translated from Japanese

A Fish Leaping from the Water (3): A Phenomenology of Hypomnesis; Flying Fish and Poison (15) | Ishida Hidetaka, Web Genron, delivered May 13, 2026

By setting Sartre’s café encounter with phenomenological reduction beside Bernard’s prison-bound exercises in thought, the essay asks what kind of phenomenology a prison could become: a laboratory of concrete experience, memory, absence, and thinking life.

水面から飛び出した魚（3）ヒュポムネーシスの現象学飛び魚と毒薬（15）｜石田英敬

Genron · 石田英敬 · 13 May 2026 · read the original in Japanese →

This series has been interrupted for a while, but in the two most recent installments I had begun an attempt to reconstruct, from within philosophy itself, the process by which Bernard’s philosophy was made inside prison.

In the installment before last, number 13, I described how, beginning in 1979, he started taking philosophy lectures through a university correspondence course; how he began each day by invariably reading Mallarme’s poetry in the morning; and how, through the reading of poetry, he moved from linguistics into philosophy.

In the previous installment, number 14, taking Aristotle’s On the Soul as my clue, I tried to reconstruct and depict the thought experiment conducted in a solitary cell, tracing how Bernard awakened to “the life of thought” while keeping in view Aristotle’s concepts of matter and form, potentiality and actuality. One might say this was the stage of basic training in philosophy.

Bernard says that prison was, for him, a “laboratory of phenomenology.” What sort of phenomenology was it? The purpose of this installment is to draw out its concrete form.

“A Laboratory of Phenomenology”「現象学の実験室」

That phenomenology is one of the major currents of contemporary philosophy after the twentieth century is, one might say, common knowledge even for Japanese people in the Far Eastern country of Japan who aspire to philosophy. The Japanese have a long history with phenomenology. Husserl’s Logical Investigations was introduced in Japan almost in real time in the 1900s, when it was published; by the 1920s Japan had moved beyond the stage of introduction and entered an era of philosophical confrontation with the Kyoto School of Nishida Kitaro and Tanabe Hajime, while many students studying abroad, Tanabe and Kuki Shuzo among them, cultural elites of the day, directly attended and received instruction in the lectures of Husserl and Heidegger. There were even people like Miki Kiyoshi (1897-1945), who was attending Husserl’s classes in his mid-twenties. In modern Japan, the birth of “philosophy” and the introduction of phenomenology almost overlap.

By the way, what sort of prior knowledge do you, my younger readers, have about phenomenology?

In my own case, for example, as I have written before, I became interested in philosophy at around sixteen, and in those days the way one began reading philosophy was, predictably enough, with Sartre and the like [*1]. Then, in 1970, when I was in my second year of high school, Kida Gen’s Iwanami Shinsho volume Phenomenology appeared. It was a groundbreaking book and immediately became a topic of conversation; several people in my class were reading it under their desks during lessons as soon as it was published. The practice, or praxis, of reading some other book during a boring class surely continues even now. Read today, it has not aged at all: it is an exceptionally well-made introduction. I took it down from my stacks for the first time in a long while in order to write this piece, and before I knew it I had reread it to the end. If you read it, you will get a general grasp of phenomenology, and it is written with real solidity. Kida wrote it when he was just past forty, and now that I have lived far beyond the age he was then, I find myself thinking what an excellent teacher he must have been. Though of course I do not mean that a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old high school student who had still read almost nothing could read it and immediately understand everything.

The opening begins with the famous anecdote, told in Beauvoir’s autobiography The Prime of Life [*2], in which Sartre learns about Husserl’s phenomenology from Raymond Aron after Aron’s return from Germany:

“Aron pointed to his glass: ‘Look, if you were a phenomenologist, you could speak about this cocktail, and that would be philosophy!’” [*3]

Aron designe son verre : « Tu vois, mon petit camarade, si tu es phenomenologue, tu peux parler de ce cocktail, et c’est de la philosophie ! »

And, since this is where the main argument of the present installment begins, I have placed Beauvoir’s French original alongside the translation because the meaning of the partitive article de la in c’est de la philosophie, an article that indicates a concrete quantity, is difficult to convey in Japanese translation; it becomes indistinguishable from “C’est la philosophie,” “That is philosophy.” What Aron said, or what Beauvoir writes that he said, was by no means that phenomenology is a philosophy that lets you talk about cocktails or anything else. If that were all, it would simply be ordinary, banal postmodernist discourse; and it cannot be denied that Beauvoir’s staging has something of that aspect. “Existentialism,” for better or worse, was also the first postwar moment in which philosophy became a fashion phenomenon. Rather, the sense is something like this: if you are a phenomenologist, look, you can speak, quite concretely, about this glass of apricot cocktail, and the cocktail becomes something philosophical. It is a passage that explains the novelty of the philosophy of the concrete made possible by phenomenology.

This was the moment when Aron gave voice to the watchword of Husserlian phenomenology since the Logical Investigations: “To the things themselves,” Zu den Sachen selbst [*4]. For Sartre, who at the time was preoccupied with the reality of contingency and with the concreteness and matter-of-factness at the bottom of experience, these words struck deep into the heart, and he listened in a state of excitement. Beauvoir writes that he then immediately rushed to a bookshop on the boulevard Saint-Michel and bought one of the few studies of Husserl available at the time, Levinas’s The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology [*5], greedily reading it as he walked, even before he had cut the pages of the French binding. This was in mid-October 1932.

There is a reason I have placed this famous episode at the beginning of the present reflection, which seeks to situate Bernard’s phenomenology.

We had already begun, in the twelfth installment, to speak about Bernard’s phenomenological reduction. What I would like first to consider, then, is the following question: if we compare (1) the “phenomenological reduction” for Sartre in the autumn of 1932, as he sits in the bar Bec de Gaz on the boulevard du Montparnasse, sipping its famous apricot cocktail and eagerly trying, rather belatedly, to initiate himself into the procedure of phenomenological reduction with a glassful of cocktail as his material, with (2) the “phenomenological reduction” for Bernard in 1979, in an empty silent cell in Toulouse’s Saint-Michel Prison, as he begins the life of the “thinking soul” (Aristotle), recites Mallarme’s line about “the absent flower,” and meditates on “a flower,” Une fleur, what, in the end, can be said?

…the essay continues at the source.

Genron · read in Japanese