Leonardo Mastromauro
Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
Volume 17, 2025
A special issue of Philosophy Today recently has been published, entirely dedicated to Reiner Schürmann’s thought, a philosopher whose political, as well as theological and philosophical, significance has not yet been fully explored by specialists, despite authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Catherine Malabou engaging with his thought, and despite the fact that, in the Italian context, the translation of Le Principe d’anarchie was edited by Gianni Carchia, an important contemporary Italian philosopher. It is precisely this lack, or this inattention, that has prompted the editors of the volume, Francesco Guerico and Ian Alexander Moore, to curate a collection that offers an impeccable overview of the various facets that characterize Schürmann’s thought, of which we will try, as far as possible, to restore the complexity of the path. In fact, the editors ask: «With the global resurgence of nationalism and numerous forms of authoritarianism […] could it be that […] the time for Schürmann has come?» (637). Today more than ever, as Michael Heitz points out, citing Schürmann, nothing has changed and the ghosts «are more tenaciously alive than the living. They impose laws on us that hold longer than those made by states or ideologists» (642). Precisely for this reason, studying the thought of this author who has long reflected on the «epochal principles» that govern us, means rethinking entirely life in the ruins of Western politics. In fact, reading Schürmann means understanding, through his comparison with authors such as Eckhart and Heidegger, how to live the «wandering joy», therefore, how to make life possible outside the network of governmental devices once their machinic operation is understood. Here, if there is something that the philosopher of «peregrine identity» and «broken hegemonies» can teach us, perhaps more than others, it is how to live «without why», how to free oneself from the laws of principles and ends. A purpose that today is more an urgency and prerogative than a whim.
The encounter with the Thuringian Master is fundamental, as Joeri Schrijvers underlines: «the event-like character of the encounter with God, […] will remain present throughout [Schürmann’s] later work on Eckhart. This encounter is never an easy, happy fusion; it rather is upsetting to the highest degree […]» (648) as it requires a rethinking of existence. Schürmann never tires of questioning «the issue of origin — as neither principle nor end, neither cause nor destination, but rather as ursprunc» (660). «The ursprunc as anarchy breaks the fetters of individuation and rids me of all attachments and links, even of God» (676). As Claudia Baracchi notes, it is a question of thinking an articulation between thought and practical life, therefore of conceiving a philosophy as a form-of-life to reach union with the divine, a process that implies first of all the abandonment of things and of oneself to embrace the possibility of a pilgrim and vagabond identity of being.
The comprehensive reading of Eckhart mobilizes a vast repertoire of resources for exiting the subject—simultaneously dismantling its regal and legal authority, shedding its constraints, and taking leave from it. […] Twisting free from stifling principles, that is, releasing life into its inherent motility, implies discontinuity, ceasing, deceasing, abandoning (664).
Abandonment (Gelassenheit), a fundamental concept of Eckhartian thought that Schürmann analyses, is a form of restitution: detachment from oneself, rendering the operation of worldly images inoperative, letting things rest in themselves, therefore abandoned, «one approaches beings as they are». In short, it is only through detachment, un-appropriability, that the human being can become what he was when he was not yet. The comparison with Eckhart, whom Heidegger himself named the Lese- und Lebemeister («master of letters and life»), also passes through a fundamental process of translation – “correct”, to paraphrase Emeline Durand, is that translation which not only comes close to the original meaning of the author, but which most clearly opens a possible path for our future – which, as the author acutely notes quoting Schürmann, «does not only open a “gateway” onto the meaning of the text, but is itself the path leading back to the source of truth» (695). «Translation provides the return to the source where every word is renewed» (ibidem). Translation places us in front of the original relationship with language, a relationship through which, reprising Schürmann, we make reality itself appear to us, in a gesture by which things are called into existence.
Not only must the translator “be perfectly released himself if he is to collect the truth from a text”, but translation is also the paradigmatic experience of releasement, since “as translation lets truth come forth in the text, it experiences this truth already as letting-be”. The process of translation is therefore complete “when the openness in which beings appear is freed from the dominance of representation and possession” (701-702).
Therefore, «it is not a matter of carrying across the meaning from one language to the other, but of transporting oneself before the source of truth» (701).
As can be seen, the relationship with the problem of origin is something fundamental in Schürmannian thought. The rereading of Heideggerian thought in Le Principe d’anarchie is dedicated to the theme of an anarchic origin. Raoni Padui, for example, in his contribution focuses precisely on the problem of anarchy and the practical a priori.
The domain of anarchy in Schürmann’s reading of Heidegger has the standing of a transcendental, of a condition of possibility of any principle whatsoever. Or, more precisely, since it is deeper than any principle, is itself not a principle, and perhaps is the condition of the impossibility of any principle, it may more appropriately bear the title of a quasi-transcendental (760).
Schürmann follows Heidegger in stating that each epoch is organized on the basis of a hegemonic principle that conditions the knowledge and practices of individuals. These principles operate within the conditions of possibility of a certain epoch, and dominate them.
But Heidegger, Schürmann argues, is interested in a deeper layer of metaphysics, that is, in the condition of possibility of metaphysics itself, a condition that is not itself metaphysical. By stepping back from the beingness of beings, from each principle that is metaphysically erected, to being itself, Heidegger seems to be after a deeper transcendental ground, but one that will not turn out to be a ground, but the very space upon which any grounding as such is erected. Hence the justification in speaking about a transcendental anarchy (761).
In fact, this ground is anarchic without being a principle or a foundation; here «metaphysics reaches its own exhaustion of principles, in which the groundlessness behind all grounding is finally revealed» (ibidem). It is from these reflections that the discourse of the practical a priori is introduced, which «involves some kind of inversion of this metaphysical priority of theory over practice» (763). A certain mode of being must be practiced to reach knowledge, not vice versa. «This dependency of thinking upon a mode of living, this priority of a mode of living or a comportment over theoretical matters, is what Schürmann means by a practical a priori» (764).
These same philosophical and theological reflections, which have many implications within the political field, operate as presuppositions for understanding how the thought of this philosopher also confronted the practice of painting, in particular that of his partner Louis Comtois. Monica Ferrando has dedicated important reflections to these questions, worthy of note also because if the relationship between Schürmann, Eckhart and Heidegger is something known to experts, despite continuing to suggest questions without exhausting its revolutionary significance, the path that leads to painting and the study of light and matter is certainly less traveled, although, as the philosopher summarizes: to answer the question of how we should paint it is first necessary to deal with another question, that is how we think. In painting, in its silent happening without why – «the landscape is there, without why», the young Schürmann of Origins says quoting Cézanne –, it is still possible to glimpse the impetuous and unpredictable presence of the divine, which cannot be named not due to a defect of language but precisely because it is already present, «a divine whose figures remain present as forms of the void, imprints, casts, abandonment, loss» (859). Fundamental here is the experience of color and light, color as an instrument and passion of light which freed from formalistic vices is able to see the origin, just as Schürmann sees it in Heidegger. «The painter’s matter — a metaphor of the matter of the world — is a thinking of light, an image aware of the relationship that light has with things» (875).
It is difficult to summarize the complexity that is hidden behind Schürmann’s thought and writing. Here we have just provided a few pointers, along with some information to guide the reader or scholar who wants to venture into the grammar of the thought of a philosopher in which more than periods, there are colons and semicolons. Here, if there is a great merit that the volume edited by Francesco Guercio and Ian Alexander Moore has, it consists in restoring this grammar. It is a useful tool, probably indispensable, not only to approach or deepen the thought of this philosopher but, through him, finally understand that: «Here is the real defeat: having origins».
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