Henry Corbin in the 1930s: Questions
and Perspectives
Maria Soster
In this brief paper, whose aim is to describe a piece of research
in its early stages, I would like to submit to your attention one of the themes
that appears in Corbin the “philosopher” starting in the 1930s. The theme that
I find characteristic of his thought is that of existence and history, or
better, existence and its history, in other words, historical existence. My
present purpose is to attempt to show where this theme of existence and its
history is visible in the writings of Corbin of the 1930s, where we find the premises
of his attitude to humanity’s mission regarding the phenomenon of the revealed
Holy Book.
A short text entitled “Annexe II: Nature des travaux à
poursuivre en Allemagne” [Annex II: Nature of the works to pursue in
Thus, the problem of existence and that of its
historicity become the question of the concept of man for the philosophy of
existence. Man is called into question, and with him, his history, because, as
we shall see in the texts, man is not in history. On the contrary, history as
potentiality-of-being is in man and simultaneously determines his past, present
and future. (This similarly concerns the tradition that appears in Corbin’s
reading of Suhrawardī. There, in discussing ‘existential time’, Corbin
points out that “A philosopher can only be his own time, and in that
alone consists his true ‘historicity’”, and furthermore that “there is a living
tradition, that is, a transmission into acts, only by constantly
renewed acts of decision”) (1).
We will therefore group together the articles published
by Corbin during the 1930s and attempt to appreciate how he developed this
concept of existence in connection with its time.
“Le Semeur” was the mouthpiece publication of the Fédération
française des associations chrétiennes d’étudiants (F.F.A.C.E.), the prime
training ground for French Protestant intellectuals. In this journal, Henry
Corbin published in November 1931 “La Fédération allemande à Caub” [The German
federation at Caub] (2), in March 1932 “A propos de Luther” [Concerning Luther]
(3), and in December 1932 “Témoignage à Kierkegaard” [Testimony to Kierkegaard]
(4). The topic of the first article is the significance hic et nunc [here
and now] of Christian existence. Indeed, only the quest for Christ can qualify
existence ‘existentially’. The search for Christ and for his Word becomes one
of the modes of being of existence, an ‘existential’ (existential, in
1937, in his lecture at the Congrès Descartes). In “Vocabulaire” in Hic et
Nunc (we will later see the significance of this periodical), the Barthian group
that included Corbin pointed out that ‘existential’ is a word borrowed by
Kierkegaard (5): “Man exists at the moment when truth, calling him into
question, challenging him, he accepts this challenge, answers this question,
and acts his truth” (6). At the very moment when God speaks his Word to
him, man receives his existence. This existence then closely connects with the
time of the event of the Word addressed to him, a time that transforms into a
time of rebirth for man himself. This time determines the crisis of
historicism, because this eschatological temporality, this hierohistory,
uproots man from the time of History and repositions him in the time of Geschichte,
of history as an event, in which there are simultaneously the event of time and
the event of existence, and not one without the other.
This concerns the encounter with the Word, the meeting of
‘I’ entering into discourse and ‘Thou’, which is the Other asking for
obedience. This possibility of finding Christ again and, with him, the truth of
existence and of the relationships comprising it (the relationship with ‘Thou’,
who is the Other and who breaks into existence, and the relationship with ‘Thou’,
who is a neighbor) is also present in the article on Luther. However, here we
find the introduction of a concept that belongs to Heidegger’s existential
analysis. In the consciousness of being-toward-death which qualifies the liberated
existence of Man [they, people] in an authentic manner, Luther,
writes Corbin, finds once again the paradoxical condition of Christian
existence, condemned to co-exist with its limitations in sin and, at the same
time, called beyond itself by the Word, which it cannot say or affirm without denying.
Corbin continues in the article on Kierkegaard: Christian
heroism resides in an individual’s courage to commit to conquering anew the ‘I’
proper. In this way, the individual must dare to meet the personal God face-to-face
in order to be himself. God posits his relationship with man through the Word. Man
must take on this challenge, surrender to God and cast aside everything
unnecessary, including all the means that natural reason puts at his disposal
(and the philosophy issued from it) to understand God and let God enter into
him. This event is the death of the natural ‘I’, and at the same time, it
represents the new birth of the ‘I’ in Christ. It concerns the movement of
faith. The ‘I’ is free in its complete submission to the Word, to God and to
his time. In addition, here Corbin introduces the theme of historical existence
(7). Kierkegaard “is an example of the abyss that separates Catholicism and the
Reformation” (8). The Reformation “remains the unique act which posits each human
being as real and alone before God” (9). Man is brought back face-to-face to
the time of the Word and returns to his original historicity. Furthermore, Catholicism
has failed to recognize this dimension. Unable to conceive of man’s solitude
before God, which alone makes possible the event of the Word, it has remained
imprisoned in Tradition and historicism, like philosophy, victim of the rationality
that conceives of the ‘I’ as the center of the world and conceals the will to
dominate things and beings (10).
More precisely, in the article “Philosophes” [Philosophers]
published in Hic et Nunc in November 1932, the question becomes “What
does Dasein mean?” and an interrogation that takes into consideration man in
his concrete and immediate situation, his existence hic et nunc. Moreover,
hic et nunc existence means a decision, because, faced with the
solipsism of the ‘I’, the real man, the Dasein, is always in a situation of
inquiry (11). He faces a question - faith or no faith - and he must answer. Upon
his response depends the actualization (the putting into acts) of his existence.
Upon this decision depends the mode of existence of Dasein, and this mode of
existence can only be dialectic, in other words, in dialogue. “The ‘I’ exists only
in relationship with the ‘Thou’, and in this dialogue is the dialectic. ‘I’ can
become real (12) only through ‘Thou’; ‘Thou’ art my world by which ‘I’ exist,
but no abstract authority could ever lead me to this actual meeting, hic et
nunc” (13). Only in this situation, dialectic and paradoxical, can
existence become real.
To decide therefore means to become responsible, to make
a commitment, and “it is in this responsibility that there is movement in existence
and it is through it (14) that it [existence] becomes ‘history’, because there
is history which dominates death only posited inside existence” (15). There is
history, because there is an answer to ‘Thou’, because there is God who
questions man and man who “responsibly” responds. A decision is required; a response
to the call is necessary. However, Corbin’s second article published in 1933 in
Hic et Nunc (16), “Quand nous nous réveillerons d’entre les morts” [When
we shall awake from among the dead], speaks of the time of this call as a Futurum
Aeternum. This is a “Future which is possible for God, but is not in our
possession, and whose powerful impetus upsets everything that we could have
wanted or known, or could want or know” (17). God is the All-Other who
communicates with man, an absurd and impossible reality for philosophy, and an
outrage for reason.
Let us return for a moment to Hic et Nunc. This
was a magazine founded in 1931 by Corbin, Roland de Pury, Roger Jézéquel,
Albert-Marie Schmidt, and Denis de Rougemont, a review inspired by Barth and a
youthful experiment enthused by the novelty of his dialectic theology. However,
it was also a place of expression for these young people, and in particular for
Corbin, considered the philosopher of the little group.
In “Philosophia Crucis”, published in July 1933 in a
double issue of Hic et Nunc dedicated to Karl Barth, Henry Corbin
attacks philosophy in greater depth, founded on the primacy of the abstract ‘I’.
More specifically, he maintains that the temporality of Dasein, of existence,
causes the collapse of the philosophy of history, submitted to the model of
mechanical causality. By means of the event of the Word, which implies a
decision, existence becomes actuality, that is to say, existence in action, an
existence that transforms into testimony. Man is not the product of his past;
he is the product of the Word, of his listening and his surrendering to God, a
Word that, nevertheless, is still always to come.
Existence reveals itself in its essential structure, as we
can read in “Note sur existence et foi” [Note on existence and faith], the last
article by Henry Corbin published in Hic et Nunc, which is the last in
two ways: it marks his final contribution to the journal and it initiates a
period of silence. In fact, Corbin’s next publication, if we leave aside “Récits
Hallājiens” [Hallājian stories] (18) and his contribution to the
Congrès Descartes, “Transcendantal et existential” (19), was to be “De la
vocation du docteur” [On the doctor’s vocation] (20), in 1937. Existence is
laid bare as potentiality-of-being, as an opening, as a surpassing of limits
and of its finitude. It opens ontologically to the Other, which constitutes it,
and to the time of the Other, time which is qualitatively different from the
time of the ‘I’ of rationalist philosophy and theology.
The philosophy of existence, moreover, considers only that
the extreme potentiality-of-being of the ‘I’ is to choose itself for death. However,
in the most complete work concerning the relationships between philosophy and
dialectical theology, “La théologie dialectique et l’histoire” [Dialectic theology
and history] (21), the theologian “cannot fail to recognize that the call
determining Christian existence is this completely other vocation, ‘Awake, thou
that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light’ (Eph.
The ontology of Heidegger’s existential analysis cannot
accept that “this Word is the Word of God” (23). The “Life” announced by
the Word “is the determination of each nunc by the Word, such as the latter
is understood in faith, such as each nunc is understood as the new possibility
of my being, as potentiality-of-being, as ‘having a future’” (ibid., p. 78). “Life”
is a mode of being “just as ‘world’ (Man) and ‘death’ are, but in complete
opposition to them, it is a being that ever is only to come” (ibid., p. 78). Hören,
to listen, to apply oneself to listening to the Word implies the
contemporaneous presence of two subjects and of dialogue. Existence, conceived
as potentiality-of-being, is not enclosed in itself, but is opened on itself.
This way of seeing Dasein does not suppress the category of the other. In other
words, it does not forget “that the real being of man is a ‘being-with-others’
(Miteinander), not as an arbitrary choice, but in the sense that ‘here
and now’ my historical being is connected to the ‘Other’, and it is in Miteinander
alone that man has a historical existence, with historical and concrete
requirements” (24).
The Word that breaks the circle of the ‘I’ also breaks
the temporal horizontality of history submitted to the laws of mechanical
causality. In addition, in breaking this linearity, it introduces a
qualitatively different element, which calls man, which uproots him and forces
him to look at his own reality and others with different eyes. Listening to the
Word turns on the importance of dialogue and here we find again, we believe,
the theme of Abrahamic ecumenism at the roots of the three Religions of the
Book. The ‘I’ is not a monologue; it is a dialogue, and this implies two poles
in relationship. The Word of God, or, better, its phenomenon and the mission
for which it makes man responsible, is the place and time common to the three
Religions.
The Holy Book is God’s Word addressed to man. The goal of
man is, in primis, a phenomenological goal in its etymological sense,
that is, that of “saving the phenomena”. Here I quote from En Islam iranien:
“‘Saving phenomena’ is to meet them where they take place and have their
place. In religious sciences, it is to encounter them in the souls of
believers, rather than in monuments of critical scholarship or in
circumstantial investigations. It is to let that which has shown itself to them
reveal itself, because that is the religious fact” (25). To speak of the
phenomenology of the Holy Book is to refer to the necessity of saving the
phenomenon of the Book by showing its bātin, “the hidden meaning
and the secret intention establishing it” (ibid., p. xix). And again: “The
hermeneutics of esotericism, of the hidden meaning … makes us anticipate what
an ‘Abrahamic ecumenism’ would be, whose single immutable base can only be this
esotericism (bātin), because all those whom the Qur’ān refers
to as Alh al-Kitāb, the ‘Family of the Book’, have found themselves
set by their Book before the same problem, an identical task” (26). The Book
poses a problem, namely, that of the interpretation and comprehension of its
hidden and true meaning. “To comprehend … is always to comprehend a meaning,
and it can only be a question of the true meaning of this Book. But the
mode of comprehension is conditioned by the mode of being of the one who comprehends”
(27).
And Corbin continues: “With the phenomenon of the ‘revealed
Holy Book’ a problem is found inaugurated which concerns not just a given specific
behavior of man, it is the very mode of being of man that is in question, in
other words, the very concept of anthropology. Because all the inner
comportment of the believer derives from his comprehending; the
experienced situation is essentially a hermeneutic situation, that is,
the situation where the true meaning unfolds for the believer, which at
the same time makes his existence true” (ibid., p. 136). From an
etymological point of view, to comprehend means to contain, “To comprehend a
meaning is to implicate it, in some way or other, in one’s own mode of being”
(28). It is thus a matter of comprehending, of implicating in our own mode of
being, the meaning of the Word that is addressed to us. To comprehend therefore
means to put back into the present, to translate into the present the meaning
of the Book, the meaning of the Word. This means that to re-actualize its
meaning through the believer’s work of comprehending is to give new birth to
the Word and, along with it, new birth to the believer himself. The Word then
becomes a symbol, and to comprehend or “to explain a symbol is not to abolish it,
to render it useless …: it is always to be deciphered anew; there always
remains to effect its meaning” (29).
The exegesis of the Word is the common task of the
communities of the Book, to all the people who have a revealed Book in common.
The true meaning, the meaning that the Book has for the believer, which depends
on his own mode of being, is never a definitive and closed meaning. This is
because, as a symbol, the Word must always be implicated anew in the believer,
understood by him in a process that can never conclude without betraying the
Word, in order to return the Word and man to their own truth.
Translated
by Christine Rhone
1. Henry Corbin,
En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosophiques, vol. 1, Le
shī’isme duodéciman (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. xvii.
2. Henry Corbin, “La
Fédération allemande à Caub,” Le Semeur (Paris: Fédération
française des associations chrétiennes d’étudiants, Nov. 1931), pp. 38-42.
3. Henry Corbin, “À propos de Luther,” Le
Semeur (Paris: Fédération
française des associations chrétiennes d’étudiants, March 1932), pp. 286-292.
4. Henry Corbin, “Témoignage à Kierkegaard,” Le Semeur
(Paris: Fédération française des associations chrétiennes d’étudiants, Dec.
1932), pp. 77-81.
5. Henry Corbin, “Vocabulaire,” Hic et Nunc (Paris,
July 1933), pp. 111-115.
6. Ibid., pp. 114-115.
7. Henry Corbin, “Témoignage à Kierkegaard,” op. cit., p. 81.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. See Henry Corbin, “Philosophes,” Hic et Nunc (Paris, Nov. 1932), pp. 19-23.
11. Ibid., p. 21.
12. By a decision, because existence becomes real
exclusively through a decision.
13. Ibid., p. 22.
14. In other words, through and by the responsibility
associated with the act of responding.
15. Ibid., p. 23
16. Henry Corbin, “Quand nous nous réveillerons d’entre les morts,” Hic
et Nunc (Paris, March 1933), pp. 43-51.
17. Ibid., p. 49.
18. Henry Corbin, “Récits Hallājiens,” Yggdrasill
(Paris, Dec. 1935), p. 3.
19. Henry Corbin, “Transcendantal et existential” in Travaux
du IXe Congrès International de Philosophie (Congrès Descartes), vol. 8 (Paris:
Hermann, 1937), pp. 24-51.
20. Henry Corbin, “De la vocation du docteur,” Propos
Missionnaires 58 (April 1937), pp. 21-24.
21. Henry Corbin, “La théologie dialectique et
l’histoire,” Recherches Philosophiques, vol. 3 (Paris, 1933-1934), pp. 249-284.
Ibid., p. 271.
22. Ibid., p. 77.
23. Ibid., p. 78.
24. Ibid., p. 74.
25. Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien, vol.1, op.
cit., p. xix.
26. Ibid., p. xx
27. Ibid., p. 136.
28. Ibid., p. 138.
29. Ibid., p. 153.