contrast, is a descriptive discipline. Following Heidegger's distinction, Romano notes that these scientific inquiries are what he calls "ontic" sciences—they investigate beings and the lawful rules governing their causal behavior. They approach entities against the background of an explanatory context permitting us to comprehend what they are, and why they behave the way they do, given the causal regularities dictating their relations. It is an inquiry into a regional ontology—a specific domain of entities.
Such sciences presuppose a classical Aristotelian ontology of beings, one in turn reflected in the ordinary grammar of language. There are "ontic substrates," which are expressed in terms of subjects, and there are the predicates of the subjects said to bear them. In turn, there are causes explaining their corresponding effects; change, on this view, is tantamount to an alteration in a substance. As Romano observes, on this ontology of beings, there is always a difference between the event (the "flashing") and what flashes—the ontic substrate, the agent of the action or equivalently, the cause of the effect. This does not always hold, contends Romano, not only as a matter of our grammar, but also of experiential fact; for when as here the issue concerns the event's mode of phenomenality, what flashes (the lightning) is precisely nothing else than the very flashing itself. There is not first an ontic substrate that takes an action or is acted upon; there is only the process itself, the pure change. Something takes place without there being any underlying subject that was always already the candidate to undergo it. The alteration did not alter something which already existed independently prior to it; the alteration itself is precisely the event of something's coming-into-being. The event marks an advent, the moment in which something comes to be. It is a birth of sorts.
Thus, traditional philosophical ontology concerns the event. The event is obscured by the ontology of beings and the linguistic conventions reinforcing it. The underlying prejudice responsible for the error of assigning all change to an ontic substrate is only exacerbated by the habits and conventions of ordinary language. How do our linguistic conventions mislead? When the phenomenon is the event rather than a cause or an effect, a being, or the state of affairs involved in their causal transactions, nothing undergoes a causal transformation; the transformation is one of pure appearing (Romano will call it a "bursting forth"), a happening that transgresses the limits of causal regularities, and hence explanation. Here, the limit is not epistemological, as if the event came about as a result of causes that remain unknown to us. The issue is rather phenomenological, for the event's very mode of manifestation escapes the causal nexus entirely. Our inability to causally explain the event is not due to limitations associated with our powers of understanding; it is the result of the reality to which the event belongs.
As Romano thus emphasizes, the event takes place without its being comprehensible through the lens by which we comprehend ordinary entities and their states of affair. When we desire to understand these "innerworldly facts," we do so by tracing their occurrence back to the cause responsible for having generated them; we treat the things in question as the effect of a causal history that gives it its sense. But that will not do in the case of the event, since, as a matter of meaning, the event manifests itself as something that happens apart from any and all causes. To search for the causes of the event is therefore not fruitless simply because the relevant aetiology is too complex for us to untangle; attempting to comprehend it causally is fundamentally misguided, because it betrays a confusion concerning the phenomenon it would purport to explain. The event (in the eventual sense) is what it is exactly to the extent that it manifests itself as something whose intelligibility lies beyond the ordered succession of temporal cause and effect—as Romano will go on to show, its meaning surpasses any causal explanation because it is the source of a new meaning for our existence. Hence, it exceeds any antecedent explanatory context. To attempt to comprehend the event with a causal explanation is not only to look for an explanation that will not materialize; it is to destroy the very thing one wishes to explain, since, in virtue of its very ontological mode of being, the event (as an event of meaning) rises above any explanatory context. Where an effect is understood by its causes, events demand interpretation, for, even if (per impossible) we could discern how it precisely came about causally, that would still not decide the crucial issue: how will we respond to it?
It is in the response that the event takes on its meaning. On way to freeing itself from historical phenomenology's residual metaphysical conception of beings, Romano takes inspiration, we have said, from the Stoics. The Stoics in a way saw what Romano wishes to highlight. If Aristotelian metaphysics as the science of being qua being obscures the event with its ontology of substance, it was the Stoics who challenged the primacy usually accorded to beings. Instead, they assigned that primacy to events since for them, events are "before anything else."8 The implications are expansive. The Stoic ontology challenges the "metaphysical grammar" determining the traditional ontological propositions governing the copulative union of subject and predicate. Not only does this Stoic ontology of events anticipate Nietzsche; it lays a foundation on which phenomenology can reform its own aims and method. For according to Romano, the whole Stoic metaphysical infrastructure ends up "removing events from the horizon of ontology."9 No longer are events reduced to the explanatory framework of cause and effect. We come to discover that here it is a decision of parting ways with the famous Aristotelian analysis of beings and causal change, one according to which discourse consists fundamentally of "saying something about something [legien ti kata tinos]." For, as Romano explains, the reformation at issue means that propositions are not exclusively encased in the predicative form privileged by Aristotle, a form where "S is P" is analyzed in such a way that the verb "is" performs the role of a copula uniting a subject and a predicate. The conception of the predicate is overturned. Rather than signifying the property of an ontic substrate, the Stoic ontology of events implies that one
no longer conceives the predicate as a property occurring to a subject, or as an accident (sumbebekos) affecting a beingness (ousia), but as an incorporeal event, which is neither a being nor of the order of beings, which names nothing, but is said about something.10
The metaphysical consequences cannot be overstated.
To begin with, it entails a fundamental revision in phenomenology itself. The event, which is already an issue for classic ontology, in Heidegger's fundamental ontology comes to be understood as the "arch-event" of Being. In Heidegger's thought of the Eregneis, all eventuality is reduced to that of Being. Romano will seek, therefore, to broaden the phenomenality of the event beyond the singularity of Being. For that, he notes, is to take on board the paradoxical fact that events are incomprehensible in terms of "the frame of beings." Irreducible to the Being of beings, events are irreducible to "beingness." Hence, to locate the event outside the explanatory framework of cause and effect provides the first tantalizing clue that there exists a path for phenomenology beyond fundamental ontology's reduction of everything to the horizon of beings. The horizon of Being is no longer the ultimate horizon for phenomenality.
If so, what more may be said? One takeaway is that, far from simply reforming the grammar of ordinary or even philosophical language, recognizing the nature of the event enacts a reformation in our understanding of the structure of phenomenality, and hence the world itself. The concern is not with how we do (or should) speak about things, but with the very essence of them—as we shall see in turning to Au couer de la raison, la phénoménologie Romano's phenomenology demonstrates that we are not imprisoned by the shackles of language, for, contrary to the claims of twentieth-century linguistic philosophy, the Lebenswelt is always already articulated by pre-linguistic structures of meaning and intelligibility. Language no doubt enriches and shapes our experience of the world in ways Romano has no interest in denying, but language itself is not the source of that meaning; the world we encounter in its everyday practical and embodied significance is manifest in a sensible realm (the world of perception) whose own integrity holds apart from any discursive powers of conceptual articulation or linguistic expression. There is, as we shall analyze later, a "logos of the world" independent of conceptuality and language. Though language powerfully expresses our encounter with the world, it does not produce that encounter. Linguistic idealism, which constitutes a major objection to phenomenology, is therefore mistaken. However, laying that issue to the side for now (yet remaining mindful of it), we can return to the issue at hand—that the Stoic conception of events involves far more than just a revision to our linguistic conventions. More significantly, it represents a revolution at the heart of the "physical doctrine of causality."11 The logical and grammatical distinctions underwriting the Stoic categorization of events reflects a reappraisal of the world and its things, not just our words.
To illustrate the phenomenological import of that reappraisal, Romano directs our attention to examples drawn from everyday life. Take, for instance, as he does, the Stoic's example of a kitchen knife's cutting meat. There is the knife (the active cause of the cutting) and the meat (the passive cause without which there could be no cutting), which, when taken together, produce the effect of the being-cut (the event). What, though, are we to say regarding the event itself? What is the ontological status of the cutting? Summarizing the Stoic position, Romano suggests that, rather than categorizing the cutting as a property of the meat (as would be the case in the predicative grammar), it should be seen as something that befalls the meat: being-cut. Such a difference is no small one, since, for the Stoics, and for Romano himself who will in this respect follow suit, it turns out that "causes are causes of the fact that a predicate (expressed by a verb) is true of something."12 Against the history of metaphysics, there thus is a fundamental distinction between the process by which a change occurs, on the one hand, and the entity that becomes what it does as a result of that change, on the other. As Romano summarizes, "The first phenomenal trait of events that has become apparent to us is the impossibility of assigning them a univocal ontic support."13 To return to our example, then, the lightning is an event that takes place, not a change in the property of an abiding substance. But if there is an ineliminable limitation at work in the traditional Aristotelean ousioloigcal ontology due to its reduction of all change to an ontic support, what is the alternative?
Lest the forgoing review of Romano's analysis of Stoic ontology misleadingly suggest that the issue is more abstract than it actually is, it will do to shift our attention to concrete examples exhibiting what is at stake in considering the question of what it means to be who we are. As Romano himself will explain, "selfhood" is the advenant's capacity to endure and respond to events. Thus, in attempting to explicate the advenant's distinctive structure of self-experience, one strategy is to proceed by way of contrast, highlighting experiences in which that capacity is disabled, and, in doing so, accentuating its otherwise pervasiveness. Romano examines two experiences that evince what occurs when our capacity to respond to events is alienated or lost—despair and the traumatism of terror. Romano's phenomenology of the event and analytic of the advenant is at its heart not simply an attempt to reprise, but rather to revise, the Heideggerian analysis of Dasein. Hence, the event serves as the leading clue Romano will use to reassess the idea of what it means to be who we are—a being for whom it is possible to endure and respond to events.
Romano's phenomenology of the advenant can be technical and dense, so before wading directly into the terminology he deploys to express the phenomena, it does to take the concrete moods just mentioned as preliminary illustrations of who the advenant is. Thus consider, as Romano invites us to do midway through his analysis of the advenant in Event and World, the case of despair, which can be usefully contrasted with sadness. Both are feelings that allow us to orient ourselves in facing the events that come upon us. In a period of great sadness, there is a kind of dejection that extinguishes our desires and closes us in on ourselves, leaving us feeling distant from others. But regardless of how profound the sadness becomes, it does not dispossess us of ourselves; it remains mine, which is precisely what makes it so difficult to bear, and why in turn inevitably it leads the one who undergoes it to seek solitude or isolation. Sadness plunges us back against ourselves, which only exacerbates the torment.
With despair, however, things are otherwise. In despair, notes Romano, there is a fundamental anonymity at work. Unlike sadness where I endure a trial that oscillates between dejection and revulsion, suffering and struggle, in despair, I am reduced to a condition of "doleful apathy." It deprives me of the ability to relate myself to what happens to me by actively responding. Consequently, it collapses my possibilities as an advenant. But not only that. In despair, we hover in an impersonal stupor detached from anything that has or could befall us, so detached, in fact, that we are separated from even ourselves. Such despair, he accordingly concludes, initiates a strange spectacle where, looking on ourselves from afar, we languish in an impersonal lucidity. Rendered totally destitute—without either self or a world in its evential sense—the one who undergoes despair is subject to a hyper lucidity in which all possibility is shipwrecked.
To accentuate how the event changes us, take next the traumatism revealed in the experience of terror. If, as Romano notes, "selfhood is the capacity-to-face what happens to us," in terror, I am entirely overwhelmed to the point of not being able to do so. I cannot face what terrifies me. Unlike fear where there is always a distance between what menaces me and myself (think of the rabid dog loose from the yard and fast approaching), in terror, there is an absolute and immediate proximity. All distance is abolished to the point of perfect coincidence. Hence, whereas fear calls for courage, because a response is still possible, there is no possibility of mustering a response in terror; it immobilizes us to the point of stupefaction. There is no question, then, of how we shall face what terrifies us, for the event overcomes us so that no possibility of facing it remains. Moreover, not only does the terrifying menace disable us from responding, it does not arrive from some external source. That which is terrifying, notes Romano, is so precisely because it swells up from within me. The most terrifying dimension of the threat is its power to reveal something about me to myself. It strips me bear. In traumatic events like the terror of the war battlefield, for instance, I encounter, in an excess of power that fascinates me, my own death. But now I no longer can face up to that death as a possibility—as something that I can anticipate, or represent, or possibly avoid—disabling me, the terror destroys the ability to master the situation, for it hands me over to an "empire of death." No longer is death something I can avoid, but what "surrounds and envelops me" to the point of dispossessing me of any power to do anything about it. Hence, in either the case of real despair or profound terror, the meaning of what it is to be an advenant is reinforced via its suspension. Rendered incapable of appropriating the event that befalls me, stripped of my capacity to respond to what has happened, I am no longer able to hold myself open to the world.
At this point, the phenomenological tradition comes directly into play. If classical ontology is unable to make sense of events (and the one who is able to respond to them), for Romano, the next step is to examine whether Heidegger's fundamental ontology does better. Will the existential analytic of Dasein accommodate the event? Does the Heideggerian fundamental ontology, which turns on the "ontological difference" (the distinction between beings and Being), adequately account for the distinction between beings and events, or does it, like the very history of metaphysics it attempted to escape, elide that difference? Said another way, does the Heideggerian free the event or, in failing to do so, must it simply serve as a waystation for a phenomenology that finally accomplishes what it has not?
Before presenting how evential hermeneutics will take issue with fundamental ontology, it bears rehearsing the latter's notable strengths, while still highlighting some of the very presuppositions it failed to adequately overcome. Its first remarkable advance beyond classic ontology is its highlighting how the question of the meaning of Being is posed by Dasein, the being for whom that very being is uniquely a question. The question of the meaning of Being arises as a question (or at least it can potentially) because, unlike other beings for whom it cannot, Dasein is the being with a tacit understanding of Being. As Heidegger says, Dasein is the being that is ontological. Hence, as Romano notes, the existential analytic accentuates Dasein's pre-eminence over other entities; Dasein lacks any fixed or stable essence in the way that a chair or a lizard do, for, unlike them, Dasein's essence is its existence, insofar as its mode of being is enacted in a transitive mode that signals its understanding of Being. It is the being whose being is marked by the capacity (and hence the burden) to grapple with the very meaning of its being—it can wrestle with the question of its own meaning. Thus, for Dasein, the very meaning of what it is be who it is remains unsettled. From this perspective, to understand Being means that we always already are confronted with the enigma of what it means to be who we are, and hence the question of what kind of existence we will choose to live. As Romano comments, "The question that is addressed to Dasein and that requires it to answer in such a way that it thereby answers for its Being is the question: Who are you?—for Jemeinigkeit belongs to Dasein's Being fundamentally."14 For Heidegger, to be who we are involves the ontological fact that as subjects—as Dasein—we are the ones for whom there is a tacit understanding of Being as such. "To understand," as Romano expounds, "is to bring about the uncovering of Being by existing (it)."15 This understanding is a work of truth, which, in the present Heideggerian context, is equivalent to one of "uncovering"; what ultimately grounds the truth of correspondence between a judgment and a state of affairs ("ontic truth"), is an underlying ontological mode of truth, the "disclosedness" of Being. This ontological truth consists in an openness to the world, our mode of being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein) characterized by the temporality of care (Sorge). Hence, from Being and Time forward, Being, which is interrogated in terms of its transitive sense, at once dismantles and points a way beyond the ontological conception of beings that we saw first questioned by the Stoics. For the metaphysical legacy inherited from Aristotelian ousiology, ontology is determined by the predicative structure and the presuppositions that govern its grammar. For Heidegger's fundamental ontology, Being in contrast is no longer understood just "logically" as copula, but as an event, as that which conditions the appearing of beings as beings—Being is that which conditions meaning, of what involves us, not simply with an "environment" surrounding the animal, but with a world. Accordingly, Being is taken by Heidegger to be the event of truth, the uncovering of things as things, the advent of the world as world—the happening of a space of meaning.16
And yet, Romano emphasizes the key point for a phenomenology of the event, that Heidegger's conception of Being as the singular event par excellence remains yoked to the history of ontology it attempts to deconstruct. How so? There are perhaps many such presuppositions one could note, but the crucial one, or at least the one Romano will himself scrutinize most exhaustively, is this: fundamental ontology relegates Being to a horizon of subjectivizing time. More precisely, Romano's reproach of Heidegger is twofold. Heidegger, he says as we have just seen, subordinates events to the "arch-event" of Being—Being is seen as the sole event. And second, the event always is brushed aside as falling on the side of inauthenticity. To cite just one famous example, the event of death for Heidegger always falls to the side of inauthenticity, since any encounter with it as a pending event cannot be appropriated authentically. As we know also, for Heidegger it is time (specifically the ecstatic temporality of care) that projects the ultimate horizon against which the meaning of Being is given. Hence, in keeping with the history of metaphysics that Heidegger wished to overcome, time is still thought within the same conceptual register of the metaphysics of time, that of subjectivized time. Time, which is said to be the horizon of Being, is that which determines the mode of being; consequently, time in fundamental ontology remains subordinated to the history of the metaphysics of time, and thus the metaphysics of the subject.
Romano invites us to face squarely the question this puts to phenomenology, one he formulates as follows: "Does thought about Being do justice to the way events show themselves from themselves, to their phenomenality? Can they be understood in terms of 'ontology,' even one that is extensively reworked, such as the fundamental ontology of Dasein?"17 If even fundamental ontology conceals the event by consigning all appearing to the formal condition of possibilities imposed by Dasein's own powers of temporal comprehension, then how can the event, as that which manifests itself without any regard for such a condition, be adequately described from the Heideggerian perspective? The conclusion is that it cannot. The event is phenomenalized precisely insofar as it "abolishes all prior condition," and so it cannot be brought into view by fundamental ontology, which assigns all appearing to one primary condition—time. This is a weighty result. Phenomenology must move beyond even its Heideggerian formulation.
But if the ontological difference fails to think the event, how are we to think it sufficiently? We have been building up to Romano's answer: evential hermeneutics. His own hermeneutical approach will lay the basis for a thoroughgoing reconfiguration of phenomenological philosophy's mode of philosophizing. Like Husserl and Heidegger, Romano contends that phenomenology must clarify what it means to philosophize phenomenologically. It must articulate its aspirations and means. And if phenomenological philosophy begins with the one who philosophizes, then it is only fitting that any attempt to revitalize phenomenology would begin with an investigation into the one who takes it on himself to ask the question of philosophical method. The task, then, Romano remarks, is no longer just to carry out a hermeneutic of Dasein, but what he calls the advenant—"the term for human being as constitutively open to events, insofar as humanity is the capacity to be oneself in the face of what happens to us."18 A mature phenomenological hermeneutics not only will reconfigure our understanding of reality by tracing the contours of the event's appearing; it will also alter our comprehension of what it means to be who we are.
Crucial to accomplishing the transition from an existential analytic of Dasein to the advenant is the question of how we are exposed to events in the evential sense. How does this capacity indicate the reality of a time lying beyond the ecstatic horizons of the subject, a time, in short, that renders us always already open onto an immemorial past and an unimaginable future? How does the event that transforms the world transform the ones who understand themselves starting from the world's rearticulated possibilities? And, if such a fundamental self-transformation is at work in the event's taking place, what manner of temporality produces it? How are we to conceptualize the time of the event? Representing an unconditioned beginning, how are we to understand that arrival and the change it ushers in?
Since to speak of a change is to invoke a fundamentally temporal category, what mode of time does the event unveil, if its time is neither that of linear succession ("ordinary" time) nor the authentic temporality of care? It helps here to consider Romano's differentiation between events that show themselves within the course of ordinary time, on the one hand, and events (understood in their proper phenomenological sense) as phenomena that happen of their own accord and without the least possible anticipation on our part. The former are changes that occur in the world, whereas the second happen to the world. As Romano explains, an innerworldly fact occurs impersonally, addressing everyone while belonging to nobody in particular. The arrival of a train at the station or the telecast of the nightly news take place on their appointed schedule, and they are public in a way that makes them of no specific importance to anybody in particular. They are not addressed to me or to you, but to everyone and hence no one. By contrast, the event in its evential sense is not a change that occurs to a "pure spectator."19 Where innerworldly facts address themselves to nobody in particular because they unveil themselves in a mode of publicity that entails their neutrality, with the event, things are otherwise:
It is a different matter with events in the properly eventual sense, insofar as they are distinguished from simple facts. While innerworldly facts are not addressed to anybody and occur indifferently for every witness, an event is always addressed, in such a way that the one to whom it happens is himself implicated in what happens to him.20
For that reason, innerworldly facts do not alter the world, for they do not reconfigure the possibilities that lie open (or closed) to me. The event as evential, however, initiates a "reconfiguration of my possibilities and of the world—a reconfiguration that occurs in a fact and by which the event opens a fissure in my own adventure."21 Events are personal, addressing themselves to the one to whom they happen—the advenant.
Along with the question of time (which we have not yet addressed directly), Romano's analysis of the event raises another enduring preoccupation of phenomenology. It reignites the problem of the world as a problem. What does the world signify, if it cannot be reduced, as Heidegger thought, to the horizon of time? In accord with phenomenological precedent, Romano notes that the world refers to a nexus of available possibilities. However, it is now necessary to evaluate the origin (and hence the ontological import) of these possibilities. The context of practical action through which we orient ourselves certainly enables us to make sense of what it means to be who we are. In that regard, the world is the ultimate context of meaning in which innerworldly facts appear; it provides the ultimate background against which innerworldly facts are causally explained.
And yet, there is still a second, more fundamental sense of world. Taken in this second sense (in the evential sense), the world itself can change. The world, too, no less than entities or states of affair within it, can be altered and fundamentally reconfigured. No longer is the world the horizon against which all change occurs; the world itself is also radically changed. In an event, the world undergoes a metamorphosis. For events do not occur within the world, altering just some of the possibilities available to us while leaving the background otherwise intact; instead, they are "world-establishing" for the advenant who undergoes them. Far from occurring within a pre-existing horizon of meaning that determines all subsequent possibility, events make for themselves their own horizon of meaning. They do not appear on the basis of a horizon of already foreseen possibilities; they make possible new possibility.
The consequences for how phenomenology understands such possibility are sweeping. For it strikes to the core of our understanding of causality, and hence intelligibility. Recall, for instance, that innerworldly facts are determined by their ordered assignment within a temporally successive causal-nexus. The order is one of intelligibility, and in at least two respects. In the first place, innerworldly facts unfold within a progression of temporal succession. They take place within ordinary time: from a future that becomes a present and eventually a past. As such, the future comes toward us as the past continually recedes behind us. Things occur within a constant succession that fixes them in a locatable position. Moreover, such temporality assigns innerworldly events their significance within an explanatory framework of cause and effect. A happening, which occurs after something else temporally preceding it, stands in causal rapport to what precedes it. Part of what it is to be an innerworldly fact, then, is to be the effect of the causes responsible for generating it, and to become in turn the cause of subsequent effects. Accordingly, the innerworldly fact is defined in its very possibility by a twofold conditioning: first, it is temporally conditioned insofar as it takes place within a stream of succession. Second, and just the same, it is conditioned explanatorily by its antecedent causes.
With the event as evential everything is very different. It evinces no aetiology: "Pure beginning from nothing, an event, in its an-archic bursting forth, is absolved from all antecedent causality."22 It is imperative to ward off a natural assumption. If the event is without a cause, is it random or unintelligible? No: everything is different with the event, not because everything is reduced to chaos or confusion, but because the magnitude of its intelligibility no longer falls under the explanatory context appropriate to beings and the causes ordering them. An event unfolds according to the order, not of cause and effect, but of meaning. Hence, as Romano holds, "The radical, 'in principle' and insurmountable difference that separates an evential analytic from any anthropology, psychology, and even psychoanalysis is tied to the fundamental difference between explaining by causes and understanding meaning."23 Or as he also says,
The event is never an objective fact that would, in addition, exert a causal efficacy on a subject distinct from it, but the way, in each case incomparable, in which the "encounter" between a fact and a "subject" takes place. Thus, the event causes nothing, and is not caused by anything: instead, it is of the order of meaning.24
How is the event the advent of meaning? Romano explains in a passage that bears quoting in full, since it recounts how, in the event's bursting forth, it springs
forth from and in itself, unforeseeable in its radical novelty, and retrospectively establishing a rupture with the entire past: it will never again be the same world, with its possibilities and impossibilities articulated among themselves, for by lighting up its own path and happening beyond any prior measure, an event reconfigures the world for the one to whom it happens.25
The event lies beyond the horizon of our anticipation. I can anticipate, and indeed I expressly plan on, the arrival of the train or my next pay check from work. But not so with the event, which as a matter of phenomenological essence takes us by surprise. Unlike Dasein, for whom strictly speaking there is no such thing as events, since everything that happens is already conditioned by its own capacities of anticipation, for the advenant who is defined by an openness to the event, events occur independently of what he anticipates or can control. Or better, because Dasein is the one that conditions the possible as possible through the horizon opened by its projection, there are for it no such thing as events for the resolute Dasein, since, as Heidegger says, anything that would be approached as an event (like existential dying in the mode of fear of demise) amounts to an inauthentic understanding. Thus, where possibilities are for Dasein always measured by a previous projection, for the advenant, possibilities are rooted in events. The self-autonomy of the subject qua Dasein (and hence the transcendental status of the world as projected by subjective time) is interrupted by what takes places in the figure of the event. Says Romano:
Irreducible to the attitudes of the advenant—that is to say, to the modalities of his understanding of what may present itself for him as fact within a given context—the event appears, consequently, as incommensurable to the modalities of the presence to the world that the advenant unfolds across time.26
The time of the event is not what we project, but what comes upon us as the crash of the ocean wave. The world is not the structure of possibilities we negotiate in light of our powers of comprehension, but rather the configuration of possibilities that present themselves, given what happens. The event articulates possibilities exceeding what I can give myself; it forces me to understand myself in virtue what they impose. Though it may be true that the idea of human existence as Dasein involves a Promethean interpretation of that existence is perhaps most (or only) characteristic of the middle Heidegger, that conception serves as a useful foil for Romano's own position. Perhaps it is possible to see Heidegger's later thought of the "fourfold" as approaching a view closer to Romano's own. But that question need not delay us here.
For although some are quick to contend that Romano's hermeneutic phenomenology owes a debt to the Heideggerian philosophy so great as to cancel anything truly novel about it, is this assessment fair?27 Does a phenomenology of the event, along with an understanding of ourselves as advenant, fail to free itself of the Heideggerian legacy it aims to transcend? Is it still shackled by fundamental ontology's metaphysics of time? Here, an explication of the phenomena of birth and death attest to evential hermeneutics' radical break with the Heideggerian philosophy.
Accordingly, it bears examining the question of birth in detail. The key marked difference between evential hermeneutics and fundamental ontology is that, although both articulate a view of selfhood as entwined with possibility, the origin and nature of that possibility differs. For the former, I respond to possibilities, but I am not their ultimate origin: "possibility is not first of all that which is powered by the advenant, but what the event, and it alone, makes-possible: literally, an eventuality."28 Possibility for Dasein is coordinated with the projections of ecstatic time; the world exhibits a holistic network of possibility configured owing to Dasein's power of projection. Fundamental ontology subordinates worldly possibility to a transcendental horizon originating in the subject. Romano will propose an alternative conception of possibility rooted in the notion of the event as what phenomenalizes itself without being subordinated to any subjective horizon. The world in fundamental ontology is a place wherein I exercise self-understanding in light of possibilities that originate in my capacity for sense-making; for evential hermeneutics, I exercise my capacity for self-understanding in response to possibilities that do not originate in that capacity. I do not project the world, but instead must respond to it. Far then from remaining a technical dispute between the two, Romano's reproach to Heidegger over possibility cuts to the heart of what it is to be the individuals we are.
Take, for example, the phenomenon par excellence of the event for evential hermeneutics, and one the existential analytic neglects: birth. As Romano's analysis reveals, if anything separates evential hermeneutics from the existential analytic and hence the Seinsfrage, it is their respective treatments of birth. Birth, indeed, is the signal event responsible for irrevocably disrupting the autarkic economy of Dasein. Romano explains it this way:
To be born is to be handed over to the nonground of a radical powerlessness with respect to this primary event, which as such cannot be taken over, which runs through an adventure as projection and, by coursing though it from end to end, opens it beyond its capacity, to the impossible as well: to events in general.29
The event of birth precedes even the "thrownness" (Geworfenheit) of care. Thrownness for Heidegger marks the facticity of our being. However, because birth precedes the ability to project possibilities, it escapes the care-structure's capacity to "take it up" as our own. Birth is prior to thrownness. For, the ability to comprehend the being of entities and indeed ourselves by pressing into the world already presupposes that birth has put us into possession of ourselves. More than just another feature of our factical inheritance, our birth, unlike our nationality, parents, sex, or physical appearance, precedes the capacity to appropriate it starting from the powers of care to interpret the meaning it will have for us. Birth, which is the most original event, forever escapes our comprehension because it is what has already brought us into a state of being able to comprehend anything else that befalls us. While it is possible to question the meaning that being American will have for me, or to question make I will make of the fact that I am a man, or that my eyes are blue, it is not similarly possible to question my birth. The very possibility of trying to make sense of anything—including birth itself—will always presuppose birth as its condition. I can never reach back behind birth to see it as anything but the unconditioned event it is. It therefore remains ungraspable, insomuch as there is no way of assigning it to any interpretive horizon that I (or someone else) wishes to give it. Hence, as Romano emphasizes, it follows that birth paradoxically is impersonal, since it happens to me, without my being able to initiate it and, even more to the point, it unfolds before I am even there to experience it—no one remembers one's own birth. Thus, birth blocks any rapprochement between evential hermeneutics and fundamental ontology. They fundamentally part ways with their respective understandings of our humanity, the one starting from birth and hence the domain of events, the other, by neglecting to even speak of birth, in turn subordinating everything to the horizon of Being and hence Dasein's transcendental powers of understanding. In taking our birth as its point of departure, the phenomenology of the event recognizes that, as an advenant, the first possibility is one preceding our subsequent self-understanding: "Birth is rather the (originally impersonal) event from which Being ad-venes; consequently, it is that which radically forbids a simple identification of Being itself an event."30 By freeing the event from the horizon of care, birth reworks the question of what it means to be who we are. As Romano himself will comment, as the primordial event through which we receive ourselves, and hence prior to our ever being in possession of ourselves as Dasein, birth opens us to a world that is not subject to our powers.
The fact and essence of selfhood is irreducible to the transcendental power to project ourselves into a horizon beholden to our own comprehension.31 The world, thus, comes upon us as its own origin. As Romano explains,
to understand an event is always to aim at it according to an interpretive projection that is no longer laid out from a horizon of prior possibilities but is instead governed, in reaching its meaning, by the possibilities but is instead governed, in reaching its meaning-horizon of prior possibilities that the event alone has pushed forth.32
He continues,
Therefore, birth is that which makes evident the phenomenological difference between selfhood, as a capacity to relate oneself first hand to events and respond to them, a capacity that alone is original, and egoity, as subjection to events in singular assignation.33
Because it is assigned to me prior to any selfhood, birth makes all the difference between the advenant and Dasein. Unlike the existential analytic which views our being as structured by the ecstases of temporality, Romano situates the self in a time that is the least subjective. The subject is no longer delimited by thrownness and projection, but by an immemorial past and an un-envisionable future. Summarizing the key to the evential analysis of birth, Romano says, "For the advenant, to be born signifies first of all and originally not to be his own origin."34
It is thus necessary to revise fundamental ontology's account of possibility. No longer are the world's possibilities subordinated to a system of ends reflecting my projections, for the event reconfigures that cohesion by first overturning them in a way that exceeds my power. There is every difference between what possibility signifies for an autonomous Dasein and what it does for the advenant. As Romano explains,
This is why making-possible by an event is more original than making-possible by a projection. The former alone opens a world through (re)configuring its possibilities. Thus, apart from understanding possibility as actualizability and as making-possible by a projection, a third sense of possibility is apparent, which we must now attempt to elucidate.35
He continues,
By thus reconfiguring my intrinsic possibilities (my world), every event—here, a decision—also opens to me ipso facto a possibility that I did not project and that, with respect to my actual or actualized possibilities (factual possibility), as well as my projected possibilities (projectual possibility), is strictly impossible.36
The event hence opens a new world, changing me. To undergo the world's metamorphosis is to face a disruption in what I had previously taken to be possible, and so, it is to have one's very identity placed at risk:
Thus, it is only on the occasion of an event—a bereavement, an encounter, an accident, an illness—in the shipwreck of the possibilities that gave shape to the world, that the evential meaning of the world can be revealed to me.37
The event modifies the totality of what is possible, and thereby transforms the one who is called to bear it. As Romano notes, it is a moment of self-transformation he calls "ex-per-ience": "The event 'is' nothing other than this ex-per-ience of a transformation of the world through which the world's very meaning appears overturned."38 "Experience," he expands,
in the primary sense, is what profoundly modifies us by putting us in play ourselves, so that after having passed through, endured, and traversed, we will no longer be the same: to undergo illness, bereavement, or joy; to love, journey, write a book, or paint: these are "experiences" in this primary phenomenological sense, very simple, but not trivial.39
The idea is that experience is not one of acquisition, but of a transformation that takes the form of a trial.40
This reinterpretation of possibility whereby possibilities are no longer projected by us, but instead come upon us at their own initiative, reinforces the need to reinterpret time. To free possibility from the horizon of Being, is for phenomenology to at last discover a way beyond the metaphysics of time. To determine in what that precisely consists, it will do to recount Heidegger's account of time, which, despite its express intentions to the contrary, subordinates itself to the same metaphysical account of time it aimed to overcome. For Romano, authentic temporality marks the culmination of the metaphysical tradition that has tried to comprehend time on the supposition that time itself is in some sense subjective: "Ecstatic temporality thus remains an attempt—probably the last—to conceive time within the orb of a radical ontology of the subject."41
As so often is the case in the history of phenomenology (Husserl's famous 1905 and 1907 lectures on inner time-consciousness are a prime example), here the problem of time proves to be the spark that throws new light on the things themselves. For as Romano's own analyses of the advenant indicate, time is irreducible to the horizon of a subject who projects it. But if time is reducible neither to internal-time consciousness nor the ek-stasis of care, from whence does it originate? At this point, it becomes evident that Romano's project of "de-subjectivizing" time forms a piece of a wider ambition to resuscitate a kind of realism that accentuates, rather than denies, the intersection between the intelligibility and sensibility. In short, at stake here is a "big hearted rationality" that brings the entwinement between conceptuality and embodiment into view.
If phenomenology has always stood in a complicated relation with transcendental philosophy, Romano will attempt to purge it of any lingering traces of that heritage, on the grounds that the transcendental perspective obscures our ability to see the inherent meaningfulness of the world apart from any performance of consciousness traditionally said to constitute it. The goal, as Romano explains, is to free phenomenology so as to bring into view the phenomena that any latent trace of a "Kantian framework" otherwise distorts. On Romano's telling, then, though Heidegger no doubt intended to free the subject from the horizons of metaphysics by reformulating the question of the subject in terms of the question of Being, that account misfires, for the existential analytic presupposes the transcendental subjectivizing conception of time it attempts to deconstruct. The question of Being remains consigned to the metaphysics of time. There is no proper thematization of the event. That which makes the event precisely what it is—its unconditioned appearing—is comprehended within the horizon of Being as temporality, a mode of time that, far from elevating the event to its status as an unconditioned phenomenon, in fact only accomplishes the opposite, relegating it to a horizon of temporality which, in conditioning it, only obscures it. The time of fundamental ontology occludes, rather than reveals, the event.
Consequently, it becomes necessary to reappraise the nature of time itself, a task that begins with freeing the question from any subjective horizon altogether. But what is the result of dispensing with the existential analytic's approach to time? One may even register an objection on Heidegger's behalf. For does not the ability to grasp the event imply that we are already first a being-in-the-world? Far from the event entailing a reconfiguration of time beyond Heidegger's account of authentic temporality, does not the very possibility of experiencing the event depend on that form of temporal experience? It would seem that the account of the event is still, in some respect, transcendental. Romano recognizes the objection, which he himself expresses directly: "Could it not be objected that an advenant must already be ontologically 'Being-in-the-world' in order to be able to grasp the world as opened by an event?"42 If Heidegger will always insist on setting the event on the side of inauthenticity, is this not because the ontological conceptuality underlying that decision sees being-in-the-world as fundamental? The attempt to recast the priority of being-in-the-world over the event only repeats the error Romano has already identified in Heidegger: by subordinating possibilities to those which conform to Dasein's powers of projection, such an account eliminates the distinctively radical newness of the event. The possibilities to which I stand open to as Dasein are cut to my own measure insofar as they answer to a system of ends that I project. There is never anything different, there is no event, because, on fundamental ontology's metaphysical presuppositions, everything is restricted to the transcendental horizon of temporality. It is worth quoting Romano's own direct appraisal of that tradition, so that we can trace for ourselves how he will attack its guiding assumptions.
For perhaps time is not something "subjective," regardless of how the "subject's subjectivity" is conceived: psychologically (Saint Augustine, Bergson), transcendentally (Kant, Husserl), or ontologically (Heidegger). Time does not belong to an advenant like a feature of his essence—because an advenant in fact has neither "Being" nor "essence," he "is" nothing other than his capacity to advene to himself from what happens [advient] to him, that is, his ad-venture, which is arrayed as ex-per-ience …. In short, by leading into a hermeneutic of temporality, which is its complement, evential hermeneutics reframes the temporal problematic: it is no longer a matter of knowing whether time belongs to the subject, but in what way the "subject" belongs to time.43
We see why the event is central to a reappraisal of phenomenology that sees it. Unlike the episodes of quotidian life that occur in accordance with the rhythm of Dasein's expectations, the event inaugurates something radically new and unforeseeable. "Indeed," says Romano, "the event presents itself from the outset with the characteristic of absolute newness: radically unforeseeable, because first of all fundamentally unexplainable starting from the possibilities that preexist it in the world."44 Such possibility bears directly, we have seen, on the broader question of time. Henceforth, it follows that the metaphysical tradition as epitomized most famously by Plato, Augustine, Kant, Bergson, and Husserl, has erred in interpreting time as something itself in time. Time, which is said to be something "inner-temporal," as Romano comments, is subjectivized. Inevitably, it leads to an aporia. "In reality," he observes, "the metaphysics of time not only conceives of time in light of that which is inner-temporal, it also conceives of inner-temporality in an inadequate way."45 To think of time as a process of change whose own dimensions of past, present, and future are themselves situated in time is incoherent. We end up having to invoke the notion of temporality as succession to explain what that succession consists in. The past, present, and future are situated in terms of temporal streaming: the future is coming toward us, the present has come upon and is slipping behind us, and the past accumulates behind us, propelling us forward. This progression of successive unfolding, however, makes reference to the notion of a flow whose own mode of streaming is inherently temporal. Hence, we have not explained the subjective passage of time, but merely presupposed it. The metaphysics of time, by subjectivizing time as a process (and hence something inner-temporal) does not explicate the phenomenon but only obscures it.
What then is the alternative? Romano suggests that we disconnect time from the horizon of inner-worldly change. The entailment is radical: "Is it not necessary to conceive of time as such hors-sujet, outside of the subject, so to speak?"46 So it seems. For if sense is to be made of the event's time, the advenant who responds to it, and the world as totality of its changing possibilities, time itself must be located outside the subject. Freed from the horizon of the subject, the one who finds himself in time no longer projects it, but instead is rendered fundamentally subject to it: "The advenant is originally temporalized, in such a way that he can never set himself up as the origin of time."47 For this reason, the time of the event is incomprehensible in terms of the ecstatic temporality of Dasein. And for Dasein, the "orb of its presence" to itself is always determined by the anticipation of its projection-toward-death; from within the transcendental perspective of its own finitude structured by the ecstasies of time in which something can appear to it as "past," "present," or "to come," the world comes into presence as a world for Dasein.48
This mode of being-in-the-world not only neglects the event of birth (as we have already seen), but also the evential status of death, the second phenomenon distinguishing an evential hermeneutics from a Heideggerian hermeneutics of facticity. For like birth, death requires evential hermeneutics to break with transcendental presuppositions of fundamental ontology. With Romano we must ask: what does death signify for the advenant? Consider one typical way we reckon with death. According to Heidegger, when death is faced as a future event it is approached inauthentically. In this way, death is reduced to a possibility in the mode of the "not-yet." Thus, from the Heideggerian perspective, it is no longer related to as a possibility. In this inauthentic attitude toward death as a future event, the one who reckons with it does so contradictorily, imagining oneself as somehow capable of surviving it. We try to imagine the world in our absence, and then imagine ourselves inhabiting that altered world as if we were still somehow there to experience the difference. As Romano explains, "to the extent that death is never realized or experienced as a fact," death constitutes the event par excellence, and yet, by relating to it in the fashion Heidegger describes, we elide the fact that we can never be there to experience it, since death, in depriving of us of a world, deprives us of ourselves.49 We cannot die and still be in the world to appreciate how the latter now reflects our absence. That, however, is what we attempt to do when struggling to comprehend what death signifies for us individually. Romano describes a flight of fancy of which we have all been guilty:
[the one who imagines his death] makes the hypothesis according to which his death, as a fact, would already have taken place, and he relates to the world following this cataclysm in the mode of a fiction in which he is a character. He relates in a contradictory manner to a world from which his presence has been cancelled as if he were still present there: he imagines his own burial in order to decide whether he would prefer it to be modest or imposing, intimate or solemn.50
For Heidegger, we know, death is not a future event that we can reckon with in the mode of imagination. For him, death remains fundamentally inaccessible to us, since, in the mode of being-in-the-world, it is the originally interpretable possibility obliging authentic Dasein to bring existence as a whole into the light of the unifying self-projection that defines each of us as the unique individual we are. Though it is not a phenomenon on a level with our other "capacities to be," it is a possibility precisely insofar as we wrestle with the impossibility of ever fully making sense of it. We must take it up as a possibility exactly to the degree that it must always be a mystery impossible to resolve.
For Romano the preceding Heideggerian analysis of death does not suffice. Facing up to death as an impossible possibility does not explain it as an event. Death is not, as Heidegger suggests, what allows us to bring our finite possibilities into cohesion, but what, like birth, originally thrusts us up against a power that radically exceeds our own powers of control. Death upends the autonomy of Dasein by revealing that the world (and its possibilities) are irreducible to our own system of projective ends. To come to understand ourselves as mortal is to see time is beyond our discretion to give or receive. That traumatic realization is made quite evident, not only when facing up to the inaccessibility of the event of our own deaths, but also when experiencing the deaths of others. Romano notes,
The death of a close friend, a love encounter, the sudden appearance of an incurable illness, the birth of a child, a brutal accident, the discovery of a vocation, are epoch-making events that suspend the meaning of my possibilities, render them suddenly insignificant; and, thereby, open a new chapter in my histories and signify, at the evential level, both the beginning and the end of a new era.51
If the event is that which radically changes us, so the death of others is too; when the beloved or friend dies, the world changes. Her own perspective on the world is destroyed and with it the possibilities that we held in common, as well as our shared ventures and even our bond. Her departure hollows out the world.
Birth and death reinforce the distinctive significance of the advenant as the one to whom something can happen, such that, in that happening, the very meaning of our existence is put into question. Events like the death of a loved one test us. To be who we are is to stand open to their arrival, to be capable of summoning a response that will come to define the meaning of who we are. "Thus," notes Romano,
unlike the subject who, in his immunity and radical autarchy, remains always the same through his alterations and cannot be affected by any event, there is an "advenant" only if events take place: the "advenant" is precisely the name for a description of the event constantly underway of my own advening to myself from the events that occur to me and through which I come to be.52
The advenant understands existence—his "adventure" through time—by negotiating the events that happen to him. Once again, the contrast with Dasein is worth highlighting:
Far from defining itself primordially by the "constancy" and "stability" of an inalienable Self, far from radically opposing itself to any change with respect to itself, selfhood is originally a potentiality to transform ourselves by contact with what happens to us.53
Evential hermeneutics is hermeneutical, then, precisely insofar as the task of being oneself involves interpreting what it is to be so in light of the events that put us at risk. "For an advenant," Romano says, "understanding is always marked by a kind of ex-centricity: understanding is always understanding something else—events—so that, through them, we can understand who we are."54 Selfhood therefore signifies "the capacity to hold open passibility's openness by holding oneself there; it signifies availability to events and the possibility of responding to them."55 In the exposure to events, we assume responsibility for responding to what has already reconfigured our possibilities and forced us to respond. Events, accordingly, precipitate a radical change in who we are, compelling us to confront phenomena that shatter our settled sense of who we are. Says Romano,
There is no objective fact first, which in a second stage upends my possibilities: an event is nothing other than this impersonal reconfiguration of my possibilities and of the world—a reconfiguration that occurs in a fact and by which the event opens a fissure in my own adventure.56
We are what we become owing to the decisions we make in the face of what assails us, in the trials that call us to respond, even if, or precisely because, they do not originate with us. I do not give myself my possibilities from an evential sense; I nevertheless must face them, if only for the sole fact that being the one I am means that I must—I am always already open to the event as something that can come upon me. That capacity can be embraced or suppressed, welcomed or despised, enlarged or constricted, but it can never be entirely avoided. Because events happen independently of the plan we will, we inevitably are faced with the task of deciding how we will respond to them when they do happen. What, then, are we to say regarding the original objection to evential hermeneutics, one according to which the capacity to stand open to events already presupposes being-in-the-world? We now have a firmer answer. "Such possibilities," Romano summarizes, "cannot simply appear to an advenant, in excess of any 'potentiality-for-Being'—and thereby address a meaning to him—unless he understands them," but this ability to understand them, though a necessary condition, is not also a sufficient one.57 To be an advenant, we see, is not to appropriate possibilities whose significance resides in a horizon projected by my own ends, for events befall us from above and beyond that horizon, opening up a horizon all their own.
The ability to interpret the excess of the event is a mark of self. That is what it is to be an advenant:
The advenant is the title for man apprehended outside the subject, in the light of his event-advent to, and as himself starting from, what happens [advient] to him. Defined in this manner, the advenant is unthinkable independently of the changes of the world in their largest acceptation: it is to them that, in a first moment, we must return.58
Selfhood itself is hermeneutic, for what it is to be the individual depends on our decisions, which, for their own part involve an element of interpretation of the situation that we respond to, insofar as we must respond to what befalls us: "An advenant's adventure consists wholly in understanding what happens to him—his adventure is itself hermeneutic."59 If the advenant's mode of self-understanding is hermeneutic, yet fundamentally different from that of Dasein, then what, according to Romano, does it comprise?
At the very least, it involves a novel conception of the world. The world as the totality of hierarchized possibilities signifies a structure that itself is always subject to radical upheaval. The event always strikes, says Romano, the world as a whole. With the event, all is changed: "what is modified is the very countenance of the world, that which the world, so to speak, turns toward me when I consider it in its possibilities."60 The event alters the face of the world, which, as "the structural, hierarchical, and signifying totality that integrates" the possibilities open before us, is always susceptible to a transformation that we can neither initiate nor predict.61
But what, it is only natural to ask, is the ultimate origin of the world's meaning? Romano confesses that this question is perhaps unanswerable: "Here we reach the extreme limits of my project, and probably the limits—strictly defined—of every hermeneutical phenomenology."62 If we have reached the limits of hermeneutic phenomenology, it bears asking: where, then, have we arrived? How does phenomenology now stand in comparison to where it stood before with Husserl and Heidegger or Sartre and Merleau-Ponty? En route to drawing our discussion of Romano's evential hermeneutics to a close, it is worth addressing the important work he has contributed to assessing the presuppositions of classical phenomenology.
At last, here it becomes necessary to assess his work's broader phenomenological ambitions. What, we need ask, is his account of phenomenology's relation to the history of philosophy? It is necessary to turn to Romano's Au Coeur de la raison, a work published a decade after his diptych on the event. In it, he countenances the question of phenomenology's very possibility in the face of both internal and external objections. Let us accordingly dwell, first, as is only natural, on Husserl. Husserlian phenomenology is a "rigorous science" that seeks the discovery of essential laws governing the experiential world as it is constituted by transcendental subjectivity. Such an inquiry trafficks, therefore, neither in empirical generalizations nor logical truths. Rejecting the traditional empiricist idea that all truths are either logical truths or else empirical generalizations (what Hume divided as "ideas of reason" and "matters of fact"), for Husserl, there is an additional domain of necessity governing the structure of the perceptual world itself. Following what Kant named the synthetic a priori, Husserl maintained that phenomenology's proper domain is a realm of necessity within the structure of the world itself—a realm of sensibility Romano will call, following Husserl's own expression, the "material a priori." We know that for Husserl such inquiry was designed to be a science without presuppositions. Crucial to his eidetic method is that it neutralize anything that left unchecked would occlude a pure apprehension of the things themselves—the eidos. In this respect, transcendental phenomenology's goal is simple: to discover a priori essences through the royal road of eidetic variation. Though generally sympathetic to Husserl's aim, Romano nevertheless proposes some serious revisions.
In doing so, nothing short of a formulation of a nouvelle image de la raison is at stake. Hermeneutic phenomenology for Romano, like the Husserl of the Crisis, is said to be a restoration of reason—broadening and deepening the scope of intelligibility, it expands the horizons of reason beyond the narrow limits imposed by the mathematical sciences and endorsed by positivism and naturalism. Romano's hermeneutic phenomenology, then, will follow Husserl in agreeing that such an inquiry will be a descriptive discipline. Phenomenology, he notes, is still interested in discovering the necessary truths (truths of essence, albeit not Platonic universals) of experience. And just like Husserl, Romano will insist that the phenomenological topic de jure is the lifeworld. Here, however, disagreement arises concerning the status of the lifeworld itself and, more specifically, our relation to it. In Romano's estimation Husserl erred, for transcendental phenomenology never escaped from the naturalistic presuppositions it rightly challenged. Phenomenology for Husserl, we have seen, is supposed to operate without presuppositions. Yet this is impossible, says Romano. The idea that it can be without presupposition is itself a historically inherited prejudice, one traceable to a residual strand of Cartesian theoreticism characteristic of an Enlightenment reason. The very conviction that it is possible to proceed without presupposition, it turns out, is itself a presupposition worthy of challenge. For, to the extent that we are inescapably situated within the given social and historical context we are, phenomenological inquiry, no less than any other kind of inquiry, must take as its point of departure the hermeneutic situation within which it finds itself. Phenomenological problems themselves are formulated within a wider historical and philosophical context that, while never entirely relativizing them, determines how we initially come to them. Husserl's unwillingness to concede this was, in a way, the specter that recurrently haunted his transcendental phenomenology. The consequences are considerable, and they are worth noting in turn.
First consequence: Husserlian phenomenology, Romano contends, remains beholden to the traditional distinction between sensibility and intelligibility. As a result, it revives the false dichotomy between empiricism and rationalism. Though Husserl identified many of their most grievous errors, he never entirely freed himself from the presuppositions guiding empiricism and Kantianism. Hence, following the similar attempt of Merleau-Ponty, Romano will say it is necessary to free phenomenology from any latent intellectualism, on the one hand, and brute empiricism, on the other. Romano's answer as to how that should be done forms a part of his wider attempt to rehabilitate a phenomenologically robust image of reason.
Phenomenology remains attentive to the phenomenal world, but, unlike with Husserl for whom Erlebnis is rooted in hyle (a cousin of the empiricist tradition's notion of sense data), for Romano, the pre-linguistic structures of meaning immanent to the "logos of the world" are no longer reduced to brute sense data nor assimilated to the empire of the conceptual. As he explains, it is necessary to abandon the notion of Husserl's hyle—in the last analysis, against Husserl, it is necessary to acknowledge that experience is not reducible to a form of sensibility animated by the sense-bestowing acts of intentional consciousness. The rejection of the dichotomy between empiricism and Kantianism entails more.
A second consequence follows from abandoning the traditional conception of experience: phenomenology is no longer Cartesian nor transcendental. Against Husserl, Romano dispenses with the residual Cartesian intellectualism underpinning the notion of transcendental constitution. The lifeworld is not constituted by transcendental consciousness. It is already inherently meaningful, rather than merely insofar as consciousness was said to confer that meaning in an act of Sinngebung. The milieu of pre-linguistic and pre-predicative meaning is immanent to the world itself.
A third consequence follows in turn. Once again Romano will partially agree with Husserl that all meaning (Sinn) is not linguistic. Like transcendental phenomenology, Romano's hermeneutic phenomenology (which in this respect resists the linguistic excesses of Gadamer or Ricœur) holds that grammatical philosophy is wrongheaded. There is a regime of pre-linguistic meaning independent of the empire of the linguistic sign and its conventions of use. Meaning, consequently, is not reducible to the logique du sensible, but is rather a logique sensible. Paralleling Husserl's own ambitions, Romano locates the reservoir of meaning in a primordial perceptual encounter with the world, a pre-linguistic world of perceived meaning that already bears within itself an immanent order and pre-conceptual intelligibility which, as he says, we access through a practically and embodied "pre-discursive intelligence incorporated in our initial openness to the world."63 In saying so, phenomenology is purged of any lingering transcendentalism.
This in turn highlights the phenomenological revaluation of reason. For Romano, phenomenology liberates meaning from the shackles of logical empiricism, neo-Kantianism, and linguistic philosophy. It retrieves a "big-hearted reason," an image of reason that recognizes the lifeworld's meaning accessible to a practically embodied subject. By redirecting our attention to the lifeworld (yet this time completely freed from any latent intellectualism of Kantianism or the positivism of logical empiricism), hermeneutic phenomenology carries out what Romano himself calls an "anti-Copernican" revolution. Unlike in the Kantian framework, where understanding and sensibility are separated, here for phenomenology, experience is no longer reducible to the constitution of a transcendental subject, nor the logical rules of conventional grammar, nor relativistic conceptual schemes. Meaning is something always already lying at the very heart of the sensible world.
Consequently, phenomenology as hermeneutics is an interpretative enterprise entailing a confrontation with events. Opening unto the heart of reason (to the logos of the sensible), it investigates the event of meaning. Thus, if, as Romano comments, the event accomplishes the metamorphosis of the world in which the very meaning of the world is in play, then in an essential way, the possibility of phenomenology itself originates in the distinctively human sensitivity to events. To do phenomenology is (among other things) to embrace the very event of meaning—to face up to our ability to make sense of that very capacity. For the advenant, phenomenology emerges as one of its most potentially fecund possibilities. Why does it prove rewarding? We are now entitled to answer. In interpreting existence by way of phenomenological reflection on that very existence, we are indirectly facing up to the event of birth. Phenomenological reflection on what it means to stand open to the lifeworld is, in fact, to wrestle with the first of all events that makes it (and everything else we do) possible: our birth. In being born, we are put into possession of ourselves from elsewhere. It is the first of all gifts, and inexhaustibly rich. As the years go by, it always gives us more to consider, for the event of our birth is precisely what has brought us into the condition of being responsible for having decided to do what we theretofore have with the time given us. The awesome fact that I am here without being the origin of myself acts as a permanent reminder, however subtle, that we cannot shirk the question of what it means to be here at all. Preceded by our birth, destined to our death, the gift of existence addresses itself to our underlying responsibility, to our irremediable capacity to respond to the fact that we stand open to the events that will mark our lives as ours in virtue of how we decide to meet them.
Where does this leave phenomenology and so us too? Not only must we decide why we are here (attempting to suppress the question is already to acknowledge it); we must decide what we will become. Perhaps, then, the ultimate lesson of Romano's herméneutique événementiale lies in this: the task of deciphering who we are exerts its demand, not as a matter of mere curiosity or predilection, but destiny.
Notes
1 Romano, Event and World, 2.
2 Marion's phenomenology of givenness characterizes the event as a saturated phenomenon that acts as a counter-instance to the traditional metaphysical conception of experience. On that traditional view, everything is subordinated to a principle of sufficient reason that sees experience in terms of beings and their causes and reasons. A recognition of the event breaks with the metaphysical principle of sufficient reason and so, as Romano will conclude with Marion, it entails a reappraisal of reason itself. It confronts us with a mode of phenomenality exceeding what can adequately be explained by any set of causes or reasons. For a commendable exploration of how Marion's and Romano's respective accounts of the event motive the phenomenological critique of metaphysics and point toward a new image of reason, see Shane Mackinley's "Phenomenality in the Middle: Marion, Romano and the Hermeneutics of the Event," in I. Leask and E. Cassidy (eds.), Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2005), 167–81. If Romano's characterization of the advenant is sometimes incorrectly seen as a straightforward continuation of Heidegger's Dasein, it is equally true that Romano's own analysis of the event is sometimes misleadingly seen simply as a development of Marion's conception of the saturated phenomenon. Against this presentation of things that would only see Romano's notion of the event as derivative of Marion's, it might be more accurate to say that there are two different (but sometimes parallel) pathways.
3
4 Ibid., 143.
5 Ibid., 65.
6 Ibid., 66.
7 Ibid., 58.
8 It is worth noting that the original's way of expressing things—"l'événement est avant toute chose"—not only means, "before anything else" as Shane Mackinlay's English translation renders it, but also "before any thing." Here, it is the second meaning that takes priority, for the event is not a thing or a being. Hence, it defies the framework of ordinary ontology (like Aristotle's) and fundamental ontology (as with Heidegger). This nuance, not captured in the English, is worth keeping in mind.
9 Romano, Event and World, 6.
10 Ibid., 7.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 9.
13 Ibid., 27.
14 Ibid., 12.
15 Ibid.
16 Phenomenology draws a distinction (from Husserl to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty) between Umwelt and Welt—"environment" and "world," respectively. While humans dwell in a world, animals only occupy an environment. What is the difference? As Romano explains, even the most mundane happenings of everyday human life are underscored by a set of ontological stakes that are absent in animal life. When confronted with even the apparently most banal of situations, there is an undercurrent of gravity that gives that situation its distinctly human inflection. For, in deciding how to spend my time, I am ipso facto working out not just how I want to live, but, at the same, the kind of existence I take to be best to live. He provides a very nice illustration of this by appealing to the familiar experience of being faced with the decision of whether to indulge in a carefree relaxing activity or to instead get back to a work commitment. This dilemma is revealing, for it highlights the fact that the actions we take are not simply taken on the basis of causes or even reasons, but of motives. These motivations address us in the form of solicitations we can either indulge or resist. Romano's nice example involves the lure of taking a vacation swim: "The sea appears to me to favor a swim, but only if I allow myself to do it, and only if the fact of going for a dive and then lazing in the sun matches the kind of existence that seems for me at that moment—that is, if it matches my deep aspirations and the idea I have of myself and of my Being" (At the Heart of Reason, 398–99). When the ocean beckons to me for a swim, I find myself in a situation that transcends the milieu of a mere environment. How I face the situation exemplifies my self-understanding of what I take most to matter and therefore who I aspire to be. What kind of existence is the right one to lead? How should I use my time? Am I a workaholic or not? As Romano's example of the ocean swim underscores, even choices as apparently innocuous as whether I should take a break on vacation are deeply human, for what we do in response to them determines what kind of existence we take to be the right one.
17 Romano, Event and World, 15.
18 Ibid., 20.
19 Ibid., 30.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 31.
22 Ibid., 41.
23 Ibid., 60.
24 Romano, Event and Time, 152.
25 Romano, Event and World, 42.
26 Romano, Event and Time, 124.
27 Though a widespread misimpression, not everyone has made the mistake of seeing evential hermeneutics as a rehash of the existential analytic. Jean Greisch, for one, has summarized the fundamental opposition, noting in an essay, "Au couer de la raison: le cardioscope phénoménologico-hermeneutique de Claude Romano" that, in regard to Romano's evential hermeneutics, "on pourrait risquer un titre para-levinassien: 'Autrement qu'être et temps, ou au-delà de l'Ereignis.'" In Agenda de la pensée contemporaine: revue trimestrielle, (20) printemps, 2011, 80.
28 Romano, Event and Time, 179.
29 Romano, Event and World, 73.
30 Ibid., 19.
31 There is a potential terminological issue that could cause unnecessary confusion. Contrary to standard usage, by "selfhood" Romano does not mean the advenant as such—or what many would simply call the self. Instead, it designates the capacity of the advenant to respond to events, one that can sometimes be entirely disabled, as in the case of what Romano calls, as we saw earlier, "traumatism."
32 Romano, Event and World, 64.
33 Ibid., 76.
34 Romano, Event and Time, 213.
35 Romano, Event and World, 84.
36 Ibid., 89.
37 Ibid., 69.
38 Romano, Event and Time, 127.
39 Romano, Event and World, 146.
40 Ibid., 144.
41 Romano, Event and Time, 107.
42 Romano, Event and World, 72.
43 Ibid., 211.
44 Romano, Event and Time, 124.
45 Ibid., viii.
46 Ibid., 6.
47 Ibid., 197.
48 Ibid., 139.
49 According to Heidegger's own analysis, there is a distinction between death as understood in its ontological-existential import (what he calls "dying"), and death taken in its everyday sense as a future event still to come (what he calls "demise"). For Heidegger, fear in the face of demise is a suppressed (and hence derived) mode of anxiety in the face of existential dying. If that is right, it accordingly would follow that authenticity requires, not an overcoming of the fear of demise, but a facing up to our anxiety over ontological death. That, of course, is precisely the proposal that Division II of Being and Time makes. Yet, even if one accepts the distinction between existential death and demise (as Romano arguably does) it is still possible to deny that the fear of demise is truly a derivative phenomenon, as Heidegger suggests. Is it really possible to understand death without retaining some idea of it as a future event? Romano asks a series of questions in Il y a that challenges the Heideggerian idea that the fear of demise can be reduced to anxiety over existential "dying." He observes, "Does Heidegger not strip death of its sting by defining it solely as a way to be (Weise zu sein) in which Dasein is engaged and by identifying it ontologically with anxiety? Could anxiety break out if death did always also announce itself to me as a future event? Can 'dying' in the existential sense be wholly dissociated from the event of demise in such a way that not only the two phenomena stand in opposition, but the latter is derived from the former? Does the phrase 'Dasein can demise only as long as it is dying' truly indicate a relation of foundation, and does it not inevitably call for its converse? Is it not because I have access to the demise of others—and through theirs, to my own—that I can also be anxious, in my Being, for that Being itself?" (Larmore, L'événement et la raison, 37–38). Romano rightly asks these key questions. However, is there not a further presupposition at work in the Heideggerian account of death? Does death, as it assumes, necessarily entail the impossibility of our experiencing it? By what phenomenological right can we say that, in death, we cannot experience our own deaths? How do we know that death entails the impossibility of experience? To put it another way: far from death eliminating the possibility that I might experience anything, does not the fact of my looming demise actually raise for me the question of whether or not I will? Though death will deprive me of the world, will it deprive me of myself? In short, if neither anxiety over "dying" nor fear of demise is foundational in regard to the other, is it not precisely because the question of my immortality is foundational to both?
50 Romano, Event and Time, 219.
51 Ibid., 230.
52 Ibid., 151.
53 Romano, Event and World, 129.
54 Ibid., 137.
55 Ibid., 129.
56 Ibid., 31.
57 Ibid., 79.
58 Ibid., 109.
59 Ibid., 60–61.
60 Romano, Event and Time, 111.
61 Ibid., 236.
62 The relevant notion here of the world as the "space of meaning" should not be confused with Wilfrid Sellars's "space of reasons." In contrast to Sellars's logicism, here, in the phenomenological context, meaning (Sinn) does not indicate solely or primarily a web of conventionally governed linguistic significations (Bedeutung) mediating access to reality, but instead, as just mentioned, the integrated, coherent, and systematic hierarchy of ontological possibilities which determines the world as world. The world, Romano thus says, "is clearly not a mere addition of entities, of facts, or of states of affairs ('ontic' concept of the world); it is an organized and structured totality of possibilities relative to the capabilities of several kinds, in light of which all that can present itself to Dasein takes on a meaning—possibilities that are subordinated to this signal capability of Dasein to choose itself and its Being" (At the Heart of Reason, 96–97). At the conclusion of the present study, we shall see how Romano defends phenomenology against certain objections which, when answered, will require radicalizing the notion of the holism of experience, thereby eliminating whatever transcendental residue remained of Husserl's or Heidegger's own phenomenological conceptions of the world. Here for now, we can simply reiterate that, by "space of meaning," we mean what that signifies for phenomenology, and not what it has come to mean in association with neo-Kantianism or linguistic philosophy.
63 Romano, At the Heart of Reason, 527. One of the most fascinating (and impressive) achievements of At the Heart of Reason is its unparalleled phenomenological appraisal of analytic philosophy. In an informative review of that work, Jean Greisch captures the stark opposition between phenomenology and analytic philosophy Romano's analyses reveal, noting, "In reference to a recurring image under the pen of Romano, I would say that one can be wet by Oxfordian mists, but not swim, as one bathes in the warm and welcoming waters of the Mediterranean." In Agenda de la pensée contemporaine, 88. In this work's concluding chapter, we will revisit Romano's defense of phenomenology against objections arising against it from analytic philosophy. For now, it suffices to note that, contrary to linguistic philosophy, Romano maintains that the immanent structures of experience are not a linguistic mirage, but in fact essential and inherent structures of the world in itself.
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