Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology, RobertSokolowski, Catholic University of America Press, 2022 (ISBN 978‐0‐8132‐3518‐9), xiv + 326 pp., pb $34.95

Sokolowski's Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology makes a helpful contribution to philosophical discussions on a variety of topics. Originally published in 1992 by the University of Notre Dame Press, the book had gone out of print, leading to its 2022 reprinting with Catholic University Press of America, as Sokolowski wished to see the book still in print. The text remains as it was in 1992, with Sokolowski making no editorial comments or changes, and without a new preface. (It was via email correspondence with an editor at CUA Press that I learned about Sokolowski's desire to reprint this text.) For all intents and purposes, then, Sokolowski has sought to keep in print a thirty-year-old book as it first appeared, from which we must deduce that he wants us to read it as is and that it still has value in our contemporary world in the form that it was published in the early 1990s. Luckily, the essays gathered here—which were written by Sokolowski over a period of 12 years (1977–1989)—still prove relevant and informative today. The essays are attempts of applied phenomenology, in distinction to the more formal and transcendental phenomenology he had written on up to this point, and each essay approaches as its topic a different form of appearance. Behind each form, and what Sokolowski strives to access and reveal in each essay, is being—an endeavor that he says is benefitted by approaching being in the ‘diffracted’ manner of different forms of appearance and not head-on (p. xiv). The book gathers the essays into six sections of pairs or triplets of a similar theme. These themes are, respectively, (1) representation in image and speech, (2) ways in which we respond to issues arising in thought, (3) the theme of measurement and the relation of whole and part, (4) sense and reference, (5) composition of sentences and images, and (6) morals and ethics. Two of the main themes that are consistently discussed by Sokolowski are the relationality and unity of opposite terms and the performativity in the world of these different acts. Looking first at relationality, Sokolowski is emphatic that ‘we must overcome the persistent myth of concepts separated from things’ (p. 29), and he makes this clear in his essays. One of the main activities in philosophy is defining and distinguishing. In his essay ‘Making Distinctions’, he writes that in making distinctions, a person makes two terms excludable; however, in order to do so, one must first bring these two terms together. But he argues that the identification (or, fusion into one) of the two terms does not precede their distinction into two terms. ‘The possibility of their being distinguished, and the denial of this possibility, is part of holding them as one’ (p. 65). This correlation means, then, that neither comes before the other, but both come together. The essay ‘Explaining’, which delves into the difference between the simple (naming) and the complex (articulating) in language, makes the same point. We generally, perhaps, think that the philosopher must break down articulations to get to the simple root word or idea, which would be seen as the truth of the matter. Rather, the philosopher's task, Sokolowski argues, is to ‘think both names and articulations in their reciprocities; the philosophical task is to think them in their distinctions from one another, because they are only in these distinctions’ (p. 94). In ‘Timing’ Sokolowski looks at clocks, calendars, and other ways that we measure time. With clocks, he points out that the two motions of clocking (e.g., a stopwatch) and clocked (e.g., a sprinter) always occur together, and we tend to be oblivious to this fact until the relation is disturbed (e.g., our stopwatch breaks). While there are more examples I could cite, the ones from these three essays suffice to show how Sokolowski demonstrates that names, terms, and concepts are not singular and divisible, but always present themselves and occur in relation, that they are in unity, and so we can only ever fully understand them as they present themselves in relation. Turning now to performativity, I will focus on the final section of essays that deal with ethics. The overall theme of these three essays is that our theories and categories about morality are based upon our acts, not the other way around, as tends to be the case. In his essay ‘Moral Thinking’, Sokolowski inquires into the question of what makes acts morally good or bad, and even what makes something moral at all. He first discusses the two main forms of moral theory: (1) the category of judgment, by which we have come to develop deontological and axiological theories, subsumes actions under rules, categories, values, and then judges them accordingly (p. 246); and (2) the category of relationality, by which we have created teleological, utilitarian, and consequentialist theories, subsumes actions, and then judges them, according to how they relate to other actions, conditions, or states of being (p. 247). In both of these theories, the category, and so thinking, is primary and takes precedence. It is the moral form and type of thinking that is judged to then make the subsequent act a moral act. Sokolowski points out the problems of these two main theories, namely, that we ‘cannot show where the moral categories, rules, and values come from’, and so we can be rational within but not about them (pp. 247–48), and that we cannot explain, relationally, ‘the moral goodness or badness of the goals or the outcomes of the actions’ (p. 248). He argues that the two overarching forms ‘are not basic enough to explain what moral action is’ (p. 248). What is needed to truly understand ethics and morality, according to Sokolowski, is an action identified in a certain way. He writes, ‘to be moral agents we must initiate a performance, but we must also understand and identify the performance in a certain way’ (p. 250). The identificational form he suggests occurs at a deeper and more primary level than the two forms described above and is more akin to a ‘moral ontology’ (p. 250). Moral transactions must be enacted or performed; according to Sokolowski, they cannot be just mental intentions or thoughts. In a later chapter, ‘What is Moral Action?’, he discusses Adam Smith as exemplary of the view that morality is the thought or intention of the will, whether or not the action based on that thought is carried out. Sokolowski argues to the contrary that the ‘substance of the moral action is in the performance itself’ (p. 267). It is therefore an embodied act in the world which creates morality. But the form (thought) is not lost in the expression: ‘It is the thoughtful form that makes the performance moral, but of course the form needs the performance as its embodiment and expression’ (p. 267). It is the performance that leads us back to an understanding of the requisite form, as he writes in the final essay in this section, ‘Knowing Natural Law’; our theoretical understanding of human nature and morality is not achieved or understood before action, but is instead derived from human action, from performative, embodied actions in the world (p. 283). What ultimately distinguishes Sokolowski's view from the other two main theories of morality initially described is the basis of a moral ontology, a form that is a type of originary or Ur-thinking. Further, this ontology is part of the warp and woof of what makes us human beings, and so we cannot not be moral: ‘We exist morally not by virtue of a decision, but by virtue of the fact that we share a world with other agents’ (p. 256). Looking at the phenomenological appeal of this book, it is clear that this is a book of phenomenology in action, rather than transcendental phenomenology, or another commentary on Husserl or Heidegger. In his introduction, Sokolowski states that he hopes that these essays can be more than just writing about different forms of appearing, but can be manifestations in themselves of being. I think that an attuned reading does indeed reveal to us, via these different forms of appearing, something of the way things are. But I think that this book has an overall philosophical appeal. In both how he writes and the subjects that he writes about (morality, language, thought, sense, pictures, images, time, measurement, etc.), Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions is accessible and relevant to philosophers who find themselves drawn to either more Continental or more Analytic ways of philosophizing, and so should be a book with a wide appeal.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.