The
concept of bearer in phenomenological currents is linked to the formation of
subjects and subjectivities and is particularly important because it allows us
to unravel the complexities of their constitution. However, it is a term that
has been little analyzed or used in other philosophical tendencies and, for
that very reason, it is unknown. The term Carrier translates the Träger
German and the Bearer English. In phenomenology, Edwig Conrad-Martius
gives the term bearer a key centrality in his thought, an issue that will be
examined in this work.
Conrad-Martius's
approaches open a space for debate in a context where postmodernity has been
hegemonic, especially affecting the understanding of the construction of
subjects in the contemporary world. It is possible to rethink subjectivities
beyond the affirmations of their dissolution without a romantic return to the
subjects of modernity. In addition, there is political responsibility in a
world ravaged by the rise of fascism and in which actions of resistance in the
public sphere are the order of the day. Although there is no reference or
direct relationship, it should be noted that this notion of a bearer is used by
Karl Marx in
The
question of the bearer subject arises in Conrad-Martius in the perspective of
the construction of his Realontologie, or the way in which all reality
is constituted from itself, with no other foundation than itself. For this
reason, he distinguishes within him three moments that underlie the formation
of the real: the bearer, the essence and the manifestation of these two, which
is, in the final analysis, reality.
Here already is the "fundamental movement" of the
realontology: the founding of that which appears in itself from out of itself
according to various modalities of selfrootedness. We have, therefore: (1) a
substantial” moment (the bearer or object as
bearer of predications), (2) an "essential" moment (the what or
being-such), and (3) An "existential" moment (the presentation of the
object as a union of the substantial and essential moments).
Miron
synthesizes the components of the phenomenon of carrying, which lies at the
core of the relationship between essence and its expression.
Conrad-Martius' idea of reality
assumes a fundamental structure of the real being. This structure is composed
of two inseparable constituents: the essence (die Washeit) and the
"bearer" (Träger) upon which the essence is "loaded". While
the former embodies what she calls the "whatness" of the thing, the
latter indicates the content of the real being. She establishes that when the
essence constitutes itself, it personally carries a bearer, which is the
filling with content of the real being, or alternatively the real is that which
carries the essence that belongs to it and specifies it fundamentally. Indeed,
the bearer is specified by the essence that is uploaded onto it and by which it
exists. At the same time, the essence is carried to the extent that it
specifies its bearer. Finally, the function of carrying is based on pure and
"formal relations that cannot be destroyed" (1924: 223) to the extent
that they should be regarded as "formally pointing out each other"
and as "coming into being at the same time" (1924: 172).
The
structure of reality is given by the inseparable relationship between the
essence and the bearer. The essence makes a thing what it is, as it is classically
defined; but the novelty lies in the appearance of this carrier, which allows
the essence to become a concrete reality and to be given as a phenomenon. In
this way, the essence charges upon the bearer the actual contents of its
being, and the bearer is specified or indexed by the essence. It is understood
that the existence of the bearer depends on the essence, without clearly
distinguishing the fact of creating the bearer from the process of charging him
with certain attributes or characteristics that come from the what is of
the essence.
The
components that form the structure of reality are affirmed as permanent and
universal: essence, carrier, charge, specification; that is, two elements:
essence and carrier, and two movements: charge and specification, united by a
necessary relationship. With this point by Miron, let us enter into the text of
Conrad-Martius, Realontologie, where he develops these ideas
extensively. (Given the difficulty of
locating this rather unknown text, I will quote it more extensively than
usual.) (Conrad-Martius,
Realontologie, 1924)
Conrad-Martius
establishes, as a starting point, the ontological status of the bearer, because
only when the essence charges the bearer is reality manifested in its
specificity, which is the way in which things exist. Real entities are the
product of the complete entry of what is of essence into a phenomenon
that thus allows it to be and to be effectively. So the fundamental ontological
question is to interrogate the essence that is carrying this carrier and that
is presented to us in its corporeality.
11. When a truth comes to realization
or becomes corporeal, a "bearer" is thus established to whom it is
charged as the real content of existence. Or, to put it another way: when a
truth is manifested through a carrier constituted in this way, it is the real
content of existence and the whole is a real entity. (Conrad-Martius,
Realontologie, 1924, pág. 167)
Let
us now look at the ontological relationship that is established between essence
and bearer, which has a correlate character; that is, the existence of the one
implies the existence of the other. The need to define each one in terms of the
other is imposed, because separately they lack meaning and existence. In the
first place, there is the essence that necessarily manifests itself, and in the
second place, the bearer that acquires real consistency or enters into
existence, only in so far as it has been charged by its essence.
A real carrier becomes an entity
by being charged with an essence; and an essence manifests as such when it
corresponds to a factual carrier or a hypokeimenon. The hypokeimenon and the
charged essence, or as we may now say, the charged essence, can only define
each other and interdependently. One is nothing without the other. (Conrad-Martius,
Realontologie, 1924, págs. 169-170)
Care
must be taken not to confuse the processual explanation of this phenomenon with
thinking that they are two separate moments in time; on the contrary, they are
fully simultaneous. The factual carrier is defined by the essence that makes
him what he is; and the essence exists only when it manifests itself in the
bearer. Neither of the two moments exists before the other. They are the two
sides of the same reality, in which the essence provides what is and the
factual bearer is put as reality.
Conrad-Martius
insists that the bearer is not a reality that exists previously and that comes
to meet an essence; this implies an effective process of emergence of the real,
which occurs precisely in the permanent conjunction of essence and factual
bearer. The essence is charged to the bearer, but, in doing so, it makes the
bearer a real entity; thus, the essence enters into the real constituting it.
On
this ontological basis, Conrad-Martius advances to the elucidation of the
bearer subject as the moment in which the truth of reality is realized as its
most prominent point of arrival. The set of elements that have served to
describe the relationship between the essence and the factual carrier, which
are support, power, representation and charge, now find their expression
in the self as a personal instance of truth. The phenomenology that corresponds
to the real ontology postulates the existence of this process of constitution
of the subject or the self.
To this end, when we speak of the
peculiar relation between the real bearer and his own real truth in terms of support, power, representation, and charge,
what is found in these expressions as characteristic for the constitution of
reality can also be fixed in a single concept more prominently and now
centrally. The real is, through its pure being and being, a positive and
personal realizer of its own truth or its own self. (Conrad-Martius,
Realontologie, 1924, págs. 173-174)
In
this real ontology of Conrad-Martius, the interrelation between essence and
bearer leads to the discovery of a constitutive foundation, which is the
self, in which reality becomes the practically realized truth. We are squarely
on the plane of transcendental idealism in the Husserlian sense of the term,
although here the author has passed from the cognitive to the ontological plane
because the ego realizes truth not only as pure knowledge, but as a moment of
reality itself.
The bearer has gone from being a
merely formal subject to a subject in whom truth has been positively
"realized" or, as one can also say, has been put into practice. Thus,
we bring reality to an underlying constitutive foundation that constitutes it,
and with this we have given the empty notion of reality the visual fullness
that corresponds to it. The real is that which has been constitutively realized
in one's own ego. (Conrad-Martius,
Realontologie, 1924, págs. 173-174)
Beyond
the debates on this particular phenomenological approach, it is interesting to
maintain this central idea of the constitution of subjects and subjectivities,
in the sense of carrying subjects who have been charged with an essence, from
which they relate to power or represent their own conformation and the world in
which they are immersed.
Or,
in another way, when we analyze social subjects and people, we have to
introduce the question of the burden that they carry, support, represent, and
that makes them such subjects, insofar as they are the expression of an essence
that is expressed in them. Of course, this is a non-substantialist essence, which
is maintained only to the extent that it manifests itself and cannot be
considered independently of the factual bearer.
Edwig
Conrad-Martius starts from Husserl and, at the same time, distances himself
from Husserl in some basic considerations, which would be unacceptable to him.
The most important difference is in the ontological turn that he imprints on
phenomenology and, later, on the articulation between the emergence of reality
from itself and the constitution of the truth of the real in the self.
From
this understanding of the relationship of the essence that burdens the bearer
with what he is and turns him into a subject, first formal and then
real, we can move towards other situations that are not taken into account by
Conrad-Martius, but that have equal relevance. Maintaining the validity of the
carrying subject, phenomena related to other modes of load that occur in
reality can also be analyzed. I am referring, in a special way, to the
situation in which the bearers are already given, whether collectively or
individually. This is the most common and everyday fact, and here a new
phenomenon arises: what happens when another essence is loaded into a factual
carrier subject already given in advance? What series of transformations take
place? In what way is the ontological status of the bearer subject altered by
the entry of a new essence? Does this phenomenon occur irreversibly or, on the
contrary, can it be done and undone over and over again?
It
will be necessary to expand, in other studies, the analysis of the essential
antagonisms that compete in the structuring of the bearer subjects and the
different types of subjects and subjectivities that become real and position
themselves as such; or, as Conrad-Martius would say, where a certain truth is
realized. This diversity of essences that enter into a carrier subject will be
particularly visible in Karl Marx's Capital.
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