Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Paul Marinescu, “Introduction: on the Stakes of a Phenomenology of Testimony”, in: Gert-Jan van der Heiden, Paul Marinescu (eds.), The Phenomenology of Testimony, Brill, 2025.
Since the 1980s, the question of testimony has significantly gained interest in contemporary philosophy. To a certain extent, this is a surprise. It was less than a decade before 1980, in 1972, that Gianni Vattimo participated in the famous Castelli colloquium on testimony with a contribution entitled, “The Decline of the Subject and the Problem of Testimony.” The topic of testimony gave him “the vague impression of an anachronism” because, as he argued, this theme belonged to a certain form of existentialism, having its roots in a certain religious thematic. In the 1970s, marked as this period was by a turn to structural- ism, such an existentialist topic had lost its topicality. That Vattimo relates the question of witnessing and testimony to existentialism and its religious prede- cessors is in itself not very surprising. There is a clear historical line of reflection on testimony from Augustine to Arnauld and from Hume to Kierkegaard, and these are all reflections on the reliability of testimonies concerning religious miracles, as well as the status of the religious witness.
Yet, the philosophical interest in testimony that has arisen since the 1980s is concerned with another type of testimony and another form of witnessing. In fact, philosophy today addresses testimony and witnessing under the heading of two additional paradigms along with the religious or existentialist paradigm found in the history of philosophy. The different research projects that Sybille Krämer has carried out with several other researchers on the question of testimony describe these two different paradigms arguing that these hardly overlap or interact. The first paradigm was developed in analytic philosophy, whereas the second originates in the field of continental philosophy—two strands of thinking that in the 1980s and 1990s were still profoundly separated from each other. Krämer and Weigel characterize the fundamental divergence between the two paradigms of testimony in various ways. This divergence concerns dif- ferences in philosophical disciplines: epistemology versus ethics; between subject matters: knowledge versus violence; between forms of truth of testimony: a discursive versus an existential or embodied truth; between types of witness: the testis, that is, the neutral third party present at a conflict or contract be- tween two others versus the superstes, the survivor of a catastrophe; and, finally, between styles: the “prosaic epistemologicization” of the analytic approach to testimony versus the “dramatic aporeticization” of the continental approach to testimonial literature.5 Such a state of affairs raises two questions: (1) What are these two paradigms? (2) How are they related?